Hockey fans have probably heard of Edmonton’s Shedon Souray. He’s got a slapshot that could put a puck through a brick wall. He’s a force on the ice, and one of the Oilers’ most popular players.
And during the 1996-97 AHL hockey season, I found out he was my brother. At least for that year.
Flashback to that time. I was writing for Hockey Ink!, a monthly minor league hockey newspaper that barely operated above credibility. My presence at the River Rats’ press table was greeted with a mixture of disdain and ennui. And a decade later, looking back, I could see how everybody felt. They were operating on nightly deadlines, while Hockey Ink! published monthly; Hockey Ink! was often out of date, it spent copious amounts of press on unimportant subjects (for years, Mike Dyer of the Troy Record was on my case about an article he thought I wrote about team mascots, not realizing that the photos of the mascots were placed by the editor around an article I wrote about first-time AHL’ers). As I’ve said in the past, the only good thing Hockey Ink! ever did for me was allow me to move up to better-selling and more profitable magazines. You gotta pay your dues somewhere, that’s the truth.
By the 1996-97 season, Hockey Ink! was even more of a joke than one would imagine. Since Hockey Ink! would take any reporter or photographer who wouldn’t mind NOT getting paid or NOT seeing their articles run on a consistent basis, they were getting a lot of lowlifes who used Hockey Ink! press credentials to get close – in some cases, TOO close – to the players. And for those of us who actually used our Hockey Ink! credentials to actually WRITE about hockey, we took the blame for the bad apples in the basket.
Anyways, that season Hockey Ink!’s press run was so poor that instead of the twelve monthly issues promised, the paper published ONE ISSUE. One freaking issue. In February. Two-thirds of the way through the season. Yeah, I’ve come a long way from those days. Sometimes not long enough.
So while I’m in the press box, I happen to see in the stands – of all people – my mother and stepfather. Unbeknownst to me, they had become River Rats fans, and were coming to the games on a regular basis. I think they even joined the booster club. They might have even taken a road trip or two to watch the Rats on the road.
And it was around that time that I noticed, in the post-game locker room interviews, that the players were all noshing on what appeared to be homemade oatmeal and chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies.
So I’m in the locker room, trying to get a few quotes for an article that I hope will be published someday by a ragtag cancerous publication for which I still have a copy of their last rubber check framed and hung on my wall, a reminder to never get involved with any publication that promises you the moon and all you get is mooned.
Sheldon Souray, who was playing for the Rats at the time, had scored two goals that evening and was named one of the three stars of the game. So I wanted to ask him about what he saw in the defensive scheme the other team placed in front of him, that allowed him to find an opening and score goals. He answered, and as I turned off my tape recorder and was about to leave, he said to me, “Hey Chuck, thank Mom for the cookies, they’re great, we love them.”
“Whose mom?”
“Your mom. Short, black hair, glasses? That’s your mom, isn’t it?”
Waitasecond – the only cookies my mother ever gave me were from a box of discount day-old Freihofer’s, and the River Rats are getting big tins of homemade cookies every night from my mother? For the Rats, my mother has suddenly become Betty Crocker?
I was stunned. At that point, I said to Sheldon, half-jokingly, “I guess you’re the cool brother I never had.”
I don’t know what bothered me more about that moment – the fact that my childhood was so toxic, where the people who raised me either didn’t read the parenting manuals or simply made things up along the way, or that after I was able to essentially raise myself, they turned into “team parents” for a minor league hockey squad.
After a couple more games, at which point I knew Hockey Ink! was toast, I stopped going to Rats games. Period. With the exception of winning a set of tickets this season by winning a night of trivia at Rev Hall, I was done covering or watching or even being enthusiastic about the Rats. Even the news that the Rats are potentially going to North Carolina after this current season ends has left me with a sense of “Eh… so what.”
Of course, Sheldon’s now in he NHL, and I wish him all the best.
And if he ever wants to get in touch with his big brother, that’s fine too. Just don’t expect any cookies. My mom passed away in 2006, and as far as I know, she took the cookie recipes with her. Me… I just get through life on day-old Freihofer’s.
Chuck The Writer 