McSorley breaks his silence on the Brashear incident

[Crosby2010]

McSorley is not anywhere near a HHOFer guys. Nor was he ever being floated as such. Led the NHL in plus/minus in 1991, which was nice, but he was a serviceable defenseman, was on some pretty good teams and certainly was more valuable than his stats show from an enforcer standpoint but he definitely wasn't elite.

One of my issues with how McSorley gets labelled is as if he was intending to do it. I don't think he was, I think he meant to hit high, like the shoulder or something, but not the head. He looked ready, almost prepared for Brashear to turn around, so my thought is that he never wanted to whack him in the head. How often did Marty do cheap shots anyway? Not sure I saw any others of his.

Also, there is a forgotten slash that happened just a month or so later that was worse than this one. Scott Niedermayer slashed Peter Worrell in the head in what looked like from just a scrum along the boards. It was harsh, hard to say that it wasn't deliberate. I'll never forget Worrell's reaction, it was priceless. It was one of those "Are you serious bro?" types of looks he gave Niedermayer. Then he fights him but by then Niedermayer had a lot of his buddies jumping in to help, because he'd have been seriously ragdolled. Anyway, I always thought this one was worse, but Niedermayer just got 6 games. Worrell didn't get hurt which was probably the biggest reason why.

 

[hacksaw7]

McSorley is not anywhere near a HHOFer guys. Nor was he ever being floated as such. Led the NHL in plus/minus in 1991, which was nice, but he was a serviceable defenseman, was on some pretty good teams and certainly was more valuable than his stats show from an enforcer standpoint but he definitely wasn't elite.

One of my issues with how McSorley gets labelled is as if he was intending to do it. I don't think he was, I think he meant to hit high, like the shoulder or something, but not the head. He looked ready, almost prepared for Brashear to turn around, so my thought is that he never wanted to whack him in the head. How often did Marty do cheap shots anyway? Not sure I saw any others of his.

Also, there is a forgotten slash that happened just a month or so later that was worse than this one. Scott Niedermayer slashed Peter Worrell in the head in what looked like from just a scrum along the boards. It was harsh, hard to say that it wasn't deliberate. I'll never forget Worrell's reaction, it was priceless. It was one of those "Are you serious bro?" types of looks he gave Niedermayer. Then he fights him but by then Niedermayer had a lot of his buddies jumping in to help, because he'd have been seriously ragdolled. Anyway, I always thought this one was worse, but Niedermayer just got 6 games. Worrell didn't get hurt which was probably the biggest reason why.

Worrell, basically a giraffe on skates who had no business ever playing the NHL. I remember watching him in pregame warmups that game with some curiosity, he was having trouble receiving passes from teammates, and awkwardly losing his balance trying to shoot a puck. I'd never actually seen an NHLer that would have trouble keeping up in my own beer league at the time. He was basically taking runs at Devils players all game, long after the puck was gone, elbows to the head of smaller guys against the glass and absolutely nothing was being done about it.

Honestly it bothered me that Nieds didnt club him harder. He deserved it

 

[Albatros]

Quite the beer league if an above ppg Q player couldn't keep up there. Of course Worrell wouldn't have made the NHL without fighting, but he had good enough hockey skills to play professionally at a lower level. That can't be said about all fighters in the big league.

 

[Johnny Engine]

Quite the beer league if an above ppg Q player couldn't keep up there. Of course Worrell wouldn't have made the NHL without fighting, but he had good enough hockey skills to play professionally at a lower level. That can't be said about all fighters in the big league.

That's something I've noticed before and kinda wondered about. There are enough guys that fit that description - substantial offense at the junior level, plugs at the pro level - that it's not all that unusual, but Worrell stands out in that the eye test was so bad. Nobody who saw him in the NHL thought he could skate, and accounts like the one you replied to are common.

So what gives? Was there an injury or ill-advised weight gain that took him from a fringe prospect to a clumsy oaf? There are also the kind of linemates and power play explanations like in my thread about goon spike seasons, but for two years in a row? How did these two versions of Worrell exist?

 

[Crosby2010]

That's something I've noticed before and kinda wondered about. There are enough guys that fit that description - substantial offense at the junior level, plugs at the pro level - that it's not all that unusual, but Worrell stands out in that the eye test was so bad. Nobody who saw him in the NHL thought he could skate, and accounts like the one you replied to are common.

So what gives? Was there an injury or ill-advised weight gain that took him from a fringe prospect to a clumsy oaf? There are also the kind of linemates and power play explanations like in my thread about goon spike seasons, but for two years in a row? How did these two versions of Worrell exist?

