Blackhawks’ Andrew Shaw has the ultimate hockey mom – Chicago Tribune
At 6, Andrew Shaw received his first stitches — right above his eye after crashing into a table during a wrestling match.
It was the first of countless times he was sewn back together.
The conversation on the way to the hospital went like this on repeat:
“I don’t want to go,” Andrew said.
“Well, you have to, so we’re going,” his mother, Darlene Shaw, replied matter of factly.
With three boys born within three years of each other — all of whom played hockey — and a daughter who was a figure skater, the Shaw family was mostly numb to the routine of bumps and bruises and scrapes. Darlene learned early that worrying wouldn’t solve much.
“There’s no sense,” she said recently over the phone from the family’s hometown of Belleville, Ontario. “Those are the little things, right?”
Darlene has a story for almost every scar Andrew collected through the years. And if she ever panicked during an injury, she never let her kids see it.
Not even now as Andrew has become a black-and-blue fan favorite as a winger with Blackhawks, who are off this Mother’s Day weekend after sweeping the Wild in their second-round Stanley Cup playoff series.
Perhaps the ultimate hockey mom, Darlene admitted the time she had to reveal her own illness to her children proved the most difficult of her life.
On Oct. 18, 2012, Darlene was diagnosed with breast cancer. Within the week she told her children and underwent surgery.
“It wasn’t even (doctors) telling me,” she said. “The hardest part was telling the kids and thinking how they would react. You don’t want your kids to worry about you.”
Darlene was fortunate: She said she was not told of an irregularity after a regular checkup, but the tumor had not metastasized. She avoided chemotherapy and radiation, instead taking medication and undergoing reconstructive surgery last summer.
Doctors are optimistic about her progress.
Andrew said her battle is inspiring.
“It just shows the type of woman she is,” he said. “She’s strong-willed. She’s never going to give up on anything. I think I have part of that from her.”
Andrew donated the stitches from his upper-right cheek — courtesy of a puck to the face in the Stanley Cup playoffs in 2013 — for cancer research in honor of his mom. They were auctioned off for $6,500 with a matching donation from The V Foundation.
“I’m so privileged to have the life I have and for her to be in it,” he said. “I thought it would be a great way to give back. Even though it was a silly thing, it still made quite a bit of money to go toward research for breast cancer. It’s something I’m never going to forget.”
Nor will Darlene. And she hopes many others remember the message they had hoped to send.
She told Andrew before he made her diagnoses public: “Cancer attacks whoever it wants whenever it wants, whether it’s a hockey player or a hockey player’s mom. It will mean more to a lot of people if they know you come from a regular family with regular problems.”
The Shaws are not a family drawn together through crisis. They were always this way.
Darlene and her husband, Doug, each coached Andrew and his brothers, Joshua and Jason, who played in the Ontario Minor Hockey Association. Darlene coached Andrew’s youth team for two years.
“She always was the one to make sure I was well-fed, made it to the rink on time,” Andrew said. “She was my first rec coach. She wasn’t the best skater but we managed and we had a great time with it.”
Of course, hockey injuries accumulated.
When Andrew was 11, an opposing player’s skate sliced open his chin. Blood pooling onto the ice, Andrew begged to return. He did, soaking through the bandages the rest of the game.
Later that season, he claimed he had jammed his finger, but Darlene eventually figured out he had been playing with a broken hand. Andrew cried when told he would miss several weeks of hockey but convinced the doctor to use a playing cast after revealing his team was in the OMHA semifinals. He scored four goals in one game with that cast.
“I’m not the mother who’s going to crawl onto the ice,” said Darlene, who works for a trucking company while her husband works as a carpenter. “There’s times I’ve wanted to, but I’m patient and wait to see his reaction.”
Andrew, known as a likable agitator to Hawks fans, hasn’t changed much over the years.
He played through the Stanley Cup Final with a broken rib, which he didn’t reveal to his parents until they questioned him when noticing a new piece of protective equipment. In the dressing room, he jabbers and teases teammates.
“We always found that the more he was wound, the better he played,” Darlene said. “If we made him sit down and settle down, he’d have a so-so game. He was always that spunky and never-run-out-of-energy Energizer Bunny.”
After years of organizing their kids’ activities through color-coded calendars, Darlene and Doug now enjoy being a different kind of hockey parent — the kind that sits back as spectators.
Andrew takes pleasure in his mom enjoying his ride with the Hawks — and he appreciates that she has shielded him from worrying about her.
“She always makes sure we’re not thinking about (her health),” he said. “She wants us to live our lives. She’s going to live her life through us.
“Every chance she gets she watches me play hockey, watches my brothers play. It hasn’t seemed to stop her.”
Chicago Tribune’s Paul Skrbina contributed.
Twitter @sryantribune
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