Going Back to LA 

Kraken coach Dan Bylsma had just completed his first full NHL season as a player with the Los Angeles Kings when asked to co-author a book with his father, Jay, about raising young hockey players.

The book would be written first from the perspective of his father on raising his four sons and a daughter to be not just great athletes but contributors to their families and communities. And then Bylsma would offer his own takes on growing up within that family and how it shaped his character climbing to the NHL as a hardworking non-star, known more for penalty-killing grunt work than scoring.

Father and son spent five months working on “So Your Son Wants to Play in the NHL” before delivering the manuscript to their publisher midway through Bylsma’s second season in early January 1998. But, unbeknownst to both, there was a heartbreaking chapter still to be written.

“Going back to LA doesn’t need to be a part of the story,” Bylsma said this week, his Kraken returning to his first NHL city to play the Kings this Saturday and then over to adjacent Anaheim to face the Ducks on Monday. “But it always is.”

Indeed, that early portion of Bylsma’s four-season stint with the Kings, followed by parts of four more with the Ducks, remain forever seared within memory.

His wife, Mary Beth, was pregnant throughout his co-writing of the book, which he’d done with the eagerness and optimism of an expectant parent. For Bylsma, his child’s upcoming birth in late-January 1998 would be an admitted “fairy-tale ending” to his hard-fought NHL path, a journey immortalized within a book co-written with his own dad -- a CPA looking to fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming an author.

Fewer than two weeks after they’d turned in the manuscript and 12 days before the expected birth, Bylsma’s wife phoned from L.A. while he was with the Kings in San Jose. She had shattering news: The unborn baby was motionless, its heartbeat stopped. Bylsma caught the next flight out. Mary Beth gave birth to a stillborn daughter two days later.

They’d not been told their baby’s gender in advance so had picked two names, one for a boy, the other a girl. But now, they didn’t use the chosen name. Instead, they named their daughter “Angel” -- holding her one final time in the hospital. And then, they had her funeral.

* * * *

More than a quarter century later, Bylsma doesn’t hesitate in explaining why when his co-authored book was published, it contained an additional epilogue penned by him two months after leaving the hospital without his daughter.

“I think sometimes with grieving, it’s fine for us to talk about it and go through it and get to share it,” Bylsma said, pausing as his eyes welled up. Then, finding the words, he continued: “Especially in this case because we didn’t have the child. And no one ever met our child. It’s just our grief.”

And as Bylsma wrote in the epilogue, he didn’t want to shy away from writing about their experience: Both to preserve his daughter’s memory and to elevate the book’s message about coping with whatever life dishes out.

“It's one thing to be prepared to deal with the ups and downs of a professional career,” he wrote in the epilogue. “Fact is, important as it is to me, dealing with the trials and tribulations of the NHL or getting sent down to Long Beach are not life or death struggles.”

And until Bylsma came home from the hospital that day, he never appreciated the value that love and support of family and friends can bring. His father, now 83 and still living in Bylsma’s Grand Haven, Mich. hometown, vividly remembers the immediate aftermath.

“You have your son tell you that he baptized her with his tears,” Jay Bylsma said. “That’s poignant.”

He then asked his son how he was going to deal with what lay ahead.

“He said: ‘There’s a hole in my heart and someday I hope to be able to look into it.’”

* * * *

Father and son toured the country together that 1998 off-season to promote their book, including a televised appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America. They did countless radio interviews – Bylsma’s dad said the total topped 1,200 that year and beyond -- many of them as in-studio guests. During their time together, they discussed feelings about life and the book’s larger meaning. That part was off-air: Jay Bylsma said interviewers were curious about children playing hockey and never asked about the epilogue – he assumes they were being respectful.

But like his son, Jay Bylsma insists the epilogue was necessary. That it drove home the point that athletes – no matter their status and money – are not immune to life’s hardships.

“This journey requires more work than anybody can imagine unless you go through it,” he said of his son making the NHL. “And even if you’re successful, it doesn’t mean your life is going to be a bed of roses. You’re going to make some money. You’re going to have some fame. But there’s still a life to live. So, this book is a good example of what life is about. It’s not about hockey. It’s about life and family.”

Around that time, Dan Bylsma began contemplating life after playing and how coaching might shape it.

He'd scored just six goals in two combined seasons but carved out a penalty-killing role on a Kings team coached by Hall of Fame defenseman Larry Robinson. The Kings had treated Bylsma and Mary Beth well as they’d struggled with their loss.

But staying in the NHL remained a battle for a forward lacking in scoring prowess. His following season was spent largely in the minors. But Bylsma led by example, unafraid of sacrificing his body to block shots.

He enjoyed sharing tips and observations with teammates inclined to listen. In fact, he’d only been invited to co-author his book because of a three-week summer hockey school in Michigan he’d started up as a minor league player in the early 1990s.

Bylsma’s father gave a weekly talk at the school to parents every Thursday titled “So, your son wants to play in the NHL?” in which he’d offer advice about the sacrifices that lay ahead.

