I wasn’t going to cry. But then I looked at home plate and the blood was just gushing all over it. I screamed and started to run. Our house was right there. You just went through the back alley, opened the gate and you were in the backyard. I was scared as shit seeing all that blood. “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t! “Garth yelled after me. “Don’t tell Mom!”
She heard the screaming and came out. “Oh my God!” she said.
My nose was almost sideways. I looked like a Picasso painting. “Garth, you asshole!” Mom said. And she chased him around with her sandal. It was the first of many broken noses for me. They used to call me Bent Beak. It got hit so many times it changed shape. My dad had the same look. It wasn’t hereditary so much as a lifestyle thing. My nose was like a curved stick.
That was the only time he broke anything, but Garth had always terrorized me in the typical ways that older brothers do. He was just a little more creative at times. When he’d babysit me, he’d make me go to bed at five or six o’clock because he wanted to go outside to play. He’d tell me there were rattlesnakes under my bed and that if I got up they would bite me. I was young—I’d believe anything he said. I’d lie there as long as I could, until my bladder was about to burst. Then I’d run across my bed and leap to the doorway, bolt to the bathroom, pee, and then leap back into the bed, imagining a pit of snakes snapping at my heels. He also told me a bear lived in the basement, so I’d refuse to go down to the cold cellar. This was before I learned how to use a rifle.
That wasn’t even the worst of it. When we still lived in Grande Prairie, when I was really young, he and his friends built a tree house and wouldn’t let me in. I sat there, pouting at the bottom of the tree, until I felt a warm trickle, like rain. I looked up, and they were pissing on me. They were laughing so hard that one of them accidently knocked a piece of wood off the platform and it smacked me right in the head. It left a big gash, so Garth made me wear a toque at dinner so our mom wouldn’t find out—it was the middle of July. When she pulled the toque off my head, my hair was all matted with dried blood. My mother had a unique talent for running after you while removing her sandal in full stride and whacking you on the ass. She got Garth good.
The worst of it, though—the big whopper of all the terrible things Garth did to me when I was young—happened during an expedition some of the neighbourhood kids went on through the Edmonton sewer system. About two miles from our house, there was a ravine with a great big steel door in one of its banks. It was the drainage ditch for the rainwater in the city. We managed to wedge the door open enough to get inside. There were all these tunnels that led to the manholes around our streets. It was all Garth’s idea. Terry was there, too. We borrowed a baby buggy, a real one, with big wheels. We had a rope that we could use to pull it along, so Garth went in ahead in waders, and the plan was to get a couple of guys in the buggy and pull them along through the waist-high water, then send it back for the next few—kind of how they did it in The Great Escape.
We had everything we figured we’d need for underground exploration, which amounted to a few flashlights. It was all planned out. I was the youngest kid, just a tag-along little brother, so they had me test out the baby buggy. Garth waded ahead and I got into the buggy. He pulled me into the darkness. When the water got shallower, Garth called down the tunnel and told me to get out of the buggy, so I hopped out and trudged along in the black water. When I finally got to the first open area in the tunnel, Garth wasn’t there. I called for him, and there was no answer. I was scared. I turned on my small flashlight and searched around and couldn’t find him. Then I heard something above me. There was a ladder on the wall, leading up to the manhole on the street. I flashed the light up and caught a full moon. Garth had climbed to the top of the ladder. Thwack. He shit right on my head. True story. I had to walk home two miles covered in shit. “Don’t tell Mom! Don’t tell Mom!” he said. “I didn’t mean to hit you!”
5
Stomach Pains
I WAS STILL IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL THE FIRST TIME THE DOCTORS tried to figure out what was wrong with me. They told my classmates I had ulcers. That’s what Kelly Hrudey remembers the teachers saying—that Clint was in the hospital and would be away for a while because he was suffering from a stomach problem.
It wasn’t ulcers. That was just how they tried to explain these things back then. My anxiety had become unbearable, and I was always on the edge.
