No. 82: DETROIT LITTLE CAESARS / More misadventures in hockey parenting: letters of complaint about my Quebec peewee story & the definitive corroboration backing me up
When I wrote about the peewee team owned by Detroit Red Wings proprietor, I wound up with a more disturbing story than I expected--a little too disturbing for a few principals tho' one vouched for me
There’s no making everybody happy. Sometimes, you wonder if it’s possible to make anyone happy. And when you’re writing about young athletes, well, crank up the indignation that your story will register.
I’ve ventured down this road before with a couple of previous SubStack entries: one, the story of Jeff Ware, a Leafs’ first-round draft pick, whose father, channelling his inner Karen, vowed to have me fired at the Globe and Mail because of his close, personal connection to the publisher; and the other, the Mother of All Hockey Mothers, who would have physically assaulted me if no witness were on hand and a blunt instrument were handy.
When I was at Sportsnet back in February of 2012, I wrote about two teams heading the Le Tournoi Peewee in Quebec: One was the Little Caesar’s team from Detroit, an outfit owned by Mike Illitch, the pizza magnate and proprietor of the Red Wings; and the other was the Terriers from Yorkton, Saskatchewan, Pop. 15,000, the smallest community sending a team to the tournament. This was of course a study in contrasts straight out of the textbook. Nothing bigger than Little Caesar’s—as you’ll read in the story, I worked one of their home games at Joe Louis Arena. Yeah, they dressed in a room usually reserved for visiting NHL teams. Nothing smaller than Terriers—they practiced in a rink where an hour of ice time collectively cost the team less than it would be to park outside Joe Louis.
I’ll include the entire text of the story here. I chose to focus on a player from each team and made a point not to go with one of the “stars,” kids who were more representative than exceptional. Nonetheless, both Alec Zawatsky and J.J. (Buzzy) Buzdeker, made it to major junior, Regina and Saginaw respectively—in fact a whole slew of kids from Yorkton were high draft picks, one a first-rounder in the WHL draft, another a second and the youngest player in the line-up wound up being the Golden Knights second-round pick, 41st overall in the NHL draft. Spin of the wheel, really. The kids from Detroit went the college route and one of the prominent players on that side of the story, Logan Cockerill, wound up playing in the U.S under-17 and under-18 program, before being a seventh-round selection of the New York Islanders before heading off to Boston University.
Buzzy.
Alec
This was one of those embedding jobs—after traipsing to Detroit and Yorkton respectively for a few days, I caught up with the teams in Quebec and tracked them. Below is the story in full (it’s from an edited draft, so there might be a typo) but the real fireworks came after publication, something just short of physical threats and the ultimate in vindications. I’ll patch in a screen grab of one irate Detroit Little Caesars parent who went off on me (dirty rotten Canadian sorta captures it) and then another who went to bat for me. I’ll let you the reader decide.
LITTLE BIG LEAGUE
More than dreams played out on ice, the Quebec Peewee Tournament is a collison of hockey worlds, by Gare Joyce in Quebec City, Yorkton, Sask., and Detroit
YOU could hear the unbroken voices of barely teenage boys coming out of the open doors to two neighboring locker rooms below the stands in the Colisee in Quebec. They told jokes, sang off-key songs and offered up scouting reports. You could hear them until someone in the room took control of the boom box and blasted Ozzy Osbourne, AC/DC and other standards that have carried over from olde-time hockey, namely their fathers’ days. Players in one room had just made it back to the dressing room after handshakes at game’s end. Players in the other room emptied into the hallway in their shorts to warm up for a game an hour off
It was a Wednesday in February, the second round of the 53rd Tournoi International de Hockey Pee-Wee de Quebec. For 10 days Quebec has the world’s highest concentration of 12-year-old boys with the arrival of teams from A (Ajax) to Z (Zurich), teams great and small.
On one side, 16 Detroit Red Wings were hanging in the stalls. The Wings, a.k.a. Little Caesars 99s represented the youth division of Mike Illitch’s empire that encompasses pizzas (the eponymous and ubiquitous chain) and sports (MLB’s Detroit Tigers and the NHL’s Red Wings). Over the years, 32 Little Caesars grads have gone on to the NHL. The program’s success draws players from miles around greater Detroit areas and even attracts a few from out of state whose parents move to Michigan to advance sons’ careers.
