CHAPTER SEVEN

It was early September 1996 when Chris got a call. It was Steve, in North Bay. “I should have taken the scholarship,” he said immediately. He didn’t even say “hi” first.

North Bay is a small city of about 50,000 on the shore of Lake Nipissing, near the southern edge of the Canadian Shield, an immense area of mineral resources, lakes, trees, winter cold, summer sunshine, wide open spaces, and not many people. The city calls itself the “Gateway to the North,” but more than that it has been a transportation junction between east and west. By car, on the Trans-Canada Highway; by train, on the railroad line from Halifax to Vancouver; and, for centuries by canoe, on what is sometimes called “the first Trans-Canada Highway,” a waterway that runs from Montreal, up the Ottawa River and the Mattawa River to Trout Lake, then over a seven-mile portage to Lake Nipissing, and down the French River to Georgian Bay and Lake Huron. North Bay’s first senior hockey team was called the “Trappers”; and its first major junior team was named the “Centennials,” coming to the city as it did in 1982, one hundred years after the railroad had arrived in North Bay.

The city had once been a centre for lumbering and mining, for sport-fishermen and hunters. RCAF Station North Bay was constructed in 1951, in the midst of the Cold War; a decade later, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) built an operations centre sixty storeys deep into the rock of the Shield to monitor Canada’s airspace and warn of a nuclear attack. The base became North Bay’s largest employer. When the Cold War ended, its operations were cut back. By the time Steve arrived in the mid-1990s, the city was doing better economically than most places its size—especially in the north—but many of its young people Steve’s age were leaving for the action and the jobs in larger cities in the south, like Toronto.

North Bay hockey had also seen better times. Most of hockey’s promising young players were now being developed in the competitive hothouses of the suburbs to the south. The north’s hockey advantages were long gone: cold weather, ice more months of the year, kids with fewer things to do and more time alone to develop a star’s special skills. But no one played outdoors now, especially in the north—it was too cold—and the indoor game could be played twelve months a year. Hockey had also become less an individual game of great personal skill than a team game based on coaches and systems. Kids needed time to play with and against others who were just as good; they needed highly competitive time, not time alone. In the south, those players and teams were in the same cities. In the north, they were a long, time-wasting car ride away.

North Bay had had senior amateur hockey for decades, a minor professional team for a year, then senior again. It had built a new arena in 1955, seating 3,500; the rink, like the city, was too big for senior amateur hockey, too small for anything more—and the OHL was tethered by bus travel to southern and eastern Ontario. Then, in 1972, the league expanded to Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury. Both cities were bigger than North Bay, but if distance was no longer the unanswerable question, then North Bay could dream.

In 1982, the OHL’s Niagara Falls Flyers were looking to the city of Niagara Falls to build a new arena, and when the city refused, the Flyers moved to North Bay. Importantly, their coach moved with them. Bert Templeton had been successful coaching junior teams in Hamilton, St. Catharines, and, of course, Niagara Falls. He would continue that success in North Bay, with the Centennials never missing the playoffs in his twelve seasons, the team making it to the OHL finals twice, winning once and going to the Memorial Cup. But Templeton was looking for a raise after the team won the OHL title in 1994, and when he didn’t get it, he left.

In the 1990s, Junior hockey was changing. NHL players were still mostly ineligible for the Olympics, and the World Championships, held at the same time as the Stanley Cup playoffs, were second-rate. For Canadians, the only defining international hockey competition was the World Junior Championships. Played in a post-Christmas, New Year lull in the NHL schedule, and broadcast on TV, these games generated a huge new appetite for junior hockey. And this enthusiasm came at a time when old local rinks were needing to be replaced. New ones went up—mini-NHL arenas with 5,000 comfortable seats, better food, and videoboards. The OHL continued to expand. Franchises increased in value.

With more money invested, owners began running teams like businesses. But North Bay had a new problem. It was the second-smallest city in the league. Much of its economy was government-based, in industries—military, education, health—that had little sponsorship or promotional money to spend on a hockey team. The Cents played in an old, small rink and had little prospect of a new one.

Templeton had made North Bay’s limited prospects work because he had made the Cents competitive. But the season after he left, the team lost in the first round of the playoffs. A year later, they missed them entirely. This is the team that Steve joined before the start of the 1996–97 season.

Steve’s call to Chris came soon after he had moved to the city—before the cold had come, before the team’s first five-game losing streak and seven-hour bus ride to Erie, before it was clear that this was a bad team going nowhere. As Chris puts it, this was an “I’m in freaking North Bay, four hours north of Toronto, and now I have to make the NHL because what the heck else am I going to do” call.

