Sunday, January 21, 2007

Hugo: The Strongman versus the Corporate Giant

This story was on the notable list in The Best American Sports Writing

From Toro, October 2005

STANDING TALL

Hugo Girard might be the strongest man in Canada but his fight to defend the rights of the world’s most powerful athletes is taking a lot more than muscle

At six-foot-six and 370 pounds, with narrow-set eyes behind reflecting shades, Travis Lyndon looks like he just climbed off Dr. Frankenstein’s workbench. Lyndon is at the starting line of an event called the Atlas Stones. Out in front of him are five huge, lead-filled concrete balls weighing 230, 265, 290, 330, and 385 pounds. And before the starter gives Lyndon the signal, Hugo Girard, Canada’s strongest man emeritus, calls him out.

“Travis is the best in the world at this event,” Hugo says into the microphone, held by the emcee at the Ontario Strongman Championship in North Bay over the Canada Day weekend. “I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t do all five.”

It sounds like good-natured banter. It seems to fit in with the genuine bonhomie on the Strongman circuit. But make no mistake: It’s trash talk dressed up as colour commentary. Hugo has been wearing a police uniform (in Gatineau, Quebec) for twelve years. He knows how to press a guy’s buttons while keeping a smile on his own face. Hugo is 330 pounds of sinew and resolve. When he goes passive-aggressive, it’s pretty plain. And though Lyndon was his training partner in Gatineau for years, everything has changed between them.

Lyndon, who brushed off Girard’s comment with a wave, sprints up to the first stone ball. Though there’s nothing to grip, he raises the 230-pound boulder to his shoulder and drops it on a wobbly metal pedestal like it was a bag of groceries he was setting on the kitchen counter.

After doing the same with the next two balls, Lyndon ambles up to the fourth, a 330-pounder that has thwarted all the other competitors. He wraps his massive arms around it, raises it cleanly, without hesitation, his back arched enough to splinter a normal spine, and thrusts the stone onto the perch. The crowd issues a collective gasp, then breaks out into a riot of cheers.

The last stone is 385 pounds. Lyndon takes a deep breath. He bends. He raises it a foot off the ground and quickly drops it. He shakes his head, turns, and acknowledges the crowd.

Hugo is furious. He thinks Lyndon didn’t make much of an effort with that fifth ball. Lyndon did enough to clinch his spot in the nationals, but Girard worries about the fans feeling shortchanged. It’s a problem for Girard because he is the event’s promoter. Hugo says nothing. If his left ankle weren’t in a cast, he’d try to do the fifth ball himself. Instead he hobbles over to the fence that separates the fans and the giants’ playground, protecting bystanders from being crushed by the Mack truck the strongmen take turns pulling up the street. He signs autographs, some on trading cards he has had made featuring his likeness, and poses for pictures. Men, women, and children are hoisted onto his shoulders like ragdolls.

Meanwhile, in the tent that is giving the strongmen shade in the
Noonday sun, Travis Lyndon sits on a plastic folding chair and glowers. The emcee, a young woman from a local FM station, is encouraging the crowd to hit the beer garden to beat the heat. “Take off your shirt,” Lyndon yells to her. His wife happens to be sitting off to the side in the tent, acting as though she didn’t hear him and watching their young daughter dance to a Brittany Spears song pumping out over the sound system.

Back in the 1970s, American television networks were desperate for sports programming, so every event from sport’s fringe made it onto ABC’s Wide World of Sports and CBS’s Sports Spectacular: Cliff Diving from Acupulco; World Arm Wrestling Championships from Petaluma, California; Demolition Derby from East Islip, New York. So ABC came up with Superstars, which featured famous athletes competing in events like bowling and cycling for the ersatz title of the best all-around jock. CBS countered with the World’s Strongest Man, and the International Management Group, the world’s strongest sports agency, recruited weightlifters, shot putters, football linemen, and bodybuilders to fill the rosters.

Dr. Terry Todd, a former U.S. record holder in the bench press and an academic steeped in strength’s history and lore, worked as a consultant on the original World’s Strongest Man competition. “We realized very quickly that the events we were staging were more visually dynamic than Olympic lifting,” Todd says.

The original World’s Strongest Man program provided an unforgettable image: competitors racing with refrigerators on their backs. “I warned them that they needed to run the event up a slight grade,” Todd says. “They ran it in the flat and Franco Columbu [a champion bodybuilder] went down. His knee just exploded and the litigation lasted for years. Then Cleve Dean, the world arm-wrestling champion, a true giant, over 400 pounds, ended up falling and being pinned by the refrigerator.”

Then a funny thing happened, much funnier than giants being pinned under refrigerators. Demand for the niche sports and trash sports plummeted in the ‘80s and ‘90s. When you’ve seen one swan dive off a cliff, you’ve seen them all. Without the cameras, arm wrestling went back to the people of Petaluma, and East Islippers got back their exclusive access to the Demolition Derby’s rolling wrecks. Even the novelty of Superstars wore out like the ass of a ten-year-old Speedo. Only one thing survived: IMG’s strength franchise. In fact, it evolved and grew, with the World’s Strongest Man giving birth to the Strongman circuit, these days the province of the International Federation of Strength Athletes (IFSA).

Though powerlifting has cred in the gym and weightlifting the Olympic seal of approval, Strongman made better programming. When it came to pulling tractor trailers at the end of a rope or lifting stones or bending steelbars, television audiences couldn’t get enough. Immense muscles rippled. Veins popped in temples. Primal grunts quaked. Sports fans who couldn’t name a single Olympic weightlifter knew Magnus Per Magnuson, the stoic Icelander who dominated Strongman in the ‘90s.

“The second generation of strongmen is coming along,” Todd says. “We’re seeing athletes who grew up watching Magnus Per Magnuson. For the original strength athletes, Strongman was an alternative, an outlet. What we’re going to see is athletes who are first and foremost Strongmen - who have trained in Strongmen.”

*

While other kids were playing with toy guns in first grade, Hugo Girard played with his father’s one-kilo dumbbells. When he was a little older, reading comic books, he wanted super-strength. He wanted to lift cars like Superman. He wanted to fight crime. He saw the Hulk throwing boulders like baseballs.

He grew up in Ste. Anne de Pontneuf, population 1,500, out between Tadoussac and Baie-Comeau on the north shore of the St. Lawrence. He played hockey with the other kids, but he was more interested in being strong and getting stronger. He had good genes. His father, Rosaire, was a construction worker. Big hands. Thick arms. Heavily muscled legs. He could swing a sledgehammer with anyone. He would have made a good strongman.

When Hugo was twelve, he took a job setting pins in a bowling alley so that he could buy his first set of weights. When he was old enough to take shop in school, his first project was gym equipment. A bench. A squat rack. Other kids read about the great athletes they saw on television. Hugo read historical accounts about Louis Cyr, the Quebec strongman who, at the turn of the twentieth century, lifted platforms loaded with people or horses, the strongest man in the world, the strongest man ever known.

In Hugo’s teens his family started to pull apart. His mother would leave with his sister. He stayed on with his father. He started to withdraw. He spent more time in his bedroom with his weights.

He doesn’t have much to do with his family any more. He’ll tell you that he has been on his own since he was seventeen, which was when he left his Québécois Smallville for Quebec, the big city, to take a law enforcement course.

*

It’s a point of pride for Hugo that he paid his own way. Hugo’s gifts landed him a job as a bouncer during his school days. It amounted to a pre-emptive hire - better to have him on your payroll than to have to tell him to drink up after last call. Hugo became a minor legend among the brotherhood of bouncers - by force of personality more than brute force. His smile alone can benchpress 400 pounds. His laugh is the sound of a bear pawing a freshly caught salmon. And working the door, he met Nadine Tremblay, a nursing student.

It wasn’t exactly love at first sight. “He was so big. It was scary,” she says. Nadine invited Hugo over for dinner. As the date approached, she thought more and more about what it would take to sate the mountain man. Nadine stocked up as though she were preparing dinner for the night shift of the Gatineau police force. A half-dozen steaks. Bags of potatoes. “That’s how I thought he had to eat to be that big,” she said.

She was a nurse. She was used to caring for people. She was, well, not the biggest fan of the police. She thought them tough, nasty, mean. And that’s before she got a glimpse of Hugo.

But that was also before she got to know him. “In a lot of ways he’s gentle,” she says. And it’s true. He is gentle. I’ve shaken hands with jockeys who grip harder than Hugo. He is patient. I kept him waiting at a train station - it was a derailment; it would have been a piece of work even for him - and there wasn’t one anxious furrow on his considerable brow. He is tolerant. Swarmed by fans just walking down the street, he signs every last autograph.

Terry Todd says this attitude is the rule among strongmen. “The St.
Bernard syndrome,” he calls it. “They’re so big, so threatening just with their size, that they overcompensate rather than scare everybody away.”

*

Eight years ago, after Hugo had dedicated so much of his life to powerlifting, to the benchpress, squat, and deadlift, Nadine pointed out a cruel fact one night while they were lying in bed. “Hugo,” she said, “you’re training like you’re going to the Olympics, but there is no Olympics for you.”

“It hurt,” he says. “She didn’t understand me – that’s what I thought at first. But then I realized that she was right. My powerlifting was all for a trophy. The national championships didn’t even make it into the newspaper. They didn’t even draw a crowd in the gym.”

He threw his lot in with Strongman. He won a skein of Canadian titles. He set world records. He came third in the worlds. And fourth. In 2002 he seemed poised to win the World’s Strongest Man. He had been the dominant strongman in Grand Prix competitions all year long. Instead, he finished a hugely disappointing seventh.

“He is still an incredible performer,” Terry Todd says. “But that might have been his best chance. The competition is that much tougher. The field is deeper.”

Still, Hugo has had his moments since then. He beat all the top strongmen at his “home” event last year, World Muscle Power in Dolbeau Mistassinni, Quebec.

Watching Hugo work out, it’s hard to believe he has lost anything. At the bench press, he warms up with four repetitions at 315; two repetitions at 365; one repetition at 405. And then the workout starts in earnest: five repetitions machine-gunned at 435; another five at 455; and the last five at a bar-bending 475. It looks like he won’t make it past three reps, but he guts it out. His teeth bite into his lower lip and his face is as red as a fire engine. When he inhales and exhales, the curtains move.

“Some people say my strength is the result of steroids,” Hugo tells me between sets. “It doesn’t make sense for me to do steroids. There’s not enough in it. I wouldn’t do that to my wife and son. As a police officer I couldn’t have done that. It would mean possessing something illegal.”

Hugo’s workout lasts barely forty minutes but he’s limited by the cast on his ankle. He has had horrific things happen to him before – the 385-pound Atlas stone once crashed down on his chest after a fall - but, up until a year ago, he has never had to stop competing. That all changed when he partially tore his Achilles tendon at the World’s Strongest Man in the Bahamas in September 2004. Five months into his rehabilitation, he snapped his Achilles again, trying to come back too quickly, trying to hoist an 800-pound girder in an event called The Hammer.

