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  The next year he was called up to Ottawa. Trent was a fourth-line spare part—valuable in the lineup but not a development prospect. He did a bit of penalty killing, but his main function was as the energy guy. When the team needed a spark, they’d wind him up and send him out. He’d get three or four minutes a game, but they were the three or four most interesting minutes.

  At the end of the year, when salaries were disclosed, Trent learned he was the second-lowest-paid player in the NHL. Sandy McCarthy was the lowest, at $150,000 Canadian. Trent was making five thousand more. But Trent didn’t mind. His lower salary made him affordable.

  After the 1995–96 season, he was traded to Boston, where he played a year and then was sent down to the Detroit Vipers of the International Hockey League. There were almost a hundred guys in the lineup and Trent got lost in the shuffle, so he asked to go to the Las Vegas Thunder. Chris McSorley, Marty’s brother, was the coach in Vegas until he got fired later that year in favour of assistant Clint Malarchuk. Chris and Clint were different birds, but Trent liked them both.

  That summer, Trent was still Boston’s property, but general manager Harry Sinden wouldn’t return his phone calls. So the first day of training camp in Boston, Trent showed up uninvited. Harry was standing with a whole bunch of reporters when Trent walked up and said, “Hello, Mr. Sinden. My name’s Trent McCleary. I played here two years ago. I came here to try out, or get my release.”

  Sinden said, “Yeah, we’ll give you your release.”

  By this time, Trent had an agent, a lawyer named Ed Ratushny. Ed arranged for Trent to walk on halfway through Montreal’s camp. During his first exhibition game, he scored two goals and had three fights, and in another game he kneed Eric Lindros and then fought him. All of a sudden it was “Who the hell is this guy?” And that’s how Trent became a Montreal Canadien.

  Every year at Super Bowl time, the Habs have back-to-back afternoon games. On January 19, 2000, they were playing Philly and Trent was out on the ice. The puck was scrambling around, so he went down in the zone to help his defence. When the puck bounced off the boards and came straight out to the point man Trent was covering, Chris Therien, Trent went down to block it. But the puck slowed down, so when Chris stepped into it, Trent was already sliding. At first Trent thought, “Okay, it’s going to hit me in the pads.” And then, “No, it’s going to hit me in the stomach,” and then all of a sudden, bang! It got him right in the throat.

  The pain was indescribable. Many times, he’d taken hard shots to his ankles, and in those times he’d thought, “Okay, chop my leg off. This is horrible!” But this pain was so excruciating it raged through his entire body.

  It started to subside a little by the time he was hauled up by the team trainer, Gaétan “Gates” Lefebvre. But his perception was a little wonky. He heard Bill McCreary, the referee, tell Gates, “Take your time.” And Gates yelling back, “The hell with you. We’re not taking our time. Let’s go.”

  And then, all of a sudden, Trent felt like he was breathing through a straw that somebody was slowly pinching shut. He grabbed his throat, thinking, “I can’t breathe. Why can’t I breathe?” Maybe it was his chinstrap—he flipped his helmet back. He yanked out his mouth guard, but nothing helped. He started to panic as his airway closed. “What’s going on?”

  In those days, team doctors didn’t sit behind the bench like they do now. And so Dr. David Mulder, who attended the Habs’ games, was sitting in the doctor’s room, which was around the corner from behind the bench. He saw Trent go down on the television and ran around to the area between the benches, where there are two big doors that open up. Trent got to the threshold and saw Dr. Mulder coming toward him. He thought, “Okay, they’ll take care of me,” and then his eyes rolled back and he collapsed.

  Gates and Dr. Mulder carried him the ten steps from the main doors into the clinic, and at that point you couldn’t see his neck anymore. The swelling was past his chin and getting bigger. They were met by another team doctor, Victor Lacroix.

  Still in his skates, Trent started thrashing around, reaching for his throat. He thought there was a rope around his neck, squeezing the life out of him, and he was desperate to remove it. The room was in chaos. The medical team was trying to intubate him, but he was a young, strong NHLer and they couldn’t hold him still enough to get through the fracture and the swelling. The trainers—Gates, assistant trainer Graham Rynbend, and two more—were trying their best. Each had an arm and a leg, and everyone was yelling at Trent—“Calm down! Calm down!” But he was literally lifting them off the ground and flailing, his razor-sharp skates slicing through the air close to their heads.

