by Mark Lazerus
It usually started on the bus from the airport to the hotel, in whatever city they were in. Rather than make each player stand in line in the lobby, waiting for their turn to check in, the hotels simply would leave everyone’s room keys out on the counter, with a player’s name on each one. And there wasn’t exactly a Secret Service agent watching over them. If the employee at the counter had his or her head turned to take a call or check in another guest, the keys were there for the taking.
And Sharp and Burish kept taking them.
They’d execute some convoluted plan during which one of them would distract Kane or Toews on the bus or in the lobby while the other darted off to grab one of the keys. And before the two young superstars could even get into their room, it was trashed. Not messed up—trashed. Like rock-star trashed. Like Team USA in Nagano trashed.
Beds were flipped over. Tables were turned on their side. Bathroom fixtures were severely damaged. Towels were defiled. Curtains, too. By the time Kane and Toews got into their room, they’d have to go back downstairs and get a new one. And while the team pays for the hotel room, each individual player is responsible for the “incidentals.” Like room service. Or a drink at the hotel bar. Or a completely destroyed room.
More than a few times, Sharp and Burish snatched the room-service ordering form out of the young stars’ room, filled it out to the tune of $300 or $400 worth of breakfast, then hung it back on their door after lights-out. And if it was an off-day the next day, a day on which the weary Blackhawks could finally sleep in after landing in Edmonton at 3:00 am local time and schlepping 45 minutes to the hotel in a bus, Sharp would set the breakfast delivery time for some ungodly hour, like 6:00 am.
Then a cheery room-service attendant came knocking on the door at the crack of dawn with three or four carts full of food.
“Toews would get really mad,” Burish says. “He’d be calling our room at 6:30 in the morning to yell at us. We just took the receiver off the hook so he couldn’t ring it anymore. The first time we did that, I saw him that afternoon and he was livid. Then I saw Kane and he’s saying how Toews was really, really mad, and yelling at the poor lady who delivered it, saying how he didn’t order any of the food. Kane just laid in bed. I asked Kane what he did. He said, ‘I ate the food. I just ate it and went back to bed. I’m paying for it, I might as well eat it.’”
Kane always shrugged it off. Toews never could.
“One thing I’ll say is, I never saw Kaner get upset over the pranks, over the hazing,” Sharp says. “He always took it in stride and kept smiling and kept laughing. Jonny, though, you could send Jonny off with just the smallest of things and he’d be so mad. It got to a point where it wasn’t even fun to mess with Patty anymore because you weren’t going to get a reaction out of him. But if you said or did one thing to Jonny, he’d fly off the handle. That was the best thing about it.”
One such instance came while a case of the flu was running rampant through the locker room. One guy would be out one day, another the next, and on and on. The day Toews succumbed, it was a skate-and-fly day—a practice on home ice and then straight to the airport. Toews, being Toews, showed up to practice anyway—“to show that he could fight through it,” Sharp says. But he forgot his passport, and the Blackhawks were headed north of the border. So he was weak with the flu, and even weaker after the practice. On top of that, now he was addled—in a veritable panic.
There wasn’t much convenient about the Blackhawks’ old practice facility in the western suburb of Bensenville, but at least it was close to O’Hare. But Toews lived downtown. He’d have to drive all the way home, grab his passport, and race back out to O’Hare to catch the charter. The whole team was having fun with it. Well, everyone but Toews, of course, who was growing increasingly agitated.
So after practice, sick and irritated, Toews tore off his hockey gear, threw it in a bag, jumped into his suit, and raced for the door, where Sharp was stretching after practice.
Sharp doesn’t even remember what he said as Toews ran by, just that it was—by his usual chirping standards, at least—pretty innocuous.
“He just lost his mind,” Sharp says. “I’ll never forget it. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him that mad. It was almost too easy sometimes with Jonny.”
Indeed, it didn’t take much. In those early years, Toews shared a house with Brent Seabrook and Andrew Ladd, with Duncan Keith as a frequent visitor. One random day off, Toews was taking a nap, as he was wont to do. And because they were basically overgrown children, Seabrook, Ladd, and Keith sat outside his room making animal noises at ear-splitting volumes. After four or five minutes, the door opened and a garbage can came flying out, directed squarely at their heads.
