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Domi, Tie Shift Work ISBN 13: 9781476782508

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9781476782508: Shift Work
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From hockey’s most prolific fighter comes a sports memoir unlike any other—passionate, funny, and candid, Shift Work chronicles Domi’s sixteen tumultuous seasons in the NHL.

Making it through a single fight as an enforcer in the NHL is a sign of toughness. Making it through 333 of them is a mark of greatness. Whether it was on the ice or off it, Tie Domi was driven to be the best at his job and was gifted with an extraordinary ability to withstand pain. He made a career out of protecting the people around him and became known as someone who would stand up for the people who needed it most.

Raised by immigrant parents in Belle River, Domi found success from an early age on the field and the rink. A gifted athlete in whatever sport he played, Tie eventually focused his sights on hockey. As he moved up the junior ranks, he made a name for himself as a player who was always ready to take on anyone who dared to cross his teammates.

Tie’s reputation followed him into the NHL, and it wasn’t long before he ranked among the game’s most feared—and fearless—enforcers. From New York to Winnipeg to Toronto, Tie quickly became a fan favourite in whatever city he played. As he went about working his name into the record books, Tie surrounded himself with people from every walk of life, learning from each one as he evolved into a respected leader who was never afraid to tell it like it was.

In Shift Work, Tie recounts the ups and downs of his life on and off the ice, showing what he has learned and how he has grown as both a player and a person. He offers insight into the most memorable points of his career, sharing his successes and mistakes with unparalleled honesty. Shift Work shows Tie Domi as he is—a devoted father and friend, a valued and loyal team player, a magnetic personality, and an athlete of immense skill and courage.

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About the Author:
Tie Domi was raised in Belle River, Ontario. Over his sixteen-year NHL career, he played for the New York Rangers, the Winnipeg Jets, and the Toronto Maple Leafs, where he was and still is a beloved fan favourite. With 333 career NHL fights, Domi has the most fights in NHL history.  Now a consultant, Domi is also active in many charitable foundations. He is the proud father of Carlin, Max, and Avery. Domi splits his time between Toronto and New York City, where he spends time with his girlfriend, Heather.

Jim Lang is a Canadian sportscaster, journalist, and the co-author of Shift Work and Bleeding Blue, two bestselling memoirs by Tie Domi and Wendel Clark. He hosts The Jim Lang Show. He lives outside Toronto with his wife and kids. Follow him on Twitter @JimLangSports.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Shift Work 1

Beginnings


MY STORY doesn’t begin with me. It begins with my parents. Growing up in Albania, my dad, John Domi, experienced a lot of hardship, both during World War II and after the war, under the communists. While my sister, brother, and I were growing up, one of the earliest stories we remember being told was about the time that my father was shot in the head while he was fleeing Albania. For the rest of my dad’s life, long after the wound healed, the bullet fragment stayed lodged in his forehead. I guess there was a piece that the doctors weren’t able to remove, and so it was just left there until the day he died. It was on the outer part of his left eyebrow, and when you touched the spot, you could feel the bullet fragment; it was like a small rock stuck under his skin.

I can’t count the number of times we heard that story when we were kids. Every time we felt for the bullet, we heard it told again. But I’m not sure my brother, sister, or I ever understood the reality of it. As we listened to the story, we sat in our living room, on our dad’s lap, with the comforts of a good home and a nice family. His stories of tough times and the war were, to us, just that—a bunch of stories. Dash and Trish and I were all born in Canada. We didn’t know anything about war or what it was like to be shot at. We were more worried about the kinds of things most kids are worried about: school, our friends, or what sport we would play next.

My dad’s struggles only began with the war. His life in Albania and his journey to make a better life for himself and his family were ordeals in and of themselves. Following the war, the communists in Albania—who had led the resistance against the Italians and the Nazis—became the main military and political power in the country. After Albania had been liberated from the Nazis, it officially became a communist country and changed its name to the People’s Republic of Albania. The communist regime that then followed was nasty. My dad was completely anticommunist. He remembered how anyone caught practising any kind of religion would be arrested, tortured, and even killed. Albania eventually became part of the Soviet Union’s communist bloc, and my dad could only see life getting more difficult because of it. Albania was not a good place to be living in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Not everyone was happy with where the country was headed. There were lots of people who served in the anticommunist movement, but in reality, many of them were actually spies for the communists. My father and his brother were in the same unit working against the Communist Party. But their unit had been infiltrated by a group of these spies, so all of their activities were being reported to the communist powers that had taken over the country. I am not sure exactly when or how my father and uncle realized they were in trouble, but it was clear that they were at risk, and so, in 1950, they decided they had to get out of the country immediately.

