CHAPTER EIGHT

The next season in North Bay was much like the first. Still, it had its moments. The Cents had a game early in the year against the Sudbury Wolves. Steve Valiquette, six-foot-six and twenty years old, was the Wolves’ regular goalie, but this being a game against North Bay, he was given the night off. So “Vally,” as everyone called him, decided to milk the moment. He sat back contentedly at the end of the Wolves’ bench, a big smile on his face, a white towel wrapped around his neck. He and Steve had never met. Steve lined up for a faceoff near the Wolves’ bench and looked over at Vally. “What’s the matter, Fatso? You not playing tonight?” he said. Vally, everyone knew, was not the fittest athlete on the planet. “Let me have that towel to wipe my brow.” The puck dropped, Steve jumped into the action, and Vally was left stunned but smiling.

Later in the season, Vally was traded to the Erie Otters, who were in a desperate chase for the playoffs. Not long afterwards, the Cents’ management, realizing that the team was going nowhere, began dismantling it to build for a new future. Steve was also sent to Erie. The day after Steve was traded, the Otters were having a team breakfast before getting on their bus to head out onto the road. Some of the players decided to go for a walk, Vally included. Suddenly Vally looked up, and Steve was walking beside him. Vally had skipped breakfast and hadn’t heard the news. He couldn’t believe what he saw. “Hey, Gillies,” Vally blurted. “What’re you doing here?” Trevor Gillies had been the second-round pick of North Bay in Steve’s draft year. Vally looked again. “Hey, you’re not Gillies. You’re the guy who wanted my towel.” Steve would become, as Vally put it, “my best friend in hockey.”

For Steve, the move to Erie meant a new city, new country, new school, new classmates, new courses; and also a new team, new teammates, and new possibilities. But the same old bus rides. He had gone from almost the northernmost team in the OHL to the southernmost, and the Otters’ nearest opponent was two hours away, with Lake Erie’s “lake effect” snow in the way. When their team walk was done, Vally and Steve got onto the bus and each went to where each was supposed to go. Vally, an overager with seniority headed to the prize spot on the bus—“the Pit,” where the second-last row of seats had been turned around to face the back row, and where the card games were played. Steve, not much more than a rookie to his new teammates, stood at the front, waited for the other players to take their seats, found an empty one, and sat down.

Life on the bus is about real estate, Vally describes. And it’s about rank. The older players have it; the younger ones don’t. The older players sit at the back, eat first, and choose the movies. The younger players sit at the front and wait. But what they all did together was chew tobacco. Chewing tobacco was the bus’s pastime. “We couldn’t smoke cigarettes,” Vally explains. “We were hockey players. We had spittoons all over the place. We bought Skoal, everybody did, and Cherry was the flavor du jour, until it got old, then Wintergreen, which was lousy, then Mint Straight.” The players were each paid $40 a week by the team; the team held back half—or $19.79, to be exact. “Our paycheques were for $20.21,” Vally recalls. For Steve, “that was gone in two days. I always thought he was from a family of no means.” With post-game drinks, a late-night run to Subway, and tins of chew at four or five bucks a piece—one tin every day and a half—the money went fast, and Steve’s went the fastest. A player chewed even when he didn’t want to chew, because, as Vally puts it, “you wanted to be an OHL player.” With dip in their mouth, playing cards with their buddies, on that bus they were kings of the world.

Steve would always run out. “Can I borrow a chew?” he’d ask Vally. “It was always ‘borrow,’” Vally says, “like he was going to give it back. Then, on the very rare occasion when I’d ask for some of his, he’d say, ‘Sure, but it’s recycled.’ He’d have taken a chew that he wasn’t completely finished with, and put it back in the tin, to save it for later.”

After the trades, the Otters went on a roll. Friday night, a win; Saturday night, a win; Sunday, a day off; Monday, it all started back up again. And the more they won, the harder they worked; the more they won, the more fun they had; and still the more they won. Week after week. Everybody’s a great guy when you win.

Earlier in the season, the Otters were just missing a few pieces, but often trades don’t work. Trading wisdom says that while you should always know what you’re giving up, you can never know what you’re getting. You know on paper, you know what your scouts tell you, but will that new player fit in? He was a leader on his old team, perhaps. Part of what made him so good was the responsibility he had, the respect he held, the specialness he felt. Is that same role open to him here? And what about the player who was filling that role before? Can he adapt? And all the time, there’s a game tomorrow, and the playoffs are looming. But in Erie, Steve and Vally fit in.

