Gare Joyce

2008-08-31T18:17:00.001-07:00

From Toro, May 2005

CATCHING HELL

PEI baseball sensation Cass Rhynes was a national cause celebre when the Dodgers draft pick was convicted of hooking up with some underage girls. By the time his case was thrown out a year later, not only had the press forgotten about him, so had baseball

It’s bad news for the three ballplayers who share Room 305A in Connors State College’s residence. Their home date against Eastern Oklahoma was rained out this morning and it’s still pissing down. Everybody else in residence has gone home for Easter, so the cafeteria is closed. The boys’ television is down and the tube was just about their only amusement. They have no wheels, no money. They’re captives in a dingy apartment without even a couch to stretch out on. Understandably Elvin Vargas, Angel Cabrera, and Cass Rhynes are punchy from boredom and homesickness.

Then again, it’s always bad news here in the hamlet of Warner,
Oklahoma, where heritage landmarks are third-generation mobile homes and frame shacks right out of Green Acres. The locals’ conservative values are spelled out in Merle Haggard’s country-and-western classic “Okie from Muskogee” (Warner is in the heart of Muskogee County): They don’t smoke marijuana; they go to church in cowboy boots; and, when it comes to courtship, they believe in holding hands and “pitch and woo.”

Connors State, a little two-year junior college housed in the only brick buildings in town, is a long way from the glamour of professional sport; and Elvin, Angel, and Cass, three members of the CSC Cowboys baseball team, are a long way from home. Elvin, a rightfielder, was born in the Dominican Republic. Angel, a shortstop, is New York-born but as Puerto Rican as Menudo. The two draw stares around town because of their skin colour and accents. Cass, a catcher, gets attention when he opens his mouth. He’s an islander himself - Prince Edward Island, which he describes as “just about the last place people go lookin’ for ballplayers, like findin’ hockey players in Florida.” Rhynes is so soft-spoken and his accent is so thick that he sounds like Popeye muttering under his breath.

The roommates see their time at Connors State as a ticket to pro-baseball contracts. “It’s Elvin’s second year here and he’s gonna get drafted in June,” Angel says. “He can really play. Cass and me, we’re probably gonna have to wait a year. Maybe we get drafted this year. Scouts are at every game. We gotta hope.”

They gotta hope and, when they’re not hoping, they gotta bitch. They bitch about baseball not even being the big sport on campus; bragging rights belong to real cowboys, CSC’s rodeo team. They bitch that their coach, Perry Keith, is the hard-ass to end all hard-asses. All the batting helmets are cracked. The can on the bus is an environmental disaster.

“The good news is that we haven’t had any tornado warnings this
weekend,” Angel says. “The other day we had one during practice. Hail’s coming down, like softballs, then all of a sudden it stopped and the siren starts. Coach says, ‘Tornado.’ He gets the hell outta there, just leaves us.”

“It can’t get worse than this place,” Elvin says.

“No,” Cass says, talking through his chaw, spitting tobacco juice into
a plastic cup. “Don’t kid yourself. It can get worse.”

*

There’s a bad-news story that we’ve come to expect in the sports pages. It begins with the athlete who seeks gratification like it’s just another game to play. It could be drugs or sex or crime, but it all goes the same way. He’s never quite accountable and never runs out of second chances. And if the going gets tough, the athlete throws money at any legal issue that arises out of his indiscretion.

When Cass Rhynes’s story first broke in the Canadian media in June
2003, it seemed to fit the mould. The eighteen-year-old Rhynes, a draft choice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, was charged with “inciting” two young girls to give him oral sex. But the story was too shocking to be kept in the sports pages; for one thing, the girls were twelve and thirteen at the time of the incidents. That alone was enough to make it national news, but it got even juicier - the whole thing started on the Internet. Instant messaging led to hookups. And a final twist: This story came out of P.E.I., the closest thing Canada has to a theme park for family values. People presume the mores there haven’t changed since the days of Anne of Green Gables and horse-drawn carriages.

Newspapers across Canada went to work turning Rhynes into Canada’s Kobe Bryant.

In a feature evocatively entitled “Good Girls Do,” The Globe and Mail suggested that Rhynes’s case was symptomatic of ever more precocious teenagers in an ever more sex-saturated culture. The article cited alarming figures: “One percent of the Grade 7 girls . . . were willing to divulge that they had engaged in oral sex.” By Grade 9, though, “it was one-third of all students.” According to anecdotes provided by incredibly worldly tweens, oral sex was the key to popularity in junior-high society. Subsequent Globe stories included accounts of rainbow parties - teenage girls leaving all shades of lipstick on the boys’ penises - and had readers reflexively dialing up their daughters on their cellphones.

First prize for vitriol went to an editorial in Montreal’s Gazette: “Cass Rhynes neatly personifies all the worst vices elite athletes can fall prey to so easily: arrogance, an attitude of entitlement, and a conviction [that] talent puts them above the law and the judgment of mere mortals who lack their preternatural skill at such socially useful activities as hitting, catching, and throwing a hardball. . . . Rhynes’s main concern at the moment seems to be [prevailing in court] so he can play baseball in the United States. In a way we hope he’s successful. A multi-million-dollar contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers might seem too rich a reward for a child molester; on the other hand, it gets him out of this country, which would be a good thing. It also puts him in a game where sooner or later, he’ll face a fastball pitcher with a twelve-year-old daughter.”

When you’ve been portrayed in the media as a sexual predator and your mother has burned up her life savings to prevent her only child from going to jail, a dreary holiday weekend at Connors State doesn’t look so bad after all. Bring on the tornadoes.

*

It’s Easter Sunday night. To break up the boredom, Elvin, Angel, and Cass head to The Barn, the rickety aluminum shed that serves as the team’s bare-bones indoor practice facility. Watching them work out, you’re reminded that baseball is a game for stoics. Rhynes has his game face on, but, then again, most of the time he seems to have an expression that’s hard but otherwise blank. His emotions seem as flat as plains. Excitement and sadness are almost indistinguishable.

“Yesterday was the anniversary,” Rhynes says, waiting his turn while Elvin takes his cuts, hitting into a net. “Easter weekend. I was nine, out playin’ street hockey with all my friends. I was havin’ a great time. I just saw all these cars comin’ over to my house. I was wondering what was happenin’. My mother called me in, all serious, and told me that my father had died. She told me that he’d gone to a better place. I couldn’t comprehend that. I remember him takin’ me to my hockey games, my baseball games. And then he was gone. One night he was feelin’ sorta tired and the next night he’s gone.”

Rhynes steps inside the nets. Elvin tosses balls to him and he works on his swing. “After my father died, my great-grandmother died . . . .” Swing. “ . . . and my mother met a fellah, Bruce Affleck, a great guy, and they got engaged . . . .” Swing. “ . . . we got along great. I was looking forward to havin’ a father again – ‘least a stepfather. But one day he had a heart attack . . . .” Swing. “ . . . and he died. My mother got sick. She had cancer . . . .” Swing. “ . . . but she got through it. She’s so strong. Nothing knocks her down. She kept right on with her security business that she started . . . .” Swing. “Still, there were times when I’d come home . . . .” Swing. “. . . And I’d say, ‘Hello,’ just hopin’ that there was gonna be someone to answer. Through all those tough times I tried not to cry, just so that I wouldn’t upset my mother. I just kept it all inside.” Swing.

Rhynes steps out of the nets. Ninety-nine percent of the time he looks like the tough ballplayer, all six-foot-two and 220 pounds of old-school attitude. But just for a moment he lets the cool, hard pose drop. “I’m not lookin’ for anyone to feel sorry for me,” he says. His voice is quaking. “Those things were worse than the court case. All those deaths aren’t an excuse for anything. I made a mistake. I did something immoral, but I didn’t do anything criminal. I believed that all along.”

Out in the parking lot, a bunch of the Cowboys are gathered around the back of a pickup truck. One kid has a prize from a trip out to the back forty of his family’s property: a beaver. He skins it in about a minute. He tells Cass and Angel dinner will be served shortly. Rhynes winces when he looks at the pelt and says, “I know how he feels.”

*

When Cass Rhynes arrived back in Cornwall, just outside of Charlottetown, in May 2003 from a baseball showcase in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he found a note that his mother had left for him. “Call the RCMP.” He worried that a friend had landed in trouble. Or that he had rolled through a stop sign or speeded. And even when he phoned the RCMP, the officer he spoke to didn’t seem in any rush to have him come in. Rhynes was tired so he decided to crash for the night and show up the next day.

As soon as the questioning started, his heart sank. An officer asked him about the girl who’d called him to pick her up at the gas station. And about the other girl who came by his friends’ hangout, an abandoned club, when his buddies were there. Rhynes said that the girls had told him they were legal, fourteen and fifteen. Well, those girls weren’t legal, the officer told Rhynes. They were twelve and thirteen. One of their mothers had overheard her daughter talking about how she had serviced the boys and called the RCMP.

As a catcher, Rhynes is used to reading situations and calling the shots. “I had done some stupid things,” Rhynes says. “Right then I did one smart thing. I asked to speak to a lawyer.”

That meant calling home and telling his mother, Velvet, the whole story.
Cass caught hell from Velvet, of course; she only eased up on him, she says, because he “was bawling his eyes out.” He thought that would be the worst of it. After talking to his lawyer, John Mitchell, he was confident that the charges wouldn’t amount to much - probably a day in court, probably a discharge.

The whole situation didn’t really sink in for Rhynes until he and a friend drove down to Boston for another showcase a few days later. He was pumped about getting a chance to play on the sacred lawn of Fenway Park. But at a U.S. border crossing in New Brunswick, Rhynes and his friend were pulled over. “Did you ever have trouble with the law?” a U.S. customs officer asked him, after calling his name up on a database. All at once it hit home. They already knew about his fix.

The customs officials let Rhynes and his friend go on to Boston and Rhynes played like he wasn’t rattled at all. He played like there was nothing going on behind that game face. He hit the shit out of the ball, parking one pitch over the Green Monster.

But the episode at the border was weighing heavily on his mind. He had already accepted an athletic scholarship to St. Petersburg College, a small school on Florida’s Gulf coast. His ride would go up in smoke if the charges stuck. And so would his dream of playing pro ball.

*

Even though he was committed to going to St. Petersburg, Rhynes was still eligible for major-league baseball’s June draft in 2003. Twelve big-league teams had talked to him. The charges against him hadn’t yet been reported, but they were likely common knowledge among scouts. Most teams were scared off him. Their intelligence network is right up there with the U.S. Customs Agency’s. Nevertheless, the Los Angeles Dodgers rolled the dice, selecting him in the forty-fifth round that June. More than 1,300 players were scooped up before Rhynes.

The day after the draft, Rhynes was featured in two stories in the
Charlottetown Guardian. The front of the sports section was dedicated to his dream of becoming the first Prince Edward Islander since 1884 to make the major leagues. The story on page one was about the month-old charges.

“[The Guardian] had to have known that I’d been charged before they were asking me about getting drafted,” Rhynes says.

The dubious celebrity of a selection in the nether-rounds of the draft offered the media a chance to torque the story. The Guardian described
Rhynes as “an aspiring pro baseball player”; CanWest News Service tabbed him as a “major-league prospect”; and The Gazette made it sound as though a million-dollar contract was in the mail.

It was all ridiculously overstated. “Only three percent of forty-fifth-rounders ever make the major leagues,” says Blake Corosky, an agent who represents Pete Orr of the Atlanta Braves and advises Rhynes. “And out of that three percent, maybe half the guys stick around long enough to make any money.”

“All this stuff made me the most famous forty-fifth-round draft pick ever,” Rhynes says.

*

Rhynes thought things were going his way when his trial began in August 2003. His lawyers gave him the impression that they were playing with a four-run lead. He had never been in trouble with the law. The worst thing on his record was a school suspension for chewing tobacco.

Rhynes wasn’t disputing that he had been in contact with girls who weren’t legal, but that wasn’t what he was charged with. Just engaging in a sexual act with them could have brought about a charge of sexual interference. Instead he was charged with “inciting” sexual touching. Under the Criminal Code of Canada, either charge carries the same maximum penalty, ten years. “If opening a car door is inciting, then I incite people all the time,” he says. “I didn’t do anything . . . going out of my way. I didn’t know [that the girls weren’t fourteen, the age of consent], and I couldn’t tell. I had no way of knowing.”

He told the court that he had resisted the girls’ advances, and that they persisted. The thirteen-year-old girl backed up Rhynes’s testimony. The younger girl testified that Rhynes hadn’t put up any fight but didn’t suggest that he had come on to her. Their victim-impact statements made it sound as though they weren’t victims in any conventional sense.

The thirteen-year-old noted, “We willingly did this stuff. I feel I was never forced to do anything and it makes me really mad that Cass is getting in trouble . . . . I feel that is old enough to make that decision. I knew what I did . . . . [Rhynes] didn’t know I was thirteen. He thought I was fifteen. Cass is a nice guy and a good friend. [If] he forced me to do anything, then I’d want him to be in the situation he’s in right now. But he didn’t. . . .”

The twelve-year-old’s account defined how social acceptance hinged on sexual initiation: “I did it four or five months after my friend. I kind of wanted to but didn’t at the same time. I felt at the time that everyone was doing it, so I did it because I didn’t want to be left behind. I felt it was my time.”

The girls arranged the hookups on MSN Messenger. In one girl’s virtual address book, Rhynes’s was just one name among 150. And no evidence indicated that Rhynes was the organizer. He maintained that he was just one of three young men along for the ride with another guy, a seventeen-year-old, assuming the role of “ringleader.”

According to the girls’ testimony, this boy played matchmaker, organizing the “hookups” and pushing them for blow jobs. The ringleader fell under the jurisdiction of the Young Offenders Act and, after pleading guilty, was fined and placed on probation for two years. The two others, also Young Offenders, were handed alternative punishment and did no time in a juvenile facility. Rhynes, alone among them, was tried as an adult.

Rhynes says the newspapers mis-read him - his game face - when they portrayed him as unmoved by the proceedings. From The Globe: “Mr Rhynes left the courtroom laughing with his lawyer.” Or, “On occasion [he] seemed to stifle a smirk.”

“My mother told me that I had to show respect for the court,” Rhynes says. “But I was damned no matter what I did. If I showed any emotion, they’d say it wasn’t real. If I tried to keep things in, they’d say I didn’t care.”

Judge Nancy Orr didn’t think Rhynes was remorseful at all. Worse for Rhynes, she didn’t think he did enough to distance himself from the girls. She found him guilty. Judge Orr accepted the account of the younger girl, who testified that she didn’t lie about her age to the boys, but seemed to discount the testimony of the older girl, who admitted that she lied about her age. Judge Orr said Rhynes should have done more to check on the ages of the girls and that he should have also realized one girl wasn’t of age simply because she wasn’t dressed appropriately for the weather.

“Anything that could have hurt my case, she chose to believe,” Rhynes says. “She threw out anything that backed me up. There’s nothing my lawyer could have done to win that trial.”

Judge Orr ordered that Rhynes undergo a psychiatric assessment before sentencing. The assessment included penile plethysmograph testing, which measures a man’s involuntary responses to pornographic images. Rhynes’s results indicated that “he is interested in consenting females of his own age and does not take an interest in females who are younger or in sexual activity that is not consenting.” He had limited sexual experiences and had not yet engaged in intercourse. He was rated a low risk to reoffend.

