WHEN I CAME BACK to Calgary I partied hard. Over the next three years I did about fifteen pounds of coke. That’s a two-thousand-dollar-a-week habit.
Josh and I were renting an executive suite downtown, two blocks from Eau Claire. I tried to monitor Josh at the beginning, but the way I was leading my life, who was I to tell him what to do? Joshy was kind of a loner. We started working on our relationship, and I’m proud of where he’s at today, but for a while there, he was pretty sad. I felt guilty, but there wasn’t really much I could say to him. I just had to show up and be an example. At first, I failed to do that. Shannon told me it was like watching a beautiful sweater she had lovingly knit by hand start to unravel. Hanging out with me meant unlimited money, Pam Anderson lookalikes and restaurants every night. Living with his mom and eating broccoli for dinner didn’t quite have the same appeal.
My night would begin at a bar, then I would end up back at my apartment for two or three days of continuous partying. I was in a really dark place. Josh saw it all. It was a bad scene.
WHILE I WAS PARTYING, I ran into a hockey player named Steve Parsons. He had been a tough guy in the minors for years. Fighting was a big, big part of his game—he’d been in more than three hundred fights in his career. A huge guy from Vancouver—six foot four, 255 pounds—he wasn’t that talented, but he said that he learned at a young age that if you have a thick neck and a heavy hand teams will always have room for you. He was real sweet, nice person—off the ice.
Steve had been off for a couple of years with a wrist injury, and two senior men’s league teams were after him to play—Lloydminster and a rez team from up north called the Horse Lake Thunder. He was trying to decide who to play for, like a free agent. Horse Lake had left me a couple of messages, but I hadn’t bothered returning their calls. I was done with hockey. Why would I play in some northern bush league when I’d just walked away from the NHL? I was sick of fuckin’ trainin’ and refs and all that bullshit. Besides, playing on the rez was taking your life in your hands. My brothers Teddy and Trav had played a lot of rez hockey for both white and Native teams. There are rules, but there are no rules. Things start out normally, and then stuff will start to happen. Say one team starts blowing away the other team—Natives get very angry, very fast.
Trav tells a funny story about a rez game one night. His and Teddy’s team—a white team—were invited to play in a game on the Ebb and Flow Reserve. Naturally, half the team came down with the Ebb and Flow flu. Trav and Teddy could only scrounge up six other guys, including the goalie. Teddy ended up playing fifty-five minutes—the only time he came off was for a penalty. The game was so rough, Teddy was slammed to the ice and broke his nose. One of Teddy and Trav’s big defencemen was jumped, and when he tried to defend himself, he was kicked out of the game. On his way to the dressing room, the only thing between him and the crowd was a rope. He was surrounded by a mob and they were closing in, so he had his stick up swinging and yelling, “C’mon, who’s coming close?”
Teddy and Trav’s team won, but the ref was assaulted, thrown down to the ice a couple of times, and when the Native team was skating off the goalie spit in his face. Finally, they had to walk out of the rink in a pack, because it was too be dangerous to go one at a time. As they were loading their stuff into their Suburban, this little kid—around 4 years old—was standing near the car and he turned his face up to Trav with kind of a blank look and said, “You fuckin’ cheaters.”
Anyway, Steve had decided that he liked what Horse Lake had to offer, so just after Christmas 2004 he gave me a call. He said he’d heard that Horse Lake wanted me to play up on the rez as well. I said, “No way, not at chance. I’m done. Besides, I’ll get scalped up there.” Steve said, “Theo, you will be the safest man in hockey. We’ve got five enforcers at the NHL level.” I thought about it a minute, then said, “I don’t think so.” Steve wasn’t giving up that easily, “Theo, you’re a hockey player. It’s what you do, it’s what you know, it’s what you are good at. You’ve been in hockey for thirty-five years. I don’t know if you can just turn the page on it. If you play, Theo, believe me, you will be safe.”
“Not interested,” I said and hung up. I called my brother Trav, and he said, “Well, it might be a good thing.” Trav was worried about me. Every day he saw me zoned out, lying on the couch, flipping channels—my weight was up to at least 220. I was just a butterball, five by five. Hockey without any pressure sounded good. I thought I would feel better if I could love the game again. I had won a Stanley Cup, a Canada Cup, the World Junior Championship and an Olympic gold medal, but I hadn’t won the Allan Cup, the championship of Senior AAA men’s hockey. The Allan Cup has been around since 1908, so there’s a lot of history there. It means a lot to hockey. Besides, it’s not as if I had anything else to do except party at Cowboys bar, and that gets kind of old after a while. What can you say to the exact same people every single night? So I called Steve back. “Let’s do it.”
