Hockey Dad (17 page)

Shawn decided that summer to come out of "retirement"
to play Peewee A rep lacrosse, which he had quit a few years
earlier, so he could, as he put it, "just relax a little."

I'm not sure how many kids that age ever talk about the
need to "relax a little," but that's our Shawnie. I wasn't happy
about his decision to quit rep lacrosse when he made it, but
what was I going to do? You can't force a kid to play something
he doesn't want to play-as much, I admit, as I would have liked
to-and Shawn had it in his mind he was going to have a "relaxing" July and August and play only house-league lacrosse.

This particular summer, though, he was feeling pretty good
about himself, although he was probably motivated by something else as well-this Peewee A lacrosse team was scheduled
to go on a much-heralded trip to British Columbia.

Being a Crazy Lacrosse Dad in the summer, I was thrilled
Shawn wanted to get back to playing the game at its highest
level. I was also thinking a Vancouver lacrosse trip might be
nice, too. So off we went to tryouts.

To say Shawn was one of the better kids at the tryouts was,
in my opinion, an understatement. He was, to my eyes, easily
in the top
five
players on the
floor
, faster and physically stronger than most. He always had decent stick skills and a good
feel for the game; at this point he had some physical prowess.

I couldn't see any way he didn't make this team.

But he didn't. He got cut. I couldn't believe it. Neither
could he. He was stunned. I was outraged, although I said absolutely nothing to anyone on my way out of Luther Vipond
Memorial Arena in Brooklin that day. When I'm really seriously upset about something, I go out of my way to not give
anyone the satisfaction to see me upset or bothered. So I plastered a phony smile on my face and headed home.

I told Shawn in the car I thought it was unfair; that I
thought he was one of the best players on the
floor
. He was at a
loss for words, which was rare with Shawn. There really wasn't
anything else to say. He was clearly disappointed. I went home
and thought about it for awhile and tried to come up with a
logical explanation for what had just happened. And then it
struck me: Maybe it was the Vancouver trip. It had to be. This
trip was something the kids on that team had been shooting
for, talking about doing for years and they were
finally
going
to do it. This was a winning team with not a lot of turnover
from year to year. It was a pretty tight group. As well as Shawn
had played in tryouts, I could see how the coaches might still
think of him as the laid-back kid who wanted to "relax" in the
summer instead of play high-level rep lacrosse; or as the not-too-competitive kid who had played his way off the AA hockey
team the year before. And I could also see how the coaches
didn't want to cut a kid who had toiled hard for them the last
few summers and deprive that kid of the much-anticipated trip
of a lacrosse lifetime to B.C.

It all made sense and, to be honest, I didn't have a problem
with it. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made to
me. I know tryouts are supposed to be about picking the best
kids, but sometimes other factors-loyalty and hard work and
commitment and, yeah, sometimes friendship-come into it.
And that can be fair, too, though it may not always seem like
it at the time.

I sat Shawn down and explained all of this to him. I told
him on one level it's not fair, reiterated that life isn't fair (I
never get tired of telling my kids that), but asked him if it
was fair for some kid, who ran his ass off in sti
fl
ing hot arenas
the last three summers, to miss out on a trip of a lifetime to
Vancouver so some other kid who just wanted to "relax" the
last few summers got to go?

The big question then was whether Shawn was going to
play on the Peewee B team. At
first
, he wasn't sure. He was
extremely disappointed at being cut. I asked him if he really
wanted to play rep lacrosse or he just wanted a trip to British
Columbia. I told him if it was the latter, the Peewee A team
was so right to cut him, but that if he really wanted to play rep
lacrosse, then he would play on the B team and start proving
to the A coaches and everyone else he was worthy to be on the
top team.

He ultimately decided to play on the B team. Long story
short, it was a great experience. He was, in my opinion, one of
the best players on the team, if not the best; he was named the
captain and became a go-to guy whose
confidence
soared. It
was a good summer; a good lesson learned, I hoped.

There was no question in my mind that Shawn was, at the end
of his
first
season of A-level hockey, good enough to go back
and play at the AA level again. In fact, I thought he might actually have a chance to make the AAA team. But I also knew it
wouldn't hurt him to spend another year in A and it would
also allow me to continue as his coach, which I really wanted
to do for at least another year. So I went ahead and committed
to coaching the A team again for the 2001-02 season.