Three days before Christmas 2003, Judge Orr sentenced Rhynes to fifteen days on one count and thirty days on the second, with the sentences to be served consecutively. She also gave Rhynes a year of probation and 100 hours of community service. She dismissed the psychiatric assessment, stating that Rhynes “would pose a risk to the community, if he were to serve his sentence there.”

Rhynes’s lawyer, John Mitchell, got him out of jail within a few hours, pending appeal. In March of last year, P.E.I. Supreme Court Justice Jacqueline Matheson heard Mitchell’s appeal and six weeks later overturned the convictions against Rhynes. Justice Matheson ruled that “the trial judge erred in finding that a failure to resist constitutes incitement”; that making plans to “meet up” is not the same thing as arranging to “hook up.” Justice Matheson also noted that Rhynes might have been successfully convicted if the RCMP had charged him with sexual interference.

The Crown took another swing at it, taking the case to the P.E.I. Supreme Court Appeals Division. Crown Attorney John McMillan denied that his office had been pressured by women’s groups to appeal to the province’s highest court. Instead, he claimed moral high ground, suggesting legal precedent was at stake; according to McMillan, no court had properly defined the word “incite” as it applies in the Criminal Code of Canada to sexual contact with children.

The Crown’s case was finally punched out last August. The P.E.I. Supreme Court’s Appeal Division upheld Justice Matheson’s decision. Justice John McQuaid supported the ruling that inciting would have required “some positive act on the part of [Rhynes] to cause the complainant to engage in sexual touching.” He reiterated Justice Matheson’s conclusion, which was, “that there was no evidence before the trial judge which could reasonably have supported the trial judge’s verdict that [Rhynes’s] actions incited the complainants to touch him for a sexual purpose.”

And with that, Rhynes swept a doubleheader in appeal. All that was left to Rhynes was to try to restart a baseball career that had stalled. “The
Dodgers hadn’t talked to me since they drafted me,” he says. “I was a ballplayer who hadn’t hit off a live pitcher in two years.”

*

At first the only pitches he saw came from the media, including overtures for a movie-of-the-week deal. Even though his mother rang up a $70,000 bill in covering his legal fees, Rhynes shook them off. “When I’m convicted, I’m on page one; but the appeals, you can’t even find them in small print,” he says. “They done me dirty. I’m never talking about this thing again.”

Though Rhynes says he received support from the good people of Prince Edward Island, he was disappointed by a others he felt had bailed out on him. Rhynes had been a member of the Canadian junior baseball team, but his former coach Greg Hamilton speaks of him in the past tense: “He’s not even on the radar when it comes to the national team program.”

St. Petersburg ultimately pulled its scholarship offer. The school president received letters from concerned individuals in P.E.I. that detailed Rhynes’s court case and contained newspaper clippings. Rhynes says the college balked because of the letter-writing campaign. Athletic director Lars Hafner confirms that the letters did reach the president’s office but won’t identify the senders. Hafner denies that the letters had anything to do with rescinding his scholarship. “We couldn’t hold his scholarship indefinitely,” Hafner says.

Rhynes thought about filing suit against St. Petersburg for breach of promise. Ultimately, though, he cut his losses and sent out letters to twenty U.S. junior colleges in September. He used his selection by the Dodgers as his calling card. One of the schools was Connors State, which has been the destination of twenty Canadian ballplayers over the years, including George Kottaras, a catcher from Toronto who signed for a US$300,000 bonus with the San Diego Padres. When Rhynes contacted Connors State, the Cowboys had just lost a catcher for the season because of injury.

Rhynes told coach Perry Keith he’d commit to two full seasons, to get his game back, to raise his stock again. “It was an easy call when Perry offered me a ride last fall,” Rhynes says. “Warner isn’t St. Petersburg for weather or social life, but I didn’t sacrifice anything when it comes to baseball. There’s a couple of guys in the majors right now who went here. At Connors there’s just school and baseball. That’s all I ever wanted.”

*

El Reno, Oklahoma, is an improvement on Warner. Sure, the highrises in town are grain elevators and on the outskirts you’ll find oil derricks. But, there’s an actual town there - stores, restaurants, even a weekly paper. And El Reno’s Redlands College looks like a big improvement on Connors State. The school is housed in new buildings set in a high-priced subdivision. And the Redlands Cougars have the best in uniforms and equipment. They look like they stepped out of a catalogue.

Yet Redlands is leagues below Connors State when it comes to baseball. Redlands plays in a lower junior-college league. Connors has a dozen players who’ll land scholarship offers to major four-year universities, while Redlands has only one who’ll get a sniff. By late spring, Connors will be the top-ranked junior-college team in the United States. CSC will be a favourite to make the Junior College World Series in Colorado - the big bus ride at the end of the season.

Perry Keith says his Cowboys excel not despite hardship, but because of it. “We play a lot and practice a lot,” he says. “I push everyone hard, and the best players I push the hardest.” On the Monday after the Easter weekend the Cowboys head to Redlands for a doubleheader. A two-hour bus ride and two seven-inning exhibition games - those are Keith’s wake-up calls to players who relaxed too much during the break.

And so, even though the Cowboys run out to a 9-0 lead in game one, Keith is barking: “attaboy” for the lesser talents; browbeating for Elvin, Angel, and Cass. Things get a little sloppy at the end of game one: Redlands scores four runs to make the score look almost respectable. In game two, Cass is behind the plate and he’s like a big puppy, desperate to please his coach. Every ball is run out. Every blocked pitch in the dirt is blocked like the season’s riding on it. And when he screws up a foul pop-up in a gale-force wind - the ball lands with a thud behind him - Rhynes hangs his head.

That “E2” in the scorebook will throb when he looks at it. At the end of the game, a 5-2 win, the Cowboys gather around Keith, drop to one knee, and join in prayer. A scout with the Kansas City Royals takes notes in the stands. He says more scouts will show later in the season, when the competition heats up. He likes what he sees in Elvin (“best arm I’ve seen in this league in years”) and Angel (“good speed down to first base”). Cass doesn’t pique his interest. “Coach told me he likes him, though he’s a bit rough behind the plate,” the scout says.

Rhynes emphasizes the positive in his own scouting report. “Three for seven,” he says. “I lost one foul ball. Just rusty, but that will come. Most
of all we won. It’s just great being out here.”

Rhynes’s faint grin hints that this is a good-news day. Out there against
Redlands, he didn’t look like a future big-league millionaire. Drenched in sweat, sunburnt and windburnt, he looked an awful lot like a forty-fifth-round draft choice, just another young man playing through the long odds of making the majors. Given where he was a year ago, though, that passes for good news.

2008-08-31T16:31:00.000-07:00

From Saturday Night Magazine

WHITE RULES
Canada is racist, says Bob White, a promoter of black athletes. But does he offer his kids a clean shot or a fast break to nowhere? By Gare Joyce

Woofin’, the ritual discourse on city basketball courts, consists of macho bluster, territorialism, contempt for an opponent, embellishment of fact, and padding one’s own legend. Before a game or a one-on-one showdown between neighbourhood heroes, each side bad-mouths, rags on, and runs down the opposition. Though a layman who can’t make a lay-up might mistake this for adolescent name-calling, sports psychologists would attest that the practice of woofin’ builds the woofer’s confidence and feeds doubt in the woofee. ‘Course Freud couldn’t hoop at all—when he looked at inkblots he probably saw guys jammin’ right in his beard.

On the asphalt playground beside the Negro Community Center in Montreal’s Little Burgundy neighbourhood, summer pick-up games usually start at 4 p.m. and the woofin’ at half past three. On this May afternoon, one seventeen-year-old is toasting an opponent with the blank verse of the blacktop. “You ain’t nothin’,” he says. “I’m gonna kick your ass, fatty.” He then offers in ribald repartee that this will be, roughly, the motherwhatever of all wars. Though the young man is six-foot-six and possesses a body builder’s torso, his cheeky forecasts are improbably brave. “Fatty” is not a corpulent schoolboy, but rather Basil Rose, a 230-pound fullback late of Southern University in Louisiana and the Montreal Machine, the city’s franchise in the World League of American Football. Rose grows angrier with every insult.

After the hyping and psyching the real contest begins, more fierce than polished. On every possession the defender pushes and beats up on the ball handler who responds with elbows swinging face-high. At the other end of the court a dozen young men, ranging in age from eight to eighteen and in height from four-foot-eight to six-foot-eight, have put an end to their shoot-around and for a few minutes will scope Rose and his tormentor. There will be a full-court game in an hour or so and it will last into the night. But this one-on-one challenge is entertainment. When the youngster jams the ball through the hoop and full force of Rose’s face, the audience bursts into laughter until silenced by the fullback’s glare.

On the sidelines stands Bob White. In his Brooklyn Dodgers hat and high-top sneakers the fifty-six-year-old White affects the look of a middle-aged Spike Lee. During the woofin’ he refrains from taking sides. He does not consider himself an arbiter but rather an advocate of the players on the court. “There’s more talent here than on any playground in Canada,” White says out of the side of his mouth as if confiding a hot tip. “There’s no telling what these kids could do with the right facilities, but the city of Montreal, the province of Quebec, the federal government, and all the Canadian sports associations would like to see us go away.”

According to Bob White, the conspiracy is motivated by racism. Bob White is black. The young men on the basketball court in Little Burgundy are black. Bob White submits that his playground heroes can’t get a break because of the colour of their skin. “Canada’s still a white man’s nation,” he says while the game rages in front of him. “It’s a racist fascist country. We’re still the underclass. My kids get better treatment in the States than they do here.”

More young black kids in high-tops file out of the row houses in Little Burgundy and congregate at courtside. Bob White calls them “his kids.” White is the founder and director of the Westend Sports Association. According to its mandate, the WSA encourages “grass roots athletic training programs through local clubs and provinces [sic].” In 1978 White obtained a federal charter to operate the WSA as a charity. Yet in fourteen years the WSA has not received any government grants. The outfit sometimes sponsors a team and occasionally offers coaching clinics, but it has no offices or athletic facilities.

White’s antogonists in the media have described the WSA as “nothing more than a letterhead.” Others suggest that White exaggerates his contribution to the local sports scene. One basketball official in Montreal says: “If you took ten kids White says he helped, one or maybe two actually benefited from his assistance.” One of his claims is beyond dispute: that he has been a mentor to Tommy Kane, a wide receiver with the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League. “Without Bobby I’d have never got out of Little Burgundy,” says Kane, “and there’s a good chance I could have ended up in jail like a lot of my friends.”

Though Kane calls White his “salvation,” coaches, the media and even the police have had problems with Bob White, self-proclaimed “activist and iconoclast.” In turn, all of them have had problems with kane and other athletes linked to the WSA. The difficulty is separating the athletes from their mentor and the facts from the woofin’.

*

Bob White was born and raised in Little Burgundy. His father was employed by the railroad and later owned and operated a grocery store. “It was the wrong side of the tracks,” White says. “A rough piece of turf. A black neighbourhood where a lot of rogues and rakes would do anything to get by.” White’s career in sport was, by his own admission, unusual for a black man at the time. “I was a swimmer and a water-polo player,” he says. “I competed in tournaments and in buildings that only a few years before banned Jews and blacks.” White says he left Montreal in the early 1950s to become “the acquatics director at the Harlem YMCA, another joint that had been restricted.” Among his treasured memorabilia is a photograph from a 1954 awards ceremony at the Harlem Y; in it, Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play major-league baseball in the modern era, is presenting White with an award. White says Robinson was “a bitter man, but he showed me you have to keep on keeping on, to hang tough, and not to take any bullshit.”

White returned to Montreal in the early 1970s and abandoned swimming pools for darkrooms. Today he bills himself as a freelance photographer. Though his client list is sketchy, he does mention that he is a contributor to the Amsterdam News, a black newspaper in New York, and that he receives support from “business investments.”

White explains that most of his time is dedicated to his work with the WSA. “My job is to work on behalf of the kids of Little Burgundy,” he says. His wide-ranging portfolio sometimes entails lobbying for athletic facilities or for hoops in a neighbourhood park; White’s style of lobbying is pure confrontation—heckling at city-council meetings broadcast on a local cable channel. Other times his job might require rounding up turkeys to give to needy families in the neighbourhood at Christmas. But White has gained notoriety as a playground head-hunter, one who finds talented athletes and hooks them up with U.S. college teams. As noted in Raw Recruits, the definitive text on U.S. collegiate basketball, the intermediary between young athletes and schools goes by a few names: “bag man, flesh peddler, broker, third party, street agent, confidant, guardian, family friend, recruiting aide, pimp, or ‘uncle.’” The most unscrupulous seek not only to bask in the warm glow of their proteges’ celebrity but also to get “juiced,” that is, to receive a kickback for safe delivery of the “product.”

For what he describes as “humanitarian reasons and compassion,” White has been an advisor to a generation of young athletes from Little Burgundy. On their behalf and, he maintains, on a strictly pro bono basis, he has solicited athletic scholarships to U.S. colleges. The athlete who made White’s reputation as a street agent and benefited most from ties to the WSA is Tommy Kane.

At twelve Kane was already a phenomenon in Montreal, dominating leagues in several sports. He desperately wanted to attend a basketball camp but it was beyond the means of his mother, Shirley, who was separated from his father. Shirley Kane, who worked two jobs to provide for Tommy and his two sisters, could not justify the expense. “I don’t know how Bob White heard about it,” Tommy Kane says, “but he found me and told me that he could handle the cost of the camp so long as I stayed in school and didn’t get into trouble. From then on Bob White would show up at my school and look in the classroom window to see if I was there or he’d find me in the streets to see if I was messing up. He made me feel guilty if I broke my promise. From then on, he was, y’know, my uncle, Uncle Bobby.”

White’s interest in Tommy was more paternal than avuncular. Like many fathers of athletes, White has the capacity to live vicariously through the accomplishments of a child. “This kid could do almost anything he had a mind to,” White says proudly and excitedly. “In midget hockey he was on Mario Lemieux’s team and he beat out Lemieux for the MVP award. In basketball he played on a Dawson College team that won a national championship. We sent him down to the Five-Star Basketball Camp in Pennsylvania [a showcase event for the best American high school players] and Tommy won the MVP award.”

Under White’s sage counsel, Kane attended Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, to raise his marks so he could attend a U.S. college. While at Fanshawe he played for the London Beefeaters, a junior football team. Though Kane’s experience in football was limited, Syracuse offered him a scholarship on the bsis of a videotape packaged and pitched by Bob White. Kane went on to garner All-American honours for his play with SU’s Orangemen. Subsequently he was drafted by the Seattle Seahawks and is now a rising star in the NFL. “Everything Bob White says I will follow,” Kane says. “He put me on the right track and kept me out of trouble. He’s what you’d call an advisor or consultant or spokesman but to me he’ll always be my uncle.”

After landing Kane’s deal with Syracuse in 1983, White had no shortage of Little Burgundy athletes applying for status as nephews. Such an adoption was, they believed, a means of acquiring athletic scholarships to U.S. colleges and, down the road, pro stardom. Most of the were basketball players. According to White, he helped the two most prominent talents, Wayne Yearwood and Charles Rochelin,, land scholarships at the University of West Virginia and the University of California-Los Angeles respectively, two heavyweight programs in U.S. college basketball. “Bobby got in touch with West Virginia for me,” Yearwood says. “Years ago U.S. colleges thought no athletes come out of Montreal. With Tommy, myself and others, Bobby put Montreal put Montreal on the recruiting map.”