Chief Dion Horseman met me in Calgary, and he was a really cool guy. He was 32 years old—the youngest chief in Canada. A really different cat—ambitious, fun, a visionary. He wanted to have the best team in the senior hockey. Why? He felt it would inspire the younger kids in his community to play hockey instead of getting into trouble, and at the same time give the people in Horse Lake some pride. So the chief and I went out and just got fuckin’ legless, the two of us.
I asked him, “How is this all going to work? What does it look like?” He said, “Well, I’ll fly you up every weekend, or whenever you want. Your mom and dad can come and watch you play, if you want. You can buy new equipment, whatever you want, I’ll take care of it.” My cousin Todd Holt, who was five years younger than me, was playing up there. I really liked the kid. Holty was one of the most gifted players ever. Unbelievable talent. A pure scorer—get it to him when he’s open and it’s in. He was only five foot seven, 160 pounds, but the San Jose Sharks drafted him. He played for the Swift Current Broncos from 1989 to 1994, so Graham James was his coach for six years. Toddy started drinking and ended up in rough shape up in Horse Lake, but no matter how much he partied, he still had this unbelievable touch around the net.
Horse Lake First Nation is near Beaverlodge, Alberta, which is six hours northwest of Edmonton. It makes the middle of nowhere seem somewhere. Once you get to Beaverlodge, you hit a dirt road with no lights, then go seven kilometres and suddenly it opens up to one of the most beautiful rinks I have ever played in outside of the NHL. It’s almost like a church. It was brand new and cost more than $9 million. There was a substantial amount of money on the rez, because they had a really nice royalty deal from an oil and gas company.
Most the other guys on the team were Native or part Native. There was Brent Dodginghorse, a six-foot, 195-pound treaty Indian from the Tsuu T’ina reserve near Calgary. He played left wing for the Hitmen for two years, got into eighteen fights and won most of them. He’s into rodeo now. Gino Odjick, at six-three and 215, is an Algonquin and one of the heavyweight champs of the NHL in his time. There is tough like Ronnie Stern and Paul Kruse, and then there are those who are in a whole other league of tough—Dave Brown, Marty McSorley, Sandy McCarthy, Bob Probert and Odjick were guys who could kill you with one punch. They split hockey helmets with their fists—I have seen it happen. One night in Calgary, when I was still with the Flames, we were playing the Flyers and I watched Dave Brown cave in Stu Grimson’s face. Stu had a screw sticking out of his eye for six weeks to hold his orbital bone in place. Gino was an enforcer with the Canucks, Flyers, Isles and Canadiens. He took on everybody in the NHL—184 fights altogether. I saw him fight a ton of times when we played the Canucks. Back in the fall of 1996, he really got into it with Jamie Huscroft, who was about his size. The gloves came off and they were just pounding each other, like dinosaurs. A couple of months later, he and Todd Simpson were boxing, and referee Kerry Fraser tried to break it up and Gino almost took his head off. Since retiring, Gino works with kids, warning them against substance abuse.
Within a week of my agreeing to play, they chartered a plane and flew Steve Parsons, Brent Dodginghorse and me up to Grand Prairie. The chief picked us up and took us to a sporting goods store. He had an account there and said, “Anything you want, it’s yours.” We were like kids—“I’ll have ten of these and ten of those sticks and …” The three of us spent ten grand on sticks and new gear. I said, “Are you sure?” and the chief said, “Yeah, whatever.” I had my own patterned sticks from Easton that were flown to Horse Lake. I was pumped.
