The Dominator - Canadian Writers Group

Sports
The alleged affair, the apoplectic wife, the ridiculed attempt
to become a TV commentator. It’s been a miserable year for Tie
Domi. Story of my life, he says. Next question By Lynn Crosbie
The Dominator
“IT’S TIE. WHO DID YOU TALK TO? What did
they say?”
In the course of my strange, rousing encounter with Tie Domi (which began with
a phone call last November and continued
for four months), I would receive numerous similar calls, throughout the day or
into the night, each one seeking the same
things: information and reassurance.
He’d ask me if I liked the “schnitzel joke”
he extemporized on Win, Lose and Tie, his
and James Duthie’s lively intermission
segment on TSN’s Wednesday broadcasts,
if I had talked to a certain hateful so-andso (any number of his detractors), or if,
when the phone rang, I thought it was “a
booty call.” And every time I would hear
the same commixture of defiance, menace
(“I will lose it if you start quoting unnamed
sources”), and plaintive hope that someone,
somewhere, will speak well of him.
The recently retired Leafs enforcer is, ultimately, both combative and needy, a paradox that is not unusual in anyone who has
ever had to fight for a living. “Will you talk
about, you know, how I look?” he asked me
several times, until I told him he looked all
right. Which is true: he is leaner and taller
than I had been led to believe (although, at
five foot 10, he is small in the world of giant
goons), and is firmly possessed of that ineffable quality, charisma.
Domi’s allure is like a blast of Axe body spray. He is an expert
flirt, but that is not his greatest talent. Given to leaning back, then
forward, suddenly, in conversation, he is spectacularly adept at
making one lose one’s composure. Anyone who watched Domi
play understands it was the element of surprise that served him
best: when he’d attack, he would smile; when nailed for a fi ght,
or simply furious, he might, for example, condescendingly toss
an autographed stick at the opposing team. When someone once
threw a banana at the “ape,” he ate it, and
when a Flyers fan heckled him in the penalty box, Domi sprayed him with his water
bottle until the man lunged at the Plexiglas
divider with such force that it finally gave
way, sending him down into the box, where
he looked remarkably like a gerbil in a cobra’s terrarium.
MAY 2007 | TORONTOLIFE.COM | TORONTO LIFE 31
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Hanging tough:
former Leaf Tie Domi
is full of contradictions—combative yet
charming, a fighter
whose favourite
song is Elton John’s
“Candle in the Wind”
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“In the back of everybody’s mind, I’m just
a tough guy,” Domi says. And no wonder.
With a career total of 3,515 penalty minutes,
the former star of such goon Web sites as
NHL Bad Boys once began a friendly interview with the Toronto Sun’s Bill Lankhof by
stating, “I don’t give people too many opportunities. I’m a pretty honest, respectful
guy. If you screw me, then usually I don’t
give you the chance to screw me again.”
But if interviewers are nervous approaching Domi (when I was given his cell
number, my contact said, “He’ll probably
tell you to fuck off”), he’s just as distrustful
of them. His retirement last September was
eclipsed by prurient speculation about his
love life. After months Lover boy: Tie
of jabs, virtually every and Leanne Domi
Canadian paper’s year- at a Leafs event
end roundup men- in 2003; with
Belinda Stronach
tioned “Bel-omi” or the
at a hockey game
man who went “from
in January 2006
enforcer to divorcer.”
“Bel-omi,” of course, is a reference to Domi’s alleged love affair with Liberal MP
Belinda Stronach, a story that Domi’s soonto-be ex-wife Leanne broke, while claiming
he was a “bully” whose sexual misconduct
also extended to Relic Hunter Tia Carrere.
His once perfect hockey wife also publicly
accused her husband of coming home very
late at night “reeking of alcohol and smoke.”
And when Domi was quickly pulled from
his first TSN job as a panellist and a new
role was carved out for him as a blunt commentator on Win, Lose and Tie, the move
was widely characterized as a demotion
until TSN started forcing retractions.
All in all, it’s been a miserable year for
Domi. Once considered a devout family man and a gold-hearted athlete—his
charitable acts include his yearly Santa on
Wheels program, the Variety Village Sport
Training and Fitness Centre, and Rose
Cherry’s Home—the newly retired hockey
player’s career ended with fanfare of a
rather unexpected sort.
