How One Bad Hockey Game Changed My Whole Life
In 2011, the Boston Bruins came to Vancouver to compete for the Stanley Cup. The result of that game changed my entire life.
In the evening of June 12, 2019, the NHL’s Boston Bruins played a Game 7 elimination game against the St. Louis Blues for the Stanley Cup Championship. The Bruins had just played 23 games of grueling playoff hockey over two months in an effort to claim the hardest trophy to win in professional sports. Now, after all that, it had come down to one game. That evening, before a home crowd of nearly 20,000 Bostonians, the St. Louis Blues defeated the Boston Bruins and claimed their franchise’s very first Stanley Cup Championship.
In 2011, the Boston Bruins had found themselves in that same position, playing in a Game 7 elimination game for the Stanley Cup. Only this time, the game was in Vancouver and their opponent was my home team, the Vancouver Canucks. In this article, I’ll share with you how the result of that game changed my career, my marriage, and my entire perspective on life.
Introduction
On March 19, 2002, a classmate of mine (a junior in high school at the time) changed his MSN Messenger status to “Bertuuuuuzzzziiiiii!”.
I had no idea who this Bertuzzi person was, but I had to know what he had done to make my friend so excited. I did a Yahoo! search and found that Todd Bertuzzi was a star forward for the Vancouver Canucks, and he had scored a natural hat-trick in a win against the New York Rangers. I dug further and found that he was a member of the Canucks top line; they were the famous ‘Westcoast Express’ comprised of Bertuzzi, super-star sniper Marcus Naslund and elite playmaker Brendan Morrison. Further, I discovered that the Canucks were in the midst of a winning season, and had big hopes for the playoffs.
At the time, I was a young teenager reaching the end of my ‘watch cartoons and read comic books and Star Wars novels’ phase, and I was ready for something new. Sports fandom seemed like a natural fit for a guy like me, and the Canucks offered the opportunity to connect with new people. And so, I decided to become a Canucks fan.
My History With Obsession
My mother will tell you that I get obsessed with things.
For instance, when I was in the third grade, a friend introduced to me to Star Wars. As a young boy who enjoyed spending time on my own and disappearing into fantasy worlds, the Star Wars universe was a perfect fit for me. I was immediately hooked.
I soon discovered that Star Wars involved so much more than the movies. There were hundreds of novels, comic books, and encyclopedias covering the entire historical timeline of the galaxy. Every character, planet, and race you ever saw on screen had a backstory and a future — and what you saw in the movies was minuscule in the full context of the Star Wars Universe. Thousands of years of history had been written by an army of sanctioned writers.
I had to absorb the entire narrative. Where did Boba Fett get his armor? How do you play Sabaac? How does a lightsaber work? Is Jabba the Hutt’s species native to Tatooine? These were the types of questions I needed answers to.
Becoming the preeminent Star Wars guru in town became my raison-d’etre. To help fortify my comprehension, and to posit myself as the local authority of Star Wars knowledge, I made comprehensive exams with up to 20 pages of questions. I would quality-test them on my younger brother, and once vetted, I took them to the schoolyard where they became the ultimate test of Star Wars mettle.
Star Wars had become more than an enjoyable sci-fi pastime to me. I felt that a thorough comprehension of the Star Wars universe was a responsibility, and I approached it like a job. This was the type of obsessive behavior that I would take with me into the world of sports fandom.
A New Hobby
In 2002, I had a part-time job at McDonald’s and no longer relied on my parent’s money to support my pastimes. I was making a decent amount of money for my age, but I can assure you I was not saving any of it. I spent my paycheques on hockey jerseys, game tickets, sports magazines, and 8 packs of Wildcat. To me, that was the high-life.
After a short time, I found that there simply wasn’t enough Vancouver Canucks content to keep me sated. I needed more… I needed a second team. I couldn’t choose a Western Conference team; that would be disloyal given the rivalries between Western Conference teams. So I looked to the Eastern Conference, where I could find a team with no rivalry with the Canucks, and since those teams play 3 hours earlier than their west-coast counterparts, I’d be able to watch them both.
