Pokey Reddick: The Masked Marvel

In street clothes, he hardly conveys the image of invincibility. But then superheroes rarely do.

Pokey Reddick is mild-mannered, quiet and unassuming. He looks more meek than menacing, more demure than defiant. He certainly is not an imposing figure. In fact, you could say he’s diminutive, except that’s too big a word for a guy so small by professional athletic standards.

But appearances can be deceiving. Like Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, and countless others, Pokey Reddick transforms himself into something remarkable every time he puts on his uniform.

He becomes the fearless defender, the tireless guardian of the goal for the Grand Rapids Griffins. His fans are legion and his powers seemingly extend to every frozen arena across the universe.

Standing bravely in front of his crease, he fends off men more powerful than a locomotive. With reflexes faster than a speeding puck, he is able to leap from his net in a single bound. Snatching bullet-like shots out of mid-air, he becomes the Man of Steal.

There is a mystique to men who wear a mask, and Pokey is no exception. He is, by his own admission, a private person. Some might call him a loner, but that tag is too harsh for a man whose dedication to his game is matched only by his devotion to his family.

He zealously guards his secrets, his superstitions – his pregame routine, if you will – as though he fears they will become kryptonite in the hands of his opponents and bring ruin to his ritualistic concentration.

His concerns are not without basis. The mind is a goalie’s most powerful, but most precarious, artillery. Break his confidence, and it matters little if he has a good glove hand or if he wields a stick with authority. Make a goalie think he’s beaten, and you’ve practically put the puck into the net without shooting.

Anyone can want to play goalie. Having the necessary iron-clad constitution – the mindset for handling the pressures of the position – is another thing. When it comes to playing pro hockey, it’s the difference between life and death.

Numerous goalies have succumbed not to their inability to stop the puck from going into the net, but to their inability to stop thinking about letting the puck go into net.

It’s the kind of negative thinking that finds its message in the maxim, “If you think you can, you’re right. If you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Whereas hockey is not generally regarded as a thinking man’s sport, the play of the goaltender is uncharacteristically cerebral. The puck is his enemy, and stopping it requires all his mental faculties. In that sense, what goes on between the ears often determines what goes in between the posts.

“Playing the game is 90 percent mental,” Reddick said. “You’ve got to be mentally prepared to go out there and put in a good performance every night. I try to stay focused so I can give the team a chance to win.”

A chance. Just a chance. That’s all any goaltender can want. Forget about the screened shot. Don’t think about the puck that bounces off a teammate’s skate into the net. Just stop enough shots to keep your team in the game.

“There’s really no place to hide out there,” Reddick said. “When you’re the goalie, you have to be able to take the heat. There’s not much else you can do but stick it out. That’s just the way it is.”

For Pokey, getting ready for a game is almost as important as the game itself. Mess up your mental preparation and you’re halfway to getting yanked in the second period. And so he plays little mind games to put himself at ease.

“When it’s the day of a game, “I just want to be by myself,” he said. “I don’t want to see anyone, don’t want to talk to anybody. I just want to get out there and get it going out on the ice.”

Reddick, like most hockey players, is an ardent follower of pregame rituals. He closely adheres to a number of routines, rehearsing them religiously without fail, like Superman reciting “Up, up, and away” every time he flies.

“I don’t really think about them as superstitions,” Reddick said. “ Every professional athlete has their own little thing. I just like to keep mine to myself.”

His routines are personal, except when they make headlines, as happened earlier this season when Reddick suffered cramps and dehydration after posting a 1-0 shutout against Indianapolis in the Griffins first-ever game. The team bus was forced to make an unscheduled stop because Reddick took ill as a result of a “routine” that kept him from drinking any water during the contest.

Goalies aren’t alone in their superstitions. Even the most casual observer of hockey has probably noticed the procession of players who poke the goalie with their sticks immediately before each period of play.

Reddick remembers a season when he had to skate out toward the blue line so a certain player could skate a complete circle around him, then tap him on the shoulders and knees before play could begin.

