DOWN WITH DENVER’S CHARM
Canucks’ Skille finds off-season home, purpose in Mile High City, writes Ben Kuzma.
You can go home again. DENVER Jack Skille did and then moved on from Madison, Wis.
The Vancouver Canucks’ grinder not only played in Denver last season, he found a home away from home.
The struggling Colorado Avalanche finished five points shy of an NHL wild-card berth, Patrick Roy resigned as coach and vicepresident of hockey operations and unrestricted free-agent Skille wasn’t re-signed after earning a roster spot on a professional tryout.
You’d think the 29-year-old winger couldn’t get out of town fast enough.
However, Skille was so enamoured with the city’s proximity to the Rocky Mountains, the four-season lifestyle and the population’s zest for living and caring for its communities that he bought a 1920s-style bungalow and endured an arduous renovation project. He also started a non-profit project called Kid Strong Foundation to better the day-to-day lives of sick children enduring short or long hospital stays.
Skille wanted to give back to a city where he met his fiancée and where he was introduced to those in need at the Denver Children’s Hospital. It had a profound affect on Skille, especially when he struck a bond with six-year-old John Howell, who had a brain tumour. Skille hung out with Howell. They played air hockey and video games and a friendship flourished.
Howell was physically capable and seemed fine, but would succumb to the tumour.
“That was a tough pill to swallow,” recalled Skille. “He drew a picture for me and it’s still hanging on my wall in Denver. It’s a sad story. You hang out with these kids and you just see who they are. You try to help them and you wind up walking out of the place being touched by them.
“You learn more at the end of the day than they do and they teach you some serious life lessons — whether they mean to or not.”
The foundation has been certified by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and Skille is in the process of signing the final papers. He has enlisted a group of tech-savvy friends to build a website and design marketing and communication strategies via social media.
“My goal isn’t just to donate money to research, but to donate it to affect their daily lives in the moment,” said Skille. “That’s beefing up their play areas and their playrooms. And for teenagers, there’s a gap. When I visited the hospital, it suited the young kids, but teens need i-Pads to play games in bed and learn things.
“More can be done and the hospitals know it, but they’re restricted financially and have budgets to keep. After meeting with administrators and bouncing ideas off each other, they were
ecstatic because nobody thinks about those kind of things — the physical aspect of making that kid happy in the moment.
“Sometimes kids are there for years waiting for transplants and stuck in the hospital because an organ could come at any moment. They need to be on site. And we want to make them happier.”
The other challenge that Skille embraced was making Denver his off-season home. He connected on and off the ice. And with a passion for the outdoors, he found something in a city where you can either get away from it all in a hurry or immerse yourself in the culture.
“There’s just so much to do,” said the former first-round draft pick (seventh overall by the Chicago Blackhawks in 2005). “You’re 30 minutes away from the mountains and I love hiking and biking and just getting away from the big mess of a city. You get the best of both worlds: great restaurants and great people. They’re active and fun and being there just one summer, I made so many friends.
“You know you can call it home when you go someplace else and I can’t wait to get back there. I went back to Madison and there was nothing left for me. I was getting anxious to get back to Denver.”
And back to another project that mirrored The Money Pit movie, a 1986 comedy in which Tom Hanks and Shelley Long disastrously attempt to renovate their recently purchased home.
“I don’t want to watch it (the movie) because it will take me back to those nightmares last summer,” said Skille.
What could go wrong? Surely, there are good contractors who could have turned the old bungalow into a new-age place of comfort.
“I did my renovations and I don’t know if I ever want to go down the road again,” he stressed. “I was naive. I thought it would be bing-bang-boom and done in one week. It turned into a three-month process. I took down three walls, opened up the living room and actually wiped out a bedroom to make a gigantic living room. I had to get a 22-foot, 500-pound refurbished wood beam from Louisiana to go straight across (the living room) and that was quite the process to just get it in the house.”
You know you can call it home when you go someplace else and I can’t wait to get back there.