by Bob Mckenzie
I don't know how much easier that incident made it for Mike to deal with million or so "cage-wearing pussy" comments he got over the next two-plus years of Junior A hockey, but I do know this: He never got another concussion in Junior A, despite being struck forcefully in his (caged) face numerous times with a puck or a stick or the boards, and he ultimately got a scholarship to play U.S. college hockey, where there is no choice but to wear a full cage anyway. I know there are no guarantees and that no amount of "protection" can keep a player safe because hockey is a dangerous game and stuff happens. I know it all too well.
But my attitude on this issue of protection is obvious-if you're not making your living at the game, why wouldn't you wear the maximum protection permitted to safeguard whatever opportunities exist? But that attitude flies in the face of hockey's macho code.
Oh, well, I guess that makes me a "pussy." That's okay, I've been called worse.
The good news, if there was any of that in the fall of 2003, was that Shawn was thriving on the major bantam AAA team. The new coach was a fellow by the name of Louis Atkinson and while his style differed greatly from John Annis's, he seemed to like Shawn. The personality of the team had greatly changed, too, as the top two players from last season-Patrick Daley and Louke Oakley-left the Wildcats to play in the GTHL. So the team was no longer a powerhouse, but they still had a solid nucleus and were very competitive. Louis must have seen something in Shawn because he gave him an A as alternate captain and Shawn responded in a positive fashion. He played hard, physically, made some plays, scored some goals and was, generally speaking, behaving himself. No more suspensions anyway.
Shawn will never forget the game that season-a career game, for sure-when the Wildcats beat Oshawa to the tune of 10-2 or 12-2 or something like that. Whatever the score ended up, Shawn scored five goals and four assists that night. A nine-point outing. It was just one of those nights where everything he touched turned to goal-and it didn't even cost me so much as a chocolate bar. That was a very enjoyable ride home.
Shawn had a game on Saturday, December 13, 2003, at the Evinrude Centre in Peterborough. The only reason I know the exact date is because it turned out to be the last game of high-level, competitive hockey Shawn would ever play.
Peterborough, at the '89 level, was never a very good team, almost always finishing in last place. What they lacked in skill, they made up in aggression. They had a couple of players who, in my estimation, were just plain dirty, out there for no reason other than to hurt people. The games with Peterborough were not a very good advertisement for what minor hockey should be.
Anyway, tensions were running high-remember, we're talking fourteen-year-old boys in their first year of high school-and a melee broke out on the boards. One of the players on Shawn's team had done something to one of the Peterborough players. Several of the Petes were trying to get at the Whitby player. Shawn was on the ice at the time and he didn't need to be told what the protocol was. He went right into the pile of Petes and started pulling them off his teammate. One thing led to another and if it wasn't a line brawl, it was damn close to it, with everyone paired off.
Shawn happened to draw the biggest kid on the ice-he was easily six feet tall to Shawn's five foot nine-and milliseconds after the first fight broke out, this big kid from Peterborough dropped the gloves and went after Shawn.
The fight was happening about twenty feet from where I was standing at ice level. I don't know if you have ever had the occasion to witness your son in a hockey fight, but it is an emotional experience like few others. Your first instinct, like that of your son, is simply survival. While this may not be the sociologically correct thing to say, survival in a hockey fight means winning, and hoping your son is on the giving end of a lot more punches than the receiving end.
The other dominant emotion for a father watching his son fight is fear, because when two kids starting wildly throwing punches there is a very real chance someone is going to get hurt, and maybe badly. Don't believe that nonsense about no one ever gets hurt in a fight. I had additional reasons to be deeply concerned (more on that later).
Shawn's fight was no little scuffle either. It was a major-league tilt. The gloves were off. The Peterborough kid got Shawn's helmet and cage off in no time and Shawn, at first, couldn't do the same to him. They started whaling away on each other. With his height and reach advantage, the bigger kid was landing some blows-three or four shots hit Shawn-and my fear was that Shawn was going to get overpowered and beaten up very badly if he didn't get the other kid's helmet and cage off. The on-ice officials were trying to break up the first fight that was going on at the same time, so Shawn was very much on his own.
