by Bob Mckenzie
Education and hockey; hockey and education. Teachers and hockey players; hockey players and teachers. Really, that’s the interwoven story of Karl Subban’s life since coming to Canada from Jamaica in July 1970, but if you don’t make some distinction between the two, he’ll be sure to let you know you should.
“People always believe it’s my sons playing hockey, them playing or getting drafted into the NHL, that is my passion in life, but they don’t understand that teaching is my real passion,” Karl Subban said. “I’m not going to kid you. Am I proud and thrilled to have one son in the NHL and two more drafted to play there? Of course I am. My boys love what they are doing, and I’m thankful for that and the journeys they’re on. And, like any parents and family, we all do whatever we can to support and help them reach their goals. But their hockey, that defines them. It doesn’t define me.”
Or as his son P.K. put it: “My dad will often say, ‘I’m not living their [hockey] dream; that’s their dream, not mine.’ My dad has his own dreams he still wants to fulfill.”
Karl Subban is a big man, six foot three and 260 pounds, if you’re measuring, but there’s a presence about him that makes him seem even bigger. He has a strong, deep voice that fairly resonates; an easy, big smile; a loud, hearty laugh; a twinkle in his eye; and a natural curiosity that has him asking as many questions as he’s being asked.
In mid-August 2013, a couple of months after his retirement party, he was in a Tim Hortons coffee shop not too far from the family home, talking about life. His life, his kids’ lives, where they’ve been and where they’re going. It’s obvious from the get-go that this “retirement” status is a misnomer, because Karl Subban has just reached one destination on his long and winding road; now he’s moving on to other places. As the voice on the GPS says: “Recalculating.” And that’s not the last time you’ll hear the GPS analogy.
“I see my life story as a challenge,” Subban said. “I love that feeling of taking on something. As life goes on, you constantly learn about yourself, and what I’ve learned—and it’s true for everyone—my potential lies inside me. We all have the ability to reach and become something. I feel like all my life I’ve been reaching. I’m 55 now and I’m still finding my passion, and for me, that’s helping people to be better, helping children to be better. I want to write a book. I already have a title: Saving Lives in Inner City Schools.”
Much of what Subban plans to do in his so-called retirement years has been shaped by his career in education, specifically an eight-year stint as principal of Brookview Middle School on Jane Street in the Jane-Finch Corridor, a job he took on late in his educational career because he felt he needed some grand, new challenge. He was comfortable in his job at other schools—maybe too comfortable.
From the outside looking in, Jane-Finch is stereotyped as a notorious high-crime/low-income development in northwest Toronto. For example, a story in the Toronto Star on August 31, 2013, called it Toronto’s “most dangerous place to be a kid” after four friends, aged 15 and 16, were gunned down within blocks of each other. While Jane-Finch residents often bristle at the stereotype and maintain there is a real community beyond the crime statistics and racial profiling, it is clearly one of Toronto’s most ethnically and racially diverse neighbourhoods (a story in the National Post in 2011, for example, said half the student population at Brookview was black, with the majority of the rest either Asian or South Asian). By any standards, though, it’s a tough part of the city. A poor part, too. The socioeconomic issues facing Jane-Finch residents, especially the children, are much more plentiful and significant than in any of the many other school districts where Subban has taught or administered in his 30 years in education.
“Jane-Finch, what it’s really like?” Subban said, pausing to consider the question. “Well, I saw children who needed a lot more support, a lot more kindness and caring from adults around them, children who needed guidance and love. The staff would go home to our nice, comfortable homes at night and you didn’t want to know what some of those kids were going home to . . .”
For eight years, Subban said he “gave it my heart, my soul, my money, my life.” So much so, his son P.K. said, that P.K. thought it was taking too much of a physical, emotional and mental toll on his father.
“I knew as he got closer to retirement, he wanted that last big challenge in his profession,” P.K. said. “I told him, ‘I don’t think you should go to Brookview . . . at this stage of your life you don’t need to come home with grey hair every night.’ You know, I talk to my mom and dad every day—not a day goes by that I don’t speak to them—and back then, when my dad was at Brookview, he would be falling asleep on the phone while I was talking to him, he was that tired and drained. But that’s my dad. He’s so committed to teaching, and for his personal fulfillment, that’s what he needed to do, that’s where he needed to be.”
So for eight years, Karl Subban was fully immersed in trying to make a difference for the kids at Brookview, and he did it with the zeal of a missionary, recognizing the stakes couldn’t have been any higher.
“I called it saving lives more than teaching,” Subban said. “That’s how you have to look at it. It wasn’t teaching reading and writing so much as saving lives. I told the staff, it’s like being in an emergency room: kids are wheeled in and lives are hanging by a thread, and you have to do what you can to save that life . . . you can’t convince me it’s not emergency room work. I’ve been at other schools and observed the kids as they walk in each morning, and they enter that school ready to learn, work and cooperate. Those [teaching] jobs, they’re a lot easier. Many of the kids [at Brookview], you have to get them ready to learn before they can learn. We’re dealing with 11-to-13-year-olds—those are the critical years, the troublesome years. We have kids who come in and they don’t know why they are there at school. It’s a simple thing, but they just don’t know why.