At that time, Albania was one of the hardest countries in the world to enter or exit. So just getting out was an incredible challenge. But it was even more difficult for my dad and my uncle—because their anticommunist past had been reported, they had to avoid any official exits. That meant they would have to sneak across the border. It took my dad and uncle a long time to get out of the country. They moved only by foot or car, and only at night. During the daylight, they would hide out with sympathetic Albanian families in their barns or basements. They were smart and lucky, and eventually they made their way to the border of what was then Yugoslavia, which they finally ended up crossing in the middle of the night.

After escaping, my dad found himself in a town called Pristina, part of present-day Kosovo. It was there that he met my mom, Meyrem, in 1954. It didn’t take long for my dad to promise my mom that he would marry her, but neither one of them expected that to take as long as it did. Things got even more complicated when my mom and her family immigrated to Turkey. My grandmother on my mom’s side was Albanian and my grandfather was Turkish, and they would switch between languages whenever they felt like it. Luckily, my dad could keep up—he spoke seven languages. But he couldn’t travel to Turkey with my mom and her family, so he ended up bouncing through Austria, Germany, and Italy, trying to find the right country to settle his new family in. Dad ended up spending time in seven countries before deciding that Canada was the place for him.

My dad finally arrived in Canada in 1963. When he first got there, he settled in Winnipeg and worked for a time for the Canadian Pacific Railway; it was common for new immigrants to work on the railway. After a lonely year of working out west and saving money, my dad moved to Toronto, where he worked for Cara Foods, loading supplies onto planes at the airport. Finally, nine years after they had met in Pristina, my dad managed to scrape together enough savings to bring my mom over to join him in Canada.

I can’t even imagine how tough it must have been for my mom when she settled in Canada. She was in a strange country and she didn’t speak a word of English. But she and my dad had each other, and in May 1965, a year after my mom arrived in Canada, my brother, Dash, was born. When my mom gave birth to Dash, she didn’t know a single person in Canada other than my dad, and she felt incredibly lonely in the hospital as she watched the woman next to her receive flowers and visitors. But then, one day, a woman arrived with flowers not for the other person in the room, but for my mom. This woman came over and actually introduced herself in Albanian. It turns out that my father had met the woman’s husband while frequenting a coffee shop where he met with other Albanian men. He told them that he and my mom had a new baby boy, and they all knew my mother was new to the country. So this woman’s husband had come home and suggested that his wife go to visit my mom, and she did. From that moment on, they were best friends for life. Suddenly, my parents had a whole new connection to their new home, and their community began to grow.

It was about this time, when Dash was a baby and my dad was still working at Cara Foods, that Dad took a trip to Windsor, Ontario, where he heard some other Albanians had settled. Nobody in our family had ever been to Windsor or the surrounding area before. The only thing they knew was that there were some Albanians living there. My dad got to know some of the people from that network, and so, once he got to Windsor, he discovered that the people he was supposed to meet actually lived outside of Windsor, in a town called Belle River. He arrived there and found that the family he was supposed to meet owned a restaurant. And that restaurant just happened to be up for sale.

All of a sudden, my dad loved the idea of living in Belle River and running that restaurant. As a place to raise a family, Belle River was a good spot. There weren’t many people living there—maybe 3,500 at the time—and it was a tight-knit community with a large number of French-Canadian families. Above all else, it was a very safe little town. Back in those days, nobody locked their front doors. And after what my mom and dad had gone through their whole lives, a nice, small, safe town was just what they were looking for.

