The team’s longest bus trip was an 11-hour excursion to Chicoutimi. When we were almost there, Vigneault told the bus driver to pull over. He stood up and told all of the rookies to gather at the front of the bus, because the assistant coach had forgotten the necessary paperwork for the rookies to travel through a park area. I can’t remember exactly what their explanation was for why we needed papers to travel within Canada, but the gobbledygook the coach fed us seemed realistic enough to be believed. His bullshit fooled me.
“What are we going to do?” I said, concerned that I had made an 11-hour bus ride for nothing.
“We are going to sneak you guys in under the bus,” Vigneault told us.
So we got out of the bus, and the three rookies climbed into the storage compartment, and then the bags were stacked around us. I don’t remember what the temperature was, but it felt arctic under there.
We then drove a couple of miles, and then the bus stopped and we could hear voices outside. Someone said they were going to search the luggage compartment under the bus. “Hide,” I whispered. “Get under the bags. Everyone get as low as you can.”
The door was opened, and the three of us were holding our breath, trying to stay as still as possible. Then we peeked through the bags and saw Vigneault and all of the boys laughing their asses off at the naive rookies. That was Hull’s method of initiating players onto the team.
The season I played in Hull, it was mandatory to use a facemask and a neck guard. Once, Gélinas and another player forgot their neck guards for a game at Three Rivers. They weren’t allowed to play, and we lost the game. We headed back home that night like we always did, but when we pulled into our parking lot at two in the morning, Vigneault ordered everyone into the dressing room. He set up a video camera, and he ordered every player to put on his freezing equipment and go in front of the camera and count off. We had to put our equipment on, and take it off, 20 times while counting each time for the camera. Vigneault was going to make sure that no one ever forgot his equipment again.
The only negative of my Quebec season was injuring my knee in my first game back with Hull after the World Junior Championship.
Once you were sent to junior hockey, you had to remind yourself you would be there for the season, because the only way the parent club could recall a junior player at that time was as an emergency injury replacement. Imagine my surprise to be at practice on Valentine’s Day in 1989 when I was told the Blackhawks were calling me up. I was stunned. Although I was skating again, I hadn’t played since the beginning of January because of my knee injury.
The issue was that the Blackhawks had three forwards on the injured list, including Denis Savard. Since they had already summoned two players from the minors, they were able to recall me from Hull. My then-girlfriend, Tracy, had just arrived in town for a visit. I hurried home and told her the Blackhawks wanted me to travel to Bloomington, Minnesota, in time to skate with the team the next morning and then play with Chicago against the North Stars that night.
The catch was that, in order to make the morning skate, I had to be at the airport in an hour and fifteen minutes to board a flight in time to make a connection in Toronto.
There was no way I was going to miss that flight. With Tracy in tow, I flew to the airport in my Chevy Blazer. Worried about missing my flight, I was driving too fast and ran a stop sign. My Blazer slammed into a car driven by a woman who panicked upon impact and propelled her car into a house. When I exited my truck, I could see the woman’s car parked in someone’s living room.
A Hull police officer, a major hockey fan, showed up and recognized me immediately. I told him the story, explaining that I had just been called up by the Blackhawks. “Get out of here,” he said suddenly. “Go play in the NHL. I will take care of everything here. We will get in touch with you.”
The officer clearly gave me a break, because I never heard another word about that accident.
My car wasn’t damaged at all, and Tracy and I climbed back in and made it to the airport in time for my flight. But when I landed in Toronto, I found out that my connecting flight to Minneapolis had been cancelled because of a snowstorm. I couldn’t get out of Toronto until the next morning. I arrived at the rink in Bloomington near the end of the morning skate. It was a whirlwind day as I checked into the hotel and tried to get some rest. I was too excited to get a quality nap.
Because the call-up had not been planned, there was no sweater with my name on it hanging from a stall when I arrived in the dressing room. The equipment manager handed me number 51, with no nameplate on the back. It turned out to be the only game I played for Chicago where I didn’t wear number 27.
