Playing Hurt

by John Saunders

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I tried to compose myself and not screw up whatever might have remained to screw up.

  “Coach, I don’t know anything about this. Can I call you back?”

  “Sure,” he said, “but I need an answer today because we’re about to give your spot to another recruit.”

  I called my father and calmly asked about Coach Farrell’s call.

  “Oh, I’d been meaning to talk to you about that,” he said casually. “You’ve got to go to Indiana. Michigan can’t give you a scholarship.”

  “But I don’t want to go to Indiana.”

  “You’ll do what I say or else you can forget all about college. You’re going to Indiana!”

  I put down the phone and started to cry. But then I pulled myself together and called Coach Farrell. I had three choices: I could follow my dad’s orders; I could say yes to Michigan’s offer of walking on, without a scholarship; or I could forget about college and try out for one of the Junior teams in Quebec or Ontario and try to get to the NHL that way.

  My confidence was so low that I decided to take the path of least resistance. I didn’t have the energy to fight with Dad again, and being a big fish in a little pond might have some advantages. So I told Coach Farrell I appreciated his offer, but I’d be going to Indiana after all. He sounded surprised, but he told me to keep in touch, and if I ever changed my mind to let him know and he’d see what he could do.

  Indiana University is famed as a basketball school, but in 1973 Bobby Knight had only been there for a couple of years and had yet to win any of his eleven Big Ten titles or his three National Championships. Indiana also had a new football coach named Lee Corso, who would become a fixture on ESPN’s College Football Game Day. They would both become great friends, but you wouldn’t have guessed that when I showed up on their campus in 1973.

  Indiana’s registration period began in mid-August, so I packed up my few belongings and my hockey equipment, hopped in my dad’s car, and headed for Bloomington. It felt good to be starting a life of my own. As soon as I arrived I realized this could work out very well. Indiana University has a gorgeous campus filled with friendly midwestern folks and stately limestone buildings, all showcased in the cult classic Breaking Away.

  After my dad left I got a ride out to the rink, which was far off campus: a rickety, three-sided building with something that looked like a hockey rink inside. I saw a sign that said, “HOME OF THE INDIANA HOOSIERS.” It was their rink, all right. My jaw dropped. This was basically an outdoor arena with three walls and about a thousand seats. Meanwhile, five hours northeast in Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan was converting its famed Yost Field House into an eight-thousand-seat arena, which quickly became one of college hockey’s best barns.

  Baffled, I called Indiana’s coach for an explanation. He told me not to worry because they would soon be playing in Assembly Hall, the basketball team’s new home. I wasn’t sure if I should believe that or not.

  I returned to campus, found my dorm room, threw my bag down, and flopped on the bed, defeated. But as I lay there, I started to focus on the positive. It won’t be so bad, I thought. It’s a nice place and a great school, and my dad offered to chip in. This could still work out.

  I was wondering when my roommate was going to check in when I heard a key turn in the door. The door swung open, and in walked a huge kid, who had to be a lineman on the football team, followed by his parents. I stood up and held out my hand to greet him. “Hey, I’m John, from Montreal. I’m a hockey player.”

  All three of them stopped in their tracks. No one shook my outstretched hand.

  “I’m not staying with no fuckin’ nigger!” the kid said to his parents. “Can’t believe Coach roomed me with a goddamn darkie!”

  His father tried to calm him down. “Don’t worry, son, we’ll get this straightened out.”

  They talked about me as if I was in another room.

  “I mean, I know I have to play with them,” the son said, “but I don’t have to live with them.”

  I turned to the mother for a sympathetic look, figuring she was my best chance. She made for the door. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  As soon as they left I wanted to get out of there too, so I went to see a movie, Last Tango in Paris, starring Marlon Brando. I’d heard it had a few nude scenes with an actress named Maria Schneider—scandalous at the time. But as soon as the movie ended I couldn’t remember one thing about it because I was still consumed by the scene in my dorm room.

