Hockey Confidential

by Bob Mckenzie

  It’s not as though he had gone out of his way to keep what happened a secret. His family, friends and co-workers obviously were aware of it shortly after it happened, and in the weeks that followed, word did filter out to others. But when asked if he wanted to discuss it in any public fashion, Campbell had always declined.

  Even three years after the fact, it was difficult for him to put into words the range of emotions he’d had since his brush with death.

  “I’d say—for the first year afterwards, anyway—not a day would go by that I wouldn’t think about it,” Campbell said. “As more time goes by, you don’t ever completely forget about it, but it’s not like you wake up every day and it dominates your thoughts. It’s not like I put together a bucket list and said to myself, ‘I have to do this or that before I go,’ but, yeah, it changes you in some ways. It’s a cliché, but probably the biggest difference is you don’t sweat the small stuff as much.”

  Campbell knows he’s not the same man he was before he almost drowned. He can’t go past that pond, or even look at it from afar, without an involuntary shudder that reaches deep into his soul.

  Truth be told, Campbell said he’s much more cognizant of potential danger now than ever before, that before he begins any task on the farm, he thinks about what could go wrong, about the inherent risk.

  “I don’t just do something now,” he said. “I try to be more careful, a little more cautious.”

  If he ever forgets that, there’s no shortage of reminders. When Campbell is doing any work around the farm, especially anything involving machinery, his wife or daughters are much more likely to monitor it. And if he’s doing anything on the farm that includes having one of his grandkids with him, he said, the scrutiny from his wife and daughters is even greater.

  It wasn’t just crashing through the ice that January day that had an impact on Campbell’s view of life and death. The following April, in 2011, Campbell’s friend and co-worker E.J. McGuire—the director of the NHL’s Central Scouting Bureau—succumbed to a five-month battle with a rare and incurable form of cancer, leaving behind his wife and two teenaged daughters. McGuire, one year older than Campbell, was 58 when he died.

  “Those two incidents really hit home for me,” Campbell said. “E.J. was a healthy guy with a young family, and just like that, no warning, everything changes. It could have been the same thing for me. But, you know, E.J.’s death was just so unfair. He’s healthy, he didn’t do anything to get the cancer. He just got it. If I had died, that was on me. I was the one who caused it by going out on the pond and falling through the ice. So between what happened to E.J. and me, it hit me pretty good.

  “I realized you don’t get any guarantees on how long you live. I tell my kids, I tell Gregory, if he’s going through a tough stretch [in hockey], you can’t get too upset with little things you think are big things because, well, you never know . . . which is funny me saying that, because when I coached, [like] any coach, we all get so goofy about a loss or a losing streak, but it’s really not life-altering stuff, even if we think it is when it’s happening.”

  Campbell has since dabbled a little in trying to understand the hereafter. He’s read material about people with near-death experiences, in particular Dr. Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven, a bestselling non-fiction book that chronicles the story of the atheist neurosurgeon who came out of a week-long coma believing he had come in contact with heaven.

  Campbell’s own near-death experience didn’t leave him with any deep or abiding knowledge of what happens, or doesn’t, after you die, but he was unquestionably curious about those two visions that had come to him so vividly at the precise moment when he thought he was about to die.

  “Who knows what it all means?” he said. “Is [life and death] just fate? Are you just lucky to live or unlucky to die? Is your time just up? I don’t honestly know the answers to those questions, but I’ve thought about them. I don’t really talk too much about [the visions] because I think people look at you like you’re a bit crazy. It’s not like I saw myself at the gates of heaven with Roger [Neilson], my dad, my grandfather, all there waiting for me, waving at me. That’s not it.

  “I’m no more religious now than I was before [the near-death experience]. You know, I’ve always believed in God, gone to church, so you do kind of wonder about it all. I mean, was it something more than dumb luck that got me through it? I think maybe it was. I guess I really wonder about that moment in time, those seconds, when you think you’re dying. I know I went from being anxious to panic-stricken to ‘I’m done,’ and I won’t forget that scary feeling of thinking my life was over.

