Joseph’s new book offers personal take on perseverance
It was the summer of 2002 and Curtis Joseph had a decision to make. He’d just backstopped the Maple Leafs to within a couple of victories of a Stanley Cup final. He’d become a massive hero in the world’s biggest hockey market in four seasons in town, winning 32 playoff games for Toronto and twice being voted a finalist for the Vezina Trophy. But he was a 35-year-old free agent with options.
“A voice in my head was saying, ‘I need Cups.’ My heart was saying, ‘Stay — you are a Leaf.’ But my brain was saying, ‘Curtis, you can have it all.’ A pretty egotistical thing to think, honestly. But that’s what it takes to be a No. 1 goalie.”
So goes Joseph’s play-by-play of his abandonment of Toronto for the defending Stanley Cup winners in Detroit as written in his arresting new memoir Cujo: The Untold Story of My Life On and Off the Ice. It’s a rare anecdote of regret in a book brimming with Joseph’s glass-half-full positivity. Almost from the beginning, Joseph’s exit from Toronto, which he now frames as a mistake, was doomed. He didn’t enjoy that long-sought Stanley Cup celebration in Detroit; he would retire at age 41 — back in his rightful place in Leafland, as it happens — having never hoisted the elusive chalice.
But the episode offers a window into the relentless selfbelief and forward-looking drive that fuelled one of the more unlikely rises in hockey history. The real meat of Cujo, after all, isn’t so much Joseph’s recollections of a hockey life well lived (although, paired with expert collaborator Kirstie McLellan Day, the 51-yearold Joseph offers plenty of worthy and funny dressingroom insights). It’s his stark portrayal of his destitute early life. Born to a 16-year-old mother unable to raise him, Joseph was taken in by a drugaddled woman he would come to call his mother who, in Joseph’s telling, showed little interest in child rearing. For a long while, young Curtis Joseph lived at Martin Acres, a halfway house for mentally ill men in what’s now the town of East Gwillimbury presided over by his guardians. There was at least one suspected pedophile and a rumoured murderer among the residents.
As Joseph writes: “I had a weird life.”
The living conditions were skin-crawling; as a child, young Curtis would curl up on a dry corner of a mattress soaked with cat urine. In the book he theorizes he’d be much taller than his current 5-foot-11 had he been fed something better than his childhood staples of processed cheese slices, stale cookies and institutional hamburgers. It’s harrowing stuff. And Joseph, in an interview this week, said he felt it was important to lay the details bare so people might take inspiration from his story. Though he paints a stark picture of a childhood bereft of love and devoid of money, one gets the sense Joseph was somehow never starved for hopes and dreams.
“My goal was to help others by writing the book … And I guess my message has always been, ‘Don’t be a victim. Be victorious,’ ” Joseph said. “Like, there’s always some- thing better around the corner. There’s always something to strive for. Failure’s a part of growing up, so just keep going. That’s the idea to get across.”
If hockey was his vehicle to overcome grim beginnings, Joseph is more than aware that his timing was excellent. Decades since he began his ascent through the ranks playing single-A hockey with borrowed equipment, the landscape has changed. Now the father of seven children — four from his first marriage, two from second, plus a nephew he and his wife, Stephanie, are raising together — he’s more than aware that the price of hockey wouldn’t likely allow for his underdog story to unfold.
“Now it’s $7,000 to play junior A … I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” Joseph said.
And thanks to the NHL’s current fixation with mostly excluding sub-six-foot goaltenders from consideration, he’d now be doubly hindered.
“I wouldn’t have had a chance,” Joseph said. “How do we get the 5-11, entertaining, super-athletic guy back into the league? Where’s the Johnny Gaudreau of goalies?”
They’re out there, is Joseph’s point. But that’ll be a project for another day. Now an ambassador for the Maple Leafs, and currently on a book tour that will take him through some 28 Canadian cities between now and Dec. 1, he’s committed to spending the coming month or so talking about the old times with throngs of adoring fans.
Among the icons whose names will surely come up along the way, Joseph spills considerable ink extolling the important influence exerted on him by a long list of teammates and mentors, among them Wayne Gretzky, Brett Hull, Leafs president Brendan Shanahan and agent Don Meehan.
“I was always searching for … not a father, not a dad, but a role model,” Joseph writes.
He didn’t always find it in the coach’s office. Mike Keenan, Joseph’s bench boss in St. Louis, comes off in the book as a distasteful bully; ex-Leafs coach Pat Quinn, whose decision to bench Joseph at the 2002 Olympics became a sore point between the two only after Quinn made it so, comes off as good-hearted but occasionally doddering; and Glen Sather, the GM in Edmonton when Joseph was traded there in 1995, gets mention for driving a miserly hard bargain.
Joseph spent the first few months of the 1995-96 season playing for Las Vegas of the International Hockey League while Meehan attempted to negotiate a contract with the Sather. William Nylander might want to read that chapter.
“You’re scoreboard watching. It’s tough. (Nylander) knows that if the Leafs lose he’ll have a better chance to get a contract. And if the Leafs win, he’ll have less of a chance,” Joseph said in an interview. “It’s terrible. It’s an awful feeling. I hadn’t played in Edmonton, so it was different. But he’s played with these guys. They’re his brothers. It has to be more agonizing than what I went through.”
Joseph’s advice to Nylander is to accept a shorter-term bridge deal.
“I get it. He’s trying to get the most he can. But he should probably do the shorter deal. Just get the deal done,” Joseph said. “He’s a great talent, a great player, and he will get paid. If it goes any longer, Nylander will be so far behind. He won’t look good. He won’t have a good year. And now what? Because then you get behind, you have a bad year and, especially in Toronto, everybody goes, ‘Oh, he’s not that good.’ But he is that good. He’s a great player.”
“Especially in Toronto,” is a phrase Joseph can speak with authority. As a boy, he grew up in squalor 45 minutes north of the city, dreaming of the better life he’s so marvellously constructed. As a man, he rose to rule the town as one of its sporting kings. As a memoirist, he’s here to tell today’s Maple Leafs that leaving the centre of the hockey universe was a mistake he wishes he could take back.
With Joseph’s 2002 exit still a sore point, the book’s final words are Joseph’s theoretical advice to Leafs goaltender Freddie Andersen should Andersen, who’s under contract through 2020-21, become a free agent: “The grass isn’t always greener … Stay here, Freddie … Stay, and win a Cup for the Leafs.”