CHAPTER ELEVEN

It was September 2000. Steve packed his gear, piled it into the back of his new pickup truck, and hit the road for Saint John, the home of Calgary’s AHL affiliate. The kid who had almost always been the youngest, who had never been the best, who had gone undrafted, was now a professional hockey player at twenty years old.

He spent the first night of the journey in Montreal. It was at Paul’s suggestion, and Steve had agreed. The next morning, Steve met with Gisele Bourgeois, a psychologist and performance coach who had worked with some senior executives at Johnson & Johnson. Steve and Gisele also met that evening and the morning after, for two or more hours each time.

Gisele was different from Steve’s other coaches. She didn’t tell him what to do, nor think of him in the context of a team. She wanted him to think of himself as being at his own centre. She wanted to help him understand what he wanted, what he needed, what he hoped for. He had played hockey since he was three. Hockey had filled most of his days and weeks, most of his doing and dreaming, year after year since then. He was good at hockey. But did he play hockey because he loved it, Gisele wanted to know, or because hockey was just what he did? She wanted to hear Steve answer questions like this because she wanted him to hear his own answers. She wanted him to reinforce the certainty he already felt, that he had demonstrated through his actions all of his life, because what he was about to undertake and wanted to achieve would require an immense commitment. She wanted him to know—and for him to say out loud: “I am at the wheel driving to Saint John to play for the Flames because I want to. This is my choice. This is my life.”

Steve was excited and fearful in their first session, Gisele recalls. Her first impression was of “someone who at a young age had made up his mind that this is what he wanted to do, and who, when he makes a decision, is all in.” He had fears, but they weren’t about living up to the expectations of others or about living up to past successes. They were about what was ahead. He wasn’t a superstar. He had never been able to shape his environment to his own wants and personality. He’d had to adapt to every new team he played on. How will I fit in now? he wondered. What will my new coach be like? Can I do it?

Gisele noticed that Steve was very aware of his impact on others, especially his teammates. He wanted to make other people happy. This wasn’t to get validation from others, she believed, but rather a simple “why wouldn’t I?” Isn’t that how any team, how any family, works? Your purpose is them; their purpose is you.

Steve had played in front of lots of people in his life, and had been written about and treated as special. But “I don’t think he ever felt special,” Gisele says. “He had an ego like every young man, [but] he knew that he wasn’t the best player on the ice. He wasn’t the most talented, and every time he was on the ice he knew he had to earn the right to be out there again. But he was okay with being one of the supporting cast. He knew that was important. He knew that he could make that significant, and he knew that early on. It gave him a certain humility, and kept him always searching for new ways to contribute to the team.”

—

“It was maybe a quarter to twelve,” Jim Playfair recalls, “just before noon, and Monty walks in.” Playfair was then the head coach of the Saint John Flames. That night, October 13, 2000, the Flames were playing their opening game at home. The morning practice was over; Playfair had posted the team’s starting lineup for the game. Steve, who had made the roster as the seventh defenceman—managing to avoid being sent to their East Coast Hockey League (ECHL) affiliate in Johnstown, Pennsylvania—would not dress. “I had this really small office in the rink,” Playfair says. “Monty sits down and says, ‘I think you are making a mistake.’ I said, ‘About what?’ He said, ‘The lineup. I think I’m better than a couple of the guys that you’ve got playing tonight.’ I said, ‘You do?’ He said, ‘Nothing against anybody, and I realize you’re probably playing them because they were drafted and I’m a free agent, but I think I can bring more to our team.’” Playfair thought for a moment. “I said to him, ‘Why don’t you do this—go home and get a bite to eat, and come back tonight for the warm-up.’” Steve left Playfair’s office. “Ronnie Wilson, my assistant coach, looks at me and says, ‘I’d send him down to Johnstown. Who does he think he is, coming in here?’ I said, ‘Tell the trainer to get him a jersey, because anybody who has the courage to walk into a coach’s office and tell him he’s made a mistake deserves a chance to play.’ After the warm-up that night, I decided to put him in the lineup.”

To Playfair, that moment defined Steve. The self-confidence, the trust he had in himself, his willingness to put himself on the line. Steve had told him how to fix his mistake before he’d even made it. And he did it without bad-mouthing anybody. “He made it seem that it wasn’t about him, that it was about the team, because he thought it was, because it was,” says Playfair.

