So You Want Your Kid to Play Pro Hockey?

SO YOU WANT

YOUR KID TO PLAY

PRO HOCKEY?

Jamie McKinven

So You Want Your Kid to Play Pro Hockey?

Copyright © 2014 Jamie McKinven

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the brothers Jankovic (Bogdan, Bojan and Beki), who truly represent a pure love for the game of hockey. Growing up in Eastern Europe in Belgrade, Serbia, it didn’t matter to the brothers that hockey didn’t promise riches and fame in the way soccer and basketball would for so many athletes in the area. The Jankovic boys loved hockey for all its purity and excitement. I really rediscovered my love of hockey as I spent countless hours with the Jankovic boys after practices and games sitting in my soaking wet equipment, drinking tea from a grungy plastic cup and chatting and laughing about everything under the sun. They loved the game so much that they spent all their waking hours at the rink playing or talking about hockey. Hockey to them represented a passion. They never dreamt about becoming millionaires or playing in the NHL. Their dreams were about being able to play the game they loved for as long as they could.

Hvala Braćas!

CONTENTS

Introduction

1: Every Boy’s Dream

2: Every Hockey Dad’s Dream

3: Major Junior vs. College Hockey

4: Junior Hockey Rituals

5: Hockey Predators

6: God Complexes of Junior/College Hockey Players

7: Politics of Hockey

8: Hockey Misconceptions

9: Booster Clubs and Super Fans

10: The Cocktail Leagues

11: The Iron Lung

12: Wives, Girlfriends & the Hockey Lifestyle

13: Alcoholism and Drug Addiction in Pro Hockey

14: Hockey as a Second Language and The Code

15: Injuries: A Toll on the Mind and Body

16: Hanging up the Blades and Retiring the Axe

17: The Instigator Rule, Matt Cooke, and the Head Shot Crisis

Epilogue

Notes

About the Author

Other Books

Author’s Blog

INTRODUCTION

Much of what we do in this world is performed so that we can enjoy hobbies and passions. For many, sport represents a passion and form of entertainment that really gets the blood pumping. It represents pride in many ways. Pride for a favorite team and pride for a nation. For Brazilians and Italians its soccer. For Americans it’s football, baseball, and basketball. For Australians it’s Footie, and for Canadians it’s hockey.

Every year hundreds of thousands of kids across Canada lace up the skates to take to the ice in organized minor hockey leagues. Each one of these kids carries on a tradition that dates back over a hundred years and counting. On television, you can’t flip through the channels without seeing hockey highlights, hockey analysts and hockey-themed shows. The newspapers are plastered with pictures of last night’s game and the magazine racks are littered with magazines speckled with the game’s brightest stars. You drive down the highway past giant hockey super stores and through Canadian cities where massive arenas house the local major junior teams. On your way you slow down through the neighborhoods as to not interrupt the local road hockey rivalries. Hockey is everywhere and it is a massive industry.

Each year parents shell out colossal amounts of cash to outfit and register their kids for hockey. They spend thousands of dollars on equipment alone each year and that doesn’t account for registration fees, travel and accommodation expenses, and hockey schools. At the end of the day, parents almost need a second full-time job to pay for hockey alone. With over half a million registered hockey players in Canada, maybe 1500 of these players will end up making a brief living out of hockey. That means that the hockey industry in Canada produces an employment after graduation rate of a third of a percent. There’s a better chance of winning the lottery.

A lot of people know about the odds but it doesn’t matter to them. Hockey is a lot more than a career or a chance to be a famous star for Canadians and hockey fans. Hockey represents a culture and a way of life. 50-year-old men strap on knee braces and grind away on their lunch hours on local hockey rinks. Local sports bars are rammed full with paying customers on Saturday nights while the Hockey Night in Canada double-header blares away on the big screen. For a great number of Canadians, hockey gives us an identity and something to root for.

Hockey is the sport that immortalizes the average human specimen. It is the sport for average sized athletes where the biggest, strongest and fastest man doesn’t always win. Hockey’s a sport that celebrates inner toughness, sacrifice and will. It’s a sport where intelligence and strategy is just as important as strength and speed. It represents a stage where even the biggest underdog can find a way to persevere and succeed.

Hockey greats such as Wayne Gretzky and Sidney Crosby came from small-town, blue collar families and represent what love and passion can create. They represent the true fruition of the childhood dream. If you can dream it, you can do it. They started out like any young, middle-class Canadian kid and rose up through passion and desire to become something exuberant and magical. Every Canadian from coast to coast was beaming with joy when Sidney Crosby scored the gold medal winning goal against the U.S. at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. One young man from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia had the power to bring an entire nation to its feet and feel proud to be Canadian. That’s a pretty amazing thing.

Hockey has been such a big part of my life that when I finally stopped playing, I began to look back on my playing career and remember all of the memories I had accumulated both good and bad. I knew that someday those memories would start to fade so I figured I better write them down while they were still fresh in my mind. When I began to write about my life in hockey I never really thought it would ever become a book. The process was meant to make me reflect upon my life. As I began to write, I realized that my career was really like a book filled with different chapters, different themes, multiple conflicts, protagonists and antagonists and ultimately an overall lesson.