I chose the Ottawa Senators. Team Captain Daniel Alfredsson, with his great speed, hard shot, and flowing Swedish hair, was incredibly fun to watch; Jason Spezza was a great playmaker with franchise player potential, and Martin Havlat and Wade Redden were already stars. Their uniforms were red and black — my favorite colors. It was a natural fit for me.
Through my Ottawa Senators fandom, I became even more familiar with all the players, stats, and narratives of the NHL’s Eastern Conference. I had consolidated my NHL wisdom, and now had opinions on almost every player in the league.
My investments paid off the day that my dad’s friends started asking me for hockey pool advice. As a teenager who was constantly seeking approval from the adult guys, that to me was the pinnacle of hockey-fan glory. I had reached a zen state in modern hockey knowledge, and I was happy and optimistic.
The Stanley Cup Finals
In June 2011, the most significant moment in my sports fandom had arrived. The Canucks defeated the Chicago Blackhawks, Nashville Predators, and San Jose Sharks in the NHL Playoffs, and had become the Western Conference Champions. They were going to the Stanley Cup Finals.
They had finished the season as the top team in the league, they were favored to win, and they were rolling in the playoffs. They had never won the Stanley Cup before, and this was their time. All they had to do was win 4 out of 7 games against the Boston Bruins. They were favored to win, and they had home-ice advantage. This was to be the moment we would tell our grandkids about, the moment the Canucks emerged from decades of mediocrity and embodied the winning character that had evaded them for so many years. Victory was imminent.
I was intensely stressed, excited, optimistic, and pessimistic; pardon the cliche but this was a rollercoaster of emotions for me. I wanted to hug strangers, honk the horn of my car, yell from my window — these same feelings were felt across the province, and lots of folks did all these things. Our whole province was in a state of euphoria, fear, excitement, and dread — I saw it everywhere. It felt like we were at war; the Boston Bruins were the evil nation that had to be defeated lest our rights and freedoms are forfeit.
On June 15, 2011, on home ice in Vancouver, the Boston Bruins defeated the Vancouver Canucks and claimed their sixth Stanley Cup.
The Aftermath
Theories of crowd psychology tell us that when we are surrounded by like-minded and emotionally connected people (e.g. sports fans), you become part of a ‘crowd’. When you are part of a crowd, your social identity is affected; your ability to self-evaluate is diminished, and you become susceptible to more primitive levels of emotional expression.
Now imagine what a primitive emotional response by a crowd might look like after 10 months of province-wide fanaticism capped off by utter defeat. I think this helps explain why Canucks fans, who had gone through a very emotional Stanley Cup run, were able to allow (or participate in) rioting and looting in their own city. Can you imagine any other time where a looter or vandals would not have been stopped by a crowd the size of the one that was downtown that evening? Instead, many people who otherwise would have walked home and languished in disappointment on their own found themselves ransacking their home.
This is not an excuse, but possibly a cautionary tale. We had gambled with our sanity and lost. In defeat, we became crazed and delirious. If King Louis XVI had been walking down Burrard Street that day, we’d have executed him.
Down in a Hole
Outside the passing of my closest grandfather, I had never felt sadder in my life than the days following that Game 7 loss. And much like a death in the family, it took me months to accept it.
I went through the stages of grief. The bargaining stage stands out the most to me; I can recall convincing myself that this was a moral victory: “hey, we made it to game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals, that’s an incredible accomplishment!” I tried desperately to embody that sentiment, but unfortunately, that optimism was fleeting and shallow.
The testing stage was the next most memorable. I convinced myself that this defeat had no practical implication for me. My livelihood nor my physical health would be affected by any win or loss by the Canucks. As I languished in my emotional basement, this sentiment was as fleeting as the last. However, it was in this stage that, while I wallowed in my self-pity, a seed of real change was planted.
