Hockey Dad Page 6

  Kids on other teams would call Mike "Four Eyes"-at the younger ages they hadn't yet twigged to the fact his dad was on TV; all that nonsense would come later-and that only added fuel to Mike's fire.

  In his second year of rep, major novice AAA, the Wildcats were playing in a December tournament in Lindsay, hosted by the Central Ontario Wolves organization. The team and Mike were on top of their game. The Wildcats went 6-0-0 to win the tournament and Mike, who had eight goals and eleven points in the six games (we know the precise stats because the newspaper story is in an old scrapbook), was named tournament MVP.

  Cindy and I should have been thrilled, but we weren't.

  In fact, we were really quite upset. Throughout the weekend's play, Mike's intensity level was too high. We talked to him about it a couple of times after the tournament games on Friday and Saturday, warned him that if he was going to continue to play like that, we weren't going to put up with it.

  But right into the championship game, he was getting worse instead of better. As well as he played, and he was on fire, he was banging his stick when things didn't go his way, waving his arms or getting flustered and agitated, at times almost to the point of tears.

  We had seen enough. Before Mike had even emerged from the dressing room with his trophy and the MVP award, Cindy and I had decided to "suspend" Mike for one game. The next league game the Wildcats played was against their arch rivals from Oshawa, so we determined that would be the game he would have to miss. He needed to understand he couldn't keep playing like that, even if he was playing well and being successful.

  We told Mike on the way home from Lindsay and he begged us to relent, promised us he would behave himself from now on, but we had heard that story on previous car rides and it hadn't happened, so we were sticking to our guns.

  We told John Velacich about our plan at practice that week and, not surprisingly, he tried to talk us out of it. As a coach, he didn't want to be without Mike for the game against Oshawa. But Cindy and I felt strongly about it and wouldn't relent.

  I would like to tell you that Mike sitting out that game against Oshawa did the trick, but there was a game later that season when Oshawa was really putting the boots to the Wildcats. In that game, a ticked-off, frustrated and angry Mike turned a noncontact major novice AAA game into full contact and had the six-six, count 'em, six-minor penalties for body checking to prove it. Remember when I told you before that parents shouldn't necessarily be held accountable for what their kids do or don't do on the ice? Well, I was speaking from experience.

  And let's just say this whole discipline thing with Mike has remained a work in progress.

  The Wildcats were having a good major novice AAA year. When the playoffs arrived, we were all hoping the team would be good enough to get to the Ontario Minor Hockey Association championships. That's the Holy Grail for every OMHA team. The league we played in was called the Eastern Triple A (ETA); there were eight to eleven centers depending upon the age group (Barrie, Richmond Hill, Markham, Ajax-Pickering, Whitby, Oshawa, Peterborough, Central Ontario, York-Simcoe, North Central and Quinte) and they competed for the right to get to what we simply called the OMHAs. Two teams from our ETA league would advance, two teams would advance from the South-Central Triple A (SCTA) league (Brampton, Oakville, Halton, Hamilton, Burlington, St. Catharines, Welland, Niagara Falls and Guelph) and there would be one host team, from either the ETA or SCTA, depending upon who had won the OMHA title in that age group the year before.

  Oakville had won the OMHAs in minor novice so the SCTA would get three teams in the major novice AAA OMHA championships. Only two would go from the ETA, so the Wildcats were going to have to win two playoff rounds to get a berth in the OMHAs.

  Our first-round playoff series was against Barrie and it was a barn burner. The Wildcats were leading the best-of-five series 2-1 and Game 4 was being played at Iroquois Park Arena. But Barrie rallied for the win and tied the series. Late in the third period of that game, Coach Velacich got tossed from the game for arguing a call with the referee. Minor hockey rules being what they are, if a player or coach gets a game misconduct in the last ten minutes of the third period, he or she must sit out another game in addition to the one they were ejected from.

  So we weren't going to have our head coach for Game 5 back in Barrie. But the kids overcame that. The boys played well in Game 5 in a really tense nail-biter and it was Steven Seedhouse who scored the game-winning goal for Whitby with only a minute left to play. We were on to the next round, against our neighbors from Ajax-Pickering, one playoff series victory from getting to the OMHAs.