TIE DOMI LOOKS UNCOMFORTABLE. “You like,
what, art and books and stuff?” he replies
when I ask if he’s ever read Sun Tzu’s Art
of War. We’re sitting at a conference table
at Tie Domi Enterprises International, or
TDE, located near Yonge and York Mills,
across from the blue neon-signed Evan-
y
l
l
a
u
Virtry paper
eve ntioned r
me l-omi” oho
“Be man w
the t from o
wenforcer t
“en orcer”
div
gel Temple and an arc of sepulchral commercial buildings. The office is a mixture
of art and sports: a plasma TV plays TSN
continuously, a florid work of modern art
dominates the adjacent wall, and Olive, the
teacup poodle belonging to Domi’s loyal assistant Shelley Bunda, whirls around like
she owns the place.
TDE is a company that, as Bunda tersely
puts it, is “the results-oriented authority in
importing and exporting, distribution, corporate acquisitions and business consulting.” When pressed to describe it in more
detail, Domi says, “I am an entrepreneur,”
but he refuses to elaborate on what, precisely, he imports, exports or acquires.
Within TDE’s high-tech confines, Domi
is dressed in deceptively casual wear: impeccable jeans and a striped dress shirt.
The long boardroom table is flanked by
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large photographs of pipework and a scarlet Russian freighter. “I like art that means
something personal,” he says.
Since his hockey retirement, he has focused on building his business and learning the ropes as a TV commentator. He
spends one afternoon a week at TSN’s
Scarborough studio, where he is slowly
becoming an expert at the art of the sound
bite. Both his co-host Duthie and TSN’s
senior VP of programming and production, Rick Chisholm, express admiration
at his willingness to learn, and surprise at
the lack of attitude from the man many expected to be “the textbook hockey guy.” He
plays tennis every Wednesday at the May-
fair, with the club’s co-owner, Garry Zentil,
who beats him on a regular basis (“I won
my first game last week!” Domi exults). He
also plays chess and table tennis with his
12-year-old son, Max, and surrounds himself with a coterie of friends and family; he
is particularly close to his mother, Meryem, and sister, Trish, and he cites Mario
Lemieux and Mats Sundin as good friends.
Before meeting with me, he hammered
out the legalities of the conversation: his
private life is taboo, thanks in part to a mutually agreed upon court order between
him and Leanne. A well-trained celebrity,
he is always on message, but loosens up
enough to speak with great affection about
his children: about Avery (his eight-yearold daughter) and the arts and crafts she
makes for him, about 13-year-old Carlin’s
love of horses, about Max’s astonishing
athletic talents. His children are what he
values above anything, he tells me.
But Domi is determined to carve out
a successful second career in business,
something that is proving increasingly difPHOTOGRAPHS FROM CP
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ficult in light of his personal circumstances. In court documents filed recently, he
laid out how the negative press was damaging his reputation and, in turn, affecting
his bottom line by jeopardizing his various
endorsement contracts. According to an affidavit, Domi claims his monthly expenses
total $52,000, while his monthly salary
is only $18,270 after taxes and withholdings. Like many retired players, he may be
struggling to maintain the lavish lifestyle
afforded by a steady hockey income.
HOW DOES DOMI FEEL ABOUT attracting hate,
love and nothing in between? “Story of my
life,” he says. This life resembles the trajectory of an errant rocket. He was born
in 1969 in Windsor, Ontario, the youngest
child of Albanian immigrants. (His brother, Dash, is quite a bit older, so they weren’t
as close as he and his sister.) Growing up
in and around Windsor, Domi excelled
at virtually every sport, including soccer,
baseball and football. (He claims he can
still kick a 45-foot field goal “in my sleep.”)
But, “like every Canadian kid,” he dreamed
of hockey fame.
In 1986, at age 16, he left home to play for
the OHL’s Peterborough Petes, where he
quickly distinguished himself as a fighter
and fan favourite. He recalls that in his first
game, he was surreptitiously asked to go
after an infamous thug—which he did with
surprising success. Shaky footage shows
the very young and slight player improbably pulling his opponent to the ice and
whaling on him to the delight of the fans.
