Mr. Hockey My Story (3 page)

My father, Albert, or Ab, came to Canada from Minnesota, lured by the promise of a homestead under the Dominion Lands Act. He did his best as a farmer, but growing crops on the Canadian prairies at the start of the Great Depression wasn’t a guaranteed way to feed a family. To help make ends meet, he would pick up work as a mechanic at a local service station or on construction sites. That’s where he was when I was born. He’d taken his horse team into Saskatoon, about nine miles west, to work as an excavator.

My mother, born Katherine Schultz in Stuttgart, Germany, was the strongest woman I’ve ever known. When she was young, she was separated from her parents and was passed from family to family until her grandfather found her. He was a coffin maker and often buried victims of cholera, typhus, and influenza. People would knock on his door and hand their dead children to my mother, who was little more than a child herself at the time. My mother came from tough stock, to say the least. She eventually reunited with her family and later immigrated with them to Canada. They ended up in Windsor, of all places, right across the
river from Detroit. Mum took a job there as a housekeeper until her family decided to move farther west. That’s how she ended up in Saskatchewan, which is where she met my dad. On the day I was born she was outside chopping wood when her labor pains set in. At that time, pioneers often had to take care of themselves. I was the sixth of nine children, so she knew what to do. With only a couple of kids around for company, she put some buckets of water on the stove and got into bed. After I was born, she cut the umbilical cord herself and waited for my father to come home. As I said, Mum was tough.

She wasn’t doing so well when Dad finally arrived, so he hurried over to my Aunt Mary’s place and brought her back to look after Mum. She’d been hemorrhaging from the birth, but she healed up pretty quickly after she got some proper care. In the meantime, Dad, who’d given up on trying to scrape out a living off the land, packed up the house in Floral and moved the rest of us into a place on the outskirts of Saskatoon.

In those days, we didn’t have a lot; no one really did. Dad was always hustling around for work, picking up this job or that one. Eventually he was hired as a foreman with the city and he ended up working there for as long as I can remember. To make ends meet, Dad used to do some hunting. The government would pay a one-cent bounty for gopher tails and you could get up to $15 or $20 for a coyote pelt.

My father was a real outdoorsman and he could ride a horse with the best of them. He used to talk about a roan he had once. It was known as a killer horse—it would kill a man if given the chance—but it could really run. Its owners wanted to put it down because it was too dangerous, but Dad stepped in and said he’d take it instead.

One time, before I was born, he was out in the countryside on that horse looking for work and saw a coyote. The way he told the story, he couldn’t shoot it because he couldn’t afford any cartridges for his rifle, but the coyote was too valuable to let go. He spurred that horse and they took off after the coyote. After a long chase, they ran the thing down. Since his gun was useless, my father took out his hunting knife, leaned over in the saddle, snagged the coyote’s back leg, and slashed its tendon. Then he dismounted and finished it off. He took the coyote to the factor, got paid, and had enough to buy more ammunition. That was the type of guy Dad was. He did what had to be done to get by.

There were eleven of us in that little house in Saskatoon: my parents and nine kids, four boys and five girls. I was pretty much in the middle: Gladys, Vernon, Norman, Violet, Edna, me, Victor, Joan, and my little sister Helen.

When we were kids, we didn’t have a lot. I guess we were poor, but we never really thought about ourselves that way. It was just the way things were. Of course, they were that way for a lot of families. I won’t go into the history of the Great Depression, but those were tough times. Between low grain prices and terrible harvests, farmers were taking a beating. Farms were abandoned all over the Prairies, and there was a steady stream of people leaving in the hopes of finding work somewhere else. Sometimes we’d eat oatmeal two or three times a day because that’s all my parents could afford. For milk, my dad used to buy Carnation powder and we’d add about a gallon of water to it. If you’ve never tried watered-down powdered milk before, I don’t recommend you start now.