“I was depressed when I tore it the first time,” he says. “I didn’t get off the couch for three weeks. But the second time I was back in the gym in a few days.”

According to Alan Black, the director of Strongman, a documentary about Hugo that has a cult audience in the demimonde of iron-pushers, “Hugo always said his goal was the World’s Strongest Man title. But now he’s at an age when that’s looking less likely with his Achilles injuries. I hope he can come back. He deserves good things to happen for him.”

*

Earlier this year Hugo and Nadine moved from Gatineau to Quebec City. She resigned from her job at the Royal Ottawa Hospital to be at home with their newborn son, Tyler. Hugo is in the last stages of stepping down from the Gatineau police force to pursue making a career out of strength. They live extra-extra large in a plush home. A statue of Louis Cyr gazes out at the pool table and bar. Two massive boxers, Spyke and Mike, pad around the house. His big SUV is parked out front. His Harley - compliments of an endorsement deal - is parked in the garage. “I’m not supposed to ride it with my Achilles, but nothing will stop me,” he says.

He is making steaks on the barbecue. It’s his lunch. Nadine is busy feeding Tyler. It’s peaceful, maybe too much so.

Nadine misses her work. She says that they left friends behind. “When Hugo is off at work or travelling it’s lonely sometimes, even though my family is here,” she tells me. Hugo listens, looking wounded.

Another complication: Hugo is conflicted about his decision to leave the police force. “What do you think people will think of me?” he asks me. He says he always cared about justice, about doing the right thing. He served as an unofficial goodwill ambassador for Gatineau and law enforcement. In the end it didn’t matter to his superiors. They didn’t want a celebrity cop. They saw him as a celebrity cop. He would pull over drivers, and they would be on their cellphones telling friends that they were getting a ticket from Hugo Girard.

He kisses Nadine and Tyler goodbye. He has an appearance tonight. The World Police and Firemen Games are wrapping up in Quebec City, and he is to deliver a speech at the closing ceremonies.

A couple of thousand people are dining on hot dogs and drinking beer at the exhibition grounds. As soon as Hugo walks in, they flock towards him. He smiles. He poses for pictures. They ask him to make a muscle. He gives a bicep pose. They ooh and ahh and laugh.

“Such charisma,” one onlooker says to me. It’s Claude Larose, a municipal councillor of Quebec City. And then Hugo is called up to the podium. He makes a speech without notes. He says that it’s a special event for him, that he knows about the life of a police officer. He gets an ovation.

“I’m shy,” he tells me after the speech. It sure doesn’t come across that way, I say. “There is a Hugo character. And then there’s me. That was
the Hugo character.”

*

A couple of years ago the IFSA had the strongmen of the circuit sign contracts. They looked like sweetheart deals. The federation was guaranteeing salaries for the strongmen - in addition to their winnings at scheduled events - and, in return, the athletes had to give up control of their endorsement incomes. Headquartered in Brussels, the IFSA would negotiate the endorsements and take a percentage. “[IFSA] made a lot of promises,” Hugo recalls. “It sounded good.”

For the Eastern European strongmen, any deal had to look good, the way Hugo tells it. “A little money goes a long way over there,” he says. When IFSA officials showed up at events with a briefcase full of contracts, they came away with a bunch of signatures. The IFSA had all the leverage. If they didn’t sign, the strongmen would be barred from many regularly scheduled events, not including World’s Strongest Man, which remains the property of Trans World International, IMG’s television division.

Hugo had issues with the IFSA contracts. “They wanted us to be characters and to have nicknames like pro wrestlers,” he says. Though it gnawed at him, he signed.

Then another funny thing happened: The IFSA notified Hugo that it wanted more than a percentage of his endorsements going forward. The federation wanted a percentage of his existing endorsement deals, the deals that he had negotiated years before. Hugo had shaken thousands of hands, passed out thousands of his trading cards, and cultivated the Hugo persona. And now the IFSA wanted a piece of all that.
“I believe in giving my word, but I also believe in being treated
fairly,” Hugo said. “First chance, I was getting out of that contract.”

And the IFSA soon gave him one when one of their scheduled payments didn’t reach him on time. With his lawyer spotting him, Girard performed a feat worthy of a strongman - he broke the IFSA chains and punched a hole in the iron-clad contract.

Then he rallied the Canadian strongmen behind him. After all, without Hugo, what is the strongman circuit in Canada? So the

Canadians were out of IFSA. Or most of them, anyway. Travis Lyndon was still on board, thus the tension at the Ontario championships this summer, and the calling-out over the Atlas Stones. Hugo calls Travis the world’s best stone lifter in one breath and in the next describes him as “weak.” It’s all about the difference between muscle fibre and moral fibre.
By fall, Lyndon has bailed out of IFSA too. He saw the light. He’s back in Hugo’s show. He’s hoping the international Strongmen will be brave enough to stand up to those who bully the giants with a contract and a pen. Travis Lyndon and the rest of the Candian strongmen are standing by Hugo Girard. They’re strong but he’s Superman, the Hulk, and Louis Cyr rolled into one.
The Celebrity Scout Goes Over to the Dark Side

From Toro March 2005

The Dominican Hustle

By Gare Joyce

Epy Guerrero sits in a shaded dugout and watches forty-five players working out on the diamond in the noonday sun. Whenever they pass by him, they nod, wave, wink. They call him jefe, boss, and when they make a good play in the field or drive the ball to the wall, they look to him for approval. None comes. He wears oversize black shades but even if he were to take them off you couldn’t tell what he’s thinking. His expression is impassive, a poker face that’s the product of thirty years of practice. After tens of thousands of workouts and tryouts on hundreds of fields all through the Caribbean, he wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if the second coming of Ted Williams were taking batting practice. He’d never tip anyone off.

Guerrero’s stony visage is a matter of habit, not necessity. There’s no one looking over his shoulder, no spies out there. He’s a half hour from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, but the diamond sits at the end of a hilly, washed-out road that would thwart any 4x4 and all but the heartiest goat. The diamond belongs to the baseball complex that he leases to the Seattle Mariners, and forty-one of the forty-five players are under contract to the ballclub. A few have played in the minors in the States; most played in the Dominican Republic’s rookie league. They’re known quantities.

Guerrero speaks in something just above a whisper, as though he fears being overheard. He gives me the rundown of the pitcher on the mound: “Lefty. Eighteen. Bad body. Fastball 92. Got a hook, too. Good mechanics. Gonna play in the States. Got a shot.”

But even if rival scouts were lurking in the palm out behind the left-field wall, it wouldn’t matter if they knew what Epy Guerrero is thinking about this lefty or any other player here. He’s working, sure, but he’s not working for anybody. He’s nobody’s jefe. “I come out here,” Guerrero says. “Most days, I no have job. Thirty years in the game, no job.”

*

Epy Guerrero breaks for lunch while the infielders are taking ground balls. He walks me over to the residence he keeps out at the complex, where he stays some nights when he doesn’t feel like driving back to Santo Domingo. So too does his youngest son, Joel, the Mariners’ trainer at the complex. Usually, another of Epy’s sons, Patrick, would be along, but he’s off on business. He’s Seattle’s scouting director in the Dominican and he’s closing the deal on a top prospect this afternoon.

While a cook in the kitchen prepares him chicken, rice, and beans, Guerrero takes me into his trophy room. It used to double as a rec room for entertaining baseball executives. “Nobody comes long time,” he says.

When he flips on the light, all the memories warm up. The walls are lined with Scout of the Month awards from the Topps baseball-card company, with photographs of the Jays’ World Series teams and with framed newspaper clippings.

Guerrero’s former prominence is captured by one of those yellowing clips: a list of the twenty-five most powerful men in major-league baseball circa 1990. It ranks Guerrero as sixteenth, several slots ahead of future Hall of Famer Roger Clemens. It was a fair assessment of the Toronto Blue Jays scout based in the Dominican Republic. The Jays were perennial contenders and the Caribbean had as much claim on the team as Toronto. At one time, eighteen players on Toronto’s forty-man roster were from Latin America.

Guerrero was a rarity in baseball: a celebrity scout. Behind every player he signed, he had a story to tell.

Those stories are on the walls of this room. One clipping recounts the inspirational rise of Tony Fernandez, how Fernandez arrived at Guerrero’s complex as a scrawny sixteen-year-old from the shanties in San Pedro de Macoris, and how he made himself into an All-Star by dint of years of work under Guerrero’s direction. In another frame, a Sports Illustrated feature details a tale of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, how Guerrero went under cover into war-torn Nicaragua to smuggle out Grant Alyea Jr., an outfielder and son of a former major leaguer.

Guerrero smiles when he looks at the SI story and a picture of himself, twenty years younger, in military fatigues. “Whatever it takes to get the player, I’d do,” Guerrero says.

Pat Gillick knew that. More than anyone else, Guerrero had the Jays’ general manager’s ear. Gillick, in turn, thought nothing of calling Guerrero at 3 a.m. to bounce personnel ideas off him, stuff having nothing at all to do with the Dominican Republic.

“My best friend,” Guerrero says, pointing to Gillick in a photo of the staff at the SkyDome. “I gotta take his call, even if it wakes up my wife.”

Gillick, who graduated from university at age twenty, and Guerrero, who did his schooling on the streets, had been in the minors together in the Houston Astros’ system. Gillick blew out his arm before he had a shot at the majors, but the Astros offered him a job in the front office. In turn, he helped Guerrero land work as a bird dog, a part-time scout for Houston in the Dominican. When Gillick jumped to the Yankees, so did Guerrero. Same with the expansion Toronto franchise.

Their vision came together with the Jays in the early 80s. They knew that only the Los Angeles Dodgers had any interest in scouting the Dominican. Epy had bought a sprawling parcel of remote bush for $750; the seller was being cleaned out by his ex’s divorce lawyer. Guerrero came up with the idea to build a baseball complex there, a diamond, and a dormitory for the players. He had to clear out palms, not corn, but otherwise el Complejo de Epy was his Field of Dreams. He built it. They came.

In the beginning, Guerrero raided major-league teams’ rosters: from Cleveland, Alfredo Griffin; from the Yankees, Damaso Garcia; from Philadelphia, George Bell. The development of homegrown talent came later. Some exploded on the scene and flamed out quickly (the fast but flaky Junior Felix); others made the most of limited talent and hung around the majors forever (journeyman infielder Luis Sojo); and a few flirted with greatness (Bell and Fernandez).

