“Knock me down, gonna get back up, thought you seen the last of me but I ain’t had enough, come to town gonna get what’s mine … I’m a Detroit son of a bitch, no way you can fuck with this, got one chance left Im’a take it”
—“Detroit Son of a Bitch”
Dirty Americans
When you travel through life at 100 mph, you miss all the scenery. The first 15 years of my pro hockey career were a blur.
I was so busy being a player and sampling its rewards that I never enjoyed the ride. When Detroit general manager Ken Holland and his assistant Jim Nill told me after Thanksgiving in 2007 that they would consider re-signing me if I could prove I still had what it takes, it felt like I was getting a mulligan. At age 35, I was going to be back in the minor leagues, playing for $500 per week, for the Flint (Michigan) Generals of the International Hockey League.
I couldn’t have been happier.
After a divorce, a bankruptcy, the death of James Anders, and four trips to rehabilitation for substance abuse, I had re-discovered the joy of playing hockey. Sober and clear-headed, I’d been working out at Draper’s Core Training Facility in Troy. Dr. Jeff Pierce supervised my training, and I made it clear that I was ready to do whatever it was going to require for me to return to the NHL.
I didn’t miss any training sessions, and even Draper remarked on how committed I was to this comeback. He seemed impressed with my focus. This was not a half-assed effort on my part. This was a man who finally remembered how much he enjoyed playing hockey.
Holland didn’t promise me anything, but he didn’t need to. We had known each other for many years. When he said he would seriously consider signing me, I knew he meant it.
My friendship with Draper had lost its energy after I left Detroit. We would text, but I kept him at arm’s length. Honestly, I avoided contact with him when I was drinking because I didn’t want him to be disappointed in me. I knew he would call me out on my drinking. It meant a great deal to me that he was willing to go to Holland and vouch for the seriousness of my intent to return to the NHL.
Also, I wanted to re-ignite my friendship with him because I need well-grounded people like Draper in my life. He was like a brother to me for so many years.
Draper was a part-owner of the Flint Generals, and he suggested I start my comeback there. I also knew another Generals owner, Ron Sanko, who was the team’s director of hockey operations. My favorite rock ’n’ roll bar, the Machine Shop, is in Flint. The great Michigan State guard Mateen Cleaves was from Flint. I was as stoked to go to Flint as LeBron James was to go to South Beach. I am serious when I say that. I was mentally invested into this comeback.
When I went to Flint, I was looking to accomplish two objectives—to get down to my ideal playing weight and to regain some confidence. Bothered by a sports hernia, I didn’t score a single goal in my 32 games with Calgary in 2006–07. I simply hadn’t played much in the past 18 months.
The Flint coach was Kevin Kerr, and I knew about him because he had played for the Windsor Spitfires from 1984 to 1987. I was four years younger and I remember watching Kerr terrorize opponents with his physical abilities and his hands in the Ontario Hockey League. He could score 20 goals and he could hammer guys. He amassed more than 700 penalty minutes in three seasons with the Spits.
Kerr registered 352 penalty minutes in his first pro season for Rochester in the AHL in 1987–88. He never made the NHL, but his legacy included a long list of victims in the minor leagues. He was my kind of coach. I knew we would get along.
I ended up playing 11 games for the Generals, and Kerr did me a great favor by giving me the ice time I needed to regain a strong conditioning level. In fact, I had more ice time per game than I’d had in my last three seasons in the NHL. It didn’t take me long to shed the extra pounds and to improve my conditioning.
To say I enjoyed my time in Flint would be an understatement. The team had a good mix of youngsters and veteran minor leaguers.
It had been 16 years since I had ridden a bus on a hockey road trip. But even that seemed like fun to me. The Generals’ bus was nicknamed “Cessie,” short for Cesspool. You can draw your own conclusions as to why we called it that. But this bus looked like it had been driven straight to Flint from the movie Slap Shot.
Sometimes the heat worked, sometimes it didn’t. But honestly, the guys didn’t mind too much because the bus rides were usually a comedy show. My three weeks in Flint were probably the best time I had playing hockey since the season the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup in 2002.
I ended up playing on a line with Jason Cirone, a player my age who I had played against in the Ontario Hockey League. He played for the Cornwall Royals back then, and then he went on to have a memorable career in Europe. He even established himself enough as an Italian to play for that country at the Olympics.
We were both living in the suburbs north of Detroit, and on practice days Jason would pick me up and then we would meet forwards John DiPace and Mike Kinnie at the Great Lakes Crossing shopping center in Auburn Hills, Michigan. The four of us would commute together, with me riding shotgun. I spent the entire trip busting balls and scheming about who we might prank that day.
Playing with Cirone was fun because he could thread a needle with his passes. In Flint, I felt as if I had an offensive role. It was fun to play a ton of minutes and play those minutes believing my shifts were important to the outcome of the game.
