It felt like I was really driving.
My grandfather was the king of pranks and the master of the card game, Rimoli. He also had the patience to watch sports with me at any time.
We were a typical small-town Canadian family in the 1970s. My grandmother was the matriarch of the family, and Sunday dinner was always at my grandparents’ home. Holidays were also spent there. Never would there be fewer than 10 people for any dinner that my grandmother cooked. Scalloped potatoes were her specialty.
Sports were a staple in our family. I had two third cousins, Chad Cowan and Robbie McMurren, and we were always involved in one competition or another.
The real sports influence on me was a cousin, Shawn Roberts, who ended up playing Junior C hockey. He was five or six years older than me, and yet he would let me get involved in games with his friends.
We would play everything, including tackle football, hockey, and chicken-fighting in the pool, and his friends never gave me any consideration for my age. They even stuck me in net when we played hockey. They toughened me up. I was about 12 when I started to be able to get my licks in during our games. That’s the age when I began to hold my own against older players.
It was actually Shawn who also gave me my first instructions on how to fight standing up.
My mother bought a mobile home and parked on the corner of my grandfather’s property, and I assumed we would live there forever. I was wrong.
When I was five, a man named Craig McCarty made a service call to our home to fix our air conditioner. I remember I was playing hockey in our gravel driveway with a squished soda pop can and a tree branch when he drove up. He asked my mother out, a romance followed, and on April 29, 1977, they were married. We moved to Leamington, Ontario, but my grandparents’ Woodslee home still seemed like it was the center of my universe.
It was my grandfather who taught me how to fire a gun. It was my grandfather who held me accountable.
Craig McCarty was a good, hard-working man, but he didn’t have the patience for a hyperactive youngster. We butted heads frequently when I was young.
But it wasn’t an overwhelming issue because I kept myself busy.
I played every sport, and I excelled at every sport. I lived for sports. I was the kid who cried when his baseball game was rained out. I lived at the rink, skating whenever I could get on the ice. I played on my own team and with any other team that would hand me a jersey.
To this day, I believe that a child with enough talent to dream of playing in the NHL should still play another sport. When you are young, you need a break from your primary focus. My second sport was baseball. In that era, our Leamington area happened to be rich with good, young athletes.
By the time I was 12, I had won three All-Ontario championships. We didn’t compete in the sanctioned international Little League tournament, but if we had I’m convinced that we would have represented Canada at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. I’m very confident in that belief.
When I was 12, we gave up four runs in the top of the first in the Ontario championship game and then won 23–4. I recall we only lost four games that summer, and we played in a multitude of tournaments.
Our top pitcher was Matt Derksen, and he could throw 87 miles per hour when he was 12. I was his catcher, and he broke my thumb three times.
We had another player on the team named Jason Wuerch, who ended up playing minor league baseball for years.
I was a decent catcher. When I was a 12-year-old, pitchers couldn’t throw a fastball past me. I had good bat speed. I could have connected on a 100-mph fastball. My problem was the off-speed pitches. I couldn’t hit the junk.
Derksen and I were great friends. His father owned a farm, and he would pay us 50 cents a bushel to pick tomatoes. The problem was that we often used those tomatoes to perfect our throwing motion.
At the end of the day, the nose-to-the-grindstone Mennonite tomato pickers would have 300 bushels and we would have 50.
Derksen was a big kid, and he was also a good hockey player. But as we all got a little bigger he seemed to lose his advantage and his interest. He was a farm boy who didn’t want to leave home. He ended up marrying the girl he was with since he was about 14, and they have a very nice life.
My devotion to the sport of hockey probably started at age 10, when I convinced my stepfather to drop me off every morning at 6:00 am so I could skate and work on my shot for an hour before school.
From the ages of six to 16, I went to the Can-Am hockey school every summer at the University of Guelph with the hope of continuing to improve my game. My parents would pay $400 for one week of camp, and then I would work for my dad to raise an additional $400 for a second week. My dad paid me $4 per hour, and it seemed to take me a fucking eternity to pay for that second week.
At 15, I scored about 80 goals playing major bantam hockey for the Leamington Raiders and it was time for my family to make a decision about my future. It was not an easy decision.
Brian Drumm had been named coach of the Peterborough Roadrunners Junior B team, and he told my parents he thought he could help me reach my potential if they allowed me to play for him. My parents were not jumping up and down with delight.
It was a big jump from major bantam to Junior B, and it was a rougher brand of hockey. The Roadrunners hadn’t won a single game the season before and Coach Drumm was building the team from scratch.
However, the biggest issue was that Peterborough was 293 miles from Leamington, roughly a five-hour drive for my parents to visit and watch me play. It’s an accepted Canadian tradition that top teenage hockey players must leave home to play at a higher level, but it doesn’t mean Canadian parents arrive at that conclusion without some concern. It’s never a slam-dunk decision to turn your children over to someone else to parent at an age when their decision-making impacts their entire life.
Coach Drumm said he believed he could work with me individually, and provide me with an opportunity to at least think about a career as an NHL player. He said I could live with him, and that he would make sure that I gave school the same attention I gave hockey.