During the ’80s and early ’90s Guerrero was the game’s most productive scout. According to Guerrero, Gillick always supported his judgment. The best illustration was the signing of Carlos Delgado.
“I see him,” Guerrero says, looking at a photo of Delgado in the minors. “I phone Pat. ‘We gotta sign him.’ Pat tells me he got no money. I say, ‘Find it.’ It gonna take $100,000 bonus or Atlanta gonna sign him. Pat comes down. He gotta ask owners for money outta next year’s budget. We sign him. We go to the airport, Atlanta guys are coming. We say, “Don’t bother. We signed him.’ They don’t believe us – till they go to Carlos’s house.”

Guerrero will still have a rooting interest this season. He’ll pull for players he signed up for the Jays. For Delgado, wherever the free-agent winds blow him. For Cesar Izturis, a Gold Glove shortstop with Los Angeles. For Kelvim Escobar, an often overpowering righthander with Anaheim. There are others, but with Delgado’s departure, not a one remains on the Toronto roster.

*

Lunch is served. Guerro’s son Joel sits in. A bundle of muscle, he puts away a whole chicken in one sitting. Epy has one breast, salad, and a beer. He opens up. He will hide what he thinks about a player but won’t hide resentment.

“It was a great organization under Pat. I thought I was there forever.”

When Gillick resigned before the 1994 season, Gord Ash moved into the general manager’s office. At that point, Guerrero says, everything changed. He maintains that his status as most favoured scout made him a target. And he doesn’t equivocate about who targeted him.
“I left Jays because of Gord Ash,” he says, piling beans on top of the rice. “Ash wanted me out.”

Sport’s great divide runs between those who played and those who never did. Those who played have more respect for their peers than for those who only watched.

That’s the way Guerrero frames it: Ash couldn’t understand the game he didn’t play and Ash envied the player-to-player respect Gillick accorded Guerrero. Guerrero says that his problems with Ash and Ash’s allies started well before Gillick’s resignation.

“I see this pitcher, sixteen, maybe five-nine, right-hander, skinny, fastball 88,” he says. “I wanna sign. Mel Queen comes. He says, ‘He’s already as good as he gonna be.” I’m saying, he good right now and we get him cheap. Mel Queen, he kill it. The Dodgers sign him: Pedro Martinez. ’Cuz of Mel Queen Toronto don’t get a Hall of Famer.”

“Queen was Ash’s guy. Others too. Pat retires, they want me out too. They don’t let me do my job. No money. Players I sign getting traded.”

Retelling the story makes Guerrero’s blood rise. His face reddens. He’d require a doctor’s attention if he could hear a conversation I had with Ash, who was let go by the Jays in 2002. Ash claimed Guerrero made things “difficult for himself.”

“Epy’s friendship with Pat transcended his business relationship with the organization,” Ash said. “During my first years as GM, we actually expanded our Dominican operation with Epy. But it became unworkable. All we were asking for was a degree of accountability. Epy was the Lone Ranger. That was his persona as a scout.”

That “Lone Ranger” shot is aimed at Epy’s self-promotion, his readiness to fill reporters’ notebooks, which rubbed many Jays staffers the wrong way.

In September 1995, Guerrero tendered his resignation. No Epy Guerrero Day. No send-off party. It was undignified, but easy to understand: New general managers sweep out offices with big brooms. What’s harder to explain are the reasons why Guerrero isn’t working today or why his phone hasn’t rang in two years. One of the sons can explain. Not Joel, though. He runs back to the diamond. He has pitchers’ arms to ice after the workout.

*

My father used to take us on his scouting trips,” says Mike Guerrero, sitting behind the dugout of Los Leones de Escogido. “We all wanted to play, but all of that time we spent with him prepared us better for other types of careers in the game.”

All five of Epy’s sons work in baseball, but Mike, at thirty-six the second oldest, is the most ambitious. He spends his winters as the assistant general manager of Escogido, one of two Dominican league teams in Santo Domingo. During the summer he manages a minor-league team in the Milwaukee Brewers system.

His Leones are running up the score on San Pedro de Macoris – 8-0 – but he’s working the cellphone, trying to land a major-leaguer for a pennant drive. He hasn’t done an MBA like a lot of thirty-something baseball execs, but he’s new school enough to talk about “networking” for players.

Ten years have passed since his father’s break with the Jays, but it’s hard for Mike to talk about it, not just because of his father’s pain. No, it’s sensitive stuff because Gord Ash is Milwaukee’s assistant general manager. He’s Mike Guerrero’s boss, and also the boss of Mike’s older brother Sandy, manager of Milwaukee’s Double A farm team.

“If Gord had problems with my father, he never let them affect how he treated us,” Mike says.

Mike picks up the story where his father left off.

“When my father left the Jays, he took a job with Milwaukee. Things were different. Milwaukee couldn’t give him the same support that Toronto did. The business was changing. Every major-league team had a complex in the Dominican like his and the Dodgers’. They spend a lot more money on players. My father used to sign a kid for $2,000, maybe $3,000. All of a sudden it was $100,000, $500,000, even a million. And Milwaukee wasn’t going to compete for those.”

Epy felt as outmatched as San Pedro is in the game against Escogido. There was no Tony Fernandez this time. He couldn’t dine out on his old success stories forever.

After the 2002 season, the Brewers announced that they were dropping Epy Guerrero. They complained that they saw negligible returns on their annual half-million-dollar investment in their Dominican operation. And, if you’re looking for more dots to connect, the Brewers dropped Guerrero not long after Gord Ash was hired.

Not one of Guerrero’s signees has a place on the forty-man roster this spring and the Brewers don’t maintain a complex in the Dominican any more. The team has signed Dominican kids to bonuses worth as much as $100,000 but they immediately bring them to the States.

Mike Guerrero takes the company line, says he can see the merits in this approach. I don’t tell him about my conversation with Ash. I don’t mention a twist of the knife – Ash complimenting Sandy and Mike for being “good organization men [who] learned what to do and what not to do from their father’s experiences.”

Whatever Mike might have learned, he still defends his father.

“If you gave all the scouts twenty-four hours, my father would come back with the best player. The best prospect down here is a shortstop in the Boston system, Hensley Ramirez. My father saw him in Punta, the town near the complex. My father sponsored Ramirez on a Little League team. He’d have signed him if he had a chance. But just seeing someone first doesn’t count if you’re a scout Maybe other places, but not as a scout.”

*

Hilario Soriano, the Jays’ man in the Dominican these days, is driving along the dusty main drag in San Pedro de Macoris. He has to catch a game between the Jays’ prospects and the Pittsburgh Pirates’ rookies.

Like Epy Guerrero, he didn’t make it beyond the minors but has seen what it takes. “I was a catcher, older than most players when I came to the States,” he says. “I was there to help players like Fred McGriff get ready for the majors.” And when he came home, he saw a little nephew picking up the game. Years later, Alfonso Soriano is a slugging second baseman with the Texas Rangers.

When I ask Hilario Soriano if he’s a celebrity, he laughs ruefully. “Here, if you’re the uncle of a major leaguer making $8-million a year, you’re a celebrity,” he says.

General manager J. P. Ricciardi is still in charge in Toronto after three years, still looking to squeeze more wins out of fewer of Ted Rogers’s dollars. The Jays’ corporate philosophy of economy extends to the Dominican, much to Soriano’s frustration.

“The Yankees, Los Angeles, and Boston are spending huge money down here,” he says. “Toronto’s not in that group. We’re in the next group. We get prospects that those clubs pass on.

Soriano is driving out to a rundown ballpark, the Alfredo Reynolds field, next to a cluster of corrugated metal shanties and lean-tos. It’s the Dominican home of the Pirates, a franchise that has a glorious history in Latin America. These days the Pirates don’t have a complex, just this shabby field and a modest home in San Pedro where they put up their prospects. They’re looking for another Roberto Clemente the same way the Jays are looking for the next Tony Fernandez: on the cheap.

“It’s not like the old days, when I signed,” Soriano says. “Nobody signs for the first offer. There’s no finding players who haven’t been seen by anybody else.”

He points to a rock-strewn diamond beside the Pirates ballpark. A dozen kids in dirty and mismatched uniforms are working out under the direction of a well-fed, sweatsuit-clad fellow in his forties.

“To understand the game in the Dominican now, you have to understand this,” he says, shaking his head, screwing his face into a look of disgust. “That’s a buscon there. Those players there have deals with him. He’s a little like a coach, a little like an agent. The players have to give him part of their bonuses – maybe all of their bonuses – and part of their salaries if they make the majors. The buscon’s job is to get them tryouts. They call us with kids. They bring them to tryouts. You want to sign a kid, you gotta deal with the buscon.”

Baseball men like Soriano regard buscones as a blight on the game. Stories that will never hang in any trophy room now routinely show up in Santo Domingo’s newspapers.

These days Mario Guerrero, Epy’s younger brother, stands at the centre of the most sensational baseball story in the Dominican. A former major-league infielder, Mario Guerrero is one of the best-known buscones. Last summer a court in Santo Domingo sided with him in a civil suit against outfielder Raul Mondesi. A judge awarded Mario Guerrero US$1-million in buscon fees and interest. (Mondesi has filed an appeal.)

But the Mario Guerrero story gets messier. It’s not that he’s suing other players and former players for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or that Mondesi claims that the dispute has him fearing for his family’s safety. No, several players have paid Mario Guerrero his buscon fees over the years, including Tony Fernandez and others originally signed to the Blue Jays by, yes, Mario’s big brother, Epy. Even on a small island, that’s getting a little close to home.

At Dominican ballparks you hear about buscones exploiting unsophisticated kids, walking off with their signing bonuses – in one case a half-million dollars. One young prospect died after he treated an injury with drugs procured by his buscon; it turned out that the drugs were intended for use on racehorses. But when major-league millions such as Alfonso Soriano’s are at stake, nothing scares off a kid from a shantytown who’s looking at a lifetime of cutting sugar cane.

“Some baseball men work as buscones – guys who were players or coaches or managers. But lots aren’t baseball men. They just hope that they find one kid, one big bonus player. Get him first. Get the money. Too many [buscones] will do anything for money.”

*

The next day at the complex, Epy Guerrero is in a better mood. Pat Gillick has called him. Gillick, who works as a consultant for Seattle, wants Epy to meet him in San Juan so they can talk to Carlos Delgado. Gillick wants to pitch Delgado on signing with the Mariners. Guerrero is excited. He and Gillick originally signed the teenager who would set the Jays’ records for home runs and all these years later they’ll try to sign him away from Toronto.

“Like old times,” Guerrero says.

Meanwhile the forty-five players out on the diamond break into two teams for a practice game. The chubby left-hander is unhittable. The catcher’s glove snaps with every fastball. Three batters fan at the heat. When the lefty breaks off curve balls, the batters swing themselves into knots. “Control. He can throw it anywhere in the count,” Guerrero says in a low voice.

The game breaks up a couple of hours later. A few players stay behind to take infield grounders. One of them is an unsigned kid in Yankees pinstripe pants that might have fit him two years ago. Guerrero’s paying more attention to him than the others. “Good bat speed. Fast. He fills out. Only fifteen,” Guerrero says.