Then things began to pick up. Despite everything else, this was a major junior team, one of only forty-nine in the country. Except for some kids from Europe and a few top draft picks who had gone directly to the NHL, Steve was playing against the best under-twenty-year-olds in the world. He was going on road trips. In North Bay, he was playing in front of 2,000 people, near to the lowest attendance in the league, but that was 1,500 more than had ever watched him before, except in Quebec. And on the road, 4,000 or more might be at the games. The Cents were losing, but he was playing—and he was only sixteen years old. He was a big deal, and he was on his way to becoming a bigger one.

He stayed with a local family like all the out-of-town players did. Many of these families had billeted players for years. Most of them were hockey fans, and some enjoyed being almost second parents to teenagers who were tasting freedom for the first time but who needed a little guidance. For some players and their billet families, this would begin a lifelong relationship. But Steve’s accommodations were “terrible,” as Paul recalls. “There was peanut butter, and some frozen food in the freezer, and the people were never around.” Steve said nothing about this to Paul and Donna; as the new kid in town he wasn’t sure he had the right to complain, and besides, having mac and cheese for breakfast, lunch, and dinner didn’t seem to Steve such a bad deal. When Paul and Donna came to visit him and saw the conditions he was living in, he was moved to a new billet, then to another, before finally coming to live with a family he liked—and one who gave him the freedom he was looking for. They let him bring teammates over to their house, and if that led to drinking at times, well that’s what teammates and kids in small towns did. They brought him ice fishing on Lake Nipissing, and if that meant sipping a little whiskey to stay warm, well that was what ice fishermen did, too.

Steve had to get used to a new school. Chris had needed to do the same a few years earlier, but that was at Notre Dame, where if you didn’t do your schoolwork, you didn’t play hockey. In North Bay, the team didn’t pay much attention to the players’ schooling. Those who really wanted to go to school went; the others went sometimes. And while the school was proud to have the Cents as students, some of the teachers were not. The players were absent more often than other students, and at times had to leave class early; they got special treatment. When they were there, the other kids hovered around them; they disrupted the class.

It wasn’t easy for Paul and Donna to know how Steve was doing. He was 400 kilometres away. This was before cellphones, email, texting, or FaceTime—and what could they really tell from a phone call a couple of times a week? Paul wasn’t a talker. He would ask Steve about school, as he promised himself he would, but Steve was also a teenager, and he didn’t say much either. During Paul and Donna’s occasional visits, sometimes with Chris and Lindsay in tow, it always seemed like Steve was either getting ready for a game, or playing a game, or winding down from a game, and all they could really tell about how he was doing was how he was doing on the ice. If the team had won or lost; if he was playing power-play minutes; if he looked good or right to their eyes.

His friends were his teammates. His classmates had Friday nights and weekends to be with each other; Steve had games to play, in North Bay or on the road. The team travelled more than 16,000 kilometres a season, the second-highest total in the OHL—all of it by bus, almost 200 hours in all. Hours playing cards, trashtalking, watching bus-movie classics like Caddyshack or Dumb and Dumber on the VCR, or napping before or sleeping fitfully after the game. These were Steve’s scheduled hours; during them, he had no choices. The hardest hours were his unscheduled ones: after school, after practice, before the next game.

There was a bar they went to. Well, not really a bar, it was more of a barber shop, Chris recalls, or maybe a hair salon. It was a place the players could go, close the blinds, spend time with each other and with girls they’d invited, and drink. Chris had wondered what Steve did in all those hours he wasn’t playing hockey. What was there to do in North Bay? Ice fishing and snowmobiling are fun, but how many times can you do that? North Bay might have been a great place to live for older people during their settled years, but what about for teenagers, especially if they were from the south, as most of the Cents players were.

It was the drinking that most surprised Chris. At home, he and Steve had snuck the occasional beer, as most kids do. But his years in Saskatchewan had been a real eye-opener for Chris. Playing weekend games in small towns, he had never seen so many people so wasted. He thought he had gotten used to it, but during one visit to North Bay he saw his brother and his buddies in action. “This isn’t a place he should be,” thought Chris.

Paul went to road games that were close to Toronto—and sometimes those farther away when he could find a reason to schedule business nearby. He recalls a game in Oshawa late in Steve’s first season with the Cents. Steve was skating up the ice, without the puck, and out of nowhere an Oshawa player, Nathan Perrott, raced at him and crushed him against the boards. Steve didn’t get up. Perrott was over 200 pounds and twenty years old. He would play 89 NHL games, mostly with the Leafs, recording four goals and five assists, and 251 PIM. Perrott got a penalty. Two or three rows in front of Paul, before Steve even got up from the ice, an elderly woman in a hand-knitted Bobby Orr sweater yelled, “Hit him again, Nathan.”

