Hockey Towns

by Ron MacLean

  Probert landed with the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds. During a televised game in March 1985 between the Hounds and the Hawks, he and Brad ended up squaring off. Brad hung in there for a minute and a half, which impressed the hell out of every general manager in the league. Suddenly, his stock began to rise. He had been rated in the middle of the second round of the NHL draft, but the fight rocketed him to the first round.

  Come draft day, Brad went sixth overall to the New York Islanders. Like everybody else, the Islanders thought he was a combination of Clark Gillies and Bobby Nystrom, but Brad was neither. He’d grown up with a sister who was a year and a half older, so he didn’t fight a lot. Boys who grow up with two older brothers who are in fighting range grow up a lot tougher. Brad played a physical game, but unless someone else chose to drop the gloves, he didn’t consider fighting to be an option. Being a first-round pick was great, but ultimately he knew he could only disappoint.

  The NHL smells like, looks like and feels like men. Some of the Islanders had been playing hockey for a long time—since near the time Brad was born. The hits sounded bigger, the crowds louder—at that time, the Islanders were still drawing big crowds to their games. In 1985, walking through the tunnel for his first NHL preseason game, Brad’s adrenaline was spiking as he neared the ice. “Holy crap!” he thought. “I’m literally going to jump on the ice and black out from stress.” He skated on, and during his first shift he got bumped. He fell, got back up, managed to shake off the stars and finished the fight.

  Brad scored a goal against Boston a few games later. It was a beautiful goal, over the glove top shelf—bing bong. He got to the bench and sat down beside Mike Bossy, the legend. The guy had scored consecutive Stanley Cup–winning goals just a couple of years earlier, in ’82 and ’83. Mike Bossy didn’t tap Brad on the leg. There was no “Good job, kid.” He just stared straight ahead at the game and said, “Oh, you’re not going to score many like that.”

  Brad said, “Say what?”

  Bossy said, “Yeah, don’t think you are going to score many like that.”

  Brad said, “Okay.” Turns out Bossy was right.

  Brad found out in a hurry that the difference between the minors and the NHL is substantial. In junior, he was a point-a-game player, and close to it in the AHL. In 1987–88, his first full season in the NHL, he felt lucky to get ten points.

  Bryan Trottier had roomed for years with Mike Bossy. They’d done everything together—sat side by side on the bus and on planes, played cards, hung out. They were so much like an old married couple, Garry Howatt nicknamed them “Bread and Butter.” But Bossy was dealing with a bad back, so he started playing less and less, and then he retired in 1987. All of a sudden, Brad was injected into Trottier’s rooming situation.

  Trottier treated Brad like gold. He was one of the best guys Brad ever met in hockey, and still is to this day. Trottier loved the game and was helpful in calming Brad down before games and making him feel like part of the team. On February 13, 1990, Bryan Trottier scored his five hundredth career goal for the Islanders, after fifteen years with the team. A few months later, he drove Brad from Nassau Coliseum to a practice rink, and the whole way he talked about team loyalty. He told Brad, “If you just give your heart to this organization, they’ll pay you back in spades.” And then he was gone. The Islanders released him. When Brad heard the news, he realized that if one of his favourite guys who had given the team so much could be unceremoniously dumped, then no one was special. And since he was way down the pecking order, he’d better not get too comfortable.

  For his first few years as a pro, Brad was up for a bit and then he’d get sent down to the farm team—Springfield at first, and then Capital District in Troy, New York, just across the river from Albany. Over his entire career he moved twenty-two times.

  After their dynasty run, during which they won nineteen consecutive playoff series between 1980 and 1984, Brad says the Islanders stopped developing players. He felt he really had no personal connection with Al Arbour. Miscast in the role of tough guy, Brad didn’t think he was a project for Al.

  The coach who worked on developing him was his minor-league coach, Butch Goring. The trainer would come out and say, “Hey, Brad, Butchy wants to see you in the office.” Butchy would kick his feet up on his desk. “How you feeling? How you doing? What are you thinking? What do you think? I know you want to get back there, but how do you feel? Here’s what you’re going to do. I’m going to put you in all these situations. You’re going to get a lot of chances to work on this or that.” It was awesome.

