This is a universal journey for players such as Podein, and it reminded me of a talk I had with Paul Ranheim about the same subject. Ranheim was raised in Edina, Minnesota, and after he retired from his long professional hockey career in the NHL he coached Minnesota high school hockey with Podein at St. Louis Park High School and currently coaches at Eden Prairie High School, a hockey powerhouse in Minnesota. During the late 1980s, Ranheim was a collegiate all-American at the University of Wisconsin and a lofty second-round pick of the Calgary Flames. When Ranheim turned pro in 1988, the Flames were a stocked team, loaded with veterans who were dug into their roles and the lineup. More important, the Battle of Alberta between the Flames and the Edmonton Oilers was raging, and it was no place for a college kid to start his career. So the Flames sent the twenty-two- year-old Ranheim down to their IHL minor league affiliate, the Salt Lake Golden Ea- gles, in Utah.
“We bused to towns like Flint, Michigan, and Muskegon and Peoria, and it was a real mental test,” Ranheim says. “We’d play three games in four nights. It’d be dreary out and miserable, and we’d pull into these towns in the middle of the night. You’d stare out the window and ask yourself, How bad do I really want this?”
“Nova Scotia was the true minor leagues,” Podein says. “Last call at the bar Smooth Herman’s was three forty-five in the morning. Everyone thinks pro hockey is like Zach Parise: ten million dollars a year. Between the taxes and finances and exchange rate and agent fees, I literally lost money playing professional hockey for the first year.”
Life on the road in the NHL means that the team bus picks up the players at their swank hotel, with its five-star chef, Egyptian cotton sheets, and center-city lo- cale, and then conveniently drops them off on the tarmac next to their chartered plane. In the minor leagues, though, the players get on the bus, and it doesn’t stop until it gets to the next town. In the minor leagues, all the players, regardless of their skill level or draft selection, are literally on the same bus. Whether it’s a muck- er like Shjon Podein playing in Nova Scotia for the Cape Breton Oilers or a highly valued draft pick like Charlie Coyle playing in Houston for the Aeros or a former NCAA Hobey Baker Award finalist like Paul Ranheim doesn’t matter. If you’re in the minors, you’re on the bus: veterans in the back, rookies up front, and pizzas deliv- ered straight to the bus as it idles outside the arena after the game. Every player looks out the same window as the bus drives across the country into these minor- league towns that are stuck out on the margins of the sports world: there are the sun-scrubbed frontier towns out West, where hockey is nothing more than a circus attraction; there are the blue-collar towns of the Midwest, cities that have typically been pummeled by a failing economy and are now rusting carcasses of their for- mer industrial selves; and there are the East Coast towns that are encased in con- crete and shrouded in sheet-metal skies.
Ranheim remembers playing in ice rinks with names like the Corn Palace and the Salt Palace. These rinks were so far off the map, so far from the bright lights of Madison Square Garden, so far away from the buzzing metropolitan NHL hubs, that they were like islands in the South Pacific. Some of these arenas would have so few fans that an air of ambivalence hung over the game with enough weight to crush all the hopes and dreams in a player’s heart, making him question his career choice and his future.
In the next game, Ranheim’s team would enter a raucous bunker of an arena and play against an opponent and a town that treated the game like it was the last stand at the Alamo. Despite the shuttered factories and downturned economy, the town would be more than ready for the game at hand, each fan having circled it on his calendar with the finality of a death sentence. Each player knew he had to get up for the game, for the battle at hand, because it would all be on the line for their team and the town.
“We had a really tough team, too. Five guys with over two hundred penalty utes. And we had Stu Grimson,” Ranheim quips. “Oh boy, did we have some bat- tles.”
The hard times of daily life in these minor-league towns could be sensed in the rink on game night. It would be a Friday night in Peoria, Illinois. The beer would be cheap, served in tall wax-paper cups. The city’s main employer, maybe a tire factory or an auto plant, would be struggling. There’d be rumors of layoffs, which felt like a noose being tied slowly around the whole town. But the fans would not think about any of that on game night. These minor-league fans had spent what little money they had for a slight reprieve, and they’d come to see their beloved Peoria Rivermen play. The fans paid for their tickets with their calluses, their square shoulders, their lives spent under hard hats, and would award themselves full license to berate the opponent. Through cupped fists and with pungent beer breath they would bark out words like “twat” and “fuckhole” as the visiting team came out onto the ice. Some- times they would throw dead rodents onto the ice. They would bang the glass and pound drums and clang cowbells. And that’d just be in warm-ups.