At a time when he was receiving praise for his good work on behalf of athletes, White chose to do battle with the Canadian sports establishment. He advised the best young basketball players in Montreal from the national and Olympic basketball program. Kane and Yearwood declined invitations to try out for the junior national team because of “prior commitments.” Other WSA players skipped national-team camps claiming they were on vacation. “Jack Donahue [the coach of the national team from 1972 to 1988] is a racist,” White says. “His teams had the same bunch of white guys playing year after year. Black kids never got a fair shot so I told my kids not to bother trying out.”

White substantiated his charges by pointing to an incident early in the coach’s career. In 1964 Donahue was coaching a high school team in New York, the Power Memorial team led by seven-foot centre Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). According to several published accounts dating back to the late sixties, at halftime of an important game, Donahue browbeat Alcindor, telling him he was “playing like a nigger.” “That’s the type of mentality we’re dealing with,” White says. “One of the great ballplayers of all time was just ‘a nigger’ to Donahue.” Donahue has long maintained that race had no bearing on the selection of the national team, yet he does not deny that he called Alcindor “a nigger.” Rather, he explains he “was only trying to motivate [Alcindor].” Bob White discounts Donahue’s story but it appears Abdul-Jabbar now accepts his ex-coach’s explanation or, at least, no longer harbours a grudge. This year Abdul-Jabbar appeared on “Donahue’s Legends,” Donahue’s series of profiles on The Sports Network.

Donahue need not invite White for a guest spot on his show. The street agent’s hostility has endured. “[Canadian] reporters let Donahue off the hook because he gives them good quotes,” White says. “”The media and the sports administration sanctioned his actions by their inaction. They’re as racist as Donahue. He got his job with the national team because no one checked up on his real record with Power Memorial.” Indeed today it’s hard to imagine how anyone who made a well-publicized, racially insensitive remark could have been appointed to a high-paying, high-profile job on the government payroll.

*

The WSA’s boycott of the national and Olympic teams was not the first sports protest motivated by the fight against racial injustice. White says he was inspired by American Harry Edwards and his Olympic Protest for Human Rights. Though White cuts a small figure on the Montreal sports scene, the six-foot-eight, 250-pound Edwards cast a giant shadow over the 1968 Summer Olympics. Edwards argued that racism in sports was symptomatic of injustice throughout society. Under his direction the best black players from U.S. colleges, Abdul-Jabbar among them, didn’t try out for the U.S. Olympic basketball team. Black athletes on the track-and-field team expressed their sympathy for Edwrads’s cause by wearing black berets on the winner’s podium and by giving the Black Power salute during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Though Edwards’s movement caused an international sensation, Bob White’s boycott was ignored by the national press. Still, the WSA stirred up emotions on courts across Canada. In 1984 the starting line-up for Donahue’s Olympic team featured four white players and one black, hardly refuting White’s accusations. But the WSA’s boycott was in fact only a symbolic gesture. It was unlikely that many of White’s players would have made the Olympic roster and even more doubtful that any of them would have improved Canada’s fourth-place finish. But White’s image was enhanced by the boycott. The erstwhile street agent had assumed the role of crusader, a champion for the disenfranchised minority. All this drew more athletes into the fold.

In 1988, Donahue’s last year before retirement, White told his players that they might as well give the national team a shot. Two of his players, Wayne Yearwood and Dwight Walton, made it. “Some of the people that had been picked for the team in other years were probably questionable,” Yearwood says guardedly. “But playing on the team was important for me. The Olympics helped me get a contract to play pro ball in Europe.”

Today White says that he didn’t consider another boycott for 1992, but he bristles at any suggestion that race doesn’t figure into the Olympic team’s selection. “I got a seven-foot-two kid from Haiti, Pascal Fleury, who didn’t even get an invitation to tryouts for the Canadian team,” White says. “I got Fleury a scholarship to Georgetown University [one of the top-ranked programs in U.S. collegiate basketball]. He works out against Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutumbo, two of the best centres in America. My players run into obstacles in Canada, They build their futures in the U.S.”

*

In February 1989, the Black Business and Professional Association announced that it intended to bestow an award on White in recognition of his work with the youth of Little Burgundy. At the last minute, however, the Toronto-based BBPA changed its plans. The association had not been aware that White was facing charges of possessing stolen credit cards and possessing cocaine for the purpose of trafficking. White had been charged with these offences after police raided a Chinese restaurant in Montreal’s west end in 1986. Police officers testified that they found a package containing forty-two grams of cocaine and eight stolen credit cards on the floor under the table at which White and two associates were sitting. One officer said White was carrying $3,800 in cash. White was acquitted on the charge of hyolding stolen credit cards and, in turn, the charge of cocaine possession was withdrawn.

Still, those who would praise White’s work with the WSA cannot ignore lingering questions about his caharacter. Pat Hickey, the former sports editor of The Gazette, espouses the prevailing opinion among the Montreal media. “Bob White is an ex-con, a sleazeball,” Hickey says. “He makes claims that have no foundation in fact.” White counters: “As a black activist in a racist society I’m a magnet for insinuation and harassment.”

Robert Henry Richard White does, in fact, own a criminal record. In Montreal in 1966 he was convicted of passing counterfeit money and was sentenced to four years. In 1968 he was convicted on five counts of transporting persons for the purpose of prostitution. White says his detractors ignore his work with the youth of Little Burgundy and, as he puts it, “dwell on negativity.”

White’s criminal past does attract “negativity,” but so do his broad claims about his community work. Among the long list of athletes he professes to have helped are those who disavow his claims of assistance. “Tommy Kane isn’t the only kid in the NFL I’ve helped,” White says. “Brian Forde [a linebacker with the New Orleans Saints] and Alonzo Highsmith [a running back with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers] are two kids from Montreal I helped get started when I got them college scholarships.” Both Forde and Highsmith have denied any association with White and the WSA. “White wouldn’t recognize half the kids he claims to have helped if they tripped over him,” says Earl De La Peralle of Sun Youth, a Montreal group involved in social services and sports. “White brags that he got Pascal Fleury a ride to Georgetown but that’s mostly hype. De La Peralle maintains that Fleury attracted a lot of attention from U.S. recruiters when he played for Montreal’s Dawson College. “I was introduced to White and he made the initial contact with Georgetown,” Fleury says. But he suggests that White is stretching it when he claims that he “got Fleury a scholarship.”

In recent years, ever since stories of White’s legal troubles reached the recruiting circuit, many U.S. college coaches have been hesitant to pursue athletes linked to the WSA. “When we were trying to recruit Tommy Kane and Wayne Yearwood, we first heard some stories,” says Boston College coach Jim O’Brien. “We never tried to recruit his kids after that. We didn’t want to be involved. We never called up Bob White to see if he had any kids worth recruiting.”

In fact, White might be doing harm to kids he has never met. “White might read about a kid or hear about someone on the street,” says one coach in Montreal. “Without seeing the kid, White will send off letters to colleges claiming that he reprsents him. That might encourage some colleges to check out the kid. But the coaches who are leery about White might drop the kid from consideration.”

*

When White’s character is called into question, his constituency rallies around him and his us-against-them cant is vindicated. “People want to make Bob the issue so they don’t have to listen to what he says or act on what he suggests,” says Earl Devine, White’s close friend. But the personal attacks obscure White’s greatest failure: his unremitting endorsement of U.S. collegiate athletics.
“The U.S. system makes ours look sick,” White says. “Canadian university sports are a joke.” The best-known images of U.S. college sports are those of grand spectacle, whereas Canadian varsity sports are painfully modest. In the States college football bowl games are played in front of 80,000 or even 100,000 spectators; the Vanier Cup, the Canadian championship, draws 15,000 in a good year. The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s basketball championships eclipse all other sports for three weeks in March and generate $140-million (U.S.) in television revenues for sixty-four participating schools; in Canada, the Canadian university championships aren’t even televised.

For athletes the star treatment accorded them in the U.S. is particularly seductive. They are wined and dined on recruiting visits. College coaches enthuse about their big plans for the prized prospects and have famous alumni call both athletes and street agents to make a pitch for their schools. White brags about letters he has received from college coaches and about talking on the phone to Burt Reynolds who was lobbying for an athlete on behalf of his alma mater, Florida State University.

“In Canada there’s no recruiting,” White says. “The coaches don’t know they have athletes on their campuses until they show up for practice. And there aren’t any scholarships in Canada. Kids are expected to pay their own way—with no help—and lost of kids in Little Burgundy just can’t do that. The scholarships in the States are worth $80,000 [across four years] and athletes get the best coaching there is. What do you think is the better system?”

White offers the question rhetorically, but is he right? Even Harry Edwards, the avatar of black activism in sport, would dispute White’s boosterism of U.S. college sports. “[Black athletes in U.S. colleges] don’t get an education because their primary purpose is to compete,” Edwards told Sports Ilustrated. “Their primary responsibility is to the athletic department and at the end of four years they end up with no degree, no job and no references.” White, however, glosses over the flaws of the “better system.” When he and Burt Reynolds discussed the prospects of a local kid attending FSU on a football scholarship, they probably didn’t discuss the FSU football team’s graduation rate. According to the most recent NCAA statistics, only twenty per cent of balck athletes on football and basketball scholarships graduate. Only thirty-one per cent of black athletes on athletic scholarships believe that their coaches sufficiently stress academics.

The woeful academic record of WSA’s student athletes confirms Harry Edwards’s bleak assessment. A few graduate from the schools White solicits. For instance, Tommy Kane graduated from Syracuse with a degree in retail management and Wayne Yearwood graduated from West Virginia with a BSc in physical education. But the majority of athletes return home with degrees. Charles Rochelin’s story is typical of the “free ride” that star jocks on scholarship receive. As a member of UCLA’s basketball team for four years, Rochelin helped the athletic department earn millions of dollars in ticket sales and television revenues; yet after five years Rochelin left UCLA without a degree and, in the words of a transcripts officer, “under financial obligation to the university.”

Worse still are the stories of athletic vagabonds, kids who bounce from school to school acquiring a few credits but nothing close enough to those necessary for a degree. Trevor Williams, another of White’s proteges, frequently shows up at basketball games in Little Burgundy. Williams began his collegiate career at Dawson College, attended Laurinburg Preparatory in North Carolina, received a “boat ride” to Southern University in Louisiana, transferred to St Peter’s College in New Jersey, and finally landed at Montreal’s Concordia University (at his own expense) in 1989. He left the Concordia basketball team in the middle of last season after a run-in with the team’s coach, John Dore, a run-in instigated by Bob White’s branding the coach “a latent racist.” Dore says such charges are “ridiculous.” He adds, “I’m not sure why Trevor quit. He wasn’t doing well academically but I’m not—and our programs are not—racist. We not only have more black players than any other program in Canada—we graduate almost all of them. Trevor was just an exception.”

“A few of my kids had difficulties adjusting to life after college,” White concedes. Several have run afoul of the law. Tommy Kane, the pride of Little Burgundy, has been the centre of much turmoil away from the playing field. According to White, Kane was only in his teens when a policeman told him: “I have a bullet in here for you, Kane.” At Syracuse he was charged with assaulting a policewoman who had tagged his car. She alleged that Kane attempted to strike her with a car door. The charge was reduced to a misdemeanour and Kane was sentenced to 192 hours of community service. This past spring Kane was hit with a charge of assaulting a pregnant friend of his family. The alleged victim never showed up in court and the charges were dropped. The woman also filed a lawsuit alleging that Kane punched her. The plaintiff testified that kane yelled: “Fuck that bitch. I’ll kick the baby out of her stomach.” The judge ruled that Kane’s denial was more plausible than the plaintiff’s account and quashed the suit.

Other WSA-associated athletes have faced more serious charges. Peter Balfour, once a basketball player at County College of Morris, New Jersey, and later at Southern University, was charged with attempted murder after a dispute over a business deal in Little Burgundy. The charge was eventually dropped. Currently Balfour is facing a single of possessing cocaine. Last April Wayne Yearwood was convicted of dealing cocaine near his alma mater in Morgantown, West Virginia, and is now serving a fifteen-month prison sentence. Other athletes from Little Burgundy, disillusioned when their athletic careers wind down, get into different kinds of trouble. White admits that one ballplayer ended up homeless and later spent time in a sanitarium. “There just aren’t opportunities for a lot of young black people, even good ones,” he says. “This is a fascist, racist country.”

White is quick to credit Syracuse University for Tommy Kane’s success, yet loath to blame U.S. college sports for the disappointments of other WSA athletes. Then again, finding fault with the U.S. system would make White culpable in the most tragic cases. As a street agent, he may not have an official title or an affiliation with any university, yet he’s an integral part of the infrastructure of U.S. college sports. “I don’t dwell on the worst cases,” White says. “I have to give hope to the ten-year-olds, the twelve-year-olds. They have to see Tommy Kane and the good they can do.” As one U.S. basketball coach explained in Raw Recruits: “The street broker’s secret is controlling the product early. It’s just like … modern-day slavery.”

*

“These kids have dreams,” Bob White says while he watches Basil Rose and the six-foot-six teenager bang each other around the court. “All those dreams start here. A lot of work and sacrifice and determination and guts. And it can all pay off like it did for Tommy Kane.”

The one-on-one battle ends. The tall kid has won easily by backing into the key and shooting over the slightly-too-short Rose. “Unstoppable, I’m flat unstoppable,” the winner enthuses as he accepts the congratulations of the audience. Basil Rose, whose career in pro sports probably cannot be restarted, gets on his bicycle and forlornly rides off. Rose will not stay for the pick-up games. He has night class tonight.

White does not allow the dispirited state of the vanquished Rose to interrupt the street agent’s patter. “Basil could be in the CFL but he didn’t get any breaks,” White says. “The first bad break he got was being born with black skin. If Basil was white he’d be playing in the CFL or on the Olympic tracki team or the bobsled team or something.” Youngsters on the sidelines nod in agreement.

Across the street Tommy Kane walks out of the row houses where he still lives with his mother in the off season. The shooting-around dies down. The kids hush and watch him. Despite standing only five-foot-nine, despite a physique that is not overly muscular, Kane looks like an athlete. It’s his walk, his bearing, the way he holds his head. Anyone who has ever played a game would recognize it. It’s something Bob White recognized a long time ago.

Arriving at courtside, Kane engages in a whispered discussion with White. The media and the sports establishment in Montreal will never approve of this relationship, an old taboo: a professional athlete associating with an ex-con. But no matter what he accomplishes in the NFL Kane can’t forget where he came from and who made his athletic career possible. And now back on the streets of Little Burgundy Kane seeks the counsel of the man who, with no vested interest, looked out for him a long time ago. Kane remains the faithful nephew, White the unlikely guardian angel. After a few minutes, Kane motions to a youngster to pass him the basketball. “You know, we should get a team of guys from Little Burgundy and challenge the Canadian Olympic team,” White says. “We would lay a beating on those boys.”

Without a warm-up, without a change in his deadpan expression, Kane dribbles twice and then leaves the ground, soaring up to the rim. In the air he brings the ball behind his head, then slams it two-fisted through the rim, shaking the backboard. “It would be a serious embarrassment,” Kane says, while the ball bounces down the court. White retreives “the rock” and awkwardly passes it back to Kane. With kids looking on, Kane silently and effortlessly rises from a stand-still beneath the basket and jams the ball.