My first time at the rink, we walked in and opened the door to the dressing room and saw twenty empty equipment bags on the floor and hockey gear dumped all over the place. At first, I figured they’d been robbed or something. When you play hockey, you pack up your stuff in your bag, take it home and air it out. I turned to the chief and said, “What the fuck?” But it was equipment the chief had provided for the community. The Native kids would come in, grab a left skate and a right skate—sometimes they’d fit and sometimes they wouldn’t—a pair of gloves, any brand, any size, and they’d go out on the ice with a stick they found in the pile. Incredibly, they had nothing but talent. We would watch them come out and hit crossbars, ping the puck off the goalposts, make beautiful passes, knock pucks out of the air. I watched guys pick up the puck and carry it down the ice like a lacrosse ball. Their motor skills were just phenomenal. These kids were 9 and 10 years old and totally independent—coming to the rink on their own, getting dressed, hanging out. A pretty self-sufficient young group, for sure. They ended up spending a lot of time around us, so we would make sure we gave them sticks and extra stuff we had, or teach them how to tape their stick or tie their skates properly. I have to admit, I really got off on that. I loved dealing with the kids.
I WAS ALL SET to start in my first game with the Thunder, in Grande Prairie against the Athletics, and found out I couldn’t play. It was all over TSN, the CBC, CTV, all over the newspapers—Hockey Alberta had ruled I was ineligible. Four thousand people had shown up and ended up watching a men’s beer-league game.
Some fuckin’ dickhead from the NHL office had called and said, “You have a contract for last year.” Meaning 2003–04. And I said, “I did have a contract, but I don’t have any cheque stubs from Chicago because I was not reinstated.” The chief hired a lawyer, and we went to court. We argued that my contract was void, and Bob Pulford, the Blackhawks’ senior vice-president, was behind us. After all, if the court had found that my contract was still in effect, it would mean I had a right to come back and play in Chicago as long as I went to treatment. Or the Blackhawks would have to write me a cheque for $4.5 million. Pulford was probably having chest pains. The only reason this made headlines was because of the NHL lockout. Sports reporters had to write something about hockey.
It didn’t seem to matter what I did or where I went, everything I did was always controversial, But I never backed down from a fight, ever, and as I told reporters, when the guys who were trying to stop me from playing dropped the gloves, I was prepared to take it as far as we needed to go.
My appeal was granted, and the next day, Saturday, January 22, 2005, I played my first game in Horse Lake. We had about two thousand fans—they usually got a hundred. I scored a goal and two assists against the Spirit River Rangers and we won, 6–5. I was officially in the bush leagues.
We went to Fairview the next weekend, but we had been partying and both Steve and I were pretty hung over—still half in the bag, to be honest. I got tied up with a guy on the ice, and he got me down on their blue line. I knew it was make-or-break time. If I was going to let guys come at me so that they could make a name for themselves or tell their buddies, “Fleury’s a pussy, in fact I took care of him tonight,” I would be dead. I had to be nasty, hard to play against. So I got up and was trying to kick the guy’s skate out from under him while cross-checking him in the head at the same time. Steve saw the whole thing developing, but he was by our blue line, about fifty feet away. He came flying down the ice like a fuckin’ semi and clotheslined the guy from behind. It was a dirty tactic, but it worked. He pretty much incapacitated the guy. I took my stick and started sticking my attacker in his neck and chest. There would be no question after this that I was there to play for real, and God help any fucker who did not take me seriously. We got on the bus after the game and I looked at Steve and said, “You know what? In all my years I have never seen anybody stick up for me like that.” We established a brotherhood right then, right off the hop.
Playing in the North Peace Hockey League was just a gong show, a fuckin’ gong show. It was insane. We were the toughest team in the history of hockey. Nobody came within five feet of me. There were Parsons and Odjick, and then Sasha Lakovic, who I had played with on the Flames, joined us along with his brother Greg. They were both mental. And Dody Wood was there. He would fight anybody. In fact, when he played for the Sharks he had gone up against Gino, who was with Vancouver at the time. He’d also danced with Darren McCarty when he was the enforcer for Detroit, and Tie Domi from the Leafs. We had another kid, Jason Beauchamp, who’d played in the minors and was insane-tough. If you really wanted to fight when you played us, there was no one to pick off our bench unless you had your tombstone ready. We were a cocky, bullyish bunch, and I was the ringleader.
The Thunder’s rink was a super-intimidating place to play, let me tell you. During the warmup the Native people played fuckin’ drums and did that chanting-singing, “Ai ai aia aia aia aia.” Powwow music. Oh, it was fuckin’ scary, man. I mean, we were the home team, so we were comfortable, but Steve would be chirping at the visiting teams on the red line during warmups and stretching—“How was the bus ride into the rez tonight?” You could see the look of terror in their eyes, they were just so nervous—sucking their thumbs, going, “I don’t want to go out there!” And of course we had the rain dance going and I’d be out there telling them all how we were going to score five goals and spear someone in the nuts, and Steve would back me up, saying that if they touched me he would clothesline them and take their fuckin’ heads off. You could see teams coming in just shaking. And of course, it was a big family event for the people on the rez. Everything from babies in brightly coloured snowsuits—some with shoes or boots, some in bare feet—to elders, 70 or 80 years old. It was such a family environment.
