BloodlineDAVID TURIK AND THE HOME OF CHAMPIONS

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new. — Dan Millman, in Way of the Peaceful Warrior: a book that changes lives, through his fictional character, Socrates.[9]

Batting against the USA, ICC One Day International, King City, Toronto, July 2010.

THE 17 YEAR-OLD TOP ORDER BATSMAN for the women's national team stepped up to the crease — the youngest player, male or female, to ever captain Canada — and swept the oncoming ball into a lofted drive for the first of two fours. At fourteen she had debuted as the youngest female or male cricketer to ever represent Canada in an open age international championship, and a few years earlier in 2010, she had helped Canada win the first T20 against USA Women, scoring forty-five not out, and taking one wicket for eighteen runs off her four overs bowled. She was ICC Player of the Match at King City and ICC Canadian MVP for the tournament.

Now at the Jimmy Powell Oval in the Cayman Islands, her side was batting first against Brazil when she retired on 14 runs not out. Her team produced a comprehensive 126 run victory and went on undefeated to win the ICC Americas T20 Championship. She made the ICC Women's T20 Cricket World Cup Qualifier, where she was again captain against Sri Lanka in Dublin Ireland, still only 18 years-old.

Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, Mikaela Turik was St Luke's School Basketball Captain in 2012, the six-foot-one forward who won the school's Basketball Excellence Award in 2010, averaging 24 points, 13 rebounds and 6 assists per game. She led her school to a 6-2 record during a US West Coast tour in December, 2010, scoring 51 points including a seven-for-eight stats-line for three-pointers against a Washington State 4A high school team. That led to an athletic scholarship at the University of Victoria in BC Canada, to play basketball in the Canadian Interuniversity Sport championships.

A dual citizen of Australia and Canada, her grandmother had graduated from Victoria's Teacher's College, and she also has family who had lived on Vancouver Island and friends who had attended UVic. But to properly explain this unusual reversal of events, I shall have to transport you back to another time and place, back to that venerable shrine of hockey at the northwest corner of Carlton and Church in Toronto, known as Maple Leaf Gardens .

It was there, back in 1944, behind a façade blending Art Deco with Art Moderne, that Miss Turik's grandfather became the first player to captain a British Columbia junior hockey team to the Memorial Cup, the trophy of the Canadian Hockey League (CHL) champion. Although his team lost to the Oshawa Generals — the likes of Ted Lindsay, Bill Ezinicki and Floyd Curry — he won the trophy the next season playing centre with wingers Tod Sloan and Les Costello in Toronto St Michael's Majors, leading the scoring with three hat tricks from five games.

Raised in Trail BC, Frank joined Frankie Mathers for two seasons in the Ottawa Senators of the Quebec Senior League where he was selected to the League's all-star team in 1947. By the time he had returned to his hometown, he had competed against players of the calibre of Doug Harvey and Gerry McNeil. For the next twelve seasons, he helped the Trail Smoke Eaters to several Savage Cup championships and the 1961 IIHF World Championship, although he did not travel to Europe. The Smoke Eaters were the last independent ice hockey club to represent Canada in international competition before the Canada men's national ice hockey team was established in 1963. He assisted on their first ever goal in Trail's Cominco Arena before becoming the first player in the Western International Hockey League (WIHL) to score five hundred points.

When Frank Turik retired from competitive hockey, he became coach of the Smokies and later Referee-in-Chief of the WIHL, playing old timer hockey with skill until the age of sixty-five. He is named on the Home of Champions monument in Trail BC commemorating those from the Greater Trail area who have excelled in their chosen field of endeavour. This was the Trail hockey family into which David Turik was born on July 5th 1959, then raised among a constant stream of imported players and international teams. Among these regular visitors to his home were many who went on to careers in the NHL.

He attended J L Crowe Secondary School and was not permitted to switch to goal as a junior until he had played forward for several seasons and developed his skating skills. His coaches were Trail’s 1939 World Champion goalie, Duke Scodellaro, and 1961 World Champion goalie, Seth Martin, of the St Louis Blues. In his book, the great Soviet goalie, Vladislav Tretiak, often speaks of Martin whom he idolized as a boy. Scodellaro, considered one of the best puck-handling goalies of his time, encouraged Turik to change catching hands to be able to handle the puck better. He was growing taller in those years, but the change also seemed to factor. He won the Trail MVP in the Bantam, Midget and Juvenile leagues.

