How Brett Kulak’s upbringing turned him into an honest defenceman

LAS VEGAS — One of my favourite old sports writers was a mentor named Ray Turchansky, and if “Turk” taught me one thing about this business — he taught me many things — it was to personalize an interview once in a while by asking a player what his mom or dad did for a living.

What paid the bills that got him here today?

When some unknown farmhand named Pontus Aberg scored the game-winner in a Conference Final for Nashville, it provided one of my favourite ledes:

“The son of a carpenter. Who else was going to save the Nashville Predators?”

(Hint: Jesus was the son of a carpenter.)

Who knew Bobby Dollas’s dad was a Montreal furrier, and Bobby had stacked pelts as a summer job? Or that Jujhar Khaira’s work ethic came from his father, a Surrey gravel truck driver, and his mother, a speech-language pathologist?

On the team I grew up watching, Walter Gretzky worked for Bell Canada as an installer and repairman, Magnus Anderson fished salmon off the West Coast, Clifford Lowe worked at a family-owned dairy in Lachute, Que., and Jack Coffey delivered bread for Christie’s in Toronto.

Out East, Henry Staal was a Thunder Bay sod farmer who put four boys into the NHL. Here in Alberta, Lou and Grace Sutter did the same off a grain and cattle operation in Viking.

And so, as Brett Kulak — a farm boy who flipped a tractor tire across the yard to build strength as a young lad — enjoys a career season for the Edmonton Oilers, we ask the question: Would a Stall or Sutter play today, with the cost of putting three or boys through elite level hockey having soared the way it has?

“I’ve got grandkids starting off in hockey, and I don’t like the way it’s going,” Gil Kulak was saying over the phone Monday. “It’s going to be a rich person’s game.”

Kulak was on After Hours with Scott Oake the other weekend, and Oake was talking about all the prerequisites that are currently required for a young player to “get to The Show.”

Oake: “Personal trainer. Did you have one?”

Kulak: “Couple of years, but then I just reverted to training by myself.”

Oake: “Skills coach?”

Kulak: “Uh… No. Not really.”

Kulak tied a rope around his waist with a truck tire on the other end, then ran the length of the driveway. Or, “Dad had an old tractor tire stored away behind the one shed. You’d lip the tire across the yard, stand it up, flip it over.”

Today’s NHL players never had a summer job like Dollas or Ken Holland, who spins a hilarious tale about his time working in a Vernon, B.C., creamery.

Connor McDavid found work as a shooter at a goalie school — not exactly flipping burgers at McDonalds, or sweeping up at Bon Ton Bakery in Edmonton, as a 12-year-old Spec did.

Today’s NHLer is a homogenized product of academies and springtime all-star teams that cost $5000 to join, pursuits that leave little time or inclination for anything but hockey. They have work ethic, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a different type.

The Dean Kennedys, the Dave Mansons, the Hunter Brothers, they were guys who would force-feed their teammates some Garth Brooks on a practice day, then fight for them on game day. Guys like that, they’re as rare as hen’s teeth today.

For 17 years Gil was a mechanic at Spruce Grove Pontiac by day, and a farmer the minute he got out of his truck back at the farm outside Stony Plain. When money was tight, with three growing boys, “I went out to the coal-fired power plants and worked maintenance inside there for another 17 years.”

The new job at the plant came with a nice raise and some overtime pay. But those 1,400 acres were always waiting for Gil, no matter what time he pulled into the yard, and he taught the boys how to drive a tractor to clean the snow off the slough.

Today, Brett has come off that frozen slough and onto an NHL roster. Somehow, he’s in the top 10 among NHL defencemen with five goals.

He’s made a career through sheer determination, a superior stride and the mental strength to never meet a hurdle that was too high.

“I’ve certainly been through my fair share of down times in my career, where you have to continually persevere through failure,” he said. “Getting cut from my regional Alberta Cup team. All your friends make the team, and it’s like, ‘Oh, that sucks. All right, let’s keep goin’.”

The perseverance that was learned over the kitchen table.

“It was the consistency of just day-to-day work ethic, and how normal it was for them,” he said of his parents. “It wasn’t like, ‘All right, I’ll put in my hours, and then I’ll get all afternoon to relax.’ It was all hours of the day, something was being done. That was just normal habit, and it still is to this day.”

Kulak likely learned as much about life from his mom Laura as he did from his dad.

“My mom, she’s always happy, every day,” he said. “She always wants to do as much as she can for everyone around her — puts everyone else above herself — and she’s just happy to do it.”

Brett’s brothers, Kyle and Tyson, are in the crane business, sometimes in the oil patch. If you’re the last guy out of the truck up in Grande Prairie, where it was minus-25 this past week, you won’t last.

“You definitely would learn work ethic. Nothing comes for free,” Gil said of his boys’ upbringing. “I’d work all day, then come home and work all night — or half the night. I’m sure they learned that it doesn’t come easy.

“The work ethic, you know, they saw it in front of them all the time.”

I recall Chicago Blackhawks winger Darryl Sutter telling us one day about how the brothers who missed the playoffs, or went out in Round 1, had to go back to the farm and pick rocks before Dad seeded the fields. It was easier to keep playing hockey, he said, than be back at the farm in springtime.

“I worked a lot less than my brothers, I’ll admit that,” said Brett. “But it was a common job for me to drive around the quad and pick up rocks. Dig ‘em up and get ‘em on to the wagon.”

There are some lessons to be learned at the end of that shovel.

Lessons that have made an honest defenceman out of Brett Kulak.