Dunn, McGregor share similar paths to help lead Canada Para Hockey team

It started with a sore knee. James Dunn came home complaining, some pain, some discomfort, maybe too much time playing sports, a tweak. But a few days later the sore knee progressed to swelling, even though he’d been taking it easy, and then to limping on a trip with his parents and brothers over to Detroit.

His family grew concerned. They made an appointment.

The 11-year-old had cancer, the X-ray revealing osteosarcoma in his right knee. By the end of December, on Christmas Day, Dunn started chemotherapy. By February of the next year, the choice was amputation, with three options: a full amputation, high on his leg, a reconstruction of his knee with a metal rod, necessitating multiple surgeries and possible limitations in climbing stairs and walking, or a rotationplasty.

“He heard limited range of motion and [the rotationplasty] was the best option that he could think of to keep into sports, moving around,” said Dunn’s father, Jeremy. “That’s ultimately what he chose.”

It was a complicated 18-hour surgery in which the knee bone was excised and the bottom part of his leg, still healthy, was reattached to his femur bone, with his ankle becoming his knee and his foot facing backwards.

“The doctor asked, ‘Do you have any questions, James?’” Jeremy Dunn said. “And he goes, ‘I just want to know when I can play hockey again.’”

It was the key question for any hockey-mad 11-year-old, one whose future in the sport looked doubtful in that moment. But when Dunn was making his way through rehab, as summer hit and into fall of 2012, the nurses at the Pediatric Medical Day Unit at Children’s Hospital in London, Ontario, suggested he talk to another boy, another hockey-mad kid, who had also just lost his leg to another form of cancer, spindle cell sarcoma. He was six years older, and approaching the end of his chemotherapy, but Tyler McGregor offered a similar story, an understanding that was hard-fought and hard to come by.

He also offered sled hockey.

Thirteen years after the two boys met, two boys who similarities were overwhelming, each searching for a way back into the sport he loved, they are mainstays on the Canada Para Hockey team, captain (McGregor) and alternate captain (Dunn) of a squad that finally, finally overcame the United States to win its first gold medal at the World Championships in seven years, taking the 2024 edition in Calgary.

McGregor and Dunn each will be on the Canada roster for the first-ever Reeve Hockey Classic. The event, which will take place the night before the 4 Nations Face-Off championship game, will see the U.S and Canada’s national sled hockey teams compete in a game put on by the NHL in cooperation with USA Hockey and Hockey Canada at Kasabuski Rink in Saugus, Massachusetts. The game will financially support the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation’s ‘Quality of Life Grant Program’ with the Reeve family participating in the ceremonial puck drop.

Each team will hold a practice open the public on Feb. 18, but capacity is limited.

McGregor, who will turn 31 on March 11, was able to share his passion with Dunn, now 24, of the sport they had lost and the sport they would find.

It helped save them both.

“I was a teenager, I was 15 and had just turned 16 before my amputation," McGregor said, "but it was far more scary to me to lose my leg and to believe I was losing my hockey career than it ever was to think I may die. And that sounds wild to me now at 30, but that was what I believed.

“That was right during the beginning of the (2010) Vancouver Olympics and Paralympics. The [Chicago] Blackhawks beat the [Philadelphia] Flyers in the Stanley Cup Final that year. All I did was watch hockey. And so, in many ways, hockey has changed my life, but it’s also saved it. Because it provided me, during a pretty tough time, something to believe in.”

* * * *

McGregor also grew up in southwestern Ontario, in Forest, a place that he called “a little hockey haven,” with a backyard rink every winter and a 400-meter walk from his house to the local community arena.

He was in skates at 18 months.

“It’s pretty much all I did through all the winter months,” he said. “And I fell in love with the game early on.”

He progressed through the ranks, all the way to U-16, in his Ontario Hockey League draft year. It was then that McGregor broke his tibia and fibula in the first game of the season. Four months into what had been a fairly typical recovery, he found that it was anything but typical.

He had spindle cell sarcoma, a form of bone cancer, and a tumor had been growing for months, spreading throughout his leg.

To save his life, he had one choice, an amputation above his knee.

“As soon as I was healthy enough, I knew I wanted to play again at the highest level I could,” he said. “About a year post-chemo was the first time I got in a sled. And I knew pretty soon after that that was going to be my opportunity to represent my country and to compete at the highest level and to be able to continue to play.”

He had spent the entirety of his young hockey career focused primarily on his lower body, a necessity for the stand-up game. But playing sled hockey was completely different, requiring significant upper-body strength, requiring use of both his right and left arms and hands.

He became the kid in his sled in the basement. He became the kid who brushed his teeth and opened doors with his left hand, making sure that he did household tasks with his nondominant hand to train it for hockey.

He became the athlete he needed to be, in order to get to the highest levels.

He became the athlete Dunn needed, just at that moment.

* * * *

That first day, after they met, the two boys went off together, sharing their love of the game, of being out on the ice, the stunning commonalities in their stories.

“We were introduced to each other as two young hockey players who were just two young hockey fans, too,” McGregor said.

In so many ways, they could relate to each other, could understand what the rest of their families and friends could not. Their families, too, could relate.

As Dunn’s recovery continued, the pair agreed to meet at a tiny little rink in West Lorne, Ontario, in January 2013, where they had rented some ice. McGregor brought two sleds to use, just their families in attendance.

