Toronto Maple Leafs legend Wendel Clark says if he hadn’t been a hockey player, he guesses he would have been a farmer, and would have been totally happy doing that.Photo Illustration by The Globe and Mail. Sources: Supplied, Getty Images
Do you think that just because you’re captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs, you get to sleep in and skip hard farm labour? No way, said hockey legend Wendel Clark’s farmer father, who knew that spending the summer digging in the dirt is a great way to keep egos in check.
I grew up on a grain farm in Kelvington, Sask., so I was working for my dad from the time I was about six. Every day when I got home from school, I was expected to do chores. You’d start at the bottom and work your way up to driving a great big piece of machinery in the field – the highlight for any kid growing up on a farm. I actually got my first traffic ticket when I was 13, after the cops pulled me over while I was taking a tractor home from the dealership, but was under the legal driving age.
All kids on a farm are expected to do something. If you worked, you got to eat that night. This was so ingrained and expected of me that even as I got older, even as I went off to play hockey in the NHL, I’d come home during the summer to help on the farm and get the crops in on time. They put me right back to work. No one cared that I played hockey.
We grew up with no curfews. My dad used to say, “I don’t know what time you’re coming home, but I know what time you’re gettin’ up.” That was about 6 or 7 o’clock in the morning, if you were lucky. If it’s any time after May 1, you would be doing anything from picking stones to cultivating and seeding, to prepping the land to get the grain in the ground. There was no set schedule or anything, it was just Dad saying: “You’re over there and doing that today.” My dad was a real “do as I say” kind of boss.
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My two brothers, one older and one younger, were on the same program. As we got older, we received a little salary – an allowance, we called it – that started at about $500 a month and went up to roughly $1,000 or higher, because our dad didn’t want us to leave to find other work. It wasn’t a bad wage in Kelvington. If I hadn’t been a hockey player, my guess is I would have been a farmer. I would have been totally happy doing that.
We were a very athletic family, and my dad loves sports, so you could take time off from the farm to do anything related to sports. Anything else? Nope. So, it was hockey in the winter and farm work in the summer for me.
It depends on the person and their salary, but many players were getting jobs in the off-season. I wasn’t making much and the Leafs weren’t winning any Stanley Cups, so I’d head home to get working. Everyone on the team pretty much knew, and anyone who grew up on a farm was probably doing the same thing, so it was no big deal. Training camp wouldn’t start until July or August, so I had time.
You’d think farming would keep you fit, but by then, farming was all pretty automated, so I’d be sitting on a tractor a lot of the time. We were initially a grain and cattle farm. Dealing with herds of cattle is obviously a lot more hands-on – as I got older, we got rid of the cattle.
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I didn’t mind either way, but the worst part of dealing with the cattle was called “standing on guard.” That’s when your dad or brother is feeding the cows with a tractor, and your job is to stand at the gate and make sure the cows didn’t run out.
I was six or eight years old; not old enough to do the feeding, but old enough to get run over by a cow. In Saskatchewan in the winters, it could easily be -30 degrees, so you’d be standing still in the cold for a couple hours, just watching the door. This was worse than actually working, which at least keeps you warm.
I didn’t like working on the farm, I loved it. The best part was the machinery – tractors, backhoes, combines, you name it. Anything to do with driving was awesome, but I love most parts of farming. It teaches you how to show up on time, work hard and get along with people. If you can do all that, you can work anywhere.
As told to Rosemary Counter