CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Before Chicago’s 2011 training camp opened, and before Steve and Vally’s annual “head” session with Gisele, Steve had his yearly “spirit” week in Vail, Colorado. The idea had started from a conversation between Marty Gélinas and Andy O’Brien. NHL players were training harder than ever in the off-season, but they were finding that after they arrived back in their NHL cities and before camp began, the energy of their workouts dropped. It was the last gasp of their summer, so it seemed they had a right to take it easier. There were also so many players of so many different skill levels in the on-ice sessions that it was impossible to get much done. The players, Gélinas and O’Brien realized, were losing fitness at the moment that they needed it most. Gélinas wondered, “What if we were to go away for a few days and have high-intensity workouts to get us ready for the season?” So he and O’Brien approached Ed Belfour, who was with Florida at the time; Belfour was all for it, and suggested Vail as the site. He had been there with the Dallas Stars; Vail was beautiful, and wasn’t busy at that time of year.

There were about eight or nine players in their initial group, Hayley Wickenheiser and Steve among them. As word spread, in subsequent years the numbers grew to twenty-four. It was by invitation only, and it was an invitation highly prized because of O’Brien and his work with Sidney Crosby—and because Crosby was there, too. How often, even as an NHL player, do you have a chance to spend five days with the world’s best player? To share the same locker room, the same ice surface, the same gym and breakfast table? To see what makes him tick? And because Crosby was there, John Tavares was there, and Tyler Seguin, and Jason Spezza, and other guys that they themselves wanted to be there—good players, hard workers, great guys. It was hockey’s Davos.

The first night, the players picked the teams, then went at each other the rest of the week. Golf, basketball, mountain climbing, bowling, three-on-three hockey; Team Crosby against Team Tavares, the players pushing themselves and each other the way no coach can; no standings in the newspaper, no money on the table, but stakes that couldn’t be higher—respect and bragging rights. It was the ultimate street hockey game. And if any of them thought of some other game to play, they competed at that, too.

“It’s at more than eight thousand feet of altitude,” O’Brien explains, “so it’s really difficult. But it’s this incredible environment removed from all the distractions of your life, where you’re just able to focus on what you are doing, whether it’s fishing, or golfing, or climbing a mountain to see a lake that’s very pristine and hard to get to. And Monty was at the centre of it. He planned the dinners. He planned the golf and put the foursomes together. He kept score of every contest, because at the end of the week a trophy was presented to the winner.

A few years later, after the camp began, Monty approached Vally, who had just retired. “‘Hey chum,’ he says to me,” Vally recalls, “‘you could be the goalie coach for our camp.’ And I’m thinking, I’m five minutes retired and I completely don’t belong. Then Monty goes to Andy [O’Brien], ‘Andy, we’ve got to bring in my boy, Vally. We need him at this camp. He’s a character. He’s going to be a guy that can glue everybody together.’ And Andy says, ‘We don’t really need a goalie coach, but okay Monty.’ And they bring me on.” Vally was amazed by what he saw. “These players have a different relationship than anything I ever experienced in the NHL,” he said. “They are stars for a reason. Crosby versus Tavares in a faceoff circle; it was just awesome.”

Awesome, too, was Steve. “I just loved seeing him chirp Sidney Crosby. I loved seeing him chirp, absolutely chirp, John Tavares. These are the stars of our league, that we all look up to, and they love him! Sidney Crosby loved Monty. They were workout partners. Monty was texting him. How did Steve Montador, my buddy, and just a regular NHL dude…?” Vally answers his own question: “Because he treated the stars like they were just regular fourth-liners. You know, like any guy is walking into the locker room and there’s Monty, ‘Nice pants, chum. You gonna change before we go out?’ Next guy, ‘Not a bad shirt. I wouldn’t wear it to a shit fight.’ You can’t say that to Sidney Crosby. And Crosby’s loving it! It was priceless.”

“It was like Monty was the superstar,” O’Brien says. “It was really funny to see Sidney Crosby taking a liking to him, following him. Monty had this ability to walk into a room and be the guy.”

