If only Crosby can make it last…

Bobby Hull was one of the great ambassadors for the game of hockey from the late 1950’s throughout his entire professional career, which ended in 1980.

While there were reports of various off-ice issues over the years, Hull was nonetheless one of those sporting “heroes” who made the time to speak with fans, who would stand and sign autographs for long periods of time after games and practices, when teammates were long gone.

In a nice piece printed recently in the Ottawa Sun, columnist Don Brennan tells how, when the Penguins were in Ottawa to play the Senators, a group of youngsters, hoping to see Sidney Crosby, waved and held up signs as he was leaving the rink after practice. When security wouldn’t allow the young fans near the team bus, Crosby ventured off to meet with the youngsters, pose for pictures and sign autographs.

Shades of Bobby Hull, indeed. And in an era when so many athletes simply have no interest in the fans, and certainly wouldn’t make the time to sign an autograph unless they were paid to do so, it is at the very least refreshing to see Crosby handle his early fame in this manner.

If he can maintain his approach for another twenty years, we can speak of him in the same breath as a Hull, or even a Jean Beliveau, who has shown respect for the game and the fans long after his playing career came to an end.

This is a wonderful lesson for young athletes on one of the many off-ice/ off-field qualities it takes to become a real professional in any sport.

"I can't do it all by myself!"

It’s remarkable how seldom professional athletes will really and truly take responsibility for their actions and/or performance.

Sometimes, on the rare occasions when they do, the response is rather peculiar. Case in point: recent comments by Ottawa Senators defenseman Joe Corvo. Corvo said publicly he has not played up to par this season, and a newspaper headline in the Ottawa Sun thereafter read, “Corvo too honest?”

Corvo’s coach went so far as to say, “you’re always a little surprised when a player admits to lacking confidence publicly”, essentially suggesting it would have been better for Corvo not to acknowledge his poor play.

Corvo responded by saying, “Guys (athletes) are kind of programmed to say robotic responses…I don’t think I’m the first one that’s been honest.”

Compare and contrast Corvo’s honest, if uncommon, self-assessment with the recent reaction of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, after the Falcons finished a disappointing 7-9 and missed the NFC playoffs.

Said Vick, "I don't see how people can point the finger at me," he said. "I think I had a great season. ... I can't do it all by myself. I call myself Superman, but I really don't have the cape on my back. I can't change the game in certain situations. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't."

He’s not the first “star” athlete to decline accepting responsibility for the performance of the team he is paid handsomely to lead. Quarterbacks in particular accept widespread acclaim when their teams achieve success but some aren’t as keen to accept any criticism that comes their way when things go off the rails.

When an athlete says, “I can’t do it all by myself…” he is sending a terrible – and likely unappreciated— message to his teammates, especially when the words come from a so-called “team leader” such as Vick.

No athlete in a team sport – not Bobby Orr, Michael Jordan or Jim Brown—won games or championships on their own. Every player on their respective teams made contributions. Orr, Jordan and Brown may have shown their true greatness by helping make the players around them better, but those players nonetheless all made valuable contributions game by game and throughout the playoffs until the championship was won.

The moment an athlete starts thinking – and goes so far as to start saying publicly – he is “doing it all by himself”, chances are he is, emotionally, “losing” the very people he needs to achieve success, his teammates.

There is a wonderful life lesson here for young athletes – and for young people in general.

The real issue is not so much, perhaps, that Vick said what he said. Rather, the problem is that he felt that way in the first place.

How could anyone who has seen teammates work in the off-season, play through injuries and do their utmost to play at the highest level in their sport, has the support and guidance of top coaches to help him prepare to be successful every day, really feel as though he is “doing it alone”.

With this story as a backdrop, aspiring elite athletes would do well to look inside themselves, and do an attitude check.

If you think you’re doing it “by yourself”, think again.

And if you truly can’t convince yourself that you are not a one-man band, for goodness sake, don’t say so out loud.

You’ll lose the respect of teammates, coaches, scouts and fans—and anyone who had an interest in your career.

The Vick quote reminds me of a similar comment made by a young NHL draft prospect several years ago, when asked by the media why his “stats” had fallen off.

He said, “If I had better linemates and been given more playing time, I would have scored more…”

In one sentence, the player essentially trashed his teammates and his coach and publicly laid blame on others for his own shortcomings.

We all understand that teenage athletes may sometimes say things they shouldn’t. No one should be that programmed.

But that player likely lost something in the minds of his teammates, coaches – and the scouts who were assessing him—when he made that comment.

If you’re a parent, you may want to encourage your child not to follow the Michael Vick approach to leadership.

Big Promises, No Support

Over the past several years, I’ve had the opportunity to work as an advisor to a number of top Major Junior hockey players. Not as an agent, which I’m not, but as a professional who assists young athletes in terms of their off-ice development: attitude, work ethic, goal-setting, task completion, becoming a better team player and developing the qualities that will help them become more professional in their hockey life—and better people off the ice.