A pragmatist, he pressed harder at hockey after spending one summer as a teenager loading watermelons for his cousin at
the Ontario Food Terminal. He realized he
would have to apply himself as an athlete
or risk spending the rest of his life schlepping fruit in and out of a truck.
He finished high school in Peterborough, hating every subject but math and
phys ed, as he lacked the ability to sit still.
Well known for his muscularity, he never
had to lock his locker. When asked if he
was a school heartthrob, he demurs, “I
was a jock, so…” (I take that as a yes.) In
a 2000 documentary about Domi called
What It Takes, Trish remarked that she was
pleased her little brother chose sports, as
she couldn’t imagine his boundless energy
serving him better in any other vocation.
In 1988, Domi was drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs, but because of his age,
he would play another year in Peterborough before joining the Leafs’ farm team
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in Newmarket. A year after that, he was
traded to the Rangers. It was following a
game in New York 16 years ago that Domi
was informed of his father’s death from
heart failure at age 62. He’d collapsed while
playing cards. It was a huge blow. “I think
of him every day,” he says of the man he
cleaved to for advice growing up, whose
counsel he still misses. Not a fan of hockey
fighting, John Domi would caution his son,
“Just play the game, Bubby.”
After New York, Domi did a three-year
stint with the Winnipeg Jets, where he was
as popular with fans as the then-captain,
Teemu Selänne—a fact often remarked
upon by the media. (“What do you want me
to do?” a baffled Domi asked his detractors,
“Tell the fans to stop cheering for me?”)
When he returned to Toronto in 1995, the
same was true here. As Don Cherry observes, on any given night, the Gardens or
ACC crowds were equally decked out in
Sundin and Domi jerseys.
“People like to see some action,” Cherry
says, in a succinct summary of the hockey
violence most commentators abhor. Yet
Domi was more than just a fighter. He was
a talented player who, by most accounts,
was the fastest skater on the team. And
yet, like all perceived goons, he played
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mainly when there was a score to settle. In
the 2002–03 season, Domi scored a careerhigh 15 goals, yet for the next two years, to
Cherry’s outrage and Domi’s frustration,
coach Pat Quinn rarely let him play.
When Domi turned down an offer to
join the Penguins two years ago—he said
he didn’t want to let his Leafs teammates
down—Cherry thought he was “nuts.” If
he’d gone with Pittsburgh, Cherry says,
“he’d still be playing today.”
Leafs GM John Ferguson also speaks
highly of him, citing, beyond his “pugilistic prowess,” his “remarkable stature” as
a player. “He performed such a tough job
for this club. He’s one of the few guys who
could do it for as long as he did.” It’s a sentiment echoed by Leafs star forward Mats
Sundin. Domi’s greatest contribution to the
team, Sundin notes, was “looking after the
marquee players,” while remaining “absolutely an on-line athlete. I miss him. He
makes me laugh. He makes me cry.”
Remarkably, barring her attendance at
his landmark 1,000th game last March—
where she stayed for only one period—
Domi’s mother has never watched him play.
“She sees me as her youngest child, not a
player,” he says. “She sees me as her baby
and doesn’t like people touching or picking
on me.” As for him picking on or touching
others, she doesn’t like that either.
IN THE MIDST OF HIS ASCENT in the NHL,
while playing with the Rangers, Domi married Leanne Coker, a Scarborough girl with
Barbie doll looks. Four years older than
Domi, Coker worked, at the time, in clothing sales, and the two were introduced by a
mutual friend. They had three children in
fairly quick succession, the last of whom,
Avery Rose, is named after Don Cherry’s
deceased wife, Rose. They went on to become hockey family royalty, overseeing the
construction of a stone Tudor mansion on
Oxbow Road and (in Leanne’s case) feeding
the media loving spoonfuls of their idyllic
family life. “Tie’s sweet,” she told the Toronto Sun in 2004. “He’s a lot different than
people expect. He’s not loud, he’s not obnoxious. He’s got a great sense of humour,
very dry, and he makes me laugh.”
Nowadays, everything in Domi-land is
public, and it’s pretty clear that Leanne’s
no longer laughing. Every time she or her
husband files court documents, the gory
details are splattered across the papers.