For that single moment, Kane’s physical gifts allow White the dignity no street agent deserves. After the pick-up game tonight the young me will return to the row houses in Little Burgundy. When they look in the mirror they will try to see Tommy Kane in their reflection. In a few years Bob White will hold the mirror for them and tell them how good they look. Then he will tell the world how good “his kids” look. He will write letters, make phone calls, talk up reporters. The best never have to woof for themselves. They leave it to their street agent, their uncle, the real pro.

RAISING KANE by Gare Joyce
Late last year, a decade after his NFL career ended, a drug-addicted Tommy Kane was charged with killing his wife. Football was supposed to be his ticket out of Montreal’s mean streets. What made him go back?

It’s an anecdote that Don McPherson has told more times than he can count, an anecdote that draws on his time as quarterback of the Syracuse University Orangemen in the ’80s. It’s the short story of a play remembered by many but understood only by McPherson and the guy who caught the most important pass McPherson ever threw. This is how McPherson tells it to me:

“We were undefeated, contending for a national championship, but Penn State was playing us tough. We were driving but trying to save time-outs. In the huddle, I called one play and told everyone to run it two downs in a row. We ran the play on the ﬁrst down and we were just about do it all over again on the second down. But just before the ball was snapped, I looked at one of my receivers. He was looking at me. He didn’t say anything, but he was able to tell me with just a look that he had seen something on the last play. Because we had spent so much time working together over three years, we knew what the other was thinking. He was telling me that he was going to run another route and he was able to tell that I understood it. Nine guys on our team just went and did what they’d done on the previous down, but he ran a completely different pass pattern, got wide open in the end zone, and caught a pass for a touchdown that won the game.”

McPherson, runner-up for the Heisman Trophy that season, is far removed from the gridiron these days. He’s now a social worker at Adelphi University in New York. He specializes in domestic-abuse cases. He tells this anecdote to those he counsels. He uses it to illustrate how two people can be so close that they communicate without words.

Don McPherson’s story became a cautionary tale last November. That’s when the receiver who was on the end of that pass, Tommy Kane, was supposed to meet his estranged wife, Tammara Shaikh, at his mother’s house in suburban Montreal and, in the presence of a minister, talk about reconciling for the beneﬁt of their four young children. That’s when, according to the accounts of friends, Shaikh tried once again to get Kane onto medication for depression and into rehab for drug use. That’s when Kane’s mother called the Montreal police, when ofﬁcers arrived to ﬁnd Shaikh badly beaten, when Kane was taken away in handcuffs. That’s when Shaikh died of her injuries in hospital, and when Kane was charged with second-degree murder. And that’s when newspapers ran a mug shot of Kane, staring a thousand yards away through a drug-addled fog, coming down and bathed in sweat.

“I had seen Tommy over the years,” McPherson says. “I only saw the Tommy Kane that I knew at Syracuse. I never saw this coming and it’s my job to be able to pick up red ﬂags. He’s thirty-nine, but he looks ten years older in that mug shot – ten years older than when I saw him, less than two years ago. I thought I knew him so well.”

*

What ever happened to . . . ? It’s a ﬁxture in sports sections and broadcasts, a way to mine nostalgia, drop a famous name. Whatever happened to Tommy Kane? Many were asking that question after the news of the murder charge. McPherson and his teammates asked a different question twenty-one years earlier, when Kane arrived on the Syracuse campus.

“‘Who is this kid from Montreal?’” McPherson said. “Nobody was coming down from Canada to the major programs in the States at that time.”

Kane was at ﬁrst a mystery to his teammates, and then a revelation. “He was behind everybody recruited from the big football states,” McPherson says. “The others had just played a lot more than he had. But his athletic ability was so great that he caught up by the time he played his ﬁrst game. He was a quick study.”

It took a little longer for Kane’s teammates to piece together the rest of his story. As a freshman, he didn’t volunteer a lot about Montreal. Like any major college program, Syracuse had its share of players who grew up in tough circumstances, but Montreal didn’t have a reputation. To the rest of the guys on the squad, he might as well have come from Paris.

Kane’s background started to emerge in interviews with the media. “Sure, I was in trouble with the law,” he told The New York Times in 1987. “Most of the kids I was with then are in jail or coming out of jail. It’s a vicious circle. They end up in jail, come out and go back again.”
Kane’s teammates learned in time that he had as much street in him as the hardest cases. It wasn’t just the punkish stuff: boosting cars or petty thefts. He had been in knife ﬁghts. He’d been in a scrap during which he took a baseball bat to a guy. He said that he would have gone to jail if he hadn’t met someone named Bob White, a “playground agent” who advised young black athletes in Little Burgundy, Kane’s neighbourhood in Montreal’s West End. White, Kane said, kept him in school, paid his way to sports camps, and even sorted through his scholarship offers.

“What he had been through earned him points with us,” McPherson said. “He had his stripes prior to coming to Syracuse. Going to school in the States could have been a cultural or social shock for Tommy, but he was never intimidated. No matter what the situation, he had seen worse. Tommy was cool, always cool.”

“I never saw Tommy even agitated, never mind violent,” says Deval Glover, another wideout on the Syracuse team. “He was not a hothead. He was just about the most relaxed guy on our team.”

Kane was a key player on Syracuse’s 1987 university squad that went undefeated and contended for a national championship. Several times that autumn, McPherson combined forces with Kane to pull Syracuse out of tight contests. He pulled down ﬁfteen touchdown catches that year to lead the nation and set a school record with an average of almost twenty-one yards per catch, a record that is still on the books.

The NFL beckoned but, on the threshold of big things, Tommy Kane lost his cool. Two weeks before the 1988 NFL draft, Kane was scheduled to meet with scouts. On the way to this meeting, Kane got into a nasty confrontation over a parking ticket with a policewoman, Lisa Phelan. Kane was charged with second-degree assault, obstruction, and resisting arrest. Kane would eventually plead guilty to lesser charges, do 100 hours of community service instead of jail time and, years later, reach an out-of-court settlement of a lawsuit ﬁled by Phelan (who went on lifetime disability because of her injuries).

“Looking back on it, Tommy had to have been under tremendous pressure,” McPherson says. “He had given up his last year of school. He had everything riding on this. This was the big step up. Just for a moment something inside him snapped and he lashed out.”

Kane’s stock in the draft plummeted. Prior to the incident, some teams might have rated him ﬁrst-round material, but he was still there when the Seattle Seahawks came up in the third round. The Hawks decided that he represented just too much talent to pass up.

Kane was never the star in the pros that he had been at Syracuse. By his own admission, he had been able to shine at Syracuse on athletic ability alone. That wasn’t going to ﬂy in Seattle. He still had a lot to learn about playing his position, and his progress was interrupted by a spate of injuries, the worst a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee in his second season.

In his third and fourth years with the Seahawks, Kane established himself as a starter. Each year he caught at least ﬁfty passes. He had become an integral part of Seattle’s high-ﬂying offence, one that was tearing up the league. And then, on the verge of big things and million-dollar contracts, it was over. Kane never played again in the NFL.

His ﬁfth season was cut short by injury, and the next summer, the Seahawks cut him in training camp. It turned out that he needed surgery on his Achilles tendons. He never received another serious call from an NFL club. They believed either that his game was left on the operating table or that his injuries had made him a bad risk, considering the hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line.

Bob White always claimed that sports were the salvation of his athletes, but sports were over for Tommy Kane by age thirty. If you were writing Kane’s story as ﬁction, the unfairness of all this would break him, push him down a well of despond. Deval Glover says that just wasn’t the case.

“I don’t think that Tommy was down or depressed about the injuries and his career ending,” Glover says. “An average NFL career is only two or three seasons. Tommy beat the odds by lasting as long as he did. In high school and college, we played with guys whose careers were ended by injuries. You understand that going in, that it can all end in one game . . . on one play. I talked with him at reunions, and he never said anything that made me think he was bitter or broken [or] drug dependent.”

In Montreal, Kane’s friends knew that his athletic afterlife wasn’t all that easy. He never found a niche to settle into: a one-season stint doing radio commentary for Alouettes games; a job in sales with Universal Studios in Florida; a business investment here and there. “Other athletes would have doors opened to get into coaching or television work or business, but not Tommy,” said one friend from the playground. “Still, he didn’t really let it get him down, not from what I could tell.”

Bob White sent a package of newspaper clippings to Toro after Tommy Kane was charged with murder. Most of the stories dated back to Tommy Kane’s days with Syracuse and Seattle. Most touted White’s work as a freelance social worker and spiritual adviser. White also sent along an essay from the Montreal Gazette that, without much consideration for Tammara Shaikh, suggested Kane was a victim of racism in Quebec society. The package included a handwritten note from White, congratulating the magazine for putting together an interesting product but otherwise not explaining the mailing.

White has always welcomed media attention, so long as no one asks questions about his own past. I went to Montreal, to Little Burgundy, to talk to White and Kane in 1991 for a magazine story. Kane was then serving as the celebrity success story for the Westend Sports Association, a loosely organized charity that White had managed to register years before. White imagined that the story was going to be a straight inspirational piece, inner-city Horatio Alger stuff. It wasn’t.

The story detailed White’s recent brush with the law: charges of possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafﬁcking and possession of stolen credit-card numbers. (The case was thrown out of court.)
The story also detailed the legal problems of several of WSA’s athletes. One ballplayer had been up on attempted murder, others on drug possession. Then there was Kane’s assault of the Syracuse policewoman.

White threatened to sue me and the magazine. Eventually, though, the matter was dropped without a correction, published apology, or cash settlement.

White has his act down. He paints himself as a mentor, advocate, and crusader. He says his athletes can’t get a break at home because of Canada’s racist sports establishment. He says they have to go to the States to get a fair shake. His message is as old as Jackie Robinson’s rookie card.

Still, some unsuspecting media types swallow White’s story without chewing. Reader’s Digest Canada recently commissioned a feature on White. In his ﬁnest rhetorical purple, White described the WSA as “an oasis that springs up every summer in the heart of the ghetto.” The proﬁle was ﬂagged as part of its “Remarkable People” series. The most remarkable aspect of the piece is the fact that Tommy Kane is not mentioned – a ﬁrst in Bob White’s career. It’s like a history of Johnstown without mention of The Flood.

These days, White’s in a ﬁx. He’ll seem less than loyal if he distances himself from Kane, who donated his entire $65,000 salary from his ﬁnal pro season, a forgettable stint with the Toronto Argonauts, to the WSA. On the other hand, White lends credence to the notion that his charges weren’t quite angels if he’s too closely tied to an accused murderer and drug user.

So when the call is made to White, and questions are asked about Kane, he dissembles. “I don’t know what happened to Tommy Kane,” White says. “I wasn’t there.”

When other uncomfortable questions are asked, White blows up. “Fuck Toro,” the Good Samaritan says, before hanging up.

Fact is, there’s no connecting White to Kane’s murder charges. The notion that Bob White started any of his talents down a road to drugs or violence just doesn’t wash. It’s as fatuous as his claim that he alone rescued them from a life a crime. Tommy Kane or any other playground hero has to accept responsibility for his life.

Unlike Bob White, Wayne Yearwood knows that silence won’t make trouble or tragedy disappear. Like Tommy Kane, Yearwood was a star on the Little Burgundy playgrounds. He played four years at West Virginia University on a basketball scholarship. He got into worse trouble at WVU than Kane did at Syracuse, a cocaine-dealing conviction that landed him a ﬁfteen-month jail sentence. But Yearwood toughed it out, eventually rejoined the national hoops program, and now coaches the men’s basketball team at Dawson College, where he and Tommy Kane led the team to a Canadian community-college championship in the early ’80s.

Yearwood makes it clear that he doesn’t doubt that Tommy Kane committed murder. “The evidence is overwhelming,” he says. “I don’t think anybody but Tommy will ever be able to explain what he did. Maybe not even him.”

Yearwood stayed close to Kane through the years. He knew Tammara Shaikh. He was around when the children were born. Last fall, Yearwood and Kane drifted apart. They stopped getting together, but, still, Yearwood kept in touch by phone. “The last time we talked was right before Tammara went over there to talk to him,” Yearwood says. “Tommy had been going through some very tough things. His marriage was in deep, deep trouble.”

Yearwood says that he would have been there for Kane if his friend had asked for help. Now he wonders whether Kane was bipolar. “I don’t know about depression, but there had to be something wrong, really wrong,” Yearwood says. “I’m not an expert, but I know Tommy. It’s just not rational to beat to death the mother of your children. I don’t know what it was that pushed him that far. I don’t know what could. It wasn’t the Tommy I knew that did that.”

Yearwood wants it known: He’s not about to offer excuses for Kane nor portray him as a victim. “I was a friend of Tammara, too, going back to before Tommy married her. I knew her, her family too. I know the children. I just never thought it would go like this – that if Tommy had to go out, that he would take away a mother from the children.”

When I was in Little Burgundy for that magazine story more than a decade ago, I went down to the basketball court where the neighbourhood’s best players gather on a daily basis. Writing about pro athletes over the years, I’ve come to expect meeting them in settings beﬁtting their status: in plush locker rooms, in fancy restaurants, in ostentatious new homes. Kane remains the one athlete whom I met for the ﬁrst time on the playground where he grew up. Our meeting wasn’t arranged. I dropped by the court to get a look at it and he just happened to be there. Kane was in the middle of a pickup game with a bunch of friends and teenagers. It was like your threesome picking up Mike Weir as a fourth at the ﬁrst tee of a municipal course in Sarnia, or like Wayne Gretzky just happening by your street-hockey game in Brantford.

Kane’s athletic ability was breathtaking. Barely ﬁve-foot-ten, he could reverse jam the ball from a ﬂat-footed start. What’s more, he could make it look easy. He could beat everyone up and down the court without breathing hard, without breaking a sweat, smiling. It was a glimpse of the coolness that his old teammates described.

Afterwards, I talked with Kane. He seemed to be an easy-to-like young man, quick to smile and laugh, neither simple nor slick. He said that he moved back into his mother’s home in Little Burgundy in the off-season. He said he looked forward to coming back to the playground. “It’s always good to come home. There are a lot of memories here. This is where I dunked a ball for the ﬁrst time. And when it’s over for me, I’ll come back here.”

He said that a lot of the kids on this playground were like him, that they came from single-parent homes. He said that he was raised by his mother and had little to do with his father, even though he lived nearby. And he said that he took the ball given to him when he caught his ﬁrst NFL touchdown pass and placed it in his father’s casket a couple of years before.

Bob White claimed that sports would allow his young men to escape tough circumstances. For Kane, however, something else was in play. When he had a world of options, he ran as fast as he could right back to the street. A patch of asphalt around the corner from his mother’s house was heaven. He was no different than the kids lining the court who had never travelled farther than the Metro could take them.

I tell my own anecdote to Don McPherson. “The Tommy I knew was a great guy,” he says. “I don’t think he was fooling all of us all those years. I don’t think there was a Good Tommy and a Bad Tommy. I do think that he was young for his age. A lot of guys struggle with the basic things after they’re ﬁnished with the game, growing up, growing old.”

