Author Biography

Bob McKenzie is a Canadian broadcaster, journalist, and author. Known as the TSN Hockey Insider, Bob has covered Canada's favourite sport for forty years. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Hockey News, hockey columnist for The Toronto Star, and the author of three national bestsellers, including the first two books in this series. He lives in Fenelon Falls, Ontario. Follow him on Twitter @TSNBobMcKenzie. Jim Lang is a sportscaster, journalist, and the coauthor of hockey memoirs by Tie Domi, Max Domi, Wendel Clark, and Bryan Berard, as well as Everyday Hockey Heroes Volumes I, II, and III with Bob McKenzie and My Day with the Cup. He hosts The Jim Lang Show. He lives outside Toronto with his wife and kids. Follow him on Twitter @JimLangSports.

Review

Praise for Everyday Hockey Heroes, Volume I
Praise for Everyday Hockey Heroes, Volume II
"A second volume of stories about the unsung stars around your neighbourhood rink."
-- Ottawa Sun
"Bob and Jim shed some fantastic light on a coast to coast truth: there are hockey heroes in every rink in Canada. Names like Westlake, St. Denis, Singh, Potvin, and Cunningham are what drives the success and our love of the game. Everyday Hockey Heroes reminds us that you don't need to make a million to be a real hockey hero."
-- KEN REID, Sportsnet Central anchor and author of Hockey Card Stories 2
"Compelling accounts of personal strength and the power of hope. Everyday Hockey Heroes gives a spotlight to important issues that people are dealing with and exhibits their ability to not only overcome these obstacles but, more important, to try to make positive change in the wake of them."
-- SHELDON KENNEDY, former NHL player and founder of the Sheldon Kennedy Child Advocacy Centre
"Hockey never ceases to amaze me with the quality of the people in the game. This book is full of hockey champions who will inspire you and show you the true depth of the people in and around this game."
-- BRIAN BURKE, former NHL executive
"Inspiring. Truly hard to put down. Bob's great storytelling abilities prove that hockey is so much more than just a game. Loved it!"
-- DAVID CHILTON, bestselling author of The Wealthy Barber
"The Humboldt tragedy showed us just how much hockey is part of the Canadian community. Because, just as we share the joy hockey so often brings, that terrible moment in Saskatchewan taught us that together as a nation we comfort each other when the game, as it occasionally does, brings us pain. My friends Bob McKenzie and Jim Lang have a lifetime of stories from covering the great game, and these pages are wonderful evidence of what they've collected over the years. You'll laugh at times, you'll be inspired at times, and you may even cry as well, but through it all you'll know that Canada is hockey and hockey is Canada. It really is our game."
-- PETER MANSBRIDGE
"Why do we like competitive sports? The drama, the stories, the heroics--the stories behind the game. McKenzie and Lang feature people who talk about their love of the game and how they're championing the next generation--paying particular attention to those working to make it inclusive."
-- Toronto Star
"You can never truly know a country until you know the game that defines the people. The U.S. has football, Brazil soccer, India cricket. If you want to know Canada, or if you're Canadian and want to know yourself, Everyday Hockey Heroes is for you. In these moving, inspirational, and entertaining stories, Bob McKenzie, the 'Mr. Hockey' of insight and analysis, and sportscaster extraordinaire Jim Lang have found the pulse of Canada--and the beat is as strong and healthy as ever."
-- ROY MacGREGOR, bestselling author of Wayne Gretzky's Ghost and The Home Team