The game started badly for the ’Hawks. Denis Savard, playing again after nine games on the disabled list with an ankle ligament injury, was reinjured less than six minutes into the game when Minnesota defenceman Shawn Chambers kicked the same ankle. With Savard gone, there was more playing time for me, and 23 seconds into the second period, I scored my first NHL goal, against Finnish goalie Kari Takko. My pass to Brian Noonan hit his stick and then caromed off the back boards into the crease, where Takko couldn’t find it to get his glove on it. I flew into the crease to punch the loose puck into the net to give Chicago a 1–0 lead. It seems appropriate that Noonan was involved in the goal, because he was from the Boston area and we had been linemates many times in summer-league play.
The Blackhawks ended up winning that game 4–2, and Mario Doyon, playing his first NHL game, also scored. At the time, the Blackhawks were scraping for a playoff spot, and that victory was the team’s seventh win in 10 games.
The next day, Pulford told the media: “Jeremy could stay here indefinitely. He can provide some offence for us.”
It became clear that they wanted to keep me the rest of the season. They even kept some injured players on the disabled list longer than they would have just to ensure there would be no issue.
After netting no points in my first three games in Chicago in October, I had 9 goals and 9 assists for 18 points in 17 games after I returned in February. Although I was starting to establish myself with my teammates in the regular season, I probably didn’t truly prove myself until a playoff game against St. Louis in April.
In the first period, I was battling in the corner, got knocked to the ice, and was on my hands and knees when Steve Larmer’s skate came up and sliced my nose. It took 15 stitches to close the wound, the first stitches I had ever received. I remember thinking how close the cut was to my eyes. It didn’t take long until I was back in the game, a fact that seemed to earn me respect from my teammates. Then, in the second period, with St. Louis up 1–0, I became entangled behind the net with Glen Featherstone. He gave me a fucking shot. I gave him a fucking shot. And then he came back and cross-checked me in the mouth.
It’s the most sickening, disgustingly eerie sensation to feel your teeth disintegrate. I believe I would rather experience the pain of a knee injury over that feeling.
After Featherstone whacked me, I was in such shock that I didn’t even spit out my teeth. The pieces were still floating around my mouth as I returned to the bench. I was telling my teammates what happened when Keenan hurried over and yelled: “Don’t tell them. Tell the referee.” Keenan summoned referee Kerry Fraser, and when I opened my mouth to tell him what happened, my four bloody Chiclets, as players call them, tumbled out. Four teeth! There one minute and gone the next. I could feel the nerve endings dangling as I entered the box to serve my two minutes for roughing. Featherstone received a major penalty, meaning we would have a power play when I left the penalty box.
My battle with Featherstone seemed to give us a lift, because we scored two goals eight seconds apart to take a 2–1 lead. Later, on another power play, Steve Thomas had the puck, and Greg Millen made the save. But I swatted in the rebound for what ended up being the game-winning goal.
My teammates were impressed by my willingness to keep playing after I had been cut up and lost teeth. Right before I finished this
book, former teammate Greg Gilbert told me that the St. Louis game had proven to everyone what I was all about. And I vividly remember Dirk Graham coming up after the game and telling me it was a job well done. “That,” he said, “is being a Blackhawk.”
I could feel the acceptance because guys were joking with me about how bad I looked. The general themes of the jokes were that I was ugly before, and my encounter with Featherstone had made me uglier. Chicago defenceman Bob McGill had a face that looked like he had seen combat. He surveyed my purplish stitch wound, missing teeth and swollen lips and said, “Kid, you are starting to look more and more like me.”
3. Knowing My Creator
Playing for coach Mike Keenan in Chicago was like camping on the side of an active volcano. You had to accept the reality that he erupted regularly and that there was always a danger of being caught in his lava flow. He was a tyrant, a schoolyard bully, an old-school coach who tried to motivate players through intimidation, belittlement and fear.