But Shawn did go out to the AAA spring tryouts, just for
the experience of it. He fared quite well, especially considering the AAA team at Shawn's age was an OMHA championship
caliber squad and one of the better teams in the province. John
Annis, the head coach of the AAA team, told Shawn he was
good enough to earn a spot but it wouldn't hurt to spend one
more year in A with his dad. Shawn was
fine
with that, but quite
proud for showing well at the AAA tryouts.

Later that season, John Annis and I worked out an arrangement where Shawn would be one of their af
fi
liate players, or
AP as they call it, which was unusual because normally only
AA players af
fi
liate with AAA teams and A players af
fi
liate with
AA teams. But we got Don Houghton, who was still coaching
the AA team, to sign off on it, so Shawn and I knew he would,
at some point, get a chance to try AAA hockey for the
first
time. John Annis occasionally had Shawn come out and practice with the AAA kids to get a better feel for the level.

Shawn had a great season in single A. He was, more often
than not, a physically dominant player. He played hard and
wasn't afraid to punish people with hits and take the puck to
the net to score or set up goals. He was aggressive and con
fi
dent. On a couple of occasions he was called up to the AAA
team by John Annis and he didn't look out of place at all. It
was not a reach to think he'd play AAA hockey the next season.

Our A team was quite competitive that season, but the
odds of us getting out of our league in postseason play weren't
very good. Cobourg had a powerhouse team, one of the best
in the province. Cobourg, a nice little town, is roughly half-way between Toronto and Belleville on the north shore of
Lake Ontario. They usually had very strong A-level teams at
all ages and were almost always supported strongly by the
townspeople.

Part of the reason Cobourg was as strong as they were was
because it was part of Quinte's AAA region, at the far west end
of the area. A lot of talented Cobourg players, who were clearly
good enough to play AAA for Quinte, didn't like the idea of
driving all the way to Belleville or Madoc or wherever for
AAA games and practices and instead decide to stay back and
play the lower A level in Cobourg. So the Cougars usually had
strong teams, whereas in Whitby, for example, the better players were generally playing at the highest level possible, either
AAA or AA, not single A.

As I said, this Cobourg team won a lot and some teams
when they win a lot, well, let's just say some parents develop
a strong personality to go with a strong team. They would
probably call themselves supportive and passionate; I kind of
thought a few of them were a tad obnoxious. They used to
really give it to me when I was behind the bench and, for the
most part, I just ignored them. It wasn't anything I hadn't
heard before.

Because Shawn was one of our most physical players-and
he wasn't shy about getting involved that season-he attracted
a lot of attention, on and off the ice. Over the years, Shawn
didn't get verbally abused or centered out for being the son
of the Hockey Insider nearly as much or as badly as Mike did.

Because Shawn played at different levels against different kids
from year to year and I had only just started coaching him,
most people didn't even realize who Shawn was on the ice.

Mike, though, took a pretty good beating almost from the get-go, because he played AAA every year against a lot of the same
teams and kids. Everyone knew who the kid with the glasses
was. But that didn't mean Shawn didn't get some abuse, too
and these Cobourg players and parents certainly knew who
he was.

Our playoff series with Cobourg was getting pretty heated.

Their fans were worked up and that got our fans going. It was
actually great A hockey, fast and physical. Shawn had crushed
a few guys in the series and they were starting to key on him
and really give it back. In one of the games at Iroquois Park,
he got absolutely
fl
attened in open ice, right in front of where
the Cobourg parents were sitting. When he went down, they
all jumped up and began cheering and banging on the glass as
he slowly got back to his feet. Some of them were yelling across
the rink and asking me if I liked that. I was ticked; I am not
going to lie. But I kept my game face on, never reacted in the
least and just tried to ignore it, although I was seething inside.

We were giving a valiant effort in the series but Cobourg
was too good. We weren't going to win this series. But that
didn't mean I didn't get some personal satisfaction before it
was over. The game was being played in Cobourg's wonderful old barn. The place was rocking pretty good. You just can't
beat small-town hockey when the town gets behind one of
its teams. A bunch of local teenage kids sat right behind our
bench the whole game and banged on the glass and were really
giving it to me and our kids. Keep in mind, this was minor peewee A hockey.

Shawn took a penalty in the game and was in the box.
While he was in there, I noticed two dads from the Cobourg
team behind the penalty box and saw that they were jawing
at Shawn while he was in there. I also noticed that at some
point Shawn said something to them. Suddenly, one of the
dads raced down to right behind the penalty box and started
banging on the glass, cursing and swearing at Shawn for some
reason. At that moment, Shawn's penalty expired and he
skated to our bench. Here's how our conversation went:
"What happened over there?"

