Wildcats coach Gardiner MacDougall reflects on family tragedy at Memorial Cup
Taylor MacDougall was expecting to see his team hit the ice at the Memorial Cup on Monday when he received a devastating phone call.
Instead of watching his Moncton Wildcats take on the Medicine Hat Tigers, the hockey club's general manager met with the RCMP to identify his father-in-law, who had died suddenly of a heart attack.
Gardiner MacDougall, Taylor's father and Moncton's head coach, reflected on the tragedy on Wednesday.
'You never want that phone call,' he said. 'My son, as a general manager, this is the highlight of his career. This should be the most joy he's ever had. He gets a call that will change his life 20 minutes before [that game].
'You don't have a manual or manuscript for that type of thing. He's handled it amazingly.'
Patrick Buckley had arrived in Rimouski from Fredericton that afternoon and checked into his hotel with Taylor MacDougall's help. His son-in-law was the last family member to see him.
Buckley drove to a nearby golf course for a round ahead of Moncton's game and was later found in his car.
'That day [Buckley] was in Fredericton. So Taylor's daughter, Lily, is four years old. He drove her to daycare that day. He kissed her goodbye, and she loved her granddad,' Gardiner MacDougall said. 'That's the last time she'll ever kiss her granddad, so it puts things in perspective.
'And then he drove, and he probably wasn't feeling 100 per cent, but he was so excited to come watch us. He came to all our playoff games.'
The veteran coach held back tears when he announced the news of Buckley's death during a news conference after Monday's 3-1 loss to Medicine Hat, calling it the most difficult game he'd ever coached.
Taylor flew home to Fredericton after the game to be with his wife's family. Gardiner, meanwhile, began preparing for Wednesday's must-win matchup against the Rimouski Océanic.
It was Moncton's most important game of the season. But hockey, in many ways, took a back seat.
'Whatever happens tonight, we're going to live tomorrow,' Gardiner MacDougall told a group of reporters at Colisée Financière Sun Life.
He also recalled a life-changing moment of his own from 1997.
At the time, Gardiner MacDougall was coaching the OCN Blizzard of the Manitoba Junior Hockey League. He was behind the bench for a game in Portage la Prairie, Man., when he learned his sister's husband – a military member stationed in Petawawa, Ont. – had been in a serious accident.
MacDougall flew to Ottawa the following day to support his sister. After her husband spent six days in intensive care, the family made the difficult decision to pull the plug on his life support.
'That changed my life,' he said. 'Hey, I'm as competitive as any guy, but I had a sister. She had a five-year-old, a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and she lost her husband in 1997 just like that.'
'We'd like to hang around Rimouski. That's our goal,' MacDougall added. 'But I think that's given me an amazing perspective. It certainly changed me as a human, it really changed me as a hockey coach in 1997, that seven days in intensive care in Ottawa with my family around me and that type of thing.
'It was another bitter call that Taylor got to have changed his life.'
Moncton and Rimouski – both winless through two games at the junior hockey showcase – played the final round-robin game Wednesday with a spot in the semi-final on the line.
Moncton captain Markus Vidicek didn't know Buckley, but said the Wildcats felt the loss deeply.
'When it happens to one person in our team, it happens to everyone,' he said. 'So for us, it was a lot.'
FOE, as in 'family over everything,' is a phrase you'll hear a lot around the MacDougalls.
Taylor's message to Wildcats players back in August, when both he and his father joined the franchise, was that 'great teams are tight teams.'
'He said, 'We have to be the tightest team ever,'' Gardiner MacDougall recalled. 'When we took the job over, when you talk to other coaches, maybe the Wildcats weren't as tight as you want to be, and certainly this year they've proven [they are].'
'Patrick was just the greatest family guy,' he later added. 'We can't control some parts of life, so we just got to make the best of it today, and there's a hockey game to be played tonight.'
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