HAMILTON HOOKED ON HOCKEY
Son of Olympians tried every sport
I don’t think they really cared if we made it to the NHL as long as we were having fun playing sports.
There was no backyard rink.
Meaning the boys never took nightly spins in wintertime elements, never froze their extremities, never chilled their cores.
Not that their parents had been afraid of exposure.
Rather, that’s what Mom and Dad — an Olympic basketball player and an Olympic rower — were all about.
Exposure to as many as sports as possible. So Dougie Hamilton and big brother Freddie experienced the gamut. Baseball. Basketball. Tennis. Golf. Soccer. Football. Volleyball. Roller- hockey. Rowing.
One time, from their home in Toronto, they travelled to Calgary where they skated at the Olympic Oval, careened down the bobsleigh track.
“We tried to introduce them to everything,” says Lynn Hamilton, point guard on the Canadian squad that competed at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. “We tried to let them chose their own path.”
The broad range of dabbling also included signifi cant time in the bleachers.
Trips to the 1999 Pan- Am Games in Winnipeg, to Wimbledon another year. Motor racing, too.
“Neither of our parents were hockey players,” says Freddie. “But just being around them and all their amateur sport, we’ve been to a lot of cool competitions. That’s key for kids, to try to do all the sports.”
Out of that smorgasbord, one activity bit — and bit hard.
The brothers got hooked on hockey.
“That was where their passion was,” says Lynn. “We’d say to Dougie ( in the morning), ‘ It’s 7 o’clock. Time to go to the ice.’ And he’s a sleeper- inner kind of guy, right? But he would jump out of bed.” She laughs. “We have no idea why they decided to take that route.”
One thing for certain, the hold remains.
Between them now — with both lads still shy of their prime years — they have skated in more than 400 professional contests.
Dougie suits up Wednesday for his fi rst game with the Calgary Flames. Freddie, meanwhile, joined the organization Sunday, coming over in a trade with the Colorado Avalanche. The centreman is now with Stockton of the American Hockey League.
“With them being able to succeed in their sport, make it to the Olympics, achieve the pinnacle of their sports, it helped us believe in being able to make it,” Dougie says of his parents. “You can see fi rst- hand that it’s possible — you can achieve your dream.”
The Hamiltons didn’t fi ght the boys’ wholehearted embracing of hockey.
But Dad, then and now, insists that the proper mindset is maintained.
“At the end of most amateursport athletes’ ( careers), the destination isn’t a very lucrative one,” says Doug, who rowed quad for Canada at the 1984 Olympics. “So we’ve always taken the view that you’ve got to enjoy the moments as you go along. It isn’t about making the NHL or making money in the NHL, it’s about enjoying the journey through hockey. That’s an amateur athlete’s perspective.”
One of the Dougie’s earliest hockey memories is telling.
A hat trick? A bodycheck? A championship? None of that.
“We might have it on video somewhere … I used to just skate around and jump over the blue lines and red lines and all the lines,” says Dougie. “My parents got a kick of out of me just not really caring about the game. It was me just having fun skating around.”
A nice thought, but as everyone in Canada knows, innocence is squeezed out of hockey as the age groups blur by.
Before you know it, your sons are being drafted into the Ontario Hockey League — Freddie, 14th overall in 2008, to the Niagara IceDogs; Dougie, 27th overall in 2009, to the IceDogs.
“It is a strange world,” says Doug, “in the sense that it shifted from hockey as a sport to hockey as a business.”
The family pulled up stakes and bought a home in St. Catharines, base of the IceDogs. Doug, a lawyer in Toronto, started commuting.
“We billeted our own kids, basically,” says Lynn. “We were here for our kids, just to help them through the whole experience.”
In view of that move — not unprecedented, but still one heck of a commitment — she’s asked if she considers herself “supersupportive.” The mission, she answers, was to keep on raising her children.
“A lot of stuff that we learned as amateur athletes, we continued with our own kids, to teach them all those good things … to be successful in life away from sport,” she says. “That was our main undertaking. We were trying to get our children to be wellrounded kids.
“We weren’t necessarily trying to make an NHL player — we were trying to make two good people that could contribute somewhere in life.”
The boys bagged back- to- back Ivan Tennant Memorial Awards, 2009 and 2010, as the OHL’s top high- school students.
Dougie was named the Canadian Hockey League’s top scholastic player in 2011.
“I don’t think they really cared if we made it to the NHL as long as we were having fun playing sports,” Dougie says. “More important was being a good person … and doing well in school. They weren’t the parents who pushed us and punished us and stuff like that. They encouraged us to do well.”
Now for Lynn and Doug, their nest is empty and their nights are full.
They tune in 200 times per year, but not for any sort of vicarious thrill.
“We watch the games in order to talk to them afterwards,” explains Doug. “After games ( in junior), the kids used to come home and talk to each other all night and laugh about the stuff that happened. So, in order to participate in the discussion, we watch the games … just so we know what they’re talking about. We watch so we can stay up to date on what they’re doing.”
This past summer, however, they had no idea where they might be watching Dougie.
A restricted free agent, he and the Boston Bruins had hit a contractual snag, so the young star — barely a week after his 22nd birthday — was on the move.
As the hockey world was keenly aware.
“We started reading stuff on Twitter that Arizona was interested, that Edmonton was going to do an off er sheet,” says Lynn. “There was a lot of things going through all of our minds here. That ( took place) over a day, but it seemed like a year.”
Adds Doug: “It’s diffi cult because of the uncertainty of not knowing where you’re going — a lot of nervousness associated with change more than anything else.”
June 26, the Flames swapped three draft picks for Hamilton.
“Exciting — a weird, interesting kind of day,” Dougie says.
“For guys my age, it’s like transferring to a new university. Or for people, in the real world, getting transferred to a new job in a new city.”
The Flames, as a welcomewagon kind of gesture, shipped a pile of swag to the Hamilton household.
One element, in particular, was eye- catching.
“The fi rst thing we all noticed was the Canada fl ag on the jersey,” says Lynn. “We all said, ‘ Wow, that’s pretty cool.’ Being amateur athletes in Canada, that was something my kids have grown up with. I think we have instilled a great love for the country and for putting on a uniform with the logo.”