Doing a bit more of a deep dive into Worrell's career I found that he did have alright stats in the QMJHL. 63 points as a 19 year old. Not great, but certainly showing he can play. Then at 20 years old 27 points in 50 games in the AHL. I looked at his PIM in the QJMHL. Two seasons of 464 and 495 PIM. Still a moderate amount of points so he wasn't just a goon running around. He probably has several more points if he isn't in the box that often, but it made me think that at 6'6" he was a frightening guy to be around. You saw how mad he got when Niedermayer slashed him and with the throat slashing gestures. I am just wondering if that fear gave him a lot more room in the QMJHL to score points. It almost certainly did. Even in the Q as a 19 year old you have to be able to skate and shoot to get 63 points, and you have to be able to do something right in the AHL as a 20 year old against pros to get 27 points in 50 games.

I honestly can't say I have a visual picture of how Worrell skated in the NHL. So maybe he was a bad skater. I don't doubt that. I just look at a couple of things and wonder. Florida had him on the power play more than you'd think. He played 8-9 minutes a game, and in the 2000 playoffs - the only time he played because his teams never made it - he played all 4 games and had 11:17 of ice time. I don't know, usually the really bad goons sat out in the playoffs. Compare it to someone like Rob Ray, who while he did play in the playoffs he only played 3:00 a game or so. And even in the regular season he was always 3-4 minutes a game. I never liked that. This was done a short brief time in the NHL, mostly in the 1990s and 2000s, when a guy would play so little and was just there as a police officer. You have to play the game. Worrell by the looks of it at least had 4th line minutes, and even some power play time. It doesn't surprise me that he didn't play long, but I've seen worse. Andrew Peters comes to mind. Worrell looks closer to Domi than he does someone like Ray or Peters. You don't play someone 9 minutes a game if they can't tie their own skates. There was at least something more he brought to the table.

 

[Jocke1]

Has anyone read McSorley's book? Has it ever been possible to purchase it?

Its one of lifes greatest mysteries to me how this book is so elusive.

This book can be found on the amazon store pages and other warehouse pages online
but ever since the beginning they have never been in stock.

It says HarperCollins Canada released it on 15 Sept 2018 as a Biography & Autobiography - 336 pages.
I have been on the hunt for this book ever since hearing about it in 2018-2019.
Feel like I'm going crazy.

The author Kirstie McLellan Day is the same person who wrote the Bob Probert autobiography.
And I remember that she had completed Lanny McDonald's autobiography but just before it was about to be released McDonald pulled the plug and didn't allow her to publish it. I think I remember her suing McDonald over it and then I didn't hear anything else.

So did something similar happen with McSorley? Did he not allow this 336 page book to be released?
Or does anyone know the truth about this whole thing?

 

[MeHateHe]

Anyone catch McSorley on the latest season of Shoresy? Looks less like a former professional athlete and more like a guy who ate a former professional athlete. Doug Gilmour and Sean Avery have also made cameos and they have not let themselves go by comparison.

 

[Johnny Engine]

I mentioned in the Goons With Spike Seasons thread that it was inspired by the Donald Brashear talk, but something funny happened when I went to look at the 30 point season Brashear had - it started to look like there was no spike season for Brashear, and he's just an unusual third liner who peaked at age 30 and fought like a player in a much smaller role.

Between 1999 and 2004, Brashear played over 11 minutes a game every year, peaking at 13:27. In each of those years, he's either among his team's 9 most used forwards, or has a couple guys ahead of him who played partial seasons pushing him down to 10th or 11th, meaning that in almost every stage of the season, he'd still be in a top 9 spot in the lineup on teams that were usually decent.

There are 145 players who played at least 100 games with a TOI between 11 and 14 in those years. He's 17th in points among that group. He's only 84th in points per game (the filter includes some scoring forwards at the start or end of their careers who'd partially explain this.) Brashear is second in PIMs in this group, with a large lead over third, so he's fairly unique in his goon-like qualities here (Barnaby is first, another guy who you'd call "uniquely goon-like"). To further underscore how much this group is not the domain of enforcers, Nik Antropov is 26th in PIMs in this group.

Here's the kicker: guess who leads this group in even strength ice time per game? If you guessed "Taylor Pyatt", that'd be sensible but he's second and the winner is Huggy Bear himself. The most surprising thing about all this is that he's not making up time by playing net front on PP2. It really does look like, in the peak years of the dead puck era, Donald Brashear was the statistical model of the third liniest third liner in the entire NHL...except he fought all the time.