I ask Guerrero if his son Patrick will sign this kid to a contract with Seattle when he turns sixteen.

“I hope,” Guerrero says. “I represent him.”

Once the sixteenth most powerful man in baseball, Epy Guerrero is now a buscon. Not by choice; he’d much rather work for a major-league club. Not by necessity; he could live comfortably on his savings and the Mariners’ lease on the complex. Spurred only by pride, he entered a racket with shame.

“I want to work,” he says. “It’s not for money. Maybe I show them.”
At the end of the workout, the Seattle prospects head back to their dorm. Lunch is going to be served. The shortstop in the Yankees pants is looking for some pocket money before he heads back to Punta. Guerrero doesn’t want to stick around for that. He hands Joel two 100-peso bills. Six bucks U.S., enough to last the shortstop the weekend. He won’t go hungry. Guerrero feels a little better about the work he’s doing. Cleaner. And if that kid does end up signing, Guerrero will feel much better. He’ll show them. He’ll show them and make them pay until it hurts.
My near-death match with wrestling's Hart family

This story was on the “notable” list in the Best American Sports Writing series.

From Saturday Night Magazine

BRAWL IN THE FAMILY

For Bret “The Hitman” Hart and his brother, Owen, wrestling is the family business, and the ring is in their blood. Go ahead – you tell them it’s all fake

By Gare Joyce

Behind the trademark reflecting sunglasses, bedecked in pink and black tights, Bret “The Hitman” Hart – 235 Calgary-born pounds of the stuff that heroes are made of – is set to take on the world wrestling champion, Rick “Nature Boy” Flair, the lascivious peroxide blonde regarded by the cognoscenti as the greatest wrestler of his generation and by all fair-minded folks as a real rotter. Flair could have scratched out of this title match at Saskatchewan Place in Saskatoon last October. He had apparently suffered an inner-ear injury a few days before and had been advised by doctors to take a month off the circuit. A wrestler, however, wins the respect of his peers by his willingness to get into the ring with an injury, to avoid the no-show. Flair has the respect of his fellow pros but the sympathies of the generally unwashed crowd are summed up in three words: “Flair, you suck.”

The old industry joke goes: Q. What has 100 legs and forty teeth? A. The first two rows at a wrestling card. To this loyal throng—pubescent fantasists, bikers, loud, round women who drink at the Legion, working stiffs and a few slumming semiologists—a world championship match involving a true Canadian is the Stanley Cup, World Series, and Olympics rolled into one.

Wise guys will always deride pro wrestling and call it “phoney,” “fake,” or “just theatre.” Of course the nay-sayers have never attended a live show and scrutinized the action. “They’ve probably never taken a shot in the squash either,” Hart says. For those in attendance, the matches shock because of the quantity and the degree of contact. In the first minute of this showdown, Hart suffers a severely sprained ankle. His punches raise welts on Flair’s face and compound the champion’s vertigo. After five minutes of action Hart notices that one of his fingers is jutting out at an odd angle. Recognizing this as a simple dislocation, he pulls the finger back into the socket and goes back to work.

Stu Hart, the father of the Hitman, sits in the stands, wringing his oft-broken hands. A former promoter and wrestler himself, Stu Hart still has some celebrity in Saskatoon. He has been brought in from his home in Calgary and introduced to the crowd for the sake of nostalgia, a remembrance of eye-gouges past. Watching the action in the ring, seeing Bret taking the fight to Flair, Stu recognizes moves he taught his son. And though the game has changed a lot, Stu knows you can’t fake a dislocated finger.

Two hundred and fifty nights a year, Bret Hart slams into turnbuckles, jumps off the top-ropes, kisses canvases, lets blood, and peers out into unsightly mobs. Hart broke into the pro game sixteen years ago, working on a small regional wrestling circuits before a few hundred fans. Today he plies his trade in arenas throughout North America, Europe and Japan. He has performed before as many as 93,000 fans at one live card and millions more on pay-per-view television. Western Report calls him “almost certainly the best known Albertan on earth.” The Hitman would accuse that august publication of thinking small. He operates on the assumption that the Harts are Canada’s first family of sport and that he is nothing less than the nation’s greatest athlete. Camp it ain’t.

*

In a demimonde populated by caricatures, Bret Hart is simply a character, the closest a wrestler might come to The Everyman. “I’m basically good but I can be as bad as I have to be,” he explains. The wrestling crew divides evenly between baby-faces (sugar-coated goody-two-shoes) and heels (evil incarnate). Matchmakers draw heat (create fan interest) by shooting angles (developing story lines and conflict between wrestlers). Surrounded by a comic-book cast that includes a catwalk-obsessed GQ fashion plate, a sword-wielding Viking, a Ugandan cannibal, an unscrupulous billionaire, a heartless tax man, and other broadly drawn no-goodniks, Hart provides relief in both substance and style. Hart has no shtick. His nickname, The Hitman, connotes nothing more than the finality of his finishing moves. Though he bears the stamp of the common man, it is in no way the imprint of mediocrity. For more than a year, hart owned the Intercontinental belt, the second-most prized not to mention bejewelled accessory in the World Wrestling Federation. Only the WWF’s world-title belt ranks higher. The championship is perhaps not the best measure of Hart’s excellence; it is his longevity that truly impresses. In a business with weekly turnover, the thirty-five-year-old Hart has been a staple in the WWF for eleven years, longer than any of the federation’s stars except for Hulk Hogan and Mexican baby-face Tito “El Matador” Santana.

Bret Hart’s ring skills are unique these days. He has mastered hundreds of holds, reversals and throws. The majority of wrestlers on the circuit today are larger than Hart and a number of behemoths dwarf him. Yet few have command of more than a couple of signature moves. Hart does nothing particularly original—there really isn’t anything new under the ring lights—but he pays homage to the past and borrows from wrestling styles around the world. “I resent being called ‘just an actor’ or ‘just a bodybuilder,’” Hart says. “There’s a lot more to what I do. I was a provincial champion as an amateur wrestler in high school. I’ve watched the best wrestlers in the world since I was a kid and I’ve worked with Japanese and European champs. The only [WWF wrestler] out there that’s close to me technically is The Rocket, my little brother Owen.”

No-one is born to wrestle but no-one more than the Hart kids was born into the business. Their father, Stu, wrestled for more than four decades and, until his retirement two years ago, was the promoter of Stampede Wrestling, a Calgary-based circuit renowned for its gothic violence and gore. Stu’s career dates back to the sport’s dark ages—before television broadcasts—practically, as his wife describes it, “to the invention of the headlock.” Stu and Helen’s eight sons have all been engaged in pro wrestling, if not in the ring then in promotion. “At six I had my first job, selling programmes,” Bret says. “Then I worked my way up to ring crew, then to music.”

The Hart kinder’s exposure to pro wrestling wasn’t limited to the arena. For many years Hart House, the family’s twenty-room home on the outskirts of Calgary, served as a residence for wrestlers working Stu’s shows or for those training at his wrestling school. It is no coincidence that the four Hart sisters married pro grapplers. Ellie married Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart, with whom Bret twice won the WWF tag-team title. Diana married Davey Boy Smith, “The British Bulldog,” who deposed Bret as the WWF Intercontinental champ before 80,000 fans at Wembley. With an angle of unprecedented verisimilitude, their match was billed as “The Battle of The Brothers-In-Law.”

The Hitman maintains that he is an excellent athlete although not “a natural.” Still, he says his understanding of wrestling feels almost preternatural: “Sometimes in the ring I feel like I’m tapping into the past, maybe something that I saw on a card when I was six or practised in our back-yard ring. I’ll do something instinctively, and it will work before I realize what it was.” Bret Hart usually avoids false modesty. He’ll tell you that, when he arrived in the WWF eleven years ago, he was already as skilled a wrestler as there was on the circuit. But when he can tone down the braggadocio, he’ll admit that he cannot take full credit for his greatness, that he was simply a product of his environment. Wrestling was the Hart legacy, something imposed upon him, as inescapable as a hammerlock.

*

“What you should know about Stu,” Helen Hart tells me conspiratorially, “is that he never got enough to eat when he was a child and he has been trying to make up for it ever since.” Mrs. Hart is sitting at a table in a Calgary steakhouse while her husband defoliates the salad bar. “Stu has a healthy appetite,” she says, “for a wrestler, that is. For normal-sized people, the amount of food he eats would be dangerous, but in his business there were always big eaters. We had to cook for Andre The Giant—he’s five hundred pounds—and the McGuire twins—they were over seven hundred pounds each. Stu is no trencherman compared to them.”

As wide and as thickly set as the door to a bank vault, Mr. Hart returns to the table with a plate loaded six inches high. “Oh Buff,” Mrs. Hart says, “you can make two trips up there, oh really.” For the amusement of onlookers, she goes through the motions of being appalled by her husband’s lack of etiquette.

He teeters slightly on his cowbody boots before wedging himself into the booth. “What was that?” he asks. “You’ll have to forgive him,” Mrs. Hart advises me. “Stu’s hard of hearing.”

Stu leans across the table. “Here, feel my ear,” he says.

“Stu, the young man is trying to eat,” she says.

He turns his head to left profile and waits for me to work up the nerve. I touch the calcified membrane that few would mistake for an ear. It has the shape and texture of petrified cauliflower. “If wrestling was all fake,” he says, “I’d have ears that look like yours.”

The waitress arrives, lugging Stu’s dinner, the second-largest prime rib on the menu—the largest is a promotional eat-two-sixty-four-ounce-steaks-and-we-tear-up-the-bill. “I’m not complaining about my ears,” Stu says, as he carves. “If I didn’t wrestle I wouldn’t have met Tigerbell.”

“The young man’s not interested in ancient history,” says Helen.

Stu continues. “I was a fair athlete back in the late thirties,” he says, punctuating each pause in the story with a forkful of rare meat. “Played for the Eskimos in football, played and coached hockey and baseball. I was Canadian amateur wrestling champ too, never pinned as an amateur. When I was a youngster on leave from the navy, I made it to Philadelphia and met up with Toots Mont, who was one of the most famous wrestlers around in those days. He took a liking to me and started me into pro wrestling. While I was down there I made a trip to New York and met Tigerbell. Her father, Harry Smith, had been a miler at the 1912 Olympics. Harry was a big celebrity in New York, had lots of famous friends.”

“I don’t know what my family thought of you and me,” she says.

“She read a lot of books,” Stu says, “and was dating this teacher. She had her choice of a lot of suitors and she picked me and we got married.”

“It wasn’t quite the noble savage and Fay Wray story,” Helen says. After almost a half-century of practice the Harts have developed their own style of repartee. They trade the floor and work in flurries, like good tag-team partners trading places in the ring.

“I started up Stampede Wrestling back in ’48 with fifteen thousand bucks,” Stu says. “Our best years we took in a million dollars a year at the gate with shows all across the Prairies.”