Talk to him about these superstitions and frankly he doesn’t seem to care. “I have mine, they have theirs, and I don’t want to be the guy wrecking theirs,” Reddick said.

And so a certain piece of equipment becomes a security blanket, a five o’clock shadow becomes a five-day-old beard – all for the sake of keeping a hot hand or a winning streak going.

Need to change your luck? Change your routine. “Those things come and go, believe me,” Reddick said. “If you’re chewing a piece of gum and they don’t score, that gum stays in. If things aren’t going right, you change fast.”

Luck, despite talk about proper technique and equipment, is still a prominent player in determining one’s success in goal. “There’s no one ingredient that makes a person a good goaltender other than luck,” Reddick said. “It takes a little of this, a little of that, but a whole lot of luck.”

So a goalie learns to take the bad with the good, knowing that his fate may very well change the next game. It was an important lesson imparted on the young Pokey by his first – and most important – teacher: his father, Stan.

“He told me that I’d get zinged some nights and that I shouldn’t worry about it. My dad talked to me a lot. He’d ask me, ‘Are you having fun out there? That’s all that really matters, that you’re having fun.’”

And so Dad spent a lot of time with his son, making sure he enjoyed himself on the ice. “My dad taught me everything,” said Reddick, who grew up in the Toronto area. “When you’re a goalie, it means spending a lot more time with you.”

Hours upon hours were devoted to teaching the youngster the tricks of the trade. The father fired bullet after bullet at the Slapshot Superboy, the little masked marvel who had a knack for stopping almost everything his father sent in his direction.

“If you’re a forward, you can practice more on your own. You can deke out a can or shoot pucks all day,” Reddick said. “A goalie has to have someone shooting at him. He can’t practice alone. My dad spent a lot of time with me.”

No matter how prepared a kid may think he is, though, junior hockey in Canada is a rude awakening for many teenagers. Reddick gave up seven goals in his first game with the Billings Bighorns in 1981-82, and his Western Hockey League stats during the three years that followed hardly suggested that he was destined to one day see his name on the Stanley Cup.

In 66 games with the Nanaimo Islanders during the 1982-83 season, he had a goals-against average of 6.48. The following season, that number dropped to 4.40 in 50 games for the New Westminster Bruins, but the average was back up to 5.64 during the 1984-85 season when he played 47 games for the Brandon Wheat Kings.

Numbers, however, can be deceiving.

“I wanted to play for a team where I could face a lot of shots and work on my game,” said Reddick, who passed up a chance to play for a better team like the Peterborough Petes, a hockey club that has had the likes of Wayne Gretzky and Steve Yzerman over the years.

“As a kid, you don’t really want to be on the best team if you’re a goalie,” Reddick said. “If you’re only seeing seven or eight shots a period, how much can you learn? You’re better off facing 60 to 70 shots a game.”

If Pokey was going to learn how to stop shots, he was going to do it the hard way. “In juniors, my defense was always heading up ice. I learned a lot about facing breakaways,” he said.

Bad stats matter little when you’re standing on your head. Reddick’s acrobatic abilities quickly earned the eyes of the prospectors who are paid to unearth new talent. “The scouts know what they’re looking for,” he said.

He signed with the Fort Wayne Komets in the International Hockey League during the late stages of the 1984-85 season and the following year led the IHL with three shutouts and a goals-against average of 3.05. His play earned him an NHL ticket to snowy Winnipeg where he played the next three seasons.

“It didn’t matter where I played. It could have been China. As long as it was the NHL, I didn’t care,” he said.

Reddick was an instant hit with Winnipeg fans. Sharing the net with Daniel Berthiaume, Reddick helped the 1986-87 Jets make the playoffs by registering a record of 21-21-4 with a 3.24 goals-against average. “The fans were really good to me there,” he said. :I was one of the more popular guys on the team.”