This wasn’t an easy decision for my parents. I can remember my stepfather, mother, and younger sister Melissa all sitting around the table discussing the pros and cons of me moving away from home.
All I could see was that playing junior hockey gave me the best opportunity to be the NHL player that I dreamed of being.
My parents could see the potential problems associated with a teenager living away from home without parental support. My stepfather’s main argument was that the odds of me making the NHL were not in my favor. He made it clear that I was a long shot.
But my parents reluctantly decided to let me go, because both of them said they didn’t want to stand in the way of my dreams.
My stepfather always said that you should never put yourself in a position to say, “What if …” That’s why I’ve always been balls-out in everything I’ve tried.
They showed their support for my junior career by buying a cottage 20 minutes outside Peterborough. That made it easier for them to visit me every weekend. It was a strain on the family budget, but they felt like it was their commitment to my junior career.
However, as you could expect, Craig’s belief that I didn’t have much of a chance bothered me for a very long time. Nobody wants to be told that they have no chance to live their dream. As a human being, the ability to reach for the stars is what gets us through every day. If you have no hope, you have no life.
What Drumm told me was that in my first year I needed to establish myself as a physical presence and then work on my skills. He was the first person to tell me that he believed I could play in the NHL. Skating was always my issue. I didn’t have a smooth, graceful stride. But I worked and worked at my skating. I went to Laura Stamm skating schools every summer. I would go down to the rink an
d skate for hours at a time, but skating remained the weakest aspect of my game. The description of my choppy skating stride at that time in my life was that it always looked like I was running on my skates.
My mom’s worst fears about this new level of hockey were realized when she came to training camp in Peterborough and watched me pound the shit out of one of the team’s toughest players in a scrimmage game. As my coach had recommended, I was simply trying to establish myself as a tough guy.
But my mom was furious. She would not even speak to me. That’s not how I played as a bantam player. As a bantam, I played like Alexander Ovechkin plays today, driving to the net like I was a Humvee. I was a scorer, not a fighter. It was difficult for her to accept my new playing style.
In Peterborough, I was going to the same high school as the players who were playing major junior for the Peterborough Petes. Coached by Dick Todd, the Petes won the Ontario Hockey League championship that season. Future NHL players Tie Domi and Mike Ricci were both on that team, along with Corey Foster. Another prime scorer was Ross Wilson, who ended up having a lengthy minor league career. My lab partner in chemistry at the Peterborough high school was Jassen Cullimore, who was a 15-year-old on the Peterborough squad. He ended up enjoying a lengthy NHL career.
In addition to being a strong hockey player, Cullimore was a super smart individual. I’m still pissed that I failed chemistry because I didn’t cheat off him as much as I should have.
In my one season with the Roadrunners, I established that I was OHL draft–worthy. In 34 games at the Junior B level, I had 18 goals and 35 points and enough fights to prove I could handle myself.
We were swept by Kingston in the opening round of the playoffs, but in the final game of the season I squared off against the team’s tough guy. Don’t recall who it was, but I remember he had a beard. I would not have been surprised if he had a wife and kids in the stands. He was much bigger and stronger than I was. To me, he looked old.
I remember the fight because I was just trying to hang on, and I remember laughing at the guy because I tied him up and he couldn’t hit me. My grip on him was vice-like to the point that I fractured my wrist from the stress of just trying to hang onto the guy.
I also remember the fight because Drumm, dressed in cowboy boots, came off the bench to go after the guy I was fighting.
This kind of scene was not the kind of hockey my mother had bargained for when she agreed to allow me to go to Peterborough.
Now that I knew the Petes players and was familiar with Peterborough, what I wanted most was to be drafted by the Petes. Peterborough owned two picks in the third round of the 1989 OHL draft, and I was convinced one of those picks would be used to select me.
When the Petes passed on me I was devastated. But the Belleville Bulls soon selected me, and then selected Jake Grimes. As back-to-back picks, we met on the stairs going up to meet our teams and we ended up becoming close friends for three years.
My three seasons at Belleville could not have worked out better. Future NHLer Scott Thornton was an established leader on the team, and I ran him into the boards in my first scrimmage as a Belleville Bull.
I could hear Thornton talking to his teammates. “Who is the crazy fucker out here?” Thornton said. “What the fuck is wrong with the kid?”
But he fought me, and I held my own. And he became a tremendous mentor for me in my first season.
Rob Pearson and Steve Bancroft were also on the team. My coach the first season in Belleville was Danny Flynn, and my coach in my second and third seasons was Larry Mavety, the former World Hockey Association defenseman.
He was the perfect coach for me because he was old school and liked rough-and-tumble hockey. He reminded me of an old western cowboy. I have a deep voice, but not as deep as Mavety’s voice. He didn’t take shit off anyone, including his players. He had rules, and if you violated his rules you paid a price for that.
That was an era when pro wrestling was popular, and I remember three of us were watching it just before our noon gameday skate. Because of our TV watching, we were literally three or four seconds late getting on the ice.
Mavety went in the dressing room and pulled the television out of the wall. Then he yelled at us as if we had committed a capital crime. In his eyes, we had. We had disrespected the game by being late for a team skate. He was my kind of coach.