  In the NHL, Brad found the attitude was “Figure it out or you’re gone.”

  On February 21, 1989, against Detroit at the Nassau Coliseum, Brad took a boarding penalty for a cross-check on Gilbert Delorme. He was in the box when Joey Kocur came out on the power play. Kocur yelled at him through the glass, “I’m going to effing get you!”

  Brad thought, “Aw crap. Okay, I’ve got a date with Joey Kocur that I don’t want to have.”

  He served the penalty and Arbour kept putting him out, and every time he did, Joey Kocur would come out too. Joey was spoiling for a fight, bumping him and slashing him, but Brad was running scared. There was no way he wanted to mix it up with Joey. This went on for a couple shifts when, at a faceoff, the linesman turned to Brad and said, “Are you going to get this over with?”

  Brad had no choice. His coach wanted him to fight, the Detroit Red Wings wanted it to happen, and now the officials were telling him to get it done. Brad knew half his team was thinking, “Geez, Dalgarno, get it over with. What are you doing? It’s embarrassing,” while the other half probably understood— “Oh man, if I were him, I would be running too.”

  The puck got dumped into the Islanders’ end and Brad thought, “All right, we’re here, let’s go.” He dropped the gloves and did pretty well with a flurry of punches, and then he and Joey got tied up. When that happened, the ref would usually come in and break it up, but this time, he was on his own.

  Brad could feel Kocur working his right arm out of his sweater, and then, suddenly, Kocur popped him in the temple with a right that came from New Jersey. Brad felt an egg break in his cheek. The warmth spread like runny yolk down to his jaw. He went down with Joey on top. The linesmen, Bob Hodges and Pat Dapuzzo—who would have his nose severed by a skate during a game in 2008—came in and broke it up. Joey got up, commenting, “How’s your face, dickhead?”

  Brad was immediately in a lot of pain, so he knew something was seriously wrong and skated right off the ice. But he had to wait until the end of the game for one of the team doctors to drop him off at Huntington Hospital to get looked at.

  Brad was admitted overnight, and in the morning a doctor came in and told him he had multiple facial fractures. The structure that held his eye in place was gone. He ended up having reconstructive facial surgery weeks later at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital. They needed two entry points to fix the damage, so they sliced through his temple and cut his bottom eyelash away. The doctors were so skilled, they didn’t add any hardware to the orbital bone. Just like a piece of Lego, they snapped it back into place and it was held there with tension. The surgery was more like engineering carpentry with crowbars than delicate work. It was remarkable what they were able to do.

  The highlight for Brad that summer was his wedding to Lesley, his longtime sweetheart. He’s got a black eye in the photos.

  All summer, he dealt with anxiety and a lack of confidence about fighting. He understood outlaw justice in the NHL—“We’ll beat the crap out of you if you take liberties with our stars.” He’d seen situations where the tough-guy approach worked to protect people, but he felt that the NHL regulating itself was a flawed mechanism. And having his ass handed to him by Kocur made him feel he had a huge target on his back. He showed up at camp wearing a visor. He’d developed ulcers, but he naively convinced himself that if he wore a face shield, everything would magically work out. During training camp and through the exhib
ition games, the team kept calling his agent, Rick Curran, and asking, “When’s Brad going to take the visor off? Because until he takes his visor off, we’re not going to bring him back.”

  But Brad didn’t want to take his visor off. Not wearing one had almost cost him his eye six months earlier. He found the whole business of hockey despicable. The process, the decision making, the posturing, the bullcrap. He knew he was making a lot of money—$95,000 per year. Mind you, it wasn’t money he could retire on, although he wasn’t complaining. But for him at that time, hockey was the least productive place he could be.