Steve was helped to the dressing room. A short time later, he was back on the bench, then on the ice. He skated over to Perrott and “tapped him,” signalling that he wanted to fight. Perrott was a fighter and, as Paul said, “Steve was a wannabe.”

“He acquitted himself fairly well,” Paul recalls, “and may have impressed his teammates. Nobody told him to do this. He was going to stand up for himself. I remember thinking, ‘He’s not a kid playing hockey at home anymore. He’s part of a different world now.’”

Midway through the year, the Centennials coach, Shane Parker, was fired and replaced by Greg Bignell, but not much changed. The team finished the season with an embarrassing 14–44–8 record, and were out of the playoffs for the second straight year. Steve had gotten a year older, and a year better in some ways. But he played on a dysfunctional team in a not-always-constructive environment. When school was done, Steve went home.

Home for him was now in a different place. The Montadors had moved to Lakefield, a picture-perfect town of old stone houses and churches on the Otonabee River, fifteen kilometres north of Peterborough. Paul was the head of Johnson & Johnson Canada, a division of one of the world’s largest health care companies that had begun its operations in Peterborough three decades earlier, expanded, then contracted as manufacturing was moved to less costly sites offshore. Peterborough had been able to attract large companies in its past—Canadian General Electric, Quaker Oats, Outboard Marine—initially because of the availability of local sources of hydroelectric power, and later because of the lifestyle that the area afforded. Executives of a company who were offered a more senior job might not accept the promotion if it were to a small town. But if it were to Peterborough, they might. With its lakes, rivers, and proximity to Toronto, Peterborough was a blue-collar town that appealed to white-collar people.

Johnson & Johnson in the U.S. had been a major supporter of an injury-prevention organization called ThinkFirst, whose purpose was to get people, especially kids, to “think first” before they dove from a cliff or played chicken with a passing train. Spinal cord injuries were the group’s initial focus; head injuries and concussions came later. Because the U.S. head office had made ThinkFirst a priority, Paul decided to do the same in Canada. He would be on its board for more than fifteen years. The head of ThinkFirst Canada was Dr. Charles Tator, a neurosurgeon. Twenty years later, it was Dr. Lili-Naz Hazrati from Tator’s sports-concussion group who examined Steve’s brain and discovered his CTE.

Peterborough is a hockey town. The Petes had arrived in the city in 1956 and, with a history of great players—Steve Yzerman, Bob Gainey, Chris Pronger—and even greater coaches—Scotty Bowman, Roger Neilson, Mike Keenan—they had been at or near the top of the OHL since then. If you were a boy growing up in Peterborough, you likely played hockey; and if you played hockey, you likely also played lacrosse, as Peterborough’s top lacrosse team—at different times called the Lakers, Trailermen, Petes, and Red Oaks—had won many Canadian championships. And if you were born in Peterborough, you were likely raised in Peterborough, and got married and had kids in Peterborough. Summer cottagers came and went by the thousands; Peterborough’s 80,000 year-round residents stayed. For those new to the city, it wasn’t easy to fit in.

When Steve was twelve, some Peterborough and Toronto fathers put together a team that included kids from both cities to play in summer hockey tournaments. Steve was one of the Toronto players on the team, Jay Legault one of Peterborough’s. It is where they first met. The team, called the Trent Stars, offered good competition over the summer and took up only three of their weekends. There were no practices. The experience was especially useful for the Peterborough kids. Toronto was the big city—its best teams recruited players from across the entire GTA, which had fifty times the population of Peterborough. During the regular winter season, when Peterborough teams played Toronto teams at tournaments, the Peterborough kids thought they would get killed. The Trent Stars were a chance for them to change in the same dressing room as the Toronto kids, go out onto the same ice surface, and see for themselves. They would have to raise the level of their game. The Stars played together for three summers—and the Peterborough kids discovered, of course, that they weren’t so bad after all.

The first night Steve was in Lakefield, he looked through the Peterborough phone book and found the name he wanted. “Hey, Jay, it’s Steve Montador,” he said, “and we’ve moved into the area.” It was a Friday or Saturday night, Jay recalls: “Right away, I got my dad to drive me out there to pick up Monty. I introduced him to all my hockey friends and to the other Peterborough guys who played in the OHL.”

This was the summer, and the Peterborough “hockey guys” were back together again, picking up where they had left off the September before—but now with a season’s worth of stories they couldn’t wait to tell. Nick Robinson had been in the Soo, Chad Cavanagh in Sudbury, Ryan Ready in Belleville, Jay in Oshawa, and Colin Beardsmore with Steve in North Bay. Also in the group were some players who weren’t as good or as interested in hockey, who had played locally on Junior B or Junior C teams. One of them was Mike Keating, or “Keats” as everyone called him.

