CHAPTER FOUR

Steven Richard Montador was born on December 21, 1979 in Vancouver General Hospital. He weighed seven pounds exactly, and had brown hair and blue eyes. His father, Paul, was with his mother, Donna, in the delivery room. His three-year-old brother Chris and his sister Lindsay, seventeen months—along with Paul’s parents, who lived in Vancouver, and Donna’s, who lived in Edmonton—all visited him the next day. In Steve’s baby book, under “News headlines of the day” for December 21, Donna recorded, “Simmer snaps record. Flyers tie one.” A few days later, the birth announcement to family and friends read: “The forward line is in place. Now we have to work on the defence.”

The Montadors lived in Richmond, a fast-growing suburb on the Fraser River delta, about fifteen kilometres south of downtown Vancouver. Paul was thirty-three and a rising young executive in the pharmaceutical industry; Donna, at thirty-two, with three kids age three and under, had her hands full at home.

Donna had grown up in Edmonton. Her grandparents had left the turmoil of Eastern Europe for the unknown of Canada not long after Alberta became a province in 1905, settling on a parcel of wild grasses and trees near Smoky Lake, about 100 kilometres northeast of the city. When Donna’s father was old enough, he moved off the farm—first to a series of nearby small towns, and finally to Edmonton to sell what a post–Second World War public was ready to buy: insurance and real estate. He also loved hockey. When the WHA was formed and the Oilers came to town, he was “second in line” to buy season tickets, Donna remembers. He bought four of them, just above the home bench. Donna’s friend, Barb, dated Al Hamilton, one of the Oilers’ players. In the off-season, Hamilton played fastball. Paul Montador, newly arrived in Edmonton from Vancouver, loved baseball and—not knowing anyone outside of work—joined Hamilton’s team. Through Al, he met Barb; and through Barb, he met Donna. Al Hamilton, a decade later, would be the first Oiler to have his number retired.

Paul had come to Edmonton to work for Ortho, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. It was his job to travel through central Alberta, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories as a “detail rep,” selling the company’s birth control products, calling on doctors, and setting the table for the sales reps who would later close the deal. It was his first job out of university.

He hadn’t wanted to leave Vancouver. All his family was there, including his grandfather, with whom he was close. His father had been the head of building approvals and inspections for the City of Vancouver, at a time when City Hall was an important place to work. As the family story goes, he was also a local baseball star who had once pitched a twenty-three-inning shutout against a barnstorming U.S. team, winning 1–0. His opposing pitcher: Satchel Paige.

Even more so, Paul didn’t want to leave the city because Vancouver was Vancouver: the mountains, the water, the weather. To him, there was no place like it. But at Ortho he would get good training. He would learn how to sell—a necessary skill in any job, he believed. He would get to know an important industry and not have anyone perched on his shoulder telling him what to do. Nor did he want to live the office-bound life of his father. Besides, Edmonton wasn’t forever. Paul had big things in mind for his life. Nothing specific, but big.

Paul loved to learn, and wanted to be in positions and places where he could learn. He wanted to know more about whatever he was doing than anyone else around him. And he wanted to be in charge. He had learned that in baseball. He was a catcher, and as a catcher he was involved in every play; he set the tone; he had to think ahead. His job was to keep everyone in the game. If his pitcher was drifting, he would fire the ball back to him hard enough to sting his hand and get his attention. He had to be the manager on the field. It wasn’t long before he realized that he liked managing as much as he did playing. In whatever job he took, in whatever field, he was going to live a manager’s life. Ortho was the first step, even if that meant Edmonton.

After high school, Donna had taken some business courses, then got a job with a travel agent. Paul was on the road a lot during the week with his work, and on weekends he played in fastball tournaments around the province with the Payton Playboys, Alberta champions for two straight years. His new relationship with Donna seemed to be going somewhere, then it didn’t, then they didn’t know. When it reached one stuttering point, Donna heard that Wardair, a charter airline, was looking to open up routes across Canada and to the U.S. and Europe, and they needed a sales agent in Hawaii. Donna was offered the job.

