Hockey Confidential (15 page)

Tim says the woman did leave the ice, but wasn't happy about it. Well, at least they found her son's tooth, didn't they?

“Nope, they never did find it,” Tim says. “I guess it got sucked up into the Zamboni.”

“Here we go again . . . another night in the books.”

Game over.

The Flyers beat the Young Nats, beat them handily. No contest.

The father and son make their way through the arena. As they say goodbye and head into the cold, dark night for the drive home, their guest thinks of a story the father told an hour earlier.

“It was after he had the kidney transplant,” the father says of his son. “I bought a boat to take him fishing. We'd go fishing a lot on Lake Cochichewick [near North Andover, Massachusetts]. He always liked fishing. Except, it turns out he didn't like going fishing at all. He only went fishing with me because he thought I wanted to go fishing. I didn't like fishing that much. I was only taking him fishing because I thought he liked it. Twenty years later, I find out neither one of us really wanted to be there.”

That's not something they'll ever have to worry about with their trips to the rink.

The cub reporter for the
Toronto Star
was sent to cover a
peewee hockey tournament in 1978. The headline on the story read:
sudbury peewee one-man band: pierre dupuis baffles wexford to lead team to championship
.

The first paragraph of the story was as follows: “Hockey coaches will tell you that there is no such thing as a one-man team, but 12-year-old Pierre Dupuis comes close to refuting that theory.”

It went on to chronicle the exploits of the five-foot-four, 140-pound Dupuis, who scored five of his team's six goals en route to a prestigious minor hockey tournament victory, and how no one could quite believe how exceptional the Sudbury player was compared to the other elite-level kids his own age.

“He's a coach's dream,” Sudbury coach Dan Heaphy said. “He's a born leader, an unbelievable hockey player, an A student at school and a wonderful kid.”

“We don't have anybody on our team who can even keep up with that kid, so what use was there in shadowing him,” Wexford coach Gerald Payne said. “If it wasn't for him, I think we would have won 3–1. Our club is as good as theirs, but they've got Dupuis.”

Another minor hockey coach and hockey school operator of some note, Frank Miller, called Dupuis the best 12-year-old hockey player he'd ever seen: “I've never seen a kid skate so well and he showed me he is the complete hockey player. He passes the puck, backchecks, he does it all and very well.”

The cub reporter, who was still in his final year of journalism school, was pleased with the story. He got paid for it, which was nice; a byline in the
Star
would look good in his story file and on his resumé; all that for watching a phenomenal 12-year-old kid put on a hockey clinic at St. Michael's College School Arena.

Not a bad day's work, he mused; it doesn't get any better than that.

Note to self, he thought after writing the story: remember the name Pierre Dupuis. That kid is going places.

•   •   •

If there's a rule, there's always an exception.

It's a universal truth, isn't it?

So when Hockey Canada, in 2005, was instituting and approving what it called the Canadian Development Model (CDM), the systematic blueprint of rules and regulations governing how young players would proceed on a year-by-year basis through the Canadian minor hockey system to the junior level, there was indeed a clause dealing with “exceptional” 15-year-olds.

What's amusing about this, truth be told, is that the exception to the rule actually preceded the rule itself.

The CDM became reality on May 23, 2005, when it was approved by Hockey Canada's board of directors in Saint John, New Brunswick.

Eighteen days earlier, though, the Ontario Hockey League declared soon-to-be 15-year-old John Tavares an “exceptional” player.

“The CDM was being put in place because there were large numbers of 15-year-olds playing Junior A, B and C hockey,” Ontario Hockey League commissioner David Branch said. “It made sense to slow down that progression and keep kids in minor hockey longer and the [CDM] was Hockey Canada's way to do that.”

The OHL hadn't had a 15-year-old in the league since 1998, when Jason Spezza played one season for his hometown Brampton Battalion, thanks to an old rule permitting 15-year-olds to play in the league only if it was in their hometown, with the player remaining eligible for the OHL draft in the off-season after his first year in the league.

During the 2004–05 season, Hockey Canada was formulating the CDM with an eye towards not allowing any 15-year-olds to play any brand of junior hockey. But Branch was made aware that season of the existence of Tavares. As he recalled it, Branch was talking to his son Barclay, the assistant general manager of the Belleville Bulls.

