Hockey Confidential

by Bob Mckenzie

  They would have talked of the 17-year-old boy who left Tillsonburg in 1970 to join Roger Neilson’s Peterborough Petes, how the stocky five-foot-nine, 192-pound defenceman scrapped and battled his way to beat the odds to have a 12-year pro career that was based more on try than talent—but don’t kid yourself, you didn’t make the NHL in the 1970s without plenty of both.

  They’d have told stories of his exploits as a Pete, winning the OHA championship in 1972, losing to the Cornwall Royals in the Memorial Cup final that year, playing alongside names such as Craig Ramsay, Stan Jonathan, Doug Jarvis and Bob Gainey in his three years with Neilson’s Petes; going to the Vancouver Blazers of the fledging World Hockey Association for his first year of professional hockey and—accumulating triple-digit penalty minutes and zealously defending the front of his net against all foes in his trademark big-bucket helmet—doing what he would do for the Pittsburgh Penguins, Colorado Rockies, Edmonton Oilers, Vancouver Canucks and Detroit Red Wings over 11 well-travelled NHL seasons and 636 regular-season NHL games (25 goals, 128 points and 1,292 penalty minutes) in what was arguably the toughest, most menacing and intimidating and dangerous era of professional hockey. There no doubt would have been talk of his trip to the Stanley Cup final with the Canucks in 1982, riding the crest of Neilson’s Towel Power.

  And then his life as a coach. Five years as an assistant in Detroit, where, amongst other things, he tried to be Bob Probert’s sober companion and watchdog to keep the troubled player from going astray; three years in New York as a Ranger assistant coach, first to his mentor and dear friend Neilson and then during the tumultuous Mike Keenan regime that ultimately led to the first Ranger Stanley Cup championship since 1940, followed by a four-year stint for himself as head coach of the Mark Messier–Wayne Gretzky-era Blueshirts that ended the way most coaching appointments end—by being fired.

  There would be discussion of his move to the NHL executive suite, how the old-school hockey guy took over as NHL commissioner Gary Bettman’s right-hand hockey operations man, administering all on-ice discipline, and how, like Brian Burke before him and Brendan Shanahan after him, he suffered the slings and arrows of public criticism and ridicule for unwaveringly doing what he thought was best.

  And yet, for all he accomplished in his hockey life, his true measure would be as a family man: his marriage in 1976 to his Tillsonburg sweetheart, Heather, the subsequent birth of their three children and two grandchildren and his involvement with their lives and their own families—daughters Lauren, the teacher, and Courtney, the lawyer, as well as son Gregory, the hockey player who went on to win the Stanley Cup in 2011 with the Boston Bruins.

  But the eulogies would have to wait. January 8, 2010, wasn’t Colie Campbell’s day to die.

  The morning of what could’ve been Colie Campbell’s last day on earth was much the same as the night before: busy and problematic.

  In his job as senior executive vice-president of the NHL and head of hockey operations, there was almost always a fire to put out somewhere, and the slate of games on Thursday, January 7 that year was no exception.

  There was major controversy in a game between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia when the producer of the Penguins’ home-team broadcast intentionally held back—from the broadcast, and from the NHL’s hockey-operations crew—a video replay that conclusively showed Philadelphia’s Simon Gagne had scored a shorthanded goal. After a lengthy video review by Campbell’s staff in Toronto, the goal was disallowed for lack of conclusive proof the puck crossed the line. Once the Flyer goal had been disallowed, the Pens’ home-team producer then showed the replay.

  And all hell broke loose.

  Another night in the NHL, another firestorm.

  So Campbell awoke early that Friday morning and knew it was going to be busy dealing with the fallout from the night before, not to mention the overnight snow that had fallen in southwestern Ontario, and who knows what else that might be on the horizon.

