Chapter 12: A Year To Forget

By the last trip to the Czech Republic my hockey career began a serious down slide.  I started having issues with my left leg.  It was like skating with a bad wheel.  Sometimes I could count on it but more and more often it would let me down.  

The summer after we returned from my fourth and final trip to Europe I signed Max and myself up to participate in the "Joe McMeekan Two Way Hockey Camp" held at the SDIA rink in Mira Mesa.  

Joe McMeekan was an old school, hard core, no nonsense coach.  He stood only about 5"7 or so. He was Canadian, must have been 70 years old. His approach was similar to boot camp.  There was no fooling around...at all.  He would skate up behind little kids and whack their stick out of their hand if they didn't have two hands on it.  There was no resting with your stick on your knees or against the boards.  If he caught you doing so he would make you do push-ups or do a lap around the rink.  

I fully participated in the camp with about two dozen kids and a couple of other adults. 

The curriculum was based on a progression of skills, starting with the most basic stride and finally near the end of the week he broke out the pucks.  It was hard work, serious business and not much fun at all. 

It was in the middle of this torture that I finally realized the extent of the issue with my back and leg.  Up until attempting some of these skating drills and having trouble doing circles and crossing over I didn't know I was falling apart.  It was embarrassing being talked to by this little skate-nazi like I was a beginner.  He didn't know who I was. He didn't know how I used to be able to fly like the wind.  All he saw was this middle aged guy who couldn't keep up with a bunch of kids.  

This set off a series of visits to an array of doctors.  I had X-rays, nerve tests, MRIs.  They looked at my lumbar and were shocked at the amount of disk degeneration.  "You need surgery right way", they clamored. 

"Yes", I replied. "But what about this thoracic injury I sustained when I was younger, could that have anything to do with the loss of function in my leg?"   They responded, "Yes, we should take a look at that". Tests were done and surgery was suggested. 

OK, but what about my neck pain.  Could all that pounding my head playing football in high school be causing this problem?

They examined my neck as well.  Oh my. It was really bad.  We must operate immediately.  Otherwise I was at risk of becoming a quadriplegic if I would happen to be hit from behind in my car.  I now suspect that is a line surgeons use to sell surgery, but at the time all I wanted was to regain my leg function. 

While going through all of these tests, I was coaching Max's AA Squirt team for the La Jolla Jaguars. This was our one and only nightmare youth season.  I've always felt lucky about that.  I've seen so many people suffer through such terrible seasons that I think we were fortunate to only have this one.  There would be one more forgettable seasons to come. We will get to that when the time comes.  

The thing to know about my coaching days is that if you didn't know it, you wouldn't realize I had a kid on the team.  I never talked to him during practices other than to give the same instruction I would give any other player.  I made a point of not treating him in any way that would cause another parent to be aware or concerned.  I had been around enough dad coaches who favored their kid, made then team captain, etc.  Not cool. 

We had a talented team, but the rink management required us to take on too many kids.  This didn't help us in the winning department.  We had a couple of good games early on.  I had one of the parents video tape our games.  After a game we should have won we came away with a tie.  I reviewed the game tape. 

I noticed a glaring problem.  Our shifts were way too long.  Oh yeah, I should mention that the old school, no nonsense mentality of the Joe McMeekan hockey school had influenced my coaching style and I adopted some of his "attitudes" as my own. 

Our next game was against the Jr. Kings in El Segundo at the LA Kings new practice facility.  At our practices all week I stressed the importance of keeping our shifts short.  I was shooting for 45 seconds to one minute long shifts. No longer than a minute. We worked on it in practice. We discussed it in our pre-game meeting.  I'm pretty sure everyone got the message…short shifts. 

We get to El Segundo.   The game is going well.  It was near the end of the first period.  The next line goes out on the ice. They were out for about a minute. The other coach and I start yelling for the kids to get off. It was Jon, Mikey and another kid whose name I forget. 

We are calling them to get off, it's over a minute. Yelling, shouting, screaming.  It was the other coach and I yelling.  The other kids on the bench are screaming.  Two minutes go by.  And then a third.  They finally skate over to the gate at the bench. 

Remember, these are squirts. They were nine and ten year-olds.  Still not tall enough to jump over the boards.   We had a system for changing the lines.  The kids coming off would skate to the gate, but wait and allow the new line to get out and into the game first.  Then the old line would come on to the bench. Otherwise we would have no forwards in the game for that brief moment.  

Not this time though.  Jon, Mikey and the other exhausted kid skate right to the gate and onto the bench at the same time the fresh line was trying to get on the ice. Logjam at the door.  The other coach and I are pushing players out the door and grabbing jerseys and pulling kids through trying to untangle this mess. 

Cue the Joe McMeekan old school, hard core, no-nonsense outrage. The last player I happened to grab was Mikey.  I had a hold of his sweater. I pull him through the crowd, plop him down on the bench, give him an old fashioned helmet slap and yelled something about "what were you thinking".  

Well, I'm not sure what he was thinking but now he is crying.  Oh crap!  That was the sound of my coaching career being flushed down the toilet. 

I sat down next to Mikey and apologized.  The other coach and I locked eyes.  This wasn't good. After the game(we lost) I found. Mikey's dad and told him what happened.  He didn't seem particularly upset. 

The next night I got a call from his dad. "Mikey's brain hurts. He's scared of you and wants to quit the team". 

I handled it the best I could.  I told him his son was not quitting.  I would resign before I would allow that. I asked him if I could talk to Mikey. I did and apologized again. I offered to remove myself and only return if and when Mikey was comfortable.  I spoke to the hockey director and then the rest of the parents.  Everyone supported me.  Until the rink manager decided I was a potential lawsuit.  That was the end of my youth coaching career for the most part.  I did make a bit of a comeback as an assistant coach for a couple of seasons in bantam and midget hockey once this incident had blown over.  Funny enough Mikey was on our team that final midget season. All went well.  

This all happened before November.  It was right after 9/11.  I ended up having neck surgery in early November.  The jaguars won only one more game that season. I was miserable.  Max was miserable. We ended up requesting a release and a transfer back to the Gulls where he'd played the previous season.  

The Gulls coach, who I'd "co-coached" with the previous season was another psycho dad coach.   He had a talented kid who peaked as a squirt.  Team captain, leading scorer, played on every power play and penalty kill.  The year before, I was set to coach the squirt B team and the other guy was to coach the squirt A team.  The problem was, none of the kids who made his team wanted to play for him, so they all headed over to La Jolla and joined the Jaguars.  So my team and the remainder of his team combined to form a squirt BB team.  We won the Southern California title that year.  Not without this coach pissing off about half of the team's parents.  At this level, he favored his kid and the top half of the team and would often sit the other half.  

