Untitled - Christopher Shulgan

GETTING ROUGHED UP IN THE CORNERS?
HAD ENOUGH OF THE OTHER TEAM’S TOUGH GUY PICKING ON YOU?
THEN IT’S TIME YOU TOOK A CLASS WITH FORMER NHL ENFORCER MIKE MARSON, THE GO-TO
MAN FOR UP-AND-COMING HOCKEY STARS TIRED OF HAVING ICE SPRAYED IN THEIR FACE
SAY HELLO
TO TIE DOMI’S
WORST NIGHTMARE
by ch r i sto ph e r s hu l g a n
W
ph oto g r a ph s by s a n dy n i ch o l s o n
hen you see it on tape, it’s the type of hit that
gets paused and rewound, and played again, and
paused again, then slo-moed, then maybe even
frame-advanced – this remarkable collision, and
what came after. It happened during the first shift in an
Ontario Hockey League game this March in Erie, Pennsylvania, versus the hometown Otters. Zack Shepley, a defenceman for Michigan’s Plymouth Whalers, follows an opposing
forward into the corner to battle for a loose puck. The puck
pops out and just as Shepley turns to go after it – here’s
where you fumble for the pause button – another Otter, an
Otter with velocity, with cross-rink momentum, sinks a
shoulder deep into the Whaler defenceman. Shepley is sixfoot-three and weighs about 195 pounds, but the force
ricochets him a body’s length backward. It knocks off his
helmet. And here’s the next stomach-turning moment: Shepley’s unprotected skull collides with the boards. His body
crumples. Then, through an act of will, motivated by instinct
NOVEMBER 2005 T ORO
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Zack Shepley (left), a defenceman with the OHL’s Plymouth
Whalers, in training with Mike Marson
– it’s a defenceman’s responsibility to clear the
puck – he stands.
“Stay the fuck down,” yells his goalie.
Shepley has no choice. He collapses after a
few pushes. In the stands his mother gasps and
thinks skull fracture, brain damage. Shepley is
helped off the ice. The team physician diagnoses him with a concussion. He misses the
four games remaining in the regular season
before Plymouth’s medical staff clears Shepley
to play in the playoffs. But when Plymouth is
swept in the first round by Owen Sound, the
seventeen-year-old’s play isn’t the same.
In May, with the Whalers season complete,
Shepley and his dad meet with his agent, Paul
Capizzano, to establish what Shepley must
add to his game to become an NHL contender.
The defenceman just completed his first fullseason in the OHL. He’d played fifty-four
games, and even before the concussion, he
seemed a little too conscious that he was defending against meaner men, some as old as
twenty. He took a lot of guff on ice, racking up
only twenty-two penalty minutes in a league
where the tougher players log 100-plus.
“Against some guys, I played a little differently,” Shepley says. “Fighting was something
I was trying to avoid.” Everyone agrees that
Shepley needs to become nastier – to play like
the big defenceman he is. He has to toughen up.
“How do we do that?” asks Shepley.
His agent knows a guy – a former NHL
player who has a black belt in karate. He runs
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T ORO NOVEMBER 2005
a program that teaches hockey fighting like it’s
a martial art, and he’s supposed to really help
the players who work with him – including
guys like 2002’s first-overall draft pick Rick
Nash, now with the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Last summer, the guy worked with several
players Shepley probably knows, the agent
says, including Erie Otters centre Ryan
O’Marra and Oshawa Generals brawler Devereaux Heshmatpour.
“What’s his name?” asks Bret Shepley,
Zack’s dad.
“Mike Marson,” counters the agent.
“Geez,” exclaims Zack’s dad, surprised. “I
know Mike Marson.”
A
week later, Zack Shepley and his
dad arrive at the dojo Marson sublets
from a Brazilian jiu-jitsu outfit, descending a flight of stairs next to a
doughnut shop just off Yonge Street, in north
Toronto. Even in May the windowless basement is humid. There are two rooms, both
floored in rubber mats, and where the walls
don’t have pads there are oil paintings of
mean-looking men in combat. Every eight
minutes or so, the floor rumbles as a subway
train passes below. Above, the exposed pipes
carry an echo from the doughnut shop’s
flushing toilets.
Decades have passed since Zack’s dad last
saw Mike Marson, whom the elder Shepley
watched on the ice when he was a boy in
Chatham, Ontario. Back then, in the early
1970s, Marson played left wing for the Junior-
A Chatham Maroons. Bret noticed Marson
because he was black, which was rare in those
days, and a force of nature on the ice – a scorer
who also received accolades for his physical
style of play.