Don McPherson realizes that he never understood what Tommy Kane had gone through to earn his stripes. He believes he might have been able to help if he’d been able to read the pattern Kane was running. It wasn’t a post, a corner, or an out. It was the pattern that many of Kane’s old friends ran: a vicious circle. Don McPherson couldn’t read it, but Tammara Shaikh sure did.

Footnote: Kane pleaded guilty to manslaughter. A court-appointed physician determined that he was suffering from depression.

2008-08-31T15:53:00.001-07:00

ENEMY OF THE STATE

DAVID HUDAK MUMBLED. THE WORDS WERE coming out, but so low that the microphone inches away from him on the witness stand failed to pick them up; so fast that the court reporter had to ask him to repeat himself again and again; so loaded with physics-class jargon and government-agency acronyms that jurors were left shaking their heads.

“. . . mmmm, uh . . . energetic materials . . .mmmm, destructive devices . . . RDX . . . DoD . . . TAA, mmm . . . .”

Hudak slumped in his seat. He’s six-foot-two but didn’t look it up on the stand. On a jailhouse diet of rice and beans, he had lost weight, stature, and energy.His blue suit hung loosely on him, his hair had thinned out, and in a town where the sun shines close to 350 days a year, his skin had taken on a jailhouse pallor.

He was looking put out and acting put out, not what you’d expect from a guy who had spent the last fifteen months in yellow jumpsuits at the Estancia Prison, just outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was diffident with the lawyer who was pulling out the stops to defend him, and patronizing towards the attorney heading up the multi-million-dollar federal prosecution.

Only occassionally did Hudak seem genuinely interested. His back straightened, for instance, when he was presented with questions about the properties of nitroglycerine. He must have felt the way he used to when he was lecturing or presenting a paper to the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators. Likewise, Hudak perked up while he described the eight- and nine-figure potential of a business that had started in his basement in Vancouver, when he was talking about his development of the weapon of choice for war in the twenty-first century.

The rest of the time, though,Hudak seemed blase while he testified, less involved than his mother, Sandy, who sat in the courtroom transcribing the proceedings, and not nearly as strident as his father, Bob, who stopped passersby during recesses to tell them his son was being railroaded. It’s hard to imagine that
David Hudak could be so matter of fact: He had repeatedly been denied bail; he was facing a laundry list of charges, including possession of ordnance and training foreign soldiers in secret U.S. military tactics.

Convictions on each count would land him in prison for fifty years without parole.Making matters worse, the people prosecuting him were employed by a hostile foreign state, namely, the United States of America in the post-9/11 era.

DAVID HUDAK WOULD BE THE FIRST GUY YOU’D hire to sink a retired battleship or knock a massive wall of snow off a mountain. There was no dispute that he was an explosives expert. You could read about those skills on his resume. Beyond that, no one could agree on a thing.

In Hudak’s own mind, he was an inventor, businessman, and autodidact. “I didn’t go to MIT for physics or Cornell for business,” he says, as a point of pride. His father had been a pilot and then a fireman. The older of two sons growing up in Vancouver, David Hudak had planned to follow his father into the air, but he came to specialize in explosives instead.He made a study of, as he says, “blowing shit up.”

Hudak had worked up a revolutionary portable explosive package and named it the BEAST (Breacher’s Explosive Access Selectable Tool). It looked like a ground sheet for a sleeping bag. It could be carried around a bayonet. And it could blow a made-to-measure hole in the hull of a hijacked plane with little
collateral damage.

Hudak also developed Hydro Cut entry frames, which go through brick walls like a cookie cutter through fresh dough. Whatever you needed to penetrate with precision – door, glass, boat, or aircraft – Hudak had a breaching device for the job.

He founded two companies – Hydro Cut in Canada, and High Energy Access Tools (HEAT) in the U.S. – that by the late nineties, distributed the BEAST and the other products to foreign-military and law-enforcement outfits and trained soldiers to use them. By bringing in an A-Team of veterans from the U.S. Special Forces, Hudak’s company offered one-stop counter-terrorism training, a growth industry in jihad-happy times.

“People accuse me of being an egotist,” Hudak admits. The point is that others haven’t held him in as high regard as he holds himself.

To the military hard-asses he recruited, Hudak was no visionary.He was a wannabe in charge of soldiers whose boots he couldn’t even shine, guys who inhabited the shadowy, never-reported-on world of Black Ops.

The lawyers defending Hudak portrayed him as an absent-minded professor. Privately, they regarded him as a pain in the ass. They told him – probably more than once – that, if he knew as much as he thought he did, he should try defending himself.

To the U.S. Attorney General’s office, he was “a greedy Canadian” who broke the law by possessing military ordnance, bombs that could be fired with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers; by shipping explosives abroad without federal permits; by training foreign troops in restricted military services, stuff right out of classified files, without approval from the State Department. The federal prosecutors were inclined to believe that his supposed counter-terrorist operation was training foreigners who might take up arms against the U.S. The prosecutors wouldn’t make that case to the jury, though. They figured they needed far less to lock Hudak away for the rest of his life.

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT THINGS APPEARING one way in the light and another way in the shadows – counter-terrorists became terrorists; demolition charges became bombs; and applications for licences became admissions of high crimes.

In many ways, though, this is a story about two friends getting into a fight. Hudak’s misfortune was precipitated by a blow-up with Steve Mattoon, the world’s meanest, best-connected bastard, a guy whose three tours in Vietnam were mere tune-ups for the netherworld of Black Ops.

Hudak testified that he couldn’t nail down when he first met Mattoon – back “in the late eighties or early nineties,” by his reckoning –but he remembered that Mattoon phoned him in Vancouver, out of the blue. “I had heard of him and he had heard about me,” Hudak said. “Steve was known as a SWAT instructor and had a background in explosive methods of entry. There are not a lot of people in explosive breaching.”

Mattoon thought that they could do business together, so Hudak drove down to Fort Lewis, Washington, near Tacoma, where Mattoon was training police officers in assorted combat arts.

Mattoon was a man’s man, a soldier’s soldier. He was more than macho. Anyone who stars in lethal-force self-defence videos could hardly be low on testosterone. Hudak’s plan was to eventually get Mattoon to run an explosives-training facility in the United States (and lend his well-known name to it). Subconsciously, though, what Hudak really wanted was to hang with Mattoon, to please Mattoon, to be Mattoon. Hudak had gone to flight school, competed in quasi-military combatshooting competitions, and been around guys in uniform his whole adult life.Now he would be running with a legend.

Mattoon had little use for civilians, but devices like the BEAST – and therefore Hudak – drew him in. Hudak’s specialty was breaching aircraft, knocking out a door without injuring hostages. In other hands, explosives were a wrecking ball. In Hudak’s hands, they were like a sushi knife.

Mattoon recognized right away that inventions such as the BEAST could change everything.

He understood that a new kind of war was going to be fought in the new century.He could visualize Chechens holing up in a Moscow theatre and sniperfire raining on Gis in the streets of Baghdad. The BEAST was meant to defuse those very moments. U.S government, law enforcement, foreign military – they’d all want the BEAST. Was it worth millions? Only if you were thinking small.

For a few years, Hudak and Mattoon built HEAT from the ground up. They recruited retired Special Forces experts with the promise of more money than they’d ever earned in the service. Some, such as explosives expert Mike Payne, had already come up to Canada to work with Hudak. Others, like sniper Frank Fish, heard second- or third-hand about the outfit.

In 1997,Hudak and Mattoon rented a space at the former Walker Air Force Base in Roswell, New Mexico, remote but ideal for business. The town of 50,000 in the state’s southeast corner, famous for its visits from little green men, is home to one of the largest aircraft scrapyards in the United States. In Roswell, HEAT had a ready supply of formerly airworthy shit to blow up.

Hudak and Mattoon did nothing on the hush-hush. They made friends with the mayor, the police chief, city councillors. They gave the local FBI agent a set of keys to HEAT’s offices. They were written up in the Roswell Daily Record. They didn’t want the townies calling 911 whenever they heard a bang.

Hudak and Mattoon put out the word about the training they could offer.An explosives unit from the Canadian military flew to Roswell for training. So did forces from Singapore and the Republic of Ireland. The Israelis came, and their million-dollar bill was footed by a defence fund financed by the U.S. government.

HEAT’s business outgrew the space in Roswell, so in early 2002 Hudak lined up a spread about forty minutes west, 8,000 acres of hills bleak enough to simulate conditions in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Mattoon was pitching HEAT hard. Genuine overheard conversation: “Give me the King of Jordan. Tell ’em it’s Mattoon.”

Next thing you know, by the spring of 2002, Hudak is in deep negotiations with the United
Arab Emirates, lining up a breakthrough contract, US$12.8-million for everything on the HEAT menu: explosive breaching, sniper training, work with night-vision tech, as well as some strategic stuff out of the Fort Bragg playbook.

Throughout 2002, Hudak was bouncing back and forth between the UAE,New Mexico, and Vancouver. There were long stretches during which he went without seeing his wife, Leslie, and his two young sons, but Hudak figured they’d be sitting pretty after this deal. He wasn’t going to pocket the whole $12.8-million, mind you A third of that was going to be spent on “shit to blow up.” Another chunk would pay the sixty people on staff. Still, he assumed other Arab allies of the U.S. would follow the UAE’s lead. By his projections, HEAT was going to draw three times as much revenue within a year. “I saw myself sailing the Pacific for a month or two with my family,” he says.

David Hudak was both a big-picture and small-picture guy.He courted the Emir in Abu Dhabi one day and hired a janitor in Roswell the next. Often, he didn’t get around to the stuff in the middle. Like paperwork.

HEAT had a lobbyist named Hank Lavery in Washington to advise the company on any federal red tape. Lavery reassured everyone that few forms and licences were needed for training the troops from Canada, Singapore, Israel, and Ireland.

Hudak depended on Mattoon more than Lavery. Hudak trusted his friend with clearing HEAT’s training – formally or informally – with the big hitters at the State Department and the Department of Defence. He also trusted Mattoon to know who they needed to know. Mattoon always assured him that “we’re with the good guys.” Mattoon knew everybody who counted. He went fly-fishing with Dick Cheney, for crying out loud.He had Colin F-in’ Powell’s home number. One time, HEAT was short some sheet explosives. Mattoon made a call and U.S. Marshals showed up with some, as though they were bringing a casserole over to the neighbours for a potluck dinner. It was easy to be impressed.

HEAT’s business mission was riding on Mattoon. If he bailed, things could come undone. And that’s precisely what happened.

JUST EAST OF THE NEW MEXICO METROPOLIS of Hondo, you happen upon Tinnie, the point at which the desert hills give way to the desert flatlands and the site of HEAT’s ranch. Here you get a different picture of David Hudak than those offered in Albuquerque’s federal courthouse. In Tinnie, he was seen as too friendly to be reviled, too pitiful to be scorned, too comical to be forgotten.

“It might sound unkind, but folks ’round here will tell you that David was the biggest sucker ever to blow into Tinnie,” says a woman named Ruby, the proprietor of the Tinnie General Store and Texas Embassy B-B-Q.

Tinnie’s townspeople will talk about Hudak but won’t give their names. It’s not just because of their usual suspicions about outsiders; it’s that many had done work for Hudak and had never been paid. The Feds blew out of town once they “secured” the property with padlocks and tape – not nearly enough to keep out the locals, especially when they had a grievance. Thus, HEAT property, whether it’s furniture, appliances, or hardware, can be found in many nearby residences.

Ruby knew one contractor who might be a good source of info about Hudak, but she says he won’t talk “because he’s still driving a HEAT truck that he drove off the ranch the day before the Feds came to town.”

Many locals didn’t like what HEAT was up to. “It wasn’t safe, blowing up explosives a half mile from the highway,” one farmhand says. “This is a big hunting area. All that stuff would be killing deer and scaring them off.”

Still, the townies seemed to like Hudak. They still laugh at the way he tried to do everything himself: driving a bulldozer and blowing two engines in a week; giving the keys to the bulldozer to another novice who
immediately rolled it. “Green Acres with explosives” was how one local described it. Nonetheless, they thought he was a regular guy when he kicked back, had a few beers, and worked through a pack of smokes.

Mattoon was another story. The locals could see how Hudak was drawn to him. “Mattoon was the real-life GI Joe action figure that David had when he was a boy,” Ruby says.

“Mattoon tried to intimidate us, saying how many guns and explosives he had,” continues a young man behind the counter at the general store. “I just told him, ‘Boy, you don’t have any idea where you are. We all got guns and explosives.’ ”

“It was sad, the way Mattoon and them treated David,” Ruby says.“David would bring in his guys and they would order up food and beers and he’d pay the full ticket out of his own pocket. As soon as he was out of earshot, they’d be making jokes about him and saying how they were going to squeeze him out of the business.”

JUST BEFORE THE BIG SCORE, THINGS STARTED to sour.

It began with the trainees, about three dozen in all, from the United Arab Emirates. They were looking to blow into Roswell early. Their passports and visas were a mess. Were they who they said they were? The brass at HEAT sure hoped so.

The rush had all the HEAT staffers wondering if they could fulfill the contract with the UAE. They didn’t have all the required high-tech equipment. The paperwork was underway but not approved. Hudak rounded up his top men for a straight up-or-down vote: Go or no? A unanimous go. These guys didn’t win medals by “waiting for paperwork.”

A complicating issue: David was fielding calls from HEAT’s financial officer in Vancouver. The company’s cash flow was non-existent. Contractors weren’t the only ones stiffed. The instructors were missing paydays. (You want to know pressure? Tell a guy with a sniper’s rifle that his cheque is in the mail.) Still, the instructors knew that fulfilling the UAE contract was their best chance of getting paid.

The trainees were unhappy, but that was to be expected; princes’ sons used to sitting on palace commodes were going through training exercises in the middle of the desert, having to dodge scorpions while taking a dump. More ominous, though, was the UAE command’s dissatisfaction with the program. They claimed they weren’t getting the promised goods. They threatened to stop payments and pull out.

It got worse. HEAT started to get calls from Lavery. Initially, he was only raising a yellow flag. Some of the training might require approval from the State Department. The UAE brass wanted more, but Lavery was telling Hudak,Mattoon, or whoever else would listen that HEAT would have to scale back until the paperwork was handled.

Hudak’s dreams were in danger of blowing up in his face like a joke-shop cigar. He needed Mattoon to hold them together. And it was at precisely this time that Hudak was starting to get under the pink-coloured Kevlar that is Steve Mattoon’s skin.

On one occasion,Mattoon ordered Hudak away from training because he didn’t have U.S. security clearance. Hudak says he wasn’t alarmed by the fractious atmosphere. “These guys had been trained to fight,” he says.“When they weren’t fighting the enemy, they were fighting among themselves. They’re Triple A-type personalities.” Hudak would sometimes side with Mattoon against Mike Payne and sometimes back Payne against Mattoon.
Still, the dissention was evident. Doris Cherry, a reporter with The Lincoln CountyNews, attended an open house at the Tinnie ranch on June 29, 2002. “You had government and law-enforcement officials there but [HEAT] couldn’t get its story straight,” Cherry says. “Ask two different people there a question and you’d get two entirely different answers.”

It reached a breaking point in July, 2002. There’s no agreement about the cause and some dispute about the outcome. This much everyone agrees on: Hudak, Payne, and Frank Fish were in a trailer on the Tinnie ranch, when Mattoon barged in, enraged.