My son's player release and transfer never went through.  It got hung up on an administrator's desk.  The Thanksgiving tournament was set to start, so he ended up playing in that and sticking it out with the Jaguars the remainder of the season.

A month later, with my neck still in a post surgery brace I was playing pond hockey in Rhode Island over the Christmas break.  When I got back to San Diego I joined on as an assistant coach with the San Diego State University club team.  I coached there for a couple of months.  It was at SDSU where earned my undefeated college coaching record.   

SDSU are known as the Aztecs.  We had a weekend series versus a school from Valencia, north of L.A. called The College of the Canyons.  I was the assistant coach.  The head coach was unable to make the Saturday game.  He coached the Friday night game at the iceoplex in Escondido.  We lost.  We beat ourselves.  Our boys had a bug up their butts and decided they wanted to hit anything that moved.  We took a lot of dumb penalties and compounded that with a bunch of retaliation calls and misconducts for yapping at the refs.

The next day we played the same team, but at the SDIA in Mira Mesa.  Before the game we had a team meeting.  I asked them one question.  I asked what the purpose of a hockey game is.  After a few responses, I suggested the purpose was not to take any one's head off, not to get pissed off and retaliate but rather to simply score one more goal than your opponent.  The point of hitting is to separate the player from the puck so that you can accomplish your purpose of scoring one more goal.

They responded by going out and playing a focused, clean, penalty free game.  We crushed the other team. I think the score was 7-0.  I retired from college coaching with a winning percentage of .1000 and an undefeated record.  

Meanwhile, back at the neurosurgeon's office.  One of the older Jaguars players, a midget,  was the son of  well known surgeon.  I went to Dr. Lance Alteneau with my results and made arrangements for the neck surgery.  He was hopeful but in no way sure that the operation would improve my leg issues.   I had the surgery in early November of 2001.  I was in the hospital for two or three days and back at work within a week.  I had to wear a cervical collar for about a month.

I asked Dr. Altenau when I could play hockey again.  He told me with all the plates and screws the vertebrae in my neck were virtually indestructible and if I had the talent I could play hockey in the NHL within three months.  So, as I said, two months later I was playing hockey on the Lily Pond in Newport, RI.   

By April, I was back to playing a bit of league and pickup.  I was skating at the San Diego Sports Arena, the home of our local minor pro team, the Gulls.  The Gulls played in the ECHL by this time.  The team started out in 1990 as an International Hockey League franchise.  A few years later they moved to the West Coast Hockey League.  Now they are defunct.

I remember skating into the offensive zone with the puck and let a wrist shot go.  I'm a right handed shot.  That sentence doesn't sound right, but that how hockey players talk.  To be precise, I shoot right handed.  As I followed through with my shot I felt a sharp pain in my lower back on the right side.   I spent the next few weeks in the worst pain of my life.  Dr. Altenau performed a lumbar discectomy.  The pain was caused by a loose bone fragment sitting on the nerve root.  Ouch, but he removed it and the pain on that side was gone.  I still had my overall back pain and my loss of strength in my left leg, but at least that excruciating agony was over.

I was playing Thursday night pickup hockey a week later.   I told you earlier, mommas don't let your sons grow up to play hockey.   I know I'm an idiot.

I had a couple of other Gulls stories you might find fun.  First, I was playing pickup hockey one night in Mira Mesa. There were a couple of Russians in the locker room before the skate.  One of them was huge.  He was dressed in brand new Florida Panthers gear.  I remembered wondering if he might be a pro.  The other guy was dressed in gray sweat pants.  He looked like a guy out for a Saturday afternoon skate on the lake.  He had shin guards, gloves, elbow pads and a helmet.  I didn't wonder if he was a pro.

Once on the ice, I noticed the big Panthers dude could barely skate.  The other guy was amazing.  Everyone was impressed.  I got to be friends with him over the next few weeks.  His name was Dmitri, Dmitri Doulebenets.  He spoke very little English. He was a really good player.  I once blocked his slap shot from the point.  The puck hit the shaft of my graphite stick and snapped it in half right in my hands.  Before you knew it all of the senior league teams were offering to buy hockey equipment and pay his league fees for him to play for them.

My friend Barry MacCarthy organized a team to go play in the Phoenix Memorial Day adult tournament.  We all chipped in and covered Dmitri's cost.  Our team had another really good  Russian player, a guy named Grecia.  Dmitri tore it up through the three game round robin and the semi-final game.  We were undefeated.  Dmitri played defense, but he could score almost at will.  I watched him wind up from the center ice red line and beat the goalie top corner, glove side.

We won the championship game by a score of 6-3.  Grecia scored 5 goals.  Dmitri was named MVP of the tournament. Grecia was pissed.  Of course the nominations and selection was made prior to the final game but that didn't matter to Grecia.

When we got back to San Diego I introduced Dmitri to the Monday night Dobek group skate in Escondido.  It was summer time and as the pro Gulls players were coming back to town for camp they would join this skate.  Steve Martinson, the Gulls coach was a part of this group.  During his playing career Steve had been an enforcer.  He played 49 games in the NHL with Detroit and Montreal, but most of his career was spent in the AHL and IHL, fighting.

Steve noticed Dmitri and invited him out to the Gulls camp.  He made the team, played one game and then was traded to the Colorado Gold Kings where he ended up leading the league in plus/minus and came in second that season for Rookie of the Year honors.  He played a few more seasons with the ECHL Wheeling Nailers before moving back to Russia.

The other Gulls story involves a knucklehead named Billy Tibbetts.  Google this guy.  He was a real piece of work.  He spent a few years playing major junior hockey then a season with the Johnstown Chiefs in the ECHL.  If you look him up on hockeydb.com you will notice it is listed as "did not play" for the next 4 seasons.  Tibbetts was from Boston.  He was involved in a statutory rape incident and he had  run in with the police and apparently was also convicted of assault and battery(shooting at police with a bb gun) witness intimidation and disorderly conduct.

When he got out of prison he resumed his promising hockey career.  He played 82 games in the NHL with Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and the Rangers.  He continued to be a head case and was never far from trouble and controversy.   He was talented but nuts.  After his NHL career fizzled he spent the rest of his career bouncing around the minor leagues.