The work is stimulating, challenging, rewarding —and sometimes distressing.

I’m not sure if it is ironic or prophetic that, some 30 years ago when I was a young fellow breaking into the broadcast field, I hosted a cable television program in the growing community of Mississauga, Ontario. This is when ‘local cable television’ was truly local community programming.

Weekly, I brought in various guests to discuss sports issues of the day. (As an aside, only 2 individuals ever asked to be paid to appear. One was a legendary writer, the late Dick Beddoes, and the other a successful Canadian Olympic “amateur” athlete. Everyone else appeared without a fee.)

On this particular evening in, I believe, the winter of 1977, I invited guests from Canadian University hockey (Tom Watt), Major Junior Hockey (Dave Draper), Junior B hockey and others to discuss the choices young hockey players faced. My question was: What is the better route to go—Junior hockey, or accepting a scholarship to play in college in the United States?

Keep in mind in those days, the prevailing “Canadian” attitude was still very much that hockey was our game, and that the Americans were well behind us. Junior hockey was seen as the best way, by far, to earn your way to the NHL.

Canadian university hockey was even less likely to see you end up in the pro ranks, but I knew that Tom Watt, the Head Coach of the University of Toronto Varsity Blues at the time, was a passionate hockey guy and would bring a thoughtful dimension to the program.

My interest in the subject was largely spurred by a growing awareness on my part that junior hockey was not always what it was cracked up to be.

This was based to a certain extent on a situation I became aware of in the early 1970’s, when I was attending the University of Toronto. A friend’s younger brother was a rising “star” in junior “A” hockey. He was playing for his hometown team in what was then the Ontario Hockey Association. Life was good for him. At least, it was for a short while.

It’s not hard to imagine a young man, playing a game he loves and is really good at, thinking he will play for his first junior team for his entire 3-4 year pre-professional career. He believes, naturally so, what adults tell him about his potential, his future and his importance to the team.

Suddenly, he was traded at the beginning of his second junior season, at the tender age of 17. Never having been away from home, with no agent or advisor or trusted mentor to guide him (and a family with no experience at all in such matters), his world was turned upside down overnight. He refused to report to the team he was traded to. He sat at home, afraid, confused.

Threatened with what was essentially league banishment by the powers that be, he eventually reported.

He was, in his estimation, treated terribly by his new club. Soon, his confidence was shattered—a particularly tough circumstance for a young goaltender. He was eventually traded again, and played out his junior days as a back-up goalie, an unhappy young man, disillusioned, downcast, hating the game that only two years ago he had loved.

He had no education to speak of, and the league had no interest in helping him out. He had put everything he had into hockey, and only hockey. He was told, and had believed, that it would be his future.

As it turned out, he was just another casualty of the junior hockey world.

Through the years, this troubled me a lot. I argued when I interviewed junior hockey folks in my various radio life incarnations that education was not being taken seriously enough for these young hockey players; that most didn’t make the NHL, that too many were essentially used and abused.

I was always assured things were getting better and better.

Today, I’m told that there are wonderful education packages for virtually all players who give up their opportunity to go to the U.S. on scholarship, to stay and play in what is nowadays called the Ontario Hockey League (or the Western junior or Quebec loops).

Unfortunately, other issues still exist, I’m afraid.

Too often, the young athletes I work with still face the reality that they are chattel; paid a nominal gratuity every week to subsist while they travel daily to games and practices. They can be traded at a moments notice (how being traded in mid-season—and usually mid-semester in high school—is beneficial to them is still a puzzle to me after all these years.)

They are basically playing in a professional, for-profit league, but not receiving any of the benefits—other than a select few who are drafted and may some day earn a very handsome income in professional hockey. Statistically, the vast majority of elite young players at age, say, 15, never make it to the pro ranks, and even fewer for any length of time.

The bigger issue, for me, though, is that these young players—yes, sometimes too coddled and very immature in some ways—are the victims of terrible communication methods still utilized by their coaches and team management.

The adults often act like children, it seems, and the young player is left confused, uncertain and, again, disillusioned.

They are not sure how they should approach their coach. They wonder, “if I speak with him, will I end up benched, or with a one-way ticket out of town….?”

Almost weekly in junior hockey, we see players leave their teams, go home to sit and await a trade they have requested, or sit and stew on the bench as they see their burgeoning careers spiral seemingly downward.

Thankfully, more than ever, these young athletes nowadays have the benefit of more education in most instances, and access to information and off-ice support that simply wasn’t available when some of these issues were first brought to my attention back in 1972, when I myself was a university student.

I’d like to think junior hockey has the interests of its young athletes at heart. Too often, I find it very hard to believe.

I would imagine many parents, and many current and former young players could share a story or two with me about how things went off the rails for them.

Size is Not All That Matters

One thing is clear at seemingly all levels of competitive sports, in virtually all sports.

Size matters.

At least it seems to matter a great deal to scouts, analysts and those who too often make decisions—including in the youth sports world—about who is deserving of playing on a certain team, or at a certain level.