  We showed up for our next practice and were told there was going to be a parent meeting. We then found out the OMHA had reversed the outcome of Game 5, which Whitby won on the ice 2-1, after Barrie filed an official protest. Barrie protested the fact that our suspended head coach was seen coming out of our dressing room before the game. John Velacich had apparently gone in to tie his son Jason's skates before the game and wish the boys good luck, but according to OMHA rules, a suspended coach is not permitted to even be around the dressing room before the game. So the OMHA ruled in favor of Barrie's protest, and reversed the outcome of that game and the series.

  Barrie, not Whitby, would be playing Ajax-Pickering the next night, and the Wildcats were destined to play in what's called the ETA playoffs, or ringette/consolation round, as it's disdainfully known.

  Poor John Velacich felt terrible. It was such an innocent thing. No one was trying to pull a fast one. I really felt bad for the poor guy. Mike's team was done as far as the OMHA playoffs were concerned and it was because of some technicality which, on one level, made sense (you don't want suspended coaches permitted to "coach"), but the punishment (reversing the outcome of a game and a playoff series) was ridiculously heavy-handed, penalizing a bunch of innocent kids. Games are won and lost on the ice, especially with nine-year-olds, and there was no advantage, real or imagined, to the coach innocently being in the room before the game to tie his son's skates.

  I was outraged. All of the parents were. And the kids? They were all crying; it was quite a scene.

  You hear about really ridiculous things happening in the name of minor hockey and this was one of them. What was the OMHA thinking? What was the Barrie team who lodged the protest thinking? Was that how Barrie wanted to advance in the playoffs, winning a series in the boardroom, not on the ice? We couldn't imagine a more unfair scenario. I've been known to spin a good yarn in front of a keyboard so I wrote a scathing letter, epic length too, to both the OMHA and the Barrie Minor Hockey Association. It was just blistering. But it obviously fell on deaf ears because no one ever responded. We were done.

  But I learned an important lesson that day about how minor hockey operates. I didn't forget it.

  And, as they like to say, payback's a bitch.

  12: "I Didn't Realize You Had Only One Son"

  We are eleven chapters into this epic and Shawn Patrick McKenzie has just now offered up this wry, albeit accurate, observation.

  "I didn't realize you had only one son," Shawn said with, if I didn't know him better, a tinge of sarcasm.

  True enough, the story thus far has been a little Mikecentric, but there are reasons for only now getting to No. 2 son in any great depth. Good reasons, too. Or at least that is our story and we're sticking to it.

  First, you show me a family with more than one kid and I'll show you a family who in a variety of different ways doesn't lavish quite the same amount of undivided attention on the second as the first received. For the first three years of Mike's life, with Shawn not being born until July of 1989, Mike had a captive audience.

  The reality is that when Mike was three years old, my focus was solely on getting him to skate. When Shawn was three years old, my hockey-related efforts were split between Mike's first year in the six-year-old house league and getting Shawn on the ice for the first time. So if my recollection of dpecifics about Shawn's early hockey days isn't quite as sharp as it was for
his brother, I suppose I stand guilty as charged.

  There's another factor, too, though. While Mike was absolutely maniacal about all things hockey-playing it, watching it, drawing it, talking it, singing it-Shawn was, shall we say, somewhat less enthusiastic. Oh, he liked it well enough. Like his older brother, he would as a toddler pick up a mini-stick and bat a ball around the house. And if little Mikey and I were in the basement "taking shots" on each other, Shawn would join in. Mike, especially if I wasn't around, would get Shawn all suited in the goalie pads and gloves and drill shots at him.

  Shawn would stand in there, get unmercifully pelted with a tennis ball and take whatever Mike was dishing out without so much as a whimper.

  But Shawn didn't sit for hours at a time and draw hockey pictures. He had no interest whatsoever in learning which logos belonged to which teams and couldn't have cared less about how Mike's friend Mario Le-Moo brushed his teeth.