He landed in San Diego for the 2003-04 season.  I was a Gulls fan.  It was fun hockey.  The tickets were cheap.  The beer and hot dogs were good.  The Gulls Girls were hot.  Tibbetts was a force.  He had played in the NHL the previous season.  He stood out.  I'd say he was one of my favorite players to watch. I admired his skill.

The following season Tibbetts returned to play with the Gulls.  It was preseason.  The Gulls had a home and home weekend exhibition series with the Long Beach Ice Dogs.  They played in front of a full house at the SDIA in Mira Mesa for the first game.  There may have been two thousand fans jammed into the rink, standing room only.  Tibbetts played in this game, but he did not make the road trip up the 405 to play in Long Beach the following day.

I was just recovering from yet another surgery.  In case you are counting, by the time this is all said and done I've had a total of six.  I went to another local rink in San Diego, the Kroc center to skate in an afternoon pickup session.  It was a fairly uneventful skate.  Maybe twenty minutes or so into it, someone came out of the locker room and stepped on the ice.  It was Billy Tibbetts.  Cool.  

A little while later Tibbetts was carrying the puck into the zone to my left.  As he crossed the blue line, the kid who was back checking him hooked him and then the stick came up and clipped his chin.  Tibbetts' response was about the most classless thing I've ever seen.  He retaliated by slashing the kid.  I say Kid, he was in his twenties.  Then he proceed to chase, pester  and harass the poor kid all over the ice.

So what did I do?   I did what any self respecting fifty year old fart recovering from back surgery would do.  I skated out and told him to cut the crap.  I told him it was an accident and if he couldn't control himself he should leave.   He didn't leave.   But he didn't beat the crap out of me either.  He did harass me for the rest of the session and then he continued to bully and berate me in the locker room.  I simply picked up my phone and called his coach.  I am friends with Martin St. Amour.  Martin was the head coach of the Gulls at the time. He is the Gulls all time leading scorer.   

That was pretty much the end of it.  Mr. Tibbetts, it turned out was with the Gulls on a zero tolerance basis due to his checkered history.  Within two weeks he was let go.  What a joke.  He's still bouncing around and getting into trouble. 

More to come......

Chapter 11: Czech Please

We are in the late 90's, early 2000s.  I ended up switching senior league teams about this time.  Too many Mustangs moved away including the goalie, who organized the team.  So I found my way onto the Hecklers.  The Hecklers were nowhere near the talent level of the Mustangs, but they were a heck of a lot more fun.  Specifically, the goalie who ran this team, Chris Heaney, is a one of a kind.  He owned a popular night club in San Diego called Brick By Brick.  Chris was very much into finding fun tournaments for the Hecklers to play in.  We played in Las Vegas and Phoenix. He got wind of a USA Hockey adult tourney in the Netherlands and in 1993 he started packaging and organizing trips to play in this tournament in Europe.  That first tournament was in a small Dutch town called Zoetermeer.  I wasn't with the team for the first few trips but word has it that they met up with some Dutch players from another town called Enschede.  Enschede sits on the northeastern border of Holland and Germany. 

The new Dutch friends told Chris about another tournament happening the next weekend in the Czech Republic.  They made their way to Enschede for a few days to hang out then travelled across Germany past the old East German border and into The Czech Republic.  The Czechs were mostly older and drank Slivovitz and smoked on the bench. And they skated and passed circles around the Hecklers.  A tradition was born and Chris just completed his twentieth year of taking teams to Europe.

One of the traditions the Hecklers came up with during these trips was something called a Shawarmafest.  Shawarma is a middle eastern meat dish, similar to Gyros, very popular in the Netherlands.  One night each year, the boys would get together at a Shawarma restaurant and hold an eating and drinking contest.  Back in the Czech Republic at the bar one night after getting shellacked by the older, drunker Czech team Chris was chatting with some of the Czech players.  They scored a bunch of goals against the Hecklers with the following play:  The puck carrier would come down on one wing, cut to the net and then take the puck behind the goal.  The very moment the goalie would start to shift to the other side of the goal mouth, the player would drop the puck back where he had just been hitting a trailer who would easily shoot the puck into the now, open net.   The Hecklers adopted this play and to this day if you watch the current Hecklers team play, every so often you will hear a player yell "Shawarma" and you know what to expect.

One of the factors that I'm sure contributed to the popularity of the Shawarmafests was that when the team arrives in Amsterdam most of them made a beeline to the "coffee shops".  A very popular stop on the tour.

I went a total of four times.  Trips of a lifetime.  The first and third times I went on my own.  The second and fourth trips I took my wife and Kids.  Max was ten for that fourth and final trip.  In addition to my family, I organized a squirt team from the U.S. to come along.  It was a challenge to come up with enough kids to field a team.  Our team was comprised of ten skaters and no goalies.  We ended up borrowing a local goalie and often a couple of skaters at each game.  Seven of our kids were local San Diegans.  The other three came from Spokane, WA.  One of them, J.J. MacGregor recently graduated from Connecticut College and just finished the year playing pro hockey in France.  J.J. was a local stud whose family had moved to Spokane a couple of years earlier.  I was friends with his dad and he enrolled a couple of J.J.'s teams mates from Spokane.

Our boys wore San Diego Gulls uniforms.  We gave our local Czech opponents Gulls pucks as souvenirs.  We won every game.  I don't think we were necessarily better than the Czech teams.  This was a time when the Czech Republic had just won the Olympic gold medal and they were quite proud of their hockey heritage.  The reason we won is because we were a team of ten skaters while our opponents teams typically included the entire town or village.  They must have had thirty kids on their benches.  Everyone wanted to play.  I suspect if they picked their top two or three lines it would have been a different story.  

One of the most popular alcoholic brands in the Czech Republic is Becherovka.  We found it curious and amusing that Becherovka was the big sponsor of many of their youth teams.  There is no minimum age to consume alcohol there.   It would be like your little Johnny having a Jim Beam on the crest of his jersey.

The tournament in the Czech Republic was held in a small town called Klasteric, about an hour and a half northwest of Prague.  We were the only team from the States.  Besides the Czech teams, other countries represented included; Finland, Switzerland and Russia.  The Russian team was ridiculous.  They had some really good younger skaters, but two of the older guys played on the 1980 Red Army team that faced the U.S. Miracle team in the Olympics.  These guys made us look silly.  I remember looking at the scoreboard in one game and before I knew it and we were down 11-0.  One year, as a joke, my wife and one of the other player's girlfriends went to the store and bought a porn magazine and held the centerfold behind the glass to distract their goalie.  He got a big kick out of it.  We still lost big time.

