Playing Hurt

by John Saunders

  Of course, the scoreboard might be coolly objective, but the coaches don’t have to be. Most coaches play favorites, which is why I loved playing for a coach named Roger St. Onge on a Bantam travel hockey team, for players in grades eight and nine. He was a young man, probably in his late twenties, but he had the look of a hockey lifer. He wore his black hair combed straight back, with a two-day beard and a windbreaker from one of his old teams. Coach St. Onge didn’t speak very much English, so he kept it simple, “John, Bernie—go!”

  But his philosophy was just as simple, and I loved it. Coach St. Onge was completely consistent and fair. With him my performance directly determined his actions: play better, and I got more ice time. Play worse, and I got less. This sounds straightforward, but how many coaches actually do that, every game, with everyone on their team? With Coach St. Onge, hockey gave me things I couldn’t seem to get anywhere else, including structure, a sense of fairness, and male role models.

  I was a very good running back, pitcher, sprinter, and high jumper, but for me hockey eclipsed them all. Montreal is home to the Canadiens, the Yankees of hockey, and our area produced serious players. Peter Quinn, two years older than me, played at Dartmouth. Steve Heggison, one year older, got a full ride to Providence College, where he played for Lou Lamoriello, the future president of the New Jersey Devils and now the Toronto Maple Leafs. If you played well in Chateauguay, you could make a better life for yourself.

  By high school I was one of the best players in the area. Ivy League teams out east and Midwestern programs like Michigan and Michigan State were courting me. Not only did I believe hockey would give me my best chance to get to college, but I also had no doubt that I’d make it to the National Hockey League.

  But my hockey dreams were about to run into two major obstacles. One I couldn’t control. The other I could, but I chose not to.

  CHAPTER 6

  Looking for a Little Relief

  LIKE MOST TEENAGERS, I STARTED TO RELY LESS ON MY parents and more on my friends. Fortunately I’ve always had good friends. By eighth grade my loose circle was evolving into a smaller, tighter group of trusted allies—Gerry, Vincent, and Barry—and we’ve remained close to this day.

  For the first time in my life I felt like I belonged to a group of people who chose to accept me. These guys became my family. They liked my ideas and thought I was intelligent enough to engage in a real conversation.

  Our relationships with our fathers varied, but none of us was very close to his dad. In those days that was more the norm than it is today. Vincent had about ten younger brothers and sisters, so he was as much a father to them as a brother and had to be responsible. But Barry and Gerry went out of their way to do the opposite of whatever their parents wanted. Gerry’s mom remarried; his stepdad was a stand-up guy who became a true father to her kids, but he and Gerry still argued a lot.

  Despite all this, I envied them for having fathers at home, a reliable supply of food on the table, and strict rules they had to follow. Even if they hated obeying those rules, they gave my friends some structure—something all kids want, even as they rebel against it. Our family had rules, but I didn’t follow them, and if my dad wasn’t home, there weren’t many consequences. So the rules quickly lost their power.

  But none of that stopped me from pretending that I had it much better than my friends did. I’d ask, “What time do you guys have to be home tonight?”

  “Midnight. What about you?”

  “Well,” I’d boast, “my dad’s in Ohio, and my mother doesn’t care what time I get in.” This was an exaggeration: we did have a curfew, but if I came in late, Mom didn’t say much, if anything.

  This was every teenager’s stated fantasy. But as my friends grudgingly left the street and headed back to home, I was the jealous one.

  Like a lot of teenagers, we liked flirting with danger. When I entered ninth grade my dream of being an NHL player cheered by thousands became less important than fitting in with my small circle of friends. Barry, Vincent, Gerry, and I made our first forays into drugs at our town’s grocery store. Someone told us we could get high by chewing nutmeg, so we stuffed our pockets with as many bottles of the spice as we could carry and gathered beneath a highway overpass.

  “All right, who’s going to go first?”