Using whatever savings he had, and partnering with another Albanian family friend, my father was able to buy the restaurant. It was called Edna’s Lunch, named after the cook and owner. At the same time, my parents moved into a nice little house. It was an orange brick bungalow with a big backyard. When my sister, Trish, was born, she had her own room. And when I came along, I got to share a bunk bed with Dash. The house had a basement, where we would play, but only in the daytime—my sister thought there were Martians that came out at night. Much as we loved playing there, we spent just as much—if not more—of our childhood at Edna’s. It was like our second home. We could always swing by to have a hamburger (still the best I’ve ever had), bring our friends to eat, make our own milk shakes, play the jukebox, do the dishes for twenty-five cents (which was a lot for a kid back then), serve from behind the coffee counter, work the cash register (which was cool when you’re a kid), play tag, and drive the employees crazy.

Because we spent so much time outside our home, we weren’t just raised by our dad and mom. My dad had made a promise to my mom when they were young that they would bring every single one of their family members over to Canada. Everything they did and every hour they worked was all for that. My dad was the driving force that kept that going, and eventually, he and my mom were able to bring over a number of their relatives, including my mom’s mother, two of her brothers, and two of her sisters. My grandmother even lived with us for a time. In the world I come from, family stays with family, and there’s always room for one more. It was important to my parents to never forget or let go of their connection to the lives they’d had to leave behind in Albania. When I was born, my parents had given me the traditionally Albanian name Tahir, and for the first few years of my life, I went by that. But my name quickly changed when I started school. For some reason, my kindergarten teacher started calling me Tie, and it stuck. Before long, even my mom was calling me Tie. Still, with so much family starting to gather around us, we never forgot where we’d come from, and my immediate family learned to always stick together.

As I grew up, my dad did well with Edna’s, and so he started buying a number of other properties across the street. He eventually bought a pizza place, another restaurant, a couple of Laundromats, and a variety store. Of course, with so many businesses to run at once, my father was always at work. I’m not sure why he was always working; maybe it was an old-country Albanian thing. Whatever the reason, we simply didn’t know any better. We thought that’s the way it was supposed to be: a dad was supposed to work all the time to provide for his family.

And my mom’s work ethic was no different. She was a typical, old-school European mother. She kept the house spotless—you couldn’t help but take your shoes off when you walked in, it was so clean. Laundry had to be ironed and folded perfectly, right down to the underwear. There were fresh sheets on the bed every day. My mom spoiled us at home. On top of that, she cooked for an army every day. Friends and family were constantly coming and going, and they always knew my mom would have a ton of food ready.

But as hard as my family worked during the week, we always tried to have a little fun on the weekends. Every now and then, we would get together with family and friends, with all the kids playing games like hide-and-go-seek or kick-the-can together. It was a classic Albanian scene: all the mothers preparing a meal and talking together while the men played cards and argued about politics. At these sorts of get-togethers, my dad was the only father who would take the time to see what the kids were doing and goof around with us. All of the kids loved him. To this day, a lot of our cousins have favourite stories about my dad. My dad took care of people. He was a loyal man, the kind of person we always wanted to be around. He was constantly cracking jokes to make us laugh, and he woke up and went to bed every day with a smile on his face. He did what so many people struggle to do: he came to Canada with nothing and built a good life for his family. To us, that was something to treasure.

Because my dad’s work took him all over the place, and with all of the sports my brother, sister, and I were playing, everyone in my family had different hours. We were constantly arriving home at different times of the day, so we didn’t have any set mealtimes; my mom would just feed us as we got home. Thanks to all of my dad’s hard work, we weren’t poor. But that being said, we didn’t have much extra, either. Of course, we didn’t know any better at the time. We had a decent house, plenty to eat, and clothes on our back. We played sports and had fun. What else did we really need? Despite that, my dad never let us forget how hard he and my mom had to work for it all. When we were young, he would tell us stories that most immigrant children have heard some version of. Stories about his childhood, how he had had no money, how he would walk to school in two feet of snow with holes in his boots, and if he was lucky, he would get one sugar cube to lick—half on the way to school, and half saved so that he had a treat for the walk home. Every time we walked in the door with a bag of candy, the stories would start up again.

My dad was like a chameleon. He could go anywhere and deal with anyone. Our house was always full of people. Some of them would be very successful and some would be very poor. It didn’t matter where they came from; to my dad, they were all equal. My siblings and I all inherited that characteristic from him. I quickly discovered I had the gift of getting along with everyone at school. I was able to hang around with the jocks, the academics (who sometimes let me cheat off of them), the yuppies, and the heavy-metal rockers. I could hang with kids who smoked, or who spoke different languages, or who played sports. All of those different people, and I was friends with them all.

