Mission Improbable Shockey’s Abrupt Exit From Hockey Was Surprising, But Hardly Out Of Character

He was a hockey player with the faith of a missionary.

Saturday night was all right for fighting as long as Sunday morning was put aside for church. John Shockey’s commitment to both extremes brought him to the crossroads of a career that still had possibilities.

He’d come to the Spokane Chiefs as damaged goods, a defenseman with a broken leg who came cheap in a deal with Swift Current. He had an in. His dad was the assistant coach here.

At the time, at 17, he was marginal, but he got better, at first taking regular shifts because there was no one else but eventually growing into a key role player in the Chiefs’ drive to the Western Hockey League West Division championship.

The game with its cycle of demands and rewards has made him different than most 20-year-olds - stronger, harder, more worldly. Sensitivities harden in the super-heated growth of a young hockey player.

But last spring, approaching his 20th birthday on June 8, Shockey had had enough.

Turning his back on a final year of junior hockey eligibility, he quit the Chiefs to take a two-year church mission abroad.

He reports Wednesday to the Mormon mission training center in Provo, Utah, before heading to Sydney, Australia.

A defenseman on a mission is in all probability forfeiting the chance to play professionally.

The job was not enough to hold him. A 72-game season can be a long winter’s blur of bus rides and game nights, 3 hours of stimulation followed by three days of repetition.

“Everything considered it was fun,” Shockey said of a career that started in Tri-City in ‘93. “But what keeps you going in the end is not so much the fun, it’s that you’ve worked so hard to get there you feel you can’t give it up.”

He did waffle a little. There was an invitation to go to training camp with the Florida Panthers. Tempted, he declined. The Chiefs asked him to attend hockey school here in August. He came, and felt nothing that changed his mind.

“My whole family was surprised,” he said from his Alberta home, about a 20-minute drive from Lethbridge, where his dad, Parry Shockey, is the new head coach of the Hurricanes. “I just came home one night and basically told them I’d made up my mind that day.

“I felt I’d lost perspective. You get caught up in the excitement, and being important. A mission won’t be easy but it’s what I think I want and need right now.”

What he leaves - friendships and locker-room humor and the thrill of a good game - weighs against the unknown of what’s in store.

“I guess I feel an obligation,” Shockey said. “How do I say this without getting religious? I love to relate to people. Relating is a lot of what you do on a mission. I think I’ll love it.”

He says he misses games but is glad to be rid of the pressure.

“I was drained,” he said. “There are a lot of high demands. The travel for one thing. If you’re going to school, there’s demands there. It’s pressure from yourself, from NHL scouts if there’s an opportunity to get drafted, from coaches. Sometimes you’re trying so hard you’re almost doing more damage.”

Although he was never drafted by an NHL club, he ran out on opportunity before it ran out on him.

“I honestly think that if I had given it everything I had, maybe one day I would have been a pro,” he said. “Florida did sign a lot of free agents to fill spots in (its) farm system. But because I’ve been torn between the mission and hockey, it affected my dedication to the game. I wondered if this (pro hockey) was really what I’d want.”

What he did want was to recognize the privacy of a teammate’s convictions.

“I don’t think I ever pushed my beliefs on the guys,” he said. “I think they stood for themselves. Guys would give you a hard time - no doubt about that - but it never bothered me. I’d come in on Sunday morning from church to our check-in and somebody might say, ‘Got the hockey gods on our side?’ or ‘Gettin’ some prayin’ before we’re playin’?

“That didn’t bother me. At least I knew they were paying attention. That was good.

“I’ve learned to relate to people that way,” he said. “I’ll be there (in Australia) to help people who are interested. I don’t feel I should influence people’s beliefs. I respect other people’s beliefs.”

He felt some pangs of withdrawal last month in Lethbridge, where the Chiefs split a pair of exhibitions.

“When I saw them all, I remembered was how tight a team we were,” he said. “You don’t remember the bad times. You remember all the good things about guys and how much you do miss them.

“Guys had a lot of compassion for one another. We were pretty solid through the whole year. I was closest to Jay Bertsch. We’d been through this since we were 12 (growing up and playing minor hockey in Lethbridge).

“He was always there for me,” Shockey said. “When I was going through tough times, he felt it with me. We spent a lot of nights, talking on the bus. He was one guy who would never give up, the one guy that, no matter what, kept guys on-side with the coaching staff. He was really loyal.”

Bertsch rejoined the team this week.

Last May they were looking at mixed signals. The club then had a logjam of 1976-born players, veterans who are 20-year-olds this season.

The logjam dissolved when Edmonton claimed Randy Favaro and Jared Hope in the expansion draft and six others - David Lemanowicz, Jan Hrdina, Sean Gillam, Jason Podollan, Darren Sinclair and Bertsch - went off with their NHL organizations.

The Chiefs started the season one under the limit of three 20-year-olds, known as over-age players.

Shockey would have been a team leader somewhere, if not here then some other WHL locker room.

“He left himself open to the what-ifs,” Chiefs general manager Tim Speltz said. “Why not do this at 21 or 22? But John knows what’s best for him and I respect his decision.”

“I think Tim on a personal level was concerned that I’d worked hard to get the opportunity (to go pro) and when I got it, I wasn’t going to take advantage of it,” Shockey said. “And on the business level, he felt I could help the team.

“They were aware of how I felt in May, when we went through our year-end interviews. At first it sounded like they had a lot of 20s coming back, so it wasn’t a big issue then. But as more 20-year-olds were gone, it became a little more of an issue of who they were going to have back.

“Tim told me that I shouldn’t fool myself into thinking I’ll get back into it,” Shockey added, “but with university hockey I’ll have an opportunity to play again. There’s a lot of hockey in Sydney. I’ll take a look at that. The game will still be there. I don’t know if the professional opportunities will be, but I’m not sure that’s what I want.”

The dream of playing professionally is probably over, but if Shockey never plays another minute, he has the luxury of going out a winner. The job was never harder than last year on opening night in the Arena when Shockey and Tri-City’s Marc Stephan, an old friend from their Alberta minor hockey days together, dropped the gloves and tore at each other, their friendship suspended for a few angry seconds by flying fists.

Although spirited, the scrap seemed to produce the usual minimal damage, except that Stephan had a history. He’d suffered a serious concussion in minor hockey.

At 19, three games after mixing it up with Shockey on opening night in Spokane, Stephan’s career was over. He left without ceremony, on a broken play in Lethbridge, missing a check, losing his balance and ramming the boards.

Stephan was through.

A year later Shockey says the fight contributed to Stephan’s premature exit from the game. But as much as he feels for his friend’s loss, Shockey can’t second-guess himself over the circumstance.

“I think we both feel we were doing our jobs,” Shockey said. “I ended his career - he had too many concussions - but it doesn’t really bother me because if it had happened to me, I wouldn’t want it to bother him.

“Sometimes you do things in hockey that are … tough, but you can’t always let your emotions get in the way. It’s the same with anything - life or business.”

How does he want to be remembered?

“As a character player,” he said, “somebody who did what it took to help the team win. I really tried. I brought everything to the table I could, most nights. I never wanted to be a star. I just wanted respect. I think the guys respect my decision to go.

“I hope they miss me a little bit.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (2 Color)