“That was an important moment for Monty, but it was for me, too,” says Playfair. “I think I became a better coach when I became a father.” He had three young sons at the time. “As parents, we all want our kids to be more self-confident, more trusting of themselves, more committed to whatever strengths they have. We strive to instill these qualities in them. As coaches, we want the same in our players. A team is about the players. It’s not about my ego, about me saying, ‘I made the decision. I’m right.’ If I listen to the players, their voices get stronger. They get stronger. Maybe that was one of my finest coaching moments, putting Monty in. I learned something that day.”

Maybe Gisele had an impact sooner than she ever imagined.

Before the season began, the players and coaches each filled out “goal setting” forms—the players about themselves, the coaches about each player. Under the category of “major strengths,” Steve wrote: “my competitiveness and determination; my skating and passing.” The coaches wrote: “physical play, energy, competes; puck movement.” As things he needed to work on, Steve mentioned “strong defensive play; one-on-ones; gap control; physical play.” The coaches wrote: “defender who competes hard consistently.”

“We had a different group of players that season,” Playfair says. Three-quarters of them were in their third professional season. Their entry-level contracts were expiring; they were trying to earn new ones and had something to prove. The Flames had two former first-round picks, Rico Fata and Daniel Tkaczuk, who had played minor hockey with Steve in Toronto; some mid-round picks; and some free agents, like Steve. Not long before, these draft picks had been judged by the managers and scouts of the Calgary Flames to be among the best players in the world for their age. Yet at the moment they were chosen, none of them, except for a few prodigies, were good enough to make the NHL. First-round pick, ninth-round pick, undrafted free agent—it is the player who improves the most from that moment who will make it. It still matters to these players and coaches who was drafted and who wasn’t—but it won’t for much longer. Their draft status will be their identity until something else is. The draft pick who doesn’t live up to expectations will carry around with him a stigma of disappointment that rarely goes away. The undrafted player who makes it will be surrounded by admiration. He will be the guy who worked and made himself into a player. Early in the season, Playfair had a message for his players: “For all of you, drafted or just signed, what being here really means is that you have now committed yourself to work harder than you have ever worked in your life. Because now there is another level you have to get to.”

Of all the players on the team, Daniel Tkaczuk knew Steve best. They had grown up in neighbouring parts of Mississauga, had played on the Marlies, and had gone to the Quebec peewee tournament together. They had both moved to the Mississauga Senators, beaten the Marlies, and won the GTHL championship together. Their mothers, who had driven them to the rink, watched them play, and feared and hoped together, were good friends. Daniel and Steve had also played against each other for three years in the OHL; when Steve stayed on for an overage year in Peterborough, Daniel had begun his pro career in Saint John, co-leading the Flames in scoring. Now their hockey lives had intersected again.

Seven years had passed since that season together with the Marlies, but not much was different, Daniel recalls. Steve was still a high-energy guy, charismatic, hard-working, loud, popular, always having to do something; some nights he was the best player on the ice, some nights the wheels of his wagon were falling off. But “his effort was always there,” Daniel stresses. Daniel was still quiet, shy, serious, an observer, a thinker; “a hockey sense guy,” as he describes himself, someone who aimed before he fired, when sometimes Steve did not.

Daniel remembers Steve with some surprise and a lot of admiration. Steve always had to “play through stuff,” he recalls. “He was never seen as a top defenceman in our age group. He was never considered for Team Ontario or for the world junior team. Even to play AAA hockey, to play for the Marlies and the Senators, at times seemed a stretch.” He was never not on the margins. “Playing through stuff” means playing through whatever circumstance arises, team or personal—whenever it arises—and doing whatever you’re asked to do. “You know how hard you’ve worked just to get to that point,” Daniel explains, “to be so close, that you’re going to push it no matter what.” On every team he played for, Steve was looked to for “the physical element,” as Daniel puts it. “You can’t be soft. You can’t say, ‘I can’t take any more of these hits. I’m not going to fight. It just doesn’t feel good anymore.’” Your teammates depend on you. Your coaches and managers trust you. They believe in you—that’s why they signed you. And you know that there’s not much difference between you and the guy who is the seventh defenceman and not on the ice—or the guys who are eighth, ninth, and tenth, and not playing in the league. The biggest difference may be simply that you are physically able to play and they’re not. Or they are able to play and you’re not. And when you are asked to play, you play because you don’t know when, or if, you’re going to be asked again. Very few players now know the story of Wally Pipp, but every player knows the lesson of Wally Pipp in their bones. As the myth goes, mostly apocryphal, Pipp was the first baseman for the New York Yankees in 1925 when, because of a headache, he was given the day off. The next time his replacement, Lou Gehrig, was out of the lineup was fourteen years and 2,130 games later. By that time, Pipp was forty-six years old and living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Daniel remembers the final game of a tournament in Kitchener when he and Steve were playing AAA with the Mississauga Senators. Their opponent was the Elgin-Middlesex Chiefs, and future NHLers Joe Thornton, who was already six-foot-three, Mike Van Ryn, and Brian Campbell. Playing against Thornton, Steve had a choice. Most players, if not intimidated by him, became passive. They backed off, avoided the one-on-one contest that by size and skill they would surely lose, and waited for help. Steve wasn’t as big as Thornton, but he was big enough, and he could skate. He was competitive; he could focus; he could live with humiliation and defeat. He went right at Thornton. “He got in his grill,” Daniel remembers, and he stayed there, giving him little room to breathe. Thornton wasn’t used to that, and the Senators won. Steve ended up on the tournament all-star team.