  Back home racists like that were like dinosaurs—you heard about them, but you didn’t think they still existed. I’d been called “nigger” on occasion, usually by a hockey opponent looking for anything he could think of to rattle me. But I had never tasted real racism until I set foot in that Indiana dorm room.

  When I returned to my room I saw that all signs of my new roommate had vanished. Apparently the idea of living with me was more than he could bear.

  How the hell do I get out of this? I needed to escape from the place I’d just escaped to. I decided I wasn’t going to wait around to see who would be my next roommate or when the rink might get finished. I picked up the phone and called Coach Farrell at Michigan.

  “Hi Coach, this is John Saunders. Do you still want me to come to Michigan?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. He explained that I’d have to come as a walk-on, with no scholarship money, but if I made the team, he’d see what he could do. I had no idea how I would pay for school, but I was desperate, so I told him I was coming regardless.

  “Great!” he said. He promised to meet me at the bus station.

  When I phoned my father he exploded. “Why can’t you do anything right? Don’t expect a damn dime from me. You’re on your own!”

  I hung up.

  I loaded up my bags and got on a Greyhound. Just as Farrell had promised, he was there to greet me in Ann Arbor—a welcome sight. He dropped me off at the Bell Tower Hotel, which is where the big-name musicians stay before they perform right across the street at Hill Auditorium. Farrell said he’d try to find me a dorm room as soon as possible. No guarantees, but his good intentions were clear. Like Coach St. Onge and Jacques Demers, Farrell was a man I felt I could trust.

  After a few days in the hotel I moved into a dorm on the other side of campus, far from the rest of the freshman hockey players. I met them the next day for dry-land training. I was now part of something big. No one has won more NCAA hockey titles than Michigan, and the university speaks for itself. Even though I was a latecomer, the guys on the team were great. Most of them were fellow Canadians, and the American guys wanted to act like Canadians. After all, hockey is our sport!

  A week into the fall semester we had to take physical exams the same day the basketball players did, and they seemed curious about this black guy lined up with all these white hockey players. Campy Russell, the basketball team’s star player and the nephew of Michigan’s all-time great Cazzie Russell, approached me and said, “You’re a hockey player?” I nodded shyly, not sure what was coming next. The room turned silent. Then he asked, “Man, how can you stand up with those knives on your feet?”

  Both teams busted out laughing. Coming off my brief experience at Indiana, this felt great.

  We started dry-land training about six weeks before we hit the ice. We ran sprints, we ran distances, and we lifted weights, things the NHL hadn’t even thought of, yet. Dan Farrell, Wisconsin’s Bob Johnson, and Minnesota’s Herb Brooks were all way ahead of their NHL counterparts on and off the ice. College hockey was entering a golden era, and these guys were leading the way.

  When we got to dress for our first practice in the former Yost Field House, built in 1923, I was so excited that I dressed quicker than everyone else so I could be the first Michigan player to step on the ice at the newly converted Yost Arena. I knew Farrell planned to red-shirt me that season—which meant I’d be practicing with the team but not playing in any games—but I hoped to impress him
so much he’d change his mind.

  I was in for a shock. If I was a bit behind my new teammates at off-ice conditioning, it was nothing compared to the gap I noticed as soon as we hit the ice. I had always been the biggest guy on my teams, but most of these guys were at least as big as I was, and they moved at speeds I’d never seen before. Meanwhile I was paying the price for all the time I’d spent away from the rink the past few years, due to injuries and other priorities.

  We had a large freshman class of ten guys, five of whom would go on to play a combined thirty-two years in the National Hockey League, part of the first wave of college players to break into the NHL. I had joined some pretty fast company, and I was struggling just to keep up.

  To start the season we played a few exhibition games, when even red-shirts can play. Farrell gave me plenty of chances to show my stuff, and I held my own—but not well enough to take anyone’s spot. The best game I played was against Western Michigan University, which was starting first year as a varsity program. I threw my weight around and handled the puck with some agility. But when Farrell posted the final varsity roster, I wasn’t on it. I would practice with the team that season but not play in any games.