“If it sounds the least bit glamorous,” Helen tells me, “you should ask him about driving hundreds of thousands of miles to cards in small towns in the dead of winter, six huge wrestlers crammed into one car to save gas money.”

“Had them all here. Killer Kowalski. Sky Hi Lee. Harley Race, now there was a great worker.” Stu rhymes off names for ten minutes. The best of them he calls “great workers,” investing the words with the distinction worthy of “artists” or “craftsmen.” Stu makes it clear that Stampede Wrestling’s best worker was its most unlikely candidate. “Tigerbell here put together the programmes and press releases and handed out the pay cheques while I was cooking up the meals for the wrestlers and the kids.”

The conversation halts for a moment as Stu tucks into his meal with renewed seriousness. Helen reaches for a manila envelope and pulls out a stack of photographs. She shows me a recent shot of their son and daughters and their spouses at a family gathering. “That what Bret looks like without his hair slicked dwon,” Helen says. “The WWF wants all their wrestlers to do something with their hair but Bret’s isn’t flattering.”

“That’s Jim Neidhart there,” Stu says, pointing to a huge man with a billy-goat Vandyke. “The bastard.”

“If Stu calls him a bastard that means he likes him,” Helen says. “Bret’s career only took off when he became The Anvil’s partner.” Then Helen pulls out an eight-by-ten glossy of their children posing beside Rocy Marciano, the undefeated heavyweight boxing champion from the 1950s. “That’s from 1965,” she says. She points out Bret, a slight, angelic-looking eight-year-old with a brush cut.

“Marciano,” Stu says. “I tried to shoot an angle with him one time. After he quit boxing, he came up here to make an appearance at the Stampede parade. On our float I set it up so that Waldo Von Erich [a psuedo Nazi villian] would take a shot at Marciano. I didn’t tell Marciano about, just for the best eefect. So Waldo pulls Marciano’s cowboy hat down over his head and Marciano doesn’t react. ‘Just clench your fist, anything,’ I tell Marciano. We could have sold out the Corral the next week, the place would burn up. But Marciano didn’t want any part of it. He was, I dunno, righteous, self-righteous or something. He thought all this wrestling stuff was comedy—that is until a wrestler—I don’t want to say who—snatched him in the dressing room in Chicago one time …”

“When he says ‘snatches’ that means he jumped him and beat him up,” Helen advises.

“Yeah, Marciano had a notion that all this stuff was fake but he got cured,” Stu says proudly.

“Wrestlers,” Helen sighs. “They’re just like overgrown kids. And Stu wonders why I only went to two or three wrestling shows in all the years we’ve been married.”

“Did you ever hear about the time Sika the Samoan got in a bar fight and bit off a guy’s nose,” Stu says. He puts down his knife and fork and goes at what’s left of his prime rib with his bare hands.

*

Fifteen minutes into their match in Saskatoon, Bret Hart has Flair in a compromised position, flat on his sun-lamp-orange back with his hairless left leg in Hart’s grip. Hart turns and whirls and suddenly Flair’s face is being pressed into the ring floor. Hart is sitting on Flair’s back and has the Nature Boy’s legs in a most unnatural position. This is Hart’s signature move, the Sharpshooter, a combination of two submission holds: the Figure-Four Leglock and the Boston Crab. Hart is administering the coup de grapple, pro wrestling’s most devastating submission hold. He knows that he’ll win now, that he’ll win the world championship, and waits only for Flair to give in.

In 1981, long before his transformation into The Hitman, Bret Hart was an anonymous greenhorn on the WWF circuit. He languished at the bottom of cards, scratching out a living, just waiting, he says, “for that one big break to make a name for myself.” Bret was sure that his break had come the day the Japanese wrestling office called. The Dynamite Kid had signed to fight the Japanese hero Fujinami for the world junior heavyweight title (under 200 pounds) at Madison Square Garden. But twenty-four hours before the bout, the Dynamite Kid was held up at the border because he didn’t have a work visa. The Japanese officials asked Hart to fill in on short notice. “The Garden was and will always be like Carnegie Hall,” Hart says. “Once you perform there you know you’re established.” Hart flew to New York and appeared at a press conference for Japanese journalists the afternoon before the match.

After the press conference Hart went to his hotel room, took his phone off the hook, and went to sleep, dreaming of the status that was soon to be his. At 6:15 he packed up his gym bag and set out to walk over to MSG. He got as far as the hotel lobby. An official from the Japanese office stopped him. “You’re off the card tonight,” he told Hart and handed him an envelope containing $200. Hart was dumbfounded and demanded an explanation. The official told Hart that the decision had been made by Vince McMahon Sr., then the voice of God in the WWF and the most powerful man in wrestling. “The Garden is only for the biggest names in the game,” the official told Hart. “Vince Senior decided you don’t have a big enough name.”

“I’ve always wanted to get past that knock of not having a big enough name,” Hart says. “I always wanted to get even for that. It was the worst experience I’ve had in wrestling, worse pain than all the injuries I’ve had.” In Calgary and western Canada, there had been security in the Hart name—a certain amount of baggage but also instant recognition. But the biggest name from one of the territories, from Stampede Wrestling, couldn’t even get him in the door at the Garden.

After this disappointment, Hart was determined to make a name his own way. He rejected the suggestion of the WWF that he become Cowboy Bret Hart. “I told them I can’t ride a horse and I don’t sound like a cowboy,” Hart says. “More than that, I didn’t want to get typed as a cowboy for my entire career.” Hart took on Jim Neidhart as a tag-team partner to create “The Hart Foundation,” developed the Hitman persona, and became a heel in defiance of the conventional wisdom that he was too good-looking to be a bad guy. Soon after repenting his past sins Hart set out as a newly righteous soloist and won the WWF Intercontinental belt. “Whenever I wrestle at Madison Square Garden, I think, ‘They know who I am now,’” he says. “I’m pretty damn high up.” With Rick Flair contorted beneath him, Hart is sitting on top of the wrestling world.

*

Now appreciate that an audience with The Hitman and The Rocket is not easy to secure. Three out of every four weeks they’re on the road, utterly at the mercy of the WWF matchmakers. The only place to corner them is at the gym. On the road and at home they pump iron two hours a day, five days a week. In Calgary The Hitman and The Rocket do their lifting at B.J.’s Gym, a body-culture emporium owned by one of their brothers-in-law and decorated with glossy photos and posters of pro wrestlers, most prominently The Hitman.

Also appreciate that a member of the media will be granted an audience with The Hitman and not necessarily Bret Hart. That is to say, Hart will show up in character. He arrives in the same attire he wears into the ring for an evening’s simulated hostilities: a black leather jacket adorned with a Hitman logo on the back and wraparound reflective sunglasses. He has lacquered down his hair and adopted The Hitman’s good-natured conceit. For The Rocket the occupational schizophrenia is less pronounced because, as a recent arrival in the WWF, he has yet to develop much of a character. “I’m just an all-American, clean-cut, high-flying wrestler,” The Rocket says. “I don’t have to paint my face.” And to his mother’s relief, he is blond enough that he doesn’tr have to slick down his bangs.

And also appreciate that The Hitman and The Rocket have their guards up.For the past year the WWF has been enduring a spate of bad publicity. In 1991 a doctor in Pennsylvania was sent to jail for illegally prescribing steroids to several WWF wrestlers. Though the Harts were never mentioned in the charges, Hulk Hogan, longtime golden boy of the WWF, was implicated. Later the federation became the object of another scandal when former wrestlers and officials claimed they were objects of unwelcome homosexual advances from high-placed WWF executives. “All the recent charges—and most of them are unfair—have put us on the defensive about our profession,” The Hitman says.

Inconvenienced, in character, and on guard, the Harts still manage to charm. Their business requires a sense of humour as much as gym-built muscles. Bret and Owen talk proudly, lovingly, about their brutal and often cynical trade because it is, after all, the family business. “When I was just a little kid, I didn’t have a real good idea of what wrestling was,” Bret says, removing his shades and dropping The Hitman’s arrogance. “Guys came up to me and said, ‘My dad can take your dad.’ I had to defend the family honour and wrestling too. I was fighting for a just cause but I wasn’t sure what it was.”

Bret and Owen, the two most successful wrestlers of the Hart progeny, were originally reluctant warriors. “We were the two sons who didn’t want to go into the business,” Bret says. “I wanted to go to film school but after I started wrestling for my father I couldn’t quit. I was better than all the other guys starting out. I had a gift.”

Owen’s account of his ring debut sounds like the confession of a “father wound” at a New Age men’s therapy group. “I wanted to be a phys ed teacher,” The Rocket says. I wrestled only to appease my father. I was compelled to get into the ring. Once I started there was the pressure of having the Hart name—I was expected to be good.”

It wasn’t merely the family name that gave The Hitman and The Rocket their shot. Back then, the organization of pro wrestling provided greater opportunities for novices. “Ten years ago you could find work all over the world,” Bret says. “There were a bunch of regional shows or territories. The WWF was the main organization but the other outfits acted as feeder systems. Stampede Wrestling was just one of a whole slew of them.”

The phenomenal growth of the WWF squeezed out the smaller shows and, in turn, led to a decline in the quality of wrestling. “Now any guy who works out in a gym wants to be a wrestler,” Owen says. “Lots move up without learning the ropes and paying their dues.” Bret cites the Ultimate Warrior, the heir apparent to Hulk Hogan, as a prime example of a star wrestler who can’t wrestle. “I’d like to see the Warrior do three or four moves in the ring,” The Hitman says. “He has a clothesline [a forearm to the throat] but that’s it. WWF wrestling is fast-paced and theatrical, but there has been a loss of skill. Owen and I definitely have a foot in the past as far as knowing the moves and I hope were part of a new wave of wrestlers, a return to old-fashioned amateur wrestling skills.”

The Hitman also hopes his sons will be part of that return to the Harts’ family values. “I’d like my sons to be the first third-generation pro wrestlers,” he says. “My oldest son, Dallas, doesn’t quite understand what it’s all about but he takes it seriously. He went into hiding when I lost my Intercontinental title. The youngest, Blade, is two years old and he goes crazy as soon as he sees me on TV>”

In one of Stu’s last matches—he was in his sixties—he teamed up with Bret. Neither Bret nor Owen can foresee staying in the game long enough to enter the ring with their sons. “I keep saying one more year and that’s it,” Bret says. The Hitman’s forehead, just below his hairline, is creased with scar tissue from gashes that were opened by punches and sometimes sharpened fingernails. He probably never envisaged such a build-up of wounds. Owen seems even less inclined to hang on. “I can see wrestling until I’m thirty, but then I’d like to get out and be with my family,” he says. “I wondered whether it was all worth it last year when I was injured at the Survivor Series. I was doing an aerial move off the top rope and took a head butt to the groin. I had to finish the match because it was on live TV but I spent a week in the hospital. I almost had to lose a testicle. I had just got married and wanted to start a family. It put into perspective the risks that I was taking.”