“The very clear reason for [having an ‘exceptional' clause] was John Tavares,” Branch said. “I was talking to Barclay and he told me, ‘Not only is John Tavares good enough to play [in the OHL] as a 15-year-old, if he were eligible in our draft, he would be the No. 1 selection.'”

That got Branch to thinking on two levels. First, he called Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson, advised him of the potential Tavares scenario and asked whether the still-in-the-works CDM might allow for an “exceptional” provision for the Canadian Hockey League. (Ultimately, it did.) Next, Branch went about the business of defining “exceptional” and determining what process and criteria the OHL could use to ensure the integrity of the “exception.” He had no appetite for an exception becoming the rule if the player in question wasn't truly “exceptional.”

Branch put together what he described as an arm's-length committee comprising four expert individuals: Frank Bonello, the head of the NHL's Central Scouting Bureau, who could speak to Tavares's on-ice ability as a hockey player; Paul Dennis, a noted Toronto-based sports psychologist with an NHL and OHL coaching background, who could, after meeting extensively with Tavares and his family, work up a full psychological and sociological profile to determine the player's maturity to deal with both on- and off-ice challenges while playing and interacting with 16-to-20-year-olds; Kevin Burkett, a lawyer and renowned arbitrator with both a strong legal, educational and hockey background (Burkett was a longtime Junior A hockey coach and his son, Kelly, played college hockey at Michigan State); Doug Gilmour, the retired NHL star who played for the Cornwall Royals in the OHL and knew firsthand the physical, mental and emotional skill sets required to play at that level.

“The mandate was very clear,” Branch said. “We had to develop a process that was beyond reproach, something with a real focus on whether the player was mature enough to handle the on-ice challenges, any off-ice issues pertaining to school, social settings and whether this individual had the support system in terms of family and friends, to say nothing of whether the individual had the skills and ability to play against players who were four or five years older than him. It had to be done right, because there was lots of speculation we were doing something that was going to open the floodgates.”

And all this at a time when the Canadian Development Model was being put in place to keep 15-year-olds playing minor hockey.

•   •   •

Brian and Kelly McDavid knew their son Connor was any
thing but “normal” when it came to hockey—his interest in it, his passion for it, how he watched it, how he played it, how he basically lived it.

It didn't take them long to know it, either.

“Almost from the word go,” Brian McDavid said. “He was maybe two and a half years old, he definitely wasn't three, and I got him Rollerblades, the little plastic ones. He put them on and he just took off, he started skating around the basement.”

By age three, he had graduated to taking shots on his Nana (Kelly's mom), who was a fine play-against-a-toddler-in-the-basement
goaltender.

“Connor would be downstairs for hours on his Rollerblades,” Kelly said. “He would take all his stuffed animals from his bedroom down to the basement. They were the fans watching him play. He'd be yelling play-by-play up the stairs, he would so get into those games. ‘So-and-so just scored the winning goal in Stanley Cup.' He'd do that for hours at a time.”

Kelly also remembered having to play him in air hockey games, and having to let him win because she simply wasn't prepared for the consequences.

“If he lost, it was horrible,” she said. “I'd let him win, I knew I was just enabling him, that he needed to learn to lose, but . . .”

When Connor was all of four years old, he tormented his parents to sign him up to play hockey in his hometown of Newmarket, Ontario. Brian fudged Connor's age when he was four, allowing him to play against the five-year-olds. And when he was five, he played against the six-year-olds. Playing against older kids would become a recurring theme for him.

Connor McDavid couldn't get enough hockey. His brother Cameron, four years older, was playing atom AA for Newmarket. Five-year-old Connor wanted to be just like Cam. When Cam would get dressed up in the minor hockey uniform of shirt and tie to go to the games, Connor also wanted to wear a shirt and tie. So off he would go, wearing an oversized team jacket, team hat, shirt and tie, dressing the part of a rep hockey player. Brian McDavid, along with Hockey Hall of Famer Steve Shutt's brother Dana, were assistant coaches on the team. Connor would help the trainer fill the water bottles before the game. He would get to sit in on the pre-game chalk talks, and when the coaches would ask the players on Cameron's team where they should be on the ice in a certain situation, Connor would put up his hand and answer.