An interesting study out of the University of Saskatchewan reminds us that size may be over-rated.

Various media outlets have commented on the study, conducted by University of Saskatchewan researcher Lauren Sherar, which will be published in the November issue of the Journal of Sports Sciences.

The Toronto Star quotes Sherar in a story reviewing his findings:

"All coaches would agree they want to pick the best team but they also need to consider how best to foster future talent," Sherar said in an interview. "By selecting only the biggest kids they are possibly ignoring the smaller, more talented kid who is small because they are late maturing or have a birthday late in the selection year."

This assessment, while important and perhaps newsworthy to some, should not shock any of us who have been around for a while.

While the study seems to focus largely on the late-year birthday factor, too often in sports, from the youngest ages to the professional ranks, players are often dismissed as potential candidates because they simply aren’t “big enough”.

Indeed, a player with skills, determination, a great work ethic and an outstanding attitude who also happens to have good size would seem to have an advantage of sorts over the “small” player with similar attributes. (Yet Dave Keon, to cite but one hockey example at the professional level, competed against Jean Beliveau very well for many years, despite his relatively small stature compared with the much larger Montreal captain. Keon compensated by utilizing his own unique traits.)

But size should not be the key determining factor, especially in youth sports.

Youth coaches often miss players, in hockey and soccer especially, who lack only size to be considered capable of playing at the highest levels.

As the study suggests, if we lose kids at early ages simply because they were weeded out as a result of their size, when in fact (as the study indicates) many of these young athletes often catch up later on in their development, this is surely not a good thing.

And what if some athletes don’t catch up in size?

That should not be the end of their opportunity to compete, either.

If David Eckstein (a major-league baseball player who stands about 5 feet 7 inches, who helped the Angels win the World Series in 2002, and was justifiably named MVP of the 2006 World Series as the shortstop for the St. Louise Cardinals) had listened to those who dismissed him over the years because of his size, lack of arm strength, and other “failings” he would never had made it to the highest levels of his chosen athletic profession.

Ecsktein has made it on determination, work ethic, and attitude.

Not because he was “big” enough to make a team.

Imagine all the people along the way who must have told him he’d never make it.

Staying "On Message" Can Send a Bad Message

There is a field of work in the public relations industry that is referred to as “media training”.

It is generally done in a workshop format, whereby executives are prepared to interact with the media by putting them through their paces in terms of trying to get a sense of how the media operates. They are pushed to anticipate the kinds of questions spokespersons from a given company may face when they make a particular announcement or respond to an issue that has arisen.

No doubt someone has documented when this kind of ‘media preparation’ first took place in a formal sense (perhaps the Kennedy-Nixon TV debates leading up to the 1960 U.S. Presidential election, when both candidates when through a number of rehearsals), but this has been going on informally for generations.

Spokespeople going through this training process are routinely told to focus on delivering “three key messages”.

The notion of focusing on delivering a select few messages makes sense, as the struggle to effectively deliver a laundry list of important ideas can end up diffusing the impact a spokesperson or organization is aiming for.

Unfortunately, part of the process usually involves telling the “trainee” they should stick to their messages no matter what.

That is, even if they are asked a fair and reasonable question, if it is one they don’t want to answer, they should either ignore the question and simply “deliver their message” anyway, or say something such as, “I’m not here to talk about that, I’d like to talk about our new plans for….”

This brings to mind the recent Hall-of-Fame weekends in both Major League Baseball and the National Football League that brought forward the imminent prospect of Mark McGuire being up for consideration for Cooperstown. (The results of the Hall-of-Fame voting will be released in January, 2007.)

It’s brought to mind because it was McGuire who appeared before a Congressional committee last year and kept “sticking to his message” (as he was no doubt told to do by either lawyers or his PR advisors) and repeating, when pressed about whether he had used performance-enhancing drugs: ”I’m not here to talk about the past…” before launching into his rehearsed message track about how he would like to positively influence young people in the future, etc.

A very nice message, to be sure.

Unfortunately, it was almost completely obscured by – and quite properly so—his ill-advised attempt to not answer questions directly, to avoid revealing anything about his own actions that could have indeed set baseball on a more honest and straightforward path.

By choosing the old, worn tactic of “sticking to his message”, ignoring the questions he was being asked, and so obviously not answering questions directly, he wavered badly off the high road. He left a horrible impression in the minds of the public and the media, and lost all credibility.

Based on his statistical accomplishments (assuming he was “clean”, which his testimony did nothing to affirm), McGuire indeed deserves induction into the prestigious baseball Hall.

But taking the advice given to too many politicians over the years, to “stay on message” no matter what, has put him in the same class in most people’s minds as the vast majority of political-types: they are seen as being untrustworthy, evasive and as lacking integrity and credibility.

A missed opportunity to communicate truly effectively may have not only cost McGuire an opportunity to make a real difference to our youth through taking an opportunity to acknowledge his errors and seek forgiveness. It may well keep him out of the Hall in 2007, and well beyond.