by Bob Mckenzie
Shawn liked playing for John Annis, or Johnny A, as Shawn and the kids often called him. John is a guy who grew up in hardscrabble Regent Park, the tough, low-income, downtown Toronto housing projects (home of NHLer Glen Metropolit).
He's a no-nonsense guy who can be a little rough around the edges, but also a lot of fun, too. As a minor hockey coach, John was very successful, winning some OMHA titles and icing competitive teams that played hard. He ran some of the best practices I've ever seen at any level, just for the players being able to skate, pass and shoot and work on their skills. He didn't tolerate slackers. If a kid was floating through practice or being a nuisance, John would just order him off the ice and send him home, and that was as true of his goaltender son Wes as it was any player on the team.
Some kids and parents no doubt ran hot and cold on John-depending on whose ox was getting gored at the time-but I always sensed that John had real affection for this group of kids and cared about them.
He definitely favored high-paced, offensive hockey with not a lot of time spent on systems or structure. He motivated the kids to play hard, demanded they compete, and as rough and tumble as he was in so many ways, his first priority was to get the kids playing the game fast and skilled and with the puck. Because he had a team with a fair bit of talent and skill, other weaker teams would try to rough them up, put the game in the gutter, and it used to drive John crazy. He called it "bullshit hockey," but rest assured that if the fertilizer did hit the fan in a game, it didn't take much to set off Johnny and his Regent Park side would come out. When that happened, uh, well, things could get interesting, to say the least.
The team had some tough kids and competitors so they could play it any way the opposition wanted. Shawn was becoming an interesting case study in this regard. As laid back and easygoing as he was off the ice, Shawn was starting to enjoy the physical part of it. Shawn wasn't tall-about five foot eight then (no more than five foot nine now)-but he was strong and didn't mind at all when the game would get edgy.
Mike's primary focus when he played was scoring goals and creating offense. If that wasn't happening to his satisfaction, Mike might get frustrated and let his emotions get the better of him. The next thing you know Mike would be in the middle of everything. Shawn also started to find himself in the middle of some "situations," but it was never because Shawn was frustrated or angry; it was more calculated on his part. Shawn loved to torment players like his brother because he had an advantage over them-he wasn't taking any of this too much to heart. It was all just good fun or sport for him.
But that didn't mean Shawn didn't need to be reeled in that season, perhaps feeling a little too full of himself as a new AAA player.
I wasn't at this particular regular-season game in November against the Clarington Toros because I had to work, but there was a Clarington defenseman who was engaging in some hit-and-run tactics, playing what John Annis would say was "bullshit hockey." It was only a matter of time until there was a response because that's how John's teams played. It was Shawn who took it upon himself, right off a face-off, to engage this opposing player. Shawn ran into him and when the guy pushed back, Shawn's gloves came off and it was on. This kid clearly didn't want to fight. He covered up and that was that. Shawn was ejected from the game and received an automatic one-game (regular season) suspension.
I wasn't too amused when Cindy related the story to me, but John Annis told me not to be too hard on Shawn, that Shawn was standing up for his teammates. I did give Shawn a lecture about picking his spots-how there's a right time and a wrong time to send a message; that fighting and getting suspended in minor bantam hockey isn't always the best way to go about it. But you could tell he was pretty pleased with himself and he had the admiration and respect of his teammates for stepping up. Whether you happen to like it or not, that, in a nutshell, is the culture of hockey, even in minor bantam.
Fortunately for Shawn, the suspension wouldn't affect him for the coming weekend, when the team was competing in a tournament in London, where Whitby's first game was against the London Junior Knights. With future Los Angeles Kings star Drew Doughty and future San Jose first-round pick Logan Couture, the Junior Knights were one of the premier teams in the province.
Shawn and I were driving to London on the Thursday night-Cindy was staying home so it was a boys' weekend away-and we were both looking forward to a fun weekend road trip.
The first game turned out to be a huge dud for Shawn's team. They got steamrolled. The Wildcats lost by a considerable margin, seven or eight goals. It was just one of those games.
The next game, then, would be crucial. Lose it and the Wildcats would play out the string with one more round-robin game on Saturday. Win it and, if there was another win on Saturday, there was at least a chance of moving on. The afternoon game on Friday was against the Mississauga Reps, a GTHL team that wasn't considered very good. But whatever ailed the Wildcats in the London game, it was still with them against Mississauga.
It was a dreadful hockey game, the absolute worst of minor hockey on display. It went from being chippy to pretty much out of control. Some games are just like that. There was a lot of hacking and whacking, cheap shots all over the ice. Johnny A's combative Regent Park side had surfaced. At one point, he was looking at the other coach and putting his fists up in a John L. Sullivan boxing-style pose on the bench, checking to see if the other coach wanted to take this outside.
Normally, I would have found some level of amusement at that, but Shawn had become involved with some player on the other team who had run him. On this occasion, whatever the kid had done to him, Shawn was genuinely angry, which was rare. Shawn then blatantly and viciously cross-checked the other player in the head. Shawn was assessed a five-minute major, was ejected from that game, and would be suspended for the balance of that tournament plus his next two OMHA league games as well. Throw in his fighting suspension from the week before and he was going to be sitting down for three league (OMHA) games.
