Rutherford Road is a wide stretch of Canadian asphalt that shoots from east to west across a small piece of the suburban sprawl emanating north from Toronto.
It runs for 11 mostly straight miles across the city of Vaughan, Ontario, past a creek and some golf courses, Canada's largest shopping center and rows of planned communities. Somewhere along that path, though, Rutherford Road curves into a right turn. And on Dec. 15, 2003, Rob Ramage missed it.
The two-time Stanley Cup champion and former Toronto Maple Leafs captain was driving back from a funeral for another former hockey player, Keith McCreary. With Ramage in the car was veteran Chicago Blackhawks player and coach Keith Magnuson. With Ramage as well were the chemical remnants of between 15 and 22 alcoholic drinks, which a toxicologist would later testify and the Canadian press would later report he must have consumed in the hours leading up to his drive.
Newspapers like The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail would widely cover what happened next.
When he didn't follow the road, Ramage and his Chrysler Intrepid crossed the center line into oncoming traffic, glanced off of another car and slammed into a Nissan Pathfinder.
Magnuson was killed instantly. He was 56.
The other car's driver, Michelle Pacheco, survived with serious injuries. She was 39.
Ramage suffered a dislocated hip. When he missed that turn, he was 44.
His son, John Ramage, who has followed in his father's footsteps as a defenseman and today wears the captain's ""C"" for Wisconsin, was 12.
John Ramage's adolescence is the stuff of grassroots hockey legend. According to his father, John was born not only into the family of one former NHL star, but a community of retired pros in St. Louis, ex-pats from Canada who moved to the area after playing for the city's pro team, the Blues.
Names like Basil McRae, Al MacInnis and Kelly Chase might not have much meaning to the average sports fan, but for a kid playing hockey they could be the legend who taught you how to block a puck or protect a teammate. They were the kind of guys who wanted to give back to the sport, and Rob Ramage said they did it the best way they could.
""Hockey has given us all so much,"" Rob Ramage said. ""We love the game, obviously, we're passionate about it.""
""Al Arbour was a great Stanley Cup coach with the New York Islanders and had actually coached in St. Louis also. He said to me once, ‘If you can't play, the greatest thing—the next best thing in hockey—is coaching.' And he's certainly right, it's a lot of fun.""
John Ramage estimated his dad coached him from the time he was eight or nine years old, and kept at it until he joined the St. Louis Bandits, the local affiliate of the North American Hockey League, in high school.
Ramage said his father wasn't the kind of coach who was too controlling, but that he was one that would force everyone—even, and maybe especially, his son—to work hard.
""I was really lucky; I've always said that,"" he said. ""Coming up, he wasn't really too hands-on, he just kind of let me be. Whenever he felt like it was time to step in [he would], just showing me things that any other defenseman never even got growing up. Sometimes with the coach's son, they get the bad attitude. My