When Cameron's game would begin, Connor sat in the stands with Kelly and the other mothers.

“We had no idea what was going on a lot of the time,” Kelly said. “A play would happen and we would be saying, ‘What happened there?' and Connor would, in great detail, explain exactly what had happened. All the other little brothers and sisters were running around the rink, but not Connor. He would just sit there and watch.”

When Brian took little Connor to a St. Michael's Majors OHL game at St. Mike's Arena, it was the same thing. He would never take his eyes off the play, focused intently on the puck and every move being made.

“It was like he was studying it,” Brian said. “He was processing it on some other level you wouldn't expect from a five-year-old. . . . It was the same thing when he played. Every kid on the ice would be in a scrum to get the puck, and Connor would stand back a few feet from the pile, on the defensive side of it, just waiting for the puck to squirt out. He would take it and go. How did he know to do that?”

By the time he was six, it was obvious he was too good to play house league against kids his own age, so the McDavids tried to move him up a year, to play against seven-year-olds in more competitive select hockey.

But the minor hockey association in Newmarket put up a roadblock. Rules were rules, they said, and six-year-olds weren't allowed to play seven-year-old select. Brian McDavid protested, appealed the decision, but was denied. So the McDavids signed Connor up to play house league hockey in neighbouring Aurora. Against kids as old
as nine.

“If a student in school is advanced, they'll promote them, move them up,” Brian said, “but they didn't want to hear it.”

Even then, playing against older kids, Connor was frustrated playing house league. He craved higher competition, desperately wanting to play AAA rep hockey, so much so that his mother devised a visual way to track that goal, drawing a set of stairs on a piece of paper, each one representing a single house league game to the end of his six-year-old season. Each week, after he played a game, Connor would cross off one of the stairs and see clearly that he was one step closer to his goal of playing at the most competitive level of minor hockey.

At the end of that season, Connor tried out for the York-Simcoe Express AAA novice (eight-year-old) team and was the last player chosen, because the team wasn't sure until the last minute whether they wanted to carry an underage player.

After that first year of novice AAA, Brian became York-Simcoe's head coach. Connor's game flourished and so, too, did the team. The Express won four consecutive Ontario Minor Hockey Association (OMHA) titles, an Ontario Hockey Federation (OHF) provincial championship in peewee, and were finalists in the prestigious Quebec International Peewee tournament.

Connor enjoyed great success playing for his dad and alongside another incredibly gifted player, Sam Bennett, who went on to star for the OHL Kingston Frontenacs and was selected fourth overall by the Calgary Flames in the 2014 NHL Entry Draft.

Through it all, Connor continued to demonstrate an insatiable desire to win, to be successful. He was absolutely driven.

In minor atom, during a game on the bench, he heard two teammates talking about playing a video game. He told his dad afterwards, “If other kids aren't on board, we have to do something about it.”

In London, at the atom OHF tourney, a season in which the team went 33–0, York-Simcoe lost 6–5 in a shootout in the semifinal. When the team came back into the dressing room, Connor, in tears, ripped the participant medal from his neck and threw it in the garbage. It was retrieved by Brian, who gave it back to Connor on the long ride home.

“We were driving home from London and I'd given the speech that we had a good year and you can't win every time,” Brian said, “and Connor is in tears in the car and he says to me, ‘Promise me, you have to promise me that you will do everything you can to make this team better next year.' That's Connor. . . . I've known for a long time he has that ‘something.' It's his passion. I've always felt that he's had that, that it's hard to find someone who feels about the game the way Connor feels about it.”

Coaching his son, and his son being such a phenomenal player, was at times a double-edged sword for Brian. The McDavids spent a tremendous amount of quality time together, sharing their perfectionist's mentality and a lot of really good family times.

“When I coached, there was a lot of routine for the team,” Brian said. “We'd have a warmup stretch, a whole team meeting, separate meetings for the defence and forwards, but Connor and I would have our own routine, too, where we would do this little stickhandling ritual. Connor is superstitious. We'd have to pass the ball the same number of times. He'd flip it up and bounce it, but if we dropped it, we had to start over again.”

But there also were the usual minor hockey politics, talk of alleged favouritism from a father coaching his son, and both conceded it was, at times, uncomfortable and difficult.