O’Brien remembers a moment the first year they were there. “Eddie Belfour had a friend who had made some money in the oil industry and had this beautiful home in one of the most expensive areas in all of the Rocky Mountains. We went up there just for a little meet-and-greet and to enjoy some time together as a group. And Monty starts talking economics and investments and real estate with this guy.” O’Brien shakes his head as he tells the story. “Monty just morphed into being whatever he needed to be in any situation. He took control of the room. Not because he wanted to. That’s just who he was.”

O’Brien also remembers a hike they all went on. “It was a jog-hike, up the mountain, a little above ten thousand feet, and then around a lake, so the guys could walk for a bit, then run again. It was probably an hour long. We had already trained an hour that morning; Monty about ninety minutes. And we’re on this trail and Monty has his bag with him with a camera in it and every kind of power gel and supplement you can imagine. Everyone else is scared about a hike at this altitude, and here’s Monty carrying a backpack that weighs twenty pounds. And he’s at the front of the group. Then he sees a bear.” O’Brien laughs at the memory, and talks even faster. “So he cuts off the path, away from the group to take pictures of this bear! He’s gone. Then about ten minutes later, we see him, and now he’s at the back of the group, but then he catches everybody and ends up way ahead again. These are some of the fitter guys in the league.” O’Brien pauses a moment. “It was actually one of the few times in my career where I took a step back and said, ‘Wow, that was very impressive.’ He was a cardiovascular machine.”

“Monty was just such a unique human being,” says Vally. “It’s hard to even explain. Actually, it’s not hard to explain, but it’s hard to believe. I just loved watching him at Vail, seeing him absolutely mature from being captain of the rookies to captain of the stars.”

—

During Steve’s first few days in Chicago, he ran into Daniel Carcillo, a tough, feisty left winger, who was also in his first season with the Blackhawks. They had met twice before, the first time years earlier when they were taping segments for the TSN show Off the Record, with Michael Landsberg. “I was twenty-two years old then,” Carcillo recalls. “I remember I’d had two or three beers downstairs because I was really nervous and wanted to loosen up a bit, and when I went upstairs there was this guy getting his makeup done. He had cool hair and tattoos everywhere, and I wondered who he was. He looked me right in the eye all the time he was talking to me. I will never forget meeting Monty for the first time. He had something I wanted. I knew that right away. He was happy and he seemed so comfortable with himself, so sure of himself.” The second time they met was when Carcillo was in Philadelphia and Steve in Boston, when they fought. That was in 2009.

Carcillo had modest size and skills, but he played with the ferocity of someone who had a grudge against the world and whose survival was at stake. “Car Bomb,” he was called. He had made a name for himself leading the NHL in penalty minutes with the Coyotes in 2007–08, but made his breakthrough with the Flyers in 2009–10, when the team went to the Stanley Cup Final and lost to Chicago. The next season was worse for both the Flyers and for Carcillo, and when it was over, his contract up, the team didn’t extend him a qualifying offer. At age twenty-six, Carcillo was without a job, and with a reputation on and off the ice. There is good “out of control,” when a player unnerves and unsettles an opponent, and bad “out of control”—on the ice and off—when he unnerves and unsettles his own team as well. Car Bomb had become a time bomb.

On July 1, 2011, he signed a free agent contract with Chicago. The Blackhawks, after winning the Stanley Cup in 2010, had been pushed around in an opening-round loss to Vancouver the next season. A headline in USA Today announcing Carcillo’s signing read: “Daniel Carcillo is ready to stir it up in Chicago.”

Off the ice, Carcillo was less sure of himself. “I was going through a really rough time in my life. I was lonely and not in the right frame of mind.” When the Flyers let him go, he had made a decision to get sober and turn his life around. He decided he would do it by himself, the way he liked to do everything.

Early in his career with the Coyotes, Carcillo had been charged with DUI, which got him the attention of the league and the NHLPA, and he was put into their substance abuse program. “I fought them for about five or six years,” he says, “asking them to leave me alone, telling them that none of this stuff applies to me, blah blah blah. And the doctors were really good. They just let me come to my own realization, because if you push a guy like me into a corner, I’m going to fight back.” But there was something else Carcillo knew, that the doctors didn’t know. “They had no idea what I was doing as far as taking pills, and how deep into that I was. When I blew my knee out and had a few surgeries in Philly, I got hooked on painkillers, and that’s what brought me down pretty quickly the last year I was there. When I didn’t get signed, that was a wakeup call.”

