Part 24 (2/2)

You can't be overt. You're recruiting, but you can't say that you're doing it, and you've got to do it in a way that's like-like you can't send a kid a letter or anything like that. That's off the deep end. It's like, you'll get in trouble, I think. Actually, I don't know what the rules are. I have no idea. I mean I'll go up to kids and tell them that they're good and that they should come to-like we had a kid at camp this week, he's going to be an eighth-grader. I was hanging out with him for two weeks, and I'm trying to get him to come to our school. Because he said he might go to this other private school near here. And the kid's good, so I told him straight out, ”f.u.c.k that-you ain't going there. You don't wanna go there.” He's black, and I was like, ”There's no black kids there. You'll be hanging out with all Jewish kids and stuff like that, but we've got Spanish broads at our school, and everything else.” [Laughs]

These kids think that's cool-they're like, ”Oh yeah, yeah, yeah!” Then they go home and keep saying to their parents, ”I want to go to-” you know, my school. So it gets to a point where the parents agree to come check us out. Then we'll show 'em around, and we've got a kick-a.s.s development director who they'll have an interview with, and she'll lay out all the academic stuff. Because I don't know anything like that.

The one thing the parents always ask me, and I should learn it so I could give them an answer, is, they say, ”What is the average SAT score?” I've got no idea. We had a kid on our team that got like a 1060 like two years ago, so I just always bring that up. I just say, ”Well, we regularly have kids that are in the thousands on our team, like 1060, 1100.” [Laughs] That seems to impress them.

It's tough, though, because if you get caught you're screwed. My athletic director here has warned me not to get caught. Repeatedly warned me. And I don't know what will happen if I do get caught, but I take him seriously. And I've never gotten caught.

But it's intense and, you know, I've gone overboard. I've f.u.c.ked up some recruiting. I had a kid, a f.u.c.kin' kick-a.s.s point guard from Philly. Eighth-grader, I saw him in a rec league last winter. And I go to like ten of his games. Sitting there right in the front, sitting behind the bench, everything. Talking to his parents all the time. And he signs a letter to come. Registers, pays his fee, everything-he's in. I go to call him this summer, to come play in the JV summer league, and I get a recording-the number has been changed. They moved to a town that's like an hour away. He's going to school on the other side of the county. And I went berserk. I was like, ”Are you serious?” I mean, I put a lot of effort into this kid-he was probably my major focus last winter, recruiting-wise. And it was probably wrong, I shouldn't have said this, but I flipped out. I called the father and I was like, ”Bad move, because you'll never win the county champions.h.i.+p as long as I'm coaching! You're never gonna beat me! I'm always gonna have better players!” And this and that. ”You better send that kid on a train every day to school.” And the father's like, ”Whoa, whoa, who you talking to? You better calm down. This is only an eighth-grader.” And I was just like, ”Ahh, well yeah, well, he's never gonna be any good! Might not have started on the freshman team anyway!” And I hung up. So he's not coming. And that was f.u.c.ked up on my part.

I'm just really into it, I guess. I'm into it all the time. Right now, in the summer, I work at a basketball camp in Philly-I do that from nine to four every day. And then my team plays in summer leagues, so at night I'll run to our summer league game. I get home at like tenthirty every night. I talk to people, and they're like, ”You're f.u.c.kin' crazy,” this and that. Because in the summer I don't get paid by the school-I get paid by the camp, a tiny bit, but I coach my team at night and on weekends for free. But that's what you've got to do for your team to be good. Some people are like, ”I don't understand why you do that if you're not getting paid for it.” But you can't look at it that way. You have to look at it like coaching is always a full-year, everyday thing, if you want to be good.

And you have to want to be good. You have to want to win. I don't know what the point of playing is if you don't want to win. I mean, people talk about playing for fun. But what's fun is winning, you know? You're not doing anybody a service by losing. The kids sure as s.h.i.+t don't want to lose.

I win. And I work my a.s.s off to win. That's probably why, f.u.c.king, I don't even have a girlfriend. 'Cause it's like, during the season, if I have an early practice, then at night, I go to a game, scout a team. Even if it was a team that we don't have on our schedule, I go scout them 'cause maybe we could play in the county tournament, or in the state tournament. And I won't have a chance to scout them later. So during the season, regardless, I'm not home until ten o'clock. Then during the spring, same thing. I coach track, and a lot of my guys run track, then we have summer league, either practice or games every night. Plus all the recruiting. So it's definitely a committed thing. It's my commitment.