Dale Dunbar was their coach. He practised the team hard, and had them do push-up and sit-up circuits in the gym and do their time in the weight room. Everything was structured. They had lots of team meetings. The Otters bought them each their own director’s chair to sit in, their own “Road to Success” T-shirt, their own “beautiful robe,” as Vally describes it, with their own number on it. They even had team flip-flops. There was energy and purpose to everything they did, and Steve loved that. He loved the feeling of being a part of something. For the younger players, Steve was their “sheep herder,” says Vally. “They needed someone popular with them who was also cool with the vets. He was the captain of the rookies. He got everybody going in the same direction.” The Otters began to feel like a team.

Other players used practice to prepare, Vally recalls. But Steve prepared for practice. “He had this attention to detail.” He was such a competitor; games, practices, it didn’t matter, and as a goalie, Vally loved playing behind him. “He didn’t skate like anyone else,” Vally says. “He skated into the ice. You could hear it. He went deeper. He had power. There was commitment.” While for many, defence is a grim position to play, with opponents always running at you from behind, “Monty absolutely loved playing defence. He went in first after the puck every time. And I knew, any fifty-fifty puck was his.”

The Otters’ roll continued. Another Friday win, another Saturday win; and a Saturday night after a win was always the best. The week’s work was done. The team would go to a bar called the Magic Lantern on the outskirts of town. Pennsylvania’s drinking age was twenty-one, but the players knew that they would be served at the Magic Lantern. There were no women there; Erie’s women could wait for them a few hours longer. “We would just sit there, drink warm pitchers of beer, and be the happiest guys on earth,” Vally remembers. “They had a jukebox, we’d play music and tell stories, and Monty’s were always off the charts; about some girl he’d met. Then you’d get up and be having a piss, and you could still hear that laugh of his all across the bar.”

By Saturday night, of course, Steve would be four-days broke. “I loved him so much, I paid his way through junior,” says Vally with a laugh. He has a story about visiting Steve the following summer in Lakefield: “I’m driving down his street, and I know it’s his street because I’ve got his address. But all I see are these mansions right on the lake. Mansions! Then the street ends; it’s a dead end. So I turn around and go back to town. This is before cellphones, so I call him from a pay phone. ‘Hey Vally, what are you doing?’ he says. ‘I saw you drive right by.’ Well, I get to his house and I lay into him. ‘Monty, you’ve got to be kidding me. You’re rich. You never had five bucks in your pocket and your dad’s got a Porsche Boxster.’ It was the most beautiful house I’d ever seen, with this beautiful dock and a beautiful boat, and I’m just laughing and crying at the same time.

“Money never mattered to Monty,” Vally explains, “so he never thought it mattered to me. He wasn’t cheap. He’d give you his money—if he had it. He just never had any.”

Sunday morning, the team went to breakfast at Perkins—sometimes directly from the Magic Lantern, sometimes directly from a “date”—and told stories about the night before. A win on Saturday meant they deserved that Saturday night, and deserved that Sunday morning, too—and having that Saturday night and Sunday morning meant that they couldn’t wait for another tough week of practice ahead, in order to win on Friday and Saturday and have that Saturday night and Sunday morning again. “It seemed we could do this forever,” says Vally.

Conditioning skates at the end of practice, extra circuits in the gym: when you lose, you need to do more; when you win, you can’t do enough. If the energy dropped a bit, there were ephedrine pills—they weren’t illegal at the time—and vials of ginkgo biloba. “We got the ginkgo from one of our teammates, who got it from his dad, who got it from some Japanese importer. It was our secret stuff, our super pill, and before a game we’d all stand around the garbage can in the middle of the dressing room, yell ‘cheers,’ and throw it back.”

When you win you can do stupid stuff, and nothing seems stupid, and nobody cares. “During warm-up,” Vally recalls, “we’d all have our helmets off, our hair would be flying as we went around the ice. We’re sweating. We’re looking at ourselves in the glass. We’re cool. And we all had visions of playing pro hockey.”

