Babcock’s Time Has Come Patience Rewards Spokane Chiefs Coach With New Opportunities And A Promising Future

Mike Babcock was as far away from the phone as he could get, hunting bear in northern Saskatchewan, when the word came down.

In keeping with how the passions of his life have fallen neatly into place lately, the message that first week of June was upbeat.

Babcock would coach the Canadian national junior hockey team.

It’s an honor without parallel in this country. Canadian families gathered for the holidays track the World Juniors on TV with more than passing interest.

“Everybody wraps themselves in the Canadian flag when they watch the national team,” Western Hockey League commissioner Dev Dley says. “It also gives fans that aren’t close to a junior hockey team the opportunity to see prospective NHLers.”

The timing is perfect.

“It’s really a down time for a lot of sports,” Dley said. “They start on Dec. 26. Going through the channels, it’s pretty tough to find something else.”

The hockey establishment doesn’t entrust its best young athletes to a loser. The appointment bumps the coach of the Spokane Chiefs closer to the top, from the regional to the national level.

It’s the latest entry in a glowing resume and it comes little more than three years since Babcock and the Western Hockey League’s Moose Jaw Warriors parted company.

If management was premature in gassing the young coach after two years, Babcock recognizes now what he might have done differently. He’s not one to ignore hard lessons. Besides, winning big is the only revenge.

The following season, he was in Lethbridge, Alberta, guiding the Lethbridge Pronghorns to their first national collegiate championship. The next April, he was in Spokane, rewriting a patient timetable with the Chiefs.

General manager Tim Speltz asked him in the spring of ‘94 for patience, play the youngsters, Speltz said, build for the future and look to ‘96-97 as the payoff.

Payday came a year early.

Picked fifth last year, the Chiefs won a franchise-record 50 games and their first division championship, with Babcock the obvious choice as WHL West Coach of the Year.

With a great season behind him, with the prestigious world junior appointment in hand, with a contract extension in his pocket and a bright, handsome family at home on the South Hill, Mike Babcock has everything he wants.

For now.

At 33, he has challenges left here - a WHL championship, an almost certain shot at the Memorial Cup, probably as next year’s host team, building a consistency into a hockey club with a roller-coaster history of soaring achievement followed by dismal failure.

But when coaching vacancies come up - most recent was the assistant’s job with the NHL Calgary Flames Babcock’s name is among the first to bob up out of the rumor mill.

He’s hot and the shapers of his game know it.

“We interviewed 11 candidates (for World Junior Tournament coach),” said Dley, who sat on the WJT policy committee. “Mike was the overwhelming choice based on experience, record and character. Character was a very critical piece. He can work with people, in this case two assistants - one from Quebec, one from Ontario. He brought all the qualities we were looking for.”

The qualities range from the polish of an educator to the grit of the overachieving defenseman he was in Saskatoon and Kelowna and later in college. His teams tend to reflect the complexities of their coach - collectively they are tough, smart, communicative. If they’re supposed to be in school they go to school or don’t play. They work hard or they don’t play. Roles are defined, with a place for skill and finesse and a place for mucking and fighting.

As for the hunt - the business at hand on that late spring break in the Canadian wilderness of Lac des Iles, Saskatchewan - it too went well.

The party brought back a bear.

For one week, Babcock was back in the comfort zone of quieter times, before the growing demands of his job trapped him indoors.

“I love the outdoors more than anything,” he said as his team prepared for its WHL opener Friday night in Kelowna. “I love the game - I love my job - but hunting, fishing and skiing which was such a big part of my life is not something I do that often anymore.”

Not that he’s complaining.

As a coach, he asks for no more than he brought to the rink as a player. The chance to give the best you’ve got.

Unlike many young athletes, Babcock was quick to recognize his limitations.

“Harry Neale (the former Vancouver Canucks coach) came in to speak at a luncheon when I was 19 and playing in Kelowna,” Babcock remembers. “He’d watched the game the night before. Basically he said to me, ‘Good luck in school. You do a lot for a guy with no talent.”’

Curiously, abandoning the Canadian dream came fairly easily.

“I was one of those guys right on the fringe,” Babcock says. “I could have been a minor-league guy who banged his head against a wall for a long time. In ‘85, when I went to Vancouver, I thought I had a good camp. I was already at university (the University of Saskatchewan and later McGill, in Montreal). I had finished a degree and wanted to go back for a master’s. At that point, I knew I wasn’t good enough to play in the National League, so I got on with it.”

Although his convictions as a player were rooted in the same bedrock of hard work that separates him from the average coach, Babcock wasn’t always successful on the ice. The ‘82-83 WHL Kelowna Wings named Babcock captain.

“We won like zero games,” he recalls. “We were the worst team in junior hockey history.”

The Wings went 12-57-3 despite the effort of their captain, who is remembered as tough, focused and fairly skilled, with the mind even at 19 of a coach.

Jeff Fenton, a Spokane physical therapist, played with and against Babcock.

