Hodson was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which results in an irregular and rapid heartbeat. He had surgery in February of 1996, and Kris Draper cut out a paper heart and drew a crack through it and taped it to Hodson’s dressing stall. He wrote the word “Ticker” on it and the nickname stuck.
Ticker was an engagingly energetic and funny guy who would do anything he could to help his team. He was also a prankster, and one of his signature moves resulted in him being called “The Turd Burgler.”
On the road, where dressing rooms are small and bathrooms are cramped, Ticker would purposely wait until he got to the rink to take the largest dump in the history of mankind.
He would stink up the place and then leave the pile for the next player to discover.
That’s a story about Ticker that you didn’t read in the Detroit Free Press. Bathroom humor plays well in an NHL dressing room.
One night, several of the Detroit players all went out to the Royal Oak Music Theater. We rented some limousines and got into our seats and all of a sudden Ticker comes running up to me like he had just witnessed a murder.
“There’s a fight outside and they’re going to kill Ozzie,” he blurted out.
Up I jumped and flew out the door, where I discovered a bouncer was holding Draper, not Ozzie, upside down. Quickly I sorted out that the incident had resulted from a case of mistaken identity. The bouncers were responding to a problem and had grabbed Draper by mistake.
But my memory of that event will forever be the look on Ticker’s face as he reported that one of our teammates was in trouble.
I always had great respect for the Russians on our team. Early in my career, Sergei Fedorov was extremely nice to me. One of my favorite times with Sergei was the night Cheryl and I went out with Sergei and his girlfriend to a concert at Cobo Arena that featured the Meat Puppets and Stone Temple Pilots. Sergei rented a limousine and made Cheryl and I feel like we had hit the big-time.
Sergei was a misunderstood player. He was one hell of a talented player, and when he was on his game he was as dominant as any center in the game.
Igor Larionov had the nickname of “The Professor” because he had such an intellectual aura about him. He was a true student of the game. I loved going out to dinner with him and hearing the stories about playing for Viktor Tikhonov. The stories we had about playing for tough coaches aren’t even in the same league with Larionov’s frightening tales of playing 11 months per year for the national team. Players from Larionov’s era couldn’t be sure what would happen to them if they got out of line. Being an athlete behind the Iron Curtain was a scary existence. Larionov was a great mentor for us all.
I always loved playing dominos with Larionov, Pavel Datsyuk, and Sergei Tchekmarev (our masseuse). Larionov was also the one who got me interested in English Premier League soccer. To this day, I remain a Manchester United fan because of Igor.
When Slava Fetisov joined the team in 1995, he introduced us all to a Russian card game called Helicopter. It’s a trick-taking game, and if you don’t take any tricks you have to match the pot.
This game became part of the flight plan for Redbird 1. There would be an “A” game, where the pots would reaches thousands of dollars, and there would be a “B” game, where the pots would be hundreds of dollars.
Games would continue once we landed. We were on a Western road trip, staying in Santa Monica, California, one night when defenseman Jamie Pushor was playing in a hand that included a pot that was more than his bi-monthly paycheck. At the time, Pushor’s yearly salary was $275,000.
That was after I’d stopped drinking, but I was chewing tobacco and I would sit at the table with a spitting cup.
Pushor was so nervous about the hand that he grabbed my spitting cup, thinking it was his beer. The tobacco hit his lips before he knew he had made a mistake.
That’s when I offered to buy his hand, figuring he didn’t need the pressure. I took one trick, which was enough to earn Pushor back his money.
You could walk away from the table with some pretty major losses. Mike Vernon was indebted to Fetisov for like $60,000, but it became customary for guys to forgive the debt for a lump-sum cash payment. You would give 10 or 20 percent of the debt in cash and all was good.
If you’re going to gamble as teammates, it has to be a friendly game. You can’t afford to have your team harmony disrupted by a gambling debt. That was not going to happen with our team. We were too close.
Draper and I were close from the beginning. We were less than 11 months apart in age, and we were both Ontario Hockey League alumni who were thrilled to have the opportunity to play in the NHL.
Our personalities are completely different, but we always had a good time together. Draper may strike you as a pretty straight-laced guy, and that’s a fair assessment, but he and I did get into some minor trouble together once.
Draper wasn’t a fighter on the ice, but he liked to wrestle off the ice. He was always challenging me to wrestling matches when we roomed together. The more we drank, the more interested Drapes became in testing himself against me.
He was amazingly strong in his lower body. When he worked out, he would broad jump on and off tables to help build strength in his legs. He was very difficult to knock off his feet, which is why we had some epic wrestling matches.
Our wildest wrestling match came in Boston on November 2, 1995. I know that because I remember it came after a 6–5 overtime win against the Boston Bruins. Steve Yzerman scored the game-winner.
Before the game, Bowman decided that Keith Primeau and Kris Draper would be healthy scratches. That was important because it meant that Drapes had a head start in the drinking department. By the time I showered and dressed and met them at an Irish pub, Draper was already feeling no pain. That was before my first rehab stint, so it didn’t take me long to catch up.
