Jungle Cat, Leader of the Wolfpack

He wasn’t just our hockey coach, he was a role model, and he wanted us to call him “Jungle Cat”. He was known as “Jungle Cat” because he was fiercer than a lion, though he roamed with the wolves. His life was guided by the laws of the jungle. He used to tell us that “the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack,”, and we lived by those words. One glance at the Jungle Cat and you could tell his dampened wrinkly face was aged with years of wisdom. His crackly voice suggested he smoked multiple packs a day, but it was his constant shouting that had worn his voice down. He sounded like a dog without his voice box. Every day that season he would show up to the rink at 5:30 a.m. in his tracksuit, hat, and glasses and get straight to work. The rink was where he brought his hard hat, and lunch pail, and it was his office.

Never would he let any of us get away with calling him, “Coach”. The word was almost an insult to him, demeaning to his integrity. He was much more than a coach, he was a life advisor, a mentor, but first and foremost a friend. At one point in his life, he was coaching and teaching at a Canadian University. While teaching one of his classes he found there was a lack of effort and ambition from his students to learn. They were struggling to memorize every bone in the body, which some students were failing at. To prove that it was just a lack of effort, he brought his five-year-old daughter into the auditorium and had the students watch as she listed every bone in the body. The Jungle Cat had got her to memorize it by using his preferred method of acronyms, which he had for every phone number, fact, or a bit of information he needed to remember. I wasn’t there, but I could imagine the entire class's jaw-dropping as a five-year-old outsmarted third-year university students.

The Jungle Cat was a perfectionist and I would argue he was the closest thing to a perfectionist that a person could get. You could never tell the man “no.” He was the epitome of “if there is a will there’s a way,” and nothing got in his way. He was like the early morning rooster call to signal the start of the day, but in this scenario, he’s waking up the rooster.

He would get up before sunrise every day just to get a head start on the rest of the world. He Arrived at six a.m. every morning in his old beaten two-door Dodge sport, a car that was aged and beat up but ran fine, and fitted him to a tee. There wasn’t a day when he wasn’t wearing his Detroit Red Wings hat and his classic gray Oakley sunglasses. If he had a choice I don’t think he would wear sunglasses as he would always make you look him in the eye for every conversation. He wanted to make sure you weren’t lying, because no one could look him in the eye, lie, and get away with it.

He was forced to wear the glasses because of an injury. I was there in the crowd when it happened, the opposing team was rushing forward when a wild puck got tipped off of his own player’s stick, into our bench and shot right into his eye. The entire arena quieted, and even the players paused play.

Classic Jungle Cat turned around with a streak of blood running from his already bruised eye and yelled at us: “What the fuck are you looking at, we got a game to play!” Relentless as always, he finished coaching the game before getting it looked at which was definitely advised against by our trainer.

The Jungle Cats reaction was exemplary of his behaviour. He wouldn’t want us to get hit and get knocked down, he would expect us to get up and keep fighting. As a good leader should, he showed that nothing should distract you from the bigger picture.

That summer he had to get laser eye surgery right before the start of the season because his vision was starting to get impaired as a result of the injury. The doctor advised him to stay home and rest his eyes for at least two weeks, so he wouldn’t strain them and cause more damage. If he didn’t, he could have had even worse results on his eyes, or worse, lost his vision. It just so happened that on the weekend after he had surgery, our team had our first two games of the season. We lost them both, and that following Monday at six a.m. Jungle Cat was in the dressing room, ready to go because you could never tell the king of the jungle what to do. He had one thing to say to us before we got on the ice that Monday. “I think I will be in the dog house for the rest of my life because of this, but we missed rent, and the rent is due every day.” If it was up to him, I think he would have walked straight out of the hospital bed to the arena. I’m pretty sure his wife begged him to stay home and listen to the doctor's advice, or he would have been there that weekend.

For as long as I've known him, I never got to see his soft side, the only time he ever mentioned anything about it had to do with his wife or daughter, and I think they were the only exception. Yes, he had a chink in the armour, a soft spot. You could say he was 99% nails, 1% soft.

I wasn’t kidding when I said nothing got in his way, after all, he is a perfectionist, and after losing two games there was some work to be done. That’s because the Jungle Cats mentality was different from the rest of the world. He believed in himself so much that if it was a thought in his mind, it became reality,- not just for himself, but for others, too.

The glasses started to become an iconic look on him because you knew if he took them off that he meant business. I will never forget the time we were playing a routine game against a team we had already beaten several times. Jungle Cat, however, being the perfectionist that he is, wasn’t satisfied with just a win. In the last few games against this team, we had let in a goal or two. These goals showed impurities in our on-ice ability, which essentially meant we had flaws, and therefore weren’t perfect. Jungle Cat would usually come in right before on ice warm-ups and give us a quick breakdown of our game plan, but not this time. Thirty minutes before the game he was letting us have it by unloading his thought’s through a long pre-game speech until he was fuming at the ears, and the game hadn’t even started yet. Right as he was coming to the end of his speech, he did a full 180, took off his glasses, and stared into my eyes.

