Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (43 page)

The outbursts worsened as he hit puberty, the boy screaming terrible threats—including “I'm going to kill you!”—at father, mother, older brother and others from the time he was about twelve right up to his arrest. The strange thing, the father says, is that the son would carry no memory of such moments, claiming “I can't remember,” and then falling into often-tearful spasms of remorse.

Compounding all this was the discovery, early on, that Mark suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. By the time he began elementary school, he was on four different medications, chief among them Ritalin. Before he even made it to kindergarten, he had been kicked out of two daycares that could not handle the whirling dervish and the angry outbursts.

The Lafleurs took their younger child—Martin, now thirty-one, had no such difficulties—to a long series of doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists, each seemingly with a new idea of what to do. When the ADHD medication kept him awake at night, one added on sleeping pills. At one point, when Mark was fourteen, he spent two months in hospital while doctors tried to find a proper chemical mix for him. By the time he left school, he had attended thirteen different institutions, including two private schools in Ontario especially designed to accommodate children with learning disabilities and behavioural problems.

“All that medication made him look like a zombie,” Guy Lafleur says. “When you give that to your kid at five, six, seven years old, you're giving him drugs. I know it's supposed to be that you're helping him out, but you're still giving him drugs.

“I'm not saying everyone is affected this way. We know people who take Ritalin and are okay with it. But then, if you don't give them that, what are you going to give them to help out?” The problems with this severe disorder prevented the youngster from finding a place for himself in the same sports world that had been such a sanctuary to the father: hockey. Martin, who had been only mildly interested in his father's game, had played briefly but preferred skiing. Mark, on the other hand, showed early talent, but his temper was soon the ruin of him.

“Maybe this is a result of all the rejection he has had in his life,” the father wonders. “I don't know if he understood from the first moment when we tried to find help. It's tough. You don't have the answers of what to do to get them out of trouble. You try to make him understand what's wrong and what's right … They are a type of kid who are very—miserable—inside. They're unhappy. They're trying to find a way out and they cannot. People who don't have kids like that, they can't understand.”

Guy Lafleur thinks he understands, to an extent. “I truly believe I was ADHD,” he says of his youth in a small mill town along the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. “But I trained a lot. I worked on the farm. I wasn't on Valium or Ritalin. Nothing.” He threw himself into hockey as there was little else for an active child to do. He worries that today's privileged youngsters have too much opportunity granted by parents with too much themselves.

“It's tougher for them to hear a ‘no' than it was in our day,” he says. “Because our parents had so little.” Guy Lafleur was never fabulously wealthy by today's hockey superstar standards—the most he made in a single season was $400,000, and about $5 million for the seventeen seasons he played in the National Hockey League—but he made superb money and was always generous to his boys. As with most parents, perhaps generous to a fault.

Guy Lafleur believes people can change. He did himself, several times. The hockey star who was once known for his between-period smokes and post-game beers hasn't had a real beer in more
than fifteen years. He sees himself today not as a hockey god, but as a simple restaurateur trying to get a family business off the ground—hopefully, at some point, with all the family involved. He says his son never got in much more trouble than the odd traffic ticket prior to his January 2007 arrest. But that is only officially, as trouble was long brewing. The young girlfriend was one thing, drugs another.

As yesterday's plea was tabled, the court was told this had been a highly abusive relationship, and given that it also involved a girl who was a minor at the time, one that most assuredly would have been torturous to the young unnamed girl's family as well as difficult for the Lafleurs. And the hurt, on all sides, is not over yet.

Lafleur, rightly or wrongly, believes young people with severe ADHD are more “immature” than their peer group, and he and Lise had always hoped maturity would come for their son before serious trouble. They tried to talk their son and his young girlfriend into going back to school. They tried to give them jobs. But nothing seemed to work.

When Mark's bail hearing came up after his arrest, Guy Lafleur agreed to watch over his son and ensure that the court-imposed curfew was kept. He made a serious error, however, when he drove Mark to a hotel rendezvous with the girl last August and allowed the court to believe that Mark had, in fact, been at the family's home in Île-Bizard. The older Lafleur said the 12:30 a.m. curfew was still being met but, of course, it was the wrong thing to do.

Since that time, Mark Lafleur has remained in jail—his parents' best hope now being that, whatever his sentencing and whatever the outcome of the other charges, his incarceration will eventually come to an end. “It's been hell for her,” Lafleur says of his wife. “She's been sick ever since Mark got arrested.”

But then, almost exactly one year later, there was a warrant issued for the arrest of Guy himself. “How do you think she felt?” Lafleur asks. “ ‘My son is criminally charged—now my husband is, too.' ”

The warrant for the arrest of one of the province's most beloved sports icons caused outrage in Quebec. Lafleur's closest friends—former players Jean Béliveau, Gaston Gingras, Yvan Cournoyer, Stephane Richer, Réjean Houle and powerful sportswriters such as Red Fisher and Bertrand Raymond—were furious.

Why a warrant?
people wanted to know. Why would the police officer involved not simply ask Lafleur to come down to the station? “She phoned me on my cell,” Lafleur says. “So, if I'm tough to reach? … I just don't know why she would do that.” Lafleur is now suing Montreal police and the Crown for $3.5 million, claiming that the warrant was unnecessary and that it, along with his subsequent arrest, severely damaged his reputation and potential earnings from that reputation.

That, however, is less important to the father than his son having a chance to one day build a new reputation and a new life. “There's time for him to go back and think about what he did,” Lafleur says.

If there is any silver lining to this very dark cloud, it may lie in the fact that Mark Lafleur has had time for some, hopefully, clearheaded reflection. After his arrest, he underwent a month of psychiatric assessment. The family then got him into a detox centre, where he spent four months. Then came the nine months in jail. With luck, the father says, that could soon add up to two years of being away from drugs.