What Shawn lacked in height, he made up for in strength and toughness-watching him, you could never conceive how easygoing and mild-mannered he is off the ice. He managed to get himself in tight with the big kid, finally got the other guy's helmet and cage off, and started to deliver uppercuts that hit the target. Suddenly, the Peterborough player was on the defensive. The tide had turned greatly and Shawn was really laying into the kid. Shawn came over the top and landed a hard blow right in the middle of the other boy's face. It buckled him big time, put him right down on his knees. At that point, thankfully, the officials got in and separated them. The fight was over.
I am not one of those hockey people who trumpets fighting as some great mythical part of the game, but I've spent my whole life in and around hockey, so I get it. I understand fighting and the culture of the game as well as anyone; I know what it's like to be in a hockey fight (mostly on the receiving end); I know what it's like to see my boys in fights; I don't turn my eyes away from a fight, but I don't go to the game hoping and expecting to see one either.
Fighting in the NHL is one thing, and this is not the forum to engage in that debate, because I believe, at the NHL level, it is a very complex issue, far more involved a discussion than the most vehement pro- or anti-fighting forces would have you believe. Besides, fighting in the NHL involves men who are making their living at the game.
So if there's going to be an anti-fighting crusade, I say identify the most appropriate target. And for me, that means all levels of hockey below professional-minor (kids), Junior A, major junior, college and university-should have much tougher anti-fighting rules. That's what is going to be needed to have any chance of putting a dent in fighting's place within the culture of the game.
Shawn's league had a rule that if you fight, you are out of the game. That rule was no deterrent to anybody in Shawn's game. Mike played four years of Junior A hockey with the same (fight and you're out of the game) rule and there were still lots of fights more nights than not. Don Sanderson's tragic death in an Ontario Senior A game-he hit his bare head on the ice when he fell during a fight-was in a league that punishes fighting with automatic ejection. And yet that didn't prevent that fight either. That automatic ejection rule doesn't "ban" fighting.
The penalties for fighting need to be far stiffer if you're going to modify the behavior and mindset of young hockey players. For me, any league where there are teenagers involved and the majority will never make their living at the game should adopt much more stringent anti-fighting measures.
You see, here's what you're up against. When a fight is over, even when it's involving fourteen-year-olds, the adrenaline and testosterone coursing through the arena are off the scale. It's absolutely tribal and raw. Shawn's teammates were beating their sticks on the boards as he skated to the dressing room. So were the Peterborough players for their teammate.
The parents on both teams were up and cheering.
Shawn's game was happening immediately before a Junior A game between the Wellington Dukes and Peterborough, so the Junior A players from both teams were lined up at the glass watching the fight and cheering wildly when it was happening.
When Shawn skated off the ice to his dressing room, the Wellington Duke players mobbed him, welcomed him like a conquering hero, patting him on the back, telling him he'd won t
he fight and lauding him for dropping the bigger player. The Peterborough player who fought Shawn received the same hero's welcome from the Peterborough Junior A players.
A lot of players, even fourteen-year-old kids, will tell you that sort of adulation, respect and attention is well worth getting kicked out of a game for now and again.
By the time I got around to the dressing room to check on Shawn, he and the other player on his team who had been kicked out for fighting were still high-fiving each other and whooping it up, the adrenaline rush was still that great. I was only there to make sure Shawn was okay, that he wasn't going to go through what his brother had just experienced.
"How's your head?" I said.
"Great, it's fine, I'm okay," he said. He had a little mark at the corner of one eye but otherwise looked as though he had emerged unscathed.
When the game was over and his team was back in the dressing room, the coaching staff presented Shawn with the game puck and he received an ovation from his teammates, who seemed a little awestruck by the NHL-style fight they had witnessed.
