Hockey Confidential

by Bob Mckenzie

  “I’m watching and some guy will be talk, talk, talking the whole time,” Don says. “I get very upset. I hate guys yapping like that.”

  “They’re just trying to impress you,” Tim says.

  So Tim is asked if sometimes he has to keep one eye on the game and one eye on his dad, to head off any potential trouble and take care of dear old Dad when he suspects there may be imminent danger of Don blowing his stack. Before Tim can answer, though, Don jumps right in: “No, he doesn’t need to take care of me, but he might need to take care of the guy who’s been yapping.”

  Tim smiles, and adds, “I don’t want to see Dad end up on the front page of the [Toronto] Sun, so, yeah, I’m always aware . . .”

  The second transgression that could solicit a . . . uh . . . response is players hot-dogging or showboating on the ice. This was actually included as a scene in one of the Cherry biographical movies. It involved future Carolina Hurricane Ryan Murphy, a Cherry favourite, and his team, the York-Simcoe Express. Murphy’s team was down 4–0 and the team in the lead was hot-dogging and showboating all over the ice. Cherry fumed, and at the end of two periods, Don told Tim that Murphy’s team would come back to win. And they did.

  “So we’re walking out of the arena after the game, and the coach of the losing team sees Dad and says, ‘Hey, Grapes, we just had a tough loss. Would you come into the room and speak to the boys?’”

  Don picks up the story.

  “Tim says to me, ‘No, Dad, don’t do it.’ So I did it. I went in and gave it to them all: ‘You little [expletive deleted]. You had 10 times the talent, you were f---ing around, you turned everyone against you, looked like a bunch of soccer players.’ We walked out of there, and it was dead quiet. The captain of the team was sitting by the door, and I whacked him on the shoulder and said, ‘You’re supposed to be leading them. Smarten up.’ The coaches just looked at me.”

  Cherry’s aggravation hat trick is completed by the thing that bothers him the most: mistreatment of the poor goalies. This one’s personal. Cherry’s grandson Del, Cindy’s son, was a goalie in minor hockey. The experience left Cherry scarred.

  “I feel sorry for all the people who have kids or grandkids that play net,” Don says. “You can never really enjoy the game. It could be going great, and in the last 10 seconds, the goalie lets in a bad one and everyone’s mad at you.”

  There was one game in particular when Don was going to see Del play. He arrived a minute after the game had started, only to find out from Cindy that Del had let in the first shot and the coach had pulled him.

  “I told Cindy, ‘I have to leave now, because if I stay here, it’s going to be murder.’ And I left.”

  Tim says many minor hockey coaches are too quick to pull the goalie, and if he sees it happening at a game with his dad there, Tim knows to tighten the reins.

  “Remember the game at the Hershey Centre?” Don says, shaking his head. “Poor kid in net, gave up two in the first minute. Never had a chance on either of them. Tip-ins. From the point. Gets pulled. I felt so bad for that kid—a minute in—so I was going to go over there talk to the [coach]. I wasn’t going to hit him or anything, but I thought, ‘You [expletive deleted].’ Tim talked me out of it.”

  You don’t grow up as Don Cherry’s kid without realizing controversy is a constant bedfellow. But that doesn’t mean you surrender to it, either. Each Saturday morning, around 9 a.m., Tim phones his dad to get a preview of what Grapes is thinking of saying that night on “Coach’s Corner.” If Tim thinks it’s inappropriate or sounds too harsh, he’ll tell his dad so. He knows once Don makes up his mind, though, it’s tough to get the train off the tracks. On Sunday, Tim will tell his dad what he thought of the segment. Even Don’s son occasionally finds some of what his dad says on the air cringeworthy, because he has a pretty good idea of what might do some damage beyond any given Saturday night.

  “My mom was always Dad’s sounding board about what to say on ‘Coach’s Corner’ and how to handle issues,” Tim says. “When we’re at the rink together, when it’s quiet, we talk a lot about what he’s going to say on ‘Coach’s Corner.’ Mom might chastise Dad when she thought he stepped over the line. I don’t do that so much. We’ll also talk about things going on in my life. My dad is very good at helping to put things into perspective for me. He’s the same with me as he is on ‘Coach’s Corner.’ He won’t sugarcoat things. It’s nice for us to be able to talk to each other about things. We are both lucky, at our ages, that we can share time with each other.”