Mattoon:Who’s running the show?
Hudak: I am.
Mattoon: I quit.
Hudak: You’re fired.

Hudak told the court that Mattoon then took a swing at him. Fish disputed that, saying that if Mattoon wanted to hit Hudak, “he’d still be unconscious.”

The townies in Tinnie recall Hudak walking around with a black eye following the showdown. Mattoon was gone the next day, and that very morning, things went from bad to couldn’t-be-worse.

IF HUDAK DIDN’T GIVE MUCH THOUGHT TO the legal repercussions of Mattoon’s departure, Mike Payne surely did. Payne inherited all the paperwork. Lavery, the lobbyist in Washington, D.C., was now telling him that some of the United Arab Emirates training fell into a “grey area.” He told them to stop training with night-vision tech and to call off the sniper work until they had licences in hand.

Once the cold sweat dried, Payne realized that he was in over his head. He went to the FBI’s offices in Roswell. He made phone calls to officials, the most plaintive of them to Special Agent Gary Ainsworth of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) on August 7, 2002. What Payne intended to be a fact-finding inquiry turned into an interrogation. From the transcript of that call:

Payne: Is this the point where I need to start asking for an attorney? . . . Or is this just conversation? I mean, I’m not getting paranoid but I’m just asking about where we’re going with all this? … It sounds like we’re getting to . . . an investigation.

There’s no transcript of other calls to HEAT, calls from SAIC, a giant in the defence-services industry. With retired generals on its board, SAIC enjoys favoured-outfit status with the Bush administration. SAIC representatives were sniffing around – maybe looking for a piece of the action, maybe to buy Hudak out altogether. Ever the optimist, Hudak believed SAIC’s interest meant that HEAT was on the verge of something big.

Two days after the last call from SAIC, search warrants were executed on the HEAT offices in Roswell and the ranch in Tinnie. Payne found out that he shouldn’t have counted on the ATF agent Ainsworth to tell him to get in touch with a lawyer. Hudak thought that he knew the drill, having been written up for a couple of violations in Canada. He thought he’d get a slap on the wrists. Instead, Ainsworth slapped on the cuffs.

HUDAK HAD BEEFS WITH OTHER GUYS WHO blew out of HEAT in a huff, and there had to be one or two rivals in the business who would have wanted to sic the Feds on Hudak. But alone among Hudak’s former associates, Mattoon had what they call “stroke” down New Mexico way. Elsewhere, it’s known as clout. “If Mattoon made a call to federal officials, they’d follow things up,” said Russ Hart, a retired major in the Marines and founder of an explosives-training business based in Yuma, Arizona. “I’m surprised how hard the Feds went after Hudak.”

In fact, the Feds involved did seem to have their own reasons for running hard with the ball. Timing was bad for Hudak – pieces of the World Trade Center were still being ferried out of Manhattan – but timing was only part of it.

Hudak had made the assumption that the UAE trainees would get State Department clearances. After all, the UAE had granted the U.S. permission to set up military bases within its borders, and several retired highranking U.S. military officers, Mattoon’s pals, were in the UAE working with its servicemen.

No official – not those at the State Department who had spoken to Hank Lavery, not FBI Agent Robin Smith, who checked out the UAE trainees at the Roswell airport, not even intelligence-agency types who visited the Tinnie ranch – ever suggested that HEAT’s freshman class might be chock full of terrorists.

Yet it would have been hard to cast the UAE as entirely “friendly.” The State Department had warily turned down a request from the UAE for training similar to that which HEAT was contracted to perform.Weeks before the raid on HEAT, FBI director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that money that financed the terrorist attacks of 9/11 flowed through the UAE. Federal attorney Mark D’Antonio alluded to this point in a pre-trial motion, noting that the UAE “at least facilitated the banking of funds” for the terrorists.

For its part, the ATF was motivated by a slap in the face. The Bush administration was trying to get all the major players – the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Defence – to throw their shoulders behind the new Department of Homeland Security. The ATF, the redheaded stepchild of federal bureaus even before the Waco and Ruby Ridge debacles, was left on the sidelines. Compounding the misery, the FBI was lobbying to take over ATF’s jurisdiction over explosives. The ATF needed high-profile busts to rehabilitate its reputation, and this case seemed made-to-order: A traitorous Canadian was supplying and training foreign nationals – maybe even Mohammad Atta’s cousins – in explosive technologies that might be turned against the U.S.

Hudak’s father has a simple explanation for the prosecution.“It’s about money,” he says. “The U.S. government wanted the BEAST and this was one way to get it. Get David behind bars and get everything that he has. They wanted to subpoena his computer in Vancouver for this trial and get all his research on the BEAST’s design. They convict him and [SAIC] gets all the contracts that David would have got.”

The elder Hudak’s theory might sound far-fetched, but an ATF agent in a taped interview with Lavery backs the idea that seizures figured large in the Feds’ plans.

Lavery: . . . The money part isn’t important.
Special Agent Barr:Well, actually, it is important to us.
Lavery: Oh.
Barr: It’s very important to us.
Lavery:Why?
Barr: Because we are going to seize the money.
Lavery: Oh. Uh.
Barr: Either in criminal or civil forfeiture, we’re gonna go after the money. So it’s really important to the
Treasury Department of the United States . . . . Basically, if there’s any of these funds out there, United States Customs Service is going after it.

So the U.S.Attorney General’s office, the FBI, and the ATF chased Hudak and Payne. They even threatened to charge Hudak’s wife, Leslie, for her participation as HEAT’s Vancouver- based business manager if she crossed the border to visit her husband. They didn’t go for half-measures. Four federal officials went
to the UAE to interview the students in the HEAT course; others travelled to Vancouver to question everybody who had dealings with Hudak. Timothy Padilla, Hudak’s defence attorney, ballparked the public costs of the trial at US$3-million. But the Feds figured they could recover all of it and more. If they convicted Hudak, they could foreclose on the ranch, seize his other assets, and empty his offshore accounts, which they presumed to hold millions.

WHEN DAVID HUDAK APPEARED IN THE FEDERAL courthouse in Albuquerque for a pre-trial hearing in August 2003, Judge John Conway advised him to think hard about a plea bargain to hedge the risk of a half-century behind bars. Judge Conway gave Hudak a chance to meditate on the decision by denying him bail.

Tim Padilla discussed a plea bargain with his client. Leslie Hudak urged her husband not to take it, but he did mull over the idea of doing, say, three years, so long as he didn’t have to forfeit his assets. “David told me that he needed something to come out to,” Padilla said. “But [the prosecutors] were pushing for six years, all his assets seized. David said he didn’t want to plead guilty to something he didn’t do.”

Hudak’s problem was that Mike Payne, his former right-hand man at HEAT, agreed to do precisely that. The U.S. Attorney General’s office threatened Payne with the same fifty-year stretch that Hudak was facing, but offered him an out: Plead guilty on markeddown charges, roll on Hudak, do a short stretch, and hold onto your army pension. Payne had a wife and six kids back in North Carolina who could use the medical coverage on his pension. After twenty years in the Army, he had become accustomed to following orders, not sorting through options. Federal prosecutors knew from his call to Ainsworth that Payne wanted desperately to do the right thing. And they convinced him that doing his time and selling out his old boss -- a civilian, not even an American – was the right thing to do for his family and his country.

The prosecution’s case largely hinged on Payne’s testimony.He told the court he hadn’t known that State Department-issued licences were needed to instruct the UAE soldiers, but, once he did, Hank Lavery had assured him the approvals were being rubber-stamped. Unfortunately for the prosecution, Payne never indicated that he or Hudak was trying to pull a fast one. “Payne wasn’t too damaging,” Padilla says. “He looked like a fall guy.”

What the prosecution did have was physical evidence: about 2,400 Thermos-sized aluminum canisters filled with RDX, the second-most potent form of ordnance-grade explosives. According to the prosecution’s expert witnesses, these were “warheads” or “destructive devices” or “bombs” designed for use in shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, the type that were downing helicopters in Iraq. ATF Agent Ainsworth testified that the “warheads” were licensed for sale only to the U.S. military and were bought by Hudak “on the black market.” That sounded damning but, instead, it ended up biting the Feds in the ass.

The trial lasted almost six weeks. It featured dozens of witnesses. It featured hundreds of pieces of itemized physical exhibits: deactivated grenades, rockets, Claymore mines, and bombs. It featured 140,000 pages of transcripts and printed evidence for the lawyers to sort through. It featured a judge, Christine Armijo, who had been appointed to the bench by George W. Bush.

It also featured “minders,” observers who sat in on the proceedings. The Department of Defence’s minder looked like he was authorized to kill to prevent classified documents from being aired in court. A young lawyer from an Albuquerque firm was “the lady in black”; she wasn’t about to volunteer her interests no matter who tried to finesse her.

What the trial did not feature was Steve Mattoon. The prosecution didn’t call him. The defence subpoenaed him and intended to call him. “It would have been risky because he refused to talk to us [prior to the trial],” Padilla said. At the last minute, Mattoon informed the court that he intended to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights. The jury was told that Mattoon was legally unavailable to testify. “In the end,” Padilla said, “nothing Mattoon could have said would have helped us more than him taking the Fifth.”

As it turned out, the least effective defence witness was Hudak himself. Reciting specs on explosives, describing the tax advantages of setting up HEAT’s offshore accounts, Hudak often lost the blue-collar jury, which Padilla and his co-counsel, Robert Gorence, a former rising star in the U.S. Attorney’s office now in private practice, had stacked with minorities and Democrats. He might have scored regular-guy points if he opened up the way he did down at the Tinnie General Store. Instead, the egotist emerged. When John Crews, the lead prosecutor, asked Hudak if it would have been difficult to rig up the explosive charges into weapons, Hudak responded, “Most people wouldn’t be able to . . . but I could.”

Padilla had told Hudak that if the jury convicted him, it was going to be because the jurors didn’t like him. The defence team considered not calling Hudak, but, in the end, his testimony neither helped his case nor hurt it. Padilla believed it was necessary, though, to open the door to call other witnesses.

Chief among these were four former employees of JRC, once a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton, the multi-billion-dollar company that was under the stewardship of CEO Dick Cheney a few years ago and that these days lands government contract after contract now that Mattoon’s ol’ fly-fishing partner is serving as Dubya’s caddy. Back in the eighties and nineties, JRC had contracts to manufacture ordnance for the Department of Defence, including the 2,400 units of aluminum-encased RDX that were recovered from HEAT’s storage magazine.

The first three former employees of JRC –intentionally referred to as “Halliburton” by Gorence during questioning – testified that the charges sold to Hudak weren’t bombs or explosive devices. Though ordered by the U.S. Department of Defence, DoD inspectors had rejected them. Their serial numbers were painted over so they wouldn’t be confused with real ordnance. The employees testified that what was sold to Hudak wasn’t functional, not without fuses or delivery systems. As one juror concluded,“If you had one down in the trenches and were hoping to deploy it, you were shit out of luck.”

A fourth employee of JRC, Mitchell Hambright, reluctantly testified that the charges were sold to Hudak on direct orders from above, on the day that JRC was sold to Tennessee-based explosives manufacturer Accurate Arms. A fax sent by Hambright to HEAT was entered into evidence: It offered 2,400 units of RDX-filled aluminum canisters – described as “charge, demolition” – for a little more than a buck a throw, the price of the box they came in. The fax was labelled “BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL,” an allusion to Kmart’s signature sale. The deal spared Accurate Arms the cost of destroying the charges. Hambright admitted on the stand that the sale was, to his mind, illegal and that he proceeded because he was concerned for his family’s welfare.

The BEAST itself couldn’t have blown a bigger hole in Ainsworth’s “black market” claim. At this point, the lady in black, who had worked on crosswords for much of the trial, started taking furious notes, looking for the world like a minder for Halliburton.

The jury was provided with heaps of evidence regarding Hudak’s attempts to comply with regulations. It heard Payne’s desperate call to Ainsworth, and Barr’s damning admission that the motive for the prosecution was money. The clincher for the defence, however, was Frank Fish.

In the hallway, before Fish walked into court, John Crews put the heat on him to follow Mattoon’s lead and refuse to testify. Fish didn’t blink. Instead, he told the court that he had already stood before a grand jury that did not return an indictment for his involvement in HEAT; those prosecuting Hudak had advised him that he was still a target, and Fish was forced to testify without immunity.

He told the court about contacting his friends in the military to check out HEAT’s reputation before joining the company. He had first met Mike Payne on a tour with the Army in Japan. “Before I signed on, I asked Mike, ‘Is everything State Department–approved?’ and he assured me it was,” Fish said.

As a witness to the “fight” between Mattoon and Hudak, Fish knew best the heat between them. Fish told the court that Mattoon “said he was going to do something after he quit.” Nothing specific, mind you. The jury had to imagine what it would be like to be threatened by a guy who could kill you with his bare hands, with explosives, or, for that matter, a phone call.

It was in cross-examination that the trial’s defining moment occurred: Crews, whose sneering courtroom manner turned off jurors, kept pushing Fish’s buttons. Eventually Fish tired of it and responded with the clinical cool that he needed to pop enemies as a sniper. He told Crews,“I’m trying to answer the questions to the best of my ability, but I resent you suggesting that I would do or even consider doing something against the interests of this country.”

Crews kept on sneering. “Are you finished?” he asked Fish.

Crews had his back to the jury.He couldn’t tell that he was the one who was done.

In his closing statement, Gorence apologized to the jury for frequent interruptions related to the admissibility of evidence that had jurors cooling their heels in the waiting room for hours at a time. But Gorence said he wouldn’t apologize for trying to get as much evidence as possible into Hudak’s defence – a play to the jurors’ sense that they were only getting part of the story. They thought the prosecution’s case was full of holes, the largest being the absence of Steve Mattoon.

At the end of six weeks, the jury deliberated for only six hours: Not guilty on all counts.

When the verdict was handed down on November 25, Bob and Sandy Hudak were overjoyed. “Our other son took his life when he was in his twenties,” Sandy said. “I don’t think that I could have taken losing another son. [A conviction] would have killed us all.”

David Hudak breathed a sigh of relief and told his mother not to cry. The U.S. Marshals in the courtroom told him not to leave just yet; some paperwork needed to be taken care of before they could release his passport to him. Hudak asked Padilla for a cellphone to call his wife. Then he turned to the reporters and said, “I can’t wait to file for my next explosives licence.”

Outside the courthouse, the prosecutors dodged the press. They declined comment other than to say they were “disappointed.” They had to be even more disappointed when they heard that the jury was drafting a letter to the judge presiding over Mike Payne’s sentencing. “If Payne does one day in jail, it would be a tragedy,” said juror Brian McMahon. (Payne is awaiting sentencing this summer.)

As it turned out, the Feds denied Hudak a timely victory lap and sent him a message that his acquittal wasn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card. They held him for six more days on a trumped-up visa beef, kept him from the media, and shipped him down to El Paso, Texas. They finally released him on bail pending an immigration hearing but held onto his passport. The ironic footnote: Hudak’s release was finally granted on the day the incoming prime minister Paul Martin boldly declared that American authorities must respect Canadian passports.