The truth is that Keenan scared me into being a better NHL player. I was 18 when I began to play for Iron Mike, and I was afraid of him. As a rookie, I felt as if my future depended on pleasing Keenan. I believed he was capable of murdering my career before it began. I believed he could do that with no sense of remorse. Before Keenan threatened me in my second NHL exhibition game, I didn’t view myself as a physical player. Within a short period of time, he had bullied me into becoming one.
The veterans on the team didn’t fear Keenan; they merely despised him, and I believe Mike liked it that way. He was always hard on players, like a drill sergeant trying to ready recruits for the dangers ahead. Dealing with Mike’s rants was one of the job requirements for being a Blackhawk. One night, the Blackhawks were playing in St. Louis, and Keenan became enraged about our effort to the point that he ripped out seven ceiling tiles in the visitors’ dressing room.
Keenan was a screamer who thought nothing of singling out one of his players for a personal attack, just to let the team know how upset he was with how the team was performing. Over the course of the season, Keenan had accused most of his players of being “chickenshit” or “an embarrassment to your family.”
“You don’t deserve to be in the fuckin’ league,” Keenan would often scream at you. “You should be ashamed of the way you are playing.”
Mercy was not usually on the table when Keenan had a lock on a player. Some of Iron Mike’s most memorable tirades came against Dave Manson, a defenceman who played for the Blackhawks early in my career. Manson was a skilled player with a heavy slapshot and a combative personality. Once teammates realized how quickly Manson’s temper could boil over, they started calling him “Charlie Manson,” in reference to the convicted murderer Charles Manson, who had those scary, crazed-looking eyes. When Dave Manson lost control, he looked as if he might kill you.
Dave was a tough competitor who had amassed 352 penalty minutes in my first season with the Blackhawks in 1988–89. During one game, Keenan had determined that Manson was responsible for everything wrong with the Blackhawks that night.
“You’re fucking brutal,” Keenan screamed at Manson between periods. “You are the reason we’re losing this game.”
Manson had his skates unlaced and his jersey off when Keenan began unloading on him with this verbal barrage. Initially, Manson took his medicine, like we all did at various times. But during Keenan’s rant, Manson snapped. He stood, yanked off his shoulder pads and flung them across the locker room, just missing Keenan as he ducked out of the way. That was merely the first salvo of Manson’s attack. As the pads were launched, Manson began running, in his skates, directly at Keenan.
Keenan fled out the door with Manson on his tail. We all scurried to the door to witness the outcome. You can imagine how fucking comical it was to see Keenan sprinting down a hallway, in the bowels of Chicago Stadium, with Manson in determined pursuit. As he chased Keenan, sparks were leaping off Manson’s skates as the blades scraped across the cement. If Manson hadn’t lost his balance while trying to run on skates, he might have pummelled Keenan.
It wasn’t their only hot-tempered confrontation. During a playoff series against Edmonton, Manson once pushed Keenan up against a wall by his collar before players intervened.
The strangest aspect of the repeated Keenan–Manson confrontations was the truth that Keenan liked Manson. He liked Manson’s toughness and his aggressiveness. He was big, he was strong, and he had a mean streak. Keenan would have loved to have a roster full of players with Manson’s ability. Keenan pushed on Manson because he believed Manson had more to give. Manson had licence to scream at Keenan, to chase him down the hallway, even to physically assault Keenan because Keenan liked his potential. In always hollering at Manson, Keenan’s objective was to make him play every game at his highest level to prove that Keenan was wrong about him.
If you couldn’t cope with adversity, the Chicago dressing room was not for you in those days. Keenan blow-ups were a regular occurrence, and they often involved some item being thrown or kicked. Another time in St. Louis, Keenan broke some toes kicking what he thought was an empty plastic ice chest. He was yelling at us between periods, and apparently he didn’t realize the chests had been filled with Gatorade just before his arrival. When his foot struck the ice chest, it stopped like a car slamming into a brick wall. The players all knew immediately that Keenan was in pain, and you could see players with their heads down, trying to stifle their laughter. But Keenan continued his rampage, and he walked out of the dressing room without a limp. No way was he going to acknowledge he was in pain.