  I was fourteen and still hadn’t had my first beer or cigarette. Neither had the others. Gerry dared to go first, and soon enough we were all chewing the nutmeg, eagerly anticipating the psychedelic paradise we’d heard about. But the truth is that chewing nutmeg is like eating sand and tastes like the bottom of a bird cage—with about the same effect.

  “Anybody feel anything yet?” Gerry asked.

  We waited. Nothing. But nobody wanted to be the first to admit he wasn’t catching that “spice high.” We all wanted to be the first spice boy, so we all acted like it was working.

  “Hey, this is pretty good!” I lied.

  “Definitely feelin’ it!” another said.

  But when Gerry asked if anyone wanted any more, we all said, “No!”

  When we got to Billings Regional High School in the late sixties the conventional wisdom held that when it came to drugs, there was little middle ground. Marijuana would rot your brain and lead you to even heavier drugs, which in turn would lead to addiction. Start smoking pot, and soon you’d be shooting heroin. I have no idea if the domino effect is true, but I can tell you this much: nutmeg definitely leads to harder drugs.

  The four of us were amateurs, but our friends’ older siblings were experienced. One night, soon after we started hanging out with them, I helped polish off a gallon of homemade red wine, about the worst stuff you could imagine. I woke up hours later inside a tent in Vincent’s backyard. I was severely hungover, and my face had somehow been smashed up, with a long scrape and a fat lip. I had no idea how it happened until my friends informed me that, after chugging the bottle, I tried to ride a bicycle from the handlebars. No one was surprised when I fell face first into a rock in Vincent’s front yard. Well, that explained that.

  I could have learned a lot from that one night: drinking alcohol can be dangerous, chugging a gallon of red wine more so, and homemade wine is to be avoided at all costs. And if you break all these rules, you probably shouldn’t hop on the handlebars of a bike and try to ride it. But the only lasting lesson I took away was a lifelong aversion to red wine.

  Even in the late sixties most of my classmates would not smoke pot. What motivated me to cross that line was a need that went much deeper than achieving fame on a hockey rink. Getting high provided a temporary escape from feeling sad and worthless, my dominant emotions at that age.

  Many people have fleeting thoughts of suicide, especially teenagers. For me the desire to die started to take hold at this age and followed me for decades. In hindsight it’s obvious that I was depressed—and yes, adolescents can suffer from depression, which is a more serious condition than typical teenage moodiness. It can be more dangerous, too, because often the decision to end one’s life is impulsive, and teenagers are more impulsive than adults. But in my teens I was no more aware of being depressed than a fish is aware of being in water.

  I knew I felt bad, though. I even thought I knew why: I was a bad kid, an inadequate son, a defective person. If you are the problem, your problem is pretty hard to escape.

  It was in one of my various basement bedrooms that the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach became much more intense. As I lay on my bed I felt even more alone in the world. I’d drop the record player needle onto a Jimi Hendrix album, like Are You Experienced? or Axis: Bold as Love. The music helped me sink into my favorite daydream: that I could close my eyes and never wake up.

  I could still retreat into the disguise of the good kid. I could ace a test, run for a touchdown, hit a home run, or score a goal, but the pleasure these things provided didn’t last. I knew my dark side was always waiting to make a roaring comeback. I decided that if I was going to get some relief from feeling horrible all the
time, I needed more than a good grade or a good game. I needed something else. So I started smoking pot with my friends.

  What I initially got out of drugs wasn’t the buzz but the feeling of acceptance. If I had the approval of this group of friends, I thought, did the disapproval of my parents really matter? I might have been high as a kite, but I felt like my thinking had never been clearer.

  However, the more pot I smoked, the harder it was to keep up my double life. I had been raised to fear God, do my best in school, and lead Chateauguay’s Little League teams, but all those things mattered less and less. After all, what did I get for all my hard work and self-denial? A dark, lonely basement room where I could wallow in my solitude.