  Tim may be Don’s biggest fan, but there was only one time, and it wasn’t even on “Coach’s Corner,” when Tim couldn’t bear to watch his dad and had to turn off the TV.

  It was in October 1992. Cherry was appearing on the CBC’s Friday Night with Ralph Benmergui, a talk show. When Cherry’s interview with Benmergui was over, the next guest was Scott Thompson, a gay member of the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe. Thompson came out and camped it up pretty good, telling Don he was a big fan because the European homosexuals cower in the corner when there’s a fight in a gay bar. At one point, Thompson sat on Cherry’s lap and they were holding hands.

  Tim was at home watching it all on TV.

  “I had to turn off the TV because I thought, ‘This is it, this is going to be the end of Dad’s career and I’m not going to watch it.’ It was live. I was afraid that Dad might have thought this whole thing was a setup to make him look bad, and who knows how he would react, what he might say or do. I couldn’t even watch it. I had to turn it off.”

  Cherry was quick on his feet that night. He camped it up himself with Thompson, made fun of the both of them, and disaster was averted.

  “If I hadn’t been sharp that night, I was in deep shit,” Don says. “Turns out it was the best show [Benmergui] ever had. It was all downhill [for Benmergui] after that.”

  Don Cherry smiles as he says that. Then he laughs.

  “The best hot dogs of all are at Herb Carnegie Arena. The same lady

  serves them all the time. She’s always been there, she’s been there forever

  and she stays right to the very end every night.”

  “You’re the first person who has ever stood with us for a game,” Don tells his visitor to Victoria Village Arena on the cold December night. “No scouts, nobody ever stands with us.”

  “I’m honoured,” the visitor tells Don and Tim Cherry.

  “Well, [Ron] MacLean stood with us for one period once,” Don says.

  Which leads to one more story.

  “Ron came down to watch the second period with us at a game in Etobicoke,” Tim says. “Right at the end of the period, right in front of us at the glass, a kid got hit and the hit knocked the kid’s tooth out. The tooth fell out over by the players’ bench. The Zamboni is getting set to come on the ice, but the players and coaches are down on the ice, looking for the kid’s tooth. So Ron and Dad decide they’re going over to help look for the kid’s tooth.”

  Picture it: Ron MacLean and Don Cherry, on their hands and knees on the ice, looking for a kid’s tooth. It gets better.

  “The kid’s mom was just livid her son lost a tooth,” Tim says, “and she comes steaming out of the stands and onto the ice—”

  “I see the mother,” Don says, “and I get up [from looking for the tooth] and intercept her. Her kid is so embarrassed. His mother’s on the ice and she’s hot. I say to the Mom, ‘Ma’am, do you love your son?’ She says, ‘Yes, but—’ I cut her off, I tell her: ‘You’re embarrassing him. Just get off the ice quietly. We’ll find his tooth, but for your son’s sake, please, just get off the ice right now.’”

  Tim says the woman did leave the ice, but wasn’t happy about it. Well, at least they found her son’s tooth, didn’t they?

  “Nope, they never did find it,” Tim says. “I guess it got sucked up into the Zamboni.”

  “Here we go again . . . another night
in the books.”

  Game over.

  The Flyers beat the Young Nats, beat them handily. No contest.

  The father and son make their way through the arena. As they say goodbye and head into the cold, dark night for the drive home, their guest thinks of a story the father told an hour earlier.

  “It was after he had the kidney transplant,” the father says of his son. “I bought a boat to take him fishing. We’d go fishing a lot on Lake Cochichewick [near North Andover, Massachusetts]. He always liked fishing. Except, it turns out he didn’t like going fishing at all. He only went fishing with me because he thought I wanted to go fishing. I didn’t like fishing that much. I was only taking him fishing because I thought he liked it. Twenty years later, I find out neither one of us really wanted to be there.”