—

Early in a season, a team doesn’t know what it has. The Calgary Flames had missed the playoffs the previous four years and hadn’t started the 2000-01 season well. Players were being moved into the lineup, and out. Some were sent to the minors.

Saint John was also sorting out its roster. Steve played some games and didn’t play others. Playfair worked with the defence in practice drills to get the puck out of their zone. “Passing from deep in your corner to the middle of the ice, that’s insane,” Playfair says. But sometimes that’s where the open ice is. As a defenceman, you need to read when to make that pass, and when not to—and be able to make that decision instantly. “One game,” Playfair recalls, “Monty passes the puck to a teammate in the middle, it goes off his skate, into the slot, one of their guys takes a slapshot; it hits the crossbar and goes up into the stands. When Monty comes off, I say to him, ‘That’s exactly the play we want. Next time, trust yourself and make it again.’ Monty had this ‘but it hit the crossbar’ look on his face. I said to him, ‘They didn’t score.’” It wouldn’t be the last time Steve made a pass up the middle in his own zone, but the puck didn’t always ring off the crossbar.

A player needs to know himself, and a coach needs to know his player, what he’s good at and what he isn’t, what he aspires to be and what his capabilities are. It’s the only way their relationship can work. In December, the Saint John players and coaches were given new forms to fill out. The players were asked to rate themselves, and the coaches rated each player—excellent, good, adequate, or poor—in the following categories: pre-game preparation, pre-practice preparation, determination/battle level, work ethic during games, and work ethic during practices. Steve answered, respectively, good, excellent, good, good, and excellent. The coaches rated him good, adequate, adequate, good, and good.

Of the areas of his game about which he felt most satisfied, Steve mentioned his “work ethic; commitment.” His coaches wrote about him: “willingness to compete (toughness); good skater and strong passer; his desire to learn pro game.”

About those aspects of his game that he believed helped the team the most, Steve answered: “aggressiveness; high intensity with moving pucks; being physical.” His coaches wrote: “playing physical game; plays within himself.”

Calgary GM Craig Button reviewed these forms with his Saint John coaches, and kept them, so that one day if a player had problems and Button was looking for answers, he might find some clues here. Button still had these forms many years later.

By December, Saint John was in the middle of the pack in the AHL, at times doing well enough to make the players and coaches think that greater success was possible, but then doing poorly enough to make them wonder. There was a team-making moment just before Christmas. Wayne Fleming, coach of the Canadian team at the Spengler Cup tournament in Davos, Switzerland, phoned Button and asked for four of the Saint John players; Steve was one of them. Playfair called the four players into his office and told them the news. Then he and Ron Wilson met with the rest of the roster. Playfair recalls telling them, “This is a great opportunity for us. Are we a good team, or do we just have some good players?” Two or three of these players had been sitting out most games; now they got to play. The others had to fill bigger roles. “When those guys were in Switzerland,” Playfair remembers with a smile, “we won all three of our games.”

The players who stayed behind in Saint John proved to themselves, to each other, and to their Spengler Cup–playing teammates, that they were good, too. Steve and the others who went to Switzerland, tested in the playoff-like atmosphere of a tournament, came back better players. When they rejoined their teammates, they also realized that they weren’t indispensable. “The second half of the season,” Playfair recalls, “the players believed we had something special.