  Shawn's attention span was fleeting. He would go from one thing to the next in rapid succession. His hockey stick wasn't going to get any more attention from him than his toy truck or toy car or toy gun or Super Soaker or toy sword or his action figures. He was much more likely to plant himself in front of the TV to watch cartoons than a hockey game, which is to say he was a pretty normal little kid.

  That said, Shawn was still going to be given every opportunity Mike had when it came to hockey.

  The first time I recall having Shawn on skates was just after Christmas of 1992, when he was about three and a half years old. That's when the Griswolds-I mean the McKenzies-decided to do the Christmas Vacation thing in Gavle, Sweden, site of the 1993 World Junior Championship. I obviously had to work the tournament for TSN and since the first game started on Christmas Day, Cindy and I agreed it would be nice for the whole family to be together for a family Christmas in Sweden.

  So we sort of celebrated Christmas in Canada with our families four or five days before the actual day. Then the four of us-Cindy, six-year-old Mike and three-year-old Shawn and I-jetted off to Sweden. If that sounds exotic and glamorous, great, but anyone who has traveled with kids that age, they know only too well what it's really like.

  There was, with a seven-hour time difference, the seven hour overnight flight from Toronto to Frankfurt and a six-hour layover in Frankfurt before the two-hour flight to Stockholm, followed by the two-hour drive north to Gavle. I recall getting into the nice Volvo station wagon rental we got at Stockholm's Arlanda airport and everyone (except me, of course) immediately, for the first time on the trip, falling asleep in the car.

  As we drove north from Stockholm to Gavle on that snowy afternoon and the family slept, I did what I could to stay awake, but it was difficult, compounded by the fact I was starting to feel extremely warm, so much so that I thought I might be getting sick with a fever. I started sweating. My shirt and jeans became drenched. The hotter I got, the more tired I got. Every so often I would have to put down the window to get a blast of cold, fresh air to keep me awake. I was never so happy on the early evening of Christmas Eve to finally arrive at our hotel in Gavle, wake up the family, unpack the car and check in. It was only as I exited the car and happened to put my hand on the driver's seat that I made an amazing discovery-this car had heated seats, which was a totally new and foreign concept for me. Let's just say that drive might have been a lot more enjoyable if I'd realized the heated seat was on high and frying my backside for the entire time.

  I mention the Gavle trip because, to the best of my recollection, that was where Shawn first skated. I had gone out in advance of the trip to buy Shawn his own skates. We took the same bob skates Mike had learned on but I figured Shawn was a little older than when Mike first tried skating, so he needed to have single-blade skates.

  There was a great outdoor rink close to the hotel in Gavle where kids and adults played shinny all day long. That is where we spent a considerable amount of our free time. Mike loved it because there were little pickup games going on all over the ice and it took him no time at all to mix in.

  It was also a time when the McKenzie family got to hang out with Darryl Sittler and his family. Darryl's son Ryan was playing for Team USA. Darryl and his lovely wife, Wendy, who passed away in October of 2001 after a battle with colon cancer, and their daughters Ashley and Meaghan, were staying at our hotel. The Sittler girls were older than our boys by quite a few years but they got a great kick out of Mike and Shawn, especially three-and-a-half-year-old Shawn, whose energy usually made him the center of attention.

  Shawn and Mike couldn't have been more different as kids.

  Mike was a little quiet and shy. He was always as neat as a pin, polite and well spoken. Shawn was not quiet and not shy. He would talk to anybody anywhere. No matter how hard Cindy tried to dress up Shawn, he always looked like an unmade bed.

  His shirt was always untucked, his hair was all over the place. As much as he talked, he wasn't what you would call a great talker. He couldn't say his name very well because he couldn't pronounce his Ss or Fs. So if you asked him his name, he would say "Gawn." When he was four, if you asked him how old he was, he would say "Gore."

  It turned out he didn't have a speech impediment as much as he was either just too lazy to say his Ss and Fs or simply liked the reaction he got from saying things incorrectly because he went to precisely one and a half speech classes before saying his Ss and Fs the right way. Our theory was once he realized he would have to commit time and effort to speech lessons, he just decided to say words correctly and be done with it. But that was Shawn. Tell him to walk, he would run. So it was obvious to me, as a Hockey Dad, that I was dealing with someone completely different than Mike.

