Hockey Dad (21 page)

Oh, well, I guess that makes me a "pussy." That's okay,
I've been called worse.

The good news, if there was any of that in the fall of 2003, was
that Shawn was thriving on the major bantam AAA team. The
new coach was a fellow by the name of Louis Atkinson and
while his style differed greatly from John Annis's, he seemed to
like Shawn. The personality of the team had greatly changed, too, as the top two players from last season-Patrick Daley and
Louke Oakley-left the Wildcats to play in the GTHL. So the
team was no longer a powerhouse, but they still had a solid
nucleus and were very competitive. Louis must have seen something in Shawn because he gave him an A as alternate
captain
and Shawn responded in a positive fashion. He played hard,
physically, made some plays, scored some goals and was, generally speaking, behaving himself. No more suspensions anyway.

Shawn will never forget the game that season-a career
game, for sure-when the Wildcats beat Oshawa to the tune of
10-2 or 12-2 or something like that. Whatever the score ended
up, Shawn scored
five
goals and four assists that night. A nine-point outing. It was just one of those nights where everything
he touched turned to goal-and it didn't even cost me so much
as a chocolate bar. That was a very enjoyable ride home.

Shawn had a game on Saturday, December 13, 2003, at the
Evinrude Centre in Peterborough. The only reason I know the
exact date is because it turned out to be the last game of high-level, competitive hockey Shawn would ever play.

Peterborough, at the '89 level, was never a very good team,
almost always
finishing
in last place. What they lacked in skill,
they made up in aggression. They had a couple of players who,
in my estimation, were just plain dirty, out there for no reason other than to hurt people. The games with Peterborough
were not a very good advertisement for what minor hockey
should be.

Anyway, tensions were running high-remember, we're
talking fourteen-year-old boys in their
first
year of high school-and a melee broke out on the boards. One of the players on
Shawn's team had done something to one of the Peterborough
players. Several of the Petes were trying to get at the Whitby
player. Shawn was on the ice at the time and he didn't need
to be told what the protocol was. He went right into the pile
of Petes and started pulling them off his teammate. One thing
led to another and if it wasn't a line brawl, it was damn close
to it, with everyone paired off.

Shawn happened to draw the biggest kid on the ice-he was
easily six feet tall to Shawn's
five
foot nine-and milliseconds
after the
first
fight
broke out, this big kid from Peterborough
dropped the gloves and went after Shawn.

The
fight
was happening about twenty feet from where I
was standing at ice level. I don't know if you have ever had
the occasion to witness your son in a hockey
fight
, but it is an
emotional experience like few others. Your
first
instinct, like
that of your son, is simply survival. While this may not be the
sociologically correct thing to say, survival in a hockey
fight
means winning, and hoping your son is on the giving end of
a lot more punches than the receiving end.

The other dominant emotion for a father watching his son
fight
is fear, because when two kids starting wildly throwing
punches there is a very real chance someone is going to get
hurt, and maybe badly. Don't believe that nonsense about no
one ever gets hurt in a
fight
. I had additional reasons to be
deeply concerned (more on that later).

Shawn's
fight
was no little scuf
fl
e either. It was a major-league tilt. The gloves were off. The Peterborough kid got
Shawn's helmet and cage off in no time and Shawn, at
first
,
couldn't do the same to him. They started whaling away on
each other. With his height and reach advantage, the bigger
kid was landing some blows-three or four shots hit Shawn-and my fear was that Shawn was going to get overpowered and
beaten up very badly if he didn't get the other kid's helmet and
cage off. The on-ice
officials
were trying to break up the
first
fight
that was going on at the same time, so Shawn was very
much on his own.

What Shawn lacked in height, he made up for in strength
and toughness-watching him, you could never conceive how
easygoing and mild-mannered he is off the ice. He managed
to get himself in tight with the big kid,
finally
got the other
guy's helmet and cage off, and started to deliver uppercuts that
hit the target. Suddenly, the Peterborough player was on the
defensive. The tide had turned greatly and Shawn was really
laying into the kid. Shawn came over the top and landed a
hard blow right in the middle of the other boy's face. It buckled him big time, put him right down on his knees. At that
point, thankfully, the
officials
got in and separated them. The
fight
was over.