Paul, too, was getting restless. At that point, he felt that he had learned all he was going to learn at Ortho and was growing tired of Edmonton. So when he was offered a job in Vancouver as a sales rep at Canlab, a large hospital supply company—effectively one step higher up the ladder—he took it. He and Donna went their separate ways, but absence soon had its effect. Over Christmas in 1971, Paul flew to Hawaii and he and Donna became engaged. Five months later, they were married in Vancouver. A year later, they moved to Toronto. Paul had been promoted again.

Paul believed that he learned about 80 to 90 per cent of what he could learn in any job in two years. Then it was time to move on: within the same company, if possible; or to somewhere else, if that was better. In Toronto he was an operations manager at Canlab, involved in purchasing and customer service—“a complete shift from sales,” as he puts it. For Paul, it was another “learning opportunity,” and a chance to build a broader foundation for his career. Donna was working at Wardair’s Toronto office. Two years later, Paul was promoted to sales manager, then again two years after that, as the company moved more broadly into the hospital sector. It was 1976, the year Chris, their first child, was born.

Soon Paul was asked to run Canlab’s new hospital division. There he worked with hospital architects who needed to know more about new medical technologies and their uses, just as he needed to learn more from the architects about the requirements of hospital design. His work took him across the country. Paul and Donna’s second child, Lindsay, was born.

These were the prime learning years, as Paul believes—from age twenty-seven to thirty-two. Years to gain experience, to develop skills and confidence, to work new jobs, to live in new places. Within eighteen months, he was asked by Canlab to run hospital supply for all of Western Canada. It was a chance for Paul to move back to his beloved Vancouver. The family bought a modern, suburban home in Richmond; Paul bought a new white Corvette. A few months later, Steve was born. Less than a year after that, Paul returned to Toronto to run Canlab’s hospital supply division for all of Canada. He was now working at the company’s head office, in the country’s biggest city; at Canlab, he had no place else to go. Now thirty-four, it was time for Paul to settle down.

They bought a house on Avonbridge Drive in Mississauga—Paul, Donna, Chris, Lindsay, and Steve—south of the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW), the main east–west highway between Toronto and Buffalo, and just north of Port Credit, on Lake Ontario. It was in an area canopied by old maples, beeches, and pines, its windy streets shaped by the nearby Credit River and by Avonbridge Creek, which ran behind their property. Their street wasn’t much more than a hundred metres long. It had new houses on both sides, and a big round cul de sac—“the circle” as they called it—at the end, where the Montadors lived. The circle, about thirty metres in diameter, flat and smoothly paved, was the gathering place for the neighbourhood’s kids, for ball hockey games, soccer games, bike riding, skipping, hopscotch, mini-car racing; it was where games of hide-and-seek and capture the flag began. It was for boys and girls of all ages, the older ones amiably ignoring the younger ones who worshipped them; a place where kids played, and parents didn’t worry.

Their house was only a few years old when they moved in. It was Cape Cod in style, with red brick, a porch, white trim and dormers across the roof in the front, and a shade-filled yard with trees and bushes and a large, curvilinear pool with a diving board in the back. From the pool, the yard sloped further downward—a perfect first hill for tobogganing—to a narrow, shallow, slow-running creek—a perfect first skating rink in winter. It was on this creek that Chris, Lindsay, and Steve learned to skate, though as Donna recalls, Steve spent most of his time lying on his back, looking up at the sky, chipping away at the ice with the backs of his skate blades.

Inside, the house was spacious and open, just right for a young family who put more priority on playing than on the scratches and dents that sometimes resulted. Steve’s baby book says that he took his first steps in this house on December 19, 1980, two days before his first birthday, and that three days later he began climbing the stairs that led up to the second floor. There is a picture of him in the family photo album on those steps a few months after that, with his first black eye. He was round and chubby as a baby; his eyes, slightly close together like Will Ferrell’s, were sometimes almost slit-shut in a grin, and at other times were wide open with a pensive, distant look.

The Montadors were a prosperous young family on the move. Chris was a big physical kid; he was all boy. Lindsay, almost two years younger, had to fight to keep from getting run over or ignored. Steve, three years younger than Chris, wanted to do everything his brother did, and he tried. The three of them were always doing something—and in their house, in their neighbourhood, there was always something to do.