  Some of the players bound for the minors were called to line up outside the secondary dressing room at the Nassau Coliseum. They were supposed to meet one on one with general manager Bill Torrey before getting sent down. Brad had always liked Bill. From the time he was drafted, Bill had been good to him, but this was a tough day. Brad thought the big, empty blue dressing room looked like a studio. There were two folding chairs facing each other in the middle. Torrey had been pumping guys up—“Go down there, work hard. Someday you’ll be back!”

  He said to Brad, “We got to talk.”

  Brad said, “Bill, yeah, we do.”

  Bill paused. “All right. You first.”

  “So, here’s the deal. I am going to hang ’em up. I just think there’s a lot more to do with my life than trying to prove something here that I’m just not ever going to be able to do for you.”

  Bill’s eyes widened. He got up, shot out the door and returned with a group of guys, from the old scouts that hadn’t given him the time of day, to the trainers, to other management. Suddenly, everyone was treating him like a long-lost son. Brad knew the team had made an investment in him, but he wouldn’t budge. On his way out, Brad said goodbye to the guys lined up in the hallway, and at least three of them said, “I wish I could go with you today. I just can’t.”

  As he walked across the cement walkway back to the Marriott hotel, he felt light as air. It was the first real decision Brad had ever made about his life. Up until then, all his decisions had been motivated by external forces—pats on the back from coaches or praise from family and friends. He was always part of someone else’s plan. But that day, he made a decision he believed in. It wasn’t popular, but it was life-altering.

  Lesley became their main means of support. She was a teacher and brought in enough to give Brad a chance to get his fitness-equipment sales business going. Brad learned a ton about himself that year as he sat in his in-laws’ basement office, trying to make some sales. Whether he had a good day or a bad day, there was no one other than himself to measure it. He was 100 per cent in control. He took a weekend course taught by Bob Proctor, who presented some interesting ideas. Some he didn’t buy into and some he did. What Brad took away from it was that your subconscious often overrides what your consciousness tells you, and so you make decisions that are actually detrimental. If he had listened to his gut and not fought Joey Kocur, despite all the external pressure, he would have been safer. And in the long run, he would have been mentally tougher for making his own call.

  In March, the Islanders came to Toronto. Brad still had some good friends on the team, so he bought a scalped ticket up in the rafters and after the game he made his way down to the dressing room. Bill Torrey walked by and said, “Hi, Brad, nice to see ya.” Al Arbour did the same. The next day, Brad got a call from his agent, saying, “Bill Torrey thought you looked great. He said if you were interested in coming back to try out in September, he’d certainly be willing to have you. What’s going on? What do you want to do?”

  Brad hadn’t really been working out, but he carried himself differently. He had learned a lot about himself that year, and so he looked confident. He thought about it for a week and then decided to try to come back, but to do it differently. He wanted to play on the second or third line, in a very physical role, not as a top scorer but as a presence, but not fighting all the time. He also determined that if he was relegated to sitting on the bench the whole game, waiting to fight, he was going to hang ’em up for good.

  His first shift back was an intrasquad practice game, a scrimmage. The other dressing room had a couple of guys going, “Eff Dalgarno coming back. Eff that. He quit on us. He’s a quitter. Let’s go get him!” But big defenceman Dean Chynoweth was the voice of reason. “Come on, guys, give him a break. Let him do his thing.”

  Brad was on the ice in front of the other net when the puck dropped and bounced by his feet. He looked down to go get it and Chynoweth came up with a two-handed cross-check that hit him in the jaw. Five teeth popped out, and the top half of his jaw was broken. He’d been on the ice less than a minute and he was picking up teeth and on his way to the orthodontist.

  He had the teeth wired back in, and the dentist replaced the broken bone with synthetic bone. He was back on the ice three days later, wearing a football helmet. Brad began to settle into a third-line checking role, and he found he really liked it. Every once in a while, he’d even get a shot on the second line or filling in on the power play, or penalty killing. He reinvented himself. The team was receptive, and everything began falling into place, but you can’t control what management wants to do, whether it fits with your plans or not, and so over the next couple of years Brad was toiling away, but a little frustrated about the amount of ice time he was getting. The Islanders played a game in Quebec City, and Brad sat on the bench for most of the game.