“Between those high moments,” Playfair now says, “there was some misery. Some days when those kids didn’t have a passion for this life anymore and thought I was holding them back.” Steve’s bad moments came, as they usually did, when he tried to do too much. Playfair worked with him patiently. “First of all, with Monty,” he says, “you had to understand he was always prepared. He worked in practice, and in the gym. He was always into the game. He didn’t do things for his own glory. If the team needed something, he tried to give it. So his weren’t lazy mistakes. They were winning mistakes. He was trying to make the winning play. Lots of players just want to get through their shift. Monty wanted to win every shift. Lots of players, when they make a mistake, they slam their stick on the ice, or bang the glass. They want you to know that they care. I don’t remember Monty ever doing that. He knew I knew that he cared.”

When the team had injuries to its forwards, sometimes Playfair asked Steve to play wing. “Some games I know he didn’t want to do it, but it gave us our best chance to win. I told him that there would come a day sometime when a team, finalizing its roster, would have to make a choice between two players as their seventh defenceman: one who could give the team some flexibility and also play up front, and one who couldn’t. I’m sure Monty thought that I was just giving him the company line.” But Steve did it. And years later, when he was playing with Florida, Jacques Martin, the Panthers’ coach and general manager, had to make a roster decision between Steve and another defenceman. “I opened the paper this one morning,” Playfair remembers, “and there is Jacques saying something like, ‘We like Steve because we can also put him up on the wing.’ So I sent Monty a text: ‘All those years ago that you didn’t want to be a winger?’ And he texts back: ‘Yeah, that just made me a million dollars.’”

Playfair and Daniel Tkaczuk both remember a particular game later that season. It was on the road against the Providence Bruins, who had won the AHL’s Calder Cup two years before. “They had some physical guys,” Daniel recalls. “It was a crash and bang game, and the crowd was really into it.” Playfair picks up the story: “They were running at us and pushing us around. Monty was sitting on the bench waiting for his shift and he leans back and says to me, ‘Put me on.’ He goes out, grabs somebody, and fights him.” It was Lee Goren, a big, physical winger. Later, they fought again. “It changed the whole temperature of the game,” Playfair says. “Monty just said to the other team, ‘Enough. You’re not allowed to do that.’ He wasn’t going to let us be on the receiving end any longer.” The Flames won, 6–2.

After that game, Daniel recalls, the coaching staff and the players saw Steve differently. He had “stood up.” He had given them a reason to see to the other non-physical aspects of his game. His occasional lapses seemed to matter less. He stayed in the lineup the rest of the year.

The Flames finished the regular season behind only Worcester and Rochester, with the third highest number of points in the league. They swept Portland in the first round, then beat Quebec, then Providence (who had upset Worcester in the second round), and advanced to the final against the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, Pittsburgh’s farm team. The Penguins won the first game in Saint John; the Flames won the next two; the teams split the two after that. The Flames headed home to New Brunswick for the sixth game, and a chance to win the team’s first Calder Cup championship.

With one minute to go, Saint John was ahead, 1–0. This is a player’s time, Playfair says; it is the players, not the coaches, who will decide the outcome. There was a time-out. The Flames captain, Marty Murray, had been with the team three years earlier, when the Flames lost in the finals to the Philadelphia Phantoms. Playfair had told Murray at the beginning of this year’s playoffs that, if the team had a chance to win, he would have him on the ice at the end. During the time-out, Playfair gave the players their assignments and reminded them of a few things; but his real purpose, in the biggest minute of the biggest game of the season, was to get the players on the ice that he could count on most. Murray skated out for the faceoff. So did Steve.

Steve’s brother Chris tells this story with a catch in his voice, because Steve had a catch in his voice when he told it to him. Fourteen years later, before Steve’s funeral, Steve’s mother Donna told Jim Playfair this story, because Steve had told it to her. The kid who had never been drafted, who needed to talk his way into the home opening night lineup, who the whole year had done the kind of mucky stuff that his team had needed even if he wasn’t very good at doing it_—he_ was sent onto the ice to bring the game home.

A minute later, the season was over. The Flames had won.

Lindsay has a full-page photo from The Hockey News hanging in her basement. With a jammed arena of heads as the background, it shows her brother mostly in profile, a baseball cap on backwards, his arms upraised, his eyes on fire, his mouth open in a roar of triumph, the Calder Cup in his hands.

—

When the next season began, Steve was back in Saint John. At 2:30 in the morning on November 23, 2001, Steve was awakened by a phone call. It was Jim Playfair. Calgary defenceman Igor Kravchuk had been injured, and Steve needed to get to Buffalo right away. He would play his first NHL game that night.

