Cujo overcame a difficult upbringing
Former NHL goalie shares story in new book
Curtis Joseph, former NHL goaltender, is the latest athlete to write his story. His book Cujo: The Untold Story of My Life On and Off the Ice is co-authored by Kirstie McLellan Day.
Unlike most hockey players who make it to the NHL, Curtis Joseph’s road to professional hockey stardom was as unbelievable as it was disturbing.
Apparently adopted, he was never sure, by a 50-year-old couple after being given up by his 17-year-old birth mother, Cujo had anything but a nurturing, stable upbringing.
He writes, “I had a weird life — two moms, three dads and I grew up in a home full of mentally ill patients run by a crazy person.”
That crazy person was his adopting mother, who he suspected was drug dependent and ran a group home north of Toronto for mentally disturbed adult men.
Curtis remembers as a 10-yearold living off stale cookies, processed cheese slices and frozen hamburgers he cooked on a small barbecue. He shared a dirty mattress on the floor with two cats in a small room in this group home.
“Mom treated her animals better than she treated her kids,” he wrote.
After he started playing house league hockey at age 10, thanks to an older adopted sister who asked him to fill in for her son on a team, Curtis’ life started to improve.
Parents of teammates regularly fed him properly; he often stayed over at their homes and began to realize what ordinary family life was all about.
Curtis’ superior athleticism started to emerge when he was playing minor hockey. Put in goal because he never really learned how to skate, Curtis immediately showed an uncanny aptitude to stopping a puck. Never playing above the single A level in the Greater Toronto Hockey League, he started to be noticed. Never drafted in the OHL, he played Tier II hockey in King City, Newmarket and Richmond Hill.
From there Curtis was given an opportunity to play for Notre Dame College in Saskatchewan on their Junior A Tier II team. He was one of a number of non-students that augmented the schoolaged players on the team. They went to the Canadian Tier II championship final in 1988, the forerunner to the RBC Cup.
From that team Curtis was recruited to the NCAA at the University of Wisconsin. There he played only one season in college before signing a professional contract with the St. Louis Blues. He split the next season, 1989-90, between the Blues where he played in 15 games and their minor league affiliate, Peoria.
Never drafted into the NHL, Curtis went on to play 18 NHL seasons. He had stops in St. Louis, Edmonton, Toronto, Detroit, Phoenix and Calgary. Curtis also won a gold medal with the 2002 Canadian Olympic team.
During his time in St. Louis he played for former Peterborough Petes coach Mike Keenan. Curtis is extremely complimentary of practically all his teammates and coaches except for Keenan.
The two, in Curtis’ opinion, never really hit it off. Curtis was more upset at the way Keenan handled other players than the way he treated him. They teamed up years later and things were better.
Much of the later chapters of the book are upbeat after his descriptions of his preteen and teen years. He relates a number of both humorous and revealing incidents involving teammates and opponents and gives a look into the less-publicized aspects of NHL hockey.
It took the encouragement of his wife and the passage of time for Curtis to finally reveal in this book his, as he calls it, “weird” upbringing and the myriad of concerning people who helped him overcome that beginning.