In searing one-liners, Leanne has accused
Domi of lying through “a full mouth of veneers,” while her credit card—which she’d
been using to cover the family’s expenses—
is maxed out at $100,000. She’s filed documents that suggest Domi’s children fear
him. She alleges that their daughter Carlin
has been the subject of “vicious verbal attacks,” and that Max, a Triple A star, has
been coached, by his father, to fight, and to
be “disrespectful of [his] coach.” None of
her allegations have been proven in court.
Meanwhile, the Sun and National Post
published grainy paparazzi-style photos
of Domi kissing “a woman who resembles
Belinda Stronach” outside Yorkville’s posh
Minto Suites, where Domi’s wife claims he
is residing under the name “Feldman.”
Hockey players, in spite of appearances,
are not permitted to act like rock stars. The
odd scattering of teeth or blood on the ice
notwithstanding, it’s a family game, and
its participants are expected to live like
the Osmonds, not the Osbournes. When
Leanne Domi went public with Tie’s alleged
infidelity, a priggish media responded as
though he were televangelist Jim Bakker.
Domi won’t comment on any of his wife’s
accusations. He is as fearsome defending
his personal life as he is shedding his gloves
and talking the kind of “You’re dead” trash
that led countless players to tear off their
tie-downs and take him on. Still, as Don
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Cherry says, the media is either “at your feet
or throat. They can break your heart.” He
has told Domi, whom he calls “a friend for
life,” the same thing. “He came up the hard
way,” he says, “fighting for everything he
achieved, and he will battle this out, too.”
LAST OCTOBER, the Rick Mercer Report “Celebrity Tip” featured Tie Domi. As the hockey
player appeared in heroic silhouette, a
booming voice introduced him thusly:
“A member of the NHL’s elite 1,000-game
club, activist, community leader, recipient
of the third most penalty minutes in NHL
history, Maple Leafs icon and table decorating guru, Mr. Tie Domi.” The audience
laughed, of course, at the end of this little
curriculum vitae, while Domi made his
way over to a perfectly set dinner table and
proceeded to arrange pussy willows into a
centrepiece and fold napkins into flowers.
Funny though it was, the Mercer piece is
not entirely ironic. In truth, Domi might be
the precise person to ask if the oyster fork
rests to the right or left of the napkin. Not
only is he surprisingly concerned with his
appearance, he is also attuned to the finer
things in life. He loves good wine, gourmet
food and Cuban cigars.
There’s a kind of Batman/Bruce Wayne
duality to the man. His favourite movie is
Goodfellas, and the character he identifies
most closely with is Jimmy “The Gent”
Conway (played by Robert De Niro)—one
of the most beloved and feared of the New
York mafia, “the kind of guy who rooted
for the bad guys in the movies.” And yet,
the gorilla-on-skates whose athletic felonies were greeted with howls of execration
(“Neanderthal!” and, naturally, “Dummy!”)
cites as his favourite song Elton John’s saccharine anthem “Candle in the Wind.”
Some of the people I spoke to, informally, were critical of both his skill as a player
and his skill as a “player”—i.e., his membership among a moneyed elite that the
average goon rarely has access to. Indeed,
he’s managed to parlay his hockey fame
into business friendships with the likes of
Onex’s Gerry Schwartz, steel magnate Alex
Shnaider, and his former boss, Leafs’ chair
Larry Tanenbaum.
Some characterized him as a social
climber, cherry-picking illustrious associates throughout his career. The Globe and
Mail’s Stephen Brunt, for example, wrote
a piece last September about Domi’s retirement party at Centro, which made the
hockey player look like a cavalier arriviste
and claimed that he had an uncanny talent for placing himself “at the right hand of
power.” There are also rumours that Domi
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was given to waving personal e-mails from
Larry Tanenbaum around the dressing
room, a site he is also reported to have once,
in front of his teammates, staked with the
following claim: “This is my room.”
During the protracted 2004–05 hockey
lockout, Domi organized a formidable sitdown at Harbour Sixty Steak House with
representatives of both sides of the dispute.