Klasteric was out in the hinterlands.  All the kids from the village would show up and line up for our autographs.  Chris married a girl from the neighboring village, Kadan.  He ended up selling Brick By Brick and opened a neighborhood bar in San Diego with a Czech theme that he named Kadan.  He also changed the name of the hockey team from the Hecklers to Kadan.

Each year on the final evening of the tournament the entire town held a huge celebration for all the teams.  It was called the Gallabender.  Everyone was there, the mayor, the town fathers, little old ladies, families and friends.  The evening always starts out as some kind of presentation by the school children.  A dance or performance of some sort.  Soon thereafter, the kids would be escorted out and it would turn into a raunchy show...I recall a drag show, a full on strip show and a mud wrestling event where bikini clad women would select hockey players from the crowd and pull them into the mud pit.  By the end of it everyone including the hockey players would end up butt naked.  Stay classy Klasteric!  

There was an American journalist who came out from Prague to do a story on us.  After the tournament he got me a press pass to attend the Czech Elite League playoffs.  The teams were Sparta Praha vs. Litvinov CHP.  There were a handful of NHL players on both teams...The biggest name was Robert Reichel for Litvinov and David Vyborny for Praha who played most of his career with Columbus.  Reichel spent most of his career with the Flames, Leafs and Islanders.  With my press pass I got to spend the game with the rest of the photographers right on the boards between the bench and the corner.  There was no glass.  I was there with my little Canon with professional photographers with their huge zoom lenses.  I got a lot of great pics and it was a blast.

One of Max's very first teammates, a kid named Cassidy April and his family came on the trip.  Max and Cassidy were mini-mites together when they were four.  They were now ten.  The would go on to play on teams together through midget hockey.  They met up again as twenty year olds for their last year of juniors hockey with the Northern Cyclones in the Atlantic Junior Hockey League in New Hampshire.  Cassidy just finished his freshman year at the University of New England in Maine where he plays defense for my old college teammate, Brad Holt.  Another theme.  The hockey world is small.

No matter what the restaurant, as we made our way through the Czech Republic, Cassidy would always request ranch dressing with his meal.  It wouldn't matter if we were in a McDonalds in Prague or in a quaint little pub and grill in a tiny village he would ask the waiter or waitress for ranch dressing.  He never found any.  By the way, at this time it was fairly common that very few of he Czech people spoke English.  On the final day of the trip we were touring around Prague with the team and their parents.  Cassidy and his family had to leave for the airport to catch their flight.  We said our "goodbyes" and soon we were sitting in a quaint little restaurant near the center of Prague.  My kids, 10 and 8 years old, were legally sipping on Budweiser, the real Budweiser, not what is sold in the states.  Beer lovers will understand.  

There in the center of the table sat a bottle of salad dressing.  On the label was the word, "Farmsky".   Sooo....that's how you say "ranch" in Czech.  We snatched the bottle, put it in our back pack and delivered to Cassidy when we returned to San Diego.  He still has the bottle.

Next up, how my coaching career crashed and burned, the beginning of the end of my playing days, my refereeing career was born and my son found his groove.

Chapter 10: Lessons Learned From Being a Hockey Dad

(Quick note: This chapter is getting a lot of readership lately and I was curious why. Please leave a comment or email me at cosmo46sb@gmail.com to let me know how you found this blog.  Thanks.  Steve)

Parents are crazy.  Coaches are arrogant.  Kids just want to have fun. But mostly, parents are nuts. Lord I know…I'm one. 

I cherish my years as a hockey dad.  I got to be totally involved with my son and my family in the sport I love.  I miss those days.  It was a time of innocence, when my kids still thought I was cool.  Now I'm just the idiot who pays for everything.  Those truly were the days.  Maybe when I become a grandparent I can recapture some of that magic.  

About the time my son's travel hockey career started taking off, my daughter was immersed in her own travel sports, soccer and softball.  As crazy as hockey parents are, soccer and softball parents may just take the cake.  The first couple of travel seasons, my daughter was not so entrenched in her own thing, so she and my wife were much more involved in going to weekly hockey games and to the holiday tournaments.  Every holiday has a hockey tournament...Is nothing sacred?  Nope.  

The boys were playing in a mite Christmas tournament in the late 90's.  The games were held at the Ice-O-Plex in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.  The L.A. Kings held a practice at this complex.  The kids were thrilled to watch the Kings skate and after the practice they were able to get their autographs.  Rob Blake, Josef Stumpel, Ian laperriere, Jamie Storr. 

My daughter had gotten a bunny rabbit for Christmas.  We named him Thumper.  Bret and Kyle had Thumper with them....they ran into Luc Robataille in the parking lot behind the rink.  He was in the midst of  frustrating scoring slump with the Kings.  Kyle and Bret talked to him.  They invited him to pet Thumper, for good luck.  The next game, Robataille scored to end his drought.  Coincidence?  I think not!

My beer league career was in full swing.  A couple of years earlier, before Max got going with his youth hockey, I was playing on two different adult league teams....It was 1994.  I was still with the Mustangs playing in the advanced division at the Escondido Ice-O-Plex.  The other team was the intermediate level team at Mira Mesa.  I don't remember the name of that team.  What I do remember is that both teams won their league championships and qualified to go to the California Senior League State Championships in Simi Valley.  We played at the Easy Street Arena.  

The Mustangs had a few USIU alumni, one guy who played a few games at BU.  We had Alan Leggett, a Canadian,a Bowling Green grad who had a decent minor pro career playing in the AHL, the ECHL and WCHL and the IHL. We also had my very good friend, Barry MacCarthy.  Barry played defense at Boston College with Jerry York and against Jack Parker at BU.  Barry was recently voted into the Brookline High School Hall of Fame in Boston.

I mention Barry because, only he played in more games that weekend than I did.  Between the two teams I played in twelve games.  We even played one game at two in the morning.  The Championship games were played back to back on the last day.  Both of my teams won their respective championships.  The intermediate level team I played on faced "The Marines" out of Camp Pendleton.  They reminded me of the Army team I faced at Uconn.  They played with a killer instinct, they were in amazing shape. They just weren't very good. We beat them by a score of 5 to something.  I got a hat trick.   Barry played on both of my teams plus one other "over 35" team...so while I played in twelve games he played in fifteen or sixteen.  

i was amassing an array of trophies that my wife made me take to my office. 