I was furious. As soon as Shawn came off the ice, I told him to get out of his gear because we were going home. He came out of the dressing room-the game was still going on-and we drove to the hotel, packed up our stuff, checked out and drove the two hours back to Whitby, with me pretty much going up one side of Shawn and down the other.
Shawn is the kind of kid who doesn't like being in trouble-Mike could have gone the two hours without saying a word-so it was an uncomfortable ride home for Shawn. And I wanted it to be uncomfortable because as happy as I was with him playing AAA, he damn well wasn't going to play like this all season long.
The good news was it was just one of those weeks for the Wildcats, and Shawn. The team rebounded to play better; Shawn served his suspensions totaling three games and came back to play hard and aggressively, but without any nonsense the rest of the season.
The Wildcats were playing host to the OMHA championship that year because they had won the title in the previous year. It's a good thing they were the host team, too, because they lost in the second round of the playoffs to Ajax-Pickering, who were led by Marcus Carroll, Bill's youngest son who went on to play for Owen Sound in the OHL. If not there as the host team, the Wildcats wouldn't have made it at all. Whitby did rebound to beat Ajax-Pickering in the semi-finallys of the OMHA tournament, but lost a heartbreaker to the North Central Predators in the championship game. In Shawn's first year of AAA, he got somewhere his brother had never been-an OMHA championship game, albeit on the losing end.
It was John Annis's last game with that collection of kids. It really was quite a remarkable minor hockey run for that group, which had been together for a number of years.
Shawn, meanwhile, was just happy and proud to have been a part of it and to have proven he was a AAA-caliber player. I could see no reason he wouldn't continue to play at that level for a good, long time. Little did I know . . . .
28: Turn out the Lights, the Party is Over
I WOULDN'T WISH the last seven months of 2003 on my worst en
emy-and that's saying something, because I've been known to suffer from Irish Alzheimer's (where you forget everything but your enemies).
The year had started with such promise. Shawn had just finished his first full season of AAA, loved it and had already made the AAA team for the next season. Shawn was going into Grade 9 at Trinity College. Mike had just completed his first year of Junior A and had excelled-the Saginaw Spirit indicated they were prepared to sign him; a number of U.S. colleges had expressed some interest in him as a potential scholarship athlete. Mike was back for his second year, Grade 11, at TCS.
As I headed off to the '03 Cup finally between the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim and New Jersey Devils, I was thinking life didn't get any better than this. And I was right, the part about life not getting any better, because it didn't.
While I was in Anaheim I got an urgent message from Cindy, who had received a panicky phone call from my dad, who called her up out of the blue one morning and said: "Tell Bobby [he always called me Bobby] to come home, I don't think I'm going to make it." My dad was seventy-five years old but in reasonably good health, enjoying life to the fullest-playing golf three or four times a week, driving his Sebring convertible, pumping the Andrea Bocelli tunes and holding court at his favorite pub, Paddy O'Farrell's. He woke up one morning with a piercing headache-he hadn't been feeling quite right for a couple of weeks-and whatever sixth sense humans possess to know something is seriously wrong, well, his alarm bell had gone off.
I rushed home from Anaheim and within a week or two of that, after a bunch of doctors' appointments and tests, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. The doctor said he might, if he was lucky, have six months; he ended up with six weeks and lost most of his mental faculties within two weeks of the diagnosis. He played out the string in palliative care at the Salvation Army Toronto Grace Health Centre in downtown Toronto (which, as an aside, is the very definition of grace, kindness, compassion and dignity). He died on July 23, 2003.
It was, obviously, a tough summer, but you know what? As painful as it is to lose a parent, it is the natural order of things.
It's the cycle of life. It's when bad things happen to your kids that it really hits you hard, because you like to think, in a perfect world, kids are spared. We know only too well that's not the way it works and there are far too many sad and tragic stories as evidence. In the pantheon of bad things that can happen to your children, what befell the McKenzie boys in 2003 isn't what anyone would necessarily deem tragic, not when you compare it to what so many parents have to deal with. But if your kids are hurting, as a parent, you hurt, too.
Six games into Mike's second season with the Legionaires, in late September, he suffered a concussion. A doozy. He was back-checking through the neutral zone at full speed in a game at North York Centennial Arena (we don't like this arena very much). He was chasing down a North York Ranger forward when a Legionaire defenseman stepped up for the big hit at the blue line. At the last second, the Ranger player jumped out of the way and Mike took the full force of his defenseman's hit, right smack dab in the middle of his face. On impact, it sounded like a bomb going off.
He never lost consciousness, but that didn't mean anything really. We took him to hospital to make sure there were no complications and he checked out fine, but it was obvious he was concussed. His face hurt like hell and his head was pounding. The headaches didn't go away either. Not the next day or the day after that or, for that matter, the next week or the week after that.