Though their older brothers, Smith, Keith and Bruce, were once regulars on the Stampede Wrestling circuit, Bret maintains that his sisters Ellie and Georgia were his toughest and most frequent opponents for sibling scraps at home. “My sisters were tough enough for any of us to duke it out with,” Bret says. “It was a no-win situation. My father was especially partial to the girls. If you were caught laying a finger on your sister, you had to deal with old Stu.”

The Hitman fighting, maybe even losing, to a girl? Being put in his place by his father? Bret Hart perhaps realizes that he has strayed too far out of character. He stands up abruptly, puts on his shades, and assumes The Hitman’s belligerent hauteur. “You are finished,” he announces.

*

My eyes are watering, my neck has just cracked, and the well-appointed dining room at Hart House is starting to spin. The clenched right fist and thick forearm of Stu Hart has just bruised and almost crushed my nose. “You felt that, did’ya?” he asks. “See, I’m just shooting it across like this …” He does it once more, further loosening my tenuous grip on consciousness. Stu Hart is showing me a little ringcraft. I have said nothing to encourgae this lesson. I have advised him that I’m late for an important appointment. He said that he’d rush through it. “I’m only showing you this ‘cause you seem like a good guy,” he says. His hand grips me near the right elbow. “See, I have you there,” he says. I can see the pictures of the Hart family that hang on the walls around the long dining table. I can see a vintage photo of Stu from his fighting days. His body was then rippled and his dark eyes were piercing. Suddenly the pictures are upside down—or rather I am. I have hit the floor with a jolt, how I don’t know. I can feel my head being pressed towards my navel. “Some people think this wrestling stuff is fake,” he says. “They have no idea what goes on inside the ring, how tough this stuff is.” Stu—who I am now sure is the world’s most dangerous seventy-seven-year-old—leans his full body weight, about 260 pounds, onto my back. I free up my head but I can’t draw enough breath to cry “Uncle.” “It’s a good thing I like you,” he says without menace. I look into the living room and see studio portraits of the Hart children from the sixties. With my head ringing, my spine cracking and the world fading to black, I can now understand that for Bret and Owen and the other sons the Hart name was sometimes a burden, one that, if you crossed Stu, could collapse a lung.

*

Last summer rumour had Bret Hart ready to leave the WWF. According to a few published reports, other wrestling circuits were interested in him, but a closed-door meeting with Vince McMahon Jr., the owner of the WWF, sorted out the matter. The son of the man who ruled that Hart didn’t have a big enough name decided that The Hitman was worthy of a push, which explains this showdown with Flair in Saskatoon. Hart is ready to ascend to the summit: the WWF world championship. Flair is writhing on the canvas, struggling to escape the Sharpshooter. This night Hart has his finishing move locked in and awaits on the ref to halt the proceedings. Flair submits. The ref calls for the bell. Hart lets loose the hold, grabs the championship belt, and holds it aloft. The fans give him an ovation and see in this match many things. Good guy vs bad guy. The decent Canadian vs the ugly American. Gel vs peroxide. These are subtexts that promoters invent and enact, the plot confections that the mat fans swallow whole. But the victor, the new champion, is playing out another story line that is closer to the truth. When Hart was starting out in the early eighties, trying to make a name for himself after working his father’s promotions in western Canada, Flair was already the best scientific wrestler and the best showman in the game. Now Hart has not only won the most important title in wrestling, he has won it in what was for four decades his father’s territory. Bret Hart suffered indignity long ago but, for The Hitman, retribution is the only angle to shoot, the only sure-fire way to draw heat.
Why Jose Theodore had to get the hell out of Montreal

This story broke some new ground in the biggest hockey story in Canada back in the summer of 2003. Jose Theodore, the Montreal Canadiens goaltender and former NHL most valuable player, was on the front pages, first when his father and four brothers were charged with racketeering, and later when photos of Jose Theodore and friends in the Hells Angels were made public. The news in this story—not reported in either the Englsih or French press—was a convicted drug dealer for the Angels having a phone book with Jose Theodore’s phone number listed (and that Theodore’s phone number was in fact a “vanity number” for the biker organization).


From ESPN The Magazine

PICTURE IMPERFECT
After a season—and summer—from hell—Jose Theodore seeks peace between the pipes.

By Gare Joyce

Jose Theodore was feeling sick and weak. He was in the Canadiens locker room, waiting for the introductions before Les Habs’ first preseason game this fall. He was hoping the Bell Centre fans would cheer him. He thought that they would, but he wasn’t sure.

By the time Theodore had finished his warm-up, he felt worn out and was soaked in a cold sweat. It might have been the flu he was battling. But it could also have been the tension of this first night in goal after a season he’d rather forget and a summer he never will.

What a difference a year makes. At the same time in 2002, Theodore owned more than the Hart and the Vezina trophies that were his reward for a season of artistry. He owned Montreal. He was la vedette—the player with star quality, embodiment of the rouge, bleu et blanc: Born and raised in Montreal, fluent in French and English, face fit for a boy band, his play in goal—equal parts butterfly and whirling dervish—reminiscent of the great Patrick Roy.

But that was before. Before a season in which Theodore slipped from first in save percentage to 15th, a season in which the Canadiens missed the playoffs after a miraculous run the previous year. Before last June, when police busted Theodore’s father, four half-brothers and an uncle for loan-sharking at a Montreal casino. Before the Montreal papers ran front-page photographs of Theodore, all smiles, posing with one of Canada’s most notorious gangs. Before Jose Theodore learned that he could not stop all the shots life fired at him.

Finally, the introductions: “Numero Soixante, Number Sixty, Jose Theodore.” Even before the PA announcer made it to the English, even before he said the name, the fans applauded, cheered, rose to their feet. Theodore sighed in relief. He had survived a difficult moment, the latest, if not the last.

*

When Theodore was a kid playing hockey for the 47 Richelieu team in Montreal, he worshiped Patrick Roy. So did a lot of other kids. But for Theodore, becoming an NHL goalie wasn’t a pipe dream. When Jose was 12, Russian hockey icon Viacheslav Tretiak predicted a bright NHL future for Theodore. Once the goalie for the Soviet Union’s 1970s hockey dynasty, Tretiak now ran a hockey school in Montreal, and in a television interview he predicted stardom for his young student. Theodore still has a tape of the broadcast, which made him a local celebrity. He can still recite it, word for word. “I’ve had a lot of goaltenders come to my school,” says Tretiak. “A lot went to the NHL. Jose was the best, better than Martin Brodeur.”

The Canadiens took Theodore with their second-round pick in the 1994 draft, even with Roy on their roster. The young man’s future could not have been brighter. His past—or at least his father’s past—was another story.

In those days, Habs scouts didn’t bother with player interviews and background checks, believing those procedures tipped off other teams. But rival scouts who ran those checks were scared by what they found. They learned that Jose’s father ran with the wrong crowd. That he had served 16 months in jail in the early 1980s for dealing hashish. “We knew about Ted Theodore,” says one junior coach who worked with Jose. “NHL scouts had to know, too.”

Their fears will be played out publicly in December, when Ted Theodore appears in a Montreal court on 59 criminal counts for offenses that include conspiracy to loan-sharking, racketeering, issuing death threats and weapons possession. Ted’s four oldest sons from his first marriage—Nicky, 45, Frank, 42, Theo Jr., 35, and Roch, 29—and his brother Boris are also charged.

In the past eight months, police have taken statements from more than 200 alleged victims of a loan-sharking ring that charged 200% to 600% interest on loans that reached well into five figures. And in May, police seized a bank account held jointly by Ted and Jose, with a balance of $85,000 (Canadian). Police say that the cash was not Jose’s, that Ted made the deposits assuming that large sums would not attract attention when one of the account-holders draws a seven-figure NHL salary. Police also say his son was never a suspect.

“Jose Theodore has not met with us, and we do not anticipate meeting with him,” says Jean-Guy Gagnon, deputy chief of criminal investigations with the Montreal police. Adds Guy Ouellette, a retired Quebec cop who’s been active in the case: “There would be no motive for a hockey star already making millions to risk everything.”

Still, the cops had to be thinking about Jose Theodore when they dubbed the case Operation Referee. Theodore won’t talk about the investigation. But he must have been dreading the results of Operation Referee throughout much of last season. And with that assumption comes another: Theodore’s worries may have had something to do with the netminder’s disappointing performance on the ice.

In hockey-obsessed Montreal, that slide would have been a focus of the media this offseason had it not been for the scandal. Now, instead of Jose’s play, the press is focused on a more lurid question, one that Montreal’s Le Journal blared in a recent headline: “What did he know?”

What did he know? Maybe Jose’s mother, Marie-France, told him stories when he asked where his father was for those 16 months, or what Ted did for a living. Because of Jose’s self-imposed gag order, we can’t know. But there’s a difference between being innocent and living blind.

“You have to believe Jose knew something,” Ouellette says. “But it’s not his duty to report his father. He had to think about the support his father gave him over the years.”

Jose Theodore wasn’t Montreal’s No. 1 goalie going into the 2001-02 season. Just a couple of years clear of the minors, he was slated to divide ice time with veteran Jeff Hackett. Montreal’s playoff hopes looked bleak, bleaker still after center and captain Saku Koivu was diagnosed with stomach cancer. When Hackett was sidelined in November with a hand injury, it looked like just another misfortune in a cursed season. But black cloud seemed to lift when Theodore took over. Although he saw 30 shots per game, more than any other NHL goalie, he led the league with a .931 save percentage. His goals-against average was a glimmering 2.11. And the numbers only started to tell the story of the team’s reliance on him.

“We asked him to be God,” says Montreal goalie coach Rollie Melanson. He was at least a god. Thanks to Theodore and the inspirational return of Koivu, the Habs made the playoffs, knocked off the favored Bruins in the first round, and took the eventual Eastern Conference champion Hurricanes to six games. Theodore’s prize? The Hart Trophy as the NHL’s MVP, the Vezina as the league’s top goalie and, after a brief holdout, a three-year $18 million contract that made him the highest-paid player in Montreal’s history.

Then, just like that, it all went wrong. Theodore struggled last season. He finished with a 2.90 goals-against average. The Habs never even sniffed the playoffs. Melanson doesn’t understate Jose’s struggles—“When you’re No. 1 in the world the only place you can go is down. What we didn’t anticipate was him coming into camp not in the condition he should have been in”—but he had no idea of the real struggles his protege was enduring.

In April, Jose had told family members that he was afraid they were going to hurt his career—a conversation that was recorded while Ted was under electronic surveillance.