There's some coaches that don't do it. They're just there for the season-after practice, that's it, good-bye. That's why their teams f.u.c.kin' blow. And think about that for the kids-I mean, in one of our summer leagues, some coaches show up for like one game a week, and they'll have their a.s.sistant or someone else do the other games. And, you know, what is that? You're telling the kids to be there every night, but you're not there every night? Like how the f.u.c.k do they react to that?

The thing is, if you're into it and you put the time into it, kids notice. One of my kids said to me one time this summer, ”You know, you're here every night, and none of these other coaches are here every night.” And he said, ”That's why we all come every night, because we know you're here.” So you might not think that they notice, but all kids notice that stuff. It's almost like you have to look at it like a player-there's that old motto that every athlete has heard a thousand times: ”Every minute you're not practicing, your next opponent is.” It's that way for a coach, too. Every minute you're not preparing for your next opponent, that opponent is preparing for you. That's the way I look at it.

Some days, of course, I think it's bulls.h.i.+t. I get overwhelmed. All this effort I'm pouring into this and it's like, I think, like, I coach in this two-bit Catholic high school with three hundred kids. In one sense, I look at it as I'm twenty-five years old and I've been doing this since I was twenty-three, and where can I move up in the job ladder? Like if you get a job in a business when you're twenty-five years old, most people can always move up and do things. But where am I going to move up to in the life of being a high school coach and teacher? There's nowhere, because I'm already the varsity coach and I'm already a full-fledged teacher. So that's it-I can only stay the same for the next thirty years. So sometimes I think about that and I'm like, you know, what am I doing? Other people are out there working to move up the corporate ladder and stuff like that. And for me, at twenty-three years old, I maxed out, I peaked out. I could get more money, but I'd never get another type of job. Because this is all I really want to do. And sometimes I think that sucks. But more often-much more often, you know, right now, I just love what I'm doing. So as of now I just think about it like, I love it, so as far as I'm concerned, this'll be it for-forever. I don't care. I love it.

Any way you can score is a good way.

PROFESSIONAL HOCKEY PLAYER.

Shawn McEachern.

I'm a hockey player. I play left wing for the Ottawa Senators. I'm an offensive guy.

My thing is, I'm a fast skater. That's what I do best. You see me- I'm not that big. [Laughs] I'm one of the smaller guys probably on the ice. But I'm just a little bit faster than most.

Hockey, you play on what's called a line. It's like a s.h.i.+ft. What happens is I play on my line with a center and a right wing. We're on the ice maybe nineteen, twenty minutes a game-out of the sixty minutes. And we go out to score goals, basically. We're a scoring line. There's guys that go out and play tough and fight and there's defensive lines that go out and try to protect a lead-try to keep the other team from scoring. We go out to score. And that's fun. It's like-that's what everybody wants to do-score. [Laughs]

I love it. You know, it's what I've always done. Just play hockey. I grew up in Waltham, Ma.s.sachusetts. My brother is three years older than me and I started playing on his team when I was five. I don't know how good I was then. [Laughs] You know, I probably wasn't all that good. But as I got older, I did pretty well on each team I was on. I was one of the better players all the time.

When I was a junior in high school, I got drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins in the sixth round of the entry draft. This was 1987. I was the one hundred and tenth pick overall. And I was excited, but that's not like a real high draft pick, you know. I mean, if you're in the first round, that's a big deal. But after the first round, it's not really that big of a deal. Because as long as you're eighteen, you can be drafted. So they'll draft anybody. Russians, guys from Europe- anybody. And once they draft you, they own your rights. That's all it is. It doesn't mean you're gonna play for them. They can trade your rights to another team. Guys get traded before they even play a game. And guys get drafted and never play a minute in the pros.