I soon discovered that writing a book about my life in hockey and my views on a lot of issues involved in the game was a great way to bring closure and meaning to a major part of my life. I began to see it as a way to answer a lot of common questions people always had for me and to reveal a path in the hockey world that most hockey fans don’t know about. This book goes down a road that has hills and valleys, dead-ends and wrong turns. The scenery along the way can be very delightful and also a bit unsavory. But, with every journey there has to be a destination and no matter which road you take, eventually you will end up getting to where you are meant to be.

This book aims to take you on a journey from childhood to manhood, from hockey aspirations in small town Canada to hockey oddity in Eastern Europe and the Southern U.S. You will learn more about a side of hockey that people don’t talk about or examine. Hockey is more than just glitz and glam, fame and fortune. For most hockey players, reaching the top of the mountain is only a pipe dream. For those lucky enough to get close, it is an accomplishment. However, just like climbing a mountain, the closer you get to the top, the rockier and more volatile the trek becomes.

For most this book will be an eye-opener about what goes on behind the scenes of the various levels of hockey. It will answer a lot of questions and will also enlighten readers about how complex the hockey world really is. For a select few others it will be a ride down memory lane and will uncover some fond and not so fond realities. For those who have gone all in on a losing hand in hockey, it may also help to make you think about what the game has meant to you.

CHAPTER 1

Every Boy’s Dream

As children growing up, we dream with no limits; with no fear or self-consciousness. We dream of being magicians, kings, astronauts, conquerors and cowboys. We dress like our heroes, oblivious to current social norms and expectations. We live in the moment and dream majestically.

Although our first dreams are conceived as young tots before we were even knee high to a duck, we always remember our earliest hopes and dreams. As a boy growing up in Canada, chances are your early hopes and dreams were playing in the NHL, dreaming that someday you’d be seeing your name amongst great Canadian heroes like Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, and Mario Lemieux, dreaming that someday you’d be the one hoisting the Stanley Cup above your head for all to see. As a young boy in Canada it’s almost impossible to escape the wonderment and excitement of the sport that has bridged so many gaps from coast to coast.

I can remember those freezing cold Saturday nights where the snow was piled so high you could barely see the car in the driveway. Inside, in front of the TV beside my dad I would sit and watch the Montreal Canadians and their regal red, white and blue uniforms take to the ice. The familiar jingle, daa-da-da-daa-daaa, of Hockey Night in Canada begins its lifelong burrow into memory. I remember the smell of wood burning in the fireplace and the thrill of being able to stay up past my bedtime. The roar of the crowd after goals and fights, the cutting sound the skates made against the ice, and the snapping of sticks with each pass and shot. All of these sights and sounds, all the bright colors and the excitement begin as early seeds in the planting of the strongest of lifelong dreams amongst Canadians for generations.

I grew up in Kingston, Ontario which is a major hockey hotbed. The city of Kingston has a rich tradition in hockey dating back to the earliest origins of the game. The ages-old, Car Harris Cup game played between Queen’s University and the Royal Military College on Lake Ontario, helped to propel hockey into the spotlight in Kingston. Since those early days, popular hockey names such as Don Cherry, Wayne Cashman, Doug Gilmour and Kirk Muller have emerged from the Limestone City into hockey stardom.

As a kid I grew up watching the powerhouse Oilers teams of the eighties during their dynasty years. I watched Wayne Gretzky make hockey history, shattering record after record, alongside Juri Kurri, Mark Messier, Grant Fuhr, and my idol Paul Coffey, on their way to winning four Stanley Cups in five years. The eighties were an exciting time for the game of hockey. We witnessed history in the making as Gretzky began his assault on hockey’s record book, shattering many held by his hero Gordie Howe. I grew up like every other Southern Ontario kid watching a young man with the same roots as me, do something magical. Wayne Gretzky was a national hero, even more famous than the Prime Minister and the Royal Family. Gretzky was the ideal role model for a generation. He was clean-cut, humble, polite, and extremely successful. As a young Canadian boy there was no better dream than to play hockey for a living and win the Stanley Cup.

My father first took me on the ice when I had just turned three. It was a cold, early winter morning at City Park across from the courthouse in Kingston. There was an outdoor rink there where hospital workers, Queen’s University professors and students would go on lunch hours and breaks to play pick-up hockey. Even though I was very young, this was one of those days you never forgot. That frigid morning stands out crystal clear in my memory down to every last detail. It really was a defining moment in my life and would change the course of my life forever.

The sun was just beginning to rise that early morning and you could see your breath in the cold, crisp air. I was bundled up head to toe, probably just as much to protect myself from the frequent tumbles as the frigid winter air. I remember teetering along on my bob-skates, inching along slowly, one foot after the other. Gradually, as I regained my footing from fall after fall, my father introduced a small cut-down stick into my hands and later a puck to push along. It was there at City Park that I scored my first ever goal. The shot wouldn’t have registered on a radar gun but it was a goal nonetheless. We were out there so early that we had the ice all to ourselves. The memory still brings a warm feeling over me today as I think back about that cold winter morning.