After the game, regardless of the outcome, it would be back on the bus to the next town, to the next game, and to the next battle.
“Each bus ride was long enough to be uncomfortable but not long enough to let you sleep,” Ranheim says. “We’d bus all night from Milwaukee to Indianapolis. I remember on that trip thinking that it was fall and football season and that I’d rather be home with my buddies watching a game. Then we pulled into our hotel, called the Knights Inn. I entered my room straight from the parking lot. I opened the door to my room, and the first thing I saw was purple velour sheets. It was dis- gusting. But we were all paying our dues.”
Podein sympathizes with Ranheim’s plight and lets out a riotous snort as he re- calls his own “welcome to the minor leagues” moment. After a long road trip, the Cape Breton team pulled into the home arena, and Podein’s car was up on blocks. Someone had taken the tires, which were worth more than the car.
“Podes just stood there not knowing what to do,” Kirk Maltby, a Cape Breton teammate, says, laughing.
As Podein bounced back and forth between the minors and the luxurious big league, he needed more than just physical strength. He had to continuously stoke his inner fire and his love of the game, the same things that had fueled him on those drives between Rochester and Duluth. He remembered the ’78 Vega; he remembered Duluth’s initial rejection. So he kept plugging away, charging up that ladder to ring the big bell.
Every player in the minor leagues has to do this. They have to find their own per- sonal way of getting up for the game at hand and the long road beyond it. AHL ros- ters are a mix of valued draft picks and retreads, of lifers and developing rookies, of Canadians and American college kids and European imports. And each one of these players is working inside this harsh unknown of what they have to do to get the call-up. A player can lead his team in points, like Ranheim did in Salt Lake City, and still not get the call. A player can routinely scrape with the toughest bastards in the minor leagues, game after game, like David Clarkson did in Albany, New York, and still not get the call. A player can grow into a power forward and be a bull “For a guy to get the call-up to the big club, so many things had to happen for him,” Ranheim admits. “You would need luck, skill, timing, someone in your cor- ner, and all of that has to come together.” below the goal line and in the corners and a sound player defensively, like Charlie Coyle in Houston, and still not get the call. But because they have worked so hard to get to that point, one rung below the NHL, they soldier forward.
“For a guy to get the call-up to the big club, so many things had to happen for him,” Ranheim admits. “You would need luck, skill, timing, someone in your cor- ner, and all of that has to come together.”
But when a player finally gets the call-up to the big club, his journey is only just beginning.
Maybe the player stays up in the NHL for only a week or two. Maybe it’s a month. They go from playing heavy minutes and being the league point leader in the AHL to being a healthy scratch for five games in a row in the NHL. If they make it into the starting lineup, maybe they play only sparingly and sit on the bench for long stretches, the sweat underneath their pads drying on their body, the chill a cold reality in more ways than one.
“It’s such a difficult thing to make it in the NHL. Guys were always coming up. Guys were always going down,” Ranheim says. “Guys were always thinking that they should be up there in the NHL. And when they were not there, it was a ques- tion of how did they react. Are they mentally strong enough? Is he going to fold? Or is he going to fight? There was always going to be players with more talent. But the mentally tough guys stuck in the NHL, and the weaker ones didn’t.”
PODEIN HAD MORE THAN enough motivation in his tank to get him through the slog of the American Hockey League. After several trips up and down between Cape Breton and Edmonton, Podein finally stuck in the NHL. And he had a helluva time doing it. During his numerous stints in Edmonton, longtime Oiler veteran Craig MacTavish was put in charge of him as a mentor.
“He was a godsend to me,” Podein says. “I enjoyed life a little too much when I was younger.”
Podein took to heart MacTavish’s veteran wisdom and guidance. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a little fun along the way. They were roommates on the road. After a lengthy road trip, Podein’s brothers and his mom flew into town to visit. After the Podein brothers tucked their dear mom in for the night, things got a little wild.
“It was my twenty-fifth birthday,” Podein says with a playful smirk.
They went out with the team, and at the end of the night Podein ended up in the hotel hallway wearing nothing but his underwear. It was dark out and he couldn’t find his room. He resorted to going down numerous hallways and trying his key in random doors.
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