I remember thinking on the drive back to San Diego from Simi Valley that I haven't been in such good shape since my college playing days.  That next Tuesday night, Barry's "over 35" team had a game.  The team was called the Blues.  I called Barry to see if I could play in the game.  I wasn't officially on the team, but I was in such great condition it would be a shame to waste all this talent. He said, "sure".  I showed up to play, again being in the best playing shape of my adult life.  Did I mention I was in really good shape? We played against a team that had a player named Steve Percy.   I think Percy may have played a bit of junior hockey in Rochester.  I first met him when I was making my hockey comeback a couple of years earlier.  He played every game with a nasty edge, as if it was Stanley Cup playoff hockey.  That would be admirable if he wasn't such a jerk about it and if we didn't all have to go to work the next day after each game.  Anyway, he was bad news and best to be avoided whenever possible.

In the first period of the game, I had a couple of run ins with Percy.  I mentioned it to the ref to keep an eye on this guy.  Someone was going to get hurt.  Note the ominous foreshadowing here. In the second period, I got tied up with him in the corner.  We ended up wrestling each other to the ice where he landed on top of me.  I felt a snap and immediately knew I'd broken my collar bone. To add insult to injury, literally, I got a two minute penalty for roughing.  Matching minors. 

When I got home, Kyle was pissed.  This happened on Tuesday night.  That coming Friday we had plans to go on vacation in Montana.  We went, but I was in a harness/sling and unable to help out with our kids as much as needed.  Kyle was even more pissed at the jerk who'd tackled me.  Her revenge?  She anonymously signed him up for dozens of subscriptions to magazines, record clubs, etc.  Do not piss my wife off.

I have many, many good friends I've met in my travels. I also made a few enemies of other hockey parents over the years. Not intentionally of course, but its hard being this cool without pissing some people off. 

One weekend when Max was playing squirt summer house league we had a game at the Escondido iceoplex. There was, probably still is a rivalry between the two rinks I keep mentioning; the iceoplex and the San Diego Ice Arena(SDIA) about fifteen minutes down highway 15 in Mira Mesa.  Many of the most talented youth players got their start in developmental hockey and house leagues at SDIA then they would make the leap to the SD Jr. Gulls the premier travel club in town. 

I was coaching the SDIA team and our game was at iceoplex.  I walked in and was looking to see which locker room we would be using.  I opened a door and poked my head in to see.  There were a group of kids and a few parents helping them get suited up.  I jokingly asked, "is this the good guys or the bad guys".  A player, an eight year old who I'll call Potty Mouth so as to protect his identity, responded with an unexpected, "f**k you!"  

Wow.  Really?  I backed out and headed back to the lobby to find the coach and let him know what just happened.  I found the coach and reported the incident. He was aghast. We marched back to the locker room together. "Ok, which one said it?", he asked me.  I pointed to Potty Mouth who immediately denied it.   It turns out the kid was the coach's son. To make matters worse, coach's wife and kid's mom was in the room the entire time. She started screaming at me to stop verbally abusing her son. 

This family would go on to stalk me anonymously on the local SoCal hockey message board for years.  The kid turned out to be a nice kid.  The parents and I have never really spoken.  Crazy I tell ya. 

So far we have two running themes here.  First, all roads lead to the beer leagues.  Second, hockey parents are nuts.  Oh and a third, hockey is the best sport in the world.

Chapter 8: Born Again

I met my wife-to-be in early 1986 after a couple of near misses.  I was 31.  I'd lived all my adult life without hockey.  My accident occurred just two months after I arrived in California in 1978. I had just turned 23. Over the next 8 years I did lots of soul searching, had two serious relationships that nearly ended in marriage. They would have been disasters, thus the near misses. I had a handful of jobs that evolved into my ultimate career.  Then I met a beautiful young woman with a boy's name. It was love at first sight. 

Her name was Kyle. We both knew immediately we would marry.  But we waited. My sister had been going with her college beau for 7 years and had plans to have their wedding that coming fall.  We scheduled ours for the following July.  

We recently found out from my parents that they took one look at the two of us and figured we were a couple of bubble heads and they would be surprised if we lasted five years.  That was 26 years ago. 

Having a wife named Kyle has caused confusion along the way. Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

Again, no hockey. Kyle didn't know me as a hockey player.  She knew me as a stock broker. I played a little softball. We road bikes. We did a little skiing.  But there was no hockey.  I did still own my CCM Tacks that I was wearing the last time I played.  

Those skates' days were numbered though.  One day Kyle was at our townhouse in Tierrasanta when she spotted a fluffy Old English Sheep Dog wandering down the street.  She brought the dog in the house and we tried to find her owner.  No one ever claimed her so we adopted her and named her Bo.  

Bo was a great dog.  Well, she became a great dog.  She was still a puppy when we found her. We figured she was around eight months old.  She was pupzilla.  We knew nothing about training a dog.  If we had a clue we would have crate trained her but that wasn't known to us at the time.  

What we did was left her in the garage during the day so she wouldn't tear our house to pieces.  She was quite the chewer. She did manage to rip up just about everything in the garage including Kyle's convertible MG.  she tore up the rag top and the upholstery.  She destroyed the headpiece from Kyle's wedding dress. She also ate my CCM's.  I didn't need them anyway.  

Bo outgrew her puppy chewing days and went on to be a great pet.  Four years later on the day the U. S. began its ground invasion into Iraq for Desert Storm, our son Max was born. It was February 24, 1991. We would soon find out that Max was also the most popular name for male dogs. 

By August we'd moved into a large loft space in San Diego's Gaslamp district. I heard that there was a new minor league hockey team that had recently started playing in San Diego in the International Hockey League, the IHL.  There had been a contest in the newspaper to name the team and it was decided to call them the San Diego Gulls after an earlier Western Hockey League franchise...not the same as the Canadian major junior WHL.

We got tickets and took our eight month old baby to watch the home opener at the Sports Arena.  We had a great time.  Max was fixated on all the movement on the ice.  I remember watching and, for the first time in over a decade, really missing the game.  

After the game Kyle, who saw the look in my eye asked me...or actually told me I should start playing hockey again.  

I thought about it. It was a scary thought.  I didn't know if my back could handle it.  It had been a couple of years since my back pain had been exorcised by my client's pain doctor son, Dr. Amundson. 