This was Mike's first-ever concussion and it was quite clear he had significant post-concussion symptoms-headaches, difficulty concentrating, motion sickness-that weren't receding any time soon. If you have never experienced these symptoms, or aren't close to someone who has, you simply have no idea how dark, desperate and scary it can be. It is like a dark cloud consumes your entire being, affecting your mood and ability to function in everyday life.
A few weeks into Mike's recovery, he thought he was getting better and started skating again at practice. He thought he was symptom-free, but even after a couple of days of hard skating in practice without any ill effects, the minute he got into a drill where there was a little jostling, some bumping and grinding, he felt like he was right back to where he was, his head hurting and not feeling quite right.
Aside from the obvious physical and emotional effects of post-concussion syndrome, the worst part is the fear and uncertainty of wondering when, or if, it's ever going to be better. When is normal going to return? It's pretty fair to say, given Mike's passion for all things hockey, he was a basket case through much of this. When he had his setback at practice, I really started to get concerned. So did he.
If you haven't already figured this out about me, I tend not to be a patient person. I don't like doing nothing. My job gives me opportunities or connections that aren't necessarily available to other people. I'm not shy about utilizing them either, especially on health concerns relating to my kids. So if the best course of treatment for a concussed NHLer is to see noted concussion specialist and neurologist Dr. Karen Johnston in Montreal, then that's the treatment I wanted for Mike.
Mike and I made the trek to Montreal to see Dr. Johnston (she has since moved to Toronto). Dr. Johnston is a wonderfully reassuring woman, who eased Mike's mind immediately by telling him that he would get better. But she also said he should be aware he would be more susceptible to future concussions, the key being to make sure he was fully recovered from this one before returning to play. Buoyed by that prognosis, Mike weathered his recovery through the balance of November. By early December-about nine weeks after he was initially concussed-he was finally symptom-free.
Dr. Johnston provided us with a very good, but extremely gradual, return-to-play protocol that was in and of itself a couple of weeks long. Since that process would put Mike back on the ice for just a couple of games before Christmas, we opted to hold him out until after his team's Christmas break and buy him almost two additional weeks of recovery time. I appreciate the sense of urgency all concussed hockey players have to get back to playing as soon as possible-to say nothing of their coaches and parents. But if all concerned would only realize the benefit of taking a little extra time to fully recover, err a little on the side of caution, the hockey world at all levels would be a much better place.
I should probably take a moment here to tackle the issue of safety equipment as it relates to concussions.
In Mike's first year of Junior A, the Legionaires' team rule was that first-year players had to wear a full cage as opposed to the half visor that all Junior A players are permitted to wear.
Naturally, once he became a second-year Legionaire and had the option of discarding the cage that is precisely what he did.
I'm not sure whether a full cage as opposed to the half visor would have made a difference in protecting Mike from his first concussion, but it certainly wouldn't have hurt, given the point of contact was directly on his face.
You should know this, though. While hockey helmets most certainly go a long way to preventing skull fractures and help to minimize trauma directly to the head and may ultimately prevent some concussions from occurring, in many cases the hockey helmet is almost inconsequential to brain trauma. Most concussions are the result of a person travelling very fast and being stopped so suddenly and forcefully that the brain literally smashes into the inside of the skull. In many cases, no amount of outside protection will cushion the blow of the brain on the inside of the skull. This, by the way, is not true of some types of bicycle helmets, which do in fact absorb some of the shock in a crash. I'm not advocating anyone to not wear a protective helmet; I am just pointing out that hockey helmets are often powerless to prevent brain trauma.
It's the same thing with mouthguards. All players should wear mouthguards because they protect the teeth and gums and while there is a "sense" that wearing a mouthguard helps to absorb the shock in trauma that may cause concussions, the truth is that there is no scientific or medical data that proves mouthgu
ards minimize or prevent concussions. In that vein, it is quite possible that Mike would have suffered a concussion even if he had been wearing a full cage instead of a half visor that day, but I still think he would have been far better off with the cage.
Hockey really is a macho game. Kids who choose to wear the most protective equipment-a full cage, for example-are branded "pussies" yet most of the players who play Junior A are doing so in order to get a scholarship to a U.S. college where full cages are mandatory. Go figure.
Mike and I had a battle royale when he was coming back from his concussion in January. He wanted to keep wearing the visor; I wanted him to wear the cage. I knew the abuse he would take for being a "cage" wearer, but I also knew that his season or maybe his hockey-playing career could be over because of an errant high stick or puck to the face. That first serious concussion he suffered had reduced his margin for error greatly, especially if he was intent on getting a scholarship. For me, it was a no brainer. I won out on that battle with Mike and only two games into his comeback, something happened to get Mike fully on board with my view
There was a scrum in the corner for a loose puck. Mike was on the periphery of it, bent over and trying to fish the puck out of a mass of skates and legs. The opposing defenceman was right behind Mike and just as Mike fished out the puck, the defender crosschecked Mike hard in the middle of his back.
The force of it drove Mike's caged-face into the top edge of the dasher board. On the way home, Mike was looking at his cage that had been badly "shmushed" in and duly noted that could have been his face that got "shmushed" in and his season, maybe even his hockey-playing life, would have been over.