All About Don Brashear
      

I was born in Bedford, Indiana in 1972 to an African American father and a white Canadian mother. My parents divorced when I was very young, and my mother moved back to Canada. I remained in Indiana with my father. After a time, since my father was an alcoholic and abusive, my paternal grandmother sent me to Montreal. There, I went to public school for the first time. My mother remarried and had three more children, but since my stepfather was also abusive, I was sent away again to a foster home. My memory of this time of my life is very fuzzy. After spending time at the first foster home, I was moved to a different home, but the only detail I can remember is that the home was a quaint little Canadian-style house and that my days there were happy. There were four children there including myself, two boys and two girls, and I am told that I was a little too much to handle, so I was moved again, this time to a much larger family. That family already had three sons and a daughter, and then I was added to the mix. That’s when life really started for me.

So there I was, eight years old without any knowledge about life in general, but old enough to understand that the previous two families I had lived with couldn’t handle me or teach me how to become a man. It was very nerve-wracking for a young boy who had already been taken away from his father, sent away by his mother, and on his third foster home to arrive in yet another small town, but it had to be done. I was sent to a little town called Val-Belair to stay with Jean-Marie and Raymonde St-Pierre. Even at that young age, I looked at it as a new beginning. One moment, I was standing nervously in front of the St-Pierre children (Benoit, Stephane, Guylaine, and Mario), and the next thing I knew I was playing street hockey with Stephane and his friends. It’s no surprise that I’ve become a hockey player. We played street hockey almost every day during the summertime.

Hockey was serious. It didn't matter if it was for fun on the street or for real on the ice. It was always real!  So real that sometimes there would be fights. One day during a match, I clipped my brother Stephane in the mouth with my stick. He grabbed me, pinned me to the ground, got on top of me, held me until I couldn’t move anymore, and punched me in the nose.  My nose started bleeding. I went into the house, wiped it off and got back to the game. I think you will understand me better when I get mad at some guys trying to hurt my teammates. Anyway, I never hit him in the face again.

In the beginning, my siblings and I would gather up a few friends and play among each other, but then we started to compete against the other neighborhood’s kids, which was a lot of fun. It brought me a great deal of pride and developed my love of competition. If we'd loose against a different neighborhood, we would have to see them at school with big smiles on their faces that just screamed “Our neighborhood is better than yours.” I don't have to tell you that there was another game the next day when we lost, but this time on their street. We always had to get our pride back.

So that was the summer of 1980. Then winter came and it was time for the real hockey season. Seeing my interest for hockey, and having three boys involved in the sport already, my foster parents asked me if I would be interested in playing. I’ll bet you know the answer!  First things first, I had to take skating lessons. Eight years old, wanting to play hockey, but not knowing how to skate in Canada? Truly, I was an anomaly. After probably a month or two of skating lessons, I was ready to learn the game. I will always remember my first year. It was probably the best one of my career so far.

If I recall correctly, I scored 66 goals in around 25 to 30 games. Back then, I was going to be a goal scorer. The year after I moved up a category, I was still a goal scorer, but things got just a little bit harder as I was moving up. Let's face it, there were other good players too. When I got to the pee-wee level, I realized how hard it was to score goals on a regular basis. Usually, we played two years before moving up to the next category, but the year before I was going to move up, the league decided to add an extra year for pee-wee players so we could learn how to body check. So at 11-12 years old, I started to pay more attention to hitting (body checks) instead of scoring goals. Along the way, I kept taking skating lessons while working for hockey schools to pay for my lessons. Organized hockey was pretty expensive, especially if you had four boys in one family playing. To help the cause, I had to go door to door selling baked bread and garbage bags. A part of it was allocated to pay for tournaments. My foster dad was working at the Quebec airport and his wife was babysitting kids at home to earn extra money for their four kids. So at 10 years old, I had to find a way to help make money. That’s how I became a paper boy. If I couldn't find the money, there was no hockey for me – the end of it, no chance to make it. But I had a dream and nothing was going to stop me.