But Sharp and Burish honed most of their tormenting skills on the road. Sometimes, they would wait until Kane and Toews went to dinner, then use their illegally procured key to sneak into their room and raise havoc. Sometimes they would steal something little—a hat, a shirt, a jacket—and see if Kane or Toews would notice. Other times, they’d actually add things to their luggage. Maybe a carefully hidden iron at the bottom of Toews’ bag. Or a hair dryer, artfully disguised underneath his clothes. Or the hotel phone. Airport security is a lot less severe when you’re flying on a private jet, after all.
On one occasion, Toews got on the plane with his bag over his shoulder.
“Hey, your bag looks pretty heavy, Tazer,” Burish said.
“What are you guys talking about?” Toews asked with a wary eye, before unzipping his bag and rifling through the clothes.
And sure enough, there was the coffeemaker from his room. Another thing that he’d get charged for. Another thing to get mad about.
Kane and Toews had neither the wherewithal nor the sinister streak to fight back against Sharp and Burish, but they did return the favor every now and then. Their best effort came in Calgary. The kids did the key-stealing for once, and they ordered a bunch of room service while Burish and Sharp were out and about. Once the food came, Kane and Toews pushed the two beds together and stacked all the furniture on top of the bed, creating a sort of dining-room table, wobbly perched atop the beds. They carefully assembled all the food that was ordered, creating a shaky but romantic dinner that would cost Sharp and Burish a few hundred bucks, as well as some manual labor.
“I was usually the butt of the joke more often than not,” Toews says. “But I think I learned to take it better and better, and kind of figured out why I was such a target to begin with. And every now and then, I could give it back.”
Kane and Toews took the brunt of the frat-boy pranking that went on, but nobody was safe—not with a bunch of college-aged kids running around five-star hotels all the time. Dave Bolland was particularly fond of the age-old gag of soaking a teammate’s carpet by precariously leaning an ice bucket—filled to the brim with water—against his door, then knocking and running away. At the rink, he and others would even occasionally put unnoticeable Scotch tape on a player’s skate blade so that the moment he stepped on the ice, he’d go down in a heap.
“That was never a good one, because a guy could pull his groin,” Bolland says. “You had to be careful. But everyone had fun on that team. We were always joking around.”
The Blackhawks spent Thanksgiving in 2007 in Edmonton, at the posh MacDonald hotel. The team—now under the rule of John McDonough and the wallet of Rocky Wirtz—set up a massive buffet in a conference room for players and staffers to enjoy. James Wisniewski and Dustin Byfuglien spent much of the time crawling under the tables, putting dollops of applesauce or ketchup on everyone’s shoes. Every so often, someone would start clinking their spoon on a glass, which meant it was time for a shoe-check.
And while Sharp was one of the ringleaders of the relentless torturing of Kane and Toews, his teammates had plenty of fun at his expense, too. As well-liked and well-respected as Sharp was—he was an alternate captain, after all—he al
so was notoriously moody, depending on how well he was playing.
“He liked to score goals,” Colin Fraser says. “And when he got in a funk, when he wasn’t scoring goals, he got a little pouty. We started calling him Pooprick Sharp. We’d put diapers and wipes in his stall when he was having a tough go in the goal-scoring department. I think he always felt slighted a bit by the attention Kaner and Tazer got. He’d have a goal and an assist and a fight, and they wouldn’t make him one of the three stars. They’d give it to Kaner or Tazer, instead. He’d lose it, and then we lost it laughing. ‘Hey, the fans don’t want to see you. They want to see Kaner twirling around.’”
Even the coaches got in on the act. Radio play-by-play man John Wiedeman—a notoriously prolific eater despite his slender stature—went up for seconds after cleaning his plate. Goalie coach Stephane Waite came over to the buffet table and immediately grabbed his attention, telling Wiedeman what was good and what he should eat, keeping his focus on the table while head coach Denis Savard and assistant coach Mark Hardy snuck over to his chair, where his sport coat was draped.