So it was nice to be drafted. But, I mean, I never thought about actually going and playing for Pittsburgh at the time. I just went on with what I was doing. I played one more year of high school, and then I got recruited to go to college. I got a full scholars.h.i.+p to Boston University. And I had a three-year career there, and then I left to go play for the U.S. National Team, which is the Olympic team. I played in the Olympics in '92. And around that time-when I was at B.U.- you know, scouts start coming to watch you play and things like that. And guys from your team sign contracts to play in the NHL. And that starts getting pretty exciting, you know. You start thinking about where you fit in, if you could play in the pros.

It ended up, right before the Olympics, I signed a contract with Pittsburgh to play with them once the Olympics were over. So I joined them and played from February till the end of the season, and then we won the Stanley Cup that year. Which is-that's the champions.h.i.+p. I mean, that's like, you were playin' street hockey when you were eight years old and you pretend you're scoring goals to win the Stanley Cup. And then actually being on the ice and, you know, carrying the Cup around and being involved in the whole thing, it was amazing, you know. I mean just touching the actual Cup itself-it's just this big silver thing-but even just touching it was awesome.

And I actually got to play in those games and I scored goals during the playoffs. I got my first pro goal then. I scored against the New York Rangers in game six in the second round. It put us up three to one to win the game. And win the series. That was so much fun. I mean, I can't even tell you, really.

But it's weird, because that was my first year, 1992-not even my first full season. And we won the Cup. And then it's been eight years since then, and I've played on some good teams, but I haven't even gone back to the finals since.

My career-I played with the Penguins for like a year and a half. And then I was traded to Los Angeles for a guy by the name of Marty McSorley. And I played fifty games with L.A. And then I got traded back to Pittsburgh for a guy by the name of Marty McSorley. [Laughs] Actually there was two more players involved on it-but McSorley and I were the main guys.

I don't know why they traded us back and forth like that. No idea. You just get traded and it's-you know, one team doesn't want you, another team does want you. It just happens. I've been traded twice again since then, so I'm kinda used to it now. Pittsburgh traded me to Boston in 1995. And I played one season in Boston, my hometown, and I liked it a lot, but then I got traded that summer to Ottawa. And I was very surprised but, you know, my contract was up and Boston didn't want to pay as much as-whatever. I don't know how it works. They didn't want to pay that much money or something. And then I got traded to Ottawa. So I've been all over the place-East Coast, West Coast, Pennsylvania, Canada. It's a lot of moving, you know. But you meet a lot of new friends each place you go.

All the teams I've played for, I've been on a scoring line, that's been my role-just score goals. So my game hasn't really changed. I've played center sometimes, and left wing, like I do now. But my role is really always about the same. You know? Try and get the puck in the net.

And-it's hard to talk about the game. It's like you need to just watch us play. Everything happens very fast. It's just a lot of instincts. It's not conscious decisions. I come down the ice-I get the puck and there's the goal and the goalie-and I just try to score. If I could score off my head, I'd do it off my head every time. You know? Any way you can score is a good way. You don't think about it, you don't talk about, you just try to do it. Like you wouldn't say, ”Oh, should I take my wrist shot or I take my slap?” You know what I mean? You just shoot the puck. There's no time for anything else. If you're near the goal and you've got the puck, you got a second, maybe two or three seconds to do what you need to do. A lot of it is just positioning, being in the right place-knowing where the right place is.

It's very mental. I mean, everybody playing pro hockey is a pretty good player. Everybody's got good skills. When you're younger, you work on your skills all the time. You work on your hockey. You do anything you can to be better, you know what I'm saying? You physically work out all the time. I still do that-all summer, I'm in the gym- but I think as you mature, you also realize that mentally you have to work out too-because it's so mental the whole game. It's something actually our team works on. We have like a mental skills coach. We go talk to him and he tries to keep us positive.

Because there's always stuff on your mind-distractions. Losing, you know? Or like if you have a bad game or something like that, you're in a rut and you're not scoring. It affects your mood. Because, obviously, it's your life and your work, you want to do well. But you have to be able to focus and try not to let it affect you.

Going on the ice, sometimes you don't feel good. It's a long season. It wears you down. I mean, in college, you probably play forty games. But in the NHL, the regular season lasts eighty-two games. And if your team goes deep in the playoffs, that's-to win the Stanley Cup it's four seven-game series. So you could end up playing more than a hundred games a year. [Laughs] It's a lot of hockey. And you practice every day. You get maybe one day a week off. Maybe. It depends who you have for a coach. So it's tiring. But you still have to concentrate. You gotta be able to just shake it off and focus.

