A Guy Like Me: Fighting to Make the Cut

INTRODUCTION: SEEING STARS

The cheering was for me. I couldn’t believe it. I walked into the banquet room filled with other players and their families at the NHL All-Star Game I had just played in, families whose company some cynics said was too good for me. Yet there they were, clapping and hooting for me. I waved the most sheepish wave I could, the kind you give when a room full of friends surprises you on your birthday. And that’s what they were—my friends, my colleagues, people who were happy to see me and happier for me that I had a reason to wave like that.

After a weekend full of firsts and amazing moments, that is the part that I will remember the most. To think that all these superstars and their families would give me a standing ovation was unthinkable and would have been almost laughable just two months earlier. And it didn’t stop with cheering. People wanted pictures. Pictures with me! I posed with anyone who wanted a shot, mostly families and friends, but some players, too. People kept asking for a photo, so I kept obliging. My jaw was hurting from all the smiling I was doing. I would have been honored just to be considered an equal, but my wife and I had somehow become the guests of honor. It wasn’t a formal gathering; it was a celebration of a whirlwind set of hours, days, and weeks that I was just trying to piece together. I barely had time to sit or gather my thoughts—the rest of my extended family was waiting for my wife and me at our table, and I’d kept them waiting long enough. I tried to have a beer and a few bites of food with them, but the constant swarm of people buzzing by was just getting to be too much. Eventually I hit a breaking point, and I needed some space to clear my head.

Let’s go, I said. My wife looked at me. The party was just getting warmed up. But in the middle of all the hoopla, all I wanted was to get back to something familiar. We thanked more people. We smiled. We posed. Then we snuck away. My wife and I went upstairs to our room, got the kids in their pajamas, and then ordered room service. It was just us, and it was exactly what I needed. We hung out, we laughed, we celebrated by ourselves. Every time there had been a high or a low, my family had always helped me make sense of it and put it into perspective. That night was no different.

That was the party I needed at that moment. We ate burgers, hung out, and laughed. I looked over and I said to my wife, You know what? I am enjoying my life so much right now. It was a perfect ending to a perfect time. There may have been fifty thousand people in town wanting to fawn over me, but I just wanted to go back to the hotel and have burgers with my family. It had been one crazy winter that led to that magical weekend. But it didn’t just happen with the flip of a switch; I’d had a lifetime of hurdles and hard work. There were long odds and doubters. But there were also close supporters, special people whom I could never thank enough.

How did I get from there to here? From the outsider to the star? It’s taken a lifetime to live it, and I’m still sorting it out.

CHAPTER 1

Humble Beginnings

We were survivors. I lived in the Evergreen Trailer Park in Edmonton, Alberta, with my parents, Howard and Marilyn, and my brothers, Jamie and Curtis, until I was five. My brothers and I shared a tiny bed, so there was never much chance to spread out. When my father changed jobs, we moved in with my dad’s mother, who lived out east in Port Dalhousie, Ontario. The move came just in time, too. Soon after we moved, a tornado hit the park area and leveled all the houses except ours. My dad had left behind a ’55 Chevy pickup truck, which he planned to, well, pick up a few months later. It was gone when we got back, and I always wondered who or what took it, the tornado or one of my mom’s brothers, who could have sold it for some extra cash.

Within a year, we packed up shop and moved again, this time to St. Catharines, Ontario, an industrial city about twelve miles from the US border, along the Niagara River. It was the place where I first went to school, and as I settled into the rhythm of my new life, I started to become very curious about my relatives. My parents always did a good job providing for us. They just never really talked much about family history, and they didn’t express a lot of emotion. They always took care of us, but life at home was a little impersonal for us compared to some of our neighbors.

The family history was in my grandmother’s basement. My brothers and I would explore down there for hours, searching through the old boxes she had stacked in nearly every corner. My grandmother had raised five kids, and each of their stories was tucked away in those boxes. She had dozens of them full of toys, photos, and old sporting equipment. My great-uncle, Nick, had a bunch of used hockey equipment that was worn down to the core. There was an old canoe, some pads, a few sneakers. It was treasure after treasure. Most of all, I remember the pictures. My parents never told me about how they met or what it was like when they were dating, nor did I go out of my way to ask them. I found my answers in the basement. There were albums upon albums of pictures. I would sit there for hours going over every picture in every one of them, piecing them together to get a glimpse into my parents’ lives when they were just kids. Most pictures were of them hanging out with their friends. My dad had a big old beard and my mom had long black hair, the kind you would see on Pocahontas from the Disney movie. My parents didn’t have much back then, but from their smiles in those photos, they looked like they didn’t have a care in the world; they looked happy.