A few days later we were walking into our loft building when I ran into someone I knew.  It turns out he lived in our building.  His name was Doug Munson. He was on my senior league team when I got hurt and I hadn't seen him since that night in March of 1978. 

It was great to see him. We spent a few minutes catching up then he told me he was on a team and he invited me to come out and play with them. 

I said "what the hell, why not?". But I owned no gear.  Doug told me to go to Barry's Sporting Goods in Lemon Grove. So I did. The problem was I'd forgotten just about everything I knew about hockey equipment.  Most importantly, hockey skates run smaller than your shoe size.  I bought a pair of Bauer Supremes, size 10. The same as my shoes. I bought a helmet with a full shield.  When I last played we didn't use shields or cages. 

I went out to a couple of pick-up sessions to try out my new stuff and see how I felt.  It didn't take long to realize my skates were too big.  I couldn't stand the shield.  I took it off after a couple of shifts.  I couldn't see the puck on the ice in front of me.  I would go back and forth about whether to wear a half shield.  I didn't like it because it would fog up or get scratched and limit my view.  One deflected slapshot that hit the bridge of my nose would end that debate.  

I was terrible.  It did not come right back like I'd hoped.  I took my skates back and swapped them for the right size, 8 and a 1/2s. 

I was nowhere near ready, but Doug told me to come play in their next game. The team was called the Mustangs. They played in the advanced division.  There were ex-USIU players, some ex-minor pros.  A pretty good level of competition. Way above my pay-grade for the shape I was in.  

I was on the third line.  In men's league, that's the bottom of the barrel. At first I couldn't take three strides without falling flat on my face. I did have a rush into the offensive zone where I skated hard to the net. My left wing fed me a pass that I redirected and lifted past the goalie. That felt good and pleasantly familiar. 

I went home and crawled in bed. I was prepared to wake up the next morning and be in so much pain that I wouldn't be able to get out of bed. But alas, I woke up and felt great.  I was hooked.  

This was the beginning of a long and exciting comeback.  I worked hard. I skated two, three sometimes four or five times  a week.  Most of the ice times were pretty late at night.  Kyle was happy to see me having fun. She was able have some quiet time with me out and Max asleep. I worked out.  I jogged, cycled and rollerbladed.  I was reborn.  

We took a family trip back to Connecticut for Thanksgiving. I took my hockey equipment with me so I could play in the annual West Haven High School Alumni game.  

The game was alumni versus the varsity.  It was not a friendly game.  I was still getting my legs back at this point, still not in great shape.  Frank Longobardi was there. Dave Depew wasn't.  Some idiot was smoking a cigarette in the locker room.  I told him to put it out.  He told me to go back to California.  It was 1991.  I think it was the same guy who nicknamed me A-Rab back in high school.

It was full contact hockey. The varsity boys wanted to hurt us. Teenagers!  I got nailed into the boards by a little punk. A little later I had the puck in the corner.  I walked out and found myself in the slot where I back handed a shot into the top of the net.  I have it on video on a VHS tape in a box in storage.   I'll never watch it. But I remember it clearly.  Snipe!

Over the next couple of years my senior league hockey team became my passion, my exercise and my social life.  I started going to adult league tournaments in Vegas and Phoenix.  

I was able to start skating with the Thursday night "old pros" group at the San Diego Ice Arena in Mira Mesa. this is the same group I mentioned earlier that has been going for forty years and would not allow a young Chris Chelios a spot before he was then cut from USIU and before he went on to have a hall of fame NHL and Olympic career. 

It was a good group of guys. Ex-NHL and WHA players and San Diego hockey icons like Joe Noris, Sandy Fitzpatrick and Brian "Howie" Morenz.  Morenz was the grandson of Montreal Canadien legend Howie Morenz.  Many of the old USIU guys played. Brian Dobek, who was the top scorer for the 1976 US Olympic team was there. In the summer some of the IHL Gulls, players like Charlie Simmer, Ron Duguay and their coach and future Atlanta Thrashers coach, Don Waddell would show up.  Chris and his brother Steve Chelios made appearances.  You can look these guys  up on www.hockeydb.com if you want to see their hockey histories.  By the way, if anyone from the 70's who played at Uconn happens to be reading this, I've been trying to locate Uconn hockey media guides from those years.  Hockeydb has stats from my freshman and senior seasons and I would love to get ahold of 74-75 and 75-76.  

I know I've mentioned the New Haven Blades previously.  I don't think I went into what a big fan I was back then, in the late 1960s.  The Eastern Hockey League was the basis for the movie, "Slap Shot".  The film was based on the Johnstown Jets, one of the teams the Blades played against.  Also both were teams in our table top hockey league.   Anyway, I studied the rosters and stats of the Blades and all their rivals.  There were some real goons as well as some talented up and coming players.   I specifically remember one Blades player who I idolized.  His name was Michel Rouleau. A French-Canadian with dashing looks and a gift for scoring.  I got his autograph on one of the game programs.

One Thursday night I was on the bench sitting next to a chubby bald guy that everyone was calling Mike.  I heard someone refer to him as Rouleau.  I had to ask.  I told him I grew up in Connecticut and was a big Blades fan and they had a guy I loved to watch play named Michel Rouleau.....He said, "Yep, that's me."  Boy did he change. So I asked him where he went after playing for the Blades.  He rattled of five or six NHL teams.   Cool.  I was impressed.  Now he owned a hair salon and was cutting hair and playing Thursday night pickup.  All roads lead to the beer leagues.  I've said it before and I will say it again.  By the way, I looked him up on hockeydb.com and he did have a half way decent career in the WHA.  He never played in the NHL.  

Willie O'Ree, the first black hockey player to play in the NHL, had played for the AHL New Haven Nighthawks.  The Nighthawks came to New Haven and played in the new Coliseum. O'Ree went on to play in the WHA for the San Diego Mariners with some of the above mentioned guys. I only mention this because I went to buy a car and Willie O'Ree was my salesman.  He went on to recover his dignity and now works for the NHL promoting diversity.  I'm not sure if he ever made it to the beer leagues. One of the few, if true. Either way he's a great man. 

Around this time, Max was rolling around in his little baby walker.  He had discovered a little souvenir wooden Koho hockey stick I had gotten when I went to hockey school in Finland.  Kyle had given it to him. He grabbed it and started whacking everything he could reach.  Kyle set down roller hockey pucks on the concrete floor of our 3rd floor loft.  The stick ended up in splinters.  It had autographs of all the pros from the hockey school: Garry Unger, Carl Brewr, Pete Stemkowski, etc.  We went on to buy many more souvenir sticks.  