  He also was already well behind on his list of chores around the farm. A week into 2008, Campbell still hadn’t disposed of the family Christmas trees, one from his home and one from his mother-in-law’s place next door. Now there was snow to plow on the long driveways connecting the two homes situated on a scenic tract of land just southeast of Tillsonburg. There’s a forested ravine behind the houses. In front, there’s the county road that separates both residences from the sprawling 140 acres of prime southwestern Ontario farmland that, once upon time, used to be a thriving tobacco farm. Today, though, most of it is rented out to local farmers who grow corn and beans. Campbell might have a farmer’s sensibilities in life, but he had neither the time nor the inclination to be an actual farmer.

  So he got up that Friday morning and knew there was plenty on his plate.

  He debated whether to wear his sneakers or put on his “Roots boots,” as he calls them; because of the snow, he opted for the latter, a decision he thinks about now as perhaps life-saving. He went outside, walked over to the barn and climbed up into the spacious cab of the big orange Kubota tractor, a massive, modern beast of farming technology with a fully enclosed glass cab boasting all the amenities (including heat and stereo), a big shovel/bucket on the front and a blade on the side for plowing.

  And off he went. Campbell started plowing the driveways, but, as so often happened when he was doing anything at the farm, his BlackBerry was constantly buzzing. He’d plow a bit, stop, take a call, make a call, read some emails, send some emails and handle the fallout from the Gagne goal (by the way, the Pittsburgh TV producer was suspended for the balance of the season but was reinstated the following season). That scene played itself out over the next couple of hours and, with the driveways plowed, Campbell was finally going to dispose of those Christmas trees he’d been meaning to get rid of.

  He tossed them into the big front bucket of the tractor and off he went, down the long driveway, out onto the county road in front of his house, crossing over it and proceeding south into the frozen farm field. A kilometre or two away, on his property, there’s a berm, a natural break in the otherwise flat landscape, an ideal spot to dispose of the Christmas trees. It was a bright, beautiful, but cold winter’s day and Campbell drove the tractor across the field, navigating around the irrigation pond set squarely in the middle of the field en route to the berm.

  Campbell looked at the pond as he drove by. A week earlier, on New Year’s Day, he and much of the hockey world had been in Boston at historic Fenway Park for the annual NHL Winter Classic outdoor game between the Bruins and Flyers. For a kid who grew up in a small town, playing pond hockey was a winter way of life. So, just a week removed from the Winter Classic, Campbell mused how much fun it might be have his very own version of the Winter Classic right on his own property, maybe play a little shinny himself, maybe get the kids and the whole family out there.

  As he headed towards the berm to dump the trees, he decided that, on his way back to the farmhouse, he’d stop and plow the snow off the pond. And why not? As ponds go, this one was pretty much idyllic. Although it’s located smack in the middle of flat farmland and half a kilometre from the farmhouse, two of the pond’s four sides, the entire southern and western edges, are framed with a thicket of beautiful evergreens and stand of trees and bushes. The northern and eastern sides of the pond are lined with reeds and bulrushes on a short slope down from the field. With the fresh snow that just had fallen, it looked like a Canadian picture postcard, or maybe even the perfect setting for a Tim Hortons commercial starring Sidney Crosby. For an old hockey player and country boy who’d just been to the Winter Classic, the idea was too inviting to pass up. Even the shape (more or less rectangular) and size (almost 150 feet long and 90 feet wide) were darn close to the standard 200-by-85-foot NHL ice surface. And if you’re sitting behind the wheel of what amounts to the farm version of a Zamboni, on a clear and cold Canadian winter day, why the hell not?

  So Campbell pulled the tractor up to the
northwest corner of the pond. He’s not a reckless man by nature. So he climbed down from the tractor and walked out onto the pond to check it out. But he knew it had been a really cold winter and that the irrigation pond should be fully frozen, easily able to take the weight of the tractor. He climbed back in. Just to be sure, he pulled the wheels up to the edge and, without actually venturing onto the pond, used the fully extended tractor bucket to tamp up and down on the ice to make sure it was solid.