  Dr. Dave Fleiszer was in the stands. He’d seen the choke sign and watched as Trent passed out. A former student of Dr. Mulder’s, Dr. Fleiszer was head of trauma at Montreal General. His wife, Ruth, prodded him to go try to help. He rushed down and could see that Trent was coughing up blood and had stopped breathing. In an attempt to get Trent some air, Dr. Mulder grabbed a giant hypodermic so he could perform what’s called a needle tracheostomy, or a needle cricothyrotomy. He tried to plunge the syringe into Trent’s trachea. But Trent was still struggling too much—he couldn’t do it. In fact, Trent almost threw Gates over the table.

  Drs. Mulder and Fleiszer had to get some air into Trent or they were going to lose him. Dr. Fleiszer did what’s called a “jaw thrust”—he put his hands under the corners of Trent’s mandible and lifted towards his head. When you lift the voice box muscles that attach to the base of the tongue and the larynx, it reduces the fracture, so the manoeuvre opened Trent’s airway. But his larynx was shattered. That meant they couldn’t do a tracheostomy outside of an operating room. Unlike what you see on television, a tracheostomy is a horribly delicate procedure, and to do it in the field is next to impossible.

  They started to bag him, pushing in air as much as they could. The problem was that, while oxygen was getting in, no gases were getting out, so his body was filling up with carbon dioxide, nitrogen and helium. He was poisoning himself.

  There was an ambulance on standby for every game, so doctors were able to load him immediately. As the ambulance pulled away, sirens wailing, Trent’s jersey was left behind on the floor. Graham had cut it off, the scissor trail going around the Canadiens’ crest—even in a life-and-death situation, the Habs logo is something you don’t mess with.

  At Montreal General, the emergency room is on the first floor and the operating room is on the eighth. There was an elevator waiting, and Dr. Michel Germain, an anesthesiologist, started an intravenous drip with a muscle relaxant in the hallway. Trent suddenly coughed and Dr. Germain saw an opening. He jammed a tube down past the fracture, keeping Trent alive for the moment. Drs. Mulder and Fleiszer, who had been taking turns holding Trent’s jaw in the right position, could finally let go. It takes a lot of physical strength to hold up a jaw, and so both their hands were almost paralyzed.

  In the operating room, when Dr. Mulder started the tracheostomy, his mind was racing. Were his hands steady enough to make their way through all the damage? What if Trent died or came out of this severely brain damaged? When he completed the surgery and Trent could breathe again, Dr. Mulder looked down below the surgical drapes. Trent was still wearing his skates.

  A few hours later, Trent’s eyes opened just a slit. He couldn’t move—he was still under the influence of the paralyzing agent that Dr. Germain had used. Everything was blurry, but he could hear the doctors talking. They were saying they weren’t sure about whether he had brain damage. He tried to shift his thoughts into second gear. “Brain damage? What the hell happened?” A nurse came in and shone a light into his eyes. He heard her remark that the pupil wasn’t dilating, which was not a good sign.

  Trent was screaming in his head, “Hey! I’m here! It’s just an old eye injury! It happened five years ago! Don’t worry about it!” But his lips were still and so no sound came out. He would have to show them he was okay. There was an oxygen monitor clipped to his index
finger, and if he flicked it off, they might know he was there with them. It took everything he had to move the finger. He was concentrating so hard that beads of sweat formed on his forehead. Well, sweating’s a sign of infection. Trent heard them discussing it and thought, “Oh my God! Stop! I’m here. I’m fine. Why can’t I talk?” And then he lost consciousness.

  The next time he awoke, Dr. Mulder and Trent’s girlfriend, Tammy, were in the room. Tammy had been at the game but had missed the accident. She’d seen the replay in the waiting room on TV but had no idea of the severity of Trent’s condition. He could hear Dr. Mulder saying, “It was close, but he’s alive.”

  Tammy responded, “What? What do you mean, ‘He’s alive’? How badly was he hurt?”

  Trent managed to open his eyes, but he still couldn’t talk. Dr. Mulder examined him and then made eye contact. He knew Trent well and could see that Trent could understand what was going on. He said, “It’s okay, Trent. You’re going to be fine. We’re going to repair your shattered larynx, so don’t worry, you will likely talk again.”