In his first hockey photo, Steve is not yet three. It shows him in the basement family room, an oversized hockey helmet on his head, his face almost invisible behind its protective cage. In a photo taken a few months later, again in the family room, he has on old goalie pads that extend almost as high as his armpits; his blocker is turned backwards and his catching glove is twisted, as if he has been propped in place by Chris and Lindsay so that they can blast shots at him.

But in the photographs that follow, Steve’s look soon changes. He moves out of family-room hockey to the backyard creek, and then to real-life arenas. He puts on full equipment, wearing it as if it were his own, with an excited, “can you believe I’m out here doing this?” expression on his face. He becomes old enough to join teams—St. Lawrence Starch, Ontario Gypsum, Dominion Securities, Royal Canadian Legion, Mooredale Construction. In team photos, he is usually standing in the back row, but never in the middle, and only once with a C on his jersey. In an individual photo taken when he was seven, a right-handed shot, he is positioned a little bent forward, his stick on the ice as if he were told to stand this way. A year later, crouched forward even more, a big smile on his face, he looks as he would in promotional photos years later, in junior hockey with St. Mike’s, and in the NHL. He looks like a hockey player.

Within a few years, his face gets thinner and more mature, his shoulders become square and broad. At eleven, he has a high brush cut and a ready-to-please grin; at twelve, his hair is long enough to be slicked back, his hands are in his pockets, and he has a teenager’s cool “okay let’s get this over with” look on his face. There is another photo of him that year, taken at the bottom of the stairs that led to the second floor. Donna is next to him, standing on the first step; Steve is taller than his mother.

Growing up in a nice house in a nice neighbourhood—with his parents, his brother and sister, and his friends around him—it was a kid’s life until he was twelve.

Then it became a hockey life.

—

For many years, Paul would arrive at the office every Monday morning to stories from co-workers, each one more horrible than the next, about their lives as parents of sons in AAA hockey. Stories about the games that might be played anywhere in the sprawl of Greater Toronto, and journeys in traffic that was getting worse by the month. About the weeknight practices that were too early for parents to put in a full day’s work, too early for their kids to have a good dinner, too late for their kids to have a good night’s sleep. About the Thanksgivings, Christmases, and school breaks when the games went on uninterrupted, interrupting everything else; about the weekend tournaments a hundred kilometres or more away in who knows where, the crummy motels, the coffee, the Timbits. About the injuries that their kids wore like badges of honour: bruised shoulders that they called “separations,” twists that were “slight tears,” and bumps to the head that they shrugged off as nothing because that’s what the NHL guys did. There were stories about real or imagined traumas—the linemates who never passed the puck to their kid; the coach who didn’t like him. The cost. The time.

One Monday morning, as Chris was nearing that hockey-committed age, Paul declared to a co-worker, “Over my dead body will my boys ever be involved in this insane activity.”

This was a declaration Paul could make at work, and attempt to manage at home. He decided that instead of saying “no” to hockey, he would get his kids to say “yes” to something else. He was from B.C.—why not skiing? It was outdoors. It was healthy and active; and it was only on weekends and holidays, and only as long as the snow stayed frozen on the ground. It also meant trips to beautiful places. The family together. It was something they could all do all of their lives. It made sense. But Paul soon realized that skiing wouldn’t be his answer. Really, there was no answer. This was Canada—neighbourhood kids playing ball hockey in the circle; NHL games on TV; team jerseys, toques, and T-shirts for Christmas and birthdays. Hockey was everywhere.

At aged twelve—“against my better judgment,” as Paul recalls—Chris joined a AA team. It still wasn’t that much more than it had been in house league and select, a game or two a week, a practice, a few tournaments; a schedule that started late enough in the year and ended early enough to allow time for soccer or baseball or trips with the family or messing around with friends. Chris was good enough to play AAA, but that would mean too much of everything—games, practices, time—for him and for the whole family. If Paul couldn’t keep Chris from playing, at least he could manage the worst of the fallout.