Above the music DJ Busdeker shouted to be heard: “C’mon boys. This is the greatest opportunity of our lives.”
On the other side, 18 Yorkton Terriers were draped on the backs of the kids who had flown to Quebec with their parents a few days earlier. The Terriers 99s were sponsored not by Sherring Gold, which sounds like a mining corporation but is in fact a jewelry store on Broadway Street, the main drag in the city of 15,000. The majority of Terriers came from Yorkton, Sask.—one from Foam Lake, an hour’s drive away, and one from the Ochapowace reserve down the highway.
Above the music, Alec Zawatsky, the son of the team’s coach, yells: “C’mon boys. Let’s be positive.”
DJ and Alec were both born in 1999. Both wear No. 14. Both shaggy hair, Bieberesque flows, and not the faintest hint of peach fuzz. Both are about five feet—that is, if Alec rolls up on his toes. Both are adolescent type A’s. With their helmets on, peering through the bars of their cages, you’d have trouble telling them apart. If you could hear them, you could mistake one for the other, one finishing the other’s imprecations, their accents faintly traceable to a sharp ear. With their helmets on, peering through the bars of their cages, you’d have trouble telling them apart. You could imagine them as friends. DJ and Alec and their teams represented two worlds of minor hockey, two congregations of kids separated by geography, life’s experiences and seemingly by everything else. Obviously, it’s a long way from Motown to eastern Saskatchewan but there were even greater distances between them. The most basic and immediate was right there on the schedule: Little Caesars were in the elite division and Yorkton was a notch below.
There was only one place where these teams and these parents could have passed each other in the halls if not met on the ice: the Quebec peewee tournament, a Canadian sports treasure. Across 10 days 112 teams were taking their best shot, though half the field is knocked out before the week is half over. Every game is the biggest game of a kid’s life so far, maybe the biggest he’ll ever play.
On its face the tournament bears a passing resemblance to the Little League World Series, mostly because the players are the same age. But Quebec isn’t like South Williamsport, Pa. The LLWS is really two separate competitions, with U.S. teams playing on one side of the draw for the home team’s berth in the final, and international teams on the other side looking to get to the championship game; Quebec offers not one trophy but four, representing pools of teams matched as fairly as possible.
It’s not fair to say that it was only the two worlds of hockey that were meeting in Quebec. There were many worlds of hockey, some in lesser orbits—for instance, in the International C pool, Team New South Wales drew Veneto of Italy in the first round. (For those who wagered on NSW plus-10, congratulations, it’s a push.) These and other C-poolers came from nations where there isn’t an established hockey culture. Teams from Russia, the Czech Republic and Scandinavia were contenders in the elite ranks. Their hockey worlds are different than anything you’d find in North America. Still, Little Ceasars and the Terriers embodied the two cultures most familiar to those who follow the game. It wasn’t the U.S. and Canada. You can find a team like Little Caesar’s in Canada and a team like Yorkton in the States. No, it was a different two solitudes: the Major Program and the Local Team. Behind one door was a team that’s always there, guaranteed an invitation. Behind the other was a team that had made it to Quebec, the stars aligning and a bunch of 12-year-olds rising far above their station.
IT was minus 25 on a Friday night in December when the Estevan Bruins 99s’ bus took a left at the casino and pulled up outside the Gallagher Centre. Twelve-year-olds don’t know existential dread, but the Bruins must have felt something like it. They must take joy in hockey, but none on a trip to Yorkton. Estevan was in second place in the Southern Saskatchewan peewee league, which stretches from Yorkton near the Manitoba border to Swift Current a five-hour drive west. But the South Sask this season had been two leagues in fact: the undefeated, untied and unchallenged Terrier 99s in one, Estevan and everyone else in the other. Said Sean Milligan, coach of Prairie Storm, a Double-A team in the Regina league: “They’re an extremely well-coached and talented bunch of kids who all love hockey and who all get along.”