The Otters couldn’t stop winning. They went 18–0–2 in their final twenty games and made the playoffs. In the first round, they played the London Knights, one of the league’s best teams. On their roster were future NHLers Tom Kostopoulos, Rico Fata, Krys Barch, Chris Kelly, Alex Henry, and John Erskine; Jay Legault, Steve’s friend from Peterborough, was the team’s top scorer. The Knights won the first three games in the best-of-seven series; the last two crushingly in overtime. But then the Otters won, and won again. “The Knights thought we were done,” says Vally, “and we just weren’t.” Erie won the sixth game at home in overtime, then lost the seventh in London.

Even though they had lost the series, Steve had never won like this before. He had never felt like he mattered so much.

—

The 1998 NHL draft was held on June 27 in Buffalo. With his December birthday, 1998 was Steve’s first year of eligibility. The year before, Jay had been drafted by Anaheim in the third round, and Ryan Ready by Calgary in the fourth; a year before that, Colin Beardsmore was picked in the seventh round by Detroit, Chad Cavanagh in the ninth by Washington. Nick wasn’t drafted. Vincent Lecavalier was the 1998 draft’s first overall pick. Other prominent first-round selections that year were David Legwand, Brad Stuart, Manny Malhotra, Alex Tanguay, Robyn Regehr, Simon Gagné, and Scott Gomez. In later rounds, Mike Fisher, Mike Ribeiro, Brad Richards, and Brian Gionta were also chosen, and in the sixth round, Andrei Markov, Pavel Datsyuk, and Steve’s North Bay teammate, Chris Neil. In total, 258 players were selected. Of them, only 29 would play more than 571 NHL games, the number of games that Steve played in his career. Steve went undrafted.

For Steve, it was another Peterborough summer teaching at the hockey school, runs at the Lift Lock, workouts in the gym, field parties at the Shack, and deep, deep conversations about who-knows-what with Keats and the rest of the guys; then it was back to Erie. Several of the Otters’ veterans had “aged out” of junior hockey, including Vally and the team’s captain, Colin Pepperall. The new veterans—among them Shane Nash, who was the new captain, and Steve—would need to fill their roles on the ice and off. The team also had a new coach, Paul Theriault. Theriault had won two OHL championships with the Oshawa Generals, and had gone to the Memorial Cup final each time. Sherry Bassin, the Otters’ manager, had also been Theriault’s boss in Oshawa. Now Theriault was behind the bench in Erie, having not coached junior hockey for ten years.

The Otters never got on track the whole 1998–99 season. The new veterans weren’t leaders in the way the old ones had been; Steve wasn’t a good enough player to be “the guy” that the team needed; and Theriault seemed not entirely happy to be there. The team scored about the same number of goals as they had the year before, but allowed many more against. They missed Vally. As for the bus rides, Steve, now a veteran, sat at the back in the Pit, chewing tobacco, playing euchre, laughing his laugh.

Erie made the playoffs and lost in five games to Guelph in the first round. Steve had improved during the year, but he was getting older. His junior eligibility was up, and he was beginning to seem like just another player. But he still wanted to play. He wasn’t ready to move on to a Canadian college. That would mean playing without the dream; nobody made it from there.

The 1999 NHL draft was held on June 26 in Boston. The first overall pick was Patrik Štefan, and then came the Sedins, Daniel and Henrik. Tim Connolly, who had played in the Quebec tournament, was selected later in the first round, as was Martin Havlát. Ryan Miller was chosen in the fifth round, as was Steve’s opponent with the Marlies and the Otters, Tom Kostopoulos; Henrik Zetterberg was the 210th overall pick. The 1999 draft class has been described as one of the NHL’s worst ever: 272 players were selected; only 112 of them played even one game in the NHL; only 19 played more than Steve’s 571 games. Again, Steve went undrafted.

Yet Steve would still get his chance. The Peterborough Petes had a spot on their roster for an overage player, so the following season, Steve returned home, this time to play.

—

In December, the Petes held their annual skate with the fans. For local kids, Peterborough’s Memorial Centre is like Montreal’s Bell Centre; the Petes are their Canadiens. The kids come to the arena that day, put on their skates, step out onto the ice, and then their pain begins. “I was so nervous,” Adam Babcock recalls. A kid at the time, he stood, looked around the ice, looked around the building, and with nothing else to do, began to skate.

The moment was not much more comfortable for the Petes players. They were teenagers, and beneath the bravado most of them were shy and awkward, except around girls. A few minutes into his solo skate, Adam felt someone come up beside him, bend forward, and ask him how he was. It was Steve. They started to skate, Steve doing most of the talking, Adam nodding, then Adam talking a little bit himself. When it was time for Steve to skate with other kids, he stayed with Adam. “I went from feeling small to feeling like the biggest guy out there,” Adam remembers. He was seven.