The lack of proper nutrition eventually caught up with me. When I was just a kid, the doctor told my mother that my back wasn’t strong enough and I was developing spinal problems. He
said that if I fell down or took the wrong kind of hit, a hard enough blow to my back might break it. He put me on some vitamin supplements, as well as on my first physical training program. It was sort of like a homemade version of the physiotherapy we have today. He had me hang like a monkey from the top of a doorway and swing my hips from side to side. The idea was to strengthen my back muscles and straighten my spine. It was pretty crude but it must have worked. My old back held up through more than thirty years of professional hockey, so I guess that doctor knew what he was doing.

•   •   •

F
rom a certain perspective, I suppose I could say that I have the Great Depression to thank for jump-starting my hockey career. It was 1933 and we weren’t the only family in Saskatoon that needed a few extra dollars. One day, a neighbor whose husband was sick came to the door with a gunnysack full of her used things and asked my mother if she would buy it to help the woman get milk for her family. Mum didn’t have much, but she was able to scrape together a few dollars. That’s the way things were then. When the going got tough, sometimes it was neighbors looking out for each other that allowed everyone to get by. Like so many things in my life, I have my mother’s kindness to thank for what came next.

We dumped out the sack on the floor and, along with some old clothes, out came a pair of skates. I spied them immediately, but so did my sister Edna. She grabbed one, I grabbed the other, and we ran outside to try them out. They were a men’s size 6, so we pulled on a bunch of woolen socks to get them to fit. We had patches of ice in the garden out back where the snow would melt and then
freeze. Edna and I started pushing ourselves across this ice on one skate each. We’d run like hell, pick up our socked foot, and glide across the ice.

When we talked about it years later, my mother and I recalled what happened next differently. She told me my sister kept her skate for a week. I wanted it badly, but she wouldn’t let it go. Eventually I broke down and offered her a dime for it, which Mum loaned me, and Edna finally let me have it. What I remember is my sister getting cold after a few nights of skating and going inside to warm up. Once she took off that skate, I snatched it up and that was the last she ever saw of it. Whichever way it happened, I know that putting on those skates was the moment I fell in love with hockey.

From that day on I skated for as long as I could, whenever I could. I don’t know if it was because I thought I could do well at hockey or whether I just loved to skate. I do know that whenever I jumped on the ice, I felt like a million bucks. Later on, when I got a bit bigger, skating was the thing that really opened up my little world.

Back then, if we had heavy rains or an early snowfall, the water would collect in the gullies and sloughs and ponds. When winter came and the water froze, we would get great patches of ice all over the place. The Hudson Bay Slough was about three blocks from my house. We’d walk over there, jump on it, and skate forever. It ran for about four miles, nearly out to the airport, and we’d skate the whole thing.

We also knew where to find all the best skating ponds. All you’d need to do was look for the bluffs on the landscape. Most of them had ponds in between them, so we’d go up into the hills, look down, and there’d be a nice sheet of ice just waiting for us. We’d play until we cut it up; if the ice was thin, it might get a little
rubbery and the water would start to follow your tracks. Then we’d take off our skates and move on to the next pond.

When winter really set in and the river froze, we’d play on it as well. The Prairies can get pretty windy, which isn’t much fun most of the time, but it did clear the snow off the South Saskatchewan, the big river that flows through Saskatoon. It felt like we could skate on it all the way to the next city if we wanted to. Mostly, though, we’d make our way up to the Grand Trunk Bridge, a big steel trestle railway bridge that’s still there. The ice was good under that bridge, as a rule, and we used to play hockey in between the piers.

When I first started out, my dad used to sharpen our skates with a file. After a while that became a lot of work, so he came up with a pretty ingenious invention. He was always handy as a mechanic and he built a contraption that hooked on to the washing machine. Then he attached a belt to the flywheel of the washer that turned a grinding stone. After that he was able to sharpen our skates all the time without much fuss.

The ice we used to skate on really put Dad’s homemade sharpener through its paces. The gravel roads in Saskatoon at the time had four ruts in them for car tires. During the day the snow that covered the roads would melt slightly, and then at night it would refreeze, which created ribbons of ice that were just made for skating. I even had street shoes with blades on them. The odd time that I’d get a new pair of shoes, my dad would take the old ones and attach metal straight blades to their soles. They made great skates. As soon as he put the blades on, I’d be off. The whole city was like our backyard. We could go anywhere we wanted, and we did. We’d even get behind a bus, grab on to the bumper, and go for a free ride. We called it “trailing.” The drivers weren’t too happy about it.
Every now and then they’d stop and chase us, but it wasn’t much of a deterrent. We could skate faster than they could run, so it wasn’t like getting caught was a big worry.