When the teams warmed up. you probably wouldn’t have been able to make the home team as peewee titans. They were no bigger than Estevan. They moved the puck around more sharply, but not so dramatically. And they were younger, in fact the youngest team in the league, with seven players born in 2000 and two in 2001.
When the puck was dropped, however, the expectation of a tense battle went out the window in a couple of shifts. Five minutes, ten minutes, 15 minutes passed and Estevan still didn’t register a shot on the ten-year-old Nolan Maier. The visitors didn’t even keep possession of the puck in the home team’s end of the ice. It was 5-0, before 10-year-old goaltender saw rubber, a turn-over that led to a breakaway and a goal.
The Jr Terriers ran out to a double-digit win against a team that had beaten every other in the AA league. In doing so, Yorktonn put on a display that would have delighted anyone who finds an aesthetic beauty in the game well played. The lines were unrelenting buzzsaw units moving in perfect concert. Each forward looked like an interchangeable part. In fact, the lines featured two sets of twins: Mack and Carson Welkie had their surnames but not their initials on their sweaters, furthering any confusion; and for Keegan and Kaedan Taphorn, initials would have been no help at all.
Jake Skudra, a tall-for-his-age defenceman, levelled an Estevan winger with a clean, open-ice hit. Alec, on the bench, offered up a “Yeah, Jake, yeah.” Alec was sitting directly in front of his dad—he observed proper hockey etiquette: no acknowledgement of the fact that it’s his father in charge, no over-the-shoulder looks. He’d rather get speared than mouth the word ‘Dad’ on bench. Ed Zawatsky observed the etiquette too: no special attention paid to Alec, no double-shifting, no extra ice time. When it was four on four or the penalty kill, Alec’s linemates Derrick Budz and Carson Miller saw the ice and Alec had to wait.
When the Terriers scored, they celebrated modestly. “You have to show respect,” Alec said. They seemed more excited in the postgame—because it was a Friday night, players and their parents went upstairs to a small banquet room where pizzas and pop awaited the players and cases of beer the parents. All attended and talked about what the Quebec tournament meant to them.
The younger generation buzzed. “Everything we’re doing is working towards Quebec,” Alec Zawatsky said. “It’s really the same team we’ve had for four years and we’ve gone on all kinds of road trips. We all know each other so well—there are cousins and neighbors on the team. We’ve played lots of games and tournaments, but this is the biggest one of all.”
Ed Zawatsky had a more complicated perspective. “We’re a physical team in a contact league and Quebec is non-contact, so we’re going to have to make an adjustment,” he said. “We’ll get in some non-contact exhibitions and games against some tougher teams from Regina. Quebec will be a step up but these kids deserve the chance. We didn’t know if we were going to get accepted when we applied and there hasn’t been a Saskatchewan team in the tournament for a while. [The organizers] haven’t told a lot of teams yet but they gave us a heads-up because they know we’re coming a long way and it’s a big commitment for us.”
Hockey had taken Ed Zawatsky places. He played at Colorado College and professionally in Germany, where he met his wife and where Alec and his older brother were born. He was more excited for Alec and his team-mates, but he had a stake in it too. He had been the coach of the community-owned Terriers team in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League and taken his team to a national junior A final but was fired a couple of years later in a bit of board-level politics. People in Yorkton knew he could coach but it would be nice to remind them. Like others in the Yorkton party, Quebec was going to cost him a few thousand bucks, and he had to scramble to get time off from his job with the department of corrections. But it was going to be worth it. Once in a lifetime stuff.
IT was L.A. vs Detroit at Joe Louis Arena on a Sunday afternoon in December. Not the Kings and Red Wings, that was the night before. No, it was the L.A. Selects and Little Caesars 99s. The Little Caesars get to skate in the JLA a few times during the season and an exhibition with the Selects ranked a special occasion. It wasn’t just that the Selects had flown in from the coast; the Selects had a heavyweight rep for producing national champions.
