Bleeding Blue: Giving My All for the Game - Softcover

Clark, Wendel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501136038 ISBN 13: 9781501136030

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2017

Synopsis

Funny, fierce, and gritty, Bleeding Blue recounts every struggle and success of Wendel Clark’s rough-and-tumble journey to becoming one of hockey’s greatest heroes.

As a young boy growing up in Kelvington, Saskatchewan, Wendel Clark never dreamed of an NHL career. The pro league just seemed too far away from the young man’s small-town life in the Prairies. But Wendel had a talent for hockey that was surpassed only by his love for the sport, and it wasn’t long before he embarked on a path that would take him away from his hometown to a new life.

Wendel honed his talents in cities across western Canada and earned a reputation as a force to be reckoned with on the ice. Drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs first overall in the 1985 NHL Entry Draft, Wendel burst onto the pro scene and immediately made an impact, all the while staying true to his roots. As he learned from the players around him, Wendel steadily matured into a respected leader. He soon assumed the mantle as the Leafs captain, and his willingness to lay it all on the line transformed him into a player who could inspire courage in his teammates and fear in his opponents in equal measure. The future seemed limitless for the young star.

But just as Wendel’s talents were set to peak, everything unraveled. Years of no-holds-barred, physical play were taking their toll, and soon his greatest competitor wasn’t anyone on the ice, but his own body. Every movement brought agony, every shift was a challenge, and every game meant the decision to keep fighting. But as Wendel’s body broke down, his resolve only grew. Determined to succeed no matter what the cost, Wendel set out on a course that would allow him to keep doing what he loved and that would turn him into one of the most beloved hockey players of all time.

Emotional and uplifting, Bleeding Blue is the story of a man who refused to say no, who wore his heart on his sleeve, and who would do anything to keep going, even when everything told him to quit.

About this title

About the Author

Wendel Clark was born and raised in Kelvington, Saskatchewan. Drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs first overall in the 1985 NHL draft, Wendel set the Leafs record for goals by a rookie. He was named the seventeenth captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1991, and he played thirteen of his fifteen seasons in Toronto, where his leadership, scoring prowess, and physical play endeared him to fans. Still active in the Leafs organization today, Wendel also works with many charities and a number of corporations. He lives in Toronto with his wife, Denise, and three children, Kylie, Kassie, and Kody.

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.

Bleeding Blue

Growing Up in Kelvington

There’s no loafing on the farm, so there’s no loafing in a game.”

As a kid, I heard those words from my dad a lot. When you grow up on a family farm like I did, you learn early on that everyone is expected to pull their weight on the home front.

Home for us was a grain and cattle farm that covered about a thousand acres when I was born, although we later expanded it to nine thousand acres. Our farm was in Kelvington, a tiny community of nine hundred people roughly 250 kilometres east of Saskatoon. You can’t get much more small-town or rural than Kelvington, Saskatchewan. We had everything that any small rural town needs: a grain elevator, bank, post office, credit union, department store, hospital, retirement home, town hall, and, like in every small town in Saskatchewan, a Chinese restaurant. The one we had in Kelvington was called Ning’s Café. In terms of things to do, the selection was a little more limited. We were big enough to have a motel and a hotel, although the motel was basically just a long strip of property just outside of town. The hotel was in town, and it had the one bar in Kelvington. There was also an auction market, a skating rink, a curling rink, and even a nine-hole golf course. The golf course was easy to find, as it was beside the water tower and the motel.

Golf in small-town Saskatchewan was different than what most people are used to. Our course had sand greens—oiled sand, to be exact. So, when you were on the green, you had to make a path in the sand just to putt your ball. I golfed on the course often as a kid, and my grandfather later brought the first golf cart to Kelvington. One of the most exciting moments I can remember was when Kelvington hosted the Saskatchewan sand greens golf championship. The tournament was held in different towns each year, and when Kelvington got its turn, believe me, it was a major deal and the whole community came out. That wasn’t all that hard, of course. Because we were such a small town, everyone knew everyone in Kelvington; we all moved in the same circles. We only had one public school and one high school, so growing up, I knew every kid in the surrounding area.

My dad had been born in Kelvington in the middle of the Great Depression, and he spent his early life there. As a young man in the 1950s, he left town to play junior and minor pro hockey. He signed somewhere different every year, from Moose Jaw to Saskatoon to Philadelphia to Charlotte. Eventually, though, he headed back to Kelvington in his early twenties to work on the family farm. It was good timing, since my mom, who was from Springside, Saskatchewan—a town about 150 kilometres away that, if possible, was actually smaller than my hometown—had just moved to Kelvington to teach school. They met soon after Dad moved back, and it wasn’t long before they were married and starting a family.

It isn’t very hard to see where I got my work ethic. My parents, each in their own way, were the people most responsible for shaping me into the man I am today. But while my dad taught me a lot of the skills I would need to get to the NHL, it was my mom who showed me every day how important it is to get along with everyone and anyone around you.

