It is Nov. 10, 1990 and Eddie Olczyk’s wife is well into labour at a Scarborough hospital.
The nurse keeps popping in and out — not to check on Diana, but to tell Olczyk that the Maple Leafs want to speak with him.
Toronto is hosting Chicago that evening. Olczyk has already assured the club he’ll be there for the opening faceoff. But, via the nurse, they keep nagging: They really need to talk to you.
Olczyk finally ducks out to take the call at the nurses’ station. This is, obviously, long before the dawn of cellphones. Then-Leafs PR man Bob Stellick puts GM Floyd Smith on the line.
“Eddie, we really hate to do this to you, but we’ve just traded you to the Winnipeg Jets.”
Seriously?
“That one really taught me that sports is a business,’’ recalls the one-time member of Toronto’s glittery GEM Line: Eddie O centring Gary Leeman and Mark Osborne. “On a delivery scale of 1 to 10, my wife was about a 7. I just thought: You can be disrespectful to me, but when you do that to my wife or my family, that’s where the line is drawn.
“These days, you might find out about a trade on social media or a text. Back then, if you were out of touch, you had to pick up a message or learn about it by reading the newspaper. I’ll never forget Nov. 10, 1990 — four hours before Diana gave birth to our son Tommy, I’m told I’ve been traded to Winnipeg.”
How pro sports have changed. Nowadays players are permitted to take paternity leave, leave the team to be in the delivery room. But Olczyk kissed his wife and newborn son goodbye, packed a bag and hustled onto a plane. Traded to the Jets, and for what would not be the last time.
It’s been a hell of a hockey ride for Olczyk, the first American-born player to be selected in the first round of the entry draft — by his hometown Black Hawks no less. The anecdotes come fast and furious down the blower — and on the pages of his newly published memoir, “Beating The Odds in Hockey and in Life,” written over 16 months while he was simultaneously receiving chemo treatments after being diagnosed with colon cancer. Which tends to put a lot of stuff in perspective.
For starters, the 53-year-old is recounting the sometimes hilarious, sometimes soul-crushing experience of playing for Mike Brophy, a notorious hard-ass and the real-life basis for Paul Newman’s Reggie Dunlop character in “Slap Shot.” There was the memorable night, for example, when Brophy dropped 57 F-bombs in a post-game tirade documented by reporters.
“Broph was Broph. If Broph could have 23 hard-hat, lunch-pail type of guys, he would take them over 23 skill guys. He liked the hard, brash, tough guys. That wasn’t my M.O. But he gave me an opportunity to play and to play a lot. My first year in Toronto I scored 47 goals, best year of my career.”
In any event, Olczyk outlasted Brophy in Toronto, before he was so rudely kicked down the road to The ’Peg. Those dream seasons with Leeman and Osborne compensated for the bullying he often received from his white-thatched cuss of a coach. “The chemistry we had was real special. We all had a role, we all knew how to push one another. Every time we went on the ice, we felt as a line that we were going to score. It was a great time, not only on the ice but off the ice as well.”
There’s simply nothing like being a Maple Leaf, even if everyone who wears the crest has been expendable. Ask Wendel Clark or Darryl Sittler or Frank Mahovlich. Or maybe, a few years from now, Auston Matthews. And nobody feels the heat like a Leaf when the going gets rough. Whether it’s brown bags over the head or waffles flung onto the ice, Leaf fans have always had a knack for expressing their displeasure.
Olczyk remembers in particular a playoff series against the Red Wings where Toronto was whacked silly 8-0 in Game 4 at Maple Leaf Gardens, trailing the series 3-1 as it shifted back to Detroit. Incensed fans had hurled garbage onto the ice, plastic cups, discarded jerseys, hats emblazoned with “Brophy’s Boys.” Unexpectedly, the Leafs won Game 5. Afterwards, Olczyk — who’d scored a hat trick, including the OT winner — told a reporter: “Considering how we left and now how we’re coming home, they should throw roses at us instead.”
When he got to the dressing room on game day, there were dozens and dozens of roses that had been delivered. “During warmup, more long-stemmed roses landed on the ice. Unfortunately, we got our rear ends kicked by Detroit.”
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing in recent days about abusive NHL coaches — hockey’s moment of reckoning, allegedly — and what’s simply not acceptable anymore as current and past bench bosses have been picked off for the harsh motivating methods they employed, the odious racial epithets, the bizarre mind-screwing and pitiless bullying.
Olczyk absorbed some of the worst of it from a tyrannical nemesis — Mike Keenan, during their converging stints with the Rangers. Again, Olczyk wasn’t the coach’s kind of player. Though, really, who was? Olczyk describes it as the most trying season of his career, Keenan deciding earlier that he’d be a Black Ace, a routine extra dumped in the press box.
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“Look, for me, the less I say about Mike would probably be best. It hurt.”
Yet it was in New York that Olczyk celebrated his only Stanley Cup, even if Keenan dressed him for just one post-season game. Not enough, with his 37 regular-season games, to get his name inscribed on the chalice, as per the rules at the time. It says a great deal about how his teammates — they’d voted him the players’ player — felt about Olczyk that they lobbied hard along with the players’ association, who successfully petitioned to have the rule overturned, albeit after the fact. That’s why Olczyk’s name (and that of Mike Hartman) appears at the bottom of the list, after the trainers.
A Cup, 18-year-old hometown rookie, Olympian, seven NHL teams over a 16-year-career, to say nothing of his post-hockey career as a coach, broadcaster and tremendous accomplishments in horse racing. None of it prepared Olczyk for his Stage 3 cancer diagnosis in August 2017, discovered following surgery to remove a tumour.
“How do I tell my kids? How long do I have to live?”
What he never asked: “Why me?”
“Because it would kill me to see anybody I loved have to go through what I did. Because it tests your will to live. It breaks you down. You hurt and you’re scared. I’m still scared. When I was sick, I was hurting, but mentally I was very much at peace. What I mean by that is, I’ve always told the most important people in my life how I felt about them, that I loved them. When I was going through the battle, I said: OK, if I get to the end after six months and I’m reassessed and they tell me Eddie, that’s it, you’re done, I’ll have no regrets.”
It was with that state of mind that Olczyk finally agreed to do the book, with Toronto-based writer Perry Lefko. To look back and, yes, look ahead with a contented heart.
“My purpose now — not only with the book, but what I do in the community — is to be a so-called unofficial spokesman, to bring awareness through my story. I have a platform for that because of my background in hockey and being a broadcaster. To be able to share. Cancer doesn’t discriminate. Maybe after reading the book, somebody will decide to have the test.’’ Colonoscopy. “Maybe prevent other people from having to go through what I went through.
“I’m just trying to be a pillar in the community and a role model. Hopefully people can be inspired by how I’ve chosen to live, what I’ve been able to accomplish.
He’s healthy now, 18 months cancer-free, with the next big hurdle a C-scan next March.
“There’s always apprehension and anxiety. Cancer is always going to be with Eddie Olczyk. But I’ve been very lucky, very blessed.”