Apathy
The start of the new season came and went, but the games felt meaningless, and I couldn’t watch. They had made it to within one win of the Stanley Cup, and now they’d have to play 82 regular-season games before they could even try again. The thought of watching a regular-season game seemed ludicrous to me. I didn’t watch a single game that season. In place of the prior year’s passion and excitement, I now felt indifference and emptiness. My emotional tank was on empty.
That following season, the Canucks finished as the #1 team again, but it felt different. The bold optimism was missing, and only the most unflappable optimists had any real hope. The thought of mustering excitement seemed empty and repetitive.
The Canucks were favored to make it to the Stanley Cup, but we weren’t ready for another run. The Canucks were eliminated in the very first round that year, and I actually think that was a relief.
Hiding Behind Glass
Two years after the Game 7 loss to the Bruins, I started to recover, but not in the way I expected. The fog from my 2011 Stanley Cup Finals emotional hangover began to thin, and my mind felt clearer and more logical. I began to ask myself questions that I had never pondered before:
- What do I lose when the Canucks lose? Nothing.
- What do I gain when Canucks win? Nothing.
- What are the real-world implications of Canuck’s failure or success? Nothing.
How long will I be sad if they lose? Forever. Ask someone who watched the 1994 Stanley Cup Finals between the Vancouver Canucks and the New York Rangers; they still lament that loss nearly 30 years later.
The most important question of all: How often will I be happy versus how often will I be sad? There are 31 teams in the league and more are on the way. Notwithstanding the addition of any new teams, the Canucks should be expected to win the Stanley Cup once every 31 years (they are way overdue already). Based on the average lifetime of a human male, if I were a Canucks fan from the day I was born until the day I died, I could reasonably expect them to win twice and lose 81 times. Peyton Manning said that losing feels worse than winning feels good; if that’s true, this would be torturous.
I also started to think about my personal economic implications of Canucks success versus failure. I came to the opinion that it would be better for me if the Canucks were perpetually awful. For example, what happens to my money when I support the team through a deep playoff run? Well, Billionaire real-estate developer Francesco Aquilini owns the Canucks and he’ll happily glean my middle-class income from ticket sales, royalties, parking, concession sales and more. What happens to my money when the Canucks are unwatchable and miss the playoffs altogether? I save my money or spend it on something rewarding and everlasting like travel, education, investments or early retirement. Anything.
As you can see, I treated this loss as a difficult break-up. I approached the situation in the same way that Spock might: I used logical arguments to suppress my emotions.
A Wrong Turn
The seed I had planted was germinating but had not yet blossomed. I had completely stopped watching hockey and I was beginning to look for my real values. In the infancy of this self-discovery that had come to fill the grief-hole left by my hockey fandom, I swung all the way right into an individualistic and self-deterministic mindset. I rejected anything that didn’t specifically benefit me and I became very self-centered. Some folks say that I was a politically Conservative during this time, but I don’t agree — this was less about aligning myself with an existing set of values, and more about rejecting others and thinking about myself. Perhaps I had become a Libertarian?
My goals were all based on wealth and vanity. I spent a lot of time exercising, and I woke up at 5:00 am or earlier each day to make stock-market trades. I was committed to being some sort of super-fit millionaire.
Unfortunately, this was never going to lead to real happiness.
Healing
When discussing the way one breaks a habit or changes a paradigm, I often use the example of a broken leg. If you break your leg and don’t set it properly, it will heal incorrectly. You may be able to walk, but you’ll never be 100%.
When the Canucks lost in the Stanley Cup playoffs, that was my broken leg. I had tried to repair it by telling myself that “it doesn’t matter because they don’t contribute anything positive to my life anyway. I should reject them and anything else that doesn’t directly benefit me”. This mindset helped me at first, and I felt great about my newfound ambition.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t fixed it correctly. I’ve never really been motivated by wealth, I just thought I should be and so that’s the route I took. I’ve also never liked running, but I thought I needed to be a great runner, so I did that too (and perhaps symbolically, I really did injure my leg doing that).
