Hockey Dad (11 page)

Less than twenty seconds into the power play, we scored
to make it 5-4. There was lots of time, more than a minute,
left. The worm had
definitely
turned. You could see the Barrie
bench was in a state of disarray. Our kids were all
fire
d up.
There was a stoppage with about one minute left. I noticed
one Barrie player on the ice still using a stick with a banana
curve.

"Stu, let me call another one," I pleaded.

Stu laughed, thought about it brie
fly
: "No, we're good now.

We're going to be
fine
."

Stu pulled the goalie in the
finally
minute and one of our
defensemen, Bobby Scott, who hadn't scored a goal all season,
tried to one-time a shot. He chunked or sliced the puck and it
went straight up in the air and came down, bouncing wildly, in
the slot. One bounce, two bounces and right over the goalie's
glove and into the net. With nine seconds left, the game was
tied 5-5. It was pandemonium.

Time expired, we were going to overtime and our message to the kids was very basic. Go for it. Hold nothing back.

We had all the momentum. You could tell by looking at their
bench they were crushed.

Sure enough, Matt Snowden scored the game-winning goal
about twenty seconds in on the
first
shift of overtime.

Our kids and parents were celebrating. I seem to recall some
of the Barrie parents yelling at me, although it looked like a few
of them were yelling at their own coach, too. The referee was
looking at me and shaking his head. If looks could kill.

Once our kids and coaching staff had gone to the dressing
room to celebrate the win, I told Stu I had better go over to
the Barrie side of the lobby, where their parents were waiting
outside their dressing room, and take any medicine that was
coming my way.

I went over and, sure enough, as soon as I got there, one of
their parents let me have it.

"What a cheap way to win a hockey game," he said. "You
should be ashamed of yourself, and to think you go on TV and
talk about hockey. You're an embarrassment."

I asked this guy how long his son had played on the team
and he responded it was his
first
year with the club. I then told
this dad to ask one of the other parents on the team whose kid
had played there for two years to explain to him why I might
be calling stick measurements in a major atom game.

If you haven't already
fi
gured it out, the coach of this
Barrie major atom team was the same guy who had coached
the Barrie major novice AAA team two years ago, the same
team that protested and overturned a playoff game that they
lost to Whitby because our suspended coach was seen coming
out of the dressing room.

Those two stick measurements-and I still wish Stu had let
me call the third one, just for the hell of it-were my
first
, second and last calls of that kind. Ever. I never, in a million years,
would have even considered calling a stick measurement if not
for the history with that coach and what the Barrie organization had done in Mike's major novice AAA year.

But, like I said at the end of Chapter Eleven, payback's
a bitch.

And if you talk to any of the '86s who played AAA hockey
in Whitby for a good long time and ask them for one of their
most memorable moments, chances are good they'll mention
the "Barrie stick measurement game." It will still bring a smile
to their face.

Mine, too.

17: The Best Reward, Bar None, and Hockey Parents From Hell

WHEN LAST WE LEFT YOU with regard to Shawn, he was
wrapping up his Select 7 experience and looking as though he
might be on his way to
figuring
out on which side of the face
off circle he belonged. It was now time for Shawn to enter the
rep phase of his minor hockey career and it was fairly obvious to all of us, including Shawn, that he wasn't exactly AAA
material.

That never bothered me in the least and it most certainly
didn't bother Shawn. He had no desire to even try out for AAA
and was content to try to make his mark with the minor novice AA team.

Mike and Shawn could not have been more different in
their on-ice temperament. Mike was competitive and driven,
sometimes too much so. Shawn was far more relaxed and
happy-go-lucky. Which is not to suggest Shawn wasn't a good
AA player in his own right. He was just motivated by different
things than Mike.

There was a game early in his minor novice year that illustrated this perfectly. Shawn found himself in the penalty box.

The timekeeper was the son of Shawn's head coach, Norm
Orviss. Shawn was chitchatting away with Norm's son in the
penalty box when The Proposition was made. "If you come
right out of the penalty box and score a goal," the timekeeper
said to Shawn, "I'll buy you a chocolate bar when the game is
over." This kid was talking Shawn's language.

As fate would have it, Shawn stepped out of the box at precisely the same moment the puck was cleared up the ice. He
found himself on a clear-cut breakaway. He went in and buried it. It was the winning goal in a 2-1 game, the team's
first
win of the regular season. In the days that followed a community newspaper ran a little write-up with a photo of Shawn that
was taken immediately after the game. The black and white
photo is a little too grainy to see it clearly, but if you look very
closely at Shawn's hands, he's holding onto something. It's a
Twix chocolate bar, which the timekeeper had given Shawn at
the end of the game.

By the time I got into the dressing room to take off his
skates, Shawn had already started munching on the bar and
happily told me the story of how he got it. He was on Cloud
Nine, as much or more for the bar as the goal. All these years
later, it's as funny and cute and brings a smile to my face now
as it did then.

I would be lying if I told you I was as heavily involved with
Shawn's hockey, from his Select 7 season through the next
three years of his rep hockey, because those were the four years
I was coaching Mike. Cindy picked up the slack for driving
Shawn and being there when I was absent because of
conflict
s
with Mike's games or practices or my work schedule, but any
chance I got to be at Shawn's hockey, I was most
definitely
there. Even if it meant I had to do a little Crazy Hockey Dad
crazy driving.