I am not one of those hockey people who trumpets
fight
ing as some great mythical part of the game, but I've spent my
whole life in and around hockey, so I get it. I understand
fight
ing and the culture of the game as well as anyone; I know what
it's like to be in a hockey
fight
(mostly on the receiving end);
I know what it's like to see my boys in
fight
s; I don't turn my
eyes away from a
fight
, but I don't go to the game hoping and
expecting to see one either.

Fighting in the NHL is one thing, and this is not the forum
to engage in that debate, because I believe, at the NHL level,
it is a very complex issue, far more involved a discussion than
the most vehement pro- or anti-
fight
ing forces would have you
believe. Besides,
fight
ing in the NHL involves men who are
making their living at the game.

So if there's going to be an anti-
fight
ing crusade, I
say
identify
the most appropriate target. And for me, that
means
all
levels of hockey below professional-minor (kids), Junior
A, major junior, college and university-should have much
tougher anti-
fight
ing rules. That's what is going to be needed
to have any chance of putting a dent in
fight
ing's place within
the culture of the game.

Shawn's league had a rule that if you
fight
, you are out of
the game. That rule was no deterrent to anybody in Shawn's
game. Mike played four years of Junior A hockey with the same
(
fight
and you're out of the game) rule and there were still lots
of
fight
s more nights than not. Don Sanderson's tragic death
in an Ontario Senior A game-he hit his bare head on the ice
when he fell during a
fight
-was in a league that punishes
fight
ing with automatic ejection. And yet that didn't prevent
that
fight
either. That automatic ejection rule doesn't "ban"
fight
ing.

The penalties for
fight
ing need to be far stiffer if you're
going to modify the behavior and mindset of young hockey
players. For me, any league where there are teenagers involved
and the majority will never make their living at the game
should adopt much more stringent anti-
fight
ing measures.

You see, here's what you're up against. When a
fight
is
over, even when it's involving fourteen-year-olds, the adrenaline and testosterone coursing through the arena are off the
scale. It's absolutely tribal and raw. Shawn's teammates were
beating their sticks on the boards as he skated to the dressing
room. So were the Peterborough players for their teammate.

The parents on both teams were up and cheering.

Shawn's game was happening immediately before a Junior
A game between the Wellington Dukes and Peterborough, so
the Junior A players from both teams were lined up at the glass
watching the
fight
and cheering wildly when it was happening.

When Shawn skated off the ice to his dressing room, the
Wellington Duke players mobbed him, welcomed him like a
conquering hero, patting him on the back, telling him he'd
won the
fight
and lauding him for dropping the bigger player.
The Peterborough player who fought Shawn received the same
hero's welcome from the Peterborough Junior A players.

A lot of players, even fourteen-year-old kids, will tell you
that sort of adulation, respect and attention is well worth getting kicked out of a game for now and again.

By the time I got around to the dressing room to check
on Shawn, he and the other player on his team who had been
kicked out for
fight
ing were still high-
fi
ving each other and
whooping it up, the adrenaline rush was still that great. I was
only there to make sure Shawn was okay, that he wasn't going
to go through what his brother had just experienced.

"How's your head?" I said.

"Great, it's
fine
, I'm okay," he said. He had a little mark at
the corner of one eye but otherwise looked as though he had
emerged unscathed.

When the game was over and his team was back in the
dressing room, the coaching staff presented Shawn with the
game puck and he received an ovation from his teammates,
who seemed a little awestruck by the NHL-style
fight
they had
witnessed.

Shawn's last game of competitive hockey was memorable,
if nothing else.

29: Into The Abyss and The Long, Hard Road Back

IT TOOK ONLY HOURS for my worst fears to be fully realized.

As soon as Shawn and I got home from Peterborough, the
McKenzie family was off to a Christmas get-together at the
home of some friends. As the night wore on, I noticed Shawn
was quieter than usual.
"Your head is sore, isn't it?" I asked him.
"Yeah," he said. "A little."

Great. Now that the adrenaline had run its course, I wasn't
at all surprised. But I was upset. Keep in mind, Mike had just
gone through two months of hell with his post-concussion
issues. Now that Mike was
finally
symptom-free and on the
verge of playing again, we thought we had put the dark days
behind us.

If ever there were a player who should not have been
fight
ing and tempting fate with head trauma, it was Shawn. And
that's because Shawn already had a long history with knocks
to the head.