In my last season in Calgary, I lost interest because it seemed as if coach Jim Playfair didn’t respect what I had to offer. It’s difficult to feel essential to the team’s success when you’re only playing four or five minutes per game.
When I agreed to play in the IHL, one of the thoughts was that the IHL tough guys were going to want to measure themselves against a proven NHL enforcer. But that never happened. In fact, the opposite occurred, as opponents mostly didn’t bother me out of respect for what I had accomplished in the NHL.
The only moment of disrespect directed toward me came in my last game with the Generals on January 27, 2008. The Red Wings had seen enough to ask me to go Grand Rapids in the American Hockey League to continue my preparation to return to the NHL.
We were playing against the Kalamazoo Wings, and at the end of the second period I came out to the point to cover the defenseman, at which time Kalamazoo player Travis Granbois took a two-hander across my pants.
I remember thinking that I should skate away because this was my last game in Flint. But Granbois was the Sean Avery of the IHL. And he had been acting like an asshole. He needed his ass kicked.
Couldn’t skate away.
“You motherfucker,” I screamed. “You’re gonna regret that slash.”
I grabbed his chin strap, and twisted it until he felt like he was choking.
Obviously, everyone in the hockey world know how much anger I brought to my Claude Lemieux battle. The only other NHL guy I can remember wanting to hurt badly was Jamal Mayers. He was respected around the NHL as a guy who played hard, but Mayers raised my anger by jumping me once and I was always looking for the opportunity to make him pay for that.
I will admit here that I wanted to hurt Granbois as badly as I wanted to hurt Lemieux and Mayers.
“You little bitch,” I screamed at Granbois. “You think you want to try to go big time on me?”
His face was turning beet red.
“So how do you like playing big-boy hockey?” I asked him as I kept twisting his chin strap.
He was on the bottom of the pile, and his feet were kicking when the linesman stepped in and saved him further embarrassment.
Even though it was my last game in the IHL, I wasn’t going to let Granbois get away with that shit.
Although I can’t be sure, Granbois may have momentarily passed out because he was having trouble breathing.
“So you think you’re so fucking smart now?” I asked him. “Well this is how we played the game back in the day. And trust me, you wouldn’t be able to cut it.”
I was 13 years older than this punk Granbois. When he was eight, I was fighting guys like Joey Kocur, Donald Brashear, Kelly Buchberger, and Derian Hatcher. I was not going to let him get away with a cheap shot against me.
The trick of putting your fingers through the ear hole and twisting the strap is an old-school move. When you do that and put an opponent in a headlock, he will panic in a hurry.
I didn’t hit him. I think I tried to gouge his eyes out. I didn’t give a fuck. He pissed me off because he tried to make a name for himself. When he was flopping around on the ice like a fish, I told him, “You don’t have what it takes, kid.”
The only other fight I had in the IHL involved Muskegon tough-guy Chris Kovalcik, who might be the most respectful enforcer I ever met.
We lined up for a faceoff, and Kovalcik said to me, “You’re my idol and it would be an honor to fight you. Would you fight me?”
I didn’t want to fight him, but how could I refuse that respectful challenge? So I dropped the gloves, and I kind of swatted away his punches, and we wrestled around. It wasn’t much of a fight.
But the kid said something like, “This has been the best day of my life.”
It was my honor just to meet him. What a respectful athlete. But that’s not the whole story.
Holland heard that I had a fight with the Muskegon tough guy and that I didn’t aggressively pound him.
When I got to Grand Rapids, Holland came up to me and said, “You don’t want to fight anymore? You let an IHL heavyweight manhandle you. Do you still have it?”
Holland loved razzing me about one thing or another.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “I didn’t want to hurt the kid. I could have killed him. After the game, I think I signed an autograph for him.”
When you factor in my experience with the Grand Rapid Griffins and then my return to Detroit, I think I had as much fun playing hockey in 2007–08 as I had ever had.
In my Griffins debut, on February 15, 2008, I scored three goals and added one assist in a 6–3 win against the Lake Erie Monsters.
It was $1 hot dog night at Van Andel Arena, and some fans threw hot dogs as well as hats after I scored my third goal at 2:45 of the third period, a booming slap shot past Lake Erie goalie Mike Wall’s blocker.
One fan even threw a shoe on the ice to celebrate the hat trick. I have no idea what that was about.
The announced crowd of 10,062 gave me a four-minute standing ovation. It was quite a night. It was the largest crowd the Griffins had drawn since opening night. According to MLive.com, the team had a walk-up sale of about 1,700 tickets in the last few hours before game time.
“What can you say, this is like a movie script,” Griffins coach Mike Stothers told the media.
Darren Helm assisted on my first goal at 5:53 of the first period. Wall had stopped his shot but surrendered a juicy rebound, and I drove it home quickly, just like Brendan Shanahan had taught me to do years before.
My second goal came on the power play. I stuffed a backhand wrap-around past Wall in the second period.