  Convinced it was, he drove the tractor onto the pond and turned it so it was facing due east. And in the midst of his very first plow pass across the pond, he suddenly felt the tractor crack through the ice. But it dropped no more than, by his guess, four to five feet, not really submerged as much as it was just stuck. He was still high and dry. Campbell’s first thought was that the big tractor was resting on the pond’s shallow bottom. His overriding emotion was more aggravation than fear. He was not happy at being stuck and figured he’d have to walk all the way back to the farmhouse to call his brother-in-law to tow the tractor out of the pond.

  In the time that followed—no more than 30 seconds—as he contemplated his salvage options and cursed at how much busier and more aggravating his day had just become, the tractor suddenly plunged entirely through the ice to the actual bottom of the pond. And the bottom was deep enough to fully submerge the entire tractor. The top of its roof was visible just a few inches below the surface.

  It had been warm in the tractor cab while he was plowing, so Campbell had taken off his coat. He was sitting there in his T-shirt, sweat pants and boots as the icy water started to seep into the floor of the fully enclosed tractor cab.

  “I was sitting there, with it stuck the first time, and I’m kind of shaking my head, thinking how stupid this is when the whole thing suddenly crashed to the bottom,” Campbell said. “When I saw the water coming in on the floor, I thought, ‘Shit, this could be serious.’ But I wasn’t panicked at that point. I figured I’d be able to get out somehow. So I tried to open the door, but it was shut tight. There was, I guess, too much water pressure on the outside and it wouldn’t open. So I put my gloves back on and tried to punch out the window, but it didn’t budge. The water was starting to fill up a lot faster now. It was up to my knees and I realized, ‘I could be in real trouble here.’ I tried punching out the door and windows again. All of them. Really hard. I tried kicking them out. I don’t think I had time to physically panic, but now I was really panicking on the inside. Once the water started to come in, it was really rushing up quickly. It wasn’t long before it was over my head. I’m trying to lift my head to get the last bit of air that was left at the top of the cab. Then it was filled up completely. That’s when I thought, ‘I’m going to die in here.’”

  With his lungs literally ready to burst and a most horrific death seemingly imminent, floating on his side, that was when Campbell experienced the dual visions—of his wife, Heather, watching the morbid salvage operation from the edge of the pond and his own funeral procession up on the county road.

  Even now, Campbell’s a little unnerved by them; how lifelike they both seemed, how it was an almost out-of-body experience for him at the precise moment he was drowning, but there’s no doubt those visions inspired him to give one last kick for freedom.

  A kick that saved his life.

  “I’ve been told since then that the window probably popped out when I kicked it the last time because, once the cab filled up with the water, there was equal pressure on both sides of the glass,” Campbell said. “That makes sense. Still, I’m glad I wore those big Roots boots, because I had thought about wearing running shoes instead, and I don’t know if I would have been able to kick [the window] out with shoes on.”

  Once out of the cab, Campbell bobbed up to the surface, but the jagged edges of the hole in the ice the tractor had fallen through cut his head in numerous places. He was able to grab onto the just barely submerged tractor arm that led him onto the big bucket, which he crawled over to get to solid ground.

  The weird thing, Campbell said, was that at no time during the entire ordeal did he ever feel cold or think about the cold. Not when the icy water was rushing over him in the cab, not when he was swimming up to the surface, and not even when he scrambled up to the field in his water-soaked clothing on a below-freezing day and walked the better part of half a kilometre to the house.

  “I was probably in shock, but the cold never registered, not in or out of the water,” he said. Yeah, it was probably shock. Or the fact that, as a hockey player, Campbell was tougher than a two-buck steak. Don’t forget, we’re talking about the father whose son, Gregory, had gained NHL-wide acclaim and universal respect for playing a shift on a broken leg suffered when he blocked a shot against Pittsburgh in the 2013 Stanley Cup playoffs, still managing to leave the ice under his own power. So perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised when the father, after a near-death experience, plodded across that frozen field to his home with nothing on his mind but an overwhelming sense of relief at still being alive.

  “That’s all I thought about,” Campbell said. “I was alive. It was kind of exciting. I was just happy to be alive.”