  “I think of those poor people who jumped from the World Trade Center on 9/11, and as they were falling to their death, however many seconds it was that they were still alive while they were falling, what must have been going through their minds? There was a story I saw of a construction worker who fell off a 70-storey building and died when he landed on top of a 15-storey building, so for 55 storeys and however long it takes to fall that far, he was alive. What was he thinking? What was that like for him? Because I can tell you, for the last 30 to 40 seconds I was underwater, I was certain I was dying. But I didn’t, and I’m not sure exactly why.”

  Campbell is wholly certain of only two things, really.

  One, after coming so close to dying, he’s happy to be alive; he cherishes each and every day.

  Two—and he isn’t being flippant about it—he hopes others will think twice before they venture out like he did: “I’ll never go out on another pond. Growing up, I’d play pond hockey all the time. There wasn’t a day went by when I was a kid that I didn’t walk across the frozen pond in town and never thought twice about it. But I can’t do it now. Those days are over.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Magic Hands, Healing Hands

  Mark Lindsay’s ART Form and Desire to

  “Stay Hungry, Hidden and Humble”

  * * *

  The best hands in the National Hockey League do not belong to Sidney Crosby, Patrick Kane or Pavel Datsyuk.

  In fact, the guy with the best hands in the NHL also has the best hands in the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the Professional Golfers Association and the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), as well as the Olympic Games—summer and winter, in case you were wondering.

  His name is Dr. Mark Lindsay. If you haven’t heard of him, don’t feel bad. He is the first to tell you his friends sometimes call him “The Ghost.” It’s been said by some that it’s easier to track down Keyser Soze, the mythical underworld figure from the movie The Usual Suspects, than it is to reach Lindsay, whose personal motto in life (which he borrowed from a famous athlete) is: “Stay hungry, hidden and humble.”

  So who, precisely, is this international man of mystery with the gifted, magic hands?

  Mark Lindsay is a Canadian chiropractor, born in 1963 near the little Ottawa Valley town of Arnprior, Ontario (population 8,114). Mind you, calling Lindsay a chiropractor is like saying Picasso was a painter or Sinatra was a singer. He’s a star in his field who treats athletes to allow them to excel in theirs.

  That would include the NHL’s pre-eminent superstar, Sidney Crosby, and upwards of 100 active NHL players, not to mention countless retired NHLers. Modesty, as well as the bond of confidentiality he shares with his world-famous clients, prevents him from even acknowledging who he treats.

  “The people I treat value their privacy and so do I,” Lindsay says of his clientele. “They trust me to work on them; they also trust me to not talk about it. That’s sacred, and rightfully so.”

  U.S. publications have reported he’s worked with Tiger Woods and Alex Rodriguez. There’s talk within the sporting community that Lindsay may have, at one time or another, worked with tennis ace Maria Sharapova and Canadian/world figure-skating champion Patrick Chan, amongst so many others who are world class in their respective disciplines
. Suffice it to say he’s worked with the best of the best and won’t discuss any of it.

  To know Lindsay—and what he can accomplish with his healing hands as well as a wealth of practical experience on how the human body should optimally function—is to want him to treat you. He’s a man in great demand, even though the most devoted sports fan likely wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup or recognize him if he were standing next to the stars he looks after. But in the eyes of the athletes he treats, and those of his peers, Lindsay is also a superstar.

  “Between the tactile, his incredible ability with his hands, and his thirst for learning, to be current and innovative and ahead of the curve, Mark is the best at what he does,” said Ottawa-based high-performance chiropractor Dr. Duane Smith, who also treats elite athletes.

  “Mark has that X factor and it’s his hands,” said highly regarded Toronto sport chiropractor Dr. Mike Prebeg, another star in the field who works with the Toronto Blue Jays as well as myriad other elite athletes in all sports. “In our field, Mark is a stud. When Mark puts his hands on an athlete, they immediately know it’s special, that he’s special. He has the touch.”