And so it comes the second part of the analogy: to fix the incorrectly healed leg, you need to re-break and reset it.
Some very wise people helped me work through this strange phase in my life; at that time, I did not deserve to have such fine people around me. Two people of particular note really broke and reset my leg for me:
- My partner Daniela. If I was a religious man, I’d believe she was an angel sent to straighten me out. She is the strongest, smartest and most loving person I know. She also has always had very little patience for arrogance, lack of critical thought or poor communication. I can’t comprehend why she stuck around with me through this nauseating time in my life. When I’m around her I have to be mindful, thoughtful and considerate. Since the day I met her, I’ve wanted to spend as much time around this woman as possible and to do so, I had to elevate myself. And as she gets wiser, the standards get higher — so I’m always working hard to better myself just to keep up with her.
- My stepdad Miles. This is the man who first noticed me straying away from my real values and helped steer me back in the right direction. When he noticed that I was becoming un-empathetic, he pushed me to challenge my perspectives and look at the world in different ways. It was his influence that prompted me to join the VIU Rights & Democracy Club (where I met Daniela) and led me to join the VIU Students’ Union (a transformative experience). Through these experiences, I swung hard left and became much more empathetic, thought more critically and discovered my passion for helping people.
A New Hope
In many ways, I’m still that person who obsessed over Star Wars as a youth and was driven to despair over a sports game as a young adult. I still feel a pull, like when Bilbo sees his old ring; it happens when I overhear people talk about their hockey pools or when I pass the sci-fi section at the bookstore. However, as an adult, I’ve come to know my real values. I’ve set goals for myself and my little family unit, and my priorities are the product of thoughtful decisions.
These days, the thing that I’m most passionate about is leadership. I read books, listen to podcasts and take courses. I have pursued a career in leadership because I love helping people discover and embrace their own values and guiding principles. I love helping people build fulfilling careers, whether that be on my team or elsewhere.
I’ve learned to balance the different aspects of my life and to prioritize that which I can not ever afford to lose. I love learning about leadership, but I’ll set aside a book to take care of my health and my relationship. I recognize that life isn’t about making sacrifices, it’s about choosing which opportunities align best with your values. I can do that now, and smile about it.
Final Thoughts
As a young boy, I struggled with low-self esteem and was bullied often. I’m not a therapist, but I suspect that my obsessive behavior may have been my way of sheltering myself from the risks and pain of reality. Perhaps none of this was about a hockey game. Perhaps it was about a protective shield that I had been lacquering for two decades. I talked about Star Wars and hockey, but there were others too: Magic the Gathering, heavy metal music, video games, stocks, politics and more. Hockey fandom was just the most recent — I felt that my knowledge of hockey was the value I could offer to the world. I had linked my identity to it, and that made me especially vulnerable when they lost.
As I write this article, I recognize that maybe I was going through something beyond a personality quirk, and I might have done well to seek out help. I’ve taken up daily journaling, meditation, and self-help practices and the pull of my old habits has become barely noticeable. Maybe everyone goes through this, and it’s just a part of growing up. Maybe it isn’t, but the support of my loved ones and all of my self-care have worked to keep me grounded.
I want to thank the Boston Bruins for what they did for me that evening in June 2011. At the time, I didn’t appreciate the pain, but I’ve healed stronger than ever. Maybe, in part because of that game, I am happy.
My name’s Chris, and my mission is to elevate standards and skills across the Management profession. I want managers to be better, and I’m taking personal responsibility to help them get better.
I train coaches and managers to build winning cultures through trust, pride, ownership, and empowerment. I’m especially interested in harnessing and developing the power of the front-line and entry-level staff. I enjoy science fiction, 80’s hair-metal and spending time with my partner and two orange cats.
I’d love to connect with you! Find me on Twitter and say “hi”.