Wiedeman went back to finish his meal and got up to leave. He noticed his jacket was a little heavy, but didn’t think much of it. As he got to the door, one of the servers stopped him in front of the entire team.
“Sir, I think you have some of our silverware,” she said. “We’re going to need it back.”
Wiedeman was nonplussed. The server helped him take off his jacket, then held it upside down and shook it as a mess of forks, knives, and spoons came tumbling out in a clattering cacophony. Savard and Hardy were already well down the hall, cackling. Even the supposed grownups acted like kids much of the time in those days.
But nobody got it as badly, and as frequently, as Kane and Toews—the faces of the franchise, the future of the sport, the easiest targets in the room.
“Guys picked on them all the time,” Fraser says. “They were young kids, they were the superstars, and they got the brunt of it. Sometimes you’ve just got to tip your hat and take it. Everyone knew they were superstars. They could afford it.”
Mr. Serious Becomes Captain Serious
Jonathan Toews was nervous. Fidgety. Pacing around the Hilton Chicago, the unflappable kid had been flapped. Denis Savard had just informed Toews that he would be named the Blackhawks’ captain at the team’s first fan convention in a matter of moments. Not Brent Seabrook or Duncan Keith, who had been with the team for a few years now. Not veteran Martin Havlat. Not Stanley Cup champion Andrew Ladd. Not cagey veteran Brent Sopel. Not rising star Patrick Sharp.
No, it was going to be Toews, who had just turned 20. Who barely a year earlier had been in college. He was going to be captain of the Chicago Blackhawks.
And the room started spinning a bit.
Toews walked up to Sharp.
“Are you okay with this? What do you think?”
Toews wandered over to Adam Burish.
“Is this right?”
Toews came up to Ben Eager.
“Are guys going to be okay with this?”
The answers were all the same. Of course, they were okay with this. Of course, it was right. Of course, Toews should be the captain.
“He was almost bashful about it, and didn’t want to rub people the wrong way,” Ladd says. “He wanted to make sure that everyone was comfortable with it, and that there wouldn’t be any hard feelings with guys who had been there a bit. But everyone knew it was only a matter of time. Yeah, not too many kids get the captaincy that young, but everyone was pretty certain around the room that he was going to be the captain at some point. So why not right away?”
That was the consensus around the team, from the fourth-liners to the head coach. When Savard and general manager Dale Tallon sat down after the 2007–08 season ended, the first order of business was choosing a captain. The Blackhawks hadn’t had a captain since Adrian Aucoin was dealt to the Calgary Flames before the season. Nearly half the roster had been an alternate captain at some point during the campaign, as Savard doled out the honor in shifts. Marty Lapointe, Robert Lang, and Sharp started out as alternates. Tuomo Ruutu and Brent Sopel got their turn in November. Seabrook and Toews got a spin in December. Burish and Keith had a turn in January. Lang, Sharp, and Sopel got them for the rest of the year, with Patrick Kane getting it a bit in April.
But the revolving door of alternate captains was never a long-term solution.
“Dale and I felt that it was a really important decision, because whoever we name now, we’ve got to be right on, because he’s going to be the captain for a long time,” Savard says. “I guess you can take captaincies away, but it’s not something that I believe should be done. We had a choice of Toews, Keith, and Seabrook. Those were our three guys at the time. And just talking to Jonny, it was a no-brainer.”
Toews pushed back a little at first.
“Maybe there are other guys who should be captain on this team,” he said.
“No, you’re our leader, and you’re going to be our leader for a long time—for years,” Savard shot back. “Along the way, I’m going to help you. Your teammates will help you, too. Just be yourself. You don’t have to be anything else but what you are. And because of who you are, because of what you are, you’re going to gain respect right away.”
Truth is, he already had that respect. In one short season, as a teenager, Toews had proven himself to his older, more accomplished, more grizzled teammates. It was clear from the first day of training camp that Toews was made out of different stuff than most. Lapointe had even told him early in his rookie season that not only was Toews going to be the captain the following year, but that he already was the captain, in deed if not in name.