With his new contract in Chicago, he decided to get help. “I went to see Dr. [Brian] Shaw and told him what I’d been doing.” Shaw, a clinical psychologist in Toronto, was co-director of the NHL/NHLPA Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health Program. “I started going to AA meetings that day,” Carcillo says. “Dr. Shaw asked me if I wanted to go to rehab, and I said no because I only had a month to train [before camp] and I wanted to be around my family. So I sat on my couch for a week just shivering, detoxed on my own, then started working out. That’s how I got sober.” Then he drove to the Chicago camp. “I wanted to try to do it on my own,” he explains, “because I wanted to feel what it’s like to come off it so I wouldn’t do it again.” He also wanted to feel proud of himself for something.

That’s when he ran into Steve. For Carcillo, it was three times lucky. “When I got to Chicago,” he recalls, “it just so happened there was a guy who had been doing what I wanted to do, and he was seven years sober. But he was just so normal. He wasn’t awkward. He was always happy. Confident of himself. Comfortable in his own skin. Well dressed. He just had something different about him. Other people try so fucking hard to be cool; it was as if he wasn’t trying. He seemed like he had it all figured out.

“It wasn’t like he began to coach me or teach me. I was just following his lead. He was showing me how to live this new lifestyle and to leave that other stuff behind me. People don’t decide to make changes unless they’ve hit rock bottom. I wasn’t quite there yet, but I needed to be sober and here was this amazing guy.”

They lived about a kilometre from each other. “If I wasn’t at his place, we were at a restaurant for dinner, or he was at mine, listening to records, chilling out and talking.” They went to concerts together—The Lumineers, The Tragically Hip. (The Hip played “Bobcaygeon,” Carcillo recalls, about a little town near Peterborough.) Restaurants and clubs aren’t easy places for an alcoholic, but to Carcillo this wasn’t about hiding away in a basement to avoid temptation. This was about keeping himself so busy that he didn’t think about temptation. It was about exchanging one fixation for another. “When I first got sober,” he says, “I kept saying ‘Never again. Never again.’ But that meant alcohol and drugs were always on my mind, and I was giving them even more power over me. So staying at home just wasn’t good for me.”

Sometimes he and Steve went to AA meetings together. “When you first get sober, you do ninety meetings in ninety days,” Carcillo says. “I really liked going to the Mustard Seed, which was mostly an all African American meeting. It was really spiritual; almost like church.” On Tuesday nights, they sometimes went to a men’s meeting. “It was just a lot easier to relate to them,” Carcillo says, “and girls can sometimes be a distraction.” There might be two hundred people at some meetings; in others, only four or five. “We also went to meditation meetings where the first ten, fifteen minutes were just silence, where you’re just thinking, then reflecting on what you’re thinking.” Carcillo didn’t say much in these sessions. Not at the beginning. “I just wanted to listen,” he said. “But sometimes they picked you and you had to say something. I just said all the stuff I heard from Monty or in some other meeting.”

AA meetings are supposed to be anonymous, but this was Chicago, and every night people came up to him and Steve and wanted to talk about the Blackhawks. “That’s why I ultimately stopped going to meetings,” Carcillo says. Instead, he and Steve started to see their almost-nightly dinners as AA meetings of their own. There they didn’t need to tell their stories, they didn’t need to feel the reinforcement of the group, they didn’t need to commit and account to others, they didn’t need to share their hopes and dreams. “Monty and I were already on the same page with everything. We were working towards being happy without any drugs or alcohol; learning how to live normally.” Carcillo pauses as he remembers Steve.

“I think about the feelings that I had while I was with Monty. I felt just so safe. Growing up as a kid, I didn’t always feel safe. Monty was so different from everything I’d experienced up to that point. It was intoxicating. This was my new drug.”

Carcillo and Steve were a good match: one needed to find a new way; the other had found it. One needed help; the other needed to help in order to help himself.