  “He has the gift of touch, no doubt about that,” said former NHL player Gary Roberts—who would know, since Lindsay has probably treated him, quite literally, thousands of times. “But with Mark, when you combine his touch with his incredible experience, to have treated so many great athletes in so many sports and be able to apply all that he has learned when he’s treating you, that’s what makes him special.”

  Lindsay is humbled by his station in life. He’s blown away that sports’ best and brightest athletes, the crème de la crème, seek him out for injury treatment or rehab or to maximize athletic performance. And that they are willing to put their faith and trust in him to the point where their bodies, careers and entire futures are in his hands. Literally.

  “It is like playing an instrument,” Lindsay said. “You can be super-bright, super-intelligent, but it has to translate to tactile, to the hands. I mean, you’re working on someone’s body. You have to feel it. From my own experiences, getting treatments, you can tell right away when someone gets it, when someone has the touch. . . . It’s like watching Wayne Gretzky or Connor McDavid play hockey and you say, ‘How do they know to do that?’ What they do isn’t easy, they just make it look that way. . . . I shake my head a lot at how things have gone for me. I grew up in a small town. Never in a million years did I imagine I’d be doing this. Sometimes I think, ‘This is cool—this is my job.’”

  Imagine a 39-year-old Mark Lindsay being called into the office of the notorious Oakland Raiders boss Al Davis and being given his marching orders for the 2002–03 NFL season: keep the aging core of Raider veterans healthy enough to stay on the field and make plays.

  That veteran core included Rich Gannon, Tim Brown, Charlie Garner, Rod Woodson, Charles Woodson, Bill Romanowski and Jerry Rice, amongst others.

  Every Friday during the season, Lindsay would fly from Toronto to Oakland or wherever the Raiders were playing. He’d treat the star veterans the day before the game, the day of the game, and on the sidelines during the game. On Monday, he’d fly back to Toronto and his regular, and thriving, chiropractic practice.

  “It almost killed me,” Lindsay said, laughing. And all that separated Lindsay and the Raiders from fulfilling Davis’s Super Bowl dream were the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the revenge of former Raider coach Jon Gruden and the bizarre disappearance of Raider all-pro centre Barrett Robbins, who went AWOL from San Diego the day before the Super Bowl to party in nearby Tijuana, Mexico. (Robbins was later diagnosed as bipolar and has suffered from mental, emotional and legal issues since then.)

  Word travelled fast about the skilled young Canadian chiropractor with healing hands. There’s no better calling card than word of mouth, and whether it was athletes from one sport talking to those in other sports or their agents talking amongst themselves, it wasn’t long before the biggest names in football, baseball, tennis and golf were clamouring for Lindsay to rehab their injuries or treat them on an ongoing basis. With a thriving practice back home in Ontario, there were occasions when Lindsay actually had no choice but turn down some of the invitations from some of the world’s pre-eminent athletes. No sooner would one door close, though, than another two would open.

  “It was an unbelievable experience,” Lindsay said. “This was all happening in a period of a few years between 2008 and 2011 when I was working with some incredible athletes in so many different sports. I had, in my profession . . . I can honestly say I reached the pinnacle.”

  Maybe Mark Lindsay was always destined to be a healer of high-performance athletes. As a teenager growing up in White Lake, near Arnprior, he dreamed one day of going to medical school. And he always loved and played sports himself. He ran track—400-metre hurdles—and was a wide receiver in football in high school. He was good enough to get an NCAA Division I football and track scholarship to Ball State in Indiana, a school he chose in large part because of its strong exercise physiology department and the presence of Dr. David Costill, who did work in the 1980s with distance runners Mary Decker and Alberto Salazar.

  Two years in, Lindsay realized Ball State and Division I football weren’t for him. He came home to Canada, ended up being a receiver and punt returner with the University of Guelph Gryphons, coached by the late Tom Dimitroff, and won the Vanier Cup—the national university football championship—in 1984. His roommate then was Parri Ceci, who was named MVP of that championship game and whose son Cody was the Ottawa Senators’ first-round pick in 2012.