  Mind you, it wasn't as if Shawn didn't like hockey. When he first hit the ice in Sweden he had a great time. But I probably spent as much time carrying the lazy little monkey in my arms and whooshing him around the rink as he did actually skating. But he was having fun out there, so were all the McKenzies and the Sittlers, too.

  The Sittlers didn't bring their skates to Sweden, but I would take off mine and let Darryl go out for a twirl with Mike and Shawn. We have video of that, which is kind of neat. Darryl would skate for a bit and then his daughter Meaghan, who went on a few years later to be a star hockey player at Colby College in Maine, would use my skates, too. It was a wonderful time. The Sittlers were great fun. Darryl is about as nice a guy as you could imagine and Wendy was wonderful, too.

  She took a real shine to Shawn, as did the Sittler girls. For as much video as we have of the kids skating in Sweden, we've got the Sittler girls putting a Harley-Davidson handkerchief on Shawn's head like a biker bandanna-Shawn was on some sort of crazy Harley-Davidson kick at the time.

  As an aside, years later, Cindy and I were having a garage sale. Those old Bauers of mine, all beat up and with no laces in them, were on a table in our driveway with a price tag of $2. A guy picked them up and looked at them, and was contemplating whether to buy them.

  "Those were once worn by Darryl Sittler," I told the guy. The guy looked at me like I was crazy. He put them back down and walked away.

  Okay, so here's the bottom line. At this age, Shawn liked hockey but didn't love it; he liked the Power Rangers more than the New York Rangers and I, thankfully, was not dumb enough to fall into the trap of believing Shawn should be exactly like Mike. It was probably easier for me to accept that about Shawn because I was so busy with Mike's hockey, to say nothing of work. For instance, when Shawn was four, I was up to my eyeballs in the craziness of Mike's Select 7 season. But however immersed I was in Mike's hockey, I still wanted to make sure Shawn was given every opportunity Mike had because it wasn't like Shawn hated hockey, he just wasn't as over the top about it.

  So for the 1994-95 season, when Mike was playing his first year of AAA, I was adamant Shawn should start playing because he was five, a full year older than when I started Mike in the Pickering hockey school as a four-year-old. But now that we were living in Whitby, not Pickering, there was no five-year-old hock
ey school for Shawn. It turned out there was a program within the Oshawa CYO (Catholic Youth Organization), which had a house-league system based on the various parishes in Oshawa and Whitby. The Oshawa CYO hockey school, though, was almost identical to the PMHA hockey school in that it was mostly instructional. Like I was with Mike, I was able to help out on the ice with Shawn.

  Shawn liked it well enough-at least he never complained about going-but when it was over, it was over and he moved on to other stuff. The big excitement that season, probably more for me than Shawn, was when he got "called up" from the hockey school to play one game in the league. Our parish, Holy Family in Whitby, was going to be short some players for a game in the Squirt house league and Shawn got the call to fill in. Not unlike Mike, Shawn never touched the puck in that first game he ever played, not even close actually, but it sure seemed like the big time to me. The stars of the CYO back then were the Neals, a Whitby family with four hockey-playing boys. The player who dominated the CYO back then was James Neal, an '87 who has gone on to star for the Dallas Stars.

  Like his older brother, Shawn had already developed a skating habit that was driving me nuts. Mike used to drag his one skate to slow himself down if he felt like he was going too fast. Shawn decided, for a period of time, that he would only push off with one skate, the same skate, over and over again.

  If you know anything about skating mechanics, you can envision what that's like. I used to tell him he had to push with both skates, one and then the other, but sure enough, he'd go back and push with just one. Like Mike, he eventually figured it out.

  If I didn't know better, I would have thought Shawn was just trying to torment me.

  13: Was It Commitment or Should I Have Been Committed?

  IN SPITE OF MIKE AND SHAWN being different in their approach to hockey, no one can ever suggest I didn't show the same commitment to Shawn as to Mike. You could argue I should have been committed, but there was never any doubt about commitment. Registering Shawn for the six-year-old house league in Whitby was a case in point.