I told the media that the game showed me that “I am doing the right things” that would put me on the path to returning to the NHL.
I truly believed that I could step in and help the Red Wings in 2007–08 the way Joey Kocur stepped in and helped the Red Wings when Holland signed him out of the beer league in 1996–97.
One of the best aspects of my time spent with the Griffins was the fact that my son Griffin was 11 and old enough to enjoy being around a pro team.
Stothers allowed him to announce the lineup before the game and he even took a road trip to Peoria with us.
The Griffins were formed in 1996, the same year that Griffin was born. And he got into his head that the Griffins were named in his honor.
Stothers was an old-school coach, and those are my favorite kind of coaches. He would tear a strip off you if you weren’t playing well, and I have never minded that because I feel like you know where you stand with old-school coaches.
He was tough to the point that his tirades could be downright funny. We were down 1–0 after two periods against Rochester, and he came into the dressing room and emptied both chambers on all of us. It reminded me of the way Mavety used to fire away at us in my junior days. No one was spared his wrath that night.
Garrett Stafford got pummeled, and all of the top players were singled out. Then he walked across to forward Tyler Redenbach, a former Western Hockey League standout who wore his very white hair in an afro.
“And you, Q-Tip, when are you going to start showing some jam?” Stothers bellowed.
I buried my head in my towel to prevent Stothers from knowing that I was laughing my ass off. I peeked out and caught team captain Mark Hartigan doing the same thing. It may have been the funniest coach yelling episode I’ve ever heard.
Playing for Stothers in Grand Rapids made hockey fun again. It’s said that old-timers don’t have anything in common with younger minor leaguers, but I had a blast.
One reason why I’m still very interested in the Red Wings’ success today is that I feel like players such as Jimmy Howard, Jonathan Ericsson, Darren Helm, Justin Abdelkader, Kyle Quincey, and Joakim Andersson are my guys.
I feel connected to them, and I hope they feel like I helped them in some way when we played together in Grand Rapids. Maybe I couldn’t show them how to score like Brendan Shanahan showed me, but I felt like I schooled them in some of the tricks of the trade, like how to protect yourself in the corners or how to defend yourself in a fight.
I feel like I have watched Jimmy Howard grow up in the Detroit organization.
Ten days after I netted a hat trick for Grand Rapids, Holland had seen enough to sign me to a $600,000 pro-rated contract. I had been playing in Grand Rapids for $75,000, pro-rated, meaning I was making about $2,800 per week before taxes. But at that point in my life, I probably would have played for free just for the opportunity to get back to the show.
Even after I signed, I had to spend two more weeks in Grand Rapids on a conditioning stint.
The truth is that Red Wings coach Mike Babcock was not as convinced as Holland was that I could help the team.
But when I played my first game back with the Red Wings on March 28, 2008, Babcock started the Grind Line. I was out there playing with Draper and Kirk Maltby. It was a classy gesture by Babcock.
I ended up only playing three regular season games, but I believe I played well enough in the season finale against Chicago to earn a place in the playoff lineup. I seemed to win the 12th forward role over Aaron Downey.
Per my tradition, I did score an important playoff goal, netting the team’s first goal in a 4–2 win against the Nashville Predators. It wasn’t the biggest goal of my career, but it sure felt that way at the time, given the climb I’d made to get back to the NHL.
“You can’t help but cheer for people who are trying to get their life back on track, especially when a guy has worked as hard as he has and has been one of the favorite sons here in Detroit,” Babcock told the media after the game.
Babcock is not a players coach. He can be infuriating. That’s why I appreciated his comments after that game.
Johan Franzen and Tomas Holmstrom both had injuries, and I was able to stay in the lineup for 17 playoff games. I didn’t lose my spot until the Stanley Cup Final, when the injured players were all back.
But when we celebrated the Stanley Cup championship on Pittsburgh’s home ice, I was just as thrilled as I was when I won my other three titles. I felt like I had done enough during the playoffs to share in the success of this Stanley Cup.
Draper said the fact that I was able to lift the Stanley Cup again was “a Disney script.”
In one respect, the fourth Cup was the best Cup for family purposes. My four children—Griffin, Emerson, Avery, and Gracyn—were all old enough to appreciate celebrating the championship with their dad. At the time, Griffin, my oldest, was 12 and Gracyn was four.
Our day with the Stanley Cup included a stop at Stroh’s Ice Cream Parlor, where we filled up Lord Stanley’s mug with chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and cookie dough ice cream, plus chocolate syrup and sprinkle toppings.
We took the Stanley Cup to the Greek Islands Coney Island for breakfast, and then the barber shop, St. Regis Catholic School, and the Core Training Facility in Troy where Jeff Pierce and his staff helped me start my comeback.
It was the perfect day for a sober man who thought he had turned around his life. On that day, spent with my family in celebration of my hockey career, I felt like I had my life back under control. But I was wrong, as I had been many times before.