At some point in the process, we began drinking Irish car bombs. To construct that destructive drink you add Bailey’s Irish Cream and Jameson’s Irish whiskey to three-quarters of a pint of Guinness stout. That drink will blow you up instantly.
Drapes and I were roommates at that point in our career. By the time we returned to our room at the Long Wharf Marriott, it was around 2:00 am. I have no idea how the hell we ended up wrestling at that time of night, but our inebriated state probably was the primary reason that we began throwing each other around the room. It looked like a scene from a Western barroom fight. At one point, Drapes drove me into a round table and the top just snapped off the base.
As Ron Burgundy said in Anchorman, “Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean that really got out of hand quickly.”
No one got killed with a trident, but a few pieces of furniture suffered mortal wounds.
Someone from hotel security came up three different times to tell us that our neighbors were complaining about the noise.
This was not our first wrestling match, nor was it our last. Our matches usually started out as a lighthearted competition and ended with me cracking Drapes with a quick left or a forearm shiver. This night, I caught Draper with an elbow to his face, causing his nose to bleed profusely. It hemorrhaged like a war wound.
Meanwhile, the room looked like a battlefield. If you marked it off with yellow tape it would have looked like a crime scene. Draper’s blood was pooled all over.
We used the fluffy, white Marriott towels in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding quickly. The sheets and bed linens were also soaked in blood, then stacked in the bathroom. It looked like we’d performed surgery in there.
We tried to straighten the room the best we could, but it was a mess. As we left the next morning, I remember making one final effort to put the table back together. I carefully placed the top on the stand. But I wasn’t fooling anyone. The minute someone touched that tabletop it was going to fall off.
About a week later we were called into the office by the Red Wing
s secretary, who informed us that the team had been charged $3,000 for damage to the room. I wrote a check for $1,500 on the spot and Draper had his in by the next day. Neither of us questioned the charges.
Yzerman was another guy like that. He didn’t get to mix it up much on the ice, but just like Draper he liked to wrestle around with the guys in the dressing room.
One of my jobs with the Detroit Red Wings was to protect Steve Yzerman, and one night in Phoenix I failed in that duty when Yzerman almost went flying out of a 20th floor hotel window because of that roughhousing.
Yzerman always came across as Mr. Serious on television, but he was a different guy when he was hanging out with his teammates. He was the master of biting, one-line humor that would make you laugh and cringe at the same time.
When he would jab you with one of his zingers, you would say to yourself, That’s funny. I hope he was kidding.
We were roommates early in my career, and he was trying to get the best of me in a wrestling match. It wasn’t going to happen, but he’s fucking Yzerman, meaning he never quit trying.
The most memorable Red Wings wrestling match happened one night in our 20th floor room at the Hyatt Hotel in Phoenix. It was two nights before we were scheduled to play the Coyotes, and Yzerman, Kris Draper, Joey Kocur, and I were in my room before heading out to dinner.
Per his tradition, Yzerman jumped on me and I pulled him off and stuffed his ass in the 18 inches of space between the bed and the wall.
Watching all of this, Kocur did what he always did—he stood up for Yzerman, and he did so by grabbing Draper and repeatedly punching him in the kidney.
Draper wants no part of a battle with Kocur, and so he’s urging me to let Yzerman go.
“I’m going to be pissing blood tomorrow if you don’t let Yzerman go,” he yelled each time Kocur hammered on his body.
Three times I tried to pull Kocur off Draper while still keeping Yzerman stuffed between the bed and wall. Every time I would get a grip on Kocur, Yzerman would squirm and make progress toward escape. I would have to shove him back down in his hole. When I would do that, I would lose my grip on Kocur. Finally, I let Yzerman go to spare Draper further punishment.
It should be noted that my hotel room door was always open and our teammates were coming in and out as our match was going on.
Everyone was laughing pretty hard when I finally paroled Yzerman—but not before I presented him with a wickedly painful charley horse punch to this thigh. I’m sure it left a mark.
Kocur released Draper. Order seemed to be restored. I was standing by the bed, wondering where we should go to dinner. That’s when Yzerman hurled himself at me, launching off the bed like he had bounced off a trampoline.
The problem was that Yzerman was far enough away that I had time to move out of the way and he went flying past me. The potential horror of that event didn’t hit any of us until Yzerman’s body thudded loudly against the window.
The glass held and Yzerman almost seemed to slide to the floor in slow motion like he was a cartoon character.
My guess was there were about a dozen Red Wings watching our wrestling show when Yzerman hit the window.
Can you imagine the headline? Revered Red Wings Captain Falls to Death Because of Horseplay.
No one in the room said a word for several seconds, all of us undoubtedly contemplating the tragedy that we narrowly averted.
“Want to get some dinner?” Kocur asked.
Sure, we said, and all filed out of the room as if nothing had happened.
For the record, Draper did piss blood the next day, just as he predicted.
5. Learning How to Win
“I get knocked down but I get up again, never gonna keep me down”
—“Tubthumping”
Chumbawamba
As the New Jersey Devils celebrated their Stanley Cup championship in 1995 on the ice at Brendan Byrne Arena, a few of us forced ourselves to watch. It was our self-imposed punishment for not getting the job done.