“We respected him so much for how he acted, the maturity that he had as a 19-year-old,” Troy Brouwer says. “For management, it was an easy decision. And for players, it was easy to get on board with. I didn’t know he was going to turn out as good as he is now, and as good a leader as he is now, but we knew he was special.”
“He had a presence in the room right away,” Ladd says. “It was his work ethic, and how he showed up every day, how he went about his business. He had a voice in the room at 19 when most guys are too scared to speak. They just sit in the corner and aren’t too vocal. But you could see that competitive nature in him. You could tell he had it in him—that thing that guys gravitate to and listen to and want to follow.”
Even Toews, deep down, knew he was the man for the job. Even if he was absolutely intimidated by the concept.
“When you look back on it now, you realize that as a 19- or 20-year-old kid, you don’t know how to handle all these things perfectly,” he says. “You’d do things differently. But there’s no doubt I felt I was ready in some ways, and there’s no doubt that I knew I was totally unprepared in some other ways. I just knew it was going to be a process, and I was ready for the challenge. If I wasn’t ready and accepting of it then, I’d never be deserving of it. So I went full-steam ahead with it, and knew I would give it my full heart and soul, and try my best to do the job the right way and be the type of player who deserves that recognition, and does right by his team and his teammates.”
There were obstacles, for sure. Being a captain in the NHL is more than just being a figurehead, a face of the franchise, a guy who talks to the officials to dispute a call on the ice. The captain is the liaison between players and coaches. Between players and equipment managers and athletic trainers. Between players and other players. Between players and reporters, sometimes. It’s about relationships, about managing egos, about fostering a positive and harmonious atmosphere in a dressing room overloaded with testosterone and short tempers.
Though he was just 20 years old, there was no doubt Jonathan Toews was ready to be the captain of the Blackhawks in just his second NHL season, in 2008.
Ben Eager, like everyone else, always figured Toews w
ould become the captain eventually. But unlike everyone else, he wasn’t entirely convinced it was the right time.
“I was a little worried for him,” Eager says. “I was thinking personally for him, wondering if it was going to be too much. To deal with all the media and all the stuff that comes with being a captain of a team at such a young age. Besides [Sidney] Crosby, there weren’t too many young captains. Nowadays, it’s common. These young kids, whether they’re a leader or not, if they’re a young superstar, they’re made captain. But back then, personally, I thought it might have been a little bit early. But obviously that wasn’t the case. He’s a great leader. He really knows what’s going on, even at that age. I was really surprised.”
Savard helped ease the transition by creating a leadership council within the room. Every 10 days or so, Toews, Keith, Seabrook, Sharp, and Havlat would meet with Savard to hash out any problems that he might not be aware of. The meetings were short—“All hockey players have A.D.D.,” Savard jokes—but to the point and productive. Savard would ask if there were any problems. He’d ask if any player was going through something off the ice. He’d even ask if they had any suggestions for Savard himself, on how he could do a better job coaching, teaching, and handling the roster.
By surrounding Toews with proven leaders with more experience in pro hockey, Savard lightened Toews’ burden. And he needed it. Because as close and as tight-knit as those early teams were, they were also an awfully rowdy bunch, with a penchant for partying at home and on the road. Good luck keeping those guys in line.
“I’d say it was pretty much impossible,” Toews says with a laugh. “That’s where I was unprepared—the off-ice stuff, the relationships. All the things that are going on, on a social level, there’s no doubt I was in over my head. That’s where guys would constantly remind me, ‘Don’t even bother with the things that aren’t worth your time.’ Just focus on what makes me a good hockey player and that would translate to being a good captain, especially in the beginning. I don’t know if you can expect a 20-year-old to go into a locker room and be socially mature like the older guys in their late twenties and early thirties. That’s where I got a lot of support from guys like Marty Lapointe, Patrick Sharp, Brent Seabrook, and Duncan Keith, and go down the list of all the other veterans we had in our locker room. It made a huge difference to have guys like that to point me in the right direction.”