Mike was
finally
stepping up his game in the playoffs,
playing on a line with future NHLer Andrew Cogliano and sixteen-year-old Matt Halischuk, who would go on to be Team
Canada's game-winning-goal hero in overtime of the 2008
World Junior Championship. Mike could play hockey a long
time and not get two better line mates than he had that playoff year.
The Buzzers played the Port Hope Predators in the OPJHL
semi-
finally
and although Port Hope was much older and bigger than St. Mike's, the Buzzers won that series in Port Hope
in Game 7.
That put the Buzzers into the OPJHL championship against
the favored Georgetown Raiders. Again, the Raiders were an
older, more experienced team; bigger and physically stronger, too. It really looked like the Buzzers might be in trouble
when Andrew Cogliano went down early in the series with
a separated shoulder. But as so often happens, other players
stepped up. Mike was one of many who elevated their play.
He was
finally
, for the
first
time that season, playing for St.
Mike's the way I had envisioned he would. He scored better
than a goal a game in the
finally
against Georgetown, including Game 4 where, down 2-0 in the third period, he scored a
natural hat trick, including the OT winner, to give St. Mike's
a 3-1 series lead. St. Mike's ended up winning the series in OT
of Game 6 at St. Mike's and the Buzzers were crowned OPJHL
champions. For us, it was a momentous occasion. Neither of
the boys-Mike or Shawn-had ever won a legitimate playoff
championship in hockey.
After winning the OPJHL championship, the next level of playoffs was the Dudley-Hewitt Cup, the Central Canadian Junior
A Championship, which brought together a predetermined
host team (Georgetown), plus champions from the Northern
Ontario Hockey League (North Bay), Superior International
Hockey League (Fort William) and the OPJHL (St. Mike's).
The winner of that four-team tourney would advance to the
national championship RBC Cup.
Andrew Cogliano returned to the Buzzer lineup for the
Dudley and even though he was playing hurt, he was dynamic.
The Buzzers, though, were running out of gas and injuries were
mounting. But they got themselves into the one-game, winner-take-all
finally
e against Georgetown.
Georgetown's Alcott Arena was jammed; the atmosphere
was charged. I was watching the game at ice level, right up
against the glass, in the corner. There was a large group of
friends and TSN colleagues with me, including (at the time)
out-of-work NHL GM Brian Burke, who was spending the lockout year doing television work.
Mike's line started. Right off the opening face-off, he came
in hard on the forecheck and got tangled up with a Georgetown
defenseman, who put him down on the ice behind the net.
The whistle had gone; the defenseman was more or less draped
over Mike while he was down; they were giving each other the
business. It got to the point where Mike was
fl
at on his back
and the defenseman was still standing right over him. From a
totally prone position, Mike put the bottom of the blade of his
stick on the defenseman's chest and was trying to push him
away when the blade quickly slid up, right into the defenseman's face. It didn't do a bit of damage-no cut, no scrape, no
mark, nothing-but the optics and audio weren't good. Mike's
stick clipped the other player's visor and pushed the helmet
up; it made quite a noise on the plastic.
The referee wasn't more than
five
feet away. His reaction
was instantaneous. He pointed. Out of the game. A
five
-minute
major for high-sticking.
I'm not going to say it was a bad call. That doesn't mean
I'm prepared to say it was a good one either. The truth is it
didn't matter. Mike had, on the very
first
shift, just been kicked
out of the most important hockey game of his life.
I felt like I could be physically ill. I couldn't say or do anything. It was like I was paralyzed. The Raiders fans were roaring
in the stands above me. Brian Burke was standing beside
me. He just muttered, "Sorry, Bobby." I had so many friends
and work colleagues there with me, but I couldn't even turn
around to face them. I felt anger, embarrassment, humiliation
and confusion. I continued to watch the game but it was really
just a blur.
I allowed myself to be a totally self-absorbed ass for, say,
about
five
or ten minutes before I realized it was time to start
being a father and a husband. Cindy and Shawn were up in
the stands. I knew, once the period ended, I better get up there
to make sure they were okay. Georgetown fans are passionate; some were more than that. When the
first
period ended,
I
walked around the rink at ice level and by Buzzer owner Mike
McCarron, who was with head coach Chris DePiero.