  After the game, on the bus with Ray Ferraro, lamenting his situation, Brad talked about a few of the great players, including Bob Probert, who would continually do something wild and detrimental and still get these great opportunities to come back and start again—and people loved them for it. Brad said, “Ray, I’m not sure what I’ve got to do, buddy. Here are these guys who keep getting shot after shot and I’m hitting a wall here.”

  Ray thought about it and said, “Look, Brad, we’ve got to give you a makeover. You’re too nice a guy. You’re a misfit. We’ve got to make you one of the boys. We’ve got to create a character for you. That’s what we’ve got to do.”

  Brad had been rooming with Pierre Turgeon. After games, he and Pierre would go back to the hotel, go for walks together, order ice cream or watch a movie. He’d hear guys talk about going out the night before and getting silly and some funny, goofy thing that had happened. But he was worried about staying out, because he wanted to be ready for the game the next day.

  Ray started riffing on a new persona for Brad. He created a whole fake backstory—Brad had a bunch of DUIs, he and his wife were kind of sketchy in terms of their relationship and he had a secret nickname, Night Train. It was all pretty funny considering the type of guy Brad was, but he embraced the humour.

  A couple of days later, after a game, some of the guys came by and asked, “So is Night Train coming out?”

  And Brad replied, “Oh, Night Train’s rolling tonight.” And he started going out frequently. He left an awful lot of full beers in bathrooms, but he stayed out late and talked and hung out. He found he could be tired and still perform. His place on the team changed in terms of respect and in terms of people sharing and opening up. He’d never fully understood the value of what it meant to be part of a team. He learned it wasn’t enough to show up, head down, do the drills and go home. You had to invest time in people. At one point, he decided, “I’m going to be the last guy to leave. I’m not going to be drunk, but I’m going to be the last guy at the table.” Night Train became a huge part of his resurrection. His reputation on the team changed his standing. It transcended the joke and became something very valuable.

  Night Train hung out a lot with Travis Green and Marty McInnis. The three of them had been shuttled back and forth between the parent club and the Capital District farm team so much that they began to bond in the iron lung. Every NHL team uses different-coloured jerseys that represent whether you’re on the first, second, third or fourth line or an extra. The guys who aren’t on a set line pretend not to pay attention to the
fact that, on any given day, they may get a promotion or a demotion, but secretly they are elated or depressed depending on the colour of the jersey they’re given.

  Al Arbour decided to put Brad, Travis and Marty together as a third line, and for the next year and a half Brad didn’t show up in the morning wondering, “Am I on the fourth line? Am I on the extra squad?” The green jersey was delivered into the room, and boom, he’d take it and not think twice. After a while he thought, “Oh, this is what Pierre Turgeon feels like every day. No fear.”

  Brad was twenty-five and Marty and Travis were twenty-three, but Al called them “The Kid Line.” They had a nice run together. In December of 1993, three defencemen were out with injuries, so the Islanders were looking at their forward lines, and the Kid Line was considered the best. They had nine goals and nine assists during a five-game unbeaten streak.

  His first year in the NHL, Brad had been staying in Springfield, Massachusetts, in a Holiday Inn. He went to a music store one night and picked up a three-hundred-dollar guitar and started learning to play. He has a nice voice, although he considers it only passable, and started with country songs because they were easier.

  In November of 1993, the team had to work out at their practice rink because Garth Brooks was doing two shows at the Coliseum. After practice, Brad grabbed his guitar and asked the trainer for the key to the Islanders’ dressing room, where he planned to camp out during Garth’s sound check in hopes Garth would come by and sign the guitar. When Brad heard the sound check end, he stood in the dressing room doorway, holding the guitar. Garth whizzed by and stopped cold. He said, “Oh hey.”

  Brad said, “Garth, sorry. I’m with the Islanders—would you mind signing my guitar for me?”

  “Absolutely.” Garth came into the dressing room, sat down and started asking Brad all about the guitar. “What do you do here? Do you play?”

  Brad told him the song he worked on all through the minors was Garth’s big hit, “Friends in Low Places.”