Hockey Confidential Read online

  Hockey Confidential

  INSIDE STORIES FROM PEOPLE

  INSIDE THE GAMES

  BOB McKENZIE

  Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Not His Day to Die

  Chapter 2: Magic Hands, Healing Hands

  Chapter 3: Uncle John, Young John

  Chapter 4: #fancystats

  Chapter 5: Grapes, Unplugged

  Chapter 6: Growing Up Exceptional

  Chapter 7: Warrior Elite

  Chapter 8: Recalculating

  Chapter 9: Fully Completely

  Chapter 10: The Road to Redemption

  Chapter 11: The Joy of Life

  Photos

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dedication

  To Cindy, Mike and Shawn.

  As Pops used to say, “Life is for the living.”

  Be mindful of the moments.

  Preface

  * * *

  I cannot tell a lie. When the publisher of the book you hold in your hands first suggested to me the title, Hockey Confidential, I was a little uncomfortable with what I thought might be the connotation. What if someone thinks it’s a tell-all book—the latter-day hockey equivalent of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four? Or maybe even a personal career retrospective, spanning my more than 35 years covering and reporting on all things hockey? Because it’s neither, and I wouldn’t want anyone to be misled.

  Of course, anyone who has followed my career path—from covering junior hockey for the Sault Ste. Marie (Ontario) Star to editor-in-chief of The Hockey News to Toronto Star hockey columnist to becoming the original Hockey Insider on The Sports Network (TSN) to @TSNBobMcKenzie having more than 750,000 followers on Twitter—would know my body of work tends to run towards the more conventional or conservative side of the spectrum. Tell-all? I don’t think so. And while there may come a day when I’ll recount what will end up being more than four decades’ worth of personal and professional behind-the-scenes recollections in a book, this isn’t it.

  The truth, though, is I didn’t have a better suggestion than Hockey Confidential. And if I did, I’m not sure you would have bought A Bunch of Stories Bob Would Like to Tell. Not too catchy, now, is it? But if we’re being honest here, that’s essentially what Hockey Confidential is: a collection of hockey stories I find compelling, stories I would like to share.

  If you read my first book, Hockey Dad: True Confessions of a (Crazy?) Hockey Parent, you’ll see very quickly that this one is much different. Hockey Dad was an intensely personal first-person story about the good, the bad and the ugly of shepherding my two sons through the Canadian minor hockey system and beyond. For those who found Hockey Dad perhaps too narrow in its scope—that is, not dealing with stories from the NHL involving professional players and/or famous people—you’ll be heartened to know Hockey Confidential should have broader appeal. Some of the names in the stories I tell on these pages will be instantly recognizable as amongst the biggest in the game, including Don Cherry, John Tavares, P.K. Subban, Steven Stamkos, Connor McDavid, Mark Lindsay and Jari Byrski.

  Mark Lindsay and Jari Byrski? Come again?

  Well, that’s one of a number of reasons why the full title of the book—Hockey Confidential: Inside Stories from People Inside the Game—is actually an apt description. Mark Lindsay and Jari Byrski may not be household hockey names, but the fact that both work with and are well known to so many of the biggest stars and best players in the NHL means you should know them—and their stories—too.

  I’d like to think there’s more to this book than just hockey, that it has a greater meaning or application beyond the obvious hockey angles. It certainly does for me. For a guy whose life more or less revolves around all things puck, and mine does, I have no doubt there’s plenty here for the hardcore hockey fan: John Tavares talking about the essence of scoring goals; Brandon Prust making sense of what it’s really like to give or take punches in a hockey fight; and the colliding worlds of old and new in the growing debate on the place of advanced statistics—or #fancystats, as many have taken to calling them. But the longer I’ve been in this business, the older (and wiser, I’d like to think) I get, the more I think I’ve learned. Perhaps the closer I get to realizing my own mortality, the more I’ve come to appreciate and try to understand some grander or more universal themes of life and death and the meaning or purpose of our respective journeys.

  To that end, the first chapter of this book is about hockey only to the extent that the subject is a well-known, dyed-in-the-wool hockey man who had a harrowing near-death experience and not only lived to talk about it publicly for the first time, but also offered a deeply personal perspective on how it impacted him and his view on the meaning of life.

  Hockey Confidential, indeed.

  You’ll notice some other themes running through the book as well.

  If life, and being around hockey, has taught me anything, it’s not what you take or get as much as what you leave or give. So whether it’s Mark Lindsay’s ability to heal with his hands, Karl Subban’s passion for aiding those less fortunate than his famous sons or Byrski’s dedication to giving kids the confidence he so dearly lacked in his own childhood in Poland, these are stories I wanted to share with you. Trite as it may sound, if I’m going to go to the trouble of writing a book, I want it be a lasting legacy for my kids, who can pick it up long after I’m gone and know what it was I believed in, what my core values were and what mattered to me.