And there's bullies out there. [Laughs] Oh yeah, I mean-when you're like me, you're not enormous, a lot of times the teams will come after you. They'll have big guys they send after the scorers. To try to get you off your game. There's nothing you can do about it except just play hard and, you know, take some abuse. Get cut and banged up and still come back and play hockey.

It's a rough sport-everybody knows that. A lot of injuries. I've been pretty lucky, but I've had my share. I took a slap shot in the face and broke my jaw my first year in Ottawa. I was skatin' and this guy shot the puck and it kinda went the wrong way and caught me in the face. I thought I got elbowed. I didn't even-you know, it kind of stunned me, knocked me down for a second. And I got up, and my face was cut through to-right through, you know-I was kind of spitting [laughs] blood comin' up like this. [Laughs] Just coming out of the side of my face, straight out. A lot of blood and stuff. That was my worst injury, probably. Had to have my jaw wired shut. And I was out- I missed like-I don't know, maybe five weeks, something like that. And this year I had this torn abdominal muscle, so I had surgery for that. I tore it just from playing. The way I skate and shoot the puck. You know, it's an injury you get right in here. It's real low. And you get, you know, you get facial cuts a lot and stuff like that all the time.

The average career is probably about six years. Some guys play a lot longer. I played with a guy in Boston and Pittsburgh by the name of Joe Mullen who's a very good player, a great player. American guy. He was forty when he retired. But the average career, I'd say is maybe five or six years. Not long.

I could see myself playing for ten more years possibly. I hope so. But honestly, I don't really think that much about when I'm going to stop or what I'm gonna do after I stop. People tend to ask me that more now since I've turned thirty-which is weird. You know? I'm thirty and people are like, when are you gonna stop playing? I had one of my best years last year, I scored thirty-one goals. That's the most I've ever had in a season. I would enjoy playing until I was forty. You know, that'd be great if my body could put up with it. If it can't put up with it then-I don't know what I'll do. I'll coach. Maybe. It's not something that's pressing me right now.

Right now, I'd just like to win another Stanley Cup. That's the main goal. When I got traded to Ottawa, we were the worst team in the league. But they'd just brought in a new coach, a new GM. And they brought in new players. And we ended up making the playoffs the first year I was here. And ever since then the team's gotten better. They've had so many draft picks because they came in last so many times that they had a lot of first picks overall-so we have a lot of very good players who're very young. We're the youngest or the second youngest team in the league, I think. And I'm one of the veterans here. I mean, I'm playing with a guy who's nineteen right now. [Laughs] It's a weird feeling. But we're good. And it's fun.

I think I'm lucky. I mean, obviously, I'm lucky. [Laughs] I'm going to make over a million dollars this year playing hockey, doing something I love. I don't think of it as a job for me. Like I don't think of it as I go to work, or anything like that. I don't say to my wife, ”I'm going to work now.” I say, ”I'm gonna play hockey.” And, like, I've been going to play hockey since I was five years old. You know? [Laughs] It's just that now I drive myself. My parents don't drive me anymore. And now they pay me money to do it. But it's just like a lifestyle. And it's so great. I mean, I still play with guys I've been playing with since I was a kid. You know, there's guys like Joe Sacco, who's playin' for the Capitals this year. I played against Joe when I was like seven years old in the town teams. And we went to B.U. together, and then Joe and I played together on the Olympic team, too. And now we play against each other in the NHL. And there's other guys I know the same way. Since I was seven, eight years old. Playing hockey. There's a lot of guys like that, you know. It's pretty wild that way.

I don't feel like it's lost anything for me over the years. I still get excited when I go on the ice. I think the older you get the more you appreciate that you can still play and have fun at it and go into the rink every day, hanging out with twenty other guys, joking around, and stuff like that. I think that's the type of thing you miss when you're not playing. You know? I think I'd play forever if I could.

We're not like the Mountain Dew guys,

or the Spicoli character in Fast Times

at Ridgemont High.

PROFESSIONAL s...o...b..ARDER.

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