Great venue but an anti-climactic contest: The top end of the Detroit roster, forwards Andrew Andary, Scooter Brickey and Logan Cockerill, outstripped anyone LA had to offer. Like the Yorkton Terriers, the Little Caesars are a family outfit. Andary, the GM’s son, possesses power and speed that would have made him a handful for a good bantam defenceman. Brickey, the coach’s son, is a heady two-way set-up man for Andary. Meanwhile, Cockerill, the strength and conditioning coach’s son, wears the Red Wings’ No. 19 but it’s hard to imagine that Steve Yzerman was a better skater at age 12—opponents can be in top gear and Cockerill passes them on a glide. With the trio dominating every shift, Little Caesars led the whole way and won by a 3-1 score for the second day in a row.
Donnie Busdeker watched from his seat. “He’s a Busdeker,” he says of his son DJ who worked Cockerill’s wing, doing all the grunt work in the corners, the Busdeker lot in life. DJ’s grandfather was the original hockey Busdeker, a minor-leaguer in Lima, Ohio, one who provided his team-mates insurance on the ice with his fists and off the ice with policies he sold part-time. Donnie Busdeker was good enough to get drafted for major junior but a bad knee shut down his career after a couple of years of college hockey. “DJ is like me … has to work for everything, anything less than total effort and he’s not going to be around,” Donnie said. “A Busdeker.”
No better than average size for a 99, DJ might rate as the quintessential Busdeker. You wouldn’t have blamed him if he resented what seemed like star treatment for the front liners—like Al Cockerill coming into the room before the game to stretch Logan’s hips and groin muscles on the trainer’s table. Or if it bugged DJ that when he was trying to pump up his team-mates before the game and Cockerill and others tuned him out with their iPods. But there were only affirmations from DJ after the win over the LA Selects.
“It’s 45 minutes in the car from Dexter to the arena for every game and practice,” DJ said. “My father can’t get away all the time—he coaches my little brother in another program [Detroit Honda]. My father takes turns with another father, splitting the driving. I have to do my homework right after school ‘cause I don’t get home until 11 after games and practices. When I get back I have an egg salad sandwich and go right to sleep.”
DJ went to Donnie two years ago and asked if he could leave the Honda program and try out for Little Caesars. The start of every season brings change in the Little Caesars roster: The GM’s and coaches’ son are three of only five peewees in their fourth year in the program. Tryouts were an open door but it was going to be a step up and a step out for the Busdekers: It was going to be an investment of time and money, both hard to come by with four kids. The dues for Little Caesars weren’t a hard squeeze by standards in a lot of communities in Canada: $350 a month. The asterisk attached was the price of travel. “We’ll get help from Mr Illitch with the trip to Quebec, but the team goes to tournaments and exhibitions lots of places and we have to cover that,” Donnie said. “I’m a manager at Frito-Lay but my wife is a stay-at-home mom who looks after a neighbor’s six-month old baby. We’re not a wealthy family. Other families can get personal trainers or send their sons to hockey camps in the summer. We don’t. It’s tough, but I’d do anything for my son and this can be DJ’s ticket to a scholarship or maybe major junior.”
Worlds collided at the game: Loaded Escalades roll down from Bloomfield Hills and other tony suburban enclaves and park outside the arena next to Donnie Busdeker’s three-year-old Uplander. Some parents and their kids will fly up to Quebec and get suites at the Chateau Frontenac. Donnie Busdeker will check in there but will share a room with two other fathers to cut costs. His son isn’t the only Busdeker.
IT was Wednesday afternoon, 3 p.m. The tournament was seven days in at that point. There had been good times Yorkton Terriers 99s. There had been good times on the ice. They had won a nail-biter over Drummondville in the first round on Sunday, a shoot-out that stretched into the fifth-round, Alex Geddes making a save and being mobbed by his team-mates. The next day, the Terriers 99s played an exhibition to stay sharp and won another shoot-out, beating the L.A. Jr Kings, a team seeded in the elite division in the Quebec tournament. There had been good times off the ice. The team had turned the fourth floor at the Best Western into a block party, with doors of every room open, parents having cocktails and beers in a few rooms and the boys and a few siblings sprinting through the halls. The Terriers had traded team pins amongst themselves and with players from foreign countries staying at the hotel. Like all other teams at the tournament, the Terriers were given their own hockey cards by the organizers.
