From The THN Archive: Little Train

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This article from the THN Archive was written by Ken Campbell. 

It was Canadian Thanksgiving in 2011 and Dave Conacher just couldn’t enjoy his dinner. It wasn’t like his son to forget to call. Since he couldn’t be there for the holiday, Cory promised he would phone to say hello to everybody after his afternoon nap. Five o’clock turned to six and Cory still hadn’t called and wasn’t picking up his cellphone. That’s when Dave really began to grow concerned and his wife told him to calm down; Cory was probably tied up with some commitment with his new teammates in Norfolk and would get around to calling them later.

But something wasn’t sitting right. Dave’s paternal instinct told him to call the Crowne Plaza hotel in Norfolk, Va., where Cory was staying while waiting to get the word on whether he should find a permanent place to live. Dave asked the staff there to check on his son and moments later they called back, saying Cory was in bed and unresponsive to their attempts to wake him.

Cory Conacher had fallen into what’s known as a diabetic coma caused by severe hypoglycemia, a condition that can lead to brain damage or death if untreated. The hotel called 911 immediately and paramedics rushed to the scene to inject Cory with a glucagon solution that raised his blood sugar level enough that he regained consciousness a half hour later. The same thing had happened twice in college and each time Dave and his wife prepared for the worst.

“The paramedics are giving me the play-byplay and my wife has pretty much gone out of her mind,” Dave recalls. “That’s your biggest fear. If we don’t know where Cory is or what he’s doing, it’s always in the back of your mind that you’ve lost him somewhere. It’s not easy for parents.”

It’s never been easy for Dave and Debbie Conacher. And it’s never, ever been easy for their son, Cory. One of the things that draws us to professional athletes in any sport is their determination to overcome setbacks and obstacles to become the best in the world at what they do. It’s part of what makes us cheer for them. And if that’s the case, Cory Conacher deserves a standing ovation every time he steps on the ice. There are stories of adversity and defeating insurmountable odds. Then there is the story of Cory Conacher.

It has so many tentacles that it’s almost impossible to put the Conacher description in a nice, tidy package. But we’ll try. Cory Conacher is a 5-foot-8, 179-pound diabetic who was born with a rare condition where his bladder was outside his body, which forced doctors to do a 10-hour operation when he was five days old where they essentially cracked him open, reconstructed his pelvis and placed his bladder back inside his body. Because of that, he has no belly button. He was cut from his AAA team in bantam, played for a small NCAA school that had never produced an NHL player, was never drafted by the Ontario League or NHL, but became just the fourth player in American League history to be named rookie of the year and MVP in the same season. The 23-year-old left winger for the Tampa Bay Lightning is a distant relative of Canadian sports loyalty and has emerged as an early-season contender for the Calder Trophy. And yes, he idolizes teammate Martin St-Louis so much he used to pretend he was St-Louis in road hockey games.

“Yeah,” Cory says, “that sounds pretty accurate.”

We’re going to try to attempt to truncate things a little here. How about Cory ‘The Little Train’ Conacher? Catchy, eh? And it works on so many levels. Not only does it pay homage to his lineage to Lionel ‘The Big Train’ Conacher, a member of the Hall of Fame and Canada’s greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century, but it also draws parallels to the story of The Little Engine That Could, the classic children’s tale that extols the virtues of optimism and hard work.

There’s only one major difference between the two. The Little Engine That Could triumphed by living by the words,“I think I can, I think I can.” It’s weird, but that’s not what drives Conacher at all. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. What most motivates Conacher is the nagging feeling he actually thinks he can’t much of the time. In fact, there are times when things aren’t going well that his father is basically the only person who can talk him off the ledge.