"Those men were mouthing off at me."

"What did they say?"

"Oh, the normal stuff, stuff about you, TSN, me. They were
swearing at me."

"What did you say?"

"Nothing, at
first
, but then I said something."

"Is that why the one dad went nuts?"

"Yup."

"What did you say to him to make him go crazy?"

"I told him to go f
uck
himself."

Pause.

"Good boy."

And with that, Shawn and I bid adieu to A-level hockey.

24: Teach Your Children Well On the "Balance" Beam

I MUST HAVE LOST MY MIND; there is no other explanation
for this rare moment of clarity and common sense.
It was fairly early into Mike's minor bantam AAA season
and I was watching him and the Wildcats get destroyed by
their hated rivals from Oshawa. This game wasn't pretty. The
finally
score was 10-2 or something along those lines. On this
night, the Wildcats looked soft and slow-not unlike that
dreadful minor peewee season-and the Oshawa '86s were,
individually speaking, quite a handful.

As a side note, I was always amazed this group of Oshawa
kids didn't accomplish more as a team-they were hard-pressed
to win a few playoff series over eight years, never mind a championship-because they were loaded with individual talent.
No fewer than
five
kids from that Oshawa team went on to
be front-line players in the OHL-Adam Berti, who was a second-round pick of the Chicago Blackhawks, and Michael Haley
(both of whom had played lacrosse with Mike from the time
they were six), as well as Mike MacLean, Andrew Gibbons and
Derrick Bagshaw. Three of them (Berti, Haley and MacLean)
went on to play pro; Gibbons and Bagshaw went to Canadian
university hockey after graduating from the OHL. When this
group was "on," they could dominate and this was one of
those nights.

Mike's game had, for the most part, improved markedly
from that horrible minor peewee year, but there were still some
nights when it was back to the bad old ways for him and his
teammates. This was
definitely
one of them.

I don't want to say it was a revelation, but it did kind of
hit me like a ton of bricks as I sat in that cold, damp, poorly lit
North Oshawa Arena late on a weekday night-we were wasting our time here.

Come again?

You heard me.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it was like a brilliant stream
of light coming into the building with a deep voice resonating from above, saying: "You're wasting your time here." But
whatever it was, it had that kind of impact on me.

I started thinking about how much time, effort and money
we had, as a family, committed to this minor hockey experience. Then I looked out onto the ice to see my kid and his
team feebly trying to keep up. What was the point? Where was
it leading? Was I nuts? I answered my own questions: There
wasn't one; nowhere; yes,
definitely
.

Of course there were some outside forces at work here,
too. Cindy, bless her rational heart, had always maintained
we needed more balance in our lives. I'd ignored that message
long enough, but there was some stuff happening on the
school front for Mike that was quite disconcerting, even for
myopic me.

Mike had always been a very good student. School was
never an issue. His marks were excellent, his conduct exemplary. But now he was in his
first
year of high school at Father
Leo J. Austin Catholic Secondary School and it wasn't going
particularly well. This was a tough time for secondary school
education in Ontario. Then-premier Mike Harris had pledged
to revamp the educational system and Mike's year was the
second to experience what was referred to as the "new curriculum." Basically, school got a lot harder. The workload was much
heavier; the course content much more
difficult
and demanding, especially in mathematics (which, by the way, is Kryptonite
to all the McKenzie boys, starting with me). Compounding the
problem was that the teachers and their union were basically
at war with the premier and the government. So at the time
Mike was entering high school, his teachers were on a work-to-rule campaign with no after-school activities at all. There was
also a huge overcrowding issue; there were more than 2,200
students at Austin, and a
fl
eet of portables.

Mike got his midterm marks and we were thunderstruck to
learn he had a forty-two in math. The other marks were much
better, but not what we were used to. It was also plain to see
that Mike wasn't really enjoying his
first
year of high school in
any way, which was painful for us because he'd always loved
everything about going to school, from the classes to the social
and athletic aspects of it.

Cindy and I went to the parent-teacher meetings in the
gym-which were more like a cattle call because of the overcrowding issue-with line after line of parents waiting to talk
to their kids' teachers for no more than three or four minutes
at a time before moving on to the next line. Our focus was
obviously on seeing the math teacher and the exchange went
something like this:

"Our son is Mike McKenzie and he has forty-two in math."

"Yes," the teacher said, looking down at her book of grades.

"That's correct."

"Well, that's not so good, so what do you think we can do
about that?"

"I don't know," she said. "Why don't you ask Mike Harris?"