“He wasn’t much fun to play against,” Fenton said. “He stuck his nose in there. I used to be a scrapper. Mike let you know that you weren’t going to push his team around, that he’d stick up for his people.”

College hockey was a nice comedown.

“It’s not advancing yourself to be a pro player, yet you can take some of the sting away, where you put off reality a little bit,” Babcock says. “You take the pill a little slower, I guess.”

The turn back to school made him a better coach. With a postgraduate diploma in sports psychology from McGill, Babcock is a communicator.

If he has a fear, it’s the fear of losing an edge, of being out-worked. He has an abiding faith in higher authority, but work is a religion, too, spoken of almost reverently.

His father, Mike, Sr., retired young in Saskatoon. The elder Babcock, 58, ran a copper/zinc mine in Leaf Rapids, Manitoba, among other remote hamlets, in his son’s formative years. Prior to Leaf Rapids, he made his living for six years in the sparse Northwest Territories. The coach was born in Manitouwadge, Ontario. He went to high school in Saskatoon. Through the travels, he remembers his father as the “hardest-working man I ever met,” as if no higher praise is necessary.

His mother died young, of cancer at 50. Ironically, Babcock learned of his mother’s death after his Moose Jaw team had played a game in Spokane, having no way of knowing, of course, that the city where he learned of the greatest loss of his life would become home.

If the passing of his mother five years ago is the central tragedy of his life, rallying around her left an enduring bond on an already tight family.

“My mom (Gail) was a big part of my life, a real good friend,” Babcock said. “It was a huge blow. She’s remembered by the Babcock children (daughter Alexandra, 3, and Mike, 1) as Gram in heaven. The toughest part is the kids didn’t get to know her.”

Babcock searched hard for a meaning in his mother’s five-month bout with cancer.

“The great gift of cancer - if there can be such a thing - is the time you have to say goodbye,” he said. “I have a belief that she looks after us pretty good. My mom was a Christian woman who prepared her family for her death. It was easier because she prepared me for it.”

An only son (he has three sisters), Babcock and his wife Rene coped with shared grief and did as Mother told them.

The experience has attached a maturity to the coach, who sounds a decade older than he looks.

“You never learn anything about people in the years when you win 50 games,” he said. “Everybody’s a great guy then. But go 4-21 (as Babcock’s first Chiefs team did in late ‘94) and you learn things.”

What he learned, he liked.

Although he kept the faith and the patience through the swoon of ‘94 there were times - the misery in Moose Jaw still fresh in his mind - when frustration got to him. He chafed under the pressure of mounting defeat, wanting - off the record - his GM to trade for an older player who would take some of the heat off his struggling youngsters.

“While I was saying we could use an older guy, they didn’t do it,” Babcock says, deflecting credit for the Chiefs soaring fortunes to Speltz and owner Bobby Brett. “Young guys getting on the ice was fine, they said. It wasn’t fine, it was ugly, but they had a plan. Sometimes in hockey, the plan gets thrown out. In Spokane (now), it doesn’t.

“As much as hockey is making decisions and adjusting and doing things at a high pace, the management part of the game better be pretty calculated. We don’t make decisions based on emotion very often.”

Speltz said: “I didn’t think Mike failed in Moose Jaw. I thought his teams worked hard. If anything, he didn’t have enough talent and he was wearing too many hats as coach and GM. He’s everything I hoped and thought he would be.”

A coach who sees life as a series of full shifts, a student of the game who was cut out to teach it.

“At Moose Jaw, it was overwhelming,” he said. “Our team was poor. Now I’d do a lot better job than I did with Moose Jaw but in saying that, there were so many things going on. I was GM as well. I was running around with my head cut off. I didn’t take the opportunity to learn from as many guys as I could.”

His first teachers, the important ones, were at home. His dad said his children grew up knowing that high school wouldn’t be the last stop in their education. Senior Babcock talks of his son as a natural swimmer, an accomplished runner and skier who, above everything else, recognizes what he can and can’t do.

“Mike realized he was never going to be a Gordie Howe or Mario Lemieux,” the elder Babcock said. “If he got there, it would be as one of the tradesmen. For the tradesmen in the game, there is no future.”

During the telephone interview, Babcock, Sr. took a dim view of the standard question - Are there friends or family who’ll share more on young Mike?

“If you want to go after his friends, you get that from him,” the senior Babcock said. “That’s not fair ball.”

Softening he added, “It’s his life, not mine. I just sit back and watch. My vest buttons have burst many times over the years. He’s never been a follower. He was a good boy.

“He’s a better man.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: THE BABCOCK FILE Personal: 33 years old. He and wife Rene have two children, Alexandra and Mike. Resume: Begins third season as Chiefs coach. Playing days: Defenseman in Saskatoon and Kelowna; McGill University in Montreal. Hobbies: An avid hunter, fisherman and skier. Notable: Picked to coach the Canadian team in the World Junior Tournament in Switzerland.