CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It was early Sunday morning. Texts, voicemails, emails shot out in a rush, and in them a few urgent words, “It’s about Monty. Call me.” From Paul and Chris, from Keats, Vally, and Nick, to the rest of the Steve-network. Those who received them knew before they called back, and knew it couldn’t be, and knew it was. And when they did call back and were told, many of them cried, went into a deep silence, and made plans to get to Toronto, to do something, to be there.

The hockey world came to his funeral. Teammates from his Lorne Park and Mississauga teams, from the Marlies, Senators, and St. Mike’s; from North Bay, Erie, and Peterborough; from all of the NHL teams he played on. His old coaches. His former opponents. People who Paul and Donna had come to know; others they had heard about; many more they didn’t know at all. People from other parts of Steve’s life, from who knows where, who had nothing to do with hockey.

They were wrecked. Filled with _why_s and _how_s, but mostly they were just sad. At the visitations, a video of moments from his life played over and over, and people stopped and watched it, over and over. Photos of Steve as a child that the friends from later in his life had never seen; photos of Steve as the adult that his childhood friends didn’t know. But all of the images, fitting together, so recognizably Steve, culminating with a clip of that goal. That face. That dance of celebration.

At the funeral, so many people spoke so movingly, so beautifully. There were shudders and sobs, but there was laughter, too. Steve was just so funny. He was quirky and weird. His life was not to be believed, even for those who had lived it alongside him. Vally told “Monty stories.” He made cue cards for himself, a single word on each one. Then, as he told everyone there, in honour of the way Steve talked and lived his life, he shuffled the cards and spoke about Steve in the order the cards appeared. “Which is no order at all,” he said. A Monty order. Vally had people laughing until they cried; crying until they laughed. He had them reliving Steve; Steve filled the room.

It was what his family and friends needed. Steve was funny. He wouldn’t want people sitting around sad. “Hey chum, gotta dance”—that’s what everyone told themselves to feel how they needed to feel. It was all too much for Jim Donaldson. Now in his late sixties, Donaldson had been Steve’s coach in minor peewee with the Mississauga Braves. Steve was the second of “his boys” he had lost. Donaldson tried hard not to feel the way he did, but to him this was all too sad to be this funny. And he left.

Nick was Nick, serious and thoughtful. He had decided not to write anything down. He wanted, instead, to “speak from the heart.” He told one or two stories about times they’d spent together, but most of all he wanted to talk about the impact Steve had had on other people. How Steve believed that a smile, a tiny gesture—even a deep, hard look into a stranger’s eyes to remind the stranger that someone else knows they exist—might change a life.

Paul held himself together. When he spoke, trying to find comfort for himself, his words helped others find comfort. “Steve packed seventy years into his thirty-five years of living,” he said. To this day, those present at the funeral repeat Paul’s words, seeking consolation when they think of Steve.

Months later, all of them were still thinking about Steve’s passing. The loss of a son, a brother, an uncle, a teammate, a friend, a father-to-be. The loss of all that energy. His laugh. The loss of someone who made life bigger, richer; who made life feel better. The loss to them, but the loss to Steve. He’d had fifty years of his life ahead of him. Fifty years of who knows what—and that would be the best part—because he was Monty. He lived seventy years in his thirty-five years, and he would have lived a hundred more in his next fifty. That’s the lousy part.

“So much attention has been given to the way Monty’s career finished,” O’Brien said a few months after Steve’s death. “About the injury he had, whether it was about CTE, or the concussions; the tragedy of his early death and the tragedy of his life. But to me these are all very, very insignificant stories when I think of Monty. The bigger story was the type of person he was. The way he cared for other people. The phenomenal example he was for others. The value of educating yourself, the value of giving, the value of friendships, and the value of maintaining humility in spite of all that is going on around you. The ability to embrace your teammates and to really enjoy the day-to-day grind at the rink.

“Monty had learned all this. He mastered it. So to me, in spite of everything else that happened, this is what Monty was about. He was just this really, really incredible person. Whether he died at thirty-five or ninety-five, his true story wasn’t the tragedy. It was the way he touched people. It was the type of person he was.”

At Vail that summer, the winner of the week-long competition between Team Crosby and Team Tavares was presented with the Montador Cup.