“You’re getting a shutout this game,” he said to me, the starting goalie that night, then proceeded to storm out of the room. I thought to myself, “That’s an impossible thing to ask,” and looked around at my wide-eyed teammates for justification. Low and behold two and a half hours later I had acquired a shutout, and Jungle Cats thought had sprung to life.

I had to ask him how he knew that would work. He replied, “The thought of you getting a shutout didn’t cross your mind till I mentioned it, did it?”

He had planted the thought in my mind, and with every save the reality of that thought grew bigger, until it was executed. You could argue it was psychological warfare, but I wasn’t complaining. At the end of the day, he just wanted the best from us, so he held us to a higher standard, one we wouldn’t begin to think of ourselves. That is why he pushed us so hard, and always led by example, because if he wasn’t holding himself to the highest standard, how could he expect us to hold ourselves to the same level of accountability.

Jungle Cat was in love with math and science and believed that it explained our lives in a way that words couldn’t. I would go as far as to call him a mad Scientist. He enjoyed math especially, because of how perfectly an equation can produce a result. For example, halfway through the season, we had lost our first back to back games since that first weekend, and we lost them by a fair margin. That morning after our second loss, we got up at eight a.m. for our usual game-day routine which was kicked off by breakfast in a room provided by the hotel. What we saw when we walked into that room blew our minds. Jungle Cat had stayed up all night writing a 50 - page essay essentially breaking down our loss and explaining it through physics, biology and chemistry. Like a mad scientist, he had stapled every single page of the essay to the wall of the breakfast room. It was four rows of papers, spanned across three walls of the breakfast room, one page after another. We knew we were in for the long haul. Thankfully he didn’t make us read the entire essay... because he had it memorized. Instead of getting us to read the entire paper, he explained everything on a whiteboard breaking it down to the utmost extreme detail. We sat in that room for three hours that morning breaking down the science of why we had lost. The Jungle Cat had gotten zero sleep that night because there was work to be done, and he was a simple guy; do the work, get the result. His attention to detail was unmatched, because the attention to detail was the foundation for perfectionism, and he had to exemplify that.

Behind the hard-shelled man, hidden deep inside was a teddy bear. Very few people ever saw this side of the Jungle Cat as he had a knack for never showing emotion unless he meant it. Like I said, emotion couldn’t get in the way of the bigger picture. I respected that quality of his because you knew it meant a great deal when he let his emotions out. The Jungle Cat had guided his wolf pack all the way to the league finals, and we would be playing for the championship. Throughout the year we had transitioned between goalies each one playing a game after the other. It was my turn to play the finals and it was arguably the toughest game of the year. The other goalie was light years ahead of me, and he was the obvious choice for a win.

The Jungle Cat had asked me to stay after our pre-game breakfast to chat. I thought I knew what was coming, but I wasn’t prepared for what I got. I was expecting a classic tough skin approach, but I don’t think he could bear it. Right as he started speaking you could hear the emotion in his voice. It pained him to make this decision because he was so proud of how far we had come as a team; like a wolf pack. However, the strength of the Pack is the wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the pack. I knew what to do. The Jungle Cat who had broken down in tears at this point left me speechless. I want to think the reason he got emotional was because of how close he felt to me, but it was more than that, it was the overarching care he had for our team. Regardless of how rarely he showed it, The Jungle Cat cared more for our team than we could ever know, and it pained him to sit me for the final, but as a coach, it was the right call. We sealed the conversation with a hug, and right as I was about to leave he spoke one last line.

“Tell anybody that I cried and I'll kick your ass, now let's go win the Championship.” There was the Jungle Cat I grew to love.

If it wasn’t for all the hard work he put us through that year, we would have never gotten the result we worked for. The Jungle Cat had pushed us, physically and mentally to limit’s we didn’t know we were capable of. This is why we won the championship, this is why he had finally broken down in front of the team seconds after. They were tears of joy as all of our hard work had paid off. The job was finally over, the rent was paid and the time for emotion was here.

Jungle Cat had offers to coach at a higher level, but it wasn’t ever about the money, fame or success, it was about where he could make the biggest impact. We were young impressionable kids, and under his coaching, he had morphed us into hard-working well-rounded people and set us up with skills for life. Like him or not, you just simply don’t find that quality of person anymore. He is a leader, he is a role model, he was the Jungle Cat, leader of the Wolfpack.