  That’s not something they’ll ever have to worry about with their trips to the rink.

  CHAPTER 6

  Growing Up Exceptional

  Connor McDavid and the Chosen Few Navigate

  the Great Canadian Torture Test

  * * *

  The cub reporter for the Toronto Star was sent to cover a peewee hockey tournament in 1978. The headline on the story read: sudbury peewee one-man band: pierre dupuis baffles wexford to lead team to championship.

  The first paragraph of the story was as follows: “Hockey coaches will tell you that there is no such thing as a one-man team, but 12-year-old Pierre Dupuis comes close to refuting that theory.”

  It went on to chronicle the exploits of the five-foot-four, 140-pound Dupuis, who scored five of his team’s six goals en route to a prestigious minor hockey tournament victory, and how no one could quite believe how exceptional the Sudbury player was compared to the other elite-level kids his own age.

  “He’s a coach’s dream,” Sudbury coach Dan Heaphy said. “He’s a born leader, an unbelievable hockey player, an A student at school and a wonderful kid.”

  “We don’t have anybody on our team who can even keep up with that kid, so what use was there in shadowing him,” Wexford coach Gerald Payne said. “If it wasn’t for him, I think we would have won 3–1. Our club is as good as theirs, but they’ve got Dupuis.”

  Another minor hockey coach and hockey school operator of some note, Frank Miller, called Dupuis the best 12-year-old hockey player he’d ever seen: “I’ve never seen a kid skate so well and he showed me he is the complete hockey player. He passes the puck, backchecks, he does it all and very well.”

  The cub reporter, who was still in his final year of journalism school, was pleased with the story. He got paid for it, which was nice; a byline in the Star would look good in his story file and on his resumé; all that for watching a phenomenal 12-year-old kid put on a hockey clinic at St. Michael’s College School Arena.

  Not a bad day’s work, he mused; it doesn’t get any better than that.

  Note to self, he thought after writing the story: remember the name Pierre Dupuis. That kid is going places.

  • • •

  If there’s a rule, there’s always an exception.

  It’s a universal truth, isn’t it?

  So when Hockey Canada, in 2005, was instituting and approving what it called the Canadian Development Model (CDM), the systematic blueprint of rules and regulations governing how young players would proceed on a year-by-year basis through the Canadian minor hockey system to the junior level, there was indeed a clause dealing with “exceptional” 15-year-olds.

  What’s amusing about this, truth be told, is that the exception to the rule actually preceded the rule itself.

  The CDM became reality on May 23, 2005, when it was approved by Hockey Canada’s board of directors in Saint John, New Brunswick.

  Eighteen days earlier, though, the Ontario Hockey League declared soon-to-be 15-year-old John Tavares an “exceptional” player.

  “The CDM was being put in place because there were large numbers of 15-year-olds playing Junior A, B and C hockey,” Ontario Hockey League commissioner David Branch said. “It made sense to slow down that progression and keep kids in minor hockey longer and the [CDM] was Hockey Canada’s way to do that.”

  The OHL hadn’t had a 15-year-old in the league since 1998, when Jason Spezza played one season for his hometown Brampton Battalion, thanks to an old rule permitting 15-year-olds to play in the league only if it was in their hometown, with the player remaining eligible for the OHL draft in the off-season after his first year in the league.

  During the 2004–05 season, Hockey Canada was formulating the CDM with an eye towards not allowing any 15-year-olds to play any brand of junior hockey. But Branch was made aware that season of the existence of Tavares. As he recalled it, Branch was talking to his son Barclay, the assistant general manager of the Belleville Bulls.

  “The very clear reason for [having an ‘exceptional’ clause] was John Tavares,” Branch said. “I was talking to Barclay and he told me, ‘Not only is John Tavares good enough to play [in the OHL] as a 15-year-old, if he were eligible in our draft, he would be the No. 1 selection.’”

  That got Branch to thinking on two levels. First, he called Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson, advised him of the potential Tavares scenario and asked whether the still-in-the-works CDM might allow for an “exceptional” provision for the Canadian Hockey League. (Ultimately, it did.) Next, Branch went about the business of defining “exceptional” and determining what process and criteria the OHL could use to ensure the integrity of the “exception.” He had no appetite for an exception becoming the rule if the player in question wasn’t truly “exceptional.”