  Lindsay graduated from Guelph with a degree in kinesiology and was planning on going to medical school at McMaster University in Hamilton. Until, that is, he suffered a herniated disc in a bad waterskiing fall in Muskoka. He was in back-pain hell until treated by a noted Scarborough, Ontario, chiropractor, Dr. Keith Innes, who was at that time treating, amongst others, sprinter Ben Johnson.

  Innes did such an amazing job of easing Lindsay’s back pain and healing him without surgery that it made a tremendous impact on the young would-be medical doctor.

  “I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe what he did,’” Lindsay said. “I was totally fixed. That’s when I decided I wanted to be a chiropractor.”

  It was too late to apply to chiropractic college in Toronto, so Lindsay went to Palmer College of Chiropractic, which is the founding college for the science, in Davenport, Iowa. He graduated from Palmer in 1989 and did a one-year residency in Texas before finally returning home to Ottawa to set up his practice there. In 1991, Lindsay hooked up with chiropractic pioneer Dr. Michael Leahy to get in on the ground floor of Leahy’s brainchild: Active Release Technique (ART). It’s aptly named because it is as much an art form as a science.

  Leahy, a chiropractor from Colorado Springs, Colorado, graduated from the United States Air Force Academy and served as a fighter and test pilot. In 1985, he discovered ART, a hands-on manipulation of soft tissue for the treatment of injuries. In 1991, Leahy taught his first ART class to other chiropractors. There were two Canadians in Leahy’s first class of six: Lindsay and Mark Scappaticci, another highly regarded Toronto-area chiropractor whose resumé is strikingly similar to Lindsay’s. Each of those six “students” in Leahy’s first class has gone on to become an ART instructor, teaching and registering the ever-increasing number of chiropractors who have embraced ART not only as a treatment for trauma and injuries, but as a systemic approach to prevent injury and enhance athletic performance. It’s a much more commonly known procedure now than it was then, but like all young sciences, its boundaries and applications are constantly being redefined, and Lindsay is at the forefront of that movement. And Toronto, Lindsay said, has become a mecca of sorts for practitioners of ART.

  “There are more good ART chiropractors in the Toronto area, in Ontario, than anywhere in North America,” Lindsay said.

  And if he had to ex
plain to a layperson exactly what ART is and its benefits?

  “Every muscle has a wrapping of fascia, like Saran wrap, and every vein, artery and nerve that goes into a muscle is also encased in fascia—it all really floats in fascia,” Lindsay said. “The muscles glide over each other in these fascia casings. What happens when you have an injury or overuse or trauma, [is] it creates an inhibition of the gliding. ART is the manual manipulation to restore that glide. It’s like you have a hard-shell suitcase and you want to make it a soft shell. It’s not like you’re trying to make spaghetti out of the muscle; you’re just trying to create gliding, create space . . . does that make sense?”

  Around the same time Lindsay was embracing the brave new world of Leahy’s ART, all the while working at his chiropractic practice in Ottawa, he got hooked up with the Canadian bobsleigh team that was preparing for the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. Lindsay had run track with some of the bobsleigh athletes. Noted strength and conditioning coach Charles Poliquin was looking for a chiropractor to treat his Canadian Olympians. So Lindsay started working with the bobsleigh team and the short-track speed skaters (Marc Gagnon and Nathalie Lambert, amongst others). He had found his calling, not to mention his wife.

  In 1994, while at the Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, Lindsay met Canadian and world champion downhill skier Kate Pace, who in 1993 was ranked No. 1 in the world. In 1995, the two were married in Ottawa, and their reception was held in the Hall of Honour in the Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings.

  It was around that time that Lindsay’s career path took a meteoric rise. The newly minted Kate Pace-Lindsay wanted to compete in one more Olympics—Nagano, Japan, in 1998—so Lindsay sold his Ottawa practice after getting married and, amongst other things, became the Canadian Alpine Ski Team’s therapist between 1996 and 1998. It was a great way to spend time with his wife while continuing to expand his professional horizons, treating Olympic athletes. The real turning point, though, came in 1995 and 1996, when Lindsay became part of trainer Dan Pfaff’s team overseeing the training and treatment of Canadian sprinter Donovan Bailey.