Mom made sure we had three square meals a day. I’m talking about a hot breakfast, lunch, and dinner, day in and day out. Steak and potatoes (with plenty of bread and butter) was my favourite meal. Of course, growing up on a cattle farm, I had to like that. But it helped that my mom was also a heck of a cook—I would have eaten anything she put in front of me. I would often look in the fridge and complain that there was nothing to eat. She could look in the fridge, and the next thing you knew, there’d be three different meals sitting on the table. She would be mixing and matching things, and everything would be delicious. She really could cook up a storm.

But on a farm, nobody does just one thing. On top of taking care of all of us day to day, my mom was also the one who would run into town for spare parts if something on one of the farm implements broke. That allowed Dad and the hired men to keep working away on one of the many jobs that inevitably needed their attention. There’s no question that the hardest-working person on our farm was my mom. She was the head chef, parts runner, and jane-of-all-trades.

We hired men during the seeding and harvest seasons—the busiest periods of the year for us—to get the jobs done in time. One constant was Tim Johnson. He was like family to us growing up. Tim was with us every year, helping out on the farm—he even lived in a little bunkhouse on our property. Tim was only ten years older than me. He had dropped out of school and started working for my dad at sixteen, which made him the cool guy in town because he had some money. As a young kid, I really liked Tim because he fixed all the things that we broke before my dad got home!

So, depending on what day of the year it was, my mom was cooking three meals for anywhere from five to fifteen people. And that doesn’t even count the snacks we might be having at nine or ten o’clock in the evening when we had to work all night or the desserts that we got after most meals. You don’t grow up on a farm without having good desserts, and they were my mom’s specialty. The only bad dessert that she made was Christmas pudding; I hate Christmas pudding.

Growing up, I did the usual chores that any farm kid would do. On top of our grain farming, we also had a cow and calf operation. We had two hundred cows that we had to tend to every day. As kids, my brothers and I had to stand by the gates of the cow pen at feeding time and make sure none of them got out while my dad used the tractor to bring in bales of hay and feed for them. It would be minus-25 degrees Celsius outside, and we would be standing still, little kids guarding the entryway against the massive animals around us.

Come spring, our big job was tree planting. In Saskatchewan, you created your farmyards by planting trees to mark the border. My dad’s philosophy was that by planting fresh trees every year, your yard would always be healthy. So, as the trees that my grandfather had planted fifty years earlier died off, we had to replace them with new saplings to keep the border from thinning out too much. We must have planted thousands of trees on our property over the years. We had two ways of getting the job done. Sometimes we would just dig a big hole and lay the tree in directly by hand. Other times we would put the trees into the ground using a potato planter. I or one of my brothers would sit on the back of the potato planter while the others towed it around with the tractor, and as the planter dug each hole, we’d drop the new tree into it. The days were long, but on a farm, even kids do whatever it takes to get the job done.

Harvest time was when things were busiest. On the farm, if it wasn’t raining during the harvest, you would be working from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. for two weeks in a row. The hired men would pray for rain just so they could have a break. The long hours weren’t a choice, though. We had to work quickly to get the crops off the ground, because we never knew how long our window of good weather would last. So, as long as the weather held, we would stay out in the fields. The only thing that would stop us was the dew. The combine didn’t work well if there was any moisture in the field, so dew on the crops meant the combine wouldn’t thrash well. And even if the dew settled in, it didn’t give us much of a break—we’d just have to work harder and faster once the crops were dry again.

At seeding time, the schedule was a little different, but the days were just as long. My dad used to get up at four in the morning and start seeding until the hired men arrived at six. At that point, Dad would go have a nap, and then he’d be right back out there, working alongside the others. Everyone got the same amount of sleep in the end, but it meant that more work got done throughout the day.

My days weren’t all that different from those of other farm families. My brothers and I were the extra help the family needed to get the jobs done. It wasn’t pretty or easy, but there were some perks. We all had parts of the farm that we liked best, but everyone knew my favourite thing was to go for a drive. As a young kid, I looked up to the guys who would drive all the machinery around the farm, and seeing them control those powerful machines made me want to do the same.

I drove a vehicle for the first time when I was six years old. We had one of those old Datsun pickup trucks with a five-speed stick shift, and it was the first car in which I could reach the pedals with my toes. Before I was ten, I was already driving small farm equipment. Once my dad saw that I was comfortable with the smaller vehicles, he decided to promote me to the bigger machines. One day, just after I’d turned ten, Dad told me that instead of coming home after school, I was to pick up our four-speed Ford tractor, which was being repaired at the John Deere dealership in town. It seemed easy enough—the machine was just a little bigger than our lawn tractor, and I’d driven that plenty of times. The dealership was right near my school in town, so to my dad, it made more sense for me to stop off there and bring the tractor home after school than it did for him to take time off work to head into town and pick it up.