—

Steve kept a journal. Before his first season with Chicago began, he wrote:

Season Goals

10 goals, 22 assists, +15, all 82 games, 20 minutes/night towards end goal of a Stanley Cup

Value me and I feel valued…

Character, consistent, strong physical presence

He also wrote about other goals he had for the year:

Travelling

Photography

Broadening my perspective

Courses—yoga, cooking, piano, guitar, book clubs, movies, AA, volunteer organizations

Under a separate heading, he wrote “Intimate Relationship”:

Baby Steps

Step 1—Having fun, people around, enjoy myself—“she’s fun”

Step 2—a buddy, first couple of steps; relationships develop

In his journal, he also asked himself, “Can I see myself playing hockey, married, and have kids??” He answered: “Up to now, NO.” Then he mentioned the names “Babcock, Gélinas, Valiquette,” three families that he liked and respected, and asked, “What would Steve married with kids look like?” He set out what he thought it would take for him to make marriage work:

Defining myself as a family man—good father (trying my best); good husband; caring, supportive.

He also wrote:

I know there is an incredible woman for me.

The right one is worth fighting for.

He wrote down the qualities he believed he brought to the Blackhawks—“gritty, hard working, puck moving, physical defenceman, money in the bank in my own zone, shots through on net, tough to play against, positive leader”—and called these collective qualities, and himself, “TIGER INC.”

A few days later, Steve’s mood had changed:

trapped—scared

Why am I doing this? I need to know why I’m doing something.

Some parts of me that feel I’m undeserving

A few days after that, he wrote:

I need to Decide

Decide to make Chicago MY CITY

Decide that I belong in this uniform, team, with these guys

I belong here, this is my home, this is my city…

I picked it, it picked me

ROOTS ROOTS ROOTS…

Something’s gonna happen to magically make me belong

Know it in my heart that I belong

If I’m gonna be here, BE HERE

The day before the Blackhawks opened the season against Dallas, he wrote:

Lace up tomorrow—own the fuckin’ ice—own the arena—own the United Center…

Skates, grounding to the core of the earth, powerful uniform, I am what I decided to be, this is my home—claiming it

Under these words, he signed “Steve.”

For Steve, it was a new city, new team, new teammates, new friends, new places to go and things to do, new habits, new life.

The year started well. He played the first thirty-eight games of the season, until January 2, when he missed the first of three games due to a back injury. The Blackhawks were 24–10–4 at the time. He was playing about fifteen minutes a game, normal for a 5–6 defenceman—on regular shifts, not on power plays or killing penalties. Duncan Keith, the previous year’s Norris Trophy winner as the NHL’s best defenceman, was playing around twenty-seven minutes a game; Brent Seabrook, his defence partner, about twenty-five; the team’s 3–4 pairing, Nick Leddy twenty-two, and Niklas Hjalmarsson twenty. Steve’s defence partner, Sean O’Donnell, was playing less than fourteen.

Steve was playing the way he had always played: competitive, determined, physical; more difficult to play against than he was punishing; more effective than he was dominant. He was hard-working on the ice and off: in practice, in games, in the gym; and in the community, making frequent fundraising, awareness-raising appearances for Chicago-area charities on behalf of the team. He was a good teammate. He still made the occasional gaffe.

He kept a record of almost every game in his journal. On the left-hand page, he visualized the contest ahead, what the team expected/hoped of him and what he expected/hoped of himself. He began his entry for each game the same way:

I am so happy and grateful now that:

I had 3 shots on net tonight and it made me feel EXCITED

I had 3 hard hits tonight and it made me feel POWERFUL

I blocked 3 shots tonight and it made me feel PRESENT

And I was +1 tonight and it made me feel HAPPY

I did all of these from an athletic stance.

A few games later he added another phrase that he would repeat for each game:

I had a goal and/or an assist tonight and it made me feel AWESOME.

Soon after he added another:

TRUE GRIT

This team is Mine, this shift is Mine, the puck is Mine

Defending—this zone is Mine

Attacking—this goal is Mine

I HAVE ARRIVED!!!

Also on the left-side of his journal page, beneath his expectations/hopes for the game, he wrote down some of the good things he had done that day. On October 13, 2011, before the third game of the season, at home against Winnipeg, he noted: “I prayed for my family today and I gave my brother 2 tickets.”

On subsequent game days, he noted other things that might seem too small to matter:

I bought food/drinks for a homeless guy yesterday.

I gave Car Bomb some chew.

I left tickets for Oscar the barber.

I held a door for a lady at the rink.

[And, on November 11]

I gave thanks to all veterans past and present and those who gave their lives in Canada’s and USA’s military. I also offered Car Bomb lunch today.