But then, Chris got a chance to play AAA bantam with the Toronto Marlboros (known as the Marlies), the most storied minor hockey organization in the country. Its big team, the Junior A Marlies, had won the Memorial Cup as Canada’s national champions seven times, more than any other team. Over two hundred Marlies players had made the NHL, including Hall of Famers Charlie Conacher, Joe Primeau, George Armstrong, Bob Pulford, Brad Park, and Mark Howe. The Marlies, as Paul put it, were a “great brand.”

Paul decided that he needed to get to know the team’s coach, Jim Nicoletti. If Chris were to sign with the Marlies, he would spend countless hours with Nicoletti—intense, meaningful, unforgettable hours. Nicoletti would become an important adult in Chris’s life. The decisions that he made, the tricky moments he faced and the way in which he faced them, Chris would see. Chris would learn from him; but would he learn what he should learn?

Nicoletti was a school principal as well as a coach, and a family man with “real integrity,” as Paul described him; his son, Dan, was on the team—a good kid and, unlike many coaches’ sons, a good player as well. Besides, Paul started to think, even if Chris playing AAA didn’t seem quite right for the family, to play at a level less than he had the ability to play didn’t seem right either. After all, that’s not how Paul had lived his life. And so Chris joined the Marlies.

Paul and Donna had a rule in the family. No matter what happened the rest of the week, no matter how much Paul had been on the road and how busy the five of them had been with their own lives, on Sunday they had dinner together. With AAA hockey, that rule went out the window. It was now a hockey life for Chris—and a hockey life for the family.

In AAA hockey, there are more games—two or three a week, plus weekend tournaments—and more practices, taking place in more months of the year, in more distant parts of the city or region. Chris’s teammates now lived many kilometres away, in Scarborough or North York, rather than down the street. There was no carpooling to a game or practice. Nor could they take public transit. And because Chris had to be there for every game or practice—in AAA there are no excuses—Paul and/or Donna (with Paul’s travel schedule, it was more likely Donna) had to be there—so Lindsay and Steve had to be there, too. Lindsay remembers a writing assignment that she did in Grade 4. She called it “My life in a hockey arena.” Chris’s commitment had become the family’s commitment.

Then Steve got to be old enough to join a team, and he too moved up, from house league to select. Paul and Donna put him into power skating lessons with a woman who was a former figure skater. She taught Steve and the other kids in her class about inside and outside edges. She pushed them to try things they had never done before. She demonstrated to them a turn in which they would need to angle their bodies closer and closer to the ice, uncomfortably close, until it seemed as if they were almost sideways to it, with nothing to hold them up. The kids had to be willing to accept this feeling, and learn to deal with it. The instructor watched them as their bodies fought their minds—their minds winning, their bodies jerking upright—and finally said to them, “You’ve got to be willing to fall to learn how to do this turn. You will have to fall. There’s no other way.” Only Steve was willing to fall. That’s how he was in everything, Paul recalls.

When Steve was twelve, he joined the AA Mississauga Braves. His coach was Jim Donaldson: “Mr. D,” as the players called him. Donaldson had been a good minor hockey player in Toronto as a kid—an opponent or teammate of many who went on to have NHL careers. He was tough, and a good skater with a hard shot, but more than anything, he loved to play. He loved the trash talk and the laughter of the dressing room, the sweat-and-grin of practice, the give-it-all feeling of the big game. He loved being around the guys. He had dreamed of making the NHL himself, of course, but when he didn’t, his hockey life merely shifted direction. He became a father and a coach. He coached mostly the way he played, but now with a parent’s perspective—he and his wife had five kids, and his son Dave was also on the Braves. He knew that his players had their own dreams of making the big time, but his dream for them was to experience the full hockey life—the sweating, grinning, trashtalking, laughter, and give-it-all feeling—the one, years later, that he has come to value the most.

Donaldson turned forty-eight the year he coached Steve. He was working in the warehouse at Chrysler at the time, an eighteen-year veteran of the night shift—10:30 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. He had turned down promotions that would let him work other hours because, as he explains, “The night shift was perfect for me. It allowed me to coach.” During breaks at work, he drew up drills for the next day’s practice on IBM cards that were always lying around. On nights when his team wasn’t playing, he sharpened skates at one of two local arenas, Huron Park or Clarkson. He did that for twenty years. Later, when his kids grew up and he stopped coaching, he moved to the day shift, but found he couldn’t sleep.