In 1978, he played hockey at Selkirk College coached by Ernie Gare, the father of Buffalo’s Captain, Danny Gare. Despite being short of players, they made it to the Canada 4 West tournament in Red Deer, Alberta. In 1979-80, he played for Illinois State University Redbirds, winning the CSCHL Tournament MVP and the attention of the Washington Capitals of the NHL, which opened discussion at least with Caps GM, Max McNab, and their goalie coach, Roger Crozier.

They wanted him to finish studies at Brown University, which was closer than Illinois State, but in August he found that he could not transfer certain courses; he would be ineligible. He applied instead to the Emily Carr School of Art (formerly Vancouver School of Art) and spent a year there, studying all facets — sculpting in alabaster, making movies, life drawing, portrait painting. There he met Rob Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Christo and others. He got back into hockey, but his interest in the arts never waned.

Today, he is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (FAICD) and, perhaps more importantly, a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA) founded in 1754 in London with Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, as its Patron. "I try to express myself with leading edge powerpoint presos," he says and visits as many museums and galleries as a globe-trotter's time allows.

In March 1981, at the age of twenty-one, he moved to Australia intending to play for the City of Sydney All-Stars who had dominated the inaugural season of the National Ice Hockey League. Instead, he took the opportunity to help coach the goalies of the Australian National Junior Team at a camp in Newcastle, and to play for the original Newcastle North Stars, along with fellow import, Garry Doré, and locals such as Steve Lindsay and Terry George.

The next season he played for Canterbury United in Sydney and in 1982 he moved to Manly and joined the Warringah Bombers at the same time as Craig Hutchinson and Mark Sadgrove. The Bombers won the Australian Sports Commission 'Domestic Team of the Year' that season. At the inaugural Slapshot ABC TV series in 1983, he was awarded CP Air Best Goaltender and a return air ticket to Canada. In 1985, he was starting goalie for the Australian select team against an NHL star-studded Teen Ranch — Ron Ellis, Garry Unger, Jean Pronovost and Dave Burroughs — before a 3,000 capacity crowd at the Macquarie Ice Rink in Sydney. He also helped coach each of the Bombers' junior teams.

He finished Best Goaltender four times from five seasons in the NSW Super League, then after marrying Tania and working long hours as a foreign exchange broker, he decided to hang up the skates in 1986, when he was twenty-seven years old. A towering keeper, his name is engraved three times on the iconic Goodall Cup — 1981, '83, '84. He was selected to tournament All-Star teams and even scored a goal against South Australia in his only match as a forward. He never represented Australia at World Championships. There was only the one opportunity that ever presented itself in the six seasons he played here and that was the 1986 Worlds in which Damian Holland débuted and Turik retired.

Although he was coaxed out of retirement by his friends Walter Leskiw and Glenn Foll to coach the Macquarie Bears, it did not end well. A grand final plagued by controversy resulted in lengthy suspensions for coach and several players. In the 1990’s he continued to build his business career, moving into telecommunications as a Director of NetComm Cellular; providing the first cellular phones to the NSW Premier and his department; and introducing world-first cellular modem applications for motor racing with NetComm Racing and the legendary Peter Brock, one of Australia's best-known and most successful motor racing drivers.

It was also at NetComm Cellular in the 1980s that he met Joe Walsh during his two tours of Australia with The Party Boys. An electronics whiz, Walsh loved testing their cellular modem technology while living on Sydney's northern beaches. Quickly rising through the ranks of Telecom Australia, Turik became the Commercial and Consumer national manager responsible for the company's Consumer Council, its Small Enterprise Policy Panel, and its Industry Standards Senate Select Committee. Along the way, he organized a benefit concert at the Sydney Entertainment Centre with lead act, The Highwaymen, and memorable time with the country supergroup's Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash.