  But when I smoked pot and stayed out all night I had a ball. I was hanging out with the only people who seemed to think I mattered. They didn’t like me for my grades or athletic ability but for who I was—something I hadn’t felt since we moved away from my grandparents.

  Our Gang of Four became part of a larger group that included Ralph, Robin, Richard, and a few others: the resident potheads at Howard S. Billings Regional High School. None of our families had much money, but if you had to be lower middle class, this was the time to do it. In the late sixties wearing the same worn jeans to school every day was considered cool. The rich kids were trying to look poor, not the other way around.

  While the kids who had a bit of money waited in the cafeteria line for their food, our gang walked past them with the same boring sack lunches we took to school every day. If my friends and I came into a few bucks, we’d visit a food truck around the corner that sold French fries and a Quebec delicacy called poutine, which is fries smothered in gravy and cheese. But we soon faced a lunchtime dilemma: How could we afford fries and still have enough money for pot?

  Gerry came up with the bright idea of panhandling. It wasn’t that unusual to see long-haired kids on the street asking for spare change, and plenty of folks passing by would throw a few coins their way. The four of us proved to be pretty good at this. We were smart and entertaining—or so we thought—plying reluctant givers with a little song or a joke, which often nudged them to reach into their pockets for some change.

  We weren’t above begging for cash from classmates’ parents, either, or even friends. We certainly didn’t feel that our pride or reputations were at stake, and sometimes we walked off with enough money to get fries and pot. Now that was a good day! But when we didn’t have enough for both, we chose the grass.

  I found that I could drink or smoke my pain away, at least for a little while, but my sadness never disappeared. It just retreated for a bit, then came back even stronger. That was when a voice began telling me, Stop at the next depot and get off. Killing myself seemed the only option that could end my pain, but the idea of actually doing it scared the hell out of me.

  I preferred fantasizing about dying in spectacular fashion than planning how I might actually do it. One of my favorite scenarios was imagining myself behind the wheel of a red Triumph sportscar doing 100 miles per hour, flying past the Indian reservation between Chateauguay and Montreal, a stretch of highway that was once called the deadliest passage in Canada. Just a small slip of my wrist, I figured, and I would be airborne, hurtling over and over, until I died in the glorious wreckage.

  You might think my death fantasies would end with the self-absorbed satisfaction that comes with vengeance: “Look what you made me do!” But mine always ended with the feeling of relief because I thought my death would make life easier for my family, like removing the family stain. So in my fantasy the spot gets removed, and our family picture becomes perfect again.

  At least when I was high I wasn’t thinking of ending my life. For many people drugs can lead to death by reducing their inhibitions to act on their suicidal impulses or through an accidental overdose. But for me getting high was fun and actually moved my thoughts away from death.

  Finding a way to get high soon became an obsession for all of us. Because we lived near Montreal, it was never difficult to find pot. We just had to find a way to pay for it. When we realized the money we were bringing in from panhandling wasn’t keeping up with our spending on drugs, we had to come up with something else.

  CHAPTER 7

  My Two Selves

  IN QUEBEC STUDENTS GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL after grade eleven, so our tenth grade is similar to junior year in American high schools. When I was in tenth grade I was elected class vice president. I was really into student council and worked hard at it. I was playing good hockey, which I still figured was my best chance to get to college and make a name for myself.

  After Coach St. Onge my most important hockey mentor was none other than Jacques Demers. Yes, the same coach who led the Montreal Canadiens to the Stanley Cup in 1993. I first met Jacques at the Phil Myre Hockey School in Montreal when I played at the Bantam level, after eighth grade. Jacques basically ran the summer camp. In the winter he coached our town’s top Junior team, the Chateauguay Wings—the pride of our city, composed largely of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds.

  Once, between skating sessions, all the campers my age were sitting in a classroom with Jacques drawing plays on the chalkboard, explaining some basic strategies. When he asked a question about a particular formation, I was the only one who had the answer. He smiled at me, then looked around the classroom. “See dat?” he said, in his thick French Canadian accent. “Dat’s why he’s going to be playing for my Junior team one day!”

