Hockey Dad (8 page)
But I learned an important lesson that day about how
minor hockey operates. I didn't forget it.
And, as they like to say, payback's a bitch.
12: "I Didn't Realize You Had Only One Son"
We are eleven chapters into this epic and Shawn Patrick
McKenzie has just now offered up this wry, albeit accurate,
observation.
"I didn't realize you had only one son," Shawn said with,
if I didn't know him better, a tinge of sarcasm.
True enough, the story thus far has been a little Mikecentric, but there are reasons for only now getting to No. 2
son in any great depth. Good reasons, too. Or at least that is
our story and we're sticking to it.
First, you show me a family with more than one kid and I'll
show you a family who in a variety of different ways doesn't
lavish quite the same amount of undivided attention on the
second as the
first
received. For the
first
three years of Mike's
life, with Shawn not being born until July of 1989, Mike had
a captive audience.
The reality is that when Mike was three years old, my focus
was solely on getting him to skate. When Shawn was three
years old, my hockey-related efforts were split between Mike's
first
year in the six-year-old house league and getting Shawn
on the ice for the
first
time. So if my recollection of
dpecific
s
about Shawn's early hockey days isn't quite as sharp as it was
for his brother, I suppose I stand guilty as charged.
There's another factor, too, though. While Mike was absolutely maniacal about all things hockey-playing it, watching
it, drawing it, talking it, singing it-Shawn was, shall we say,
somewhat less enthusiastic. Oh, he liked it well enough. Like
his older brother, he would as a toddler pick up a mini-stick
and bat a ball around the house. And if little Mikey and I were
in the basement "taking shots" on each other, Shawn would
join in. Mike, especially if I wasn't around, would get Shawn
all suited in the goalie pads and gloves and drill shots at him.
Shawn would stand in there, get unmercifully pelted with a
tennis ball and take whatever Mike was dishing out without
so much as a whimper.
But Shawn didn't sit for hours at a time and draw hockey
pictures. He had no interest whatsoever in learning which
logos belonged to which teams and couldn't have cared less
about how Mike's friend Mario Le-Moo brushed his teeth.
Shawn's attention span was
fl
eeting. He would go from
one thing to the next in rapid succession. His hockey stick
wasn't going to get any more attention from him than his toy
truck or toy car or toy gun or Super Soaker or toy sword or his
action
figure
s. He was much more likely to plant himself in
front of the TV to watch cartoons than a hockey game, which
is to say he was a pretty normal little kid.
That said, Shawn was still going to be given every opportunity Mike had when it came to hockey.
The
first
time I recall having Shawn on skates was just
after Christmas of 1992, when he was about three and a half
years old. That's when the Griswolds-I mean the McKenzies-decided to do the Christmas Vacation thing in Gavle, Sweden,
site of the 1993 World Junior Championship. I obviously had
to work the tournament for TSN and since the
first
game started
on Christmas Day, Cindy and I agreed it would be nice for the
whole family to be together for a family Christmas in Sweden.
So we sort of celebrated Christmas in Canada with our
families four or
five
days before the actual day. Then the four
of us-Cindy, six-year-old Mike and three-year-old Shawn and
I-jetted off to Sweden. If that sounds exotic and glamorous,
great, but anyone who has traveled with kids that age, they
know only too well what it's really like.
There was, with a seven-hour time difference, the seven
hour overnight
fl
ight from Toronto to Frankfurt and a six-hour
layover in Frankfurt before the two-hour
fl
ight to Stockholm,
followed by the two-hour drive north to Gavle. I recall getting
into the nice Volvo station wagon rental we got at Stockholm's
Arlanda airport and everyone (except me, of course) immediately, for the
first
time on the trip, falling asleep in the car.
As we drove north from Stockholm to Gavle on that snowy
afternoon and the family slept, I did what I could to stay awake,
but it was
difficult
, compounded by the fact I was starting to
feel extremely warm, so much so that I thought I might be
getting sick with a fever. I started sweating. My shirt and jeans
became drenched. The hotter I got, the more tired I got. Every
so often I would have to put down the window to get a blast of
cold, fresh air to keep me awake. I was never so happy on the
early evening of Christmas Eve to
finally
arrive at our hotel in
Gavle, wake up the family, unpack the car and check in.
It was only as I exited the car and happened to put my hand
on the driver's seat that I made an amazing discovery-this car
had heated seats, which was a totally new and foreign concept
for me. Let's just say that drive might have been a lot more
enjoyable if I'd realized the heated seat was on high and frying
my backside for the entire time.
I mention the Gavle trip because, to the best of my recollection, that was where Shawn
first
skated. I had gone out in
advance of the trip to buy Shawn his own skates. We took the
same bob skates Mike had learned on but I
figure
d Shawn was
a little older than when Mike
first
tried skating, so he needed
to have single-blade skates.
There was a great outdoor rink close to the hotel in Gavle
where kids and adults played shinny all day long. That is where
we spent a considerable amount of our free time. Mike loved
it because there were little pickup games going on all over the
ice and it took him no time at all to mix in.