When Shawn was four years old and hanging on monkey
bars at a playground outside a rink where Mike was playing
lacrosse in Hamilton, one of Shawn's pals grabbed his feet and
pulled on them while Shawn was about four or
five
feet off the
ground. Shawn lost his grip and fell, the back of his head hitting the ground hard. He was brie
fly
unconscious and taken
by ambulance to a local hospital, where he appeared none the
worse for wear, other than the fact he had obviously just suffered concussion No. 1 of his young life.

No. 2 came a couple of years later when I was away at
the Stanley Cup
finally
. Mike was chasing Shawn around our
backyard pool. Shawn tripped and banged his noggin off the
concrete deck. He wasn't knocked out and appeared to be
fine
.

He didn't even cry. (In fact, I must say I have never seen Shawn
shed a single tear or cry out, ever, because of physical pain; this
kid's pain threshold is legendary.) But when Shawn woke up
in the middle of the night somewhat disoriented, saying his
name was Brandon, Cindy and her dad took him to the hospital emergency room to be on the safe side.

No. 3, at least we awarded it No. 3 status, happened one
winter when Shawn and some schoolmates were playing at
recess. He ended up at the bottom of a pile of kids and someone must have pushed his head into the frozen ground. Shawn
came home from school and told us about it, saying he thought
he saw Dave Thomas of Wendy's Hamburgers fame sitting in
a tree in the schoolyard. That was good enough for us to call
it No. 3.

No. 4 was in the fall of 1999-six years after No. 1-and was
spectacular in its sheer ghastliness. Shawn was Rollerblading
home from school and was no doubt
fly
ing right along. He
went to make the turn onto our street and clipped someone's
front lawn trying to cut the corner. He apparently did a
full-speed face-plant into the concrete sidewalk. One of the
neighbors on the street found Shawn face down and semiconscious with his entire face scraped and badly bloodied.

No. 5 was three years after that, in the summer of 2002,
when Shawn was cross-checked in the head in a lacrosse game
in Peterborough.

No. 6 was on September 14, 2003, exactly two weeks to
the day before Mike suffered his concussion at North York
Centennial Arena. This one came in the semi-
final
of the Ajax-Pickering Early Bird tournament. Shawn took an elbow to the
jaw, but never lost consciousness. In fact, Cindy and I didn't
even realize he had suffered an injury of any kind because he
didn't tell us about it and it wasn't obvious. His head was sore
after that game-he never said a word to us while we were getting lunch before the
finally
-but he played quite poorly in the
championship game. He seemed totally out of it on the ice. I
was all set to give him grief for a lack of effort until he told me
why he had been so out of it-his head was sore and he felt
nauseous throughout. He never should have played.

The
fight
in Peterborough, not-so-lucky No. 7, was obviously the bad news. The good news, if there is such a thing
with concussions, is that in each of the
first
six Shawn suffered,
he never had a single symptom beyond the day on which the
injury occurred. In other words, once he got rid of the initial
headache or confusion or whatever he suffered that day, he
woke up feeling perfectly
fine
the next day and reported no
further problems. Also, because I was familiar with concussion
protocols, we always erred on the side of extreme caution in
protecting Shawn. Seven days is the recommended shutdown
period-that's seven days from the
first
day of no symptoms;
not seven days from when contact to the head was
first
made-and we often kept Shawn out of any potentially hazardous
activities longer than that. The other noteworthy point is that
Shawn's concussions all came on signi
fi
cant blows to the head.

This was only good news insofar as some who suffer multiple
concussions get to the point where even the slightest contact
will produce a concussion and symptoms (see retired NHL
player Pat LaFontaine's
finally
concussion, which was caused by
the most minor of contact).While Shawn was concussed often,
he was not concussed easily and he had never experienced true
post-concussion syndrome in terms of lingering effects.

So as fearful as we were because of Mike's recent experience, there was still a hopeful part of me thinking Shawn
would wake up Sunday morning feeling perfectly
fine
. That,
after all, was his history.

But that didn't happen and, to be perfectly honest, it still
hasn't happened. I mean, as I write this book in 2009, coming up on six years after the
fight
, Shawn still has headaches.

Shawn's headaches were dull and constant. They carried on
right through Christmas and into the New Year. They would
occasionally-probably a time or two a week-spike up into
something more intense and painful. By early January, I
figure
d it was time for Shawn, like his brother, to visit Dr. Karen
Johnston in Montreal. She was still somewhat reassuring. She
said the determining factor(s) in the severity of concussions in
children was not necessarily how many had been suffered as it
was how symptomatic they were.