  Dr. Mulder got Trent paper and a pen, and Trent scrawled a message to the team. When there’s a big game, you put money on the board to pay for a team party if you win. Montreal was playing Boston the next day. So Trent wrote, “Here’s $500. Go Habs.” That way the guys would know he was okay. Afterward, he thought maybe he should have said fifty dollars. The guys might think he had brain damage if he was putting in five hundred.

  Gates calls Trent’s survival “a perfect storm.” From the moment he blocked the puck and was helped off the ice, to passing out in the doorway of the tunnel, which enabled them to drag him into the clinic, to the three doctors in attendance, to the quick ride to Montreal General without a blizzard or traffic jam—seventeen minutes. It was a miracle.

  The Canadiens flew his family out and paid for everything. Their attitude was, “Whatever you need, you got it.”

  Trent couldn’t swallow, so he was fed through a feeding tube for six weeks. He lost twenty pounds off his already lean frame. In that time, he went from an elite athlete to a guy who could barely shuffle down a hallway. He started back on solids with a pot of overcooked Kraft Dinner, and it was one of the best meals he’d ever had.

  He got his voice back. Vocal cords are like two barn doors, when you breathe, they open and get out of your way, when they come together, sound is formed. One of Trent’s cords is permanently closed, which means his airway is partially obstructed. It makes him a bit raspy. He sounds like Clint Eastwood.

  By the end of the season, Trent had started some light training on the bike, but his fitness level was nowhere near NHL standards. Nevertheless, he was sure he could play again. He considered himself a cat with nine lives.

  In training camp the next season, he blocked a few shots without hesitation. But fifteen or twenty seconds into his shift, he was just dying, skating through quicksand. He couldn’t take deep breaths to get the volume of air he needed to get rid of the lactic acid in his muscles. Inside, he knew he wasn’t able to play up to the level he’d been at before the accident, but he refused to give up.

  Dr. Mulder was watching him like a hawk. The Canadiens played Vancouver in an exhibition game, and afterward Dr. Mulder sat him down. “Great try, good effort, but you’re impaired, Trent. You can’t do what you’ve done in the past. It makes you a liability out there because you can’t get off the ice fast enough. You’re too tired. I’m pulling your medical clearance.”

  It was almost a relief. Trent appreciated not having to make the decision to leave. He just wasn’t a quitter—it wasn’t in his DNA. Unless you’re Jaromír Jágr, who can still produce at forty-three, or Lanny McDonald or Wayne Gretzky, who retired on a high, few people go out on top. Trent gave it everything he could. Nobody predicted he’d have a seven-year pro career, with four in the NHL. It was always, “He’s too small. He’s not talented enough,” but he proved everybody wrong and didn’t fade off into the sunset. In the end, he was sad, he was disappointed, but he didn’t argue. He knew he couldn’t breathe.

  Later, he was often asked, “Would you block the shot that almost killed you again?” His answer was always the same, “Of course.”

  That’s just who he is.

  Red Deer

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  In my office at home, sitting at the computer stuck for ideas or words, I’ll glance to my right and stare at one of my favourite landscape paintings. It’s called “South of Red Deer.” Dirt road, a few poplar trees, some sage bush and rapeseed with plains of full white clouds filling a big sky. It’s the wonderful work of Judy Sutter, whose husband, Brian, played and coached in the NHL.

  The painting makes me think about how austere beginnings can be. The phrase “out of nowhere” always comes to mind. And I relax, knowing that the writing rut in the road I’m on will smooth out in a mile or two.

  I first laid eyes on Brian Sutter in 1972 in my hometown when he skated for the Red Deer Rustlers. Brian, a left winger, and his centre-ice man, Terry Wittchen, were a dominant pair—heroes in my eyes. I remember them winning the Alberta Junior Hockey League crown and then facing the Kelowna Buckaroos on the Centennial Cup trail. I have in my head this image from an overtime game in that series. There was a delay to fix the chicken-wire screen behind the Kelowna net, so the Rustlers gathered at their bench. Sutter sat in one open gate, Wittchen in the other. They were sucking on orange quarters, and the sweat was pooling on the ice at their feet. They looked totally spent. The Rustlers lost the series in five, but Red Deer won that night on a goal engineered by one of Brian’s relentless forechecks. Quit was not a word in his vocabulary.