Later, we were told by stadium personnel that Keenan fell to the floor in agony after he shut the door behind him.
There was another time when we had gone through a very bad week, had lost three in a row, and the players knew Keenan was going to skate us until we were ready to puke. We came out for practice that morning and the lights were off. So we just started to skate around the rink. Five minutes passed, and no coaches appeared. Ten minutes passed, and still no coaches to be found. We just kept skating around the rink in the dark. Soon, 20 minutes had passed, and then 30 minutes.
Finally, Keenan came on the ice, carrying a chair that he parked at centre ice. Sitting down in the chair, he commanded half the players to line up at the goal line and the other half to line up along the side boards.
A whistle emerged from his pocket. He pointed to those of us on the goal line and told us to skate up and back. He blew the whistle. We skated up and back. Then he pointed to the players along the side boards and blew the whistle, and they skated across and back.
When those players returned to the side boards, he pointed to us again and blew the whistle. We did this for 15 minutes, and then he rotated the players along the side boards to the goal line and vice versa. Fifteen more minutes of up and back and across and back, and then we switched again.
After more than 45 minutes of this, we were all dog tired, and defenceman Trent Yawney was in the goal-line group going up and back. On the return trip, he stopped at the blue line. Keenan watched Yawney coast the final 35 feet and yelled, “Trent Yawney, go again.”
Yawney went again, and for the second time, he started to apply the brakes at the blue line instead of the goal line.
“Trent Yawney, go again,” Keenan bellowed.
Now we were all lined up watching Yawney being skated by himself, some of us thankful that Yawney’s misfortune has allowed the rest of us to catch our breath. Don’t recall how many times Yawney went up and back, but I’m clear on my memory that on one of his trips up the ice, he skated as fast as he could and caught Keenan with his shoulder. Keenan was knocked rudely from his chair, spilling hard onto the ice.
We were all stunned, petrified at the prospect of what Keenan might do.
What Keenan did was get up, sweep the ice off his pants, and scream: “It’s about fucking time you hit somebody, Yawney. Everyone off the ice.”
As we were all leaving the ice, our captain, D
enis Savard, never a Keenan favourite, said, “If I knew that’s all we had to do to get off the ice, I would have hit the motherfucker on the first fucking shift.”
Singling out one player to blame always seemed central to Keenan’s strategy. Maybe he just knew that shredding one player was far more uncomfortable for players than the ripping of an entire squad. It angered us. Probably, that was his objective.
Sometimes, if a player wasn’t working hard enough in skating drills, Keenan would punish him by forcing him to watch all of his teammates being punished.
“So, you don’t want to work today,” Keenan would say to the offending player. “That’s okay, because you have teammates that will work for you. You just rest.” Then Keenan would have that player stand there while he skated us up and down the ice.
“You can thank your buddy for this skate,” Keenan would say.
Of course, we would then be screaming at the teammate who forced us to be punished. Keenan seemed to like to have his dressing room filled with tension. He believed his team performed at a higher level if they were on edge. He liked to push his players to that edge any way he could. He clearly seemed to believe that keeping his players shoulder-deep in adversity at all times kept them sharp.
He was constantly benching players or criticizing them for some reason or another. Goalie Darren Pang played 35 games in net for Keenan in 1988–89, and Keenan pulled him 13 times. That’s 37 percent of the time. Keenan once pulled Pang 28 seconds into a game against Pittsburgh when he was beaten on breakaways by future Hall of Famers Mario Lemieux and Paul Coffey.
J.R.: My Life as the Most Outspoken, Fearless, and Hard-Hitting Man in Hockey Page 5