Those talks were featured on the hockey school’s website and eventually spotted by an executive at the Sleeping Bear Press publishing company in Michigan – which had just done books on former Detroit Tigers manager Sparky Anderson and slugging great Kirk Gibson.

“They called us just out of the blue and said: ‘Would you be interested in writing a book?’” Bylsma said. “I was like, 27 years old and had never dreamed of writing one. But my dad had.”

Bylsma admits it was somewhat overwhelming.

“You’re going to expose your life and your story to the world,” he said. “So, it was a little daunting.”

Little did he realize how much of himself he’d ultimately expose.

* * * *

The book was an above-average success, with Bylsma’s NHL status and his nationwide tour with his dad leading to roughly 60,000 copies being sold.

There was a second printing and then a 2001 follow-up, published by Chicago-based Contemporary Books, titled “So You Want to Play in The NHL” – this time a guide for young players rather than parents. Bylsma had moved on from the Kings and was in his first season with the Ducks and serving as an alternate captain.

Both father and son again offered tips throughout their second book about forging strong character and coping with setbacks. About listening to coaches, staying out of trouble and – most importantly – preparing for life after sports.

By this point, Bylsma’s own post-playing goals were coming into focus. He’d enjoy parts of four seasons in Anaheim, but his playing time dropped with each – ending after a knee injury in 2003-04.

That’s when he entered coaching, as an assistant with the Cincinnati Mighty Ducks AHL affiliate he’d spent much of his final active playing season with.

As his playing career was winding down, Bylsma and his dad co-authored two more books – works of historical sports fiction – in 2001 and 2003.

The first, “Pitcher’s Hands is Out!” is titled after a version of schoolyard baseball played when there aren’t enough fielders to cover an entire diamond. It's based on a boy growing up in the Depression Era 1930s and moving to a new town – meeting friends who play that version of baseball as he deals with economic hardships experienced by his family.

Their final book was “Slam Dunks Not Allowed” set against the backdrop of World War II. It tells of a discouraged high school basketball bench-warmer who ultimately discovers that his wit and humor were strong team-building traits as he plots his future life as a fighter pilot.

Again, the books, at their essence, were about character and coping.

And though Bylsma and his dad stopped book writing after that, as his coaching career evolved, the lessons lingered.

Jay Bylsma had once been an English major, but switched studies midway through his sophomore college year to become a CPA in order to stubbornly prove to his own father that he could do it. Though he grew to love the work, that itch to “become the next John Steinbeck” lingered and had finally been scratched by the four books with his future NHL coach son.

And his urge to impart lessons, emphasized within the books, never left him either. He currently teaches business and statistics four times a week at a local community college.

“To this day, people will still come up to me and say: ‘I just want to tell you, I read your books and my son is a hockey player’,” Bylsma’s father said. “The watchman at the college where I teach said to me, ‘Mr. Bylsma, I just want to tell you my son plays hockey and we got a copy of your book and I can’t tell you the impression that’s made on him.’”

And that, he said, means more than any money earned from the books.

“Knowing you had an impact, that you impacted people’s lives for the better, that’s the greatest human endeavor you can have.”

And one his son is still striving to achieve in his third NHL head coaching go-around, heading back to Los Angeles with his new Kraken team for the first time.

* * * *

Bylsma has been back to L.A. many times, often as a visiting coach sporting a Stanley Cup ring from his rookie season taking over behind Pittsburgh Penguins bench in 2008-09. But that acclaim, even after years of struggles to reach the NHL, means less than Bylsma once imagined. Same with being recognized or remembered for the player he was with the Kings and Ducks.

Once, while he and his dad were dining out early in his career, a restaurant patron recognized Bylsma as a Kings player, sat down uninvited at their table and began talking hockey until asked to leave.

After that, his father said, Bylsma told him he was “done with his 15 minutes of fame.”

Indeed, after the stillbirth of his daughter, his daily priorities were largely about him and Mary Beth getting through the day and finding strength to begin another. She became pregnant again later that year in 1998, but even that brought little peace.

“It wasn’t great,” Bylsma said.

As the pregnancy got further along, they worried the same result would befall them.

“There was no reason given for what happened to our daughter,” Bylsma said. “So, when we had another child, once the baby started moving at 20 weeks or whatever, the next 20 weeks we were holding our breath.

“It was difficult,” he added, his voice wavering. “And it is the reason we have only one child.”

That son, Bryan, is now 25 and a software engineer. The Bylsmas are forever grateful for him but knew they could never again put themselves through the torment of those months in L.A. spent wondering whether more heartbreak was coming.

They’re now content to share and appreciate a good life with the family they have. Hockey is merely part of a bigger journey for Bylsma, Mary Beth, his father and those closest to them, something they aren’t shy about sharing with anyone seeking their wisdom.

And lest Bylsma be tempted to stray from lessons about what truly matters, imparted throughout his books written years ago, going back to L.A. won’t let him. In many ways, he never left.

“I don’t need to be going back to L.A. to be reminded of it,” he said. “But it happened in L.A. That’s always a part of it. And it’s always there with me.”