I followed my dad’s instructions, and after I got out of class, instead of catching the bus like I usually did, I walked to the dealership, grabbed the keys, and started driving the tractor home. My plan was to head through town and stop off at my grandma’s house before continuing on home. I didn’t realize that my route would take me right past the police station. As soon as I rolled by, one of the cops came flying out of the parking lot with the lights on. He made me pull over, and once he heard my story, he told me he would move the tractor. But when he got behind the wheel, the cop saw that there was more to the machine than he thought, and he realized he didn’t have a clue how to drive it. My dad wasn’t mad—it was his idea, after all. But he also refused to come pick me up. Work on the farm still came first. So I had to wait by the tractor with the cop until my mom came to collect me, the machine, and the ticket I’d been given for driving underage.

By the time I hit thirteen, I was consistently driving the bigger machines like the tractors, combines, and swathers. It didn’t matter whether the engine had five horsepower or five hundred, I loved driving it. It’s easier to experiment like that as a kid in a rural community. The population density in Kelvington is next to nothing. So when I was behind the wheel of a car, a five-hundred-horsepower tractor with double wheels in the front and the back, a grain truck, or anything else, I had nothing but space around me.

My parents never stopped me from driving. In fact, they encouraged it, because if I could drive, it meant I could work. We had that Ford tractor, along with a Datsun pickup and a smaller Toyota, and often, my mom might send me out to deliver meals to the crews in the field. She would finish the cooking and set it out, and when I got home from school, I’d hop in one of the little pickup trucks and take the food out to the guys. Especially at harvesttime, every minute was precious. We were all working from dawn until well after sunset, so we couldn’t afford to have everyone walk back and forth from the fields to get their meals. Also, our farm was well spread out. It crossed lots of roads and was scattered around the town. It got to the point where parts of our land were up to twenty-four kilometres away from our house—you actually had to drive through town to get from one side of our property to the other. I’d leave school in the centre of town and walk home, then turn around and take the food to the crew, cruising along the numbered streets past the school, the post office, and the grain elevator with KELVINGTON stamped on the side. Everyone pitched in; we all knew that we had a role to play if we were going to get the job done.

·  ·  ·

I was the second of three sons in our family. My dad, Les, and my mom, Alma, had my older brother, Donn, in 1962. I was born in 1966, and then my younger brother, Kerry, came along in 1968.

You would think that three brothers growing up together on a farm would mean there were a lot of fights. But Donn, Kerry, and I never scrapped all that much. I never fought that much in school, either. I tried to never fight, because if my dad ever found out about me scrapping, my punishment at home would be way worse than anywhere else. My mom wasn’t any more lenient. She had quit her job as a schoolteacher after I was born, but she still knew the other teachers and had plenty of that teacherly discipline to direct at us. If I did anything bad at school, she would have found out about it real quick. In a small town, you really can’t get away with anything; if you do something bad in the morning, everybody knows about it by lunchtime. So I tried to stay out of trouble.

That being said, Donn, Kerry, and I still took up a lot of air. When I was growing up, everything happened outdoors. Our house wasn’t big enough to play in, so we would get kicked out of the house a lot. And once we were outside, Mom wasn’t letting us back in until it was time to eat. I can’t blame her—it was a small farm home, too small for three boys to be running around in. Also, we weren’t the only animals around. We always had family dogs—straight farm dogs that lived outside and were never allowed in the house, but when you added them to our mix, I’m amazed our mom didn’t kick us off the property, let alone out of the house.

We had a basement, but it wasn’t much more than a cold storage room and the furnace. If we were playing in there, we might as well have been outside. We preferred to be outdoors, anyway. Donn had his own room, but Kerry and I shared a bedroom, so for the two of us especially, being outside meant that there was more room for each of us.

We were also lucky that our closest neighbours were also our cousins. Neil, Darryl, and Rory were my cousins, and they were the same ages as me and my brothers. Of course, when I say they were our closest neighbours, they still lived half a kilometre down the road. Still, having them relatively close by was perfect for a sports-crazed kid like me. Whether we were playing three-on-three hockey, baseball, soccer, football, or any other team sport, the six of us could organize games right there without needing anyone else. To this day, I hate hearing the words “We have nothing to do.” To an outsider, it might have seemed that Kelvington didn’t offer much. But to the six of us, it was our entire world, and we couldn’t have been happier.

Still, rural Saskatchewan isn’t known for a whole heck of a lot. The scenery is beautiful, the people are kind, and the farming is nonstop. But one thing it can claim is cold weather. As a kid, I never gave the cold much thought or found it to be that bad. It was just a fact of life. I remember playing a hockey game when I was eight years old in Invermay, Saskatchewan. We were at an indoor rink, but even with a roof and four walls around us, it was minus-40 degrees on the ice. It was just too cold for us to sit on the bench between shifts. So the coaches and refs came up with a system where every player who wasn’t on the ice went to the dressing room to keep warm. Every two minutes, the ref would blow his whistle, and both teams would change their ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1501136038
• ISBN 13: 9781501136030
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224