  That’s another common thread you’ll find running throughout this project: the value of family within a hockey context—an 80-year-old Don Cherry sharing precious moments with his son, Tim, at the rink; rock star Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip communing with his brothers in a lifelong love affair with the Boston Bruins; the patriarchs of the Subban and Tavares families emigrating from Jamaica and Portugal, respectively, to become household hockey names and raise great Canadian superstars; to say nothing of a teenaged Connor McDavid leaning on his family and support system, including the incomparable Bobby Orr, to help cope with the pressures of being tabbed as the Next Big Thing in hockey; as well as Sheldon Keefe’s dramatic personal struggle to leave behind a dark and troubled past to become a better man, son, brother, husband, father and hockey coach.

  My original vision for this book was for it to be 25 to 40 chapters, 2,000 to 3,000 words each; but as I started telling some of the stories, they morphed into something entirely different—11 chapters in total, ranging anywhere from 3,000 to 15,000 words apiece. I started thinking of each chapter as its own mini-book, an opportunity to do something that is totally foreign to what my job has become—and, really, something that flies totally in the face of where media

  has gone.

  Whether I’m appearing on television (where a 40-second comment is now deemed to be a major oration) or I’m on Twitter (tapping it out 140 characters at a time), it’s become an attention-deficit disorder world. Don’t get me wrong; that’s not necessarily a criticism as much as it might be a lament. Hey, I’m as guilty as anyone of propagating the quick-hit, all-the-news-fit-to-print, so-long-as-it’s-in-140-or-fewer-characters news feed. One of the reasons I got into journalism in the first place was because I wanted to be a storyteller, and I fear I’ve strayed from that, at least as the basis for what my job has become. My primary focus is to share news and information, and hopefully some perspective and insight along the way. The nature of the beast is that more output is better than less, but short is better than long, and really short is best of all. That isn’t to say there aren’t good long-form st
orytellers in our business, because there are, but I’ve either not had the opportunity to be one of them or wilfully neglected to do so. Until now, anyway.

  I’m far from a wordsmith when it comes to writing—more of a grinder than a natural talent. I have always envied those who seem to write so effortlessly. I’ve always been awestruck whenever I’ve read anything written by Michael Farber, whether it was back in his days as a columnist for the Montreal Gazette or later as a feature writer for Sports Illustrated. And I don’t think I’ve ever read an NHL game story that could rival what Red Fisher did in his heyday covering the Canadiens for the Gazette. It was like poetry. I fully confess to having writer envy.

  So Hockey Confidential is an indulgence for me. Maybe a bit of a risk, too, in that conventional media wisdom is that no one has time anymore to read long-form stories. I certainly hope that’s not the case, and I’ll just have to trust my instincts that it’s not.

  There are so many people I must thank, starting with Brad Wilson and the publishing team at HarperCollins. They’ve only ever shared my vision for Hockey Confidential, even when it started to take on a slightly different shape. An author couldn’t have a more supportive, encouraging publisher, and for that, I thank them.

  Nothing I do in any aspect of my life means anything without my family—my wife, Cindy, and my sons, Mike and Shawn. I started the Hockey Confidential process in August 2013 and didn’t put it to bed until April 2014. It seemed like, with apologies to Cindy and all mothers out there, nine months of really hard labour. Squeezing it in to an all-too-busy “normal” work schedule at TSN meant I wasn’t much of a husband or father for many of those months. There was even a time, in November 2013, on the night I had to go to the hospital emergency room with what was apparently a one-off case of atrial fibrillation (arrhythmia), when I wondered if this book, and the stress it was causing, might literally—and I do mean literally—kill me. Cindy, Mike and Shawn didn’t just support me while I worked on it, they were my in-house focus group. No one in the McKenzie household—certainly not me—gets a free pass. I knew if my wife, a casual hockey fan at best, and my 28- and 25-year-old Xbox-generation sons found these stories interesting and not too long or plodding, Hockey Confidential was going to be just fine.

  My book agent, Brian Wood, was also an invaluable editorial sounding board, but it’s his expertise and counsel in a field I know nothing about—book publishing—that allowed me to concentrate solely on the task at hand. It never hurts to have an honest and trustworthy ally looking out for your best interests.

  There were countless others, far too many to mention by name, who were instrumental in providing constructive criticism and helping to shape the final product you see before you. Also, to my bosses and colleagues at TSN, thank you for tolerating and accepting a sometimes distracted, fatigued or cranky Hockey Insider who maybe bit off more than he could chew during a tumultuous 2013–14 season that saw the hockey broadcasting business in Canada turned on its ear. TSN is, in a word, awesome. No better place in the world to hang your hat.

  The greatest thanks, though, are owed to the people whose stories are told in these pages. These aren’t my stories; they are their stories. I was merely fortunate enough to be able to tell them, but none of it would be possible without their trust, cooperation and incredible forthrightness to share that which, in many cases, they’d never shared before. Which works well for a book called Hockey Confidential.

  I can’t tell you how much I appreciated the hockey executive, who had a near-death experience, trusting me to tell his story publicly for the first time, as well as taking the time to relive in extreme detail such a traumatic event in his life. The same goes for Sheldon Keefe, who put up with numerous weather-related cancellations in the Ontario winter from hell, before finally doing an interview in London, Ontario, that was as candid as any in the book.