It's actually quite impressive, because I'd be shocked if anyone saw his career going this direction as of 1996 or so.

 

[Jocke1]

It's actually quite impressive, because I'd be shocked if anyone saw his career going this direction as of 1996 or so.

He did pretty damn good at the world championships in Finland in late April, early May 1997 playing for team U.S.A.

Being linemates throughout the tournament with Mike Sullivan, Dan Plante, Chris Marinucci, Ted Donato and Bob Beers, Brashear had 5 points in 8 games (scoring goals against Latvia and Norway, assists against Italy, Sweden and Czech Republic).

It was actually a crazy thing to see Brashear playing in the worlds, you could probably count on one hand how many times an enforcer had gotten a chance to do that.
And later on as the next season started he would put up nearly 400 PIMs (372) in 1997-98. Quite a contrast from playing in the worlds.

 

[tarheelhockey]

I missed this when it was originally posted so just heard the interview.

Mixed reactions to McSorley’s account. On one hand he has what sounds like a very practiced series of talking points to blame the courts, blame the media, blame the other side, and portray himself as a huge victim. He casually drives a wedge between “real hockey fans” and the evil media, as if the entire hockey world didn’t naturally have strong opinions on this incident, and he has plenty of unverifiable stories of people coming up to him privately to give him their support and call Brashear a “coward” behind his back. It honestly sounds like he’s been cribbing notes from certain politicians who use exactly this playbook to deflect damaging stories.

On the other hand, he does land some interesting points along the way. One is that he was very clearly instructed to go out and start the fight, which he refers to repeatedly as “his job” and his purpose on the team. The NHL will deny until they’re blue in the face that this dynamic exists, particularly when it comes to legal liability. I have no doubt that McSorley was embittered by the experience of doing his job as instructed, then being left out to dry by his employers when it came time for court appearances.

Also, I do tend to believe his account of the stick swing, that he wasn’t looking to hit Brashear directly in the head. It was reckless to swing so high, but it does seem believable that he was swinging at the arm/shoulder and simply missed the target as Brashear leaned into his turn. It’s a case study in why stick-swinging isn’t allowed, but I do think it’s a bit of an exaggeration to suggest it was a deliberate swing at the head.

Lastly, it was classless of the hosts to characterize him as “contentious” after he got off the air. Even though I didn’t like everything he had to say, McSorley was respectful and repeatedly asked to turn the topic back to the Vancouver Giants. They kept making a deliberate effort to push him back into a provocative topic. Seemed like a rude thing to wait till he got off the air and then paint him as some kind of crazy person.

 

[The Panther]

Has anyone read McSorley's book? Has it ever been possible to purchase it?

Its one of lifes greatest mysteries to me how this book is so elusive.

View attachment 974499

This book can be found on the amazon store pages and other warehouse pages online
but ever since the beginning they have never been in stock.

It says HarperCollins Canada released it on 15 Sept 2018 as a Biography & Autobiography - 336 pages.
I have been on the hunt for this book ever since hearing about it in 2018-2019.
Feel like I'm going crazy.

The author Kirstie McLellan Day is the same person who wrote the Bob Probert autobiography.
And I remember that she had completed Lanny McDonald's autobiography but just before it was about to be released McDonald pulled the plug and didn't allow her to publish it. I think I remember her suing McDonald over it and then I didn't hear anything else.

So did something similar happen with McSorley? Did he not allow this 336 page book to be released?
Or does anyone know the truth about this whole thing?

I have been wondering about this, too. There was a bit of pre-publication hype over this book, and then... nothing.

I dunno, does Kirstie McLellan have a track record (besides Lanny) of pissing off her "clients"?

Another thing is that McSorley has been teammates / friends with A LOT of high-powered NHLers (Gretzky, Messier, Lemieux, Robitaille, Coffey, Robinson, etc.), and I wonder if he revealed a little too much in his book and then publishers back-tracked at the 11th hour...?

 

[JianYang]

Anyone catch McSorley on the latest season of Shoresy? Looks less like a former professional athlete and more like a guy who ate a former professional athlete. Doug Gilmour and Sean Avery have also made cameos and they have not let themselves go by comparison.

I haven't seen big buff since he retired and I'm almost scared to see it.

 

[seventieslord]

Has anyone read McSorley's book? Has it ever been possible to purchase it?

Its one of lifes greatest mysteries to me how this book is so elusive.

View attachment 974499

This book can be found on the amazon store pages and other warehouse pages online
but ever since the beginning they have never been in stock.