My first experience on the ice proved to be just the tip of the iceberg of a passion and love for the game of hockey that would last my entire life. From that day forward, hockey would begin to consume my youth and provide a structure in my life to heap my hopes, dreams and fantasies upon. As I began to grow up, hockey would fill my days, my room and the trunk of my parents’ car.

Aside from school, which much of the day was filled with hockey daydreams rather than academic focus, most of my time was spent playing road hockey with the neighborhood kids, hockey practices with the local rep team, and scouring flea markets with my mom to enhance my vastly growing collection of hockey cards. Road hockey games and mini-stick games would take on forms of art, replaying hockey’s greatest moments. Famous scenarios such as, Mario Lemieux’s triumphant goal during the 1987 Canada Cup, Wayne Gretzky’s famous 50th goal in 39 games, or Steve Yzerman’s overtime winner against the Blues would be played out over and over in the basement or on our street with the same enthusiasm and excitement as the moment it actually happened.

With a stick in hand and a sunny day, a young boy could be anyone he wanted or do anything he wanted. One moment he would be Paul Coffey leading a rush against the Islanders and the next moment he would be Patrick Roy making a glove save in overtime of game seven of the conference finals. Hockey provided a new world where there were no limits to what you could imagine or achieve.

Growing up as a kid in Kingston, I had the perfect setup. The winters experienced snow from November through to March without much thaw in between. My house was in a neighborhood littered with kids my age, a big park across the street that had a hill fit for tobogganing, snow fights, and an outdoor rink complete with boards and lights so you could play well past dusk. I had all the venues to stay active and keep out of trouble.

The outdoor rink became my own personal canvas to paint my masterpieces. I took pride in that rink as if it were my own creation. The City of Kingston ran the rink but they barely fulfilled the minimum duties to keep the rink safe and functioning. My friends and I took it upon ourselves to make sure the rink was in tip top shape. We would shovel, add water when needed, and fill in ruts to ensure the quality of our sanctuary was upheld. After school it would be a mad dash to get home and grab your skates and stick so you could get to the rink first. Dinner time was always a struggle for parents to pry screaming kids off the ice. Even though I could see my house from the rink, the idea of taking a half hour break to eat was horrific.

That rink became a home away from home during the winter seasons and occupied most of my free time. Between school and bedtime, I would spend hours on end playing with the neighborhood kids and adults. Even when the rink was desolate I would be out there imagining myself playing alongside all the NHL greats in a game that seemed to be filled with only spectacular plays. On the weekends when I wasn’t playing on my organized hockey team, my dad would take me down to the big outdoor rink at Victoria Park where people of all ages would play intense games all day long. My dad would stand in the cold beside the rink with a coffee and watch as I would agitate older kids and men who couldn’t catch me and watch me mope and complain when it was my turn to take a shift off.

Saturdays would be my dad’s days on weekends, taking me to games, practices and the odd tournament. Sundays would be my mom’s days, taking me with her to the flea markets to add to my ever-growing hockey card collection. She would spend time looking over antique furniture and lamps, while I’d be rifling through rookie cards and box sets. My collection grew and grew and began to take up valuable storage space that my parents could have been using, but they never complained.

Christmas time was always a fun time when I was growing up. I was never very difficult to shop for when I was young. You could never go wrong if it had anything to do with hockey. Christmas morning would look something like this: Wrapping paper strewn over the living room, with my gifts hoarded into a corner. A new hockey stick, hockey posters, hockey cards, the newest Don Cherry’s Rock Em’ Sock Em’ video, hockey books, and basically anything to do with hockey. There was nothing else I wanted to do or wanted more. A lot of kids go crazy over something when they are young. For some kids its video games and comic books, or building tree houses and forming clubs. For me and for many Canadian kids, it happened to be hockey.

When I was young, hockey was everything to me. It was all I thought about and all I wanted to do. I couldn’t have imagined wanting to do anything else. When I grew up I was going to be a hockey player and that was that.

CHAPTER 2

Every Hockey Dad’s Dream

As big as the game of hockey is for all young Canadian boys, it is as big or even bigger for all Canadian hockey fathers. It must be remembered that all hockey dads may have had, at one point, the same dreams or bigger than those of their hockey playing sons. For some fathers, watching their son lace up the skates and take to the ice represents another shot at glory and for most dads it’s a shot they may have missed or failed to achieve. Now not all fathers take on the form of a domineering drill sergeant, obsessed with creating the perfect hockey prodigy, but unfortunately, minor hockey arenas are riddled with overbearing dads fuelled with aggression and misplaced ambition.

Anyone that has been to a minor hockey arena has heard the loud, obnoxious dad who screams at the referees, coaches and players. Every team has one or many and they are unmistakable in the cliché. Their aggressive remarks are both unintelligent and hurtful. They often are bursting at the seams with insecurity and are totally oblivious to the damage they cause. Their poor son, trapped in a prison of perfectionism and ridicule. The tragedy of the unhealthy mix of fatherly love and maniacal mentorship is ageless and can be traced back from generation to generation.

There are even some documented success stories that spring from these pressure-cooked relationships. The relationships between Earl