“If you got into his territory, he made you
pay for it,” recalls Bret, who followed Marson’s
career after he left Chatham to be drafted
fourth overall into the OHL (then called the
Ontario Hockey Association), where he played
with the Sudbury Wolves, and was named
captain in his second year. Marson, who
developed a reputation as a knockout artist,
racked up ninety-four points and 146 penalty
minutes in sixty-nine games. His combination of soft hands and hard fists got him
drafted by the Washington Capitals in 1974,
number nineteen overall, three spots before
Bryan Trottier. They signed him to a threeyear contract in the ballpark of US$100,000.
Marson was the NHL’s second black player,
and the first in more than a decade.
The Mike Marson who shakes Bret Shepley’s hand looks a lot different than he did in
his playing days. In the mid-’70s, Marson
wore his hair in an Afro and sported a thick
black Fu Manchu. Now, a few months shy of
his fiftieth birthday, Marson wears a karate
ghi. Under a smooth pate, his moustache
shows flecks of grey. Marson has always been
muscular; he stands only five-foot-eight but
in the NHL his playing weight was 200 pounds.
In contrast, the man who shakes Shepley’s
hand weighs nearly 300 pounds. Marson
resembles a bowling ball with legs, more
sumo wrestler than fifth-degree karate master.
Marson and Bret Shepley finish discussing
old times, and Bret leaves. “Well, let’s get to it,
Zack,” Marson says, his voice a deep bass.
Marson leads Zack through five minutes of
stretches and then asks the young OHLer to
put on boxing gloves. Marson, who dons pads,
goes through several different combinations
with Zack. He demonstrates how to snap the
jab. Each time Zack does a set of punches –
ten usually, at this point – his tongue extends
out past his lips. Mike shows the proper foot
positioning for the straight right punch, and
how to extend the fist for maximum power.
“It’s just like a slapshot,” says Marson to Zack,
in one of the many hockey analogies he’ll use
that day. “It’s all in the hips.”
The hardest task of the one-hour session
comes immediately after the punching drills,
when Marson has Zack shove him up against
“the blue meanie” – a big blue pad set against
the basement’s western-most wall – no easy
task, considering Marson’s bulk. There’s some
strength training, push-ups and sit-ups, which
AD
Zack is surprised to see Marson doing too.
And then, the hour is up.
E
ach saturday through the spring
and into the summer, Shepley works
with Marson, who demonstrates he
has hidden in his bowling-ball silhouette far more strength, and a hell of a lot more
agility, than Shepley might have imagined. In
turn, by about June, Marson is beginning to
wonder about Shepley. The player remains
tentative, too genial in his punching drills – in
other words, too nice.
Approximately a dozen players work with
Marson each summer. Probably half are new,
that is, in their first summer with him. It takes
a couple of workouts for the new crop, Shepley
included, to learn the routine: how, after the
initial stretch, Marson likes to put his charges
through about a quarter-hour’s worth of
punching drills to refine their form. Then
comes sparring, which can sometimes last the
remainder of the hour. For the new guys, the
sparring sessions are fairly easy. The key
moments happen at the blue meanie. Marson
sets himself with his back against the pad and
beckons Shepley to get close. With his left
hand Marson grasps Shepley’s shirt collar,
and Shepley does the same. Then, moving in
slow motion, Marson wafts a roundhouse at
Shepley’s brow. Shepley is supposed to block
it by sweeping up his free forearm. Another
roundhouse, and Shepley blocks that with a
downward sweep.
At the next blow, Shepley dodges left,
extends his right hand up above Marson’s
blow, and catches Marson’s arm in the crook
of his elbow. He sinks down now, forcing
Marson to bend at the elbow, and Shepley
threads his right arm up to grab Marson’s left
wrist, effectively immobilizing both Marson’s
arms. Now Shepley’s other hand is free to let
go of Marson’s collar. With his opponent tied
up, Shepley can throw as many punches as he
wishes.“Good,” says Marson, his voice muffled.
“Let’s try that again. A little faster.”
It’s a move Marson teaches to all his students, one designed to lock up an opponent
and free an arm, allowing the player who can
do it the opportunity to rain punches on his
foe – or to simply wait, to stand there until the
referees rush in. The move is easy enough to
do in slow motion. But at anything above
half-speed, Shepley has trouble.
Fifteen minutes before Shepley’s session is
to end, another player walks into the otherwise
deserted dojo. Ryan O’Marra, an OHL centre
drafted fifteenth overall this summer by the
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New York Islanders, has the slot after Shepley,
and he’s early. Sensing an opportunity, Marson
has O’Marra take his spot and watches as the
two seventeen-year-olds grapple against the
big blue mat. Shepley tries to tie up O’Marra’s
arm. This should be fairly easy; Shepley has
about seventeen pounds on O’Marra, and two
inches of height. But Shepley can’t tie him up.