“If you don’t get them going down the right path, they’re taking the wrong road, and there’s a consequence, a cost to society, for failure. And it’s a major, major cost when a child doesn’t do well or does nothing at school. If they’re failing middle school, they’re going to fail high school. If they fail high school, they’re going to be on the street. This is very costly to society . . . children headed for the unemployment line, children being incarcerated, children being dead.”
Subban experienced some moments of incredible angst and heartbreak at Brookview, like the time the school had to call 911 for an out-of-control boy who ultimately had to be sedated against his will by EMS personnel while he screamed, “Please, Mr. Subban, don’t let them do this to me.” Subban was so distraught by it all, he punched a wall and cried.
But many days, as challenging as it was, the immediate goals were relatively simple.
“At this school, students smoking or drinking or taking drugs were not a big problem,” he said. “Coming late was the big problem. Getting them to focus and pay attention once they were there, that was the big problem. You can’t learn to read or write if you’re not there on time, if you’re not focused when you’re there.”
Like all good teaching situations, the teacher often ends up learning as much as, or more than, the students. From the students. And so it was for Subban at Brookview. And the revelation for him, what those kids taught him, was that when children come to school and they’re tired or hungry or scared or even scarred by their lives outside of school, a much broader reprogramming is required before there’s any chance to begin the teaching process.
“Every child, regardless of their situation in life, comes with a built-in GPS,” Subban said. “P.K., for example, told me when he was very young, ‘Daddy, I want to be like those guys on TV playing hockey.’ His GPS was programmed to be a hockey player. That just happened naturally for him. So it was our job, as parents, to do the things to allow him to try to be like those guys on TV. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Every kid has that GPS in him
or her, but these kids in the priority neighbourhoods like Brookview, their GPS is there, but it isn’t always loaded. They’ve had to deal with so many other things in their lives, they can’t see any destination. Our job, as educators, is to load their GPS. And until we can come up with something better, their GPS has to be loaded to simply be a better student and a better person every day. Every child must have a pledge. That’s what I learned at Brookview. As teachers, we can make a case to them why it’s important to be a better person, a better student. Most parents do this naturally for their children. But if there’s no role model of a mom or dad going to work, if parents are not able to do that for their children because of whatever circumstances at home, well, the school needs to step up.”
So Principal Subban instituted the Brookview Pledge, a daily reminder for students, said aloud, of why they’re in school and how they’re going about it.
“I come to school to save my life,” the pledge reads, “by working hard to be a better person and a better student.”
In addition to the pledge, there were also the 4 Ts, the tools necessary to fulfil the pledge: time—be on time for school and make time to do your schoolwork; task—complete the assigned work; training—practice makes us better; team—cooperate with peers and adults.
Subban remembers one little boy in particular. The principal would see him every morning and ask him, “Why are you coming to school?”
“And this little boy, he would say to me, ‘I’m coming to school to be a better person and a better student.’ Then I would ask him how he’s going to do that. And he would tell me. And by the end of the year, that little boy had really turned it around. His GPS was loaded. I’m very big on telling kids, ‘You have greatness inside of you, and you can develop it.’ There’s no timetable here; it takes time and we have to work at it.”
Subban also utilized his own love of hockey, even traded on some of P.K.’s burgeoning celebrity status, to implement the Vancouver-based HEROS (Hockey Education Reaching Out Society) hockey program at Brookview. HEROS is a charitable foundation, founded in 2000 by former Western Hockey League player Norm Flynn, that solicits corporate support and charitable donations to “use the game of hockey as a catalyst to attract youth to a program offering support for education, self-esteem building and life-skills training . . . focusing on boys and girls of diverse ethnicity from economically challenged neighbourhoods.”
“Hockey is a big part of my life, and I wanted to bring it to the kids there,” Subban said. “P.K.’s status in hockey gave me a lot of credibility with the kids. A lot of them wanted to be P.K. So I announced, ‘If you want to play hockey, come see Mr. Subban in the office.’ Seventy kids showed up.”
And the Brookview HEROS program was off and running. Willie O’Ree, the first black player in the NHL, dropped by to support the cause. It became a thriving community project, with volunteer help from the Toronto Police, Big Brothers and Big Sisters, and countless other organizations. Every Tuesday was Hockey Day at Brookview, and the kids would go to the nearby multi-pad facility at York University, where the donated new equipment was stored. Subban fondly remembered a huge hockey jamboree, not just for the Brookview students on the ice, but the entire school and surrounding community, where more than 700 people showed up in the stands to cheer the kids on. It was an excellent tool to keep the kids’ GPS loaded.
“The hockey was fun, it was great, but it was all about imparting the values, about using hockey to reinforce expectations,” Subban said. “If you come to school on time, if you do your work, you could leave school early on Tuesday to go to the rink. But if you don’t show up to school on time, if you don’t do your work, you can’t leave early. Hockey—sports, for that matter—are such a wonderful tool to reinforce listening and cooperation and helping another person. We had more kids who wanted to play than we had equipment. It was wonderful to see how all these children of diverse backgrounds wanted to play Canada’s game, just like I wanted to play when I came to Canada.”