I specifically remember Kris Draper saying, “We are never, ever going to let this happen to us again.”
Despite Draper’s promise, the following season we set an NHL record of 62 wins and still didn’t win the Stanley Cup. We registered 131 points that season, the highest point total produced by any team since Scotty Bowman’s Montreal Canadiens had 132 points in 1976–77.
We ranked first in goals-against and first in penalty killing, and we were third overall in goal scoring. We went 13 games (12–0–1) at one point without losing, and twice we registered nine-game winning streaks. We had six 20-goal scorers, and had the third-highest scoring team in the league.
But the Colorado Avalanche, playing their first season in Denver after moving from Quebec City, took us out in the playoffs in six games.
In that the Western Conference Final, Claude Lemieux had been suspended for a game for punching Slava Kozlov. Then in Game 6, he checked Draper from behind and drove him face-first into the boards. It happened near enough to the Detroit bench that we could all hear the bones in Draper’s face being crushed by the blow. It was a sickening sound.
Draper suffered a broken nose, severe facial cuts, and a fractured jaw that required surgery. His teeth and jaw had to be wired shut and he wasn’t able to eat solid foods for six weeks.
For his crime, Lemieux was suspended for the first two games of the Stanley Cup Final, when the Avalanche played the Florida Panthers. In hindsight, that would turn out to be only a small part of his punishment.
There was a lot of talk in the newspapers and on talk radio about how the Red Wings needed to get bigger, stronger, and tougher. Some of my teammates said Lemieux would pay a price down the road, but honestly, Draper and I never had a real conversation about the topic. He didn’t ask me to go after Lemieux. There was no master plan for exacting revenge.
When I picked Drapes up at the hospital, it wasn’t as if Lemieux was a main topic of conversation.
While we were driving home, I simply said, “I’ll take care of this.”
That was all that was said. There was no lengthy discussion about when it would be done, or how it would be done. Draper really couldn’t say much because his jaw was wired. Mostly I told him about our plans to get all of the boys together to go to the U.S. Open at Oakland Hills.
When Draper had his mouth wired up, it represented the only time during our long friendship that he has ever shut up long enough for me to say much of anything.
All of us were concerned about what Lemieux did to Draper, but we were also concerned that we had lost the series. Within the organization, there was clearly a discussion about whether we had the right mix to win a championship.
As players, we wondered that ourselves. Before the 1995 Stanley Cup Final, Detroit veteran Dino Ciccarelli had warned us not to squander our chance because you can’t be sure you will ever return to the Stanley Cup Final.
“You have to take advantage of it when you get to the Final,” Ciccarelli said.
When we lost to the Colorado Avalanche in 1996, many of us remembered Ciccarelli’s warning and wondered whether we would ever reach the Final again.
Obviously, we did play in the Stanley Cup Final again, and we won three championships in a span of six seasons. When I look back at those glory years, it’s clear to me that the key factors that resulted in us coming together as a team were the trade for Brendan Shanahan, signing Joey Kocur out of the beer league, and our ability to exorcize our Colorado Avalanche demons.
Shanahan was acquired from the Hartford Whalers on October 9, 1996, the day of our home opener against the Edmonton Oilers. We gave up Paul Coffey and Keith Primeau, both of whom had been in Scotty’s doghouse, plus a first-round pick to get Shanahan and Brian Glynn.
Shanahan dramatically changed our team in a variety of ways. He was a big, physical player who could fight and score goals. He sto
od up for his teammates. He was a presence on the ice and in the room.
Shanny was only a few years older than Martin Lapointe and me, but he taught us so much. I couldn’t one-time the puck worth a damn until Shanny worked with me. Shanahan had one of the best one-timers in the league, right up there with Brett Hull.
I remember playing on a line with him, and asking him where he wanted the puck when I passed it to him.
“Just put it somewhere near me,” he said.
That’s truly all you needed to do. I could pass the puck to his front foot, his back foot, or anywhere in between, and Shanny, a right-hand shot, would open up, adjust his body, and then rocket the puck on net. Even if he didn’t score, he would always end up with a great scoring chance. It was an impressive skill.
He worked with Marty Lapointe on being a goal scorer. Many times after practice, Shanny, Lapointe, and I would stay on the ice and work on our shots or talk about what goes into playing a power forward role. It was Shanny who helped me learn how to better pick my spots for fighting.
The importance of the Kocur acquisition is often overlooked. He was out of hockey, playing defense in a recreational league in summer hockey when Ken Holland signed him to give us more toughness. He was called “Papa” for a reason; he was a fatherly figure who brought a calming influence to our dressing room.
He had helped the New York Rangers win a Stanley Cup in 1994. He had done it all, and seen it all, and when the pressure started to build he had the ability to get us to relax.
On the ice he was an intimidating presence. Nobody wanted to fuck with us because they were fearful that they would have to face Joey. As I previously mentioned, he was a scary fighter.
But off the ice he was just as effective. Our captain, Steve Yzerman, considered Kocur a close friend, meaning that Kocur was in the leadership inner circle. The younger players worshipped Kocur, meaning he was considered one of the boys.
My Last Fight Page 6