Jay, Steve, Keats, Nick, and some others worked as on-ice instructors at a hockey school. It ran for seven weeks. If they were lucky, they got four shifts a week, and made between three and four hundred dollars. They also picked up odd jobs to fill in their other days. Many of their parents had small businesses in the area. They cut wood for Nick’s dad, who was an arborist. They roofed houses, poured concrete, and put up tents for Lester Awnings. When they weren’t working, they hung out and trained.

The OHL players, all with at least one junior season behind them, were now more serious. An NHL future had always been the dream. Now they knew what they were up against. Now they could feel time running out. The next few years would determine whether they would make it or not. They got together at the Peterborough Lift Lock and ran; they went to the gym; they pushed each other. They rented the ice to work on their new moves and to laugh at last year’s ones that still didn’t work. On the ice with them were the Peterborough pro-hockey guys—Cory Stillman, Marc Savard, Dave Reid, and others—the guys who had made it. Some of them had been born in the city; others had played with the Petes, had loved the atmosphere of its winning team and adoring fans and, with pro money in their pockets, had come back: to jobs in the city, to summer places on one of the lakes, to marry a girl they had met in junior, to make Peterborough home. They all knew each other—the pros and the juniors. They were the same guys, only a few years apart, and on the ice the pros had to live up to their local reputations, and the juniors had to show them they belonged. For all of them, it was a chance to work up a sweat and a thirst.

For Steve, Jay, Keats, Nick, and the others, a job instructing at the hockey school, roofing houses, or pouring concrete was all about having money for the weekend. None of them had places of their own; none of them wanted to invite twenty-five occasionally out-of-control guys over to their parents’ house. So they had “field parties,” as they called them. At the Lagoon or at Jackson Park, some place enough off the beaten path that they could make a little noise, drink underage, not bother anybody, and not have anybody bother them.

They also took things a step further, and built a cabin in the woods between Douro and Norwood, and called it “the Shack.” The father of one of their friends was a dairy farmer. He had a little land he wasn’t using, supplied them with some barn lumber, and helped them build it. All of them pitched in. The cabin was about fifteen feet by twenty feet, with one room on the main floor and a ladder that connected it to two mini-lofts that could sleep four or five comfortably, and which often slept eight. On weekend summer nights, there might be thirty or forty people around. Everyone brought a case of beer, and they would have a bonfire, hang out, talk, and act foolish, as Jay puts it. They would “chirp” and needle and get under each other’s skin, and everything was fair game. The only offside words were the ones that weren’t funny.

They talked a lot about girls, and at two in the morning, they talked about things that sounded profound. But it didn’t matter what they talked about. This was about being with each other. They were seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old, and at the Shack they could do what they wanted to do. “We spent one whole summer building that thing,” Jay recalls. “Keats, Monty, Nick, all the guys. It was our baby.”

Steve fit right in with the Peterborough guys because of hockey, drinking beer, and girls; because of his humour and the way his mind worked; because he was willing to try anything and do anything, look stupid and be stupid if that’s what the moment was about. He wasn’t shy about the “shenanigans” they got up to, as Keats calls them, they were just more fodder for stories and laughs they would share years later. Steve fit in because he never thought of himself as a hotshot. He lived in the big house on the lake. He was a Toronto guy, but he was different from every other Toronto guy his Peterborough friends had met. Toronto guys acted as if they knew something Peterborough guys didn’t. Steve wasn’t like that. He was one of them. He liked to hang around, pitch in, and do what they did, as if what they were doing mattered, as if Peterborough mattered, as if they mattered. Even when he made it to the NHL.

“He gave everyone the time of day,” Keats recalls. “He used to say, ‘You never know what a person has to say, so why not listen?’”

In time, for the Peterborough guys, their year-round lives took over their summer lives. They got married, had kids, got adult jobs. In time, the drinking got to be too much; the stupid stuff too stupid. Keats, Jay, and Nick went away for a few years. Keats and Jay came back; Nick stayed away and got a job in New York with a large private investment firm, but he came back to visit his family. When Paul and Donna later returned to Toronto, only Steve could pack up and walk away. Yet he always came back, too, for a few days each summer—and Keats, Jay, and Nick visited him wherever his NHL career or summer freedom took him. Between these times, Steve kept in touch with them by phone; later, by email and text. When they were on his mind, he let them know. Just a few funny, familiar lines. It made them feel like they were always close. Jay, Keats, and Nick began as Steve’s summer team, and became his lifelong team.