While Karl Subban’s time at Brookview came and went, and official retirement from the educational system ultimately beckoned, it’s clear to anyone who knows him that this work to “save lives” and “loading the GPS” didn’t end with his retirement party in June 2013.
“There’s something about poverty and achievement,” Subban said. “If you look at income level, the higher the income, the higher the achievement. The lower the income, the lower the achievement. It doesn’t mean those lower-income children can’t learn. It just means the schools need to do things differently, and that’s what my book is going to be about. I love my children, I share in their passion for what they do, but this, that’s my passion.”
From the moment Sylvester Subban’s family arrived in Sudbury from Jamaica in that summer of 1970, it was almost as if they were destined to connect with the game of hockey—and the Montreal Canadiens. Sylvester, a diesel mechanic, had a good job in Jamaica but wanted to give his family more opportunities, and a job with mining company Falconbridge in Sudbury in faraway Canada seemed a good start. It was almost impossible to not come into contact with hockey once the Subbans arrived in the Big Nickel.
Sylvester’s wife, Fay, got a job doing laundry at Memorial Hospital and worked alongside former NHL player Eddie Shack’s mother. Living on Peter Street (now known as Mountain Street), the Subban boys met the anglophone and francophone kids who also lived on the street, where they were introduced to Canada’s game. They’d play road hockey there. Karl got his first hockey stick from their landlord’s son, he got his first pair of skates from the Salvation Army, and he’d try skating and playing hockey at the outdoor neighbourhood rinks, though he knew, at age 12, he wasn’t going to be able to catch up to the Canadian boys who had been skating almost as long as they were walking.
The Subbans had their choice of only two TV stations—one English, one French. Karl immediately became infatuated with the Montreal Canadiens. He’d watch their games in English on Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday night, and on weeknights, les Canadiens were en français on the French channel.
“We would have big fights in our home,” Subban said, laughing heartily at the memory. “I was the only one in the family who wanted to watch games in French. My poor parents; here they move to a new country, the snow, the cold, all of that, and now they’re watching a foreign game they don’t understand in another language.”
Karl loved the Canadiens, especially netminder Ken Dryden, and Dryden’s number, 29, became his favourite number, especially after his daughter Natasha was born on October 29. Karl loved hockey, and it was seemingly all around him. He attended the same high school as members of the Sudbury Wolves of the Ontario Hockey League—guys like Dave Hunter, Alex McKendry, Hector Marini and Ron Duguay. When Karl wasn’t watching his beloved Canadiens, he would go to the Sudbury Arena to watch the Wolves.
But he was a good athlete himself. He played basketball and lacrosse in the summer, and though he remembers being cut from his school’s Grade 7 basketball team—“a setback is a set up for a comeback,” he said, one of many motivational slogans he’s liable to throw at you—he went on to be a very good player in high school, moving on to play varsity basketball at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay.
“Not bragging,” he said, “but I was pretty good.”
Indeed he was. He played for the Lakehead Thunderwolves, often a top-10 team in Canada, from 1979–84, amassing enough points (2,019) to be No. 5 on the school’s all-time scoring list, twice leading the team in scoring. He was team MVP in 1981 and co-MVP in 1983. He played varsity hoops, but also intramural hockey at Lakehead. And he still loved his Canadiens, watching their games religiously on Saturday night before he would go out to parties.
But it was while working as an instructor at a Lakehead basketball camp for kids that he heard his calling to be a teacher. He got his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983 and a Bachelor of Education degree in 1984.
“I was in the business program and I switched to education after working that basketball camp,” he said. “I loved working with kids. I just knew teaching is what I would do, it would be my life’s work.”
Once he had his degrees and was ready to embark on a career in teaching, he moved to the big city, Toronto. He coached the men’s basketball team at George Brown College. He eventually was hired to teach at a Toronto elementary school. He also met the love of his life when they were introduced at a New Year’s Eve party.
Like Karl, teenaged Maria St. Ellia Brand immigrated to Canada from the Caribbean, the island of Montserrat. Like Karl, Maria was a fine athlete, a track star at Bathurst Heights Secondary School in Toronto, a sprinter who ran against future Olympian Angella Issajenko (then Angella Taylor), amongst others. But unlike Karl, Maria was an unabashed supporter of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Oh, the horror. Could a diehard supporter of the bleu, blanc et rouge find love and happiness with a true blue Maple Leaf fan? Apparently so, and the result was Nastasia, Natasha, P.K., Malcolm and Jordan.
And as was the case in Sudbury when Karl arrived in Canada, the Subban family fully embraced the Canadian way of life in Toronto.
“We were living in Brampton, and the girls were on skates before they ever bounced a basketball,” Karl said. “We enjoyed skating as a family. We’d go to the outdoor rink at the Bramalea City Centre, it would be 30 below zero and we’d be the only ones out there, skating around the big Christmas tree. We must have been quite a sight, the only ones out there.”