I bit my tongue. Hard.

"Let's not bring politics into this. The issue is my son and
what we're going to do about this mark of forty-two."

"I don't know," she said. "I didn't
finish
teaching the whole
curriculum last year because I stopped to help the kids who
were struggling with the concepts. Because I spent that time
going back over the material to make sure they understood it, I
wasn't able to
finish
teaching them everything I was supposed
to. I got in trouble for that. I'm not going to do it again."

"So you're just going to forge ahead with the course and
if kids don't understand the material, too bad, they get left
behind and that's their problem?"

"Yes," she said.

Cindy and I were livid. Partisan politics aside, Mike was
clearly caught in the cross
fire
between the teachers and the
provincial government. He was basically on his own; that was
this teacher's message.

This was unacceptable to us so we charted an immediate course of action. One, he would get what extra help was
available from his math teacher (two mornings a week, twenty
minutes at a time, before school started). Two, we would get
him math tutoring from one of the many independent companies that had sprung up all over the place because of the
obvious need. Three, we would start exploring the idea of
enrolling Mike in a private school for Grade 10. We weren't
going through this experience again.

So that was my mental state at the time-temporary insanity perhaps?-and all of these thoughts were bouncing around
that night in North Oshawa Arena, when the substandard performance of Mike and his team made me see the light. On the
way home, I broached the subject with Mike, told him that as
much as we all loved hockey perhaps the time had come to
broaden our horizons a little. I ran the idea of going to a private school by him and, surprisingly, he didn't reject it. He was
intrigued. I was selling him on the fact that maybe it was time
to get involved in more sports-play some football, run cross-country-and get an education that would really prepare him
to be successful in whatever he chose to do with his life.

We are not the boarding school type of people-our attitude is the longer you can keep your kids under your roof, the
better-so our options were fairly limited because of geography. We homed in on Trinity College School in Port Hope, a
very
fine
private co-ed school with a population of about
five
hundred, including a couple of hundred day students who were
bused in from surrounding areas. Port Hope is about twenty-
five
miles due east from Whitby, or a thirty-minute drive right
along the 401. If he were to go there, Mike could catch a bus
at the Whitby commuter train (GO) station each morning at
7:15 and it would drop him back there after the day's activities, including the many extracurriculars, around 5 or 6 p.m.
It wasn't cheap-in the $15,000 to $20,000 range for a
year-but we thought it was a good investment in his future.

There was a wide variety of extracurriculars and students
were not just encouraged but obliged to participate in them. I
checked out the TCS hockey team-they had their own rink
and while the school was top-notch, there was no question the
hockey was going to be a major step down from AAA for Mike.
This was something of a concern for me. Sports are a big part

of TCS life, but in a school with about only 250 boys, many of
whom hail from foreign countries, it goes without saying their
football and hockey teams, among others, didn't always stack
up well in the wins and losses against all-boys' schools with
powerhouse athletic programs such as Upper Canada College,
St. Andrew's and St. Michael's College.

But if hockey and athletic results were the focal point of
this exercise, we would just keep playing AAA, so the three of
us-Mike, Cindy and I-decided this was the way to go, that
education and a well-rounded experience were paramount.
Mike was going to go to TCS for Grade 10, but he did have one
request or condition-he wanted to
finish
his Whitby minor
hockey career the next year in major bantam.

It was a reasonable request. He had played AAA hockey in
Whitby every year from minor novice all the way up to minor
bantam. There was just one more year to complete the eight-year cycle and he wanted to
finish
it with the four remaining
kids he started it with-Kyle O'Brien, Kyle Clancy, Steven
Seedhouse and Matt Snowden.

I talked to TCS headmaster Rodger Wright-brother of
former Canadian Football League commissioner Tom Wright
and one of the more impressive people I've ever met-about
Mike's desire to
finish
this chapter of his life before he wholly
committed to the TCS experience. Rodger was great, he said
that Mike's AAA hockey would, for that one year, count as an extracurricular activity and so long as Mike made an effort to
do what other extra activities he could, an exception could
be made.

So that settled it. Mike would go to Trinity College the following school year; he would
finish
his major bantam season
playing AAA hockey in Whitby and he would embark on a new
journey with an emphasis on education and becoming a more
multidimensional person than his father ever was.

Though I have to tell you, Dad was feeling pretty good
about
finally
seeing the light and realizing there's more to life
than hockey. What is it Cindy called it? Oh, yes, balance. Yes,
that's it. Balance.

Well, that was the plan anyway.