“If I don’t play well, I think I’m the worst player in the league,” he says. “Then I start to think, ‘Am I really good enough? I have to get better somehow. I have to do something tomorrow. I have to go to the gym, I have to have a harder shot, I have to skate faster, get stronger.’ ”

Do you notice something in that attitude? Here’s a clue. It always comes back to him, and not the physical limitations he could be justified in using as a crutch. To hear his parents tell the story, it has always been that way, ever since Cory first put on in-line skates when he was three. Cory’s father co-owned a roller rink at the time and between roller hockey and ball hockey, his parents could not keep their son sitting still. And it worried them a little because he had been born with bladder exstrophy, an rare condition where the abdominal wall fails to close during fetal development, resulting in the bladder protruding through the lower abdominal wall and outside the body. The surgery to correct it was so severe that doctors told Dave and Debbie Conacher that their child might never walk properly. When doctors sewed him back up after the surgery, they reattached his skin at the belly button. He was in traction for the first nine weeks of his life and spent another month in traction at the age of three. He was in and out of the hospital with various surgeries until he was seven.

And just a year after that hurdle had been cleared, they learned their son had Type I diabetes. For the next four years, Cory had to have needles poked into his stomach and leg every day and right from the age of eight, he insisted upon administering them himself. When he was 12, he switched to a diabetic pump that clips onto a tube permanently inserted into his body. The pump also has a censor that tells him whether his blood sugar is too high or too low. He doesn’t wear the pump during games, but has it handy on the bench and sometimes checks his level between shifts. If his blood sugar is too low, he administers a shot of glucagon and if it’s too high, he takes a dose of insulin.

Pretty sure we mentioned already that he’s 5-foot-8 and 179 pounds, right? You can add to that his hockey-unfriendly birthday of Dec. 14, which meant he was not only the among smallest, but also the youngest and least developed players on almost all the teams he played for through minor hockey. The size gene from the NHLplaying Conachers didn’t filter down to Cory Conacher, so nobody expected him to be much of an athlete. With a child who had faced so many health issues so early in life, the last concern Dave and Debbie Conacher had was whether or not their son would be a talented hockey player.

“We never, ever had any expectations of Cory,” Dave says. “It was living day-to-day through the early years, just getting through every day making sure Cory would get up in the morning.”

In a strange way, Cory’s health issues have actually helped even the playing field a little bit for him. Follow us on this one. Because of the bladder exstrophy, he has a smaller bladder than most people, so he has to get up most nights to pee several times. That’s kind of a plus when you have diabetes because it prevents him from oversleeping and running the risk of slipping into a diabetic coma. And having diabetes has actually helped Conacher in his quest to be an NHL player, because it has forced him to be hyper-vigilant about managing his diet and sleep habits. And while he enjoys having a post-game beer with his teammates as much as the guy in the next stall, his diabetes pretty much prevents him from being able to get drunk.

Which brings us to an interesting question. Has Conacher been able to excel because he’s hardwired to deal with adversity or have all the issues he’s faced made him into the player and person he is today? It’s impossible to answer, of course, but he has always been able to overcome. A native of Burlington, Ont., Conacher played AAA, the highest level of competitive hockey offered in Canada, until he reached the bantam age group when he was 13. It was that year he was cut and moved down one tier to AA for both his bantam years. In his first year of midget, he tried out for a AAA minor midget team in Burlington and left it during tryouts when the coach made it clear to all the players they shouldn’t be there if they weren’t singularly focused on being chosen in the OHL draft. He went back to AA for that season, then played AAA for his major midget season before making the jump to Jr. A with the Burlington Cougars. It was then only then that, in Debbie’s words, Dave began to think, “Holy s---, he could get a scholarship!”

Dave remembers when he became a believer. It was early in Cory’s Jr. A season with the Cougars and they were playing a game in one of those smalltown barns with a small ice surface. Dave was watching from behind the glass at the other end while his son cut hard to the net with reckless abandon. Dave shuddered as his undersized son looked to be on a collision course with a serious injury just as he took a pass just feet from the goaltender.

“The puck was in the net, he was in the net, the goalie was in the net and the net was against the back boards,” Dave recalls. “I just shook my head. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

Perhaps it’s time, though, to stop thinking everything Cory Conacher does as being so darn unbelievable. Whether it’s managing his diabetes or playing hockey in the best league in the world, all he does is take on challenges and overcome them. That said, who would have ever thought a kid who played four years at Canisius College in Buffalo and studied accounting would make the NHL?