Nighttime was the worst. I couldn’t be alone without feeling overwhelmed by panic and fear. I cried a lot, but I never really understood what was wrong. A few months after the night my dad smashed our windows and took off, I could still hear that smash every night in my dreams and would wake up sweating and panicked. Dad was still around then. He’d take off for days at a time and we wouldn’t hear from him at all, but then he’d come home sober and sorry and my mom would take him back. Or he’d come really late at night, smelling of booze, and apologize for working late.
I don’t think I knew how to deal with my drunk dad—someone I loved and hated at the same time. With my friends, I was funny and loud and competitive and normal. But I was always hiding something.
In the fifth grade, I started to unravel. My head was spinning. It was filled with anxiety swirling around, refusing to leave. I would just cry. I mean, really, just sobbing uncontrollably alone in my room. For a while, I wouldn’t go anywhere unless it was with my sister, Terry. I felt comfortable and safe around Terry. She was probably the nicest person in the world. I acted fine when I was around other kids, but the anxiety never went away. I was a great actor.
I don’t know if it was depression. I wouldn’t describe it as that, exactly. I was just so anxious. I’d try to find reasons in my mind for what was causing it. I’d worry that I was the only person on the planet who felt this way. Or I’d worry that it was really just me here, and no one else was real. Weird shit. No one knew what was wrong.
My mother took me to see our family doctor, Dr. Flook. He was a nice man. He kept asking me what was wrong, so I did my best to explain it. I told him I had taken a knife from the kitchen and pushed it into my stomach—just enough to draw blood and feel pain. I think I was just so anxious and feeling depressed that I thought if I pushed it hard enough, it might end the pain, but then it might kill you, too. It was very abstract at the time. I was young—I had no idea what I was doing. It didn’t cause any serious injury, but I think it scared the doctor, because he told my parents what I had done with the knife, and they agreed that I needed to stay under observation at the hospital. He thought I was having a nervous breakdown.
They kept me in the children’s ward. Dr. Flook would come in to see me once a day. He’d ask me a few questions about how I was feeling, almost like I had a broken leg or something like that. They didn’t do much else. I didn’t even see a psychologist. I was kept under the supervision of the nurses. My parents would come and visit—both of them, even though Dad was on his way out of our lives at the time. The incident when the cops were called was the beginning of the end for my parents. But he came to see me in the hospital. I was glad. I still loved him.
The anxiety didn’t go away. I had to interact with the other kids in the children’s ward. We all had to eat together in one room and it made me anxious. I hated it in there. One night, I tried to escape. I had been crying all night in my room and decided that I’d had enough. All the other kids were sleeping. I crawled past the nurse’s desk so she couldn’t see me. I made it to the stairwell—we were on the fifth floor—and got through the door without her noticing. I made it all the way down until I found a door that said EXIT, but it had that emergency alarm on it, so I didn’t go through it. Instead, I went down another flight of stairs to a door that said MORGUE. That freaked me out, and I ran back up the stairs and crawled past the nurse’s desk and into my room. Another night, I got upset again and tried to leave, and they sedated me.
No one knew what to do with me.
I missed a lot of school. My mom would bring my bo
oks and lessons from class, but I fell far behind and never really caught up.
The one thing they did let me do while I was in the hospital was leave to play hockey. It was the only thing that seemed to make me happy, so they decided it was better to let me play. My mom would bring my hockey gear up, and I’d get half-dressed in the hospital room and she’d drive me to the rink. My teammates were nice. They didn’t say anything to me about being in the hospital. They didn’t ask me what “ulcers” were. I just played the game and everything felt fine. Then it was back to the hospital.
I was there for two months, cooped up in this “cuckoo’s nest” for kids. I have no idea why they let me out in the end. I have no idea what they learned about me. Nothing really changed. They probably thought, Forget it, this kid is hopeless.
6
Empty Bottles
DESPITE MY TIME IN THE HOSPITAL, I STILL EXCELLED ON THE ice. I jumped a level in hockey when I was thirteen. They called me up from the Ironco bantams to the Westgate Chevy midget team. All the other players were fourteen, fifteen and sixteen. These guys could shoot the puck.