“I tell him, ‘When you get out, we'll help you out. But go slow. Be patient. Try to understand what happened and why.' I will tell him, ‘If you want to do that type of life, it's your call. If you want to change, fine. We'll help. But if you choose that life, that's it. You're going to have to forget us as a family. There's not going to be a second time.'

“We have a life, too. It's something that if you let it happen, he will ruin his mother's life, my life, too. So I say, ‘If you want to ruin your life, ruin it on your own.' ”

The tension of such talk plays on the familiar face, but Guy
Lafleur is determined. “Mark is capable of doing well and changing his life,” he says. “I'm not going to change his life. But he's twenty-three years old and he's going to have to do it himself.” It takes a fourth fill of coffee for the smile to return, and even when it does it is small and uncertain.

“I always say, ‘There's only one past—but there's a lot of futures.' It's going to be up to Mark to make the best of it. The most important thing is to get him out of there and on the right track. There's no other choice.”

Guy Lafleur was convicted in June 2009 and given a one-year suspended sentence. He appealed and, on August 17, 2010, was unanimously acquitted of all charges by the provincial Court of Appeal
.

VIKING, ALBERTA

T
hey came to say farewell to a man who loved black cows, sappy songs and “pull my finger” gags. They thought, for most of the day, that they would be burying the game he loved best as well—the National Hockey League, where six of Louis Sutter's seven sons went off to play a total of 4,994 games. They filled the community centre with as many mourners as the town has citizens, fourteen hundred, filled it on a cold clear day where the only lingering cloud was in the conversation before and after the service.

Is the NHL season over?
Will it be, as everyone expected when they set out for Louis Sutter's funeral, officially cancelled this afternoon in a New York press conference? Or has it—through
panic, through coming to senses, through the intervention of three key players—been salvaged just when fans were beginning to accept that the owners' lockout would mean no season at all this year?

No one at the funeral knew what was going on in the surprise last-minute meetings between the league and the players, not even Harley Hotchkiss, chairman of the board of governors. “I didn't even know the man,” said Mr. Hotchkiss, one of the owners of the Calgary Flames. “But I came because, right now, I feel there's more of the Sutters in all of us than there is in what's been going on elsewhere.”

Whatever was going on elsewhere was far, far away from little Viking. Here, they started arriving before noon for a 2 p.m. funeral service. Some came by chartered bus, some wheeled their own chairs down the snow-covered streets. Some wore Hugo Boss suits—the true official uniform of NHL players—and some came in jeans and cowboy boots. Some men tossed cigarettes away at the door and inserted toothpicks; some men gave up their seats to women and went and leaned against the walls.

They were here to honour Louis Sutter, seventy-three, the seventh of thirteen children and, surely forever, to stand as the Secretariat of hockey breeding. Sons Brian, Darryl, Duane, Brent and the twins, Ron and Rich, all learned the game on the farm slough and went off to play in the NHL where, as a family, they scored a total of 1,320 goals and 2,935 points. They won Stanley Cups and played on so many teams that it is easier to remember the one none ever did play for—the Oilers straight up Highway 14. All six are still involved in hockey. Darryl coached the Flames to the Stanley Cup final last June, and Brent coached Team Canada to the world junior championship last month.

But the gathering also paid tribute to Grace, the widow who celebrated her fiftieth anniversary with Louis last summer, the mother who sorted out the tube socks and washed the long underwear. By wide admission, Grace was the central force
behind a family so smitten with hockey that it was said that, on weekends, you had to go out into the barn if you wanted a breath of fresh air.

What Louis Sutter handed down to his boys was stubbornness, a willingness to work hard and a strong sense that you are never better than anyone else. The Sutter boys—only Gary, who stayed behind to work the farm, did not pursue a professional hockey career—were consummate “soldiers” in a Canadian game that admires grinders and heart and determination above all else.

Sutters never complained, never whined, never believed in the self above the team. A stark contrast often noted by those who stayed around to chat while the direct family, with the boys all serving as pallbearers, went off to the cemetery for a private burial.

People spoke with great affection for Louis, who was obviously sometimes a handful. They told the story of him trying to sneak into town for a drink driving the combine. Even his grandchildren joked about his love for “happy hour,” which sometimes went on “too long.” His great-nephew, Perry Chernesky, talked about the great delight his uncle took in playing the old “pull my finger” gag on any kid silly enough to yank the older man's finger and suffer the consequences.

It is unlikely that Mr. Chernesky, a pastor, has ever told a similar story to his congregation in Edmonton. But Edmonton is not Viking. Only Viking has a sign by the elevators claiming to be “Home of the Sutters.”

It was this recognition as a special hockey family that brought so many of the hockey world out to honour a man many of them had never even met. Kevin Lowe and Craig MacTavish were there from the Oilers. Bob Pulford was there from the Chicago Blackhawks. Former players Lanny McDonald, Jim Peplinski and Rich Preston were there. Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson was among the mourners, as were numerous scouts and various present players.

They came to sit and listen while Louis Sutter's grandchildren took to the podium, their voices sometimes breaking, and told stories about their grandfather.

“He loved old cows, preferably blacks. He said black cows could calve up in a tree.”

“Grandpa loved standing oat crops—every year they were going to run 110 bushels.”

“He loved grabbing handfuls of wheat and chewing on it until he had gum.”

“He loved country music, especially the old ones, and thought he could sing them all.”

“Grandpa loved shooting gophers with his old twenty-two.”

“He loved Grandma's desserts—especially rhubarb pie and pudding. And chocolate bars from town.”

“He loved watching hockey and baseball on television.”

“He loved the Toronto Maple Leafs”—and, apparently, cheered for them even when one of his own would be playing for the other side.