It was also a time when the McKenzie family got to hang
out with Darryl Sittler and his family. Darryl's son Ryan was
playing for Team USA. Darryl and his lovely wife, Wendy, who
passed away in October of 2001 after a battle with colon cancer, and their daughters Ashley and Meaghan, were staying at
our hotel. The Sittler girls were older than our boys by quite
a few years but they got a great kick out of Mike and Shawn,
especially three-and-a-half-year-old Shawn, whose energy usually made him the center of attention.
Shawn and Mike couldn't have been more different as kids.
Mike was a little quiet and shy. He was always as neat as a pin,
polite and well spoken. Shawn was not quiet and not shy. He
would talk to anybody anywhere. No matter how hard Cindy
tried to dress up Shawn, he always looked like an unmade bed.
His shirt was always untucked, his hair was all over the place.
As much as he talked, he wasn't what you would call a great
talker. He couldn't say his name very well because he couldn't
pronounce his Ss or Fs. So if you asked him his name, he would
say "Gawn." When he was four, if you asked him how old he
was, he would say "Gore."
It turned out he didn't have a speech impediment as much
as he was either just too lazy to say his Ss and Fs or simply liked
the reaction he got from saying things incorrectly because he
went to precisely one and a half speech classes before saying
his Ss and Fs the right way. Our theory was once he realized
he would have to commit time and effort to speech lessons,
he just decided to say words correctly and be done with it. But
that was Shawn. Tell him to walk, he would run. So it was obvious to me, as a Hockey Dad, that I was dealing with someone
completely different than Mike.
Mind you, it wasn't as if Shawn didn't like hockey. When
he
first
hit the ice in Sweden he had a great time. But I probably spent as much time carrying the lazy little monkey in
my arms and whooshing him around the rink as he did actually skating. But he was having fun out there, so were all the
McKenzies and the Sittlers, too.
The Sittlers didn't bring their skates to Sweden, but I would
take off mine and let Darryl go out for a twirl with Mike and
Shawn. We have video of that, which is kind of neat. Darryl
would skate for a bit and then his daughter Meaghan, who
went on a few years later to be a star hockey player at Colby
College in Maine, would use my skates, too. It was a wonderful time. The Sittlers were great fun. Darryl is about as nice
a guy as you could imagine and Wendy was wonderful, too.
She took a real shine to Shawn, as did the Sittler girls. For as
much video as we have of the kids skating in Sweden, we've
got the Sittler girls putting a Harley-Davidson handkerchief on
Shawn's head like a biker bandanna-Shawn was on some sort
of crazy Harley-Davidson kick at the time.
As an aside, years later, Cindy and I were having a garage
sale. Those old Bauers of mine, all beat up and with no laces in
them, were on a table in our driveway with a price tag of $2. A
guy picked them up and looked at them, and was contemplating whether to buy them.
"Those were once worn by Darryl Sittler," I told the guy.
The guy looked at me like I was crazy. He put them back down
and walked away.
Okay, so here's the bottom line. At this age, Shawn liked hockey
but didn't love it; he liked the Power Rangers more than the
New York Rangers and I, thankfully, was not dumb enough
to fall into the trap of believing Shawn should be exactly like
Mike. It was probably easier for me to accept that about Shawn
because I was so busy with Mike's hockey, to say nothing of
work. For instance, when Shawn was four, I was up to my eyeballs in the craziness of Mike's Select 7 season. But however
immersed I was in Mike's hockey, I still wanted to make sure
Shawn was given every opportunity Mike had because it wasn't
like Shawn hated hockey, he just wasn't as over the top about it.
So for the 1994-95 season, when Mike was playing his
first
year of AAA, I was adamant Shawn should start playing because
he was
five
, a full year older than when I started Mike in the
Pickering hockey school as a four-year-old. But now that we
were living in Whitby, not Pickering, there was no
five
-year-old
hockey school for Shawn. It turned out there was a program
within the Oshawa CYO (Catholic Youth Organization), which
had a house-league system based on the various parishes in
Oshawa and Whitby. The Oshawa CYO hockey school, though,
was almost identical to the PMHA hockey school in that it was
mostly instructional. Like I was with Mike, I was able to help
out on the ice with Shawn.
Shawn liked it well enough-at least he never complained
about going-but when it was over, it was over and he moved
on to other stuff. The big excitement that season, probably
more for me than Shawn, was when he got "called up" from
the hockey school to play one game in the league. Our parish,
Holy Family in Whitby, was going to be short some players
for a game in the Squirt house league and Shawn got the call
to
fill
in. Not unlike Mike, Shawn never touched the puck in
that
first
game he ever played, not even close actually, but it
sure seemed like the big time to me. The stars of the CYO back
then were the Neals, a Whitby family with four hockey-playing boys. The player who dominated the CYO back then was
James Neal, an '87 who has gone on to star for the Dallas Stars.