Shawn's last game of competitive hockey was memorable, if nothing else.
29: Into The Abyss and The Long, Hard Road Back
IT TOOK ONLY HOURS for my worst fears to be fully realized.
As soon as Shawn and I got home from Peterborough, the McKenzie family was off to a Christmas get-together at the home of some friends. As the night wore on, I noticed Shawn was quieter than usual. "Your head is sore, isn't it?" I asked him. "Yeah," he said. "A little."
Great. Now that the adrenaline had run its course, I wasn't at all surprised. But I was upset. Keep in mind, Mike had just gone through two months of hell with his post-concussion issues. Now that Mike was finally symptom-free and on the verge of playing again, we thought we had put the dark days behind us.
If ever there were a player who should not have been fighting and tempting fate with head trauma, it was Shawn. And that's because Shawn already had a long history with knocks to the head.
When Shawn was four years old and hanging on monkey bars at a playground outside a rink where Mike was playing lacrosse in Hamilton, one of Shawn's pals grabbed his feet and pulled on them while Shawn was about four or five feet off the ground. Shawn lost his grip and fell, the back of his head hitting the ground hard. He was briefly unconscious and taken by ambulance to a local hospital, where he appeared none the worse for wear, other than the fact he had obviously just suffered concussion No. 1 of his young life.
No. 2 came a couple of years later when I was away at the Stanley Cup finally. Mike was chasing Shawn around our backyard pool. Shawn tripped and banged his noggin off the concrete deck. He wasn't knocked out and appeared to be fine.
He didn't even cry. (In fact, I must say I have never seen Shawn shed a single tear or cry out, ever, because of physical pain; this kid's pain threshold is legendary.) But when Shawn woke up in the middle of the night somewhat disoriented, saying his name was Brandon, Cindy and her dad took him to the hospital emergency room to be on the safe side.
No. 3, at least we awarded it No. 3 status, happened one winter when Shawn and some schoolmates were playing at recess. He ended up at the bottom of a pile of kids and someone must have pushed his head into the frozen ground. Shawn came home from school and told us about it, saying he thought he saw Dave Thomas of Wendy's Hamburgers fame sitting in a tree in the schoolyard. That was good enough for us to call it No. 3.
No. 4 was in the fall of 1999-six years after No. 1-and was spectacular in its sheer ghastliness. Shawn was Rollerblading home from school and was no doubt flying right along. He went to make the turn onto our street and clipped someone's front lawn trying to cut the corner. He apparently did a full-speed face-plant into the concrete sidewalk. One of the neighbors on the street found Shawn face down and semiconscious with his entire face scraped and badly bloodied.
No. 5 was three years after that, in the summer of 2002, when Shawn was cross-checked in the head in a lacrosse game in Peterborough.
No. 6 was on September 14, 2003, exactly two weeks to the day before Mike suffered his concussion at North York Centennial Arena. This one came in the semi-final of the Ajax-Pickering Early Bird tournament. Shawn took an elbow to the jaw, but never lost consciousness. In fact, Cindy and I didn't even realize he had suffered an injury of any kind because he didn't tell us about it and it wasn't obvious. His head was sore after that game-he never said a word to us while we were getting lunch before the finally-but he played quite poorly in the championship game. He seemed totally out of it on the ice. I was all set to give him grief for a lack of effort until he told me why he had been so out of it-his head was sore and he felt nauseous throughout. He never should have played.
The fight in Peterborough, not-so-lucky No. 7, was obviously the bad news. The good news, if there is such a thing with concussions, is that in each of the first six Shawn suffered, he never had a single symptom beyond the day on which the injury occurred. In other words, once he got rid of the initial headache or confusion or whatever he suffered that day, he woke up feeling perfectly fine the next day and reported no further problems. Also, because I was familiar with concussion protocols, we always erred on the side of extreme caution in protecting Shawn. Seven days is the recommended shutdown period-that's seven days from the first day of no symptoms; not seven days from when contact to the head was first made-and we often kept Shawn out of any potentially hazardous activities longer than that. The other noteworthy point is that Shawn's concussions all came on significant blows to the head.