Excerpt from Book

1. Black and White Black and White Bob McKenzie I''m from Scarborough, Ontario. I consider it my hometown since my parents moved there when I was only three years old in 1959. It was home for the next twenty years. The only thing that has changed about Scarborough since then is everything. Well, almost everything. The boundaries--Lake Ontario on the south, Steeles Avenue on the north, Victoria Park Avenue on the west, the Rouge River and its valley on the east--are still the same. I grew up in a Scarborough that was quite white. It was first settled in 1799 by Scottish stonemason and farmer David Thomson and his wife Mary. As a young boy in the sixties, I briefly went to Sunday school at St. Andrew''s Presbyterian Church, which was built on the Thomsons'' land and includes a graveyard where they''re buried. You could say Scarborough was the very picture of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant life, though WASP didn''t necessarily mean affluent. Scarborough was far more middle class than upper crust. As near as I could tell, it was more blue collar, working class--a lot of young families of whom both parents needed to work to afford their first-time homes. Today, the quite-white Scarborough of my youth has become one of the most ethnically and racially diverse communities in all of Canada. In the 2016 federal census, 67 percent of its population were visible minorities. Of the more than 630,000 people who called Scarborough home, 25 percent were from South Asia, 19 percent from China, and almost 11 percent were Black. Drive any thoroughfare and its multiculturalism is ubiquitous, from the faces of the people walking its streets to the cornucopia of international cuisines available to the strip mall signs in many languages. Scarborough has earned national, at times international, recognition for its citizenry--comedian/actor Mike Myers (you didn''t really think Wayne''s World was set in Aurora, Illinois, did you?); The Barenaked Ladies; race car driver Paul Tracy; marathon swimmer Cindy Nicholas; Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, better known as the Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter/producer The Weeknd; Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson, and countless pro athletes in the NHL, NBA, CFL, and NFL. But in such a richly diverse Canadian community, it should come as no surprise that Scarborough is second to none in putting Black hockey players in the NHL. While the first Black man to break the NHL colour barrier was from Fredericton, New Brunswick--Willie O''Ree in 1957--the next Black player to do so was from Scarborough. Mike Marson was the nineteenth overall selection in the 1974 NHL draft and played 196 games over six NHL seasons, surpassing O''Ree''s 45 over two seasons. Marson was the first of many more from Scarborough to make the NHL. Anson Carter played 698 NHL games between 1996 and 2007; his neighbourhood friend, goalie Kevin Weekes, played 357 games in a pro career between 1995 and 2009; Joel Ward played 809 NHL games in a thirteen-year career spanning 2005 to 2018. The Stewart brothers--Anthony and Chris, the latter of whom played part of the 2019-20 season with the Philadelphia Flyers--combined for 969 NHL games starting in 2005; Wayne Simmonds finished the 2019-20 season with the Buffalo Sabres, 953 NHL games and still counting in a career that started in 2008; Devante Smith-Pelly had 446 NHL games from 2011 to 2018, including playing a key role in the Washington Capitals'' winning the Stanley Cup in 2018. Nathan Robinson played seven NHL games in a pro career that spanned sixteen seasons, and goaltender Chris Beckford-Tseu saw action in part of one NHL game during his seven-year career, but they nevertheless helped swell the ranks of Black kids from Scarborough who can say they made it to the NHL. That''s ten in total and number eleven isn''t far off. Scarborough''s next Black NHL standard-bearer will almost certainly be Akil Thomas, the Los Angeles Kings'' second-round pick in 2018, who''s expected to start his pro career in the 2020-21 season. Thomas scored the game-winning goal for Team Canada at the 2020 World Junior Hockey Championship. Quantity and quality of Black NHL players; Scarborough has it all. On a day when I was taking note of how many Black NHL players have come from my hometown, I started thinking about when I was a kid playing minor hockey. Mike Marson was born in 1955, the year before me, but I never saw him play minor hockey or even knew of him until he went on to the OHA Junior A Sudbury Wolves and then the NHL Washington Capitals. From 1964 to 1975, I had a Black teammate on only two occasions, but I do recall playing against a few players of colour in that eleven-year span. Two in particular stand out. Vividly. Even now I still remember them--one was tall and gangly; the other