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D'Amico battling cancer in Toronto
By John McGourty | NHL.com
May 27, 2005 - The hockey world is coming together to rally around retired NHL linesman John D'Amico and his family. D'Amico is suffering from leukemia and bone cancer in a Toronto hospital and friends have gathered to comfort him.
"No one is more respected than John," said former partner Ray Scapinello, who retired last season. "Everyone knew if it was an important game, John would be one of the two linesmen. If it was the deciding game of a Stanley Cup Playoff series, it was John's. The seventh game of the Stanley Cup Finals? It was automatic. We went to training camp in the fall knowing that if the Stanley Cup went to seven games, John D'Amico would be one of the three officials deciding the game."
From 1964 to 1987, D'Amico worked 1,604 NHL games as a linesman and 23 games as a referee. The Toronto native officiated in four Canada Cup tournaments and the Challenge Cup and Rendez Vous series that replaced the NHL All-Star games in 1979 and 1987, respectively. He also appeared in 20 Stanley Cup Finals.
D'Amico suffered a heart attack in September 2002 and underwent bypass surgery. Subsequent testing revealed blood abnormalities and he was diagnosed with aplastic anemia. He has suffered bouts with gallstones, had a broken blood vessel in his stomach and has fought off pneumonia. He recently made the decision to forego chemotherapy and will be transferred soon to palliative care, said former NHL Referee-In-Chief Scotty Morrison.
"He lost all his red blood cells so he's not getting much oxygen to his extremities and his brain," retired referee Paul Stewart said. "The chemotherapy is the hardest part, but they had to discontinue it, he had gotten so weak."
"I just got off the phone with him," said retired referee Wally Harris, who signed his first NHL contract on the same day as D'Amico in 1963. "You remember the big giant of a man, strong as a bull, and it's tough to see him in this state. He's my oldest buddy in hockey. I had been talking to him every month and he was promising he'd get up to see me, but each time he wound up back in the hospital."
Put simply, D'Amico, 67, defined what a good linesman should be. Harris said D'Amico was one of the two best linesmen in the history of the NHL. The other, Harris said, was George Hayes, like D'Amico a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame. It was Hayes' retirement that opened the door for D'Amico.
D'Amico was as strong as an ox and courageous in separating fighters. Once D'Amico pulled them apart, they were done.
"When I was a player, John had grabbed me a few times when I got into fights," recalled Stewart, himself a cancer survivor. "He was a big, burly guy, a fierce competitor. So, I was nervous before working my first game with him, an exhibition game, Winnipeg at Minnesota. He was very helpful to me and all the young guys coming along.
"I was refereeing Rendez-Vous '87 and had put Canada down two men at the end of the first period. A guy comes down and starts berating me. So, I said, 'Who do you think you are?' John pulled me into the dressing room and said that's Alan Eagleson!"
Stewart had a reputation for letting the players play. He found out one night that D'Amico saw the game a bit differently.
"I got speared in the knee and had to leave the ice. John took over as the referee," Stewart recalled. "The game went from no penalties to 10 penalties while I was gone. We had different philosophies, but I have so much respect for John. We've come full circle in our lives. He was a supervisor while I was an official. Later, I supervised his son, Angelo, when he was breaking into the NHL."
Angelo D'Amico split the past four seasons between the NHL and AHL and signed on as a full-time NHL official last spring.
"I was bound and determined to make John a referee," Morrison recalled. "He was doing well, no problems and everyone had so much respect for him. It was working out but he was breaking out in hives. He was continually after me to put him back on the line. So, I tried a little psychological ploy on him. I assigned him to line a game with a brand-new referee and a linesman I brought up from the minor league. I figured that would get him thinking to himself that these young kids weren't going to take his place. So, after the game I went down to that little referee room in Maple Leaf Gardens and John said, 'Boss, can I see you outside for a minute?' Great, I'm thinking. John put his arm around my shoulder and said, "I can't thank you enough. Now I know I want to be a linesman for the rest of my career.' There went my psychological ploy! From then on, we used him to train the younger officials.
"He was always a guy you could tease," Morrison continued. "One training camp, I broke the officials into four teams and I named four captains to draft these officials onto their teams, referees John Ashley and Art Skov and linesmen Matt Pavelich and Neil Armstrong. We get down to the final three officials and John is still undrafted. So, the blue team passes and the red team passes and the green team takes one guy and the orange team takes another and that leaves John. So, I tell them, just like the NHL draft, we have to go another round. All four teams pass and John goes storming out swearing he's going to get revenge when they get back on the ice. The airport was my favorite though. We'd be returning to Toronto where the customs people knew us on sight so we'd all get a big greeting. Except John. They always pulled him out of the line and it would infuriate him. I'd tease him, 'John, with that big black wool overcoat, black scarf and black fedora, you look like the head of the Toronto mafia.'