  That was tough, but what made it even tougher was that I’d become good friends with two other freshmen, Dave Shand and Rob Palmer. Both were from the Toronto area and came ready to play. After the first game the Michigan Daily announced, “PALMER SPARKLES IN DEBUT,” so I immediately christened him “Sparky.” The nickname followed him into the NHL and to the present day. As Palmer says, however, “It could have been worse. Saunders could have called me ‘Sparkles.’” Be thankful for small blessings, Spark.

  Because my dorm room was so far away, Rob and Dave let me crash on their dorm room floor. They had no problem getting girlfriends, while I extended my unfortunate knack for becoming “just friends” with just about any girl I met, but never more than that.

  Compared to living with a racist roommate at Indiana, even sleeping on a dorm room floor at Michigan was quite an improvement. I could eat in the cafeteria too, thanks to Shand. We were about the same size, but he was white with shoulder-length hair, and I was black with a big Afro. He’d get in line before me, flash his meal card to the guy checking at the door, then pass it back to me, and I’d use it. The guy checking was either happy to play along or he had really, really bad vision. I’ve always liked to assume it was the former.

  Sparky and Dave treated me as an equal, which gave me some confidence when I sorely needed some, even though they were already stars while I was sitting in the stands. Still, it wasn’t easy watching my friends play, while I sat out. I missed my brother and sister. I missed my friends. And I missed taking drugs to forget about everything for a while.

  Self-medication wasn’t a term we used back then, but that was exactly what I had been doing. That’s one reason why, when I had to go clean during my semester at Michigan, my depression deepened. Self-medicating isn’t a good idea, of course, as it just delays your troubles and makes them worse, but stopping cold turkey was hard.

  I also felt like a stranger in the States. By the time I arrived on Michigan’s campus in 1973 we were just a few years removed from inner-city riots igniting across the country, including Detroit, and the University of Michigan was one of the hottest campuses for racial turmoil. In 1969, a few months after football coach Bo Schembechler arrived in Ann Arbor, Jesse Jackson met with the Michigan football players and tried to persuade them to boycott the team. They declined, telling him the program treated them fairly, but protest was in the air. The next year the Black Action Movement (BAM) shut down the campus for eighteen days.

  Just three years after that I’m walking across campus with Dave and Sparky when we passed three black women walking together. Being Canadian, we all stepped to the side so they could pass. They looked at me and nodded, which was the code at the time among black students to show solidarity. Fresh from Canada, I had no idea about this custom. I didn’t know I was supposed to nod back. When I didn’t, all three women turned to yell at me.

  “Who do you think you are?” one of them said. “Just ’cause you got some white friends doesn’t make you better than us!”

  Her friend started in. “You keep trusting those honkeys, and you’ll get stabbed in the back. Stay with your own, brother!”

  I was speechless. Just a couple of months earlier I had faced old-school racism from my white roommate at Indiana, and now I wasn’t black enough? I didn’t have anything like the consciousness of other black students at the University of Michigan because I hadn’t experienced what they had, which added to my sense of isolation.

  I wasn’t playing hockey. I lived on the other side of campus. I didn’t have a girlfriend, and I was being called out for not being black enough. As fall wore on, things seemed to get harder on all fronts.

  Returning from hockey practice one chilly November afternoon, I passed a group of black students hanging outside my original dorm room, where I only checked in occasionally to get a few things. They began taunting me, calling me “Oreo,” “sell-out,” and “wannabe.” They accused me of thinking I was better than they were because I hung out with white guys. They probably didn’t know those guys were not just my teammates but my closest friends on campus.

