If you thought your dad was hockey crazy …

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/10/2009 (6201 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hockey Dad

True Confessions of a (Crazy?) Hockey Parent

By Bob McKenzie

Wiley & Sons, 276 pages, $30

All who enter these pages, be warned.

Herein you’ll read about a hockey dad who drags his unwilling kid to power skating at age four, who lies about where he lives to get his five-year-old into a better hockey program, cringes in shame when his kindergartener starts wearing glasses, and drives his seven-year-old to competitive-level hockey games scattered over a couple of hundred kilometres through the heaviest traffic in Canada.

Meanwhile, he harasses referees, almost gets into fistfights with opposing coaches and parents, and gives grief to an eight-year-old (now grown up and with the Edmonton Oilers) for not passing enough.

The hockey parent, in this case, is ever-smiling television broadcaster Bob McKenzie, also known as the Hockey Insider when dispensing NHL gossip on the TSN network.

If you’ve ever had kids in any organized kids’ sport, you’ll recognize McKenzie’s type, though maybe you’re not so willing to see yourself in him.

McKenzie writes about the hockey careers of his now-adult sons Mike and Shawn in the just-east-of-Toronto megaburbs from 1990 through to the current day. Much of the time, McKenzie was one of their coaches.

This memoir is pretty funny at times, with McKenzie ruefully recounting some idiotic stunts he pulled and frequently reminiscing that he was a horse’s rear end.

But some of his recollections are downright painful, such as the time he called his own son a coward for not body checking and threatened to cut him from the team.

But McKenzie wants it both ways.

He’s very much still justifying some things he did almost 20 years ago, and not in the least repentant over his zealotry in making hockey the focus of his family’s life. His wife appears only sporadically, as someone to whom McKenzie must answer when he frequently goes overboard.

McKenzie doesn’t even acknowledge the uninitiated reader. He offers no glossary to explain such terms as minor novice, rep hockey, A, major bantam, AA, minor atom, selects, and AAA.

This fall, McKenzie’s older son enters his fourth and final year of a hockey scholarship at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York. McKenzie recounts how he’s pushing his son to try out next year for the American Hockey League or the lesser East Coast Hockey League.

But nowhere in these pages does he mention what his son is studying at university or what his life’s aspirations outside of hockey may be.

Still, if you’ve been involved in kids’ sports, you’ll see some familiar adult faces flashing in your mind as McKenzie describes the hockey parents from hell, those "who roar onto the scene with reckless abandon, lighting fires, abusing coaches, insulting kids and parents and generally proving to be antisocial deviants who were born without a clue."

Nick Martin is a Free Press reporter who has coached his son and daughter’s teams.