No. 25: NAME WITHHELD / "The Mother of All Hockey Mothers"

Sometimes the apple can't fall far enough from the tree. Dealing with deranged parents is every hockey reporter's worst nightmare. Another cautionary tale, a guessing game and a tragic payoff.

On the hockey beat, it was the slowest of slow-news days at the end of September in 1997: the uneventful interim between the last cuts of NHL training camp and the start of the regular-season schedule. With the grind looming, I rounded up some friends from my ‘hood and told them over a few beers that I was looking forward to seeing them again in June.

That is to say, I was minding my own business, about as thoroughly away from my business as I could be, when a bartender mentioned to a patron I’d never met that I was a hockey writer. Sigh. Nothing good ever comes of that. My friends would have known better.

When the woman mentioned that her son was a player, I knew the end was nigh. I made the best of an awful situation, which is to say I made a bit of a column out of it for the Globe and Mail. I made a point of not naming the woman, in part out of fear of embarrassing her son, in part out of fear that she’d key my car or throw a rock through my window. She was terrifying and I put nothi…