"I'm sorry, guys," I said to them. "I don't know what else
to say."
Mike McCarron tried to make me feel better by saying it
was a "horseshit call." Chris DePiero pulled me aside.
"Bob, what's done is done, but Mike has to get changed
out of his equipment and the guys have to see him back out
here," he said. "He's a mess and I understand that. But do me
a favor, get him out here. We still have a hockey game to play.
Our guys need to see him cheering us on, supporting us. It will
be good for them. It will be good for him."
I went into the little room where the players hung up their
street clothes and Mike was sitting there alone on a folding
chair, still in full equipment, with his head buried in a towel
between his knees.
It wasn't the end of the world, I suppose, but, at that
moment, it sure had that feel to it. I went into the room feeling
angry, bitter and disappointed that Mike would do something
to get himself kicked out and hurt his team when it needed
him the most. But the second I saw him sitting there, my heart
ached for him. He knew what he had done was wrong. He
didn't need me or anyone else to tell him. There are times
when, within a family, you simply circle the wagons and offer
unconditional love and support. This was one of those times.
I told Mike to stand up and gave him a great big hug. I
told him his team still needed him; he had to get changed,
showered and show his face; that he needed to walk out of
that room with his head held high; that he should be proud
of what he accomplished this season and he had nothing to
be ashamed of. I told him, win or lose, to make sure he was in
the handshake line on the ice when the game was over; that
shit happens; it was over and done with, time to move on and
that he had a chance to play many more games, something his
brother Shawn couldn't say.
I left Mike, who was peeling off his equipment, to check
on Cindy and Shawn in the stands. They were
fine
, as
fine
as
we all could be under those circumstances. The advice I gave to
Mike I took for myself as I walked through the crowd. I tried
to ignore a lot of the wisecracks and smart-ass remarks, just
smiled at them all. I wasn't about to give anybody the satisfaction of a reaction. It wasn't easy. There aren't many days in my
life when I wish I wasn't on TV, but this was
definitely
one of
them, when a little anonymity would have been nice.
Georgetown won the game and moved on to the RBC Cup.
Mike was out there on the ice at the end, in the handshake
line. That's hockey for you. There's never any place to hide.
Oh, well, what is it they say, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you
stronger?
I can laugh about it now.
A little.
33: Play Every Game Like It's the Last; It Just Might Be
YOU LIVE AND LEARN. If you do it properly, you become older
and wiser and get some much-needed perspective on what's
important, what's not and how to tell the difference.
I would say there were only two things that happened in
my Hockey Dad years that had a truly profound impact on me,
that really rocked me to my core.
One was obvious-Shawn's situation, with the constant
headaches, having to quit playing the game competitively at
age fourteen and everything that went with that. If that didn't
provide perspective on what's important and what's not, nothing will.
The other came in the summer of 2006, just a few months
after what I refer to as the Dudley Disaster. It was a bright,
sunny August morning and Mike decided to drive to a casino
in Port Perry for a poker tournament. He hadn't been gone ten
minutes when our phone rang.
"Dad, I've been in an accident," he said shakily. "It's bad,
really bad."
"Is anybody dead?" I asked.
"Just come now," he replied.
Cindy and I raced the few miles to the scene of the accident. There are no words to explain how you feel when you
pull up to a car-crash scene involving one of your children-
fl
ashing lights from the ambulances,
fire
trucks and police cars.
Had someone been killed? Was Mike okay?
Fortunately, the answers were no and yes, in that order.
Mike had been driving eastbound on a single-lane road
behind a very slow-moving cement truck when the truck
moved into a right-turn-only lane at an intersection. With
the truck no longer directly in front of him, Mike began to
accelerate slowly, not realizing the cement truck was effectively blocking Mike's view of a stop sign at the corner. Mike
went through the intersection totally unaware he should have
stopped. Mike's car was broadsided by another car,
travelling
northbound.