Mike was fortunate throughout his minor hockey career to
have some nice continuity in coaching. He had John Velacich
for three years. Then it was Stu Seedhouse, who was an assistant under John, for the next two years. Then it was me, who
was an assistant under Stu, for two years, followed by Bucky
Crouch, who worked on my staff as the goalie coach, for two
more years. Mike played eight years of AAA hockey and had
only four head coaches. His new head coach was always someone who had been an assistant the year before.

Shawn, on the other hand, had three different head
coaches in his
first
four years of competitive hockey and never
had the same coach in two consecutive years until I coached
him in major atom and minor peewee. Jeff Sisson, a good guy
who lived in our neighborhood and whose son, Kyle, went
to school with Shawn, was the Select 7 coach. Norm Orviss
was Shawn's minor novice AA coach. Jeff Sisson came back
to coach the major novice AA team for a year and then Don
Houghton took over in the minor atom AA season. I suppose
there's nothing intrinsically wrong with having a new coach
each year, but there is a lot to be said for continuity, for the
coach getting to know the boys really well and vice versa.

Every new coach comes in with big ideas on how he wants to
do things. If that philosophy or approach changes year after
year, it's a lot harder for kids to adapt.

Shawn's
first
year of rep hockey, though, did feature our
first
experience with The Hockey Parents From Hell (THPFH).

It's funny, really, that for all the minor hockey and lacrosse
teams Mike and Shawn played on, I could count the real problem people on one hand and have a
finger
or two left. Sure,
over the course of time, there might have been isolated incidents involving a parent on a particular issue, but there was,
from our personal experience, just one extreme case of THPFH.

THPFH generally fall into two categories. The
first
is
THPFH lifers, who in spite of being a cancerous blight on the
minor hockey landscape, manage to go the distance and be
a royal pain in everyone's ass for an eight-to-ten-year period.

For reasons no one can explain, they bounce from team to
team wreaking havoc but have inexplicable staying power. The
second is THPFH
fl
aming burnouts, who roar onto the scene
with reckless abandon, lighting
fire
s, abusing coaches, insulting kids and parents and generally proving to be antisocial
deviants who were born without a clue. The former is bad; the
latter is worse. The lifers have some-not much, mind you,
but some-sense of boundaries, knowing that if they push too
far they'll ultimately be expelled from minor hockey culture.

The
fl
aming burnouts, though, know no bounds. They come,
they go, they scorch the earth and then pull their kid out of
hockey because of the "politics." It's always the politics, never
the fact that they are usually rude, ignorant,
selfish
, malicious
and truly crazy.

THPFH on Shawn's team were
fl
aming burnouts, there for
just one season. It was obvious at the
first
tournament of the
year when the patriarch of THPFH showed up to the game with
a stopwatch and a pen and notepad to keep track of Junior's
ice time. He had actually enlisted another parent on the team
to help him out because, well, as anybody in the game knows
keeping track of nine forwards' ice time on the
fly
is no mean
feat. And, of course, misery loves company. The other dad
should have known better but then that's the real danger of
THPFH.

What is it they say about the universal truth of coaching
in minor hockey? Five parents love you,
five
hate you and
five
are neutral. The challenge is keeping the
five
who are neutral
away from the
five
who hate you. I love that. It's so true. Even
in the NHL, coaches will tell you it's the same, not with parents
of course, but players.

Shawn's coach that year, Norm Orviss, had come out of
minor hockey retirement, along with three of his best buddies
who had once coached their own kids. They were a little older
version of Stu, Kevin and me, just looking to relive some of the
glory days. And they got THPFH as their reward.

In the wake of the tournament where everyone saw THPFH
and his accomplice feverishly recording ice times, Norm called
a parent meeting in a dressing room at Iroquois Park, where
he tried to put out the
fire
. He explained as best he could their
philosophy and while it all made perfect sense, the patriarch
and matriarch of THPFH weren't satis
fi
ed. They began peppering the staff with questions and accusations. It was very
uncomfortable with most of the parents just looking at the
floor
and hoping it would end soon.

I'd
finally
had enough of this inquisition-being a coach
for Mike's team at the time, I had great sympathy for Norm
and in the middle of it all, I just said: "Well, I think we can all
agree that the coaches are doing a good job. I would say this
meeting is over."

All the parents made for the door except of course THPFH,
who continued to grind Norm. It was just them and me and
Norm. I was seriously concerned this verbal confrontation
might escalate to physical, so I put my arm around Norm and
said, "Excuse me, but I need to talk to you about something
outside."

And that was that. We just left them in there. Long story
short, THPFH were never heard of again after that season. I used
to occasionally see them around the rink the next season-it
wasn't long before they disappeared entirely-and isn't that
the most unfortunate aspect of all?

Their boy seemed like an okay kid and was a decent little
player, too. I always felt sorry for kids like that. They never
stood a chance. Kids like that don't get cut from hockey teams;
their parents do, not that THPFH would ever
figure
that out.