This was only good news insofar as some who suffer multiple concussions get to the point where even the slightest contact will produce a concussion and symptoms (see retired NHL player Pat LaFontaine's finally concussion, which was caused by the most minor of contact).While Shawn was concussed often, he was not concussed easily and he had never experienced true post-concussion syndrome in terms of lingering effects.
So as fearful as we were because of Mike's recent experience, there was still a hopeful part of me thinking Shawn would wake up Sunday morning feeling perfectly fine. That, after all, was his history.
But that didn't happen and, to be perfectly honest, it still hasn't happened. I mean, as I write this book in 2009, coming up on six years after the fight, Shawn still has headaches.
Shawn's headaches were dull and constant. They carried on right through Christmas and into the New Year. They would occasionally-probably a time or two a week-spike up into something more intense and painful. By early January, I figured it was time for Shawn, like his brother, to visit Dr. Karen Johnston in Montreal. She was still somewhat reassuring. She said the determining factor(s) in the severity of concussions in children was not necessarily how many had been suffered as it was how symptomatic they were.
The frustrating part about concussions is there's really not a lot that can be done to treat them. Doctors will tell you the basic prescription is rest. Shut it down completely. Little or no physical exertion that elevates the heart rate and blood pressure. Try to give the brain as much of a holiday from any activity as is humanly possible.
Many of these things are easier said than done, especially for a fourteen-year-old boy who felt like he was really starting to take off in minor hockey at the time he was forced to shut it down. It's fair to say Shawn woke up every day hoping it would be the day the headaches would be gone and he could get back to playing again. This was a time I maybe wished Shawn was more like he had been when he was six or seven and didn't seem to care so much about the game. But he was unquestionably smitten with it now that he had emerged as a pretty fair AAA player (he was one of his team's leading scorers at the time he was injured).
The beastly part of brain trauma is how the after-effects can pile up on you, layer on top of layer on top of layer. Think about it. Shawn had a constant headache, every minute of every day. That, and that alone, is more than enough to wear on anyone. But he also wasn't permitted to do any physical activity so he rapidly lost h
is fitness level. On doctor's orders, he spent an inordinate amount of time lying on the couch.
He didn't have a lot to look forward to. No hockey practices or games. He couldn't even read a book or play a video game because he wasn't supposed to stimulate his brain.
The sense of loss was huge. Shawn was a kid who had played hockey in the winter and lacrosse in the summer, and being part of those teams was his social life and peer group.
Really, Shawn lost his identity.
Day after day after day, and keep in mind we're talking weeks and months here, it was like we were all slipping into an abyss. We felt powerless to really do anything. It was a dark time for us. As a parent, there is no worse feeling than that. Nothing.
Now try to factor school on top of all of this. Shawn, unlike Mike, was never entirely sold on going to Trinity. He was doing it as a one-year trial and even before he suffered concussion No. 7, I wasn't convinced he was going to stay at TCS beyond Grade 9. Which was fine, we just wanted him to give it a one-year shot to see if he liked it.
What had started out with the best of intentions-giving him the best educational opportunity-was now problematic.
He had to get up far earlier than he otherwise would to get to Port Hope for school in the morning. Shawn's life at TCS was, generally speaking, more challenging and difficult than it would have been if he'd stayed at school in Whitby. And while he was doing quite well with his marks at TCS before the injury, the headaches were an obvious impediment. Factor in the anxiety over whether he would play hockey again and it was indeed a dark, difficult time for all of us.
Shawn had to be medically excused from writing his Grade 9 exams because his ability to concentrate well enough to study, never mind write the exams, wasn't where it needed to be. Summer vacation came and that helped because Shawn's brain would get some downtime. But the physical limitations placed on Shawn were still an issue.