While the front-page stories about his family may not have been Jose’s doing, the next media frenzy was. In June, two papers ran photos of Theodore posing with the Hells Angels. In the United States, the image of the Hells Angels might be along the lines of middle-aged weekend warriors on Harleys. But in Canada, and Quebec specifically, the gang represents nothing benign or romantic. For years, in fact, the Angels had been waging a bloody turf war with a rival gang, the Rock Machine, on the streets of Montreal: guns, bombs, the works. The toll across the province: 164 dead, including 29 innocents, one an 11-year-old boy. The Angels have also killed prison guards, bombed police stations and bribed cops and juries.

And Jose Theodore was their pet.

In the photograph published by Allo Police, a crime tabloid, Theodore was standing with 13 Hells Angels at a golf tournament sponsored by a strip joint in 1998. In the second, published by Le Journal and taken in 2000, he is seen with the Angels in full regalia, in one of their clubhouses just outside of Montreal.

The NHL prohibits personnel from associating with criminals, but the league didn’t punish Theodore or even confirm that officials spoke with him after the photos were published. Ouellette, the retired investigator, claims that Louis Laframboise, who heads the company in charge of NHL security in Quebec, said he had spoken to Theodore about the pictures. An NHL spokesman says only that league security is “an internal matter.” Theodore’s agent, Don Meehan, says the NHL has never spoken to his client about the Angels.

Whatever the truth, Theodore talked to reporters about the two scandals just once, in August. He was understandably cautious. “When you’re young, you don’t have the same judgment as today,” he said. “These photos were taken five or six years ago. I learn from experience. But I’m not perfect … These are the things that come with my fame.”

Even if the NHL never warned Theodore about running with the Angels, they had to be disturbed by one piece of evidence from the prosecution of Eric Bouffard, a boyhood pal of Jose’s. Bouffard is serving four years for drug trafficking, and when he was arrested police seized his address book. That Jose Theodore’s name and number were listed did not surprise Ouellette. But the digits did. “It’s not important what the first three numbers were,” Ouellette says. “It was the last four, 8181. For Hells Angels, these are very important. Many use 81 as a short form for the Hells Angels. H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, A the first. Hells Angels will pay a lot of money for a phone number with 81 in it.”

*

Jose Theodore is the best known NHL player with a family connection to crime, but he won't be the first. In fact, he won't even be the first goaltender from Montreal whose family was linked to the underworld.

A famous story retold many times when veteran hockey men gather: An agent walks through the lobby of a hotel in Montreal and spots Billy Johnston. "Good to see you, Billy," the agent says. "What are you doing these days?"

Billy Johnston looks at him stone-faced and in a matter-of-fact monotone says: "Bank robber, retired."

Billy Johnston may or may not have robbed banks but he was a known wiseguy in Montreal three or four decades ago and the brother of Eddie Johnston, former Boston Bruins netminder and former coach of Hartford and Pittsburgh. In fact, in the Johnston family, the hoods out-numbered the jocks, another brother Mickey being connected as well.

The Johnstons grew up poor just a few blocks south of the old Montreal Forum. Just like Jose Theodore, they dreamed of playing for the Habs. They couldn't afford tickets to Canadiens games and so they ran through the turnstiles and hid in the crowd in the standing room section. "In those days all the players in Quebec were owned by Montreal, so I played on the Canadiens junior affiliates," Johnston says. "To make extra cash I worked as a practice goalie for the Canadiens for a buck a practice. For one dollar I had Maurice Richard coming in from the blueline, running me over."

While Eddie Johnston saw hockey as a way off Montreal's mean streets, his brothers ran with what he calls "a tough crowd." Among those in the crowd, as it turns out, was Ted Theodore.

Still, Eddie Johnston said that his brothers respected his hockey ambitions. "Thing is, I was never involved with my brother and his friends and they never tried to involve me," Eddie Johnston says. "I don't know if they were protective of me or just wanted to see me make it."

There's the difference between then and now. The Johnstons were hands off with Eddie. It seems Ted Theodore wasn't worried about keeping a distance from his famous son. He recklessly tried to use his son as cover. Meanwhile Jose's boyhood friends were all too ready to capitalize on their friendship with him, no matter what the consequences.

Johnston wouldn't speculate about Theodore's future with the Canadiens. "Maybe it turned out easier for me because when I was still a young guy, Montreal traded me and I spent the rest of my life living in the U.S," he says.

And that's what many were looking for this autumn: a trade that would make life easier for Jose Theodore. Canadiens executives defended the goaltender during the summer—but as any Montrealer knows, even a Montrealer who has been stamped as the next great star of the Canadiens, this is the most image-conscious franchise in professional sport, more of a cultural institution than a team. If Theodore lost the fans, if the media turned on, or if somehow he were implicated in his family’s alleged crime syndicate, those trophies and gaudy numbers wouldn’t mean a thing. He’d be traded. Like Roy was. Like other Hall of Famers had been before him. In Montreal, the criminals are more sentimental than Canadiens executives.

*

Flu-ridden and rusty, Jose Theodore gave up two first-period goals in that first preseason game. Eric Fichaud, a goalie in the minors, started the second period, but left after breaking a finger in his catching hand. Mathieu Garon, Theodore’s regular backup, was in the arena in civvies and could have rushed into service. Instead, Theodore, white as the ice, skated back into the net. After last season’s uncertainty and last summer’s heat, he was relieved to be back in goal, even though the Habs would go on to lose 4-3. He had to keep his head in the game—on the bench his mind would have been racing.

After the game, as Jose unlaced his skates, reporters huddled around him. They observed his ground rules and asked no questions about the scandals. Despite the headlines, fans, journalists—even Guy Ouellette—wish him well. No one seems to hold his family’s alleged crimes against him. Besides, Theodore always seemed to have a bit of danger in him. Like Allen Iverson, his street cred is part of his appeal.

“Every time I made a save, I heard clapping and cheers,” he told the reporters. “It was a big boost. The coaches told me, ‘It’s only preseason. You’re sick. You shouldn’t play.’ I’ve played in worse situations.”

He’s lived through worse ones, too. All through Theodore’s summer from hell, there were as many trade rumors filling the air as mosquitoes. One had Jose going to Colorado, filling the void left by Patrick Roy’s retirement. But that would have been a very unpopular trade: One survey reported that 71% of Quebecers opposed the idea. “He’s not on the market,” Canadiens president Pierre Boivin told Le Journal. “He’s still our No. 1 goaltender.”

And he’s playing like one: Through six games this season, he has a 2.00 goals-against average and two shutouts.

Will it last? Even if it doesn’t Jose Theodore has made his mark on the franchise. Across from his stall in the Canadiens dressing room in the Bell Centre, Theodore can see his name engraved in marble. Carved into the gray tablet on the wall near the door to the ice are the names of Canadiens who have won the NHL’s individual trophies. “Jose Theodore 2002” is the most recent entry among Hart Trophy winners, a list that includes Jean Beliveau, Maurice Richard and Howie Morenz. “Jose Theodore 2002” is also on the honor roll of Vezina Trophy winners, along with Roy, Ken Dryden and Jacques Plante.

It will be a struggle to get his name back on that marble, but Jose’s father may be able to help. At a hearing in September, prosecutors pushed for a December court date for Ted Theodore and the other defendants. They’re pressuring for a plea bargain, to bring a quick end to a proceeding that could drag for months. If Ted Theodore cops a plea, Jose can start to get on with his life—with a heavy heart, perhaps, but a clear mind. “What did Jose Theodore know?” will no longer be the burning question, and he’ll have a chance to answer the one that really matters. How will Jose Theodore be remembered?
The saddest story in hockey: The abused prospect

This story appeared in ESPN The Magazine in June of 2003. I worked on getting this teenager and his family to talk about his abusive father for months. On the website of ESPN’s arch-rival Sports Illustrated their hockey editor called it “an excellent story,” which might have been a shot at SI’s own staff.