Next up, more beer league, getting Max on the ice and the beginning of life as a hockey dad, fan, coach and ref. 

Chapter 6: More on Uconn

Those four years flew by.  I had no more injuries to deal with, but my back was the source of ongoing pain.  I never did do enough stretching.  I recall thinking if I ever coached or had a kid who played hockey I would make sure to stress the importance of stretching.

I thoroughly enjoyed my days at Uconn.   We were a middle of the road Division 2 program. In those days it wasn't the same D1/DIII split that you see today.  Our opponents included some of the current day NESCAC schools:  Amherst, Bowdoin, Colby, Wesleyan, Trinity,  Williams.  We played Army, the Univerity of Vermont, St. Anselms, AIC, Umass(Amherst), Lowell Tech(later Umass/lowell), Babson, Holy Cross, Hamilton and New Haven College. We also faced Nichols, Salem State, New England College and North Adams State.   Quinnipiac was merely a local commuter college at the time with no hockey program.

The University of Vermont was the only legit Division 1 team we faced.  We played them my freshman and sophomore seasons.  They beat us 6-2 and 7-1.  In the game during my freshman year I met up with my old buddy John Glynne.  I hip checked him into the boards and ended up breaking his leg in the process...Not only could I get hurt, occasionally I dished it out as well.  I felt badly, but there was no love lost. (I did a little fact checking to verify this.  What I found was that he was drafted 185th in the 1975 NHL amateur draft.  It states that he missed most of his freshman season at UVM with a broken ankle. Close enough)  One other point, Dave Taylor was drafted 210th in the 15th round.  He was considered to be too skinny to play in the NHL.  Went on to have his jersey retired by the Los Angeles Kings.

My final college game was at Lowell. We lost 5-4.  I had what I thought was 99 total career points going into the game. I scored the last goal of the game on a slap shot from the left point. I took the shot, not expecting much to happen and watched it sail through some traffic and into the top right corner of the net.  It's the only goal I remember from all four years.  It turns out when the final stats came out I had a point I didn't know about so I ended with 101.  My anthropology major had no math requirement.  

Our games against Army were never close.  It was always the pot smoking liberal hippies versus the battle ready soldiers.  They wore crew cuts.  We had long hair and beards.  They were in tip top shape.  We ran the stadium stairs.  They played with a level of intensity worthy of storming Iwo Jima. We were hoping to escape with our lives.  We joked about their sticks having bayonets. Of the four times we faced them the closet scores were 7-3 and 8-4.  The other two games ended with scores of 9-1 and 11-0.  They were not fun to face. 

Frank and I played on a line with Our centerman, Gene Cufone,(Gene "on-the-phone" Cufone)  for our sophomore and junior years.  All three of us wore Lange skates and were called "the Lange Gang."   Lange was a ski boot company that decided to get into the ice hockey skate business in the 70s.  The Lange's were pretty good skates with the outer boot constructed out of the same hard plastic material as their ski boots.  They were quite protective for blocking shots.  But they tended to crack near the tendon guards.  The Lange factory was right down the road in Tolland, Connecticut.  We would drive down to the plant and trade in our skates for new ones anytime the shell started to crack.   I went back to CCM Tacks for my senior season.  

You may know that the Uconn mascot is the Husky.  Frank and I lived in a funky old colonial house on Coventry Lake our senior year.  We thought it would be a good idea to get a husky puppy. Chick magnet you know.  Even though we both had girlfriends.  Frank's girlfriend was Pat.  They got and are married to this day.  Mine was Maureen, Mo.  We never got married.  That's another story which I will tell in a bit.  

We ended up getting the cutest little blue eyed, silver gray and white husky puppy you've ever seen.  We called him Keemo. We never should have been allowed to own a dog.  You will see why soon. 

Keemo was probably only eight or ten weeks old when we got him. Puppy breath, fluffy fur, not housebroken.  Frank and I co-parented him. He never was well trained.  He did a great job attracting the ladies, but he was a runner.  We couldn't take him anywhere with having him on leash or he would take off.   

We got him in the summer and by that winter he was nearly full sized. He must have been about eight months old.  When we left each morning for class we left him alone to run and roam.   Coventry lake was huge and frozen.  Keemo would wander all day and greet us when we returned home from hockey practice at dinner time. 

One afternoon we got back and Keemo was nowhere to be found.  The next morning the sheriff showed up and informed us, "Your dog is killed."  Wtf?  He told us that Keemo had killed a farmer's sheep and the farmer shot him.  We never believed this. We thought at most Keemo may have come upon the dead sheep and helped himself.  On the other hand, huskies have wolf in their DNA and we had to admit it was possible.  Regardless, it was as if our child had been shot in cold blood. 

We were in shock. That was and still is one of the saddest moments of my life.  I told you we never should have been dog owners.  This is why.  We had a game that night and I remember Frank and I looking at each other on the bench doing everything we could not to break down in tears. 

The season ended with out much fanfare.  We never made the playoffs. Not once in my career.  My senior season was the worst of my four years.  We went 8-14-2 that year.  My first 2 years we had winning records of 15 and 10 and we went .500 my junior year.  However, I think that last year was the most enjoyable.  All the pot smokers had moved on by then.   Coach Chapman coached another four years before retiring and handing over the reins to my teammate Ben Kirtland.  Ben went on coach for seven seasons...He's now in federal prison due to involvement in a ticket scam he participated in as associate athletic director at Kansas University.  Coach Chapman coached a total of 24 years at Uconn and passed away in 2002 at the age of 76.   I never spoke to him after I left Uconn.

Back then, junior hockey was not such a big deal.  At least not at the level we played.  I,  like most players,  went straight from high school to college.  I did get  an offer from the Yale coach when I was a senior at West Haven High to do a post graduate year at Taft prep school.  My parents nixed that idea.  So I was 21 at the beginning of my senior year.  Lucky for us, the drinking age at that time in Connecticut was 18.  Of course today, it's the norm for players to be 20 or 21 year old freshmen when they get to college due to the almost mandatory junior hockey route.

I mentioned at the end if my last entry I would talk about something that would change every thing.  I'll get to that next time. 

Chapter 3: Mamas Don't Let Your Kids Grow Up to Play Hockey

There were many more days and stories from our time playing hockey on Lake Phipps.  It was the souce of much fun, excitement and mischief.  I enjoyed a few more winters of this kind of tom foolery until I went off to college and then eventually moved away to California.