Of course, Reddick heard his share of boos – “If you don’t get booed by fans in the course of 80 games, something’s not right,” he says – and by his third season in Winnipeg, he was ready to move on. On Sept. 28, 1989, he was traded by the Jets to Edmonton for future considerations.

It was a storybook opportunity.

Although he played sparingly behind Bill Ranford, Reddick would get the chance to accomplish something that most hockey players can only dream about – winning the Stanley Cup.

“Getting a Stanley Cup ring is the ultimate goal of every player,” he said. “One of the reasons you play hockey is to get your name on the Cup. I know guys who played the game 18 years and didn’t get so much as a handshake when they left.”

Reddick rarely wears his ring – “I’ve only worn it once or twice,” he says – out of deference to his current teammates. “I’m here in Grand Rapids to try to help this team win the Turner Cup,” he said, referring to the IHL’s ultimate honor.

He accomplished the task in 1993 when he helped the Fort Wayne Komets win the championship by going an amazing 12-0 in the playoffs with a phenomenal 1.49 goals-against average.

It’s been said that while some of the Komets players were hoisting the Turner Cup during the celebratory post-game skate, the rest of the team was holding Pokey above their heads.

Reddick’s playoff performance was indeed remarkable – even for a guy who had gone 33-16-4 during the regular season, including a long winning streak to close out the season.

“I can’t explain it, other than to say it’s just a feeling you get,” he said. “The puck doesn’t look any bigger. You just get into a groove. It’s like going to work every day and knowing that everything is going right. You just can’t wait to get back to work.”

And then there are days when he wishes he never climbed out of bed. Getting pulled by the coach after one too many goals is a sick feeling to which no netminder ever becomes accustomed.

“You can’t worry about it. If it happens, it happens,” he said. “You can’t worry about things beyond your control. Sometimes you might not be playing that badly, but the coach will make the change in hopes of firing up the team.”

It’s after playing a particularly poor game that Reddick appreciates his family. If Pokey has a weak spot, it’s in his heart.

His family – wife Melissa, seven-year-old son Bryce, and three-year-old daughter Jenna – clearly rank ahead of winning any Stanley Cup or Turner Cup or any other league championship.

“Life is a little more important,” he said with obvious understatement. “The hockey stuff is something I’ll appreciate when I’m done playing. Nothing can compare to seeing the birth of my kids.”

And kids have a way of bringing superheroes back to earth. “I’ll come home after playing a brutal game and Bryce will come to me and say, “Dad, help me with my homework.’ It could feel like the worst day in my life and the kids will say something that picks me up.”

Bryce is already a talented little athlete – he plays baseball, basketball, and soccer, besides hockey – but Reddick is not crazy about the idea of his son becoming a goalie like his father or his Uncle Stan, Pokey’s younger brother, who plays in Europe.

“I want him to enjoy being a regular little boy,” Reddick said. “It’s not so much the pressure I worry about, it’s that I want him to avoid the comparisons. I don’t want him worrying about being compared to his dad.”

Reddick knows what it is like to live with expectations. For years, he heard he was too small. He is listed at 5-feet-8, but standing next to him, you figure that measurement must have been made when he was standing on his toes.

Fact is, Pokey plays bigger than whatever height he may be listed at. “People have always said that I’m too small,” he said. “I’m playing my 12th professional season. I’ve proven those people wrong.

“Size is all in tour heart.”

Before coming to Grand Rapids, Reddick played the last two years in Las Vegas. He makes his home in nearby Henderson, Nevada, where he enjoys gardening, golfing, and fishing. “I spend most of my time with my family,” he said.

His family is the reason he has only passing interest in playing in the NHL again. “I had a couple of opportunities to go up the last couple of years, but you get tired of moving here, moving there.”

Even so, he hasn’t lost his desire to play. “I enjoy the game. I wouldn’t play the game if I didn’t,” he said. “I’m still learning. I’m still having fun.”

And fun is something every kid – no matter what superhero they might have imagined themselves to be – can understand.

Originally published in Griffiti Magazine.