THREE MONTHS LATER, IN FEBRUARY, HUDAK was still in southeastern New Mexico, still waiting for his immigration hearing, trying, he said, “to put my life back together.” Leslie and his two young sons were with him, but this was no ocean cruise. He was rooting around the Tinnie ranch, taking inventory of what little the looters had left behind. He’d already applied for a licence – Singapore wanted a shipment of the BEAST, an order he could fill now that the U.S. government had returned his seized property – but the State Department was taking a lot longer than usual to get back to him.

“Right now, I wonder whether I really want to be in this business any more,” he said after a disheartening day spent walking about the looted compound.

Hudak said there was no going back to Roswell, either. The authorities there had leased HEAT’s former space at the Walker Air Force Base. It was probably for the best. In a town famous for conspiracy theories, Hudak’s acquittal didn’t quell rumours about HEAT. Supposedly, some trainees hadn’t landed at Roswell’s airport. Supposedly, they parachuted into Mexico and were smuggled across the border. Supposedly, they were from some terrorist hothouse in the Middle East.

Jim Bullock is just one of the Roswellians who had a close encounter with suspicious aliens affiliated with HEAT. In the spring of 2002, three Middle Eastern men moved into a ranch house next door to Bullock, a retired teacher who lives near the old air base. “After 9/11, I was keeping an eye with David Hudak, HEAT, and the whole mess. They didn’t send out the Welcome Wagon for him and eye on everything,”

Bullock says. “They wore HEAT jackets leaving for work. One day I took over some bread that my wife had baked. They didn’t volunteer much about [their work], but when I asked them, they said that they were from Jordan and not [the United Arab Emirates]. They said they spent time in Georgia and Virginia before coming out here. Didn’t say anything about flying into Roswell from the UAE.”

Bullock says he didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to them. “They got outta Dodge,” he says. On the day the Feds descended on HEAT’s facilities in Roswell and Tinnie, the three left for work and never came back. They left behind their clothes in the closet and their furniture in the living room. They left the lights on and their neighbours’ suspicions burning.

Out in Tinnie, the townies have always figured there was less – not more – than meets the the missus on their return, but they seem glad enough to have him back. On the record, he can’t talk about any civil actions that might be filed in coming months. He can’t talk about Accurate Arms or Halliburton. He can’t talk about his immigration hearing. He can’t talk about Steve Mattoon. Or won’t. But you can be sure that they’ve heard all about it at the Tinnie B-B-Q.

He will go on the record about some of the things he tells the locals over mesquite and a beer during bull sessions at the general store. He will say that the U.S. Department of Defense would be crazy not to let him train its soldiers, not to prepare them to wage war as it will have to be waged in the twenty-first century. When he gets on a roll, the old resolve is back and even the BEAST couldn’t knock a hole in it – which explains why he went to war in a New Mexico courtroom. And why, in the end, he was more resilient than at least a couple of America’s toughest fighting men.

Footnote: A federal judge threw out Payne’s plea out of court. Hudak’s lawyers filed suits on his behalf against Accurate Arms and Halliburton among others, but according to Timothy Padilla his client “is years away from seeing a dime.”

2007-01-21T10:19:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-01-21T10:14:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-01-21T10:09:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-01-21T10:07:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-01-21T10:04:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-01-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

Russian teenagers running NHL agents ragged

From The Ottawa Citizen, June 16, 2002

FEEDING THE NEW RUSSIAN REVOLUTION:

The cut-throat deals that fuel the NHL's entry draft

On a Thursday afternoon last June a dozen future millionaires mingled in a crowded bistro in Fort Lauderdale. They were easy to spot. They were the ones wearing hockey sweaters, the ones being interrogated by sportwriters and the only ones not old enough to drink.

Every year on the eve of its entry draft the National Hockey League introduces the world's top 18-year-old players to those who will cover their heroics for years to come, a coming-out party of sorts. It's a scene that will play out next week in Toronto before the draft on June 22, but last year the spotlight shone on a dark-haired prodigy in a Moscow Spartak sweater, Ilya Kovalchuk, who a year before had known little about the NHL and still seemed bewildered by the hoopla. In the final years of his junior career, Kovalchuk, a native of Tver, Russia, had courted controversy by shamelessly show-boating in international tournaments and cockily mocking rival juniors in the press. Nevertheless, NHL executives and scouts considered him the most exciting teenage talent since Mario Lemieux almost 20 years before, questions about his character be damned.

It should have been good news for the NHL. After all, the draft sells hope to teams on hard times. Kovalchuk was 6-feet-2-inches and 210 pounds of hope for the Atlanta Thrashers, Ted Turner's struggling expansion franchise and holders of the first pick in the draft.

It wasn't good news for Scott Greenspun of Impact Sports Management, a tiny boutique sports agency based in New York City. Anything but. Greenspun looked at Kovalchuk, saw only lost opportunity, one that would have netted him millions of dollars. Greenspun had once believed he had locked up Kovalchuk as a client. Now, he shrugged it off with a world-weary fatalism. "We're a small agency," Greenspun said. "We had an agreement with him going back a year before. His leaving us was a disappointment but not a surprise. We saw it coming."

Kovalchuk had dumped Greenspun for Jay Grossman, becoming another in a parade of top Russian teenage stars who had stiffed their agents to hook up with Grossman's SFX Hockey agency in New York. SFX describes itself immodestly but not inaccurately as "the world's largest promoter, producer and presenter of live entertainment events."

When agents gather at events like the one in Fort Lauderdale, there are bound to be some hard feelings. Hockey agents could probably teach Mafia dons a thing or two about holding grudges, that's just the nature of their competitive business. But here, the agents viewed SFX's successes as a symptom of a changing business culture, more cut-throat, driven by hard corporate cash. They also viewed the next wave of players out of Eastern Europe as a bunch of baby-faced shakedown artists, and worried that Russian or Eastern European coaches and officials and even the parents would expect cash or cars -- under the table of course -- to ensure their young charges signed.

"It's the way the business is going and it rewards those who can make a huge financial commitment to a player before he has signed an NHL contract," said agent Mark Gandler, who has represented Alexei Yashin and many other prominent Russian stars for more than a decade but came to the 2001 draft without a prospect projected to go in the first round. "To represent the top Eastern European juniors you're going to have to pay up front."

Though not illegal in either North America or Europe, to offer financial inducements would be a breach of the business' tradition, not to mention a violation of policy set down by the NHL Players' Association.

At the bistro Kovalchuk sat in a large circular booth, crowded by reporters. He squinted as the television lights trained on him. Grossman sat across the table, content to blend in with the palm bushes. "I've met with Don Waddell (the Thrashers' general manager)," Kovalchuk said as Grossman's assistant, Vadim Azrilyant, translated. "We talked about cars." He was then asked what make of car he owned. Kovalchuk hesitated, suddenly looking uncomfortable. "I think Waddell owns a BMW," he said. He was asked again what kind of car he owns. Kovalchuk glanced at Azrilyant and then Grossman before uttering "nyet."

A few weeks earlier in the Soviet Sport newspaper, Kovalchuk admitted to owning and driving an Audi around Moscow without a licence. "The Audi is gone," he stated. "I gave it to my parents." He also told Soviet Sport that he wasn't going to need a car because he was taking an extended vacation to the Mediterranean.

Reporters at the bistro then asked Kovalchuk about his father, Valeri. "He was a basketball player and now owns a sports school and store," he said. The prospect dodged a follow-up question about a rumour that, as a condition of his signing with SFX, his father had been hired by the agency as a consultant.

Kovalchuk was drawing a wage from Spartak but not enough to give sports cars to family members or flit about with the Jet Set. It wasn't only talent that separated Kovalchuk from the other young players gathered at this party. A kid such as Dan Hamhuis, a defenceman who played in Major Junior in Prince George, B.C., and earned $60 a week, would be lucky to spot an Audi from the window of the team bus on a road trip. And the collegian among them, a defenceman named Mike Komisarek, couldn't let an agent so much as buy him a sandwich without risking his scholarship to the University of Michigan. One day Hamhuis and Komisarek would be professionals. At 18, Kovalchuk already was.

*

You might not think that it matters when young stars come into their money, whether a 17-year-old is fronted tens of thousands of dollars before his draft year or has to wait, at least for a couple of months or at most for a couple of years, for his signing bonus from an NHL club. Just try to tell league executives that.

They aren't simply nostalgic for simon-pure days. The game is sustained and renewed by its young talent and these executives worry that young players in Eastern Europe have their eyes trained on the buck rather than the puck, that they aren't just dirtied by money but spoiled by it. Hockey players in Russia are approached as 13- and 14-year-olds and any number of them can be drafted from there, the only restriction being that they have turned 18.

In Fort Lauderdale one scout overheard an agent brag that he was representing two Russian prospects, and snarled, loud enough for the agent's audience to overhear: "Yeah, two Jeeps, it took two Jeeps." A Jeep, apparently, is the vehicle of choice among Russian teens and, word has it, the going rate for an Eastern European prospect projected to be drafted in the first two rounds.

A few executives didn't bother with veiled references. "The way the business is being conducted isn't in the interests of the teams or the players," said Craig Button, Calgary Flames general manager. "Teenage kids are hopping from one agent to another, always looking for something on the side. Some teams end up investing and wasting millions in kids who never fulfil their potential because of the off-ice distractions. We're putting at risk some of the best talents coming into the game and the league needs all the talent it can get."

Most agents were no less disgusted. "Everyone knows what's going on and it's unethical," said Kingston-based agent Mike Gillis, a former NHLer who represents Pavel Bure but does not recruit in Eastern Europe. "These (agents) should know better than to be recruiting kids, 13 or 14 years old, waving money and creating an environment of greed that's sure to spread."

Junior players from Tver to Prince George routinely commit to agents before their draft year. Except for U.S. collegians who are prohibited by NCAA rules from associating with agents, virtually all of the 289 players selected at the 2001 entry had representation. If everyone was playing by the rules not one of them would be one dollar richer before signing an NHL contract. Nobody pretends that is the case. No agent nor player will own up to it and neither will they go on the record with the names of agents slipping players cash-filled envelopes or keys to Jeeps. It's not that nobody wants to cast the first stone so much as nobody having the stomach to look under the rock.

The NHL Players' Association's code of conduct is unequivocal: It prohibits agents from "providing or causing to be provided a monetary inducement or any other thing of value to any player to encourage or induce him to utilize (an agent's) services." Proof of a violation would lead the NHLPA to de-certify an agent, effectively drumming him out of the business. (Only agents certified by the NHLPA can negotiate contracts with NHL teams.)

There are grey areas. "Technically, taking a player out to dinner or providing a kid with equipment -- these would be things of value," says Don Meehan of Toronto-based Newport Sports. "Nobody (at the NHLPA) wants to pursue de-certification on those grounds. But there's a big difference between that and a straight cash payment."

The NHLPA claims the moral high ground with its ban on inducements. "It's just a bad way to start a relationship," says NHLPA associate counsel Ian Pulver. "The kids have to understand that nothing in life comes free."

This Chicken Soup for the Junior Hockey Player's Soul sounds risible emanating from the NHLPA where the over-riding concern is not building character but rather ensuring ever-rising salaries for its members. In fact, the NHLPA's ban on inducements makes business sense for the players. "If a (draft-eligible) junior received money from an agent in advance of signing a contract, then that agent is going to look for a return on his investment as quickly as possible and a team will use that to its advantage in negotiations," says Brian Lawton of Octagon Sports, which represents 65 NHLers. To maximize his commission, an agent who hasn't bankrolled a player will be more likely to wait for the best deal.

The NHLPA's rules, however, are like Doug Gilmour. They have no teeth.

No agent has ever been warned, sanctioned or de-certified for offering inducements. NHLPA director Bob Goodenow declined to comment for this story. Agents suggested that he didn't want to divide their ranks, especially when he's counting on them to rally their clients -- his membership -- in the next round of collective bargaining and through a probable lock-out in 2004. He did set up a committee of agents to look into the issue of inducements last December but the committee disbanded after a couple of unproductive meetings and Goodenow, they say, has done nothing since to indicate he considers inducements a high priority.

NHLPA officials admitted at first they have no resources in place for enforcement of their own rules and rely on agents to rat on their peers. Later, they back-tracked, saying they deal with such matters internally and refuse media inquiries.

A few agents cut Goodenow and his association some slack. Some suggest any attempt to de-certify an agent would end in court. "It's a difficult issue for the NHLPA to address because these junior players aren't yet NHLPA members," says Mike Gillis. "The one thing is that this is all new – the certification process is new, recruiting in Russia is new. Everything is evolving, so you hope that eventually the problems will be ironed out."

The evolution notwithstanding, agents have always had to keep up their elbows to stay in the game in Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia. When the NHL first tapped into the Soviet Union in the late '80s, agents had to devise strategies for defections or broker authorized passage by building contacts with officials in national federations. By the mid-'90s, free markets might have been evolving but the market for young hockey players was one of the least free. It was easy for players to go to west -- as long as they committed to the agent recommended by their coaches and the federation.

Some agents, such as Gillis, never recruit in Russia and many who do are ambivalent about it. Last year at a meeting with his superiors at Octagon, an international agency with clients in all major professional sports leagues, Lawton proposed abandoning Russia. "We stayed on in Russia because we have a couple of first-rounders in the 2002 draft," he said. "But there's so much jumping around from one agent to another that it's hard to justify the time and expense (with Russian juniors)."

The standard contract between a player and an agent allows either party to cancel out at any time, whether it's an NHL All-Star making millions or a 16-year-old riding the buses in the junior ranks. An agent's one consolation -- and what binds established professionals to an agency -- is that once an agent negotiates a player's contract, he will receive his commission for the duration of that pact. As a result, predatory agents usually find unsigned junior players more attractive than a pro in the middle of a long-term contract. "Before a team signs a (junior) player, there are no guarantees," Finnish agent Peter Lehto said. "You see players switching agents in other places but not like in Russia. Until the contract is signed nobody can be sure who'll end up with the prospect."

*

Jay Grossman didn't look as if he were plagued by uncertainty at the draft in Fort Lauderdale. A short man with closely cropped hair, Grossman plays things close to the vest and low to the ground, which sets him apart from his louder, flashier, publicity-seeking competitors. He is the object of their snickers whenever he is spotted carrying his clients' hockey bags after a game, which is just not done. And while high-profile agents attend games with sports and entertainment celebrities, Grossman shows up at New York Rangers games at Madison Square Garden with his son. But with Kovalchuk on board and all the leverage with Atlanta, a team with deep pockets and desperate to improve, he seemed to have the last laugh.

Grossman first made hockey news two decades ago while still a teenager. He was hired as a scout by Roger Neilson, then coach of the Vancouver Canucks and the iconoclast who ran the summer hockey school Grossman attended. Grossman's playing career stalled -- he had hoped to be a goalie -- and his scouting assignment was a one-off, but his appetite for the game was whetted.

"I was determined to play a role in the game," Grossman said. "I didn't know quite what I was going to do but I was willing to try anything." As an undergraduate at Union College in Schenectady, New York, he found his niche as a freelance agent, hustling clients for Athletes and Artists, a Manhattan-based sports agency. Even before he graduated with a law degree in 1987 he had made contacts on the U.S. college circuit that would lead to A and A signing Brian Leetch, a future All-Star.

Leetch, today the Rangers' captain, remains Grossman's client 15 years and tens of millions of dollars later, but the agent figures that everything else in the business has changed. He once freelanced, now he is the lead man. He once competed against two dozen agents, now 200 are certified by the NHLPA. There are more territories to work, bigger numbers in play. And many of Grossman's stand-bys such as Adam Oates, whom he recruited as an unheralded forward at Ransselaer Polytechnical Institute in Troy, N.Y. in the '80s, moved to other agents and young Eastern European players have filled the void.