In a material sense, the pins and the cards were going to be all the Terriers would come away with on their trip to Quebec. Their tournament was over shortly before 3 p.m. Wednesday, with the Romande Lynx from Switzerland taking a 3-0 lead in the second period of Yorkton’s second-round game. In the pre-game handshake and gift exchange, their opponents had given the Terriers chocolates wrapped to look like Swiss Army knives. That was all they gave them. The Terriers had won only a handful of shifts all game; they generated one scoring chance. Their tournament was over before the game. There was still a period to play when they filed into the dressing room and the Zamboni circled the ice.
Looking at the kids from Yorkton, it was hard to imagine that smiles ever creased their faces, that they had ever won a game.
Ed Zawatsky stood in the middle of the silent room. “I’m still gonna love you, all of you after this game,” he said. “This game won’t change that. I’ll still see you up at the lake and we’ll have fun. I’m still gonna love you but you have a decision to make.”
He held up an erasable board. He had written three lines on it before the game.
HARD WORK
STICK TO THE PLAN
BELIEVE
He pointed to the board. “We can do this,” he said and paused.
Then he crossed out the words. “Or we can this,” he said.
None of the players let his head dip for fear that the coach might think he was being ignored. They looked at him vacantly with reddening eyes.
“I’m still gonna love you no matter what decision you make,” Ed Zawatsky said. He then ran through instructions that, if heard at all, wouldn’t be remembered minutes later.
In the hallway, in the hallway with his assistant and trainer, Ed Zawatsky was almost as speechless as his players. “They froze,” he said. “I don’t know why.”
They have a future: The core of this team was going to play together three more winters. All the 99s were going to move up next season, maybe some of the 2000s too. The 2001s would be back in peewee next fall but a couple of years down the road they were looking at being a force in bantam in Saskatchewan, just as they had been in peewee all season.
The problem was the present: The third period was a blur, a quarter-hour nightmare. Some slammed sticks. Some mouthed epithets beyond their years out of coaches’ earshot. What you’d expect to go with 15 minutes of damming up tear ducts. Jake Kustra scored a goal on a fluke, a dump-in that went through the Swiss goalie, but it only made the final score, 4-1, look more respectable.
After the game, Ed Zawatsky walked into the dressing room and shut the door behind him. About half of the Terriers looked stunned and the others wept, Alec Zawatsky hardest of all. The coach took a lap of the room and shook each player’s hand and, again, his players kept their heads up.
That night Alec Zawatsky climbed into his bed at the Best Western and messaged a friend on Facebook: I’m upset but I’ll get through it. It just feels like I wasted my time embarrassing myself and then playing the game … even though people say I played good. This was one of my dreams when I was little and I only got to play two tournament games.
He sent out messages until he was able to get to sleep. He hit send for the last time at 2:28 a.m.
AN hour after the Terriers had cleared out of their dressing room, the Little Caesars 99s were on the ice and in a jam. They had been less than their best with a 3-2 win over Hamilton in the first round and then drawn a bigger and more skilled Czech team in the second round. Though Andray and Cockerill were pouring across the blueline with speed, the Czechs scored first and carried a 1-0 lead deep into the first period. The Czech netminder was shutting down the Americans at point blank range and looked more of a contortionist than a gymnast—comparisons to Dominik Hasek were operative. And then came a stretch that DJ Busdeker will never forget. He tied the game in the last minute of the first period, pouncing on a loose puck at the edge of the crease. He set up the winner in the second and an insurance goal in a 3-1 win. He hadn’t been one of those Little Caesars 99s who made tournament all-star teams and MVPs but he was his team’s best player of the day.
And yet the post-game was far more hot-blooded than the game.
The players had heard out Scott Brickey’s comments—speech would be too strong a word—and started to change into their street clothes. The coach stood outside the dressing room with his assistant Jason Gray and strength and conditioning coach Al Cockerill. Brickey was as white as freshly flooded ice—he had been hit with food poisoning on his team’s trip to the slopes to do some tubing on an off-day and was now, near dinner time, ready for bed.
They were standing there when the father of one of the Little Caesars strode up to them with eyes wide and nostrils flaring. “You jumped my kid,” said the father, who looked like he had played hockey or maybe football. “He didn’t play a shift in the last six minutes of the second period. He’s absolutely crushed. He’s upstairs and he’s absolutely crushed. We come all this way to Quebec and for this?”