It was a tough time for me. It didn’t help that Dad was screwing around with the mother of one of the players on the team. Everyone knew about it; the rumours got around. I remember going down the street to play hockey with one of my teammates on the midget team. I rang the doorbell, and his mom answered. She looked at me and said, “You’re nothing but a punk. And your mother’s a slut.” She was a friend of the woman my father was having the affair with. They’d all turned on my mom—and on me, apparently. “I don’t want you around here,” she said. Somehow my dad and this broad he was screwing came out as the victims.
My parents divorced a year later. Dad had been kicked out of the house for a while, but this time Mom made sure his ass was gone for good. Just as alcoholism is a progressive disease, a bad marriage also festers. And their marriage had rotted away. Mom used to stick up for him. She put up with his drinking as long as she could; she sheltered me from him. (For everything he did, Dad never hit me.) She knew that the man she had fallen in love with was trapped somewhere inside of what he became. Eventually she realized that the man she loved was never coming back.
I was always very courteous to my mom. She never asked me to cut the lawn; I just did it. If I saw her outside doing it, I’d say, “No, no, I can do it.” I hated taking out the garbage, so she’d do that. But my room was always clean—spotless, actually. I couldn’t stand a mess. That had more to do with the OCD I’d be diagnosed with later than with being a good kid—but still it was a bonus. The same went for my hockey gear. I used to wipe away all the puck marks to make sure everything looked brand new.
It was just Mom and me by then. Terry was married and had moved away. Garth was off playing junior hockey in Calgary. So Mom and I relied on each other. She needed me and I needed her. We sold our furniture to make ends meet because the old man wasn’t paying what he was supposed to be paying in support. And we couldn’t find him to make him pay. We had a table and chairs. Everything else we sold. We just hung on, together.
Mom had to go back to work to support me. It sounds like a sad old cliché, but it’s true. She found work as a secretary in an office downtown after spending two decades raising a family. It was hard on her. I came home one day and found her sitting over this damn typewriter, crying—she couldn’t learn to type fast enough.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
I hugged her. “Yes you can, Mom. You can do this. We can do this. Just keep pounding the keys.” We became a team. When I got home from school before her, I’d try to put dinner together for her. She was always grateful, even though the only thing I could make at the time was a bowl of Corn Flakes.
Mom always put me first, even in the tough times. She was one of those parents who always drove the players to games and practices. It didn’t matter how early or how far—she’d pick up every teammate in the area and drive us to play hockey and then drive everyone home again. I don’t know if Mom thought I had a future in the game or not. She probably knew that I was elite for my age, and she was well versed in the game with all of Garth’s success. But I think she just did it because she knew how much the sport meant to me.
I played for the Canadian Athletic Club in AA level hockey—there was no AAA in Edmonton at the time. There was a South Side Athletic Club and Northwest Athletic Club. We played all over the city. I changed the name on the back of my jersey to my mother’s maiden name, Henning. Knowing what my dad had done, it was a show of solidarity with my mom. He wasn’t coming to games anyway. He probably didn’t know, but it was a bold statement for a kid my age to make. I ended up changing it back after a year because it caused all kinds of confusion. By that time, I’d already made a name for myself as a Malarchuk. Garth and Terry both kept their last name, too, so I was on my own with the Henning thing.
We had a routine in the summer to earn extra cash. She’d go to work and I’d get on this old rickety bike I had and ride out to the construction sites on the outskirts of Edmonton. There were pop cans everywhere. I’d take green garbage bags and fill them up and hide them in the bushes. Then I’d bike miles home. When Mom got home from work, we’d drive out and pick up all the bags. We earned a nickel a can or bottle.
That’s how I paid for my first pair of goalie skates. At that time, if you played in a community league, they’d loan you the gear for the season. But I had to buy my own skates. I got them from Ken Hitchcock. Long before Ken became a Jack Adams Award–winning NHL coach, he sold hockey gear at United Cycle in Edmonton. They had a lot of used goalie equipment at the store, and Ken always gave us a really good break. He knew a little bit about my background, that I was one of the best goalies in the city and that my family situation was less than ideal. We weren’t pretending to be poor—we were poor.