On the right-hand page, after the game, he wrote his observations about how he played that night. He would mention the good things he did and what he needed to do. He offered no self-criticism. For the game against Winnipeg, he noted:

I played well, I was simple with my positioning and the puck. I was physical. I can join the rush more, use my speed to aid in the attack. You’re a good player, know it.

BE IT.

OWN IT.

My town, my team.

The stats sheet that night showed he had one shot on net, two hits, two penalty minutes, was minus-1, and played fifteen minutes. The Blackhawks won, 4–3.

Steve scored his first goal for the Blackhawks in Columbus in mid-November, the sixteenth game of the season, also recording an assist and a fight—Steve’s first and only Gordie Howe hat trick, which gave him half as many as Howe himself had in his entire career. Three nights later, he scored two goals; three nights after that, another goal.

But things were going less well than they seemed.

A year before Steve signed with Chicago, Mike Kitchen had been hired as a Blackhawks assistant coach. A defenceman himself in his playing career, Kitchen was small and had limited offensive skills. He’d known that if he were to make the NHL, and stay there, he would have to work hard, train hard, be disciplined and smart, accept the role of the 5–6 defenceman, and play a simple, uncomplicated game. He played eight NHL seasons.

Kitchen had also been an assistant in Florida when Steve was there, and had worked with Steve to simplify his game. He would remind him when he was trying to do too much, and Steve would shake his head. He knew; and Kitchen knew that he knew. And the next time it happened, Steve would shake his head again, and know again, and Kitchen would keep working with him, and grow more frustrated. It was unimaginable to him that Steve couldn’t do what he so clearly needed to do. Know what you are and what you aren’t, for heaven’s sake. Do what you can do and don’t do what you can’t. What you can do is good enough! Both Kitchen and Steve were good guys. Both were team players. They should have been a good match.

In Chicago, Kitchen again worked with Steve to simplify his game. This is the Chicago Blackhawks, not the Florida Panthers. The team has Toews, Kane, Keith….When it needs a big play, let them make it. Don’t even try.

Steve had never played on a team like the Blackhawks before. The Flames in 2004 had come out of nowhere, giving the players and fans an unexpected gift, but that had created only hope, not lingering expectations. Chicago had won a Stanley Cup two seasons ago, and the team was getting better. They had the chance to win every year.

It had seemed that same way for Chicago once before, in 1961, when they had the great Glenn Hall in goal; the league’s best defenceman, Pierre Pilote; the scoring champion, Stan Mikita; and the game’s most charismatic player, big-shooting Bobby Hull. But after winning the Cup that season they didn’t win again, and by the mid-1970s, Chicago was beginning to slide. Their owner, Bill Wirtz, who had inherited the team from his father, Arthur Wirtz, didn’t like the reality of the WHA, so he ignored it. Later, he didn’t like the reality of free agency or of TV broadcasts of local games, so he ignored them. This was his team. Nobody was going to tell him what to do. And in winning every battle he fought, Wirtz turned a great hockey city into a sour, deeply disappointed one.

The team became competitive again in the early 1990s, with Chris Chelios, Jeremy Roenick, Steve Larmer, and Ed Belfour, then inconsequential for a decade until Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, and coach Joel Quenneville, arrived to join the rapidly improving Duncan Keith. Crucially, Rocky Wirtz, who believed in spending money to make money, took over ownership of the team from his late father. Joy returned to Chicago hockey, and with joy came fans, money, and success—and with them more fans, more money, more success, and fist-pumping pride. The Blackhawks had learned how to win, and had learned what winning feels like. They wanted nothing less, and would accept nothing less. They were hooked, and the fans were, too.

The loss to the Canucks in the first round of the 2011 playoffs had shocked all of them. For the Blackhawks, the next season couldn’t begin soon enough. It was as if ownership, management, coaches, and players were on a quest. Good guys on a good team are forgiven for bad moments. Good guys on a Cup-questing team are not.

At Steve’s first lapse, Kitchen’s memories of Florida flooded back. He didn’t trust Steve, and Steve knew it. “Value me and I feel valued,” Steve had written in his journal.

Steve’s journal entries got longer. He was in contact with Gisele more frequently. His lapses didn’t stop.