Donaldson coached with a growl in his voice and a tight smile on his face, and when he spoke, his mouth turned slightly to one side, like tough guys used to talk. Most of the kids on the team had moved from team to team with him, from select to A, and now to AA. Nine of them would stay together for six years, which in a big city is something almost inconceivable in minor hockey. Steve was one of two players who were new to the team. He was also the youngest. With his December 21 birthday, a teammate or an opponent might be almost a year older than he was—not an insignificant advantage when you are only twelve years old. That older player can be more physically, emotionally, and intellectually developed. He is able to do more things, play with better players as linemates, be on better teams with better coaches. He is more likely to seem to others—teammates, coaches, parents—and to himself, to be a better player, and he is more likely to be a better player, both now and in the future. The first stars, usually the oldest kids, are often the future stars.

Steve had to find a way to fit in with his new team on the ice and off. But if anyone was worried he wouldn’t manage it, they needn’t have. Donaldson describes how, after a week, “I walked into the dressing room and there he was in the middle of the fray. He wasn’t exactly shy and retiring.” When Donaldson thinks about Steve later in that first season, he remembers him as “like [golfer] Lee Trevino walking up the fairway to his ball—talking to the fans, joking. But when he got to that ball, he would focus. It was his time. In practice, Steve would be kibitzing around, but then when I’d blow my whistle he was all business.” He did every drill to “his absolute maximum. Good mood, bad mood, when he came to the rink, no mood. Just hockey. This was like heaven for him. It was where he wanted to be.”

Steve had to pick up the pace of his game; this was AA now. He was a good skater, and had a good shot, but just because he did—and though he was immensely proud of it—it didn’t mean he had to shoot every time and from everywhere. Donaldson often reminded him that when he began to shoot he lowered his head and could no longer see his teammates, who might be open and in an even better position to score. (Donaldson remembers watching the Calgary Flames on Hockey Night in Canada more than ten years later. On the screen, he saw Steve standing at the point; the puck came back to him, he wound up, stopped, and wristed a pass to a teammate in the corner. Donaldson jumped up out of his chair. “He listened,” he shouted. It was a coach’s moment.)

Donaldson coached Steve during the most pivotal minor hockey season for every kid—the year when body-checking is introduced (the age has changed over time, and varies depending on the province). There had been lots of body contact in the seasons before, of course, but it was incidental—two players going for the puck and bumping into each other—and (mostly) accidental. In Toronto, minor hockey tryouts are held in May for the next season, not long after the previous season has ended. When coaches select their team before that body-checking year, they have to ask themselves for the first time: Is he big enough? Is he physical enough? Can he take it? For those kids and their parents who get the good news, they spend the summer thinking about what’s ahead, all of them excited, but many also fearful. Some kids mature earlier; some later. One of Donaldson’s players made the team in May wearing size eight skates and started the season four months later in size elevens. Physical growth brings confidence and aggression to some kids, and gangly, mismatched body parts to others. And suddenly, on the ice, these kids are allowed to collide.

In that first checking year, players look like little bighorn rams running at each other, and they can’t stop themselves from doing it. For weeks into the season and sometimes longer, the puck is almost forgotten. The kids have to prove—to their coaches, to their teammates, to their opponents, and to themselves—that they are tough enough to hit and to take a hit, in this game, next game, every game. Kids who, up until this moment in their lives had been the best players on the ice, who can skate like the wind, prefer suddenly to skate like the wind without the puck, to be the targeter not the target, the punisher not the punished. For some, the joy that has always been in their eyes is gone. And this is true of their parents, too; every season Donaldson saw it happen. A year or two later, and these kids are out of hockey, because of the financial cost of the game, because of the time commitment it requires—that’s what the kids and their parents will say. But really, for many, it’s because of body-checking.

The coaches try to prepare young players for body-checking: how to position themselves, how to take a hit. Although Steve was the youngest on the team, he was strong, big enough, solid on his skates, and had a “knack for hitting,” as Donaldson puts it. Just before the moment of contact, when both kids were loading up for the blow, Steve would deliver his a split second sooner. He had this sense of timing. Maybe it was from having an older brother, and all the wrestling and banging around they did. Steve wasn’t mean, Donaldson recalls, but he could really sting you.

