Dietrich learns life lessons from hockey

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This article was published 24/09/2016 (3545 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Few people have taken more from the game of hockey than Don Dietrich.

The 55-year-old former Brandon Wheat Kings defenceman, who played 10 years of professional hockey including 28 games in the National Hockey League, said the lessons he learned from former coach Dunc McCallum and his junior hockey teammates have stayed with him through his battles with Parkinson’s disease and cancer.

“The game is the main reason I’m here today for sure,” Dietrich said. “If I could give back a tenth of what the game’s given me … I don’t think I’ve done that. There’s a saying that you’re only as good as your last shift and a lot of those things I take with me in life. And a lot of them I learned right here in Brandon.”

Dietrich’s hockey journey began in his hometown of Deloraine, where he grew up idolizing Wayne Coxworth, who spent two seasons with the Wheat Kings from 1970 to 1972. When Dietrich played road hockey with his friends, they were stars from the Toronto Maple Leafs. He was Coxworth, and shared his dream of playing in Brandon.

Dietrich attended his first camp in Brandon at 15 in 1977, something he admits was intimidating.

“I was 15 years old and Dave Semenko is out there and Billy Derlago and some of those really good players,” Dietrich said. “But I came with the attitude that I wanted to stay and I wanted to make it next year. I did whatever I had to do to make the team and was fortunate enough to do the right things I guess.”

He played that season with the Deloraine Royals, a senior team that was later enshrined in the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame. It unknowingly prepared him for the season that lay ahead.

“Winning was something that was engrained into me,” Dietrich said. “Baseball was the same way. We had good ball teams as a kid growing up. I knew these guys (the 1978-79 Wheat Kings) were going into a great season but nobody even thought that we’d lose just five games.”

Dietrich had the good fortune to join the team that had the best regular season in Canadian Hockey League history, going an amazing 58-5-9 for 125 points. The roster included a who’s who of future NHL stars, including Brad McCrimmon, Brian Propp, Laurie Boschman, Ray Allison, Walt Podubny and Steve Patrick.

As a young defenceman he had lots to learn, and a mentor with plenty of experience to teach him.

“I was a very offensive type of defenceman and Dunc McCallum was our coach,” Dietrich said. “He was an NHL defenceman himself so there were lots of little things that I needed to learn. I accepted them and put them to use on the ice. I played the power play the odd time and I’m out there with Brad McCrimmon on point with me and Allison, Boschman and Propp. I think I had 46 points that year. I just had to stop the puck behind the net and give it to one of those guys and away they’d go.”

Dietrich said he started to get a sense of how good that team could be when they headed out on their first extended road trip. At the time, they played Regina and Saskatoon 16 times per season and had a lot of success against them.

They kept rolling against non-division teams they didn’t normally play against, although a loss against the Billings Bighorns also helped them turn a corner.

“We didn’t like it and that’s when it kind of hit me that these guys want to win every game,” Dietrich said. “That’s the way we went to the rink. We were going to win every game.”

In the old playoff format, which was changed two years later, Brandon went 7-1 in the divisional round robin, swept the Saskatoon Blades in four games, went 3-1 in the league semifinal round robin and beat the Portland Winter Hawks in six games to capture Brandon’s first Western Hockey League title.

“We expected to do it,” Dietrich said. “Like any team that goes along, everything fell into place. You’re in the right place at the right time. You might be down a goal or something but we always knew that we could come back. You need to have a bit of luck too to get as far as we did, but whether it took luck or hard work, we just expected it to happen.”

The luck ran out in overtime at the Memorial Cup final when Brandon lost 2-1 to the Peterborough Petes, ending a magical season.

The next season began with more pressure on Dietrich to perform. Many of the top players on the previous year’s team had graduated, and his role grew larger. The NHL also changed its rules to allow 18-year-olds to be selected in its entry draft, suddenly putting Dietrich under the microscope of scouts.

He responded by posting 60 points in 63 games to finish fifth in team scoring as a 17-year-old defenceman.

“I played a ton in those days,” Dietrich said. “I would play 35, 40 minutes a game. You paced yourself in those days and that can either help you or hurt you. I think it maybe hurt me because of my style that I played. I was a big guy but I wasn’t really all that physical because I was the type of guy who got tired trying to run around and hit guys. I had to be in the best condition I could be on the ice so sometimes that meant not taking a big hit or giving one. You find yourself not putting yourself in situations that might hurt you in the long run.”

As a result, Dietrich didn’t hear his name called until the ninth round when he was selected by the Chicago Black Hawks.

It was also a tough year on the ice, with the squad falling to a record of 33-37-2 in 1979-80.

“We just didn’t have that scoring power,” Dietrich said. “We were a tough team to play against but if you don’t put the puck in the net … you can’t win unless you score one more than the other team. We struggled with ups and downs. We had a fairly successful season but we didn’t go as far as we wanted.”

They ended up losing in the second round to the Regina Pats, who went on to win the league title.

In his final season, 1980-81, he moved up to third in team scoring with 80 points but the Wheat Kings finished 29-40-3 and were once again ousted by the Pats, this time in the first round.

McCallum left after Dietrich’s second season and was replaced Les Jackson, but McCallum continued to have a huge influence on the young defenceman.

“One thing I always remember from him is that man in the mirror poem,” Dietrich said. “You can’t fool him. No matter what, that guy is staring back at you in the glass. I think that’s the biggest thing that I took from my junior hockey days. You have to give an honest effort and you only have one guy to answer to, and that’s the guy staring back in the glass at you. You can’t fool him.”