The most profound change, though, is the number of sports agencies that have been bought by international corporations during the last five years. A few big agents remain independent and Don Meehan and his Newport Sports group, the outfit with the largest NHL client list, has so far resisted all comers. But market forces conspire against independent operators. Corporations not only offer agents a chance to profit from the sale but also promise a chance to manage a well-capitalized shop, a comfort few enjoyed as independents in an ever-precarious business.

In 1997, Grossman and A and A were among the first to answer the siren's call when they were acquired by SFX as its only hockey representation. Throughout the late '90s, SFX was the largest acquisitor of sports agencies, scooping up David Falk's FAME (most famous client was basketball legend Michael Jordan), Tellum & Associates (Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers) and the Hendricks Management Company (New York Yankees ace Roger Clemens). Today, SFX represents one-sixth of the players in the National Basketball Association and major-league baseball. SFX has closed in considerably on industry leader IMG, the Cleveland-based international sports agency whose founder, Mark McCormack, invented sports marketing by turning Arnold Palmer from a golfer to a brand in the early '60s. IMG represents, among others, the Pope. The best SFX can counter with is Bono.

Controversy has dogged SFX for years. A few years ago, basketball agents and executives complained that Falk was representing SFX clients who were negotiating with the Washington Wizards whose part-owner at the time was Jordan, not only Falk's reputation-making client but also a source of income from marketing commissions. They feared Falk would favour Jordan and Washington, but before the issue came to a head Jordan sold his interest so he could play with the Wizards.

Last year two top baseball agents, Jim Bronner and Bob Gilhooley, sold their agency to SFX but instead of remaining to manage the division as Falk and Grossman and others, they were fired and filed a $60-million lawsuit against SFX.

Many hockey agents were concerned that once Grossman joined SFX, he would adopt the practices of the mother company. "The way that SFX lands its concert promotions is by promising bands like U2 $100-million up front, before they play a note, and the company makes its money on the back end," said one independent agent who asked not to be named. "If an agent with huge financial resources at his disposal operated that way unchecked (by the NHLPA) it would be very hard, maybe impossible, to compete."

More immediately troublesome for agents and the NHLPA was the acquisition of SFX for $4.4-billion U.S. by Clear Channel Communications, a broadcasting titan whose vice-chairman is Tom Hicks, owner of the NHL's Dallas Stars and baseball's Texas Rangers. The NHLPA and other agents howled about conflict of interest.

The NHLPA ordered SFX to divest its interests in its hockey division, so Grossman bought back his shop this spring and renamed it Puck Agency. The players' association is satisfied that SFX and Grossman have complied, though one agent called it "a paper wall." Grossman's offices are still in Clear Channel's building on 42nd Street and SFX officials admit that they have "a close relationship" with Grossman.

Grossman's agency has operated in the shadow of Falk and his hoops division. At the 2001 NBA draft, Falk landed the top selection, Georgia high schooler Kwame Brown, and nine of the top 28 players in the first round. And though there's no evidence that Falk drew his stable of players by paying them up front, he effectively did so by foregoing a commission on his draftees' first contracts, expecting far higher returns on second and third-year deals. (NBA entry contracts require little negotiation because a cap on rookie salaries is set by the NBA's collective agreement.)

Yet you could argue that Grossman had a greater impact at the NHL draft than Falk had at the NBA gala. After the Thrashers selected Kovalchuk with the first pick, two players from the Avangard team based in the Siberian outpost of Omsk, Alexander Svitov and Stanislav Chistov, both SFX clients with Grossman their agent, were picked by Tampa Bay and Anaheim the third and fifth overall. Many scouts rated Chistov as the second-best talent in the draft. The key to SFX's fortunes, however, was Kovalchuk.

As a 17-year-old with Spartak, Kovalchuk played against pros in their 20s and 30s in the Russian elite league, scoring 35 goals in 47 games. Before his first NHL shift, Kovalchuk was being compared to Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. The Thrashers signed him to a three-year, $1.1-million U.S. contract (the maximum allowed by the rookie salary cap) but incentive bonuses raised his earnings to $4.4-million U.S. (and Grossman's commission for the year to around $150,000, before endorsements). A finalist for the league's Calder Trophy which will be awarded this week, Kovalchuk astonished even his most optimistic backers by ranking among the league's top scorers until a shoulder injury ended his season in March. "He might be the best one-on-one player in the league," Detroit Red Wings coach Scotty Bowman told reporters. And perhaps the ultimate measure: The value of Kovalchuk's rookie hockey card made a record jump to more than $1,000 U.S.

None of David Falk's clients made a first impression like Kovalchuk's. He seemed to not only have a chance to someday earn $10-million a season but also could offer his agent priceless clout -- as Jordan had for Falk. Those destined for the pantheon not only put their agents in the news but serve as magnets, attracting others into the fold. It is reasonable to suppose that Grossman's association and success with Kovalchuck would enhance his reputation among players he would seek to recruit in Russia and elsewhere no less.

It was certainly a factor in Grossman landing Anton Babchuk, a defenceman with the Elemash club in the Russian elite league, who is projected by scouts to be selected high in the first round at next weekend's draft in Toronto.

Neither would it hurt his chances of representing two young Russian forwards who are inspiring comparisons to Kovalchuk. Nikolai Zherdev, a fleet if mercurial forward, is ranked as the top European eligible for the 2003 draft. Alexander Ovechkin was the leading scorer at the world under-18 tournament in April, which featured most of the top European and American talent eligible for the 2002 draft. But the 16-year-old Dynamo Moscow centre cannot be drafted by an NHL team until 2004. Grossman said that he did not believe that either Zherdev or Ovechkin had representation and hinted that his agency could well be in the hunt.

At the best of times recruiting is a nasty business and the bigger the stakes the nastier it gets. Jay Bouwmeester, a defenceman with the Medicine Hat juniors and the probable top pick in next weekend's draft, is a case in point. Bouwmeester is represented by Byron Baltimore, an Edmonton-based agent who is not a big-name. One high-profile agent privately admitted that he went into this season with two strategies for landing Bouwmeester -- one involved buying Baltimore's business and bringing him on staff, the other, baldly stealing the teenager if Baltimore wouldn't co-operate. (To the surprise of many Bouwmeester remains Baltimore's client and his alone.)

Though Grossman had been a goaltender, he glided like a figure skater around questions about how he landed Kovalchuk.

"It's understandable that there is a lot of turnover -- players changing agents -- in Russia," he said. "There are a lot of agents or would-be agents on the ground there. Though there's a lot of expertise about developing talent in Russia, the business of pro hockey is something still new to them. It's still a culture adjusting to the free market."

To commit to Grossman, Kovalchuk had to fire Scott Greenspun. "Kovalchuk was recruited by an agent we brought in not long before, Andrei Belmatch, a former player and manager of the old Soviet Wings team," Greenspun said. "But a few months before the draft we figured that Belmatch was getting ready to leave us (for another agency) and Kovalchuk was going to go with him."

Greenspun had it half right. He rightly assumed that Kovalchuk and Belmatch were jumping ship but to Mark Gandler.

Gandler, who wasn't in the picture, would only discuss generalities, leaving it to others to connect the dots: "Players will go to people who offer money up front. I won't do that. Some agents have greater resources than I do. I have to look at players who are willing to wait ... and look at the long term. I have had to change my approach and expectations (in Russia)."

Like Greenspun, Paul Theofanous, a Manhattan-based agent, lost a Russian client -- Stanislav Chistov -- to Grossman. Theofanous's consolation was that he had been at least the second agent to whom Chistov had committed.

"I recruited Chistov when he was came over as a 15-year-old and played and went to a high school in California," Theofanous said. "But all the work you do doesn't matter a lot of the time. It's all driven ultimately by money up front. It's not unusual for $100,000 to change hands. That's what happened to me. And the turn-over doesn't stop when they sign. Those who have switched agents once -- or been bought -- are the most likely to switch again."

Grossman insisted that he doesn't play that game. "In terms of support, we can offer a lot that others can't," he said. "Our kids spent a few weeks in Pittsburgh with the top instruction training for the scouting combines (physical tests leading up to the draft). Some agents can't offer that. When it comes to financial services, marketing, investments, SFX can do a lot more than one agent working alone."

*

The Fort Lauderdale draft was a moment of triumph for Grossman, he and SFX hit a bad patch of ice after that. The story serves as a cautionary tale for agents recruiting in Russia, where too often a sure thing is never as sure as it seems.

Last fall, while Kovalchuk was making headlines with the Atlanta Thrashers, Grossman's other high-profile teenagers from the 2001 draft, Svitov and Chistov, both 19-year-olds, were thousands of kilometres from the NHL. They were stuck in Omsk, Siberia. The clubs that had drafted them, Tampa and Anaheim, were in a tug of war with the Avangard team in the Russian elite league, whose officials wanted to hold onto these young players just as their talents were about to bloom. They believed the players were worth far more than the standard $50,000-per player transfer fees that the club would have received from the NHL. Grossman might have been able to negotiate their release had it not been for Avangard owner Anatoli Bardin, a Siberian oil baron and sports entrepreneur whose gift for the outrageous is two-parts George Steinbrenner and one part Nikita Khrushchev. Bardin recruited the Russian army to help him stymie the NHL teams.

Both Svitov and Chistov had contracts to play the 2001-2 season and through 2005 with Avangard but an agreement between the International Ice Hockey Federation and the NHL stipulates that any player who signs with a drafting club before July 15 can void his contract in his homeland. Svitov signed a $3-million. contract with Tampa on July 14, 2001, and figured on spending the 2001-02 campaign with the Lightning. Chistov didn't sign but he wanted to stay in the U.S. into the fall so that Anaheim's medical staff could oversee his rehabilitation from a knee injury.

Bardin went ballistic. He convinced military officials to draft Svitov and Chistov into the army, relying on another IIHF-NHL pact that prohibits military personnel from signing an NHL contract.

"Tampa contacted the Russian federation about me signing a contract," Svitov told the Russian press. "They sent me (to the army centre) pretty quickly after talk about my contract got out. I was naive to believe such consequences would not occur."

"Bardin (told me) that if I did not return I would be declared a deserter," Chistov said.

But Bardin's plans back-fired in a way he couldn't have imagined. Last fall on a road trip to Moscow, Svitov and Chistov were taken at gunpoint by military police from the hotel where the Avangard team was staying. Army officials then advised Bardin that as servicemen Svitov and Chistov could only play for army teams, not his privately owned Russian league club. For almost the entire season, the two teens made not one thin ruble, not playing, not even skating.

"I ended up in the same (army) division where I already spent (the season) serving military duty playing for Omsk," Svitov told Soviet Sport. "I didn't get to jump with a parachute though I would not have been surprised to serve in the airborne forces for an entire year."

"I spent my time (at the army centre) painting fences," Chistov said. "For 11 days I did not do a thing, though I wore army boots."

Bardin accused Svitov and Chistov of not appreciating his club's role in their development and accused the NHL of an imperialist attitude toward Russian teams. Clearly, he had an ulterior and predictable motive: Having caught a whiff of the money, he wanted to squeeze as much coin as possible from the NHL clubs. "There will be a court session in Florida where we, acting as plaintiffs, will demand that Tampa pay us for Svitov," Bardin said, though he has yet to file a suit against either the Lightning or the Mighty Ducks.

Chistov maintained it was just a ruse. "(Bardin) wanted us to fire Grossman," he said. Perhaps, but word in Russian hockey circles was that Bardin was willing to deliver Svitov to Tampa Bay for $500,000 U.S., 10 times the player transfer fee to which he was entitled under agreements between the NHL and the IIHF.

Grossman allowed that the impasse with Bardin might not only be a setback for his players but also have a chilling effect on the NHL, scaring teams off from drafting Russian prospects. "The agreement between the IIHF and the NHL is pretty straightforward and (Bardin) clearly tried to circumvent. Hopefully it can be straightened out in time but (going into the 2002 draft) some NHL teams might have concerns about drafting Russian players." No doubt NHL teams other than Tampa and Anaheim were watching Svitov's and Chistov's progress with interest.

By December, Svitov and Chistov had made it as far as Moscow. They were skating with a Russian army club but they couldn’t play in league games. They still had a chance to showcase their skills at the world junior tournament in the Czech Republic over New Year’s and at another tourney in St. Petersburg in April but it was going to be hard to be in game shape. Svitov admitted to feeling “psychologically empty,” Chistov to being “bitter at how things turned out.” Every agent recognized this discontent and despair as the stuff of which client defections are made.

*

Early last January, at an arena in Pardubice, about 100 kilometres east of Prague, Stanislav Chistov skated off the ice with a gold medal around his neck. The Russian team had just won the world under-20 championship with a thrilling 5-4 victory over Canada. With the Canadians ahead 3-1 in the second period, Chistov scored a sensational goal on a Russian powerplay and started a four-goal rally. In the scouts’ opinion he was the best player on the ice. For his part, Alexander Svitov struggled in that final game as he had throughout the tournament. He only distinguished himself when he was suspended following an opening-round game for spitting on a Canadian forward. Nonetheless scouts still rated Svitov an elite talent.

Grossman’s clients were at least playing and this should have been good news. Yet he didn’t seem as happy as his competitors.

Rival agents were taking delight in the rumour that Svitov was ready to fire Grossman and that Svitov was shopping for his fourth—or was it his fifth—agent. The rumour gained validation when a letter appeared in the Moscow-based Sport Express, a letter signed by both players and addressed to the NHLPA. The letter was dated November 5, 2001 and in it the players state (in Russian): “Jay Grossman and his associates have paid certain sums to our parents (and we were) under pressure to work with him.” The players cited this tortuous and frustrating season as the reason for their request to break their contracts with Grossman. (The players later recanted, claiming that they had been coerced into the signing the letter. NHLPA officials would not comment about the letter nor confirm that they had received it. The players took no subsequent action against Grossman.)

The glory of the under-20 tournament would fade once Svitov and Chistov were back in Moscow, practicing but not playing, eating army rations and envying Kovalchuk’s millions.

Grossman and Azrilyant knew this when the Russian team skated off the ice with their medals. Chistov hardly looked in the mood to celebrate. Pats on the back from his agent didn’t help his mood. When questioned by English-speaking reporters he feigned complete ignorance of the language. “I could have done more if I had a chance to paly in more games this season,” he said with Azrilyant translating.

Grossman and Azrilyant went to follow their client down the corridor to the Russian dressing room but were blocked by a beefy Czech policeman. He pointed to the laminated passes around their necks and said that they need the ones designated for team officials. Behind the policeman, meeting Chistov in the doorway to the dressing room, was Mark Gandler, who was wearing one of those team passes. As Grossman peered around the big cop Gandler gave Chistov a bearhug and then the two disappeared from sight.

Grossman was slack-jawed but only for a moment. Nobody plays the agents’ game with these precocious talents is naïve enough to believe that getting clients will be harder than keeping them. Gandler didn’t scalp Chistov or Svitov that night nor was he necessarily trying to. They would stick with Grossman through this lost season. But with these players and in these arenas the threat is constant and though there are rules it seems the only ones enforced apply to the passes required for access to the dressing rooms.