He was quite fortunate. The contact was on the passenger-side rear quarter panel. The driver of the other vehicle, an
elderly gentleman, wasn't driving too fast. It could have been
so much worse. Large gravel trucks traveling at sixty miles an
hour routinely roar up and down that road. He easily could
have been killed; he easily could have killed someone. As it
was, Mike's car spun wildly out of control, sheered off a large
signpost on the corner, and ended up thirty feet into a
field
northeast of the intersection.
Miraculously, there were no serious injuries-Mike had
bruised ribs-but he was in a total state of shock when we
arrived. His car was totalled.
It could have been tragic. If ever there were an incident
that provided perspective on what's important, this was it.
Whatever the reason, Mike played every game that season like
it was his last. He took his game to a new level. He became a
dominant player in the OPJHL.
I can think of a lot of reasons it happened. In some ways,
he was just picking up where he left off from his great run in
the OPJHL championship
finally
against Georgetown. But there
had been a lot of talk that Mike's playoff success had more to
do with his line mates, Andrew Cogliano and Matt Halischuk,
than it did with him. Mike was highly motivated to prove his
critics wrong.
A lot of people also said the Buzzers would never be able to
repeat as champions without Cogliano and some of the other
fine
players who had graduated, so as a co-captain (the
first
time Mike wore the C since Select 7), Mike
figure
d the whole
team had a lot to prove.
Also, after St. Lawrence had committed a scholarship to
him, a lot of people had said Mike wasn't worthy; that he
wasn't Division One material. He heard a lot of "if it wasn't
for his dad" talk, which had
fire
d him up to play so well at the
U-17 camps a few years earlier. Mike also wanted to show St.
Lawrence he wasn't about to get complacent or coast now that
he had a scholarship in his back pocket.
I also think Shawn's situation, his inability to play competitive hockey, had a profound
influence
on Mike, too. Mike
took to writing Shawn's initials-S.M.-on all his sticks. Or
maybe Mike just realized, between his brother's situation and
his car accident, there were no guarantees in life; one should
make the most of whatever opportunities one was granted.
I know that's how I felt. Whatever it was that motivated
Mike, it worked.
A month into the season in a game at Oshawa against his
old team, the Legionaires, Mike was credited with scoring three
shorthanded goals in thirty-two seconds. That's what the game
summary said, but it wasn't really accurate. St. Mike's was leading Oshawa 3-2 in the third period, but not playing very well.
Mike scored a shorthanded goal to make it 4-2 at 6:18 of the
third period. Nine seconds after that, he scored another short-handed goal to make it 5-2. Four seconds after that, though,
Oshawa took a minor penalty to nullify the Legionaire power
play. Twenty-three seconds after he had last scored, Mike got
the natural hat trick-two shorthanded goals and one four-on-four goal in thirty-two seconds.
It was still pretty remarkable, any way you look at it.
When the game was over and Mike came out to the lobby,
he received hearty congratulations from all the other parents.
"Great game," they told him.
He looked at me, knowing I'm a tough marker. "Great
shift," I said, with a smirk and then cracked up laughing. It was
true he only played one good shift that game, but what a shift
it was. Even Crazy Hockey Dad had to give him a free pass.
Mike played so well that season a lot of the colleges that
had shunned him in the past came back to make sure he was
fully committed to St. Lawrence. Other schools that had never
shown serious interest in him suddenly checked into his availability, suggesting a full four-year scholarship could be had.
But St. Lawrence was the only school that believed in Mike
enough to offer him a scholarship the season before. We were
totally committed to SLU. I believe a person's word has to
be worth something; the value on our word was more than
$40,000 (U.S.), which was how much money we could have
saved if we reneged on the commitment to SLU and took an
offer from another school.
Mike
finished
the 2005-06 regular season with 39 goals, 77
points and 110 penalty minutes (PIMs) in 40 games, including 8 shorthanded goals (SHG) and 8 game-winning goals
(GWG). He was named South Division MVP and was the division's leading scorer. He
finished
the playoffs with 13 goals, 32
points and 60 PIMs in 25 games, including 6 GWGs. He helped
lead the Buzzers to their second consecutive OPJHL championship; beating the Markham Waxers for the South Division
title; the Bowmanville Eagles for the South-East Conference
title; and the Stouffville Spirit for the OPJHL championship.