I didn’t want to play goal to be like my dad. I wanted to be like Garth. He left home to play Tier II Junior A in Kamloops, B.C., when I was ten. Then he played major junior for the Calgary Centennials. We’d often drive down to watch his games. Garth was drafted by the Washington Capitals in the seventh round, 109th overall, in the 1974 NHL draft. The Toronto Toros of the upstart World Hockey Association drafted Garth in the sixth round, eighty-sixth overall, the same year. I was so proud of him. He never made it to the NHL on the ice—it just didn’t work out for him. He played in the International Hockey League in Kalamazoo, Dayton and Fort Wayne before retiring in 1977. Garth went on to be a police officer in Calgary and then joined the NHL ranks as a well-respected scout. He was the real father figure in my life. But we never talked about Dad. Never. He was always a topic better left buried in the past.
Besides the skates I bought with the pop bottle money, my most prized piece of gear was an old catcher Garth gave me for Christmas one year. He was away playing in the IHL and had it sent home. The label said it was from Santa. I unwrapped the present under the tree on Christmas Eve. It was a brown leather Cooper GM-12 catcher, the best of its kind at the time, before they had webbing. That night, I went to sleep with the catcher on my hand. I woke up on Christmas morning and it was still on. It was the best gift I’d ever received.
A lot of kids dream of making the NHL, but very few ever do. I realized this when I was young, but I basically said, “Screw that. I’m going to be a hockey player.” I’d heard that if you worked hard enough and wanted something badly enough, it would happen. It seemed logical to me. School sure as hell wasn’t going to work out, but I was actually good at hockey. So I worked harder than any kid I knew.
There was a contest called Save and Score, run by Lowney’s candy bars in 1971. The grand prize was a week at Bobby Orr’s hockey camp in Orillia, Ontario. It was a Canada-wide contest. I was ten at the time. The people who sent in the most golden wrappers would win the trip. I saw the contest as my big opportunity. I’d go to the arena with my mother to watch one of Garth’s games, but I’d spend the whole time digging through the garbage cans, pulling out every candy wrappe
r I could find. I must have searched through hundreds of garbage cans across Edmonton. I collected about 2,500 Lowney’s wrappers. That was the easy part. The hard part was writing my name and address on each one. I finished in first place by a mile and won goalie equipment and the trip to Bobby Orr’s camp.
They flew me from Edmonton to Toronto, and then I had to take a two-hour bus ride to Orillia. It was the first time I had really left home, other than visiting my grandmother in Grande Prairie. Kids obviously get homesick, but for me it was constant. It kept me up all night. The instructors called me the homesick kid. But the guy in charge of the program was really nice. His name was Bill Watters. He went on to jobs in upper management with the Toronto Maple Leafs and as a sports media personality. But to me, he was the guy who went out of his way to help me when I felt alone and scared. He and his wife were incredible to me that week. I’ll never forget that.
I started a serious workout regime when I was twelve years old, and I stuck with it obsessively. Aside from spending every minute I could on the ice, I was militant about doing all of the exercises and drills in Jacques Plante’s book. I’d do push-ups and sit-ups and deep knee bends. I’d run the stairs, up and down, up and down. When I worked up at the ranch in the summers, I’d do shoulder shrugs and take extra deep strides while carrying ten-gallon buckets of milk across the barn to pour into the pigs’ trough.
The work ethic and focus helped get me noticed by the Portland Winterhawks while I was playing midget. But it also took over my life. There was no line separating competitive drive from full-out obsession. I constantly compared myself to other goalies. I feared that I’d be second best. I’d lose sleep over it. I have to be the best, I have to be the best, I’d think while working out. I’d think about it while playing. I’d think about it while lying awake in bed at night. Worried, worried, worried—honestly, as a teen, I’d lose nights of sleep over it. Am I going to lose my starting job? Am I going to sit on the bench? If I got pulled from a game, I’d double up my workout the next morning. I’d bug my mom constantly. “Do you think I’m better than that goalie? What about this guy?” Whatever I was emotional about, I was obsessive about. It had become a competition.
The Crazy Game Page 3