When they switch positions, O’Marra succeeds
in easily locking up Shepley, then, with his
free hand, delivers a couple of good hard
knocks to Shepley’s brow. By the time his
hour is up, Shepley has endured a solid fifteen
minutes of manhandling.
Such sessions normalize combat for the
players. Marson’s weekly instruction wipes
away the mystery of combat. He can be brutal
with his veteran players, especially during
sparring. Veterans like O’Marra know they can
take a punch in the head without collapsing
because Marson has punched them in the
head, and they haven’t collapsed. “All that
sparring means they don’t panic when they
get tied up by a brawler,” says Joe Resnick, Rick
Nash’s agent, who encouraged Nash to see
Marson when he was sixteen, going from bantam, where fighting is strongly discouraged,
into the OHL, where it’s almost mandatory.
“After the initial session, I remember Rick
being a little startled at the way Mike sparred
with him – just throwing him around,” says
Jamie Nash, Rick’s dad. “After some sessions
I’d pick up Rick and he’d talk about how a
punch Mike threw at him really had him seeing stars. I just said, ‘That’s the way it is, Rick.
Mike Marson, at one point the only black player in the
NHL, joined the Washington Capitals in 1974.
dled the bigger Shepley is that O’Marra has
learned to tap into the power of ferocity. He
doesn’t shirk from getting a little angry during
these sessions, because O’Marra, like most of
Marson’s veterans, has realized that there’s
power in anger.
The week after Shepley sparred with
O’Marra, on a sweltering day in late June,
Shepley descends the stairs to the gym. It’s
humid and smells rank, like the inside of a
post-game hockey glove. Marson’s head is
already glossy, a sweaty, ebony dome that
MARSON WANTS HIS
STUDENTS TO SNAP
You can’t throw a punch without knowing
what it’s like to take a punch.’ Rick learned
something from Marson. He found out a
punch wasn’t going to kill him.”
During sparring sessions, Marson’s veterans all seem to realize that they’re no longer
kids playing a kids’ game. Many of his clients
begin seeing him because they have what you
might call a reality problem: Their immature
minds haven’t caught up with their suddenly
adult bodies. It’s Marson’s job to teach them
the power they can wield. To tap that power,
Marson needs to get the student angry. One
way to account for the way O’Marra manhan-
couldn’t be more wet if he was showering.
Reggae music plays from the sound system.
Marson’s in his ghi. Shepley’s wearing a New
York Rangers T-shirt.
Ten minutes into the workout, Marson has
Shepley shadowboxing, a drill where he
punches, rotates a quarter turn, punches twice,
rotates a quarter turn – all told, four different
stations. “This is all about protecting the net,”
says Marson.“When a forward comes into your
zone, you clear him out –” And here Shepley
does his two punches – “And then you move
to the next guy.”
But Shepley’s still holding back. His jab is
AD
tense. He’s putting too much thought into his
straight right. Looking for something to jar
his charge loose, Marson gets Shepley to don
the sixteen-ounce boxing gloves as he slips on
the pads. “You’re about to perform your craft,
Zack,” says Marson. “Nothing in your life gets
in the way of this.” Until now Marson’s been
talking to Shepley in a conversational tone.
Now he shouts with all the power his 300pound frame can muster: “Freedom!” Shepley
flinches. It’s obvious he’s startled by the sudden
volume in this confined space.
There’s a scene in The Dirty Dozen, just
after Lee Marvin’s character has assembled his
crew of criminal soldiers, when he’s still trying
to gauge their mettle. One of them is Clint
Walker, who plays an Austrian strongman in
jail for killing a man who shoved him. Marvin
singles out the Austrian, and does something
he knows will bug him: He shoves him. “Don’t
push me,” the guy says. “I don’t like to be
pushed.” Marvin, a dwarf next to this European giant, shoves him again. It takes several
more shoves before the Austrian snaps and
goes after Marvin.
Watching what Marson does next with
Shepley is a little like that; Marson wants to
push Shepley until he snaps. After the first
punch, Marson stops the drill. He steps toward
Zack, whose arms hang at his sides. “Think of
this as a fight for your life,” says Marson. “I
will not face death like that. I will face death
like – ”And here Marson steps in closer, maybe
an inch from Shepley’s face, and he roars at
the best volume he can manage, so Shepley’s
ears go deaf for a second and his nose fills with
bellowing at each other like a pair of lunatics,
Marson pulling out the hockey references
now, anything to get Zack excited. “It’s a slapshot Zack. Swivel the hips!” and Shepley is
slamming his knuckles into Marson’s palm
with more energy than he’s ever mustered.