  Campbell walked up to his house—to the side garage door, actually. He was standing there, now trembling, soaking wet and frozen, vainly trying to recall and punch in the security code to open the garage door. As he fumbled with the keypad, he could hear Heather, who was putting garbage in the garage from an inside door leading to the house. Campbell started banging on the garage door and yelling to get her attention. She came over, hit the automatic opener and couldn’t believe what she saw when the door opened: her husband standing there, rivulets of blood all over his head and face, wet and frozen.

  “At first, because of the blood, she thought I had been attacked by coyotes,” Campbell said.

  Many a man, having been through such a traumatic physical ordeal with exposure to ice-cold water, bitterly cold winter weather and quite likely hypothermia, to say nothing of nearly drowning with dirty pond water filling his lungs, would have gone to the hospital for medical attention. But Campbell possessed a hockey player’s mentality and farmer’s stubborn streak. Besides, it was a workday.

  All he wanted, once he got into the house, was a long—very long—hot shower. And, practical man that he is, he wanted to make arrangements to get the tractor hauled out of the pond.

  Campbell spent a good half hour in a steaming hot shower, doing nothing, he said, but luxuriating in the “sheer joy of breathing.” A doctor friend who lived in the area did drop by the house later that day, but aside from taking some Advil, Campbell seemed to be okay. Mind you, as the day wore on, he lost his voice, leaving him with just a hoarse whisper. And by that evening, he had tremendous lower-back and rib pain, which turned out to be a nasty kidney infection from ingesting the dirty pond water.

  But the NHL schedule waits for no man, not even one who almost drowned at lunchtime on a Friday afternoon. By seven o’clock that night, NHL games were being played. And in Campbell’s world, that meant the next issue or controversy was only a puck drop away.

  Right on cue, in the second period of the New Jersey Devils–Tampa Bay Lightning game at the Prudential Center in Newark that night, the lights unexpectedly went out. A circuit breaker blew, and the computers controlling the lights in the arena were damaged and couldn’t be repaired. There was a delay of more than an hour and 40 minutes.

  For much of that time, there was great uncertainty as to how the league could, would or should proceed, all initially exacerbated by the inability of many to get hold of the league’s senior executive VP and director of hockey operations. Campbell’s cell phone was still at the bottom of the pond in the big, orange Kubota. (As an aside, Campbell said when the tractor was pulled out of the pond, he got the cell phone back, dried it out for a day or two, and it worked like a charm. Even his cell phone had a knack for survival.)

  No rest for the weary.
Campbell had no choice but to be back at work, using his landline to consult with his right-hand man, Mike Murphy, in Toronto.

  “We felt the teams could not continue playing,” Colin Campbell was later quoted as saying in the newspapers in New York City and northern New Jersey. “We tried for an hour and [42] minutes to restore power and appropriate lighting but were left with no alternative but to postpone further play for the evening.”

  Campbell could have added: “Oh, I came within a breath of dying today.” He didn’t, of course.

  After the fact, it bothered Campbell that his tractor had crashed through the ice at all. He’d been careful, he thought. With the extended frigid temperatures that winter, he was convinced the ice in the man-made irrigation pond was plenty thick enough to take the weight of the tractor. Campbell even asked the NHL’s ice expert, Dan Craig, about the thickness and weight ratios and couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out why he’d almost met a most untimely end.

  It was later, long after the ice had melted that spring, that Campbell discovered, to his surprise, that the man-made irrigation pond they often needed to top up with water in the summer was, in fact, also fed by either a very small underground spring or underground runoff through the tiling. The water entered the pond at the northeast corner, mere feet from where his tractor crashed through the ice.

  “The ice all over that pond was more than thick enough to take the weight of the tractor,” Campbell said. “It was just at that one point, where the spring or the runoff feeds into the pond, there was a little bit of current. That’s why I went through the ice right there. It wasn’t as frozen.”

  Campbell was comforted somewhat to get the answer to that question. He had so many more, though.

  “Sure, you wonder why, you wonder about a lot of things,” Campbell said in November 2012, standing at the edge of the pond where his tractor plunged through the ice almost three years earlier, the first time he was prepared to discuss for the record what happened that day.