You have probably heard of “Indian time.” Well, it is no joke. They would schedule a game for seven o’clock, but we wouldn’t get underway until at least eight. The ice wouldn’t be ready, the concession wouldn’t be open, the lights wouldn’t be on until somebody bothered to get there—and you could never be sure when that would be.
We gave the rez the exposure they wanted, and they wanted us to play a certain way, so that is how we did it. The chief was like the captain of our ship. He had an obsession for game-worn jerseys. If you know anything about game-worn jerseys, they are not cheap—collectors pay top dollar. My jerseys start at about two thousand dollars. Well, the chief would wear game-worn jerseys seven days a week. And I never saw him wear the same one twice, ever. He had sweaters worn by Gretzky, Messier, me, and other big-name NHLers. I bet he had fifty thousand dollars’ worth of them. Here was a guy running a multimillion-dollar reserve (all the money goes to the chief, and he allocates it), and he’s 32 years old with five kids, wearing track pants and a vintage hockey jersey.
The chief’s appetite for beer, scraps and controversy set the tone for everyone else. When your leader acts a certain way, everybody else kind of assumes the same identity. And that is exactly what happened to us as a team. We were a bad-ass crew who played by our own set of rules. And we had the chief on our side. We used to go to this bar called Champs in Grand Prairie after games. It had become a Mecca for our fans. Sometimes, we’d have five or six hundred people all kind of gathering around us. One night, we’d won the provincials and Champs had prepared a big spread for us—pizza and chicken fingers, lasagna and salads. The chief had arranged it for the players and our families, and of course there was an open bar. Steve and I were both drinking pretty heavily at the time, so it would be nothing for us to order twenty-five vodka and waters, twenty-five Coors Lights and twenty-five rum and Cokes just for me and Steve and whoever stopped by. We also asked the waitress for fifty shooters while she was at it. I remember the bill came and it was nine thousand dollars. That included the flats of beer out the back door for our after-party, which was always a gong show. I watched the chief walk out to his truck and come back and peel off ten grand and hand it to the owner like it was nothing, just the cost of doing business.
That’s just how the chief was, extravagant. Even in the NHL, you have a roommate, but not the Horse Lake Thunder. One time, he flew everyone into Edmonton for four days and we practised—twice—at the Northlands Coliseum. The ice cost $500 an hour compared to $140 at a city rink, and he invited everyone to bring their girlfriends, wives, parents, kids, and we all got our own rooms. If you needed another room for a family member, he would pick up the tab for that too. We had the best buses, the best hotels, the best facilities, the best equipment, the best jerseys, team jackets, track suits, everything we needed and more. This guy treated us like we were in the NHL. It was really phenomenal.
Our record that year was 79–3–1. We killed every team. My brother Travis was not happy about our play. Trav had kept me at arm’s length because it hurt him too much to see me partying the way I was. He put it to me this way: “If you wanna go for supper and come back to the normal life and hang out with me, I am there.” He came to one of our games in Innisfail and left pissed off. He had played a lot of Native hockey and didn’t like our intimidation factor. He said Innisfail was a one-sided game and that we were basically just bullies. “The Thunder is just nasty. You got Lakovic suspended from every league he played in. He’s a skilled player, he doesn’t need to run guys and intentionally try to hurt them and fight and stuff. This is senior hockey—these guys gotta work the next day. All those guys, they have normal lives, they have normal jobs. And your buddy Parsons, there is no mercy with him. He could really hurt somebody and he plays that card. And crippling somebody is just for bragging rights for the chief. C’mon, man.”
I understand how it looked to Trav, but there was shit going down that he and the people in the stands were not aware of. What had happened was that an Innisfail player was being overly lippy, calling me everything in the book—a drunk and a crackhead—and calling Parsons a fat fuck and a drunk and a traitor. The guy just wouldn’t shut up. When the score was still 0–0, Parsons was lined up for the faceoff beside him and said, “I’ll tell you what, I am gonna let everything you are saying slide, but as soon as we go up by five goals I am gonna jump you and beat the shit out of you.”
