Free Hockey Confidential by Bob Mckenzie

you just like to watch practise to see all the creative things he would try.”
    Shanahan loved lacrosse, too, but knew he would have to give it up to focus on hockey. Tavares, though, was a pure lacrosse player, although Shanahan laughed at what might have been had Tavares been inclined to skate or play hockey.
    â€œJohn Purves, who was a very good hockey player, played lacrosse with us too and [he] would rent ice in the summer,” Shanahan recalled. “John [Tavares] would come out for fun. He couldn’t skate very well at all, but you could see he was taking everything in, sizing up what everyone was doing, where they were on the ice. It was like he was studying us. So even though he couldn’t skate, it wasn’t long before he was starting to dangle guys and make plays. [Purves] always said, ‘If [Tavares] ever decided he wanted to be a hockey player, he’d be better than all of us.’ He had that kind of mind to really process things.”
    Tavares won a Founder’s Cup national Junior B championship with Mississauga in 1986. Statistically, he ripped up Junior B (scoring 132 goals in 17 games in one season) and Junior A lacrosse. He played and starred in high school football and wound up going to Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, playing defensive back on the varsity football team.
    He graduated from Laurier with a desire to become a teacher. He wanted to go to teacher’s college, but didn’t have the money. He found work at the high school he attended as a student, Philip Pocock Catholic Secondary School in Mississauga. He was hired as an educational research worker with special-needs kids and did that for a couple of years. It was while he was playing for the Buffalo Bandits that he got hooked up with D’Youville College in Buffalo, where he got his teaching certificate. Ultimately, he landed a full-time teaching job at Pocock.
    Technically, one of Canada’s most gifted athletes is a high-school math teacher.
    It wouldn’t be accurate to say Tavares made no money playing lacrosse, but it’s never been nearly enough to call it a livelihood. In 2014, he was getting the maximum NLL salary of close to $40,000 for the five-month season. Officially, the summer leagues in Ontario and B.C. are amateur loops, though everyone knows there’s a little cash to be made—“expenses” to be paid. But even for a superstar like Tavares, a 14-game regular season, and maybe that many more playoff games, might yield around $500 a game, if that. By anyone’s best guess, the most Tavares has ever made in one year from lacrosse would be around $50,000, and keep in mind, when he started playing in the MILL in 1992, he got $125 per game for the eight-game season.
    â€œYeah, but it went up to $150 a game in my second year,” he said with a laugh.
    If such an extraordinary athlete ever felt bitter about his career lacrosse earnings being a mere fraction of what the lowest-paid NHL player would get for one season, never mind what superstar athletes of Tavares’s ilk earn in other sports, he doesn’t show it. Or that he had to spend hours in rush-hour traffic, driving the 160 kilometres from Mississauga to Peterborough for summer games rather than travelling in style on an NHL charter.
    â€œIt would have been nice to make more money, but lacrosse has brought a lot of good things to my life,” Tavares said. “It would have been great to make a livelihood at it, but that wasn’t possible. I am a math teacher. When I was growing up, I played lacrosse because I loved it. There was no pro league to aspire to. I never set out to be a lacrosse player, so I can’t be disappointed. I’m fortunate to have been able to play at the level I’ve played.”
    Now he takes great pride in being a father. He and his wife, Katrina, had son Justin in 2006 and daughter Breanne in 2007. J.T. coached Justin in tyke lacrosse, but Justin