He got an early-morning flight to Toronto, but the plane got rerouted to London, Ontario, because of fog. The plane stayed at the gate in London, and passengers were instructed to remain on-board as the pilots waited for the weather to clear. When it didn’t clear, the flight attendants eventually gave in to Steve’s pleading—“I’ve got to get to my first NHL game!”—and allowed him to collect his bag and sticks from the hold and get off the plane. He rushed and got a taxi to take him directly to Buffalo. Paul, Donna, Chris, and Lindsay all drove down from Toronto to be there.

No goals were scored in the first period; Buffalo scored three by the mid-point of the second. Rhett Warrener was a defenceman for the Sabres at the time; two years later, he and Steve would be teammates in Calgary. “I can remember looking at the stats sheet that night before the game,” Warrener says, “and thinking, ‘Here’s a kid who’s played the last two years in the minors and has just been called up. Guaranteed he’s going to want to fight and make a name for himself. I know that’s what I’d do. I looked around our dressing room and I’m thinking, ‘He doesn’t want to fight Rob Ray [the Sabres enforcer]. I’m probably next on the list. I’m going to have to chuck the knuckles with this kid.’”

Instead, four minutes after Buffalo’s third goal, Steve got into a fight with Denis Hamel.

In the third period, with the score at 4–0, Steve got an assist on a goal by a former Saint John teammate, Steve Begin. The Flames lost, 5–2. Steve had two shots on net and played just under fifteen minutes. “[He] was pretty good,” Calgary coach Greg Gilbert said after the game. “He was pretty steady. That’s what Steve Montador is going to be, a defenceman who moves the puck well and doesn’t try to do too much with it.” Earlier in the day, a Saint John journalist had asked Jim Playfair why Steve was the one called up. “We didn’t say to ourselves, ‘Well, he’s the hot commodity of the day. Let’s send him up there,’” Playfair said. “He’s undergone steady growth and development. He’s a very steady, strong player who moves the puck well, gets up the ice well, and gives us a physical presence. With all those factors, he’d earned the right to go and play in the NHL.” Two days later, Steve played again, in Columbus, then was sent back to Saint John when Kravchuk returned from his injury. He would play a total of eleven games for Calgary that season.

Not long after his return to Saint John, Steve and his teammates and coaches filled out their December review forms. Under the categories of pre-game preparation, pre-practice preparation, determination/battle level, work ethic during games, and work ethic during practices, Steve rated himself excellent, good, excellent, excellent, and excellent. His coaches rated him excellent across the board. As to the areas of his game he felt good about, Steve wrote: “defensive zone play; understanding on-ice awareness/ice management; being confident about my game.” His coaches wrote: “overcame a rough start; confidence—wants to be an impact player; physical presence—becoming a feared defender.” To the question of how the organization could make him a better player, Steve responded: “expand the workout area.” The coaches wrote: “time and patience.” For the first time, Steve’s coaches saw more in him than he saw in himself.

In his rookie year in Saint John, Steve had learned to survive. He had learned to be a regular. He had learned how to win again. Over the next few years, in Saint John and in Calgary, in the words of Marty Gélinas, “he learned how to be a pro.” He had known how to prepare himself for games and practices; he knew the importance of the little details; he knew he needed to commit and deliver every night, and every moment of every night. But he got better at all of these things. Steve was young when he began his second season in Saint John—just twenty-one. Defencemen and goalies, hockey wisdom says, take longer to develop. Not because of the physical skills required, but because of the consistency and discipline that are needed to play such unforgiving positions—a consistency and discipline that maturity brings. Forwards have to create, and they fail almost all of the time because of the difficulty of what they are asked to do. It’s to be expected. Not so for defencemen and goalies. Very few goals are scored in a game; very few can be allowed. Offence is about opportunities; defence is about mistakes.

Steve played solidly for the rest of the 2001–02 season, and the following year, when he was mostly in Calgary. He was getting better, but he wasn’t yet ready to be a regular. Being ready is not something you wait for. It is something you prepare for. Steve was preparing himself for a season and a moment he couldn’t be sure would ever happen. The Cup run of 2004 was still ahead.

—

In Calgary, near the end of the 2002–03 season, Steve was struck in the face by a puck and received several stitches. His injury was described as “facial lacerations.” It was likely his third concussion.