A few days later, somebody in the Petes office called the Babcocks and asked if they were interested in billeting a player. They had done it before but their kids, Adam and his sister Amanda, who was five, were now at an age where they saw everything and took in who-knows-what—and every billeted player, whether he was on the Petes or not, was a stranger. The Petes office had been inquiring about a place for Steve. Mary and Terry Babcock said yes.

The Montadors’ house on the lake was only thirty minutes away, but with Steve’s schedule, and with Peterborough’s unpredictable and often sudden winter storms, the Petes thought it better that he live in town. Steve was also nineteen and had lived on his own for most of the past three years. He had become independent. It was easier this way.

If there wasn’t a game, Steve ate supper with the Babcocks; or if practice kept him late, there were leftovers in the refrigerator for him to warm up when he got home. When he was around, which was much of the time, he did what the family did. He watched TV with Amanda, who was about a quarter his age. Amanda liked cartoons; Steve didn’t. Steve learned to get to the TV first to control the remote. Amanda learned to get to the TV even earlier, turn on her cartoons, and hide the remote in the freezer. She knew he would never get up to change the channel.

On weekends, he would go bowling with the family, or push the kids on the swings. He played ball hockey with Adam on the family’s driveway, and sometimes his teammates would come by and join him and Adam in a game they called “rebound hockey.” Steve would stand in front of the net, a tennis ball on his stick, his teammates next to either post. They would put Adam in goal. Steve would shoot, and if there was a rebound, his teammates would pounce on it. “If they scored,” Adam recalls, “it was a point for them. If I covered it up, a point for me. It was torture really, but Monty always kept a watch out for me.” If he could see that Adam was getting frustrated, he would catch the eyes of his teammates and they would back off a little. “And if I stopped one,” Adam recalls, Steve would shout like an NHL announcer: “Oh, and Babcock makes the save!”

Steve continued to visit the Babcocks every summer, even after the Montadors had relocated to Toronto and Steve had made it to the NHL. During his last season in Chicago, Steve invited Terry to go on a dads’ trip (later these became moms’ and special parent and friends’ trips as well) with the Blackhawks. He had taken Paul on a similar trip a few years earlier. To a hockey parent (or friend), the only future more impossible to imagine than having a son make the NHL is the chance to share that future with him on the road; to live the life themselves. Terry travelled with Steve to Florida for games against the Panthers and the Lightning, then back to Chicago for a game at the United Center. Terry had known Steve for more than a decade by this time, but almost entirely in the environment of Peterborough, and within his own household. Now he’d be seeing Steve as a member of a big-time team that had won the Stanley Cup the previous year with a roster of big-time stars. How would Steve be?

“It was like he wanted to take me by the hand and show me his world,” Terry says. “He wanted me to be a part of everything he was doing.”

“He had this amazing gift for making you feel that you mattered to him,” Mary recalls. “He would come back in the summer, he had all this money, it wasn’t like he couldn’t do whatever he wanted. But he hung out with us. He did it because he wanted to.”

Adam is now twenty-three. His games of rebound hockey with Steve on the driveway turned him into a goalie. Recently, he got a new mask. On the top of it he has written “Monty”; on the bottom, “1979–2015.”

—

The Petes were a mediocre team. But again, Steve was getting better. And again, he was getting older. When the 1999–2000 season ended, his junior career was over. He was twenty years old, and facing the same choice he had the year before. He could take the scholarship credits he had earned from his junior teams and go to a Canadian university, play a few years, keep improving, and hope. He had taken some courses at Mercyhurst University the second year he played in Erie. But he didn’t want to go to college. He still had his hockey dream. Besides, going back to school would prove that he was wrong and Paul was right.

Calgary’s general manager, Craig Button, had seen Steve play as he had scouted the OHL’s stars the previous years. Button knew that there wasn’t much difference between a fifth-round pick and someone like Steve. Neither is good enough at twenty to play in the NHL, and both need time to develop. They would both have to work harder than they had ever worked before in order to make it, and not everyone is willing to do that. Button liked Steve’s spirit, and offered him a contract. Steve signed.

—

In February 2000, in a Petes game, at a moment that didn’t seem to matter at the time and in a way he later wouldn’t remember, Steve got his second concussion.