Hockey Confidential (2 page)

The man was drowning.

He was trapped.

His desperate attempts to escape—the punches, the kicks—had all failed.

The ice-cold water had filled the cab of the submerged tractor.

There was no air left to breathe.

His lungs were filling up with water.

He knew his life was down to its final seconds.

“I'm going to die in here,” he thought. “I'm done. Is this how it ends?”

It was at that moment, panic-stricken in his mind, now floating on his side, encased in a watery tomb of glass and steel, that his entire life didn't so much flash before his eyes as his impending death did.

With no sense of time at all—it might have been just a fraction of a second, it might have been more than that, he just doesn't know—two visions came to the drowning man, stunning in their clarity and detail.

In the first, he could see his wife standing at the water's edge as the tractor and his lifeless body were pulled from the pond.

The second was his own funeral procession—the hearse, limousines and cars driving slowly past his family farmhouse on the road just across the open field from the pond in which he was now trapped and dying.

“I saw no flash of white light like they talk about,” the man said. “I couldn't tell you how long I'd been in the water. Was it 45 seconds? A minute? Two? I don't know, but those visions, they seemed so real . . . I knew this was it, I was done if I didn't do something. If I didn't get out then, the visions would be real.”

The drowning man gave one last desperate kick, using both his boots, to the side window panel of the tractor. Maybe it was fate—just not his day to die?—or perhaps it was simply that the water pressure on the glass had finally equalized from outside and inside the cab, but whatever it was, the large glass window popped free from its rubber moulding, offering escape.

The man frantically exited the cab, rose straight to the surface, crashed his head against shards of ice, coughed dirty pond water out of his lungs and gasped for air. Bleeding from his head, he crawled over the tractor's partially submerged arm and bucket, navigated his way to the snowy, reedy embankment and climbed up to solid ground.

The only vision he saw now was a most welcome one, and it was real: the bright noon-hour sun and cold, clear sky of a below-freezing winter's day in southwestern Ontario.

As he set out on the 500-metre trek to his farmhouse—wearing only a soaked T-shirt, sweat pants and boots—he traversed the snow-covered field to cross the road on which he had envisioned his own funeral procession. As he arrived at his house, he didn't feel the cold—didn't have any feelings, really, with the exception of one.

He was alive.

If Colin (Colie) Campbell had died on that sunny, clear and
cold Friday January 8, 2010, on his farm near Tillsonburg, Ontario, he would have been eulogized for a life well lived, for an accomplished career in hockey as a player, coach and executive as well as that of an earnest and good family man—a husband, a father and a grandfather.

There would have been no shortage of friends or family or hockey people to pay tribute to a man who didn't quite make it to his 57th birthday but had lived a full and rich life nonetheless.

They would have talked of the 17-year-old boy who left Tillsonburg in 1970 to join Roger Neilson's Peterborough Petes, how the stocky five-foot-nine, 192-pound defenceman scrapped and battled his way to beat the odds to have a 12-year pro career that was based more on try than talent—but don't kid yourself, you didn't make the NHL in the 1970s without plenty of both.

They'd have told stories of his exploits as a Pete, winning the OHA championship in 1972, losing to the Cornwall Royals in the Memorial Cup final that year, playing alongside names such as Craig Ramsay, Stan Jonathan, Doug Jarvis and Bob Gainey in his three years with Neilson's Petes; going to the Vancouver Blazers of the fledging World Hockey Association for his first year of professional hockey and—accumulating triple-digit penalty minutes and zealously defending the front of his net against all foes in his trademark big-bucket helmet—doing what he would do for the Pittsburgh Penguins, Colorado Rockies, Edmonton Oilers, Vancouver Canucks and Detroit Red Wings over 11 well-travelled NHL seasons and 636 regular-season NHL games (25 goals, 128 points and 1,292 penalty minutes) in what was arguably the toughest, most menacing and intimidating and dangerous era of professional hockey. There no doubt would have been talk of his trip to the Stanley Cup final with the Canucks in 1982, riding the crest of Neilson's Towel Power.