My friends and I continued to play on the lake in the winters and then on the high school and summer league teams at the rink and around Connecticut.  We all improved, getting pretty good, pretty quickly.  We played JV hockey our freshman year, then 3rd line my sophomore season for the varsity.  

While hockey was my life and my passion, being "the man with the golden hands" I continued to play football for the high school team.  I also played baseball until I got to the Babe Ruth League.  I was an excellent fielder with a so-so arm and an above average bat.  That all changed when the pitchers starting hurling curve balls. Jon Capone ended my baseball career. I was sure that ball was coming straight at my face and then whoosh....it would drop and go right over the plate.  Or it would be coming right down the middle and I'd find myself swinging at a ball three feet outside the strike zone.  I was rendered helpless and looking like a fool.  Thus ended my competitive baseball career.

Football was another matter.  It was in my DNA....and it helped my hockey game.  I was more physical and a better hitter thanks to football.  I was also stronger and in better condition because of it.  The other thing that helped me with hockey was the fact that before I got my drivers license, my friends and I rode our bicycles everywhere.  I developed a massive hockey butt and thighs from all the leg work.

For football, we had spring training, weight lifting and what we called triple sessions in the muggy, sweltering August heat the week before we started back to school.  The biggest drawback to me for football was that it went until Thanksgiving day and the hockey team started practicing the first week in November.  We weren't allowed to overlap, so those of us on both the football and hockey teams had to wait until after the final game in late November before  we could start practicing with the hockey team.  

My friends and line-mates Dave Depew and Frank Longobardi and I were expected to be a big part of the hockey team for the upcoming season, my junior year of high school.

I was the starting tight end for the football team.  Tom Hunt was the head coach.  He was an old school tough, hard ass of a coach.  I think he had a cup of coffee with the Denver Bronco's but he had bad knees.  There's a good chance he would make headlines were he to be coaching in today's more sensitive atmosphere where beating and berating players is frowned upon.  But that was a different time.  So we were beaten and berated on a regular basis.  And we didn't complain.

It was Thanksgiving day, 1971.  We were playing Hillhouse High School, a New Haven, CT inner city school.  Always a tough opponent.  It was a cold, drizzly miserable Saturday morning.  

I was on the kick receiving team for the opening kick off.  My assignment was to go across the width of the field from the left side and block a kid who happened to be a 230 lb all-state tackle.  I weighed about 170.  He was bigger.  My advantage is he had no idea where I was coming from.  His advantage was 60 pounds of muscle.  

The kick off ensued. I sprinted across the field and dove, stretching my body out in front of said large tackle as he made a beeline for the ball carrier.  I nailed him.  He never saw it coming.  He went flying ass over tea kettle over me. I noticed the effect of his unsuspecting knee which sunk deep into the middle of my gut.  I rolled on the cold hard ground and got up clutching my left side, making my way back to the offensive huddle for the first play call of the game.  I could not catch my breath, much less a football.  The pain in my gut was immense.  I had to keep my left arm tucked into my stomach to try to contain the pain.

The first play was called.  Great.  Thanks.  It was a pass play.  A crossing pattern about ten yards deep, to me.    I ran, if you want to call it that, the route.  I made it across the middle.  Pete Riccio, my quarterback from midget football (no midgets played) fired a bullet in my direction, slightly above and away, just out of my reach.  I could not lift my left arm away from my stomach.  I couldn't reach it.  The ball was catchable.  But not for me.  I got my other hand on it, but to no avail.  Incomplete pass.  Second and ten.

I limped back to the huddle.  That was the last pass ever thrown my way. The rest of the half was a blur, which mercifully ended.  I played every offensive snap. During the break I went to Coach Hunt.  "Coach" I stammered, "I don't think I can go anymore".  

Coach Hunt turned and barked, "Herzog-you're in.  Balaban is a pussy."

I never played another play.  I sat on the bench huddled up, clutching my side.  I was covered with the Blue Devils poncho in the drizzling rain for the second half of the game.  I don't remember if we won or lost.

I rode the yellow team school bus for the twenty minute ride back to West Haven High School. Bouncing and bumping, feeling every little vibration, I continued squeezing my arm to my side all the way back to the school.

I got myself changed out of my football uniform and into my street clothes.  I don't remember how I got home, but the next thing I recall is sitting in the dark downstairs on the couch.  My sister got home.  She had been at the game.  I doubt she had a clue about what I was going through, but she recognized my pain when she came downstairs and saw me sitting there.

This was another moment in a life long string of instances of me not acknowledging pain.  I told her I was fine.  Thank goodness she didn't buy it.  "You aren't fine! You are as white as a ghost".  My parents weren't around.  She got Mr. Steinberg, Mark's dad, to come over.  He drove me to the Milford hospital.

Next thing I know I'm waking up with my mom telling me at least I won't have to go to Viet Nam.  "Say what?".

As it turns out that knee in my gut on the opening kickoff ruptured my spleen.  A spleen I no longer possessed.  All I had left was a large scar on my belly and the realization that I was done for the year.  No hockey.  I needed about six months to recover.  Damn it.  

As for Viet Nam, it turns out my lack of spleen meant I was susceptible to Berry Berry or some tropical disease and I would not be eligible for the draft as a result.  I think I would have rather gone to war if it meant not missing my hockey season.

So that was that.  I didn't play that year. I don't even remember one thing from that hockey season.  I did show up for spring training for football but I quickly realized I wasn't willing to risk my senior hockey season.  So I gave up football.  There were a lot of people disappointed in me, but I stuck to my guns.  Quitting football was a big deal.  I probably could have handled it with more maturity.  I honestly don't recall much that went down then but I still have the letter from my big brother, who was away at Brown University by then.  He expressed his disappointment at me being a quitter.

*(update-It turns out I did play some of my junior season.  A few years ago I ran into my team-mate, David Hanson and he told me that I'd played and he produced a newspaper article of WH beating Hamden.  There was a picture of me missing an open net on a pass from David. I still have no recall of that season)

By the way, Herzog.....Donny Herzog, the tight end who replaced me the day I got hurt, grew over a foot and went on to be named all-state defensive end the next season and then went on to play college ball at Northwestern.  The team, the West Haven Blue Devils or the Westies went on to go undefeated and win the state championship.....without me!

At least I could now prepare for my upcoming senior hockey season.

more to come......