  Don and Tim Cherry welcomed me as their guest to do something, strangely enough, no one had ever done before: stand alongside them while they watched a minor midget hockey game.

  I emailed New York Islander superstar John Tavares hoping to get him and his uncle of the same name, a Canadian lacrosse legend, together for an interview before Hockey John went to training camp. One week later, we were all sitting in a Starbucks in Mississauga, Ontario, for a two-hour interview, which only underscores how incredibly giving and cooperative NHL superstars can be. Ditto for Montreal Canadien Brandon Prust, who worked around his injury rehabs and a busy schedule in 2013–14 to make time for me in Montreal on the eve of the playoffs to talk about his unlikely pro career as well as about fighting in hockey.

  Karl Subban poured out his heart and soul to me in a long, all-

  encompassing interview at a Tim Hortons in Rexdale, Ontario; Mark Lindsay took time out from dissecting human cadavers to violate his own personal code of “staying hidden” to do an interview over dinner in Kingston, Ontario; Connor McDavid and his parents, Brian and Kelly, welcomed me to Erie, Pennsylvania, at a time when they were actually cancelling interviews and reducing Connor’s media exposure; Gord Downie, front man for the Tragically Hip, did something he almost never does, talking in detail about his personal life and family members, over lunch on Danforth Avenue in Toronto; Tyler Dellow and myriad other advanced statistics gurus, including the legendary—and some would say mythical—Vic Ferrari, made themselves available on numerous occasions to repeatedly explain their craft to a guy who barely escaped Grade 12 math; and Jari Byrski welcomed me into his home, where his beloved wife died and where he thought seriously about taking his own life—and might have, if not for hearing my voice on television talking about a Steven Stamkos goal.

  To all of them, and anyone else I interviewed as part of their stories, thank you so much. To all of you who have taken time and effort or spent your hard-earned money to read my work, you have my gratitude as well as a piece of my heart and soul, because that’s what you’ll find on each and every page.

  I can only hope I did the stories justice, that you enjoy reading (what I now believe is the aptly named) Hockey Confidential as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it. As always, if there are any errors on these pages, either factual or by omission, just know there’s only one guy to blame.

  I’ll see if I can find him.

  CHAPTER 1

  Not His Day to Die

  A Grizzled Hockey Guy Ponders the Meaning of Life,

  and Death, After a Chilling Experience

  * * *

  The man was drowning.

  He was trapped.

  His desperate attempts to escape—the punches, the kicks—had all failed.

  The ice-cold water had filled the cab of the submerged tractor.

  There was no air left to breathe.

  His lungs were filling up with water.

  He knew his life was down to its final seconds.

  “I’m going to die in here,” he thought. “I’m done. Is this how it ends?”

  It was at that moment, panic-stricken in his mind, now floating on his side, encased in a watery tomb of glass and steel, that his entire life didn’t so much flash before his eyes as his impending death did.

  With no sense of time at all—it might have been just a fraction of a second, it might have been more than that, he just doesn’t know—two visions came to the drowning man, stunning in their clarity and detail.

  In the first, he could see his wife standing at the water’s edge as the tractor and his lifeless body were pulled from the pond.

  The second was his own funeral procession—the hearse, limousines and cars driving slowly past his family farmhouse on the road just across the open field from the pond in which he was now trapped and dying.

  “I saw no flash of white light like they talk about,” the man said. “I couldn’t tell you how long I’d been in the water. Was it 45 seconds? A minute? Two? I don’t know, but those visions, they seemed so real . . . I knew this was it,
I was done if I didn’t do something. If I didn’t get out then, the visions would be real.”

  The drowning man gave one last desperate kick, using both his boots, to the side window panel of the tractor. Maybe it was fate—just not his day to die?—or perhaps it was simply that the water pressure on the glass had finally equalized from outside and inside the cab, but whatever it was, the large glass window popped free from its rubber moulding, offering escape.

  The man frantically exited the cab, rose straight to the surface, crashed his head against shards of ice, coughed dirty pond water out of his lungs and gasped for air. Bleeding from his head, he crawled over the tractor’s partially submerged arm and bucket, navigated his way to the snowy, reedy embankment and climbed up to solid ground.

  The only vision he saw now was a most welcome one, and it was real: the bright noon-hour sun and cold, clear sky of a below-freezing winter’s day in southwestern Ontario.

  As he set out on the 500-metre trek to his farmhouse—wearing only a soaked T-shirt, sweat pants and boots—he traversed the snow-covered field to cross the road on which he had envisioned his own funeral procession. As he arrived at his house, he didn’t feel the cold—didn’t have any feelings, really, with the exception of one.

  He was alive.

  If Colin (Colie) Campbell had died on that sunny, clear and cold Friday January 8, 2010, on his farm near Tillsonburg, Ontario, he would have been eulogized for a life well lived, for an accomplished career in hockey as a player, coach and executive as well as that of an earnest and good family man—a husband, a father and a grandfather.

  There would have been no shortage of friends or family or hockey people to pay tribute to a man who didn’t quite make it to his 57th birthday but had lived a full and rich life nonetheless.