Although I never knew my parents’ whole story when I was growing up, I at least knew that there was a story. My mom’s parents met in Saskatchewan before moving to British Columbia. When they arrived in Quesnel, a tiny town in the province’s interior, they had to cut down trees to make room for the house that my grandfather, a domestic engineer, was building. I believe my grandpa still has the mark for felling the biggest tree on record. And that’s back when they used only a saw—none of the chainsaws and harnesses people use these days. My grandpa built the house by hand, so my mom and her eight siblings—including two sets of twins—grew up with no electricity.

Dad was born into a Catholic family in St. Catharines, where my grandparents owned a grocery store that supplied a lot of the local shipping industry. But when my dad was thirteen, my grandad passed away, so my grandma sold the store and moved my dad, along with his three brothers and two sisters, to Bobby Orr’s hometown of Perry Sound, Ontario, where they opened a dairy business. Compared to people around them, my dad’s family was relatively well off. When my dad was twenty-one, he went on a trip to California, where he bought a car to drive around and tour the United States. By the time he made it up to British Columbia, he’d been gone for four months and had drained his money. My dad had a friend in B.C. who was dating my mom’s sister. My mom was eighteen when they met, and she already had a son, my brother Jamie, from a previous relationship. My dad met my mom, and they fell for each other quickly. They moved to Edmonton to join a construction business, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. They didn’t actually get married until I was five. I understood that it was a special day, but I didn’t really know why. There was a nice church and a reception with a lot of people. I remember dressing up in a suit for the big day—it might not have been so comfortable to wear, but I got a lot of compliments about that suit.

My dad was always quiet and reserved. He was like a worker bee: if there was a problem, he’d find a solution. When we moved to St. Catharines, he became a construction superintendent for the Charter Building Company. When I was growing up, he’d wake at 5:00 a.m. and wouldn’t get back until six thirty or seven in the evening. He worked a lot. Dad never smoked and didn’t drink much. His main job in life was to make sure we had everything we needed, and we always did. Like a lot of people in his line of work, he went where the jobs were. If the job was in Toronto, he’d be up extra early, making the seventy-mile drive. He usually had three or four projects going on at once, so he was always on the move.

My parents had very distinctive mannerisms, especially when they were in serious thought. Whenever my dad would start thinking of his work, he’d take both his hands and start rubbing under his chin. He still does it all the time when he’s on the phone, like he’s trying to paint a picture for himself that he can’t actually see. My mom would open her mouth when she was concentrating. When she backed up the car and had to watch for obstacles, it looked like she was at the dentist, saying, Ah.

My dad also ran a strict household. When we misbehaved, we took our licking. My dad used to spank us with a hand, a belt, a wooden spoon—different things. One time, my neighbor ten houses down was picking on my brother Curt, so I gave the bully a good kick in the butt. I knew what was coming, but I did everything I could to give my dad a cooling-off period. I went into my room and, like I did every time, built the sturdiest barricade I could. I would move the dresser in my room up against the door, put my feet up against the dresser, and brace my back against the other wall. Waiting to take a lickin’ was the worst part of the whole ordeal. I later came to realize that it’s a lot like a hockey fight. A lot of the time, I would psych myself out so badly that the actual fight—or spanking, as a kid—was nothing compared to the torture I put myself through beforehand. One day, my mom was giving my brother Jamie and me a spanking for doing something bad. She was using a belt and I was taking the worse of it. But when she got to Jamie, he just stood there laughing at my mom. After a while, my mom gave up and let us both be. I asked Jamie how the heck he was laughing while getting hit and he told me he had learned to time mom’s swing, so he could catch the belt before it whipped and stung him. Only Jamie could somehow get spanked and still manage to laugh in my mom’s face while it happened. It was priceless.

My parents were amazing, and they gave me a lot of things, but I don’t know where I got my height from (today I am six eight). My father is six feet and mom is five five. I was always big for my age. Hockey teams usually place racks in the hallways by the locker rooms where guys leave their hockey sticks on the way in and pick them up on the way out. The racks come in different sizes depending on the age—and, of course, the typical size—of the players involved. I can’t recall ever having hockey sticks that fit inside the stick racks my teams used. In juniors, college, even today—I’ve gotten used to balancing mine against the wall next to the rack.

I also don’t know where I got my interest in sports. When I was ten, Dad told me that he was a rower. But later, when I was exploring the photos in one of the boxes, I learned that he wasn’t exactly a rower—he was a coxswain. My dad had never operated a paddle. He’d been the one with the bullhorn, yelling instructions, shouting out number counts to keep the rowers in rhythm or just telling the team to hurry up and row. The coxswain is usually as small as possible, taking on as little weight as necessary, since he isn’t actually rowing. On the one hand, he’s an important guy, like the team quarterback; on the other, well, he doesn’t have athletic size or skills that translate into anything other than coaching or becoming hockey announcer Doc Emrick in another life. Those were the genes I had to work with.