  Branch put together what he described as an arm’s-length committee comprising four expert individuals: Frank Bonello, the head of the NHL’s Central Scouting Bureau, who could speak to Tavares’s on-ice ability as a hockey player; Paul Dennis, a noted Toronto-based sports psychologist with an NHL and OHL coaching background, who could, after meeting extensively with Tavares and his family, work up a full psychological and sociological profile to determine the player’s maturity to deal with both on- and off-ice challenges while playing and interacting with 16-to-20-year-olds; Kevin Burkett, a lawyer and renowned arbitrator with both a strong legal, educational and hockey background (Burkett was a longtime Junior A hockey coach and his son, Kelly, played college hockey at Michigan State); Doug Gilmour, the retired NHL star who played for the Cornwall Royals in the OHL and knew firsthand the physical, mental and emotional skill sets required to play at that level.

  “The mandate was very clear,” Branch said. “We had to develop a process that was beyond reproach, something with a real focus on whether the player was mature enough to handle the on-ice challenges, any off-ice issues pertaining to school, social settings and whether this individual had the support system in terms of family and friends, to say nothing of whether the individual had the skills and ability to play against players who were four or five years older than him. It had to be done right, because there was lots of speculation we were doing something that was going to open the floodgates.”

  And all this at a time when the Canadian Development Model was being put in place to keep 15-year-olds playing minor hockey.

  • • •

  Brian and Kelly McDavid knew their son Connor was anything but “normal” when it came to hockey—his interest in it, his passion for it, how he watched it, how he played it, how he basically lived it.

  It didn’t take them long to know it, either.

  “Almost from the word go,” Brian McDavid said. “He was maybe two and a half years old, he definitely wasn’t three, and I got him Rollerblades, the little plastic ones. He put them on and he just took off, he started skating around the basement.”

  By age three, he had graduated to taking shots on his Nana (Kelly’s mom), who was a fine play-against-a-toddler-in-the-basement

  goaltender.

  “Connor would be downstairs for hours on his Rollerblades,�
�� Kelly said. “He would take all his stuffed animals from his bedroom down to the basement. They were the fans watching him play. He’d be yelling play-by-play up the stairs, he would so get into those games. ‘So-and-so just scored the winning goal in Stanley Cup.’ He’d do that for hours at a time.”

  Kelly also remembered having to play him in air hockey games, and having to let him win because she simply wasn’t prepared for the consequences.

  “If he lost, it was horrible,” she said. “I’d let him win, I knew I was just enabling him, that he needed to learn to lose, but . . .”

  When Connor was all of four years old, he tormented his parents to sign him up to play hockey in his hometown of Newmarket, Ontario. Brian fudged Connor’s age when he was four, allowing him to play against the five-year-olds. And when he was five, he played against the six-year-olds. Playing against older kids would become a recurring theme for him.

  Connor McDavid couldn’t get enough hockey. His brother Cameron, four years older, was playing atom AA for Newmarket. Five-year-old Connor wanted to be just like Cam. When Cam would get dressed up in the minor hockey uniform of shirt and tie to go to the games, Connor also wanted to wear a shirt and tie. So off he would go, wearing an oversized team jacket, team hat, shirt and tie, dressing the part of a rep hockey player. Brian McDavid, along with Hockey Hall of Famer Steve Shutt’s brother Dana, were assistant coaches on the team. Connor would help the trainer fill the water bottles before the game. He would get to sit in on the pre-game chalk talks, and when the coaches would ask the players on Cameron’s team where they should be on the ice in a certain situation, Connor would put up his hand and answer.

  When Cameron’s game would begin, Connor sat in the stands with Kelly and the other mothers.

  “We had no idea what was going on a lot of the time,” Kelly said. “A play would happen and we would be saying, ‘What happened there?’ and Connor would, in great detail, explain exactly what had happened. All the other little brothers and sisters were running around the rink, but not Connor. He would just sit there and watch.”