From ESPN The Magazine

DAMAGE CONTROL

Patrick O’Sullivan always looks for his father in the stands. He’s done it since he was a 2-year-old skating in Winston-Salem, N.C. He still caught himself doing it this season when, at age 18, he was the leading scorer for the Mississauga IceDogs of the Ontario junior league. And at the NHL draft in Nashville, before he even takes a seat, O’Sullivan will look around the arena, searching for his father.
But this isn’t Jim Craig trying to find his father after the Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid. On draft day, Patrick O’Sullivan won’t be the only one looking for John O’Sullivan. So will Patrick’s mother, Cathie, and an ready-for-action team from NHL security.
“I hope he won’t be there,” Patrick says, sounding more weary than angry. “I hope he’d know not to come with everyone looking for him, and with me not wanting him there. A perfect day would be getting picked by a team that wants me, and knowing my father is not in the arena.”
Scouts rate Patrick, a 5'11", 193-pound center, as a top-five talent in the draft. There’s no better finisher in the pool. In the time it takes most players to recognize a scoring chance, Patrick’s already wired the puck into the net. He has the rare combination of near-psychic anticipation and surgeon’s nerve. Mike Bossy had it. Brett Hull, too. It’s the kind of gift that starts a father dreaming big dreams for his son. Dreams that can get out of control.
For the past year and a half, the teen hasn’t worried much about his father being around. That’s because, after years of emotional and physical torment, Patrick stood up to him. He filed assault charges that landed John O’Sullivan in jail. By the time he was released, a judge had issued a temporary restraining order against him.
The team selecting Patrick will also want John O’Sullivan to stay out of the picture. To scouts and general managers, a dysfunctional family is as much of an impediment as weak ankles. John O’Sullivan believed he was Patrick’s greatest asset in the boy’s pursuit of a pro hockey career. But according to more than one scouting director, he might be his son’s greatest liability. And one scout puts it this way: “Kids from a troubled family hardly ever pan out.”
So Patrick will sit beside Cathie and his sisters Kelley, 15, and Shannon, 8, on draft day. He will wait to hear his name called—and hope that his father is in another area code.
*
Hockey fans know Wayne Gretzky’s story starts with his father Walter, a former minor leaguer, flooding a backyard rink for his son in Brantford, Ont., nurturing his talent with homespun wisdom. John O’Sullivan wanted his story to turn out the same.
Like Walter, John had played the game. Raised in Toronto, he figured he’d make it to the NHL if he worked harder than anybody else. He practically lived at the rink and the gym. When guys would knock off for a beer after a game, John would be doing push-ups and sit-ups, knocking back milk and protein powder. But his dedication didn’t translate into stardom.
Although John played a few games for junior clubs in Quebec and Saskatchewan, no NHL team drafted him. He was invited to the Winnipeg Jets’ training camp one year and the Penguins’ the next, but that’s as good as it got in his brief career. John landed in the Atlantic Coast Hockey League, but even in the minorest of the minors, he was a scrub, a forward who scored seven goals in his best season.
“He was a loner who fought a bit,” says Panthers general manager Rick Dudley, who coached John with the Winston-Salem Thunderbirds. “He didn't hang out with the other players.”
He did find a girl to hang out with: Cathie Martin, from Winston-Salem. They married in 1982, and three years later John left the game for good when Cathie gave birth to a son. As soon as Patrick learned to walk, John put a toy hockey stick in his hands—and swore he saw a special gift.
It’s not clear when John O’Sullivan’s support for his son’s hockey career crossed the line—when, as Patrick says, “He started to live his dream through me.” It may have been when he moved his family to Toronto so his 5-year-old son could play against better competition. Or when John insisted that Patrick play against boys at least a couple of years older. Or when he quit jobs because they clashed with Patrick’s practice schedule.
To Patrick, John crossed the line when he made his eight-year-old son get out of the car a mile from home and run the rest of the way carrying his gear, as punishment for a sub-par game. Or when John moved the family to Sterling Heights, Mich., to find better coaching for 12-year-old Patrick and his sister Kelley, then 9 and a budding tennis star. Or when Patrick was 13 and John was driving him across the Canadian border five or six times a week, an hour each way, to play against guys as old as 21. That season, Patrick played with a winger who was married and the father to a newborn.
John O’Sullivan saw nothing wrong with that picture. After all, Wayne Gretzky had been a boy among men. But nobody was mistaking John O’Sullivan for Walter Gretzky, although word of his prodigy got around.
The USA Hockey development program in Ann Arbor recruited Patrick, and at 15 he spent a year playing with the best American talent his age. That was Patrick’s most enjoyable season, and not just because of the wins in international age-group tournaments. He finally felt like part of a team, going to the same high school as the rest of the players. For once, he had friends, not just wingers.
“I played with John at training camp in Winnipeg,” says Moe Mantha, who coached Patrick for USA Hockey. “I told him to trust us. I think he did most of the time.”
Still, John pushed his son relentlessly. Nothing was good enough. When Patrick scored, he seemed more relieved than happy. Teammates knew why. Some of them asked referees to give credit for a fuzzy goal or assist to Patrick, to spare him John’s wrath. A few times Mantha asked Patrick if he should go with him to the parking lot after a game to “talk John down.” Patrick declined, fearing it would just provoke his father. Says Mantha, “I told John if he didn’t change, his kid was eventually going to tell him to screw off.”
At 16, Patrick was selected by Mississauga with the No. 1 pick in the Ontario Hockey League draft. To play in the OHL, Patrick would have to forego his NCAA eligibility. He’d hoped to play college hockey with friends in the USA Hockey program. But John had never been able to cut it in the OHL. This was his chance for sweet retribution, and his son’s chance to hit the NHL jackpot. So Patrick became a Mississauga IceDog.
As it happens, the coach and part-owner was Don Cherry, the legendary Hockey Night In Canada commentator. “John was wound real tight all the time,” says Cherry. “I was worried something was up when Patrick came to the rink once with cuts and bruises that weren’t from games.”
Says another team official: “By mid-season Patrick thought it was either going to be his father killing him or him killing his father, whichever came first.” It didn’t come to that. But it came close.
*
Patrick O'Sullivan didn’t have to look for his father in the stands at the game in Ottawa on Jan. 4, 2002. He was the guy leaning over the glass behind the IceDogs’ bench. The one screaming at Patrick, “You’re f---ing finished. You should have gone to f---ing college. You’re going f---ing home.”
The tension had been building all day. John and Cathie had driven 10 hours from Michigan to Ottawa for the game. They’d dropped Kelley and their other daughter, 8-year-old Shannon, at John’s parents’ in Toronto. The drive gave John time to simmer: Patrick was screwing up. He was soft.
By the time they made it to the arena, John was seething. On the bench, Patrick stared straight ahead. Without turning around, he yelled at his father to “f--- off.”
After the game, Patrick was about to get on the team bus when, according to teammates, John grabbed him and shoved him into his van. John told Patrick he’d played his last game, and then drove from Ottawa to his parents’ house in Toronto, ranting for the entire four-hour trip.
Cathie was terrified, but Patrick was defiant: “I’d had enough. So many times I wanted to quit just to get back at him. But not now. I was going to play. It was my life, after all. I was even laughing at him.”
When the van pulled up to John’s parents’ house before dawn, he went to collect Kelley and Shannon. Patrick got out of the van too, telling his father that he wasn’t coming home. He was making a stand for himself. It had to end now, he said, knowing exactly what was coming.
On the lawn, with his parents and John’s younger brother Barry looking on in horror, O’Sullivan started punching and kicking his 16-year-old son. Fighting was John’s game. He had more than 30 pounds on Patrick. It was the Atlantic Coast league all over again. He left Patrick in a heap on the grass, bruised and cut.
John got in the car and drove off alone before Patrick got up off his knees. Cathie called the police. That afternoon, a judge issued a warrant for his arrest.
The next day, Cathie and Patrick visited IceDogs GM Trevor Whiffen, and told him what happened. He was sympathetic. Assistant coach Joe Washkurak was not surprised. He’d seen it all too often in his day job as a social worker specializing in domestic crisis cases. “The red flags were out there,” Washkurak says. “Everyone saw his obsessiveness. But in a lot of relationships, the abuse goes on out of sight.”
John was at large for a week. For the first time, Patrick would look in the stands and his father wouldn’t be there.
The IceDogs put in new team rules: Patrick wasn’t to be left alone on road trips or at the arena, before or after a game. John gave police the slip until he was arrested near the IceDogs’ arena. He pled guilty to assault and spent 22 days in a Toronto jail.
Cathie and the girls moved back to Winston-Salem. She talked to a lawyer about divorce. Patrick got a restraining order that barred his father from any close contact with him. John was barred from any hockey arena in Ontario. But he was still spotted at several games.
It’s hard to think of an 17-year-old as being made young again. But the court order did just that for Patrick, who began playing better than ever, and was named the top rookie in all of the Canadian junior leagues. In April 2002 Patrick went to the World Under-18 Championship in Slovakia and was reunited with many of his friends from the USA Hockey development program.
“He seemed much happier,” says Mike Eaves, who coached the American Under-18s. “One day I had the guys jog a couple of laps of a track to loosen up. Patrick is so competitive, he made it into a race and pushed other guys into running harder. And it was fun. You got a sense that he was breaking free.”
And in the tournament Patrick did break free. Going into the final game, the U.S. needed a two-goal victory over Russia for the gold. On the ice was Nikolai Zherdev, now the top European prospect in the 2003 NHL draft. But Zherdev was overshadowed by Patrick. In the last minute, he quarterbacked a power play that gave the U.S. a 3-1 victory and the gold. Patrick, the American team’s youngest member, was also its leading scorer.
“It’s simple,” say one NHL scout. “O’Sullivan was the best player on the best team in a tournament against players a full year older than him.”
Cherry wasn’t surprised: “He’s a tough kid,” he says. “By age 16 he had to go through more than most adults ever have to. Scouts may worry about his family. But he managed to score 40 goals last season with all this other stuff going on. That tells you what he’s made of.”
As of now, though, reports from the NHL's scouting service, rate Patrick as No. 14 among this year’s crop of North American draft hopefuls. If that’s accurate, he’ll be a late first-round pick. What’s happened in the year since his triumph overseas that’s dragged down his stock?
To begin with, NHL scouts were disappointed by Patrick’s play at the world Under-20 tournament in Nova Scotia this winter. They had hoped to see the same player who tore up the Under-18 tournament. But Patrick didn’t see much ice time and pressed too hard on the shifts he got.
And then there was the John O’Sullivan factor. The American Under-20 squad was accompanied to the tournament by a U.S. Marshall, in case John, restraining order or not, made an appearance. Which he did. Patrick had no trouble spotting him in the stands. His only trouble was getting away.
“He called my room at the hotel and we saw him around,” Patrick said. “After the medal-round games, he tried to get down to the dressing room.”
There was no violent incident, but NHL scouts knew about the intrigue. It’s an NHL rule of thumb that the scouting of a player isn’t complete until you’ve scouted the parents. To scouts, John O’Sullivan is more than a nuisance.
*
It takes a while to find John O’Sullivan, who’s been on the move lately. He has no visitation rights to his children—Cathie is seeking a permanent restraining order in the U.S.—but John recently moved to Winston-Salem, a couple of blocks away from Kelley’s school. No listed phone number. No return address on the unopened letters to Patrick and the girls. There’s only one way to reach him: a call to his attorney. “I’ve had to use lawyers a lot lately,” says John.
It’s just a phone conversation. So you have to draw your own picture of someone who sees most everything in his life differently than his family. Does he have a thousand-yard stare on his face, or is he anxiously fidgeting? Is he in denial, or does he really believe?
John professes to still love his ex-wife and kids. He hopes “that everything can be worked out.” He says his family was taken from him by “agents and lawyers [who] have had too much influence over my wife and Patrick.”
He thinks he wasn’t just a good father, but a very good father, better than his own father. He says he only wanted the best for his kids. “Cathie and I were underachievers who might have done more if we had had more support,” he says. “I was totally committed to doing anything for Patrick and my daughters. Kelley is top 10 in the state in tennis. She should get a scholarship.”
There’s no point in telling John that Kelley has not picked up a racquet for months and has no plans to; that she’s studying theater and film.
And while his assault on Patrick landed him in jail, John is unrepentant. “No regrets,” he says. “I wouldn't do anything different.” He also suggests that the brawl wasn’t an assault, or even a fight: “We’re best friends,” he says. “We’d always wrestle and scrap a bit, like friends. I only wish Patrick were more like me as a player, a tougher guy.”
When asked if he planned to attend the draft, and if Patrick would acknowledge him there, John’s voice starts to break. “You’re starting to push my buttons,” he says, then nothing more. Click.
*
On the last Friday and Saturday in May, Patrick and the other top 99 players eligible for the 2003 NHL draft gather at a Toronto hotel near the IceDogs rink for a scouting combine that’s one part physical evaluation and one part personnel interviews. Almost all the players opt for a conservative look: dark suits, Cole Haan shoes. Patrick wears a baby blue shirt and metallic blue tie—not quite casual but not too slick, just the look of an 18-year-old who’s more comfortable in jeans, biting the bullet at least halfway.
He has 14 interviews on this Friday. The shortest is over in 20 minutes, the longest lasts an hour. It’s hard to tell if the interviews end when the execs hear what they want to hear, or what they don’t want to hear. Patrick hears questions like this: How would you characterize your relationship with your father? What’s the difference between your game now and five years ago? Do you drink? Have you ever been in trouble with the law? Ever been in jail?
Nobody asks him if his father will be at the draft. But here’s what he would have told them: That he knows there’s only a faint hope that his father will one day accept that their relationship is over. That he knows that for as long as he plays, everything he does on the ice will remind his father of other times, what John thinks were better times. That he knows his father will always believe his son should be better, tougher, more like he was. He would have told them that, yes, he’ll scan the stands in Nashville searching for his father. That he always has. Always will.