And then his life as a coach. Five years as an assistant in Detroit, where, amongst other things, he tried to be Bob Probert's sober companion and watchdog to keep the troubled player from going astray; three years in New York as a Ranger assistant coach, first to his mentor and dear friend Neilson and then during the tumultuous Mike Keenan regime that ultimately led to the first Ranger Stanley Cup championship since 1940, followed by a four-year stint for himself as head coach of the Mark Messier–Wayne Gretzky-era Blueshirts that ended the way most coaching appointments end—by being fired.

There would be discussion of his move to the NHL executive suite, how the old-school hockey guy took over as NHL commissioner Gary Bettman's right-hand hockey operations man, administering all on-ice discipline, and how, like Brian Burke before him and Brendan Shanahan after him, he suffered the slings and arrows of public criticism and ridicule for unwaveringly doing what he thought was best.

And yet, for all he accomplished in his hockey life, his true measure would be as a family man: his marriage in 1976 to his Tillsonburg sweetheart, Heather, the subsequent birth of their three children and two grandchildren and his involvement with their lives and their own families—daughters Lauren, the teacher, and Courtney, the lawyer, as well as son Gregory, the hockey player who went on to win the Stanley Cup in 2011 with the Boston Bruins.

But the eulogies would have to wait. January 8, 2010, wasn't Colie Campbell's day to die.

The morning of what could've been Colie Campbell's last day
on earth was much the same as the night before: busy and problematic.

In his job as senior executive vice-president of the NHL and head of hockey operations, there was almost always a fire to put out somewhere, and the slate of games on Thursday, January 7 that year was no exception.

There was major controversy in a game between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia when the producer of the Penguins' home-team broadcast intentionally held back—from the broadcast, and from the NHL's hockey-operations crew—a video replay that conclusively showed Philadelphia's Simon Gagne had scored a shorthanded goal. After a lengthy video review by Campbell's staff in Toronto, the goal was disallowed for lack of conclusive proof the puck crossed the line. Once the Flyer goal had been disallowed, the Pens' home-team producer then showed the replay.

And all hell broke loose.

Another night in the NHL, another firestorm.

So Campbell awoke early that Friday morning and knew it was going to be busy dealing with the fallout from the night before, not to mention the overnight snow that had fallen in southwestern Ontario, and who knows what else that might be on the horizon.

He also was already well behind on his list of chores around the farm. A week into 2008, Campbell still hadn't disposed of the family Christmas trees, one from his home and one from his mother-in-law's place next door. Now there was snow to plow on the long driveways connecting the two homes situated on a scenic tract of land just southeast of Tillsonburg. There's a forested ravine behind the houses. In front, there's the county road that separates both residences from the sprawling 140 acres of prime southwestern Ontario farmland that, once upon time, used to be a thriving tobacco farm. Today, though, most of it is rented out to local farmers who grow corn and beans. Campbell might have a farmer's sensibilities in life, but he had neither the time nor the inclination to be an actual farmer.

So he got up that Friday morning and knew there was plenty on his plate.

He debated whether to wear his sneakers or put on his “Roots boots,” as he calls them; because of the snow, he opted for the latter, a decision he thinks about now as perhaps life-saving. He went outside, walked over to the barn and climbed up into the spacious cab of the big orange Kubota tractor, a massive, modern beast of farming technology with a fully enclosed glass cab boasting all the amenities (including heat and stereo), a big shovel/bucket on the front and a blade on the side for plowing.

And off he went. Campbell started plowing the driveways, but, as so often happened when he was doing anything at the farm, his BlackBerry was constantly buzzing. He'd plow a bit, stop, take a call, make a call, read some emails, send some emails and handle the fallout from the Gagne goal (by the way, the Pittsburgh TV producer was suspended for the balance of the season but was reinstated the following season). That scene played itself out over the next couple of hours and, with the driveways plowed, Campbell was finally going to dispose of those Christmas trees he'd been meaning to get rid of.

He tossed them into the big front bucket of the tractor and off he went, down the long driveway, out onto the county road in front of his house, crossing over it and proceeding south into the frozen farm field. A kilometre or two away, on his property, there's a berm, a natural break in the otherwise flat landscape, an ideal spot to dispose of the Christmas trees. It was a bright, beautiful, but cold winter's day and Campbell drove the tractor across the field, navigating around the irrigation pond set squarely in the middle of the field en route to the berm.