It says HarperCollins Canada released it on 15 Sept 2018 as a Biography & Autobiography - 336 pages.
I have been on the hunt for this book ever since hearing about it in 2018-2019.
Feel like I'm going crazy.

The author Kirstie McLellan Day is the same person who wrote the Bob Probert autobiography.
And I remember that she had completed Lanny McDonald's autobiography but just before it was about to be released McDonald pulled the plug and didn't allow her to publish it. I think I remember her suing McDonald over it and then I didn't hear anything else.

So did something similar happen with McSorley? Did he not allow this 336 page book to be released?
Or does anyone know the truth about this whole thing?

I don't know the whole backstory, if there even is one, but I do know this book doesn't actually exist.

 

[MeHateHe]

Also, I do tend to believe his account of the stick swing, that he wasn’t looking to hit Brashear directly in the head. It was reckless to swing so high, but it does seem believable that he was swinging at the arm/shoulder and simply missed the target as Brashear leaned into his turn. It’s a case study in why stick-swinging isn’t allowed, but I do think it’s a bit of an exaggeration to suggest it was a deliberate swing at the head.

Lastly, it was classless of the hosts to characterize him as “contentious” after he got off the air.

No, they called the interview contentious, not him. Everyone was a little uncomfortable - it might have been the first hard questions those two asked an interviewee in months. And as they said, if you come to an event billed as "Legends of the Sin Bin" you should expect the questions to be about the things you did that landed you in the sin bin. Nobody cares about what Marty McSorley thinks about the Vancouver Giants.

But yeah, you can feel a little sorry for McSorley because he was just doing his job.

But whether he meant to or not, he whacked Brashear in the head. And if he thought he was going to come across as a sympathetic character in this interview, he's dumber than I thought he was - and I never thought he was too bright to begin with. Here's a lesson for all you kids out there: if you do something even by accident, and everyone in the whole world sees you did it, don't say you didn't do it. Don't blame the other guy or the chin strap or your coach or the NHL. McSorley doesn't have to willingly walk to the guillotine as a result of this, but if you're going to speak in public, and you're likely to get asked about it because you really haven't been a public figure for about 20 years, you could say "I feel really bad about what happened. I was doing my job and I made a mistake. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to whack him in the head, but it happened and he got hurt. Again, I didn't mean to do it, but ultimately I did the thing and I'm sorry for that."

 

[jigglysquishy]

I don't know the whole backstory, if there even is one, but I do know this book doesn't actually exist.

Now I'm interested.

How does a book get pulled last minute like this? How does the story of the debacle stay quiet?

 

[MadLuke]

How does the story of the debacle stay quiet?

small market of buyer for such story, NDA all around for the few that know we can imagine, if the person had to give any reason why to pull the book.

For authorized auto-biography like that, I can imagine the subject asking a I can stop the project at any point of time, no reason needed in their contract and getting them.

 

[Jocke1]

I don't know the whole backstory, if there even is one, but I do know this book doesn't actually exist.

Well at some point it did exist, and probably still does in some warehouse or archive somewhere. Or have they all been destroyed, burned?

The book is still all over the internet to this day at different online stores,
these following screenprints are from within the hour.
The release year vary, the publishers vary. But they all keep the same info on number of pages.


Here's a release from 2014:

From 2016:

From 2017:

From 2018:

 

[MadLuke]

The book is still all over the internet to this day

all those link seem to mention no copy available to sell, only 2 rating 0 review on goodreads, I am not sure what validation was required back in the day of having actually read the book to put a rating, but it could have been from the editor/author/publisher staff, having accounts to leave 5 stars reviews would not be special.

Existing as in plan to release it existed at some point no doubt, was it actually sold to anyone of the general public ? you can have months between a book announcement, some ads and acceptation of pre-sold copy order and the actual launch.

 

[Jocke1]

all those link seem to mention no copy available to sell

Yes, sorry. I only meant that they are still up and still exist in the search engines at these places. It's clear that the book has been unavailable from the very start and that something major happened between Marty and Kirstie for it to have been aborted. Much like what happened with Lanny McDonald.
It's just odd how the release dates vary in range from 2014 all the way to '18.
That's quite a span.

I can't tell you how much I wish I was able to get my hands on those 336 pages

 

[MadLuke]

It's just odd how the release dates vary in range from 2014 all the way to '18.
That's quite a span.

It is bizarre for a 2018 kindle edition to pop-up, maybe there is some automation going on, general deal, 4 years of exclusive before a digital drop that all spawned a bit automatically without no one doing it.

A lot of it feel like there is an automated internet that goes on, without human intervention