Winning ways

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This article was published 13/11/2021 (1651 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mark Messier is no stranger to success. A six-time Stanley Cup champion, the perennial all-star and multiple MVP award winner enjoyed a professional hockey career that lasted a quarter century. Following his retirement in 2004, his #11 sweater was retired by both his hometown Edmonton Oilers and the New York Rangers, while the National Hockey League itself named an award for leadership after him.

Indeed, leadership is the key theme to Messier’s new memoir, which was written with Emmy award-winning sports journalist and author Jimmy Roberts. While many of these lessons may prove rote to those who’ve worked their way into leadership positions themselves, Messier doesn’t shy away from the unconventional. For example, a psilocybin mushroom trip on the beaches of Hawaii gave a 19-year-old Messier a “profound” realization that, he writes, changed him for the better.

“I was electrified with an appreciation for how vast the mind is, that there is so much we don’t know,” Messier admits. “The result was a deep and lasting appreciation for the diversity of human beings… Never again would I believe that someone was fundamentally mistaken because their mind worked in a way I was unfamiliar with.”

The importance of family is another theme Messier returns to again and again. And while there is no doubt that Messier was inspired and followed in the footsteps of both elder brother and his father, a professional hockey player before he became a teacher, the influence of his uncle Vic, a psychology professor and “free spirit,” is not to be overlooked.

“He believed that to limit consideration of the mind’s function to conventional theories and models was to limit the true understanding of what it was or did,” Messier writes. “For him, life had always been about exploring what we really mean by ‘the self’, and it made a huge impression on me.”

On another trip to Hawaii, uncle Vic introduces Messier to the work of Alex Grey, a “so-called visionary artist” whose spiritual and psychedelic Sacred Mirrors series exploring the power of the body’s energy remains popular today. Messier writes that he took it all in a stride at first, but later the work came to provide an “epiphany” during the Oilers’ Stanley Cup run in the spring of 1990.

“It was a lightning bolt moment,” Messier recalls. “I needed to get myself into a better place emotionally. If I was the leader, I had to think about what people saw when they looked at me and how that might influence them… it was like I stepped into a phone booth and came out a different man. I not only exuded calm, I shared it. A weight had been lifted.”

The lessons on leadership that Messier shares throughout his memoir can be applied not only to sports teams, but any organization, be it corporate, non-profit or educational. And while Messier provides readers with a play-by-play of his Hall of Fame-worthy career, he doesn’t dwell much on the stats or any behind-the-scenes action, opting instead to focus on lessons learned along the way.

“Winning is about how well things work collectively,” Messier writes. “Everyone matters. Everyone.”

That’s not to say that Messier doesn’t dish out some particularly interesting tidbits — multiple Cup runs, Canada Cups, and his ill-fated time with the Vancouver Canucks, for example — along the way, though they invariably refer back to the central theme of leadership, teamwork and being all-in on any endeavour you sign up for.

When the Captain speaks, it’s best to listen up.

Sheldon Birnie is a Winnipeg writer, reporter, and beer league hockey player.