Just as Coach Drumm had taught me, I established myself in that first season. As a 17-year-old, I had 12 goals, 15 assists, and 142 penalty minutes in my first season in the OHL. I fought enough to set a tone for future seasons. Intimidation is a huge aspect of junior hockey. Age and size make a difference, and the older players have the advantage. When you are a younger player, you wait for your time to take advantage of that. I knew my time was coming because I had fought against the toughest players in my “class.”
In my second season with the Bulls, I produced 30 goals, 37 assists, and maybe 20 fights in 60 games. My penalty minute total rose to 151. But I had 23 goals at Christmas time, and only had seven in the second half of the season.
What I also remember about the 1991–92 season in Belleville was meeting up with Kris Draper for the first time. He was playing for the Ottawa 67’s, and he had come back from the World Junior Championships like he was jet-propelled.
I remember thinking, Who the hell is the guy wearing a gold choker chain who can skate 100 mph in blue blades?
Little did I know that the guy was going to end up being such a close friend in our days together on the Red Wings. He owns up to the gold chain, but he swears he didn’t have blue blades, even though that’s how I remember him.
The 67’s beat us in six games during the playoffs, but what I recall most about that series was a fight between Draper and Brent Gretzky. I always tell Draper it was like watching a pillow fight.
Here were these two skinny-ass centers trying to fight like they were heavyweights. I believe Drapes won the fight, although I would never admit that to him.
It was like two little rats clawing at each other. The battle started behind the net, and when the linesmen finally moved in the fight was at the red line. Although they had battled for close to 100 feet, neither player had a mark on his face. It was like they were hitting each other with whipped cream pies. I’ve always told Draper that he lost that fight.
“You may have beat us in the series,” I always tell him, “but at least I didn’t get beat up by Gretzky.”
No one in the NHL played more aggressive against Wayne Gretzky than Draper, and I’ve always believed it was because I razzed him all the time about being hammered by Brent.
Brent Gretzky was a quality player, and if he came out in today’s NHL he would have had a long career. He could skate and play the game like Wayne. He just wasn’t very big. In 194 games in Belleville, Brent posted 84 goals and 166 assists for 250 points. It wasn’t easy being the younger brother of Wayne Gretzky, but Brent handled it better than I would have.
Brent and I spent a lot of time together. He took me to his home in Brantford, Ontario, and it was like taking a trip to the holy land. Their basement was like a shrine to Wayne. All of Wayne’s trophies were there, along with all of the game-used jerseys he had collected through the years. It’s an amazing display. It’s like going through the Hall of Fame with no glass separating you from the displays.
The other memorable trip with Brent involved going to Wayne’s home in Southern California during the summer. Wayne was away at the Canada Cup, and his wife, Janet, was also gone for the start of the week. So Brent and I had the run of the mansion. The only people around were the cook, Janet’s brother, Jerry, and security guards.
Brent and I went to several parties, and met an endless stream of celebrities. I ended up picking up a model at one of the parties. I brought her back to Wayne’s place, and we got frisky in the hot tub and pool. What I didn’t know was that security guards taped and watched my
sessions with the model. When Janet came home later in the week, she wouldn’t stop kidding me about it.
When Wayne saw me over the next few years, he would say, “I hope you had fun at my house.”
Even if nothing had happened between me and the model, I still would have said that I had a great time at Wayne’s house. Just being at breakfast at Wayne’s table and having gorgeous Janet Jones show up every morning wearing her housecoat was enough for me to call it a great trip.
If you are having breakfast with Janet Jones, you know you have made it.
From 1987 through 1991, the NHL draft rules allowed 18- and 19-year-old players to be chosen only in the first three rounds of the draft. Once you turned 20, you could be drafted in any round.
As a 30-goal scorer, I had a chance to be drafted as a 19-year-old. Rollie Thompson was my agent at the time, and he had heard that the Buffalo Sabres were considering drafting me.
When it didn’t happen, I switched agents, going with Newport Sports. I also made up my mind to become a monstrous force in my draft year. In the summer, I committed to a training regimen of mountain biking and rollerblading. I was in the best physical shape of my career.
In my third season with Belleville, it was fucking comical how much room I would get when I had the puck. If I skated the puck over the blue line, I could skate with it to the faceoff dots before I had to shoot. No one wanted to get too close to me.
I was named OHL Player of the Year after I scored 55 goals in 65 games. I finished with 72 assists and 127 points. Gretzky had 121 points. How many players can say they outscored Gretzky in junior hockey?
My analysis of my fighting career in the OHL is that I only lost one fight. Certainly I had some draws. Defenseman Jeff Ricciardi of the Ottawa 67’s and I had some memorable battles, and neither of us ever gave an inch. We just stood there and battled toe-to-toe. But I don’t think he ever bested me.
Ryan VandenBussche was the most enthusiastic fighter that I faced in junior hockey. I would tie him up until he couldn’t reach me, and then I would tee off on him. He took more punches from me than anyone else because he would never quit. Honestly, I would grow tired and bored of hitting him. “Dude,” I would say, “are you done yet?”
My Last Fight Page 2