Free Hockey Dad by Bob Mckenzie Page B

quite a few years but they got a great kick out of Mike and Shawn, especially three-and-a-half-year-old Shawn, whose energy usually made him the center of attention.
    Shawn and Mike couldn't have been more different as kids.
    Mike was a little quiet and shy. He was always as neat as a pin, polite and well spoken. Shawn was not quiet and not shy. He would talk to anybody anywhere. No matter how hard Cindy tried to dress up Shawn, he always looked like an unmade bed.
    His shirt was always untucked, his hair was all over the place. As much as he talked, he wasn't what you would call a great talker. He couldn't say his name very well because he couldn't pronounce his Ss or Fs. So if you asked him his name, he would say "Gawn." When he was four, if you asked him how old he was, he would say "Gore."
    It turned out he didn't have a speech impediment as much as he was either just too lazy to say his Ss and Fs or simply liked the reaction he got from saying things incorrectly because he went to precisely one and a half speech classes before saying his Ss and Fs the right way. Our theory was once he realized he would have to commit time and effort to speech lessons, he just decided to say words correctly and be done with it. But that was Shawn. Tell him to walk, he would run. So it was obvious to me, as a Hockey Dad, that I was dealing with someone completely different than Mike.
    Mind you, it wasn't as if Shawn didn't like hockey. When he first hit the ice in Sweden he had a great time. But I probably spent as much time carrying the lazy little monkey in my arms and whooshing him around the rink as he did actually skating. But he was having fun out there, so were all the McKenzies and the Sittlers, too.
    The Sittlers didn't bring their skates to Sweden, but I would take off mine and let Darryl go out for a twirl with Mike and Shawn. We have video of that, which is kind of neat. Darryl would skate for a bit and then his daughter Meaghan, who went on a few years later to be a star hockey player at Colby College in Maine, would use my skates, too. It was a wonderful time. The Sittlers were great fun. Darryl is about as nice a guy as you could imagine and Wendy was wonderful, too.
    She took a real shine to Shawn, as did the Sittler girls. For as much video as we have of the kids skating in Sweden, we've got the Sittler girls putting a Harley-Davidson handkerchief on Shawn's head like a biker bandanna-Shawn was on some sort of crazy Harley-Davidson kick at the time.
    As an aside, years later, Cindy and I were having a garage sale. Those old Bauers of mine, all beat up and with no laces in them, were on a table in our driveway with a price tag of $2. A guy picked them up and looked at them, and was contemplating whether to buy them.
    "Those were once worn by Darryl Sittler," I told the guy. The guy looked at me like I was crazy. He put them back down and walked away.
    Okay, so here's the bottom line. At this age, Shawn liked hockey but didn't love it; he liked the Power Rangers more than the New York Rangers and I, thankfully, was not dumb enough to fall into the trap of believing Shawn should be exactly like Mike. It was probably easier for me to accept that about Shawn because I was so busy with Mike's hockey, to say nothing of work. For instance, when Shawn was four, I was up to my eyeballs in the craziness of Mike's Select 7 season. But however immersed I was in Mike's hockey, I still wanted to make sure Shawn was given every opportunity Mike had because it wasn't like Shawn hated hockey, he just wasn't as over the top about it.
    So for the 1994-95 season, when Mike was playing his first year of AAA, I was adamant Shawn should start playing because he was five , a full year older than when I started Mike in the Pickering hockey school as a four-year-old. But now that we were living in Whitby, not Pickering, there was no five -year-old hockey school for Shawn. It turned out there was a program within the Oshawa CYO (Catholic Youth