“Good, Zack – you’ve got it. Now try again.
Thirty seconds on the clock.”
Shepley switches up sides and he’s shouting
as he makes the punches and it’s the funniest
thing: Now, as he hits, he’s hissing out his
exhales, and his tongue has disappeared. His
punches are knocking back Marson. Shepley’s
realized he’s not a fifteen-year-old kid any
more. Now, at seventeen, he’s a six-foot-three,
215-pound monster with trapezoids like eagle
wings and powerful legs and suddenly he’s
manhandling Marson. When it’s over, Marson
exclaims, “What an improvement!”
T
oughness is a strange quality. Its
nature is the reason Marson is as key to
toughening these kids up as the kids are
themselves. What’s crucial to Marson’s
method is that these kids trust him. They
must believe what he says for his method to
work. They do because Marson is an easy guy
to respect. At fifty, Marson exercises with
them, doing every sit-up and push-up he asks
of them. Throughout the summer, as Marson
works out, he drops the weight he gained
during the winter, so that by August he’s
down around 275.
These kids respect Marson for another reason, too. Marson has overcome some serious
“MY GUYS WILL RULE
IN THE CORNERS”
the scent of whatever Marson had for breakfast. Just as he did before, Shepley flinches. He
steps back, seems about to say something to
Marson – maybe: “Quit yelling in my face, you
fuck” – but thinks better of it and returns to his
punching stance. His next punch is a little
harder, but it’s not enough for Marson, and
again he roars in Shepley’s face.
And again, Shepley flinches. Then, almost
before Marson gets his pads up, Shepley is
punching at him, starting with the straight
lefts and now he’s roaring, yelling with each
punch, as Marson shouts back, the two of them
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adversity over the years. The facts come out
during his stream-of-consciousness narrations
to their punching.“I wish I had a Mike Marson
when I was seventeen,” Marson says. Or: “Have
you ever been rich?” Inevitably, from these
kids, the answer is no. “It’s nice, it’s nice.” And
he’ll talk about his first car, a Jaguar Mark II.
Marson is not rich any more. And this
training is something he does only on the side
for a little extra cash. It’s not his main gig.
Marson’s NHL savings have long since dried
up. In fact, the NHL contributed substantially
to the adversity Marson faced. He went pro in
the ’70s, when things were a lot more brutal,
and, for at least one of those years, Marson
was the only black kid in an otherwise white
league. Players dropped the n-bomb like the
f-bomb. Marson received death threats pasted
together from words cut out of magazines
and newspapers. One read: “You’re skating on
thin ice black boy… The nigger is going to die
if it thinks it belongs in a white man’s game.”
This was decades before the age of terrorism.
It would have been comparatively easy to
smuggle a firearm into a crowded hockey arena.
Things weren’t any better at home. Marson’s
mother died the year before the NHL drafted
him. When he was in his early twenties, one of
his two brothers died of an aneurysm. Marson’s
first season in the NHL was also the Capitals’
inaugural year. He totalled twenty-eight
points – not bad for a rookie – but the rest of
the Capitals squad was dismal, setting league
records for fewest wins (eight), most defeats
(sixty-seven), and most goals allowed (446).
Struggling with his weight, fan racism, and
his own unpopularity with his teammates,
Marson bounced back and forth between the
pros and the Capitals farm organization for the
next several years. He developed a reputation
as a brawler. In 1976, his wife had complained
to the Washington Post that Marson’s inability
to get playing time might have had racist origins. By 1980, Marson had left hockey.
Now, after Marson finishes his Saturday
sessions, he sometimes has to rush to his home
in Toronto’s Leaside neighbourhood, grab a
nap, and then drive to work. He’s driven a bus
for the Toronto Transit Commission for
almost twenty-five years. Other players, especially brawlers, often have a tough time after
leaving the NHL, battling addiction and
depression. Marson had his share of those
troubles, but it didn’t stop him from getting
a typically blue-collar job. After all, at the age
of twenty-five, he had two kids to feed, and
another on the way. Now, after Marson’s spent
the day working with NHL prospects, some of
whom will go on to make pro-league annual
salaries in the millions, he might pull an overtime shift, driving the night route famous in
Toronto as the “vomit comet,” transporting
raucous clubgoers north along Yonge Street.
The next morning, he’ll sleep a few hours,
then drive to another gym, where he works
with more young hockey players.