At the table were Tanenbaum, Bill Daly,
the league’s executive VP and chief legal
officer, and Mario Lemieux, as well as players’ union president Trevor Linden, the
union’s senior director of business affairs,
Ted Saskin, and Domi himself. The lockout
continued for another seven months, much
to the dismay of observers, who felt the
dinner provided a rare opportunity to settle the dispute. But the more salient question was how Domi had acquired enough
clout to call a meeting reminiscent of the
Five Family sit-down in The Godfather. By
many accounts, he has a talent for making
friends and influencing people that would
make Dale Carnegie flush with pride.
And yet, his friendship with the hockey elite is simply explained. When Domi
was a Ranger, Lemieux, who was visiting
New York, sought him out to get him on
the guest list for the trendy China Club.
Tanenbaum and Domi met at a Christmas
party and bonded on the spot: “From that
moment on,” says Domi, “we were family.”
Why? “Maybe because I’m not an ass-kisser. But people are jealous of this stuff, even
though it has no relevance to anything.
Story of my life.”
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THE CONSTELLATION OF SCAR tissue on Domi’s
face and hands is a testament to his violent
past. One weal in particular, caused by a
hockey stick, bisects his mouth; the cut
split his lip open like a radish in water. He
tells me this as we’re sitting at a table lush
with lavender pansies in the Four Seasons’
Studio Café. On the way in, a phalanx of
fans had interrupted him, offering good
wishes and listing with awe. He greeted
them pleasantly, then sat down and ordered
a green tea. What fazes him isn’t the admiring attention, or the men and ladies in hats
who stare and whisper. It’s the fact that I
order a mimosa at 11 a.m. “I’ve never seen
anyone do that before noon,” he says, as his
surprisingly delicate fingers manipulate the
cup’s tiny handle.
He is stared at because of who he is, and
because he radiates style, atypical of hockey players, who tend to gravitate to cheap
leather and variations on the theme of
taupe. On this day he’s again dressed casually, yet the brown velvet blazer is, on clos-
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er examination, a Hugo Boss; the discreetly
psychedelic shirt is a Paul Smith; the jeans
are clearly not Levi’s; and the nondescript
brown loafers are Prada.
To break the ice, I fire off some lightweight questions: why he chose to elbow
Devils defenceman Scott Niedermayer in a
2001 playoff game, with 7.4 seconds left on
the clock (“I made a mistake”). Occasionally, I throw in something about his personal
habits, including what cologne he wears.
He stares back at me, as though searching
for the right answer. “Brut,” he eventually
says, jokingly. (In fact, it’s Armani.) He tells
me about his regrets, one of which is having beaten an ailing John Kordic “pretty
badly,” not having known what condition
the drug-addicted player was in.
I had hoped to meet him for a beer, which
I discover he hates. I had hoped to get him
to admit to a recent night of carousing, perhaps one that caused him to come home
“reeking of alcohol and smoke,” as his wife
alleged, but he reports that he spent his
just-passed birthday quietly, with friends.
From one of them, he received a gift of a
blown-glass lion, which is possessed of
such apparent beauty, he closes his eyes
remembering it.
I had hoped to find in him Al Purdy’s confluence of “ballet and murder,” and in this,
I wasn’t disappointed. Domi’s style of fighting is known as “the spin cycle,” a strategy
wherein the modestly sized fighter shoves
his opponent to make him lose equilibrium.
As the opponent struggles to catch his balance, the southpaw, who hits with his right
hand, disables him in a cannonade of blows.
“You have no idea what it’s like,” he tells me,
“preparing each day for a possible fight. It’s
an exhausting mental process.”
This morning at the Four Seasons will
be the last time I see Domi. “Make me look
like a star,” he commands, after walking
the gauntlet of smiling, apprehensive fans
in the lobby. Outside, he flags a cab for me,
and says to the driver (who will almost run
me over in his haste to pick up the famous
hockey player), “Take care of my friend.”
He also, though hesitantly, signs an autograph for my dog (“To Frank, from your
friend…”). He tells me he trusts me. Then
he jumps into his Mercedes and peels out
of the Four Seasons lot.
I have some idea, after my tumble in the
spin cycle, that he doesn’t need me to do
a thing. Domi will be remembered as he
pleases—a man who played hard on the
ice, leaving there the occasional heaving,
near-comatose victim, one hundred goals,
and a trail of blood that marks him, still, as
a true blue warrior.
E
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