  For a sixteen-year old, that was an amazing thing to hear. My buttons were popping. But did he really mean it? I learned that, like Coach St. Onge, when Jacques told you something, his word was good.

  The next year I played for Les Aisles’ Midget team, just a level below the Junior team, with a promise to come up as soon as I was ready. Jacques was a very smart coach, but his calling card was his amazing enthusiasm, which was contagious. When we learned he lived around the corner from us, we couldn’t resist visiting him occasionally.

  What we didn’t know then—what no one knew until Jacques confessed in 2005—was that he was illiterate. He couldn’t read. Imagine how smart you have to be to work around a handicap like that and manage to become head coach of five NHL teams. When I read the news of his illiteracy, I gained even more respect for him—for his cleverness, for his determination, and for having the courage to confess publicly.

  In his autobiography Jacques explains why such a smart guy could be illiterate: his father beat his mom and him, which made him so anxious he couldn’t learn. “All I wanted from my father was to treat me with love,” he writes. “Not to beat me up when I did something wrong. Not to beat up my mom. It really hurt me because he took away my childhood.”

  That sounded familiar. No wonder we connected so well. Jacques believed in me, and he often told me I was a legitimate pro prospect.

  The support I received from Jacques’s boss, Mr. Bougee, the manager of the Chateauguay Wings, was far more conditional. Whereas Jacques was an athletic, dashing, well-dressed guy with a stylish moustache, Mr. Bougee was a big, frumpy man. He also knew more about me than Jacques did—which was not to my advantage.

  After practice Mr. Bougee told me he’d heard rumors that I was hanging out with drug users, which was really only the half of it. I wasn’t just hanging out with them; I was one of them. He added, in a stern voice, “If you want to play for us, you better keep yourself clean.”

  My only real dream at that age was to become a professional hockey player, and the Chateauguay Wings represented the best route to get there. So I lied and told Mr. Bougee there was no truth to the rumors. I’m sure he didn’t believe me.

  “You got de talent and aptitude for dis game,” he told me. “And dat’s a rare combination, especially at your age. I’ve seen only a few with your understanding of de game. You can go as far as you want in hockey, even play in de NHL. Don’t blow dis by doing something stupid.”

  If I had listened, it might have changed the course of my life. But his
wise words just wafted away like the smoke from the joint I’d smoke ten minutes after I left his office.

  My NHL dreams would soon face another obstacle, this one not of my own making. In our football team’s season-opening game, our kicker boomed it, and I ran downfield to make the tackle. I thought I had the runner lined up, but when he cut sharply I missed him and hit the ground hard. My left shoulder popped out of its socket. The pain was worse than anything I’d ever experienced playing sports before.

  Riding in the ambulance I began to hallucinate. At the hospital the doctors twisted and pulled my arm for two hours, trying to jam the ball joint back into its socket. It was an excruciating process—and for nothing. After all that, when they wheeled me into the X-ray room, I simply stood up, and my shoulder magically popped back into place. It still hurt, but nowhere near as badly as it had.

  To make sure the joint healed properly, they put me in a cast from my waist up to my neck, like a turtle shell. I missed the entire football season. After I recovered I returned to our midget hockey team, where I was one of the league’s best players. It helped that I played with Bernie, one of the scoring leaders. I was one month away from being called up to the Juniors, Jacques’s team, for the 1970–1971 season.

  In February of 1971 we were playing on the road against one of our big rivals. When my brother scored the go-ahead goal, I skated over to congratulate him—while an opposing player snuck up from behind and flattened me. I went down hard, ripping my left shoulder from its socket for the second time. In an instant my chance to join Demers’s Junior team vanished.

  After they put me back in the cast for another six weeks I had no reason to go to practice. I suddenly had all this unexpected free time, and I used it to smoke pot. While my friends worried their parents might find out, I worried my coaches would. But none of those fears stopped us.