  Brian was the captain of the St. Louis Blues in 1984, my first year working in NHL television. On one of my first broadcasts, producer John Shannon arranged for Brian to be an intermission interview. Brian used a simple, thoughtful gesture to help me feel like I belonged and to create that same perception for the viewer. He used my name. “Well, Ron, we felt if we could stay disciplined . . .” and “You know, Ron, the Flames had a game last night in Edmonton, so . . .”

  In 1988, the Blues hung his jersey, number 11, in the rafters at Scottrade Center in St. Louis. He’s the only Sutter brother to have his number retired. When his playing days were done, Brian launched a great coaching career. In 1991, after he won the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s coach of the year, we all retired to a suite at the Westin Harbour Castle in Toronto where Blues chairman Michael Shanahan was staying. Among the guests that evening were Iron Mike Keenan and the notorious chairman of the NHL board of governors, Chicago’s Bill Wirtz. At 5 a.m., Mr. Wirtz called down to the kitchen and ordered hamburgers for everyone. Another beer, another bite and the hockey stories started to flow.

  And in 2009, Sutter coached the Bentley Generals to an Allan Cup.

  The greatest compliment I’ve ever seen Brian receive is one he may not even be aware of. When Bob Bourne retired from the NHL in 1988, New York writer/broadcaster Stan Fischler wrote a glowing tribute along with a Q-and-A with Bourne for The Hockey News. Stan brought up Bob’s four Stanley Cups and how he’d led the Islanders in scoring in the 1983 playoffs. He mentioned Bob’s Bill Masterton Trophy and his having been named Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year for his work with children who have disabilities. Then Fischler asked Bourne, “Bob, in your fifteen NHL seasons playing with the very best, and skating against the very best, who is your most valuable player?”

  Bourne replied, “Well, I’ve had the pleasure of playing alongside Bryan Trottier and Denis Potvin, and of course we all know about Wayne Gretzky, but for me the MVP of the NHL is Brian Sutter over in St. Louis. He does more to lift that team over there than any other player on any other team in the league.”

  And that brings me to my favourite Sutter memory. After Bill Ranford won the Stanley Cup in Edmonton in 1990, Bill, whose parents lived in Red Deer, was in town during the annual summer fair. Bill was asked
to be exhibition parade marshal. I was invited to be assistant marshal. So there we were aboard the float, making our way along the route on the big day, smiles wide, waving to the citizens and perhaps feeling our oats, when I glanced to my right and spotted something that pulled me hard back down to earth. There in the crowd was a slender man in a plaid shirt and jeans. Chiselled, tanned and arrow straight, the next year he’d win the 1991 Canada Cup as part of the coaching staff. Like everyone else in the audience, he was gracious, even a little excited to wave and applaud. Brian Sutter, my boyhood hero. Out of nowhere.

  Brian Sutter was really green when he was called up to the St. Louis Blues in December of 1976 for a game against the Boston Bruins, one of the toughest teams in the NHL. Coach Don Cherry had the likes of Terry O’Reilly, Brad Park, Mike Milbury, John Wensink, Stan Jonathan and Gary Doak on his bench. St. Louis, meanwhile, had only one really tough guy—Bobby Gassoff from Quesnel, British Columbia—and he needed some help.

  Brian wasn’t a big guy—under six feet and just 170 pounds—but he had made a name for himself in junior. In 1975–76, playing for the Lethbridge Broncos, he had ninety-two points and 233 penalty minutes.

  The game against Boston was on the road. Brian was flown in. He practised with the team and was all set to go, but that night at the Garden, Blues coach and general manager Emile Francis sat him out. Turns out Francis had brought him in for a front-row view of his future.

  But he was back on January 6, 1977, this time in Philadelphia, and it was World War III. Dave “The Hammer” Schultz had been traded, but the Flyers still had guys like Bobby Clarke, Mel Bridgman, Bob Kelly, Orest Kindrachuk, Paul Holmgren and André Dupont. Nineteen fights broke out. Back then, you were allowed three before you were kicked out of the game. Brian says that what the Flyers would do to get rid of guys on the opposing team was to challenge them on their way to the box after their first fight. So when Bobby Gassoff got sent to the dressing room for the night, Brian looked around, and it suddenly hit him—he’d been called up to take care of his teammates. There he was, just twenty years old, taking on the Broad Street Boys.