Campbell looked at the pond as he drove by. A week earlier, on New Year's Day, he and much of the hockey world had been in Boston at historic Fenway Park for the annual NHL Winter Classic outdoor game between the Bruins and Flyers. For a kid who grew up in a small town, playing pond hockey was a winter way of life. So, just a week removed from the Winter Classic, Campbell mused how much fun it might be have his very own version of the Winter Classic right on his own property, maybe play a little shinny himself, maybe get the kids and the whole family out there.

As he headed towards the berm to dump the trees, he decided that, on his way back to the farmhouse, he'd stop and plow the snow off the pond. And why not? As ponds go, this one was pretty much idyllic. Although it's located smack in the middle of flat farmland and half a kilometre from the farmhouse, two of the pond's four sides, the entire southern and western edges, are framed with a thicket of beautiful evergreens and stand of trees and bushes. The northern and eastern sides of the pond are lined with reeds and bulrushes on a short slope down from the field. With the fresh snow that just had fallen, it looked like a Canadian picture postcard, or maybe even the perfect setting for a Tim Hortons commercial starring Sidney Crosby. For an old hockey player and country boy who'd just been to the Winter Classic, the idea was too inviting to pass up. Even the shape (more or less rectangular) and size (almost 150 feet long and 90 feet wide) were darn close to the standard 200-by-85-foot NHL ice surface. And if you're sitting behind the wheel of what amounts to the farm version of a Zamboni, on a clear and cold Canadian winter day, why the hell not?

So Campbell pulled the tractor up to the northwest corner of the pond. He's not a reckless man by nature. So he climbed down from the tractor and walked out onto the pond to check it out. But he knew it had been a really cold winter and that the irrigation pond should be fully frozen, easily able to take the weight of the tractor. He climbed back in. Just to be sure, he pulled the wheels up to the edge and, without actually venturing onto the pond, used the fully extended tractor bucket to tamp up and down on the ice to make sure it was solid.

Convinced it was, he drove the tractor onto the pond and turned it so it was facing due east. And in the midst of his very first plow pass across the pond, he suddenly felt the tractor crack through the ice. But it dropped no more than, by his guess, four to five feet, not really submerged as much as it was just stuck. He was still high and dry. Campbell's first thought was that the big tractor was resting on the pond's shallow bottom. His overriding emotion was more aggravation than fear. He was not happy at being stuck and figured he'd have to walk all the way back to the farmhouse to call his brother-in-law to tow the tractor out of the pond.

In the time that followed—no more than 30 seconds—as he contemplated his salvage options and cursed at how much busier and more aggravating his day had just become, the tractor suddenly plunged entirely through the ice to the actual bottom of the pond. And the bottom was deep enough to fully submerge the entire tractor. The top of its roof was visible just a few inches below the surface.

It had been warm in the tractor cab while he was plowing, so Campbell had taken off his coat. He was sitting there in his T-shirt, sweat pants and boots as the icy water started to seep into the floor of the fully enclosed tractor cab.

“I was sitting there, with it stuck the first time, and I'm kind of shaking my head, thinking how stupid this is when the whole thing suddenly crashed to the bottom,” Campbell said. “When I saw the water coming in on the floor, I thought, ‘Shit, this could be serious.' But I wasn't panicked at that point. I figured I'd be able to get out somehow. So I tried to open the door, but it was shut tight. There was, I guess, too much water pressure on the outside and it wouldn't open. So I put my gloves back on and tried to punch out the window, but it didn't budge. The water was starting to fill up a lot faster now. It was up to my knees and I realized, ‘I could be in real trouble here.' I tried punching out the door and windows again. All of them. Really hard. I tried kicking them out. I don't think I had time to physically panic, but now I was really panicking on the inside. Once the water started to come in, it was really rushing up quickly. It wasn't long before it was over my head. I'm trying to lift my head to get the last bit of air that was left at the top of the cab. Then it was filled up completely. That's when I thought, ‘I'm going to die in here.'”