  My temper, never dormant long, flared up. I turned to one of the larger, more vocal members of the group. “You don’t know shit about me,” I told him. “You couldn’t survive the life I’ve lived.” This got his attention, so I kept going. “You’re at one of the most prestigious universities in the country and you’re not an athlete. I’m guessing your parents had enough money to send you here, and now you want to bring me down? No, I don’t think I’m better than any of you. But I want an education too, and the only way I can get it is by playing hockey. If that means my friends are white, well, it’s what I’ve lived with my whole life.”

  Everyone went silent. I walked away, savoring my minor triumph. But when I returned to my dorm room that night, I found a bag of Oreo cookies tacked to the door. I stormed down the hallway, screaming for whoever did it to show their faces. Once again, no one made a peep.

  I tore open the bag and placed a single cookie beneath the door of every room in my hall. On a large sheet of paper I scrawled a challenge and posted it on the hall bulletin board: “LET’S MEET & SEE WHO IS MORE OF A BLACK MAN.”

  A few days later I was heading out of the dorm to go to class when four black students stopped me. They grabbed my arms and escorted me back into someone’s room, where they had me sit in a chair in the middle. I knew I was in trouble, so I tried to talk my way out of the situation. I explained that in Canada I was only one of a handful of blacks at my high school but had very few problems. Growing up with generally harmonious race relations, I told them how shocked I’d been to face blatant racism from white students. I told them my story about Indiana, and said I understood why they felt the way they did.

  They weren’t impressed. Two of them jerked me up out of the chair, and the biggest guy slugged me in the ribs as hard as he could. Then they took turns punching me. No one touched my face. I guess that would have been evidence. After a few minutes they left me in a heap on the floor.

  One of them turned back to me and said, “Now maybe you understand how strongly we feel about race relations. If you don’t have us on your side, you have nothing. The same white people you call your friends are calling you a nigger behind your back. WAKE UP!”

  The next day, in the locker room, I told my teammates some of what had happened, but not all of it. I was careful to leave out the actual beatdown because I knew if these guys heard about one of their teammates getting messed with, they’d defend me. That’s what hockey guys do. It wouldn’t be about race for them but about team solidarity. The rest of campus wouldn’t know that, though, and would probably assume it was racially motivated. The last thing I wanted to do was start a race riot.

  I did tell my Canadian teammates a few of the attackers’ lines, whi
ch they thought were bizarre. They had seen my black classmates try to entice me to sit with them, and some had harassed me when I didn’t accept their invitation, but the idea that sitting with my white teammates would invoke anger in people who didn’t even know me was truly foreign to my teammates. “Why do they care who you hang out with? Tell them they’re welcome to join us.” It was a different world for them too.

  I felt a lot more comfortable in the locker room surrounded by white Canadians than I did in my dorm surrounded by black Americans who thought I wasn’t black enough. Obviously most of our history was the same, starting with slavery. In Canada we had similar black churches, food, and music. But our history after reaching Canada is largely one of inclusion, not segregation. And that was where my experience differed from that of my black American classmates.

  Perhaps understandably, they weren’t interested in learning about my life north of the border. That was fine. But I couldn’t put aside the unfair assumptions they’d made about me, and that was a problem.

  With my first semester at Michigan coming to a close, I assessed my situation. Coach Farrell told me I had little chance of getting any scholarship money second semester. I wouldn’t get into any games until my sophomore year. I had good friends on the team, but no girlfriend. And I had no friends among my black classmates—and no prospects for making any. When I added it all up, I started to think I wasn’t going to make it at Michigan.

  Sitting in the stands made me more depressed than anything else. I’d been playing hockey since I was four, and on every team I’d been on, if you weren’t playing much now, you probably never would be. It never occurred to me that in college hockey, you had to wait your turn. Freshmen usually didn’t play much, if at all. The seniors generally carried the team. But when your two best friends are freshmen who are playing all the time, you think that’s how it works. Throw in the fact that I’d missed most of my last three hockey seasons, and I had a lot of catching up to do, and this would be a hard place to do it.