For a young player accustomed to winning, Dietrich’s first professional season was more of what he had come to expect.

The New Brunswick Hawks won the Calder Cup in his professional debut, although Dietrich wasn’t in the lineup every night.

He received his first NHL callup two years later, debuting on Dec. 31, 1983 with the Black Hawks against the Detroit Red Wings. He played 17 games with Chicago that winter, famously being loaned to Team Canada for the Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, and then being ruled ineligible just before the tournament was set to begin because he played in the NHL.

After finishing the season in Chicago, it took a change of organizations to find his way back to the NHL, which came late in the 1985-86 season with the New Jersey Devils.

Dietrich then took his game to Europe.

The beginning of the end of his hockey career came when he shattered his kneecap in Europe in his first season there. He played four more seasons, but the injury cost him a step and hastened the inevitable. Eventually his phone stopped ringing with offers of new jobs in the game.

“I wasn’t a guy who was prepared for that,” Dietrich said. “I figured that I was invincible and could last forever. Once you get that reality — I had three small kids, two in diapers still — I had to go out in the real world, look at that man in the mirror and do the best that I could.”

He had met his eventual wife Nadine in Portland, Maine while he was playing with the Maine Mariners of the American Hockey League.

They bought a home in nearby Buxton and he landed at a golf course for three years as an assistant superintendent as boys Tristan, Jacob and Nick got older.

The family moved to Deloraine in 1994 when they took over a fast-food restaurant, and Dietrich began volunteering to help out young hockey players.

What would prove to be the second chapter of Dietrich’s story had actually started a year earlier when Parkinson’s symptoms began to show. Dietrich adapted to the shakes in his right arm by using his left instead.

With the symptoms worsening, Dietrich was finally diagnosed in 1995 at age 34.

His outlook on Parkinson’s, which he calls “his old pal,” has changed.

“I consider myself a Parkinson’s warrior because I fight it every day,” Dietrich said. “I’m just dealing with that outlook at it now. I don’t know if that’s from 20 years of saying that I was going to kick his ass. It’s tough because it’s a progressive disease. I don’t ever like losing but every day I have to get up and face the battle with him.”

He wouldn’t let it slow him down.

Dietrich said after his Parkinson’s diagnosis, he went to his doctor to see if he could still play senior hockey.

“He said I’ll tell you the same thing I tell all of my other Parkinson’s patients,” Dietrich said. “You do what you can and you do it now.”

His health took another turn for the worse in 1999 when doctors found an aggressive type of cancer called leiomyo sarcoma. He was given six months to live, but took an experimental drug for six months and then returned to work with Canada Customs.

Two years later the cancer was back, this time in his liver, but again an experimental treatment worked.

He’s now had six cancer surgeries in his abdomen and battled Parkinson’s Disease for more than 20 years.

“I take every one of those attitudes that I got in hockey, basically, with that junior foundation to deal with my illnesses the way I do” Dietrich said. “There’s no guarantee.”

He was touched during his battle with cancer when old Chicago teammates Tony Esposito and Doug Wilson called to chat.

Despite his health battles, he never stopped giving back to the game of hockey.

He worked with the Royals senior team and the Southwest midget AAA Cougars. And as a member of Canada’s national coach mentorship program, he developed a breakfast club that allowed young players to come out twice a week to work on skill development.

His efforts certainly didn’t go unnoticed.

After being elected to the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame with the 1978-79 Wheat Kings in 2007, Dietrich was inducted in the builders’ category in 2011.

He will celebrate 33 years of marriage to wife Nadine this fall, and is now a grandfather.

His story was told in a 2007 book called No Guarantees, a collection of Dietrich’s memories assembled by Nadine and freelance writer Brad Bird.

As Bird did the interviews and pulled the book together, he got to know Dietrich quite well in the process.

“I’m not a guy who has heroes a lot,” Bird said. “I’ve been a reporter for darn near 40 years and I’ve seen all kinds of human nature to me, but Don is a hero to me. Why? Because of his tenacity, because of resilience, because of his kindness. This guy played one of the toughest pro sports there is and is still a kind, decent human being through all that he’s been through. And it wasn’t always easy for Don.”

The book is on Amazon, but can also be purchased for $19.95 by contacting Bird at birdbrad@hotmail.com

Dietrich’s continued contributions to the sport can be seen in the Wheat Kings lineup this year. He coached current Brandon defenceman Garrett Sambrook.

He was touched when he was told that he was one of the defencemen that Wheat Kings fans can pick for their all-time team in a joint promotion between the team and the Brandon Sun.

“That’s pretty overwhelming,” Dietrich said. “I don’t view myself as being up there with some of those guys. That leaves me speechless.”

His days as a Wheat King remain special to him. He remains in contact with his close friend Kelly McCrimmon and other teammates including Don Gillen, Ron Popplestone and Ken Schneider.

He remembers McCallum telling him that money changes everything and he agrees.

“My best friendships are from junior hockey,” Dietrich said. “That’s something that Dunc McCallum used to tell us. He’d say ‘You’ll always remember these guys that you’re riding in a stinkin’ bus with across Western Canada not making a dime. Those will be your best friends,’ and he’s right.”

He calls it an honour to have been on the ice with his former Brandon teammates, and is happy that he managed to get 10 years of pro hockey in.

Dietrich said he made $365,000 in 10 pro seasons, but the experiences that his time in the game provided are priceless.

“I made a living at it, I didn’t make a fortune,” Dietrich said. “But I wouldn’t change that for anything. That’s part of looking at that man in the mirror. Are you satisfied with him? Can you honestly look at him and say you did your best?

“I’d say I did.”

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