“He got me out on the ice for the first time in a sled and I kind of just fell in love with the game again, just in a different form,” Dunn said. “Being able to get back out on the ice was amazing and I really appreciate him for doing that for me.”

He tried skating on a prosthetic leg once, on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, but he lasted only 10 or 15 minutes. The sled was right. Dunn never put skates on again, joining the Blizzards, a team out of London, to play sled hockey.

“He’d go for a treatment, then every Wednesday, he’d be at the rink on this sledge skating around with these guys, frail and white as a ghost, no hair,” Jeremy Dunn said. “But he just loved it.”

It was a new chance, an opportunity after the isolation of cancer, after being separated from the friends who could still play and skate, as they aways had. Dunn got that back. It made all the difference.

“Getting out on the ice, it gave me such a happiness,” Dunn said. “I was going through a pretty tough time battling cancer and him showing me that opportunity of being able to get on the ice again was amazing.”

It was something to look forward to, something to set his mind right.

At 15, just four years after his amputation, Dunn made the national team.

“It was like a full-circle moment from introducing me to the sport and then three or four years later, playing with him (McGregor) on the same team,” Dunn said. “And now he’s the captain of the team and I’m one of the [alternate] captains, so it’s pretty cool to be able to do that and to see how far we both have come together.”

* * * *

But cancer was not finished with Dunn.

Soon after he met McGregor, with the chemotherapy going well and signs looking up, Dunn slipped and fell. He started to feel unwell. They were at a London Knights Ontario Hockey League game, and Dunn started having trouble breathing, the family leaving after the first period.

He returned to the hospital, where they did X-rays on his chest.

They found a tumor, on his left side, near his lungs.

“Just when we thought everything was behind us, we get dealt another blow, right?” Jeremy Dunn said. “I think that’s the hardest thing to talk about is what he must have been going through. But to be honest with you, I think he was stronger than all of us.

“They said it was too messy, too big to operate on, and it came to a point where they said, 'You’d better get your affairs in order.' ”

Dunn was put on an aggressive chemo drug that, as his father said, “took him right to the brink,” as well as a feeding tube. But the drug was too aggressive, so it was swapped out for another, perhaps a last chance.

It took.

The tumor, which was located on his diaphragm, shrunk. Surgery was June 17, 2013. And though it would take five years of being cancer free for any of them to feel out of the woods, for the moment, they could breathe again.

* * * *

Each player soared on the national team, with McGregor heading to the 2013 World Championships in South Korea, his first time on a flight out of Canada, a reality so far from the one he viewed at his own that it was mind-bending. He returned with gold.

“It was three years after my cancer diagnosis and it was almost so surreal that I still can’t believe it,” McGregor said. “Because I was just filled with so much gratitude that I was able to find a way to play a sport that I loved, but also find this group of people that had become so special to me so quickly and to be able to share a moment of pure joy with them, it was just unbelievable.”

He was back again at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, meeting up with Dunn at a London game afterward, where the two posed with McGregor’s bronze medal.

It’s a picture Jeremy Dunn still keeps handy.

It wasn’t long before Dunn had joined McGregor, making the national team ahead of the 2016 World Sledge Hockey Challenge. He became the youngest player in Hockey Canada history to represent the country at the Paralympics, playing in 2018 in Pyeongchang, which he called “an opportunity of a lifetime, being able to wear that maple leaf out on the ice representing Canada in the sport.”

And as they found themselves competing in hockey at the highest levels, Dunn and McGregor found something else, the community and team they had lacked in the hospital while undergoing treatment, an isolating period.

They found each other.

“It’s pretty crazy to think we really don’t live that far apart, kind of pretty much have the same story,” Dunn said. “I really, really appreciate him and we’re great friends on and off the ice. And I just really appreciate him getting me on the ice the first time and showing me this. It’s become both of our lives.”

Jeremy Dunn shudders to think of the alternative, not just had James Dunn’s cancer treatment gone in a different direction, but had he not found McGregor, had he not found sled hockey.

“I’d have to say it saved his life,” Jeremy Dunn said. “If he knew he couldn’t have played hockey, I’m sure the results would be different. But he had that insight from Tyler to know there was an alternative to being competitive.”

It worked out for him. It worked out for McGregor.

Even if they haven’t won as many golds as they might have liked -- or felt they deserved -- Para Hockey has been a guiding light for both, an outlet and a community and the heartbeat of their lives.

“I’m in my 13th season now and, to be really candid, we’ve been on the wrong side of it more than the right side,” McGregor said. “You’re grateful for it all. I think sport is a microcosm of life. And we’ve been punched in the mouth more than our fair share.”

They have watched the U.S. take the past four straight Paralympic golds, while yearning for more of their own.

“But I think through that process you’re grateful for it," McGregor said, "because although you’d love to win every opportunity, I think the growth that you go through as both an individual and as a collective team, in showing up year after year, trying to find a way, is a great lesson for life. It’s helped forge us into stronger individuals and a stronger team collectively.

“That really is the way life is.”

He has seen it in going through cancer, in finding a way through and up, in helping provide that for other young players, like Dunn.

He has picked up the pieces.

“I think that’s one of the best things about our sport is the people that you meet within it,” McGregor said. “They all have such spectacular stories of resilience and perseverance. And everybody just comes together because they love to play.”