But I also had something more valuable. My parents always supported my love of hockey. When they had the means to take a vacation in the winter, they never went to a warm climate; instead they took me to a tournament, a camp, or just a game or practice that happened to be on the schedule. I always knew I had their support, even if they weren’t the types to make a big show of how much they were helping me.

In the summers, we would sometimes go to Snug Haven, a little resort cottage nestled on a beach in northern Ontario. It was awesome. It was right near where my dad had grown up, so he loved taking us for cruises on a little ten-foot aluminum boat with a small nine-horsepower engine, showing us around the rocks and trees that most tourists would never dare to navigate. He would show us his favorite beaches and fishing holes, as though he were sharing a secret with us. That place will always hold a special spot in my heart; I hope one day I can share more of those memories with my kids.

Growing up, I had a lot of friends, but I’m not sure I really had a lot of close friends. I didn’t delve into other people’s lives and I still don’t let people in very easily. Don’t get me wrong, I still had a group of really great friends whom I would have taken a bullet for. I was just a strange kid. I had a hard time connecting with people on a deeper level. I had no problem hanging out with guys and shooting the breeze, but when it came time to open up and let someone in, I just couldn’t do it. That made it hard when my friends would open up to me or confide something to me. I probably came off like a massive jerk to them, because whenever one of them tried to have a real talk with me about something important, I would change the subject as quickly as possible. It’s not that I was trying to be a bad friend; I honestly didn’t have the tools to deal with it.

I was clear about one thing, though: I hated bullying. I was the big kid, sort of popular, the kind of kid who could get away with picking on other guys as a way of feeling better about myself or asserting myself into the hierarchy of the neighborhood. I saw others like that, and I told myself that I would never be that person. There was a kid in our area named Richard. He lived across the street from my school, and our moms were friends with each other. Richard was special, and the other kids saw him as an easy target because he was clumsy and couldn’t stick up for himself. One day after school around Christmastime, some of the other guys in the neighborhood were dragging him along on a sheet of ice. I put a stop to it quickly. The guys gave me a look that said, Hey, what’s wrong? We’re just having a little fun. But it wasn’t fun for Richard, and it just had to stop.

My younger brother, Curtis, wasn’t nearly my size. When Curt started high school, he had a broken leg and was in crutches. I was in my OAC year (grade thirteen), and I heard about someone giving him a hard time, kicking out his crutches and such. I happened to see it take place one day in the hallway, and let’s just say the kid never went near Curtis again. I also think he had to invest in some new underwear.

Today, when people look at guys who fight in the NHL, they often don’t understand that we are there to look after our teammates. Our actions are defensive: keeping the peace as much as causing trouble. If one of my guys takes a cheap shot, somebody needs to be there to stop it, so that doesn’t happen again. Somebody needs to look after the speedy thirty-goal scorer who might not be able to fend for himself in a scrap. Somebody needs to look out for guys like Richard.

I probably got that sense of sympathy from my mom. My mom was incredible. She was the one who cooked and put our food on the table. In fact, she really did everything in the house. Because my dad worked so late, we never had a set family mealtime, except on holidays, so most of the time my mom would cook things in large pots, and we’d bring our plates downstairs and watch TV while we ate.

I was a good eater, but I was also a simple kid who liked his mashed potatoes and pork chops. And I had food allergies that drove me nuts. I was allergic to chocolate, fruit, shrimp, crab, lobster, even avocados. Every time I ate something I shouldn’t, I would get a rash on my face or across my chest. I told my mom I’d stay away from chocolate, but the evidence would be right in front of her. Okay, where have you been? she would ask. I couldn’t hide it. The problem was that fruit is really in everything. I wasn’t supersensitive to it, but it was just another item in a list of things I had to deal with. I also had pretty bad psoriasis that made me very self-conscious, and on top of that, I was colorblind. I couldn’t appreciate the green of a Christmas tree or the red of a Detroit hockey jersey. It helped that a puck is black and the ice is white, because color distinctions are typically lost on me.

Things could have been much different for me, too. When I was growing up, I discovered that before I was born, my mom had been pregnant with twins but that she lost one of us. I don’t know if it was supposed to be a sister or another brother. My parents never told me, so I honestly don’t know how I found out about it. But I did, and I told a friend. Not long after that, a guy came up to me and said, Someone said you killed your brother. It upset me so much at the time that I never asked about it again. My parents didn’t tell me about it, because they just didn’t volunteer a lot of information about certain things. I didn’t like to cause problems, and I recognized that it was an uncomfortable subject, so I just moved along, like I always did in those situations.

My mom was always the one who comforted me when I was in pain, which happened a lot. I had terrible growing pains as a kid. My parents weren’t very tall, but I just sprouted. Between eighth and ninth grades, I grew six inches over the summer. The spurts would make my bones ache and I’d lie in bed crying until my mom would come in and coax me to sleep. She would rub my back and my knees and put hot towels on me. It would be agonizing for me just to fall asleep. I have stretch marks on