"John had quite a career and he's had quite a life, a wonderful wife, wonderful loving children who have done well and five terrific grandchildren that he loves. It's a shame this befalls him at a time when he was enjoying having more time to spend with them."
"John was a supervisor when I started in 1993," said Don Van Massenhoven, the president of the NHL Officials Association. "He is an amazing man, very strong and a great teacher. He was so respected by the teams. We'd go to the playoffs and everyone knew John and respected him. He really wanted to help the younger guys. He was a very caring guy. He had a job to do, but you sensed there was something beyond that, that he really wanted to help you in every way."
"When he became a supervisor, John would work with young officials," Harris said. "He wanted everyone to be perfect and would do anything to help them. It was beautiful to watch him spend time with them between periods. He gave instruction in a nice way that gave young officials a lot of confidence."
"Everything I know about officiating, I learned from John," Scapinello said. "I started in 1971 and 70 percent of my games in my first five years were with John. He was brilliant and was rewarded for that by being inducted in to the Hockey Hall of Fame. I did it for 33 years and John was without a doubt the best I've ever seen. Half the battle in officiating is having the respect of the coaches and general managers. That trickles down to the players. No one was more respected than John."
Scapinello and Harris remember the night Harris frustrated D'Amico to the point of rebellion.
"At the League meetings, they decided to clear up the penalty times on the clock, make it simpler," Harris recalled. "So, I call a 5-minute penalty for a bad slash in a St. Louis-Montreal game. The other guy retaliates and I give him 10 minutes, but the first guy retaliated to that and I gave him another two minutes for roughing. One guy has 10 minutes and the other seven so I told the timekeeper to put up three minutes on the clock, the first three-minute minor in NHL history! John's telling me that's not right, but I go over to Scotty Bowman, the Montreal coach, and Emile Francis, with St. Louis, and they both agree with me, saying that's the way they remembered the discussion at the meetings. John won't drop the puck, keeps coming back to me. Finally, I pull rank (Harris was president of the officials association, as well) and said, 'Drop the puck.'
"Scotty Morrison, the director of officials, called the next day and reamed me out badly. It cost me the playoffs assignment and John was trying to save me from myself. The rule was changed eventually. I was just ahead of my time!"
"Wally kept sending John back into the circle and John would be ready but then he'd rethink and head back to Wally," Scapinello recalled. "Finally, Wally ordered him to do it. I have to credit Wally for standing up for us with Morrison. He took the blame himself. When they changed the rule, John and I teased him, calling it the 'Wally rule.'"
In a sense, D'Amico owed Harris, anyway.
"We were doing that game in Boston in the early 1970s when Boston out-shot Chicago something like 54-14, but Tony Esposito wouldn't be beaten, including two breakaways by his brother Phil. The teams were fighting for first place overall and Chicago was leading when Bobby Orr picks up the puck with a minute left. He comes flying through everybody until he hits the blue line where Bill White checks him and sends him flying. The crowd hears a whistle and expects a penalty. The Bruins expected a penalty. I didn't call a penalty and wound up throwing out Orr and Derek Sanderson for arguing. I look around and see D'Amico signaling offsides. The crowd goes nuts when there's no penalty and they shower us with debris. John and I stood there calmly with trash raining down on us. Finally, we went to the officials room while they cleaned the ice. It was about an hour's delay, but there was no way we were going to cut short the game.
"I told D'Amico, 'I'm getting crap for your call!' We were scheduled to do the game a week later between Boston and Chicago and Morrison called and said he was substituting for us. I told him I would do the game and D'Amico was coming with me. Best thing we ever did. Going back showed guts. After five minutes of us being called every name under the sun, things calmed down and it was a very simple game."
Mike Murphy, the former captain of the Los Angeles Kings and now NHL Vice President of Hockey Operations, runs the Toronto "war room" where NHL officials watch each game in progress. He was glad to have D'Amico's assistance in recent years.
"We used John a lot in this office last year," Murphy said. "I'd ask him to come in on the heavy nights and often he was the entertainment for the night. You couldn't match his storytelling or his resolve for excellence. He wanted officials to do the job error-free. He is a very proud man in the way he approached his work as an on-ice official and as a teacher later in his career. I never met more of a perfectionist in officiating. He cared a lot about it and he wanted everybody to be the best they could be."
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