Because he could get along with so many different groups, Dad would take us with him to spots that were different than the places most other fathers took their kids—places that were off the beaten track or that weren’t considered proper for children. Sadly, there was a lot of poverty in the neighbourhoods where my dad owned his shops. The worst of those neighbourhoods surrounded the Laundromat he owned in Detroit. We would drive over to East Detroit to check in on it, and we would pass through rough neighbourhoods along the way. As we made our way into the building, all of the locals standing outside would greet my dad by name on his way in. “Hi, Johnny,” they’d say. We never stayed long—just enough time to check up on the place and pick up the money from the machines. It was my job to take the brown money bag full of coins and cash and put it inside an empty soapbox the size of my chest, and then carry the whole thing to the car. Before we’d leave the building, my dad would say, “Don’t make it look like there’s money in there.” I could barely lift the thing—any other kid would have fallen over trying to lift it up—but I didn’t want to let my dad down. I guess that carrying open cartons of money in East Detroit in the 1970s helped me become fearless.

My dad trusted most people, and he went out of his way to help everyone he could. But he eventually got burned trusting so many others. My dad couldn’t always cross the border to check on his Laundromat in Detroit, so he hired an employee to help him watch over the business when he wasn’t there. It turns out my dad trusted the wrong guy. In one of the periods when my dad didn’t drive down to check in, this employee stole all of the cash that the Laundromat made each day. Not only that, but he even had all the washers and dryers cleared out and sold the day before my Dad got back. Then he disappeared; my dad never saw the guy again.

My dad blamed himself, saying it was his fault. That’s what he was like—always refusing to talk badly about anyone or blame others. He helped people find houses, get jobs, buy restaurants, and when he went through some tough times, he never showed it. He stayed upbeat and...

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  • PublisherSimon & Schuster
  • Publication date2015
  • ISBN 10 1476782504
  • ISBN 13 9781476782508
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages240
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. 1st Edition. No DJ.15.2 x 2.3 x 22.9 cm-Illustrated covers. Making it through a single fight as an enforcer in the NHL is a sign of toughness. Making it through 333 of them is a mark of greatness. Whether it was on the ice or off it, Tie Domi was driven to be the best at his job and was gifted with an extraordinary ability to withstand pain. He made a career out of protecting the people around him and became known as someone who would stand up for the people who needed it most. Shift Work is more than just a sports book. Tie tells about his personal and professional life, from being a young boy to the present. The book is a winner, just like Tie. (Don Cherry). Seller Inventory # 006994

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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition. From hockeys most prolific fighter comes a sports memoir unlike any otherpassionate, funny, and candid, Shift Work chronicles Domis sixteen tumultuous seasons in the NHL. Making it through a single fight as an enforcer in the NHL is a sign of toughness. Making it through 333 of them is a mark of greatness. Whether it was on the ice or off it, Tie Domi was driven to be the best at his job and was gifted with an extraordinary ability to withstand pain. He made a career out of protecting the people around him and became known as someone who would stand up for the people who needed it most. Raised by immigrant parents in Belle River, Domi found success from an early age on the field and the rink. A gifted athlete in whatever sport he played, Tie eventually focused his sights on hockey. As he moved up the junior ranks, he made a name for himself as a player who was always ready to take on anyone who dared to cross his teammates. Ties reputation followed him into the NHL, and it wasnt long before he ranked among the games most fearedand fearlessenforcers. From New York to Winnipeg to Toronto, Tie quickly became a fan favourite in whatever city he played. As he went about working his name into the record books, Tie surrounded himself with people from every walk of life, learning from each one as he evolved into a respected leader who was never afraid to tell it like it was. In Shift Work, Tie recounts the ups and downs of his life on and off the ice, showing what he has learned and how he has grown as both a player and a person. He offers insight into the most memorable points of his career, sharing his successes and mistakes with unparalleled honesty. Shift Work shows Tie Domi as he isa devoted father and friend, a valued and loyal team player, a magnetic personality, and an athlete of immense skill and courage. Seller Inventory # 010267

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