was shorter but strong and powerful--and how they played. There''s no doubt they stood out to me because they were Black. To suggest otherwise would be silly. But these guys also stood out because they were good players, better than average in our age group and far better than me, though that was a pretty low bar. There was a third reason I remember them so well--they had memorable names. Terry Mercury. Lindbergh Gonsalves. I got to wondering what it might have been like for them--Black kids playing an almost all-white sport in an almost all-white community in the 1960s and 1970s--and it struck me that Terry Mercury and Lindbergh Gonsalves were pioneers of sorts. All these years later, they must have some stories to tell. Wouldn''t it be interesting, I thought, to track them down and have a conversation. And that''s exactly what I did. Terry Mercury''s family tree could be featured as part of Black History Month. His father, David Austin Mercury Sr., was born and raised in Toronto, but Terry''s paternal grandfather, Reverend George Luther Mercury, was born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. When George Mercury couldn''t get into divinity schools in Canada, he opted to go to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which was headed up by Booker T. Washington, and later became Tuskegee University. In fact, Booker T. Washington was one of George Mercury''s professors. "When I heard that, I thought, ''Oh, someone is blowing smoke'' until my cousin showed me the photograph," Terry said. "I was like, ''Holeeeeee, there''s my grandfather in this classroom and there''s Booker T. Washington at the front of the class.''?" Terry''s paternal grandmother, Gladys Smith, was from the tiny St. Mary Parish in Jamaica, just miles away from where Bob Marley would later grow up. Terry''s mom, Barbara Thompson, has roots that date back to 1800s Virginia. "My mom''s family came to Canada via the Underground Railroad," Terry told me. "That makes me a sixth-generation Canadian on my mom''s side of the family." Terry''s parents met in Toronto. His dad attended Harbord Collegiate and his mom went to Central Tech, two high schools separated by less than a kilometre in Toronto''s west end. Terry was born December 14, 1956, at Toronto General Hospital, the fourth of six Mercury children, three boys and three girls. Of the six, three were adopted. His dad worked as a real estate agent, mostly for RE/MAX, while his mom was an operator for Bell Canada. When Terry was four, his parents--like many young couples living in the city at the time--wanted a new home in wider, more open spaces and found just that in the Midland-Eglinton area of Scarborough. Terry and his siblings went to nearby Lord Roberts Public School. They weren''t the only Black family in the new neighbourhood, but the fact Terry can remember the name of the only other one--the Berrys--paints the picture pretty well. What Terry quickly realized is that he loved hockey. "I played it all the time," he said. "I played street hockey with my friends until the streetlights came on. Then I''d go downstairs into the rec room and play with the net that my dad got me for Christmas. But I remember being scared to skate because I didn''t want my friends to see me fall down." Terry, who would grow up to be six-foot-three, was always a tall kid, much taller and more gangly than other kids his age. "I was all arms and legs," he said with a laugh. "I didn''t want them to find out I couldn''t skate." Terry''s father had none of that. For the 1964-65 season, he registered Terry for Cedar Hill House League, which played their games at McGregor Park Arena, a two-pad outdoor rink that was just a couple of miles from their home. "I''ll never forget it," Terry said of his first time on skates. "My dad pushed me out on the ice and I couldn''t skate. I wanted to get off, but he said, ''No, you''ve been bugging me about buying you hockey sticks and a net. Just get out there and learn to skate.'' He wouldn''t let me off the ice. And by the end of the season, I could skate." Those two years playing house league for Cedar Hill were pretty idyllic for Terry, who was eight and nine at the time. "Kids that age just want to play hockey and have fun," Terry said. "It was completely innocent. I was a member of the Paul Willison Valiants. All of my teammates were white and I was Black and it didn''t matter to them or me. I was just one of the guys. We''d sit in the dressing room and laugh and have fun and I''d have other fathers on the team come up to me, pat me on the shoulder, ''You go get ''em out there, Terry,'' and they would sit with my dad and drink hot coffee to stay warm. My dad had helped some of the other fathers buy houses and they appreciated that. I was accepted, my dad was accepted. You know how they talk about ''hoc

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