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Jul 18, 2016/vol. 70, issue 01
THEIR HOME AWAY FROM HOME
Steve Martinson knows life as an ECHL coach is a rollercoaster ride at the best of times. For Jeff Christian, it has helped him deal with tragedy
BY JASON BUCKLAND
IN MINOR LEAGUE hockey, often the only thing consistent is change. Just ask Steve Martinson, the veteran Allen Americans coach.
His club, which won its second straight Kelly Cup title as champs of the ECHL, has been through as much recent turnover as a team could have in one season. There have been roster call-ups and players poached by other leagues and every usual roadblock a minor league coach must steer around.
Though for Martinson, disorder has often proven normal for his Texas team, which has jumped through so many administrative hurdles of late it didn’t even belong in the ECHL not so long ago (the Americans were adopted after the Central League folded in 2014.)
He has been the face of his franchise since 2012 and a successful one. In 20 years coaching in the minor pros, Martinson, who played 49 games in the NHL, has won 10 league championships and missed the playoffs just once. He has led the Americans now to four straight titles, including two in a row since joining the ECHL.
Martinson is respected in the league, but so, too, is the new coach of the Wheeling Nailers, which fell four games to two to the Americans in the final behind the guidance of Jeff Christian, another former NHL pro.
He was thrust into Wheeling’s lead job less than two months ago after the team’s coach took a leave of absence. Christian, like Martinson, is no stranger to uncertainty in sport and in life. He has found plenty over nearly two decades in pro hockey at almost every level.
But his greatest lesson couldn’t be taught on dressing room whiteboards or between the bluelines. He could only learn it after unthinkable personal loss threatened to tear his world apart.
She comes to the coach each moment of every day.
If he’s behind the bench, she is there, arms crossed by his side. If he’s on the ice, she’s there through each glide along the rink. If he’s in the car, she’s there in the back seat, singing along to the songs he can never quite listen to the same way again.
Christian can’t escape her, or he can’t let her go. Certainly, both are true. Likely, both are by design. The Nailers coach and longtime journeyman, who reached the NHL for 18 games in the ’90s but played his 21 pro seasons largely in small-time arenas from Owen Sound, Ont., to Sheffield, England, still has a love affair with his daughter, Ryan.
The great tragedy is that for more than three years she has been gone.
In 2010, Christian’s wife, Dorie, entered their daughter’s bedroom to find the girl locked in a seizure. A run of tests followed. It took eight agonizing days to discover the root of Ryan’s condition when doctors found a mass hiding in her adrenal gland. It wasn’t common, but also, surgeons suggested, was unlikely to be anything of grave concern.
What was instead uncovered floored Christian, the news seeming to crumple his powerful 6-foot-2, 210-pound frame into itself. The mass was cancer, and worse than that a form so rare it affects only about one of every million children.
A doctor explained to Christian and his wife that Ryan had pediatric adrenal cortical carcionoma. They looked on as they were warned that, for their eight-yearold with light hair and fair skin, it might already be too late.
She fought like hell. For nearly three years, through enough treatments and surgeries and clinical trials for any lifetime, let alone that of a small child, Ryan grit her teeth and swung back at the cancer that was coming for her.
She gave it her all until Jan. 24, 2013, when she closed her eyes for the final time.
Not that she doesn’t live on, particularly in the heart and waking consciousness of Christian, whose winding life in hockey has taken him from NHL draft pick to ECHL coach, a profession so goofy and all-encompassing he must keep Ryan with him every moment.
When he finally gave up playing in 2011, Christian retired to Columbus, where his wife had family. Dorie had mirrored her life after her husband’s for some time – after law school, she took off for Europe to be with Christian as he played in Germany and the United Kingdom – but now it was her time to shine.
While she worked as an attorney for Nationwide Insurance, Christian, 45, entered a new phase of his life: stay-at-home dad, or, as he took up work as a realtor and peewee hockey coach, at least the primary caregiver to Ryan and the couple’s other child, son Tyler.
“I was basically being Mr. Mom,” Christian said.
He relished the time with his family, the stability, Dorie’s rising law career. But hockey never left his soul.
Earlier this year, three years after Ryan’s passing, he began to beg for a job back in the sport, exhausting all the contacts he’d made throughout his years in hockey.
Finally, he was brought on as an assistant coach in Wheeling and, following a personal leave by coach Dave Gove, Christian was elevated to interim coach during this season’s playoffs.
Christian blows his whistle and instructs his guys, but at this level there’s so much more than just thinking about the game immediately before him. On a June afternoon before Game 3 of the ECHL final, Christian was busy scouting the Americans and preparing for the rest of the series, yet there were other matters at hand.
The team photocopier had broken down, and guess whose responsibility that was to fix.
Christian not only has to have the copy guy on speed dial, he must also rent the team shuttle, drive the thing and pay for team dinners out of pocket until the Nailers reimburse him. There’s no job, large or small, Christian is not in charge of.
WE HAD A GOOD DAY TODAY. WE’RE GOING TO HAVE ANOTHER GOOD DAY TOMORROW – JEFF CHRISTIAN TO HIS DAUGHTER, RYAN
So he leans on the memory of Ryan, and he leans on his family. The team puts him up in a flop house near the arena, and when Dorie and Tyler, now four, come visit from Ohio, he tries to spruce it up as best he can.
For Christian, the son of a hard-nosed former Tiger-Cats tight end in the Canadian Football League, it fits him fine.
“I was born in the east end of Hamilton,” he said. “I don’t need fancy things.”
His circumstances have suited him well. He took over a strong team already in the playoffs and drove the Nailers all the way to the final.
Christian likes to credit Lou Lamoriello, his old boss when he played for the Devils in New Jersey, for the approach he takes to being a pro, for the lessons he tries to impart upon his young players.
Yet often there’s a parallel between his success and a mantra he adopted with Ryan when she was sick. So much about minor league hockey is a slog, a long season with lousy travel and poor accommodations.
But Christian learned also through Ryan’s death the importance of finding the good in life, of burying your head and pushing through no matter what. And so sometimes in guiding his players, he thinks back to Ryan during her treatments all those years ago.
“We had a good day today,” he would tell his dying girl. “We’re going to have another good day tomorrow.”
Martinson was in something of a sour mood during the Kelly Cup. It had been a trying season for the Americans coach, who watched dissatisfied as a team he felt was much stronger finished second in the ECHL’s Central Division.
“It was a little frustrating season,” he said. “I thought we had a better team than our record.”
He was right. In the Kelly Cup, after falling behind two games to one, the defending champs would triumph. In the ECHL’s 27 seasons, the Americans became the third team to repeat.
What may come for Martinson and Christian, one established coach and another still finding his footing, can’t be foretold. It will be an off-season of turnover, of players come and gone, of copy machines fixed and broken and fixed again. For both, it’ll be a ride.
(Photo Courtesy of the Allen Americans)