Then came a period of involvement in building telco businesses in Australia, Hong Kong, China, Canada and the USA; the public listing of companies in Australia and Canada; and Chairman of a company listing on the NASDAQ OTC. The success of these ventures allowed him to rekindle his interest in sport and so it was he formed Impart International Sports and Entertainment with former IIHF and IHA Official, Rick Williams. CEO of their sports marketing business, he became a major sponsor of the Newcastle North Stars in the Australian Ice Hockey League.

When NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly became the Honorary Patron of Ice Hockey Australia, Turik and Williams were waving the magic wands. When a direct link to the Ice Hockey Australia website materialized on NHL.com, and vice versa, it was Turik and Williams pulling it out of the hat, positioning "Aussie hockey" among the elite of NHL networked websites. Their entrepreneurial enchantments led to more and more inter-sport wizardry. They equipped referees with microphones similar to the National Rugby League (NRL). They introduced the NHL Bunker Room to the NRL. They represented the American IMG Academies in Australia and assisted the Chinese with their 2008 Beijing Olympic Bid. In between, Turik appeared in a Ford Laser commercial, Penthouse magazine articles and other major media.

His wife, Tania Fitzgerald, was a former representative softball player for Manly Warringah for several seasons. His son, Jason, is the Events and Community Engagement Manager at the Men of League Foundation, an organisation dedicated to assisting rugby league players, coaches, referees, officials and administrators and their families. Responsible for major fundraisers, his 2016 theme, the Captain's Captain, was developed with the head coach of the national rugby league team, Mal Meninga, a legendary goal-kicking centre and one of the finest footballers of the twentieth century. Its aim was to select and honour the all-time greatest captain of the The Kangaroos.

By now, it will probably come as no surprise to learn that Hills College at Jimboomba in Queensland, where his son finished high school, has a golf academy. When Jason Turik first attended in 2005, it was led by the boy from Beaudesert, current World Number 1, Jason Day. In 2006, the year Day turned pro, Jason Turik was invited to Dragon Lake in China to play at the Aaron Baddeley International Junior Championship (ABIJC), one of the leading junior tournaments in the world, the winner of which is invited to play in the Australian Open. Golf, rugby, softball, basketball, cricket, ice hockey. The Gospel according to David Turik. A rich mine of sporting ideas and inter-sport innovation, founded on the bedrock of an extensive library of biographical, business, motivational and art literature.

Turik has also been actively involved in coaching and administration of his daughter's sport of cricket and is a co-founder of the Cricket 4 Life Foundation. He was the Assistant Coach of Team Canada in the inaugural Ice Hockey Classic at Allphones Arena in Sydney in 2013, with a crowd of over 18,000 spectators in attendance, and he assisted former European pro hockey player, Kerry Goulet, to organise the Gretzky 4-on-4 in Sydney in 2016. That year he was also working on a major NHL project, as well as printed LED lighting developed in association with NASA and rolled-out in conjunction with the Clinton Global Initiative and the United Nations' Global Off-Grid Lighting Association.

Although it has been in his blood for over half a century, the part of David Turik's hockey career that unfolded in Australia has now spanned 35 years, on and off. And perhaps this goes some way towards explaining why his teenage daughter, Mikaela, retraced her sporting bloodlines back to sacred ground, back to her home of champions. Like the many internationals before her who had made that same pilgrimage, on their way to someplace called Renown.

NOTES AND CITATIONS

1. Biographical notes of David Turik, September 2016
2. Home of Champions monument, Trail BC, entry for Frank Turik
3. Historic Trail Smoke Eaters, 2013, Trail Historical Society
4. Wikipedia entry for Mikaela Turik, Online
5. 1960-61 Trail Smoke Eaters, BC Sports Hall of Fame Online
6. The Evening Citizen, Ottawa, Mar 13 1946, Frank Turik Injures Knee as Senators Hold Drill
7. theaihl.com, June 18, 2013, Intense Battle Won’t Just Be On the Ice. Online
8. Vladislav Tretyak, 1977, The Hockey I Love, Lawrence Hill [translated]
9. Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book that Changes Lives, 2006, by Dan Millman, HJ Kramer (first published 1980).