Well into August, Shepley continues
attending Marson’s Saturday sessions. With
two weeks remaining in the summer, he
switches to two sessions a week – one each on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. Shepley’s shaved the
red fuzz that burred out from his head, and his
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newly shorn scalp gives him a look. He’s soldier mean. Prison-yard hard. Marson narrates these sessions in Ali-esque free-association rants. There’s little instruction now.
Instead, Marson restricts himself to encouragement. “Zack, this season? Once you get on
the ice? You’ll be a different player.”
After one drill, Marson even claps for Shepley.“Oh man,” says Marson, shaking his head.
“Wait until they get a load of you.”
The grappling’s become more intense;
every so often, especially if Shepley lands a
punch, Marson will answer with a hefty
knock on his skull, explaining, “When you
came here, you were a rookie, Zack. You’re not
a rookie anymore. Now, you have privileged
information.” The sparring sessions happen
at full-speed, and Shepley is explosive, tying
up Marson in a second. “When Shepley came
in here he was a boy,” shouts Marson from
inside a Shepley chokehold. “Now you can see
it in his eyes. He’s a man. He’s a six-footthree-inch demon!”
M
any ohl teams send their players
to local boxing schools to teach
them how to handle physical punishment. Every good trainer knows
a former pro who’ll take a few bucks to teach
a prospect how to hit an opponent’s helmet
so it clatters to the ice, or how to throw a solid
haymaker. But where Marson excels is in the
mental side of the process.
Marson’s teaching methods aren’t perfect.
His rants on Eastern spirituality frequently go
over his young charges’ heads. He trains his
students on the ice only reluctantly, if their
parents pester him to do it. That seems wrong.
It’s like Rob Lowe’s hockey dad says in Youngblood, “You can learn to punch in the barn.
But you’ve got to learn to survive on the ice.”
Still, as O’Marra and Nash and dozens of
other students attest, Marson’s method works.
It works because, after a summer with Marson,
his students believe they’re tougher. On some
level, what Marson does in these training sessions is irrelevant. His process is really akin to
a benevolent brainwashing. They could be
practising tiddlywinks. They could have spent
one hour every Saturday of the summer
flipping coins on the dojo’s blue mat. And so
long as Marson convinced them that flipping
coins makes them tougher, then come September, they’ll play tougher. And when an opposing fighter drops his gloves and starts into that
weird little reverse-wiggle skate that is the prelude to every punch-up, Marson’s boy will send
his own mitts to the ice, and get into it.
“My guys are going to rule in the corners
this year,” Marson tells an onlooker, with Shepley in hearing range. The thing is: Shepley
will rule in the corners, because Marson has
convinced Shepley – as he did Rick Nash,
Ryan O’Marra, and all the others – that he’s
got the tools to stand up for himself. Most of
Marson’s guys already had the tools. They just
didn’t know it.
“What it’s done with Zack is instill a large
amount of confidence,” says Bret Shepley.
“He feels he can face anyone now. Even the
way he carries himself is different. When he’s
walking around at home, I don’t know what it
is, exactly, but you can tell he’s six-foot-three.
And, just hearing him talk it’s not, ‘If I can do
this.’ Now, it’s ‘when I do this.’ ”
Training camp begins in September with
the usual round of physical testing. Shepley
impresses Whalers coach Mike Vellucci with
his vastly improved condition. In the off-season, he’d grown a half-inch and packed on 17
pounds. Shepley’s bench press score – based
on the number of times a player can lift 150
pounds – more than doubles, from six to thirteen. Even his running scores improve dramatically, which is unusual with such an increase
in strength.
But what the coaches really notice is an
improvement in Shepley’s on-ice performance.
“It’s obvious that he worked hard this summer,” says Vellucci. “He came into training
camp in great shape, and on the ice, you can
really see him playing more physically.” His
assistant coach, Todd Watson, concurs with
Vellucci: “He’s got more confidence this year.”
Shepley may never be the type of defenceman
who scores thirty goals a season, and he certainly won’t become a permanent fixture in
the penalty box, like the Maple Leafs’ Tie
Domi or former Red Wing Bob Probert. What
Shepley’s summer with Marson added was a
willingness to use his body. He’ll use his body
to deliver the same hits he was receiving at the
end of last season. And when the time comes,
he’ll raise his fists.
“Last season, fighting was always in the
back of my mind,” says Shepley, swigging
from a bottle of water after one particularly
brutal late-summer session. “You know who
the fighters are. Some of those guys just snap,
and you think about it – don’t do anything to
make them go after you.” Another sip from
the water bottle, and then Shepley shrugs.
“This year, I don’t really care about fighting.
If it happens, it happens.” He’s ready. Ω
Christopher Shulgan interviewed screenwriter Graham Yost
for this year’s April issue.
NOVEMBER 2005 T ORO
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