This guy was beyond cocky. He said, “Sure, sure, you guys ain’t gonna get a five-goal lead.” Parsons stayed calm and kind of smiled and said, “We will, and when it happens you’re getting it.”
And as soon as he finished the sentence, we got the puck and bam! it was 1–0. A couple of shifts later it was 2–0, then 3–0. Parsons skated by their bench and said, “Three zero, Billy—two more.” A while later, it was 4–0. Then 4–1. The Innisfail player came back and laughed in Steve’s face. In the next period it was 5–1, and within a shift and a half it was 6–1.
Both benches knew what Steve was gonna do. The cocky guy came out for the faceoff, and so did Steve. The puck dropped, the play was underway and Steve went to find him. The Innisfail player saw Steve coming and tried to go for a line change, but it was too late. Steve fuckin’ grabbed him and bullied it up a little, but he’d called his shot and couldn’t back off of it. He kicked the crap out of this kid until the linesman managed to get him off. If a bee stings you, burn down the hive.
We were pretty ruthless—it was us against the world. We didn’t have any allies, except within the walls of our locker room. The games were like wars. We wouldn’t go out there looking for trouble, but guys would get frustrated when they couldn’t score, so we’d say, “Well, okay, we can go that way too if you want.”
When I played for Horse Lake, I was shocked at the racism we faced. I know people stepped it up against us because we were tough and ugly, and I was cool with that, but some just hated Aboriginal people. When we played off the rez, we heard everything from “fucking featherheads” and “wagon burners” to names even worse. I could not believe the prejudice that existed in my country, a country I’d represented at the Olympics—twice. It was absolutely embarrassing. When I was a kid, I was hassled sometimes about being part Native, but until I played for Horse Lake I had no idea what Native people go through.
The TV sports networks, TSN and Sportsnet, followed us on the road, so the games were sold out. Senior men’s hockey usually pulled in around 500 to 600 fans, but the rinks were filled to capacity from 2,500 to 6,000 to watch us play. Lots of people from Horse Lake followed us everywhere because they were proud of us. We were on the road as a community, not as a bunch of individuals. Sometimes when we went into a visiting team’s building, suddenly there wouldn’t be enough tickets for our fans from the rez. Other times, our fans were shuffled off to the cheap seats up in the rafters. That was so wrong. The Horse Lake Thunder was the reason the small-town rinks were filling up. People came to see stars, not the usual teams. We made a lot of money for those teams we played. Every single one of those buildings was sold out.
We were on the road to the Allan Cup in the 2005 playoff run. We won our first series against Stony Plain, and then on February 25 we began a series against the Bentley Generals. Bentley’s little rink held only eight hundred people, so we ended up playing at the Centrium in Red Deer, Alberta, instead. That’s where the Rebels, a junior team in the Western Hockey League, play. Twelve thousand people came to watch us. We sold out the building, both nights. The Rebels have trouble doing that.
I didn’t know it until he told me recently, but my buddy and old roomie Pete Montana was working in Red Deer. He said that when he first heard I was coming he was pissed, not because the Allan Cup isn’t a prestigious trophy, but because he thought I should be in the NHL, not in the bush leagues. He told me that he said to himself, “Theo is going be a Hall of Famer … What the hell is he doing playing for Horse Lake in the Allan Cup playoffs?” He thought it was wrong, but he decided to go see the game anyway.
Pete said he was sitting with the play-by-play guys in the press box, and prior to the game he decided he’d come down to the bench and talk to me. And when Pete talks about this part of the story, he still gets pretty emotional. He said he went down underneath the stands where the dressing rooms were, and I was standing outside about twenty yards away. He said I had a lit cigarette hanging from my bottom lip and I was concentrating hard, squinting through the haze as I worked on my stick. Pete said he stopped cold. He couldn’t do it. He could not come over. Pete said to me later, “It just broke my heart. Here was this superstar, this kid who I’d seen battle his way against all kinds of odds to finally make it with this huge deal with the Rangers. How does your life not get better? I mean, you had just done what no one in your family could ever do. Create this wonderful legacy and you just fucked it all away. So I went back upstairs and I walked into the press box.”
When the guys asked Pete if he had talked to me, he told them no. And from that day on, whenever the topic of our friendship came up, he shut his mouth and said, “I don’t know him anymore.”