Future Prospects: An Inside Look at Major Junior Hockey

by Debbie Elicksen

This book gives you a birds-eye view as to what it was like to work and play in the Western Hockey League, Ontario Hockey League, and Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. Ron Robison, who was Commissioner of the Western Hockey League, wrote the Foreword. For this book, personal interviews were conducted with Fred Brathwaite, Patrice Brisebois, Valeri Bure, Tim Connolly, Nigel Dawes, Shean Donovan, Andrew Ference, Jiri Fisher, Ryan Getzlaf, Jarome Iginla, Jacques Lemaire, Doug MacLean, Mike Modano, Bob Nicholson, Mike Ricci, Richard Zednik, Radoslav Suchy, and more. Here are some Radoslav Suchy played hockey in Slovakia prior to major junior in Sherbrooke and Chicoutimi (1994-95 to 1996-97). “Always my dream, when I was a kid, was to play in the NHL. I knew three ‘thank you,’ ‘sorry,’ and one that’s bad, starting with ‘f.’ I was in Quebec, so everybody spoke French there. I went to school for English, but as soon as I came to the dressing room, everybody was talking French. For two months, I didn’t talk to anybody. Maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t speak English. First while, it was really hard. I wanted to go home, but I didn’t know how to tell them. So I stayed. Fred Brathwaite describes his first billet experience. “You walk into a stranger’s house and they have their own mindset on what they want to do and how things are. You’re kind of used to what you’ve been doing at your own house. You’re nervous and a little tentative, but probably after a month into it, they become your family. You don’t want to do anything to get them mad at you. I lived with different families that made me a better person.” Bearcat Murray about Western Hockey League coach Scotty “Scotty actually bought the Lethbridge Sugar Kings so Davidson would have a place to play until he was old enough to join the Centennials. He also put him into a Junior B team in the Northern League in High Prairie, which was actually an outlawed senior league with a bunch of outlawed players and ex-pros who couldn’t play in the National Hockey League. On that team, our scouts missed another Tom Lysiak. He was a country boy and just came out to play for the team. The whole thing geared around John Davidson, so nobody paid any attention. Scotty was livid when he found out because Medicine Hat took Lysiak in the draft. They also got John Senkpiel and Lanny McDonald from us.

140 pages, Paperback

Published June 2, 2016