Brickey didn’t raise his voice. He might not have been able to. His attempts with the father didn’t get beyond a few mumbled words. The father was intent on pushing the limits and pumped the volume. “You know, don’t you?” he said to Jason Gray.
“Don’t throw me under the bus,” Gray said.
The father started moving forward to Gray, the ritual dance steps before a street fight.
Logan Cockerill, the last one out of the dressing room, was carrying his hockey bag out of the dressing room when he stopped and watched the scene unfold.
“Go upstairs,” Logan’s father, Al, said.
The coaches, parents and players make jokes about Al Cotterill, about the three- or four-hour workouts in weight room. He would weigh a bare minimum of 250 pounds. Al wrapped his hands around the father’s face, like a mafia don ready to give the kiss of death to a disloyal member of his crew. His huge mitts produced a vice-like grip but the father spewed a string of profanities though forcibly gritted teeth.
Donnie Busdeker was with DJ upstairs on the Colisee’s concourse when the scene played out in hallway downstairs. The star of the game was gone to a team meal by the time Donnie heard from a bystander that arena security was looking for the irate father. Donnie dropped his head and shook it. That resentment of DJ’s ice time wasn’t going away any time soon. The win didn’t matter to the father of the jumped son. DJ’s goal and assist didn’t matter either.
Donnie Busdeker had been around hockey enough to know that the spot on the roster that opened up for DJ was once a disaffected kid’s, one who had worn a Little Caesars sweater but no longer felt part of the team. And that there would have been hurt feelings, another kid jumped and crushed, maybe words and another argument with a coach. The irate father knew that word of the scene at the Colisee was going to get back to DJ. Maybe it already had.
The Quebec tournament was, DJ said, “the greatest opportunity of our lives.” By the time the Busdekers started the drive home, DJ would have a bunch of pins, some souvenirs and no illusions about the game or his team.
THE puck sat at center ice and 10,000 in the stands clapped in anticipation. DJ Budseker was standing on the blueline, nothing but ice between him and goaltender Tyler Haywood and nothing but Haywood between the Little Caesars 99s and the semi-final of the elite division.
It was down to the last strokes. It had looked like Little Caesars were going to run Haywood’s New York Jr Rangers out of the rink early on but the goalie had been spectacular and kept the game scoreless through regulation and a five-minute overtime.
In the shoot-out the Andary had dented crossbar with the Caesars’ first attempt and Cade Robinson had slipped it past Haywood with a clean deke. Meanwhile, the Rangers had made one out of three. That left the puck and the tournament was on DJ’s stick.
Busdeker skated in boldly and looked good right up to the edge of the crease, but Haywood had read him and beat him to the post.
Head down, DJ skated to the bench. He wasn’t going to raise it until he made it to the dressing room.
The Rangers made their next two attempts, while the Little Caesars had a make and then a miss that ended their tournament. DJ alone among Detroit’s shooters had a chance to get his team through to the semis. The Little Caesars skated out for the handshakes. DJ was last in the line, bent at waist, stick resting atop his shinpads.
Ed Zawatsky had watched the Little Caesars-Ranger game with a bunch of Yorkton father’s high up in the stands. “It’s not always the best team,” he said.
Alec had missed a lot of the action. Five girls dressed very maturely for 12-year-olds had taken seats a row in front of the Terriers. The girls told Alec he looked like Justin Bieber. Language was no impediment to flirting.
“Let’s go Alec,” Ed said.
One of the Yorkton fathers went off to fetch his rental van and Ed waited with Alec and other kids by the Colissee’s back gate. A few feet away Donnie Busdeker was waiting for DJ. Before Yorkton’s vans pulled around, DJ marched up the stairs, sobbing. He dropped his hockey bag and fell into his father’s arms.
The girls across the foyer were watching the Yorkton boys leave. Big Program, Local Team: They couldn’t tell them apart. END
The fallout: I knew the scene about the dust-up in the hall outside the Little Caesars dressing room would piss off some folks. It got messy, though it stopped well short of getting sued, although intimations of “challenge” could be read variously.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying) to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.