LEAF’S ROOTS
Teaching job could have derailed Babcock’s $50M coaching gig
In retrospect, Mike Babcock would have been a pretty good school teacher — chalking blackboards in rural Saskatchewan, coaching some basketball or volleyball, inspiring this kid here and that kid there.
Babcock — the Toronto Maple Leafs’ new $50-million man — was headed down that road, once upon a time. That’s right after the Moose Jaw Warriors decided they needed to go “in a different direction,” as they put it, by firing him.
Their message: To make ourselves better, we must leave him behind.
This all happened, of course, before Babcock led Canada to a world junior championship and two Olympic gold medals; before he coached Detroit to the Stanley Cup; before he became hockey’s most desired head coach, before he pulled down the richest bench deal in hockey history.
Before all that, the Saskatoon native lived the insecure life of a hockey coach in Moose Jaw, fretting through two seasons on a franchise that ground up coaches like hamburger. He was their sixth head coach in an eightyear span, carrying the disposability of a Styrofoam coffee cup.
When the Warriors tossed him away in 1993, Babcock had a wife and a baby, no money, and a degree in physical education. He eyed a teaching job in Strasbourg, with its regular, steady paycheque — good, solid, responsible employment for a good, solid, responsible family man. But that opportunity didn’t pan out, which leaves us to wonder what would have happened had he landed that particular gig. Instead, Babcock accepted employment with a business consulting firm.
He’d already proven himself a good leader of people, with a willingness to shake things up when needed.
Babcock was instrumental in replacing the Warriors’ ridiculous old logo — a screaming, bare-chested cartoon Indian, brandishing a tomahawk in one hand and a hockey stick in the other — with a simple and dignified facial profile and headdress.
“We need it to be classy,” he said quietly at the time.
That logo remains on the Warriors’ jerseys today, Babcock’s fingerprint lingering more than two decades later.
But he didn’t win enough hockey games on a franchise that had managed just one winning season in Moose Jaw prior to his hiring. He cobbled together records of 33-36-3 and 27-42-3, then the Warriors board of directors axed him in the summer before the 1993-94 campaign, and Babcock’s life in hockey dangled off the precipice.
Life outside hockey looked OK, he told himself, probably very reluctantly. Then life offered up another one of those twisting paths it’s so fond of interjecting.
Dave Adolph, who like Babcock is a University of Saskatchewan Huskies alumnus, left his coaching gig at the University of Lethbridge to take on the Huskies vacant position.
Babcock cast his eyes to Lethbridge, taking the hockey gamble one more time, and he landed the job — fired and hired, in one dramatic summer.
He won the national CIAU title in his only year at the helm. Then he went to the Spokane Chiefs, where he shone for six seasons, then to the AHL, then to the NHL, and to the Olympics, and now to Toronto, which looks an awful lot like that old Moose Jaw team did once upon a time — except for that $50 million contract, of course.
The Warriors gave Babcock, then awash in obscurity, two years to turn things around.
Toronto is giving eight years to its coaching star.
Babcock could have taken the easy path to career greatness this week by staying in Detroit or by heading to a few other destinations. In taking the Toronto job, he’s pocketing piles of cash while throwing his resume into the path of a potential wrecking ball.
From a hockey perspective, Babcock’s decision is sheer guts. He’s not taking the easy way to greatness; he’s fully aware that this franchise, and this job, can cement his legacy or rip it in half.
He emerged a bigger, stronger man from his experience in Moose Jaw by refusing to give up on the sport he loved. Sticking with it was impractical, but prescient.
More than 20 years later, Babcock is taking another impractical job.
But unlike 1993, we can state, definitively and for the record, that the man can really, really coach.