The frustrating part about concussions is there's really not
a lot that can be done to treat them. Doctors will tell you the
basic prescription is rest. Shut it down completely. Little or
no physical exertion that elevates the heart rate and blood
pressure. Try to give the brain as much of a holiday from any
activity as is humanly possible.

Many of these things are easier said than done, especially
for a fourteen-year-old boy who felt like he was really starting
to take off in minor hockey at the time he was forced to shut it
down. It's fair to say Shawn woke up every day hoping it would
be the day the headaches would be gone and he could get back
to playing again. This was a time I maybe wished Shawn was
more like he had been when he was six or seven and didn't
seem to care so much about the game. But he was unquestionably smitten with it now that he had emerged as a pretty fair
AAA player (he was one of his team's leading scorers at the
time he was injured).

The beastly part of brain trauma is how the after-effects
can pile up on you, layer on top of layer on top of layer. Think
about it. Shawn had a constant headache, every minute of
every day. That, and that alone, is more than enough to wear
on anyone. But he also wasn't permitted to do any physical
activity so he rapidly lost his
fitness
level. On doctor's orders,
he spent an inordinate amount of time lying on the couch.

He didn't have a lot to look forward to. No hockey practices
or games. He couldn't even read a book or play a video game
because he wasn't supposed to stimulate his brain.

The sense of loss was huge. Shawn was a kid who had
played hockey in the winter and lacrosse in the summer, and
being part of those teams was his social life and peer group.

Really, Shawn lost his identity.

Day after day after day, and keep in mind we're talking
weeks and months here, it was like we were all slipping into an
abyss. We felt powerless to really do anything. It was a dark time
for us. As a parent, there is no worse feeling than that. Nothing.

Now try to factor school on top of all of this. Shawn, unlike
Mike, was never entirely sold on going to Trinity. He was doing
it as a one-year trial and even before he suffered concussion
No. 7, I wasn't convinced he was going to stay at TCS beyond
Grade 9. Which was
fine
, we just wanted him to give it a one-year shot to see if he liked it.

What had started out with the best of intentions-giving
him the best educational opportunity-was now problematic.

He had to get up far earlier than he otherwise would to get
to Port Hope for school in the morning. Shawn's life at TCS
was, generally speaking, more challenging and
difficult
than
it would have been if he'd stayed at school in Whitby. And
while he was doing quite well with his marks at TCS before the
injury, the headaches were an obvious impediment. Factor in
the anxiety over whether he would play hockey again and it
was indeed a dark,
difficult
time for all of us.

Shawn had to be medically excused from writing his Grade
9 exams because his ability to concentrate well enough to
study, never mind write the exams, wasn't where it needed to
be. Summer vacation came and that helped because Shawn's
brain would get some downtime. But the physical limitations
placed on Shawn were still an issue.

He, of course, wasn't able to play lacrosse and this was a
year where he would have played on the Whitby Warriors'
Midget A team, even though he was only a
first
-year midget.

He had played extremely well on the Bantam A team the summer before-he led the team in goals, points and penalty
minutes and by a fairly signi
fi
cant amount in each category
and the Midget A coach was eager to have him as one of only
three or four
first
-year midgets. Shawn had
finally
arrived on
center stage athletically and now he wasn't allowed to compete. As it turned out, that underdog Whitby midget team
won the provincial championships that summer and Shawn
would have, if he'd been able to play,
finally
won a championship of some kind.

Shawn would try to keep busy and engaged in whatever
social activities his friends were involved in-playing golf, for
example, used to make his headaches much worse-but it was
often something that he either couldn't do or shouldn't do.

But that didn't mean he wouldn't try sometimes. What I
gleaned from that was there were occasions when Shawn would
get his heart rate elevated and it wouldn't exacerbate his headache or any other post-concussive symptoms. He would ride
his bike with his friends and tell me he felt no different during
or after the ride than he did before. That, generally speaking,
is not consistent with post-concussion syndrome. After we
consulted with Dr. Johnston, she raised the possibility Shawn
might be suffering from a headache or migraine condition as
opposed to actual brain trauma or post-concussion syndrome.
What became readily apparent to me was that it was time to
start healing his heart and soul more than his brain.