Most of the time, we were just looking to get somewhere to play more hockey. We’d play every day after school, and on the weekends we’d go from early morning until late at night. Imagine a game that lasted for twelve hours with kids coming and going. I’d play for hours, then when I got cold or hungry I’d skate back home. It’s been said that, while growing up, I ate meals with my skates on. It’s true. Mum would spread newspapers over the linoleum floor in our house, so my brothers and friends and I could come inside on our skates. After we warmed up and had something to eat, we’d head right back outside. It was as if we hadn’t left the game. We’d just ask someone the score and start playing again.

Anyone who’s ever gone to a rink and stepped onto a sheet of freshly Zambonied ice knows it’s something special. It’s so smooth and perfect, it’s like a canvas. And that’s what you get just at a local arena. Move up to the NHL and skating onto a fresh sheet of ice is like being in a cathedral. Playing outside is something different altogether. The ice isn’t pristine like it is indoors. It’ll be uneven in spots and have ripples and ridges and bumps in others. I’ve always been strong on my skates, and I give some of the credit to spending my childhood skating outside on different kinds of ice in all types of conditions. Once I got to proper rinks, the ice was so nice it was like cheating. It really let you fly.

Nowadays it seems that kids don’t play much hockey unless it’s organized. I understand that times have changed, but I always figured that the way to get better at something is to do it as much as possible. Maybe I was too single-minded at times, but that’s the way I was with hockey.

A number of years ago I remember asking some young guys if they ever played hockey with a tennis ball. They said it was pucks for them, mostly. I think that’s a shame. When I was a kid we would play ball hockey on the road or in driveways all the time. With a tennis ball, you’re basically playing with a bouncing puck. You can’t force a tennis ball; you need to be light of hand to control it, so playing with one really helps to develop your touch. Plus, if you play it against a wall, when it comes back your way either you learn how to trap it with your stick blade or you end up spending your time chasing it down the street. I didn’t like chasing tennis balls too much, so I became pretty good at trapping them out of the air. I told these youngsters that was how I practiced as a kid. Whenever I went anywhere, I was stickhandling a ball down the road.

Years later I read a story about Steve Nash, the basketball player. When he was in college, he used to dribble a tennis ball around campus on his way to class. He won a couple of MVP awards in the NBA, so I guess a tennis ball helped him out, too.

Growing up, I would spend hours shooting a ball or a puck at the side of our house. We had a shingled veranda, which ran about two-thirds of the way around the house. It made a great target. I’d sit back and fire away, breaking more than a few of the shingles in the process. After a while, the veranda started to get down to the bare planks. One day, my dad came out of the house, took a look at it, and shook his head at me. He didn’t get too angry, though. Instead, he took me for a walk down to the Quaker Oats mill. We found a couple of big plywood sheets that had come off the railroad grain cars and Dad carried them home. He leaned one up against the house, put the other down on the driveway, and told me to keep shooting as much as I wanted.

Over the years, some folks have suggested that my father was too hard on me. He was stern, sure. And he was tough. He also had to work a lot to keep food on the table, so he wasn’t around for the kids like Mum was, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t care. The Depression made for tough times everywhere, but the Prairies were hit particularly hard. Wheat was the major crop, and when the bottom fell out of the market, it took Saskatchewan down with it. Not that farmers were able to grow much during a drought anyway, maybe a couple of bushels an acre if they were fortunate. The summers then were hotter and drier than any I’ve seen since, and when the wind came up there was nothing to stop the topsoil from blowing away. It was called the Dirty Thirties for a reason. Even as a kid, I understood that Saskatoon was in bad shape. There was hardly any work and there wasn’t anything going on. I remember feeling lucky that my dad had a job. I knew other families that were on relief; that’s what social assistance was called at the time. Dad couldn’t be involved in my life the way parents are these days, but he was still there for us in a way that fathers were back then.