Well, Dave Smith kind of did. He’s the coach at Canisius and had an inkling he had something special on his hands when a fifth-year senior came to him after the first practice of Conacher’s freshman year and said Conacher was the most talented player he had ever seen. Conacher ended up playing at Canisius for four years, breaking every offensive record in the school’s Div. 1 history, finding time in the summer after his freshman year to lead Canada in scoring in Group D of the World In-Line Hockey Championship, a tournament Canada won, which earned it a spot in the top grouping.

Still, almost nobody knew who Cory Conacher was. Fewer cared. He was essentially this little guy with a great backstory who was breaking records and wowing people at a school and in a league that was a couple of steps below the big college hockey powers and was never scouted by the NHL. But Smith would watch as Conacher would go home every year at Christmas and the summer and come back a little stronger, a little faster, with a little harder shot. Smith was a junior scout back in the 1970s when Pat Verbeek was playing Jr. B and decided to call Verbeek to get Conacher on his radar. According to Smith, Verbeek was just one of three NHL teams that answered his calls on Conacher. Verbeek, a scout with the Detroit Red Wings at the time, filed the information away. He became more intrigued when, as director of scouting with the Lightning, he began receiving raving reports from Mike Butters, one of his men in the field.

“I believed Cory could play for more than a cup of coffee in the NHL,” Smith says. “Sometimes we’re right about these things, and sometimes we’re wrong.”

That led to the Lightning signing Conacher to an AHL contract last season with their then AHL affiliate, the Norfolk Admirals. And it’s probably no coincidence that Conacher got his chance with the Lightning. Both Verbeek and player development coordinator Steve Thomas were undersized players by NHL standards who could relate to Conacher’s travails and were more willing to take a chance on him. Like Conacher, Thomas was never drafted by an OHL or NHL team and Verbeek, like Conacher, was quite the pain in the ass. Verbeek’s nickname in the NHL was, ‘The Little Ball of Hate,’ and shortly after he landed in Norfolk, Conacher earned the nickname ‘The Honey Badger’ in deference to the small but ferocious animal who is a notorious predator and bully. Its tough skin makes it difficult to kill and it has been known to rip planks from hen houses or burrow under stone foundations to get at its prey.

“I thought it was kind of weird when they called him that and I had to look on the Internet to see what a honey badger was,” Cory’s father says. “It’s one of those animals that just takes whatever it wants from everybody else and pushes everybody around. He’s a gritty little creature. And that’s what Cory is.”

But those who know him also say Conacher is anything but a bully off the ice. When he was eight years old, he would notice when his mother got her hair done and compliment her on how good it looked. His father said he loves babies so much, he should have been a politician. Even during games, from the ice, Conacher will wink or smile at a youngster sitting in the stands.

Verbeek is a little reticent to take any credit for Tampa Bay’s ability to find Conacher, saying the Lightning basically got lucky. Right around now, 29 other teams wished they could be so lucky. The organization was looking for more depth in terms of speed and skill at the time and Verbeek figured that even if things didn’t work out at the NHL level, they’d have a nice little offensive guy for their minor league operation. He figured it would take Conacher about three years to work his way through the minors, but Conacher ended up scoring 80 points in his rookie pro season on a team that set an AHL record by winning 28 straight regular season games en route to the Calder Cup championship. In their AHL deal with Conacher, the Lightning had the option to trigger an NHL deal, a little bit more “luck” they had in dealing with Conacher.

“He was much better than we ever thought,” Verbeek says.

For now, at least, the narrative when it comes to Cory Conacher, in large part, has to do with his compelling and rich story. Even by the against-all-odds standards, it’s a doozy. Conacher realizes it and is willing to play along, but there will come a time when he hopes people look at him as legitimate NHL player and contributor, not the guy who made the NHL despite having diabetes, being born with his bladder outside his body and not having a belly button.

“I want to be known as a Stanley Cup winner,” he says. “That’s my only goal. I’d love to have people come over in the summer and have a sip out of the Stanley Cup and enjoy a nice little party as well.”

Four Players named AHL rookie of the year and MVP in the same season. Cory Conacher won both in 2011-12 with Norfolk.

14 Conacher’s points (five goals and nine assists) through 15 NHL games, which led all rookies in scoring.