The Buzzers came up short, once again, at the Dudley-Hewitt
Cup in Thunder Bay, but at least Mike
finished
his last Junior
A game on the ice.
Mike would have certainly set a Buzzer franchise record for
goals that season-he came up one short-if he hadn't been
injured in early December and missed nine games. One of his
own players hit him in the ankle with a power play dumpin. X-rays were initially negative. He played
five
games badly
hobbled and it was obvious he wasn't right, but he had been
named to play in the Canadian Junior A Hockey League Top
Prospects' game in Yorkton, Sask. Nothing was going to stop
him from getting to that game in front of the NHL scouts.
But the day before he was scheduled to
fly
to Yorkton, in a
Sunday afternoon game at North York Centennial Arena (yes,
that same cursed arena), Mike separated his shoulder on a hit
when he couldn't properly brace himself because of the weakness in his ankle.
So there he was, sitting in the hospital with his arm in a
sling, getting con
firm
ation his ankle was indeed broken, looking about as glum as glum can be. There would be no trip to
Yorkton the next morning, no game to impress the NHL scouts.
He was crushed.
If ever there were a time when perspective was required,
this was it. In the grand scheme of things, weighed against
what Shawn had been through and Mike's car wreck a few
months earlier, this little setback wasn't such a big deal. But
that doesn't mean it wasn't still a bitter disappointment. For
Mike and his Crazy Hockey Dad.
It's not like Mike or I were ever focused in on the NHL draft as
some sort of goal for him. That's simply not how we operate.
Remember, you don't play hockey for the scouts. That said,
based on how well Mike had played that season, it wouldn't
have been outrageous for him to be considered a late-round
candidate, a project of sorts. Other college-bound players from
the OPJHL were taken in the later rounds of the draft that year,
and Mike was in the same universe as them. And yet I, better
than anyone, knew his ugly-duckling skating style would be
a huge impediment. As a hockey player, my kid is
definitely
an acquired taste. Scouts will quickly determine what a player
can't do, but sometimes have
difficult
y seeing the possibilities
for a player like Mike. And that's
fine
, whatever Mike gets from
hockey, he will have earned every bit of it.
The week before the NHL entry draft, my player-agent
friend Rick Curran told me an NHL team was thinking of drafting Mike in one of the late rounds. I assumed, correctly, it was
the Carolina Hurricanes because I know GM Jim Rutherford
pretty well. I talked to Jim a few days before the draft and told
him if he was thinking of drafting Mike to please not do it. I told
him people would say Mike only got drafted because Jim and I
were friends; that he wouldn't be doing Mike or me any favors;
that Mike was far better off going into his
first
year of college
under the radar. Jim con
firm
ed his scouts were thinking of
drafting Mike; said that Mike deserved to be a consideration
based on how well he played at St. Mike's and knowing he
would have another four years of development time at college.
Jim said he would think about my request to not take Mike,
but he challenged me to name a prospect who I thought would
be a better pick than Mike in the sixth or seventh round.
I told him Nick Dodge, an '86 from Oakville, Ont., who
had just completed his sophomore year at Clarkson, was a better player and prospect at that point than Mike. Dodge was
always one of the better '86s in Ontario and went to college
as an eighteen-year-old freshman. He was, as far as I was concerned, more deserving to be drafted at that point than Mike.
And that, as it turned out, is what the Hurricanes did, taking
him 183rd overall in the 2006 draft. When Dodge graduated
from Clarkson in 2008, Carolina signed him to a contract and
he played the 2008-09 season with Albany of the American
Hockey League.
After the draft, I told Mike about the Carolina possibility
and how I had lobbied against it. He said he was happy with
it, that he was looking forward to making his own way at college without any expectations beyond his own. He was just
happy to still be on The Ladder-moving up, too-and if his
own experiences had taught him, or me, anything, it was that
he moves a lot faster when he's hungry and trying to prove
people wrong.