For kids in minor hockey, there is “BC” and “AC”—“before contact” and “after contact.” And there are the “BSs” and the “ASs”—the “before stars” and the “after stars.” Steve, who had never been the best on the ice, at this moment began to see some of the best fall away, and he was still left standing.

One of Steve’s teammates on the Braves was Mike Gardner. Both he and Steve were defencemen, and both played the same defence-first style of game. They both liked to hit, but Steve hit the hardest, “like a truck,” Mike remembers. Steve was the best skater and had the hardest slapshot. Other guys with big shots blasted away from the point, the puck going high and everywhere, their teammates scattering from the front of the net to safety. Steve’s shot, though he used it too frequently, was heavy and low, and nearly always on the net—just right for deflections and rebounds. But it was Steve’s attitude that made him different. He was competitive, fearless, and intimidating to play against. You couldn’t get to him, Mike remembers. If other guys got knocked down they would get embarrassed and shrink away; Steve would get back up as if nothing had happened. If he got into a fight and lost, it was as if he hadn’t lost. He just kept going. If he tried to do too much and got caught out, which happened not infrequently, he’d try harder the next time. He’d do what needed to be done. The team might be behind 3–1, and in between periods “you’d look around the dressing room,” Mike recalls, “and some guys, you know, they’d figure we’ve got no chance. I’d look at Steve and know we did.

“He was my idol,” Mike says now.

Mike’s parents and the Montadors were friends. The year before, Mike’s older brother, Jimmy, had been killed in a bicycle accident; Mike was devastated. He and Steve didn’t know each other well at the time. Maybe Paul and Donna said something to Steve about the accident, Mike thinks, or maybe Steve just knew, but that summer after his brother’s death, Steve hardly left his side. They had sleepovers, went for bike rides, played endless games of catch. “How many kids would do that?” Mike thinks now. When you are that age you don’t even know what to say when someone dies, let alone what to do. It’s not that they talked about Jimmy, Mike recalls. It was the comfort he felt from Steve being around, and doing things together.

When Mike thinks back on that year’s Braves team, he remembers “a great bunch of guys. We lived in the same neighbourhood, went to the same school. Everybody knew each other. We were a real team. We felt like a team. We played like a team. About 80 per cent of us still see each other today.” They play in a Braves reunion game every year; they play golf together. “It was the best team I ever played on.”

“Steve just loved to play,” Donaldson remembers. “He loved every part of it. He didn’t just love it when he was a star, when body contact came in, when he had a coach who liked him and put him on the power play; when the team was winning. He loved it, every bit of it, all the time. You just knew somehow he would make it.”

It’s tough being a minor hockey coach. It’s the long hours; it’s all the rest of your life that you don’t have time for. But it’s the responsibility you have, more than anything. That’s the best and the hardest part. These players like each other. They develop a feeling for each other and a loyalty to the team; they make a commitment to each other. In the end, they would do almost anything for each other. Those who are coaches and decision-makers in the league know this, but sometimes they forget. If they ask their players to go through a wall for their team, these kids might just try. They will do things that are good for themselves and for each other, and they will do things that aren’t. Coaches and the other adults in the league have to know the difference between what seems to be good for these kids now and what might be bad for them later.

Donaldson himself had been a heart-and-soul player. He did some things as a player that, now as an adult, he knows that he shouldn’t have done. As a coach, he came to know there were limits to what he should ask of his players—because each of these kids had his own life, and lots of years to live it.

At the end of the season with the Braves, Donaldson gathered the parents together. It had been a good year. The team had almost won the AA championship. The kids liked each other. The parents liked each other. Paul recalls how, at this point, Donaldson grew impassioned. There was no need to go on to AAA, he told them. They could stay together and get everything out of the minor hockey experience that they, as parents, had always said minor hockey was for. But the pull of moving up was greater, and several players left—including Steve, who would go on to play AAA hockey for the Marlies.

—

During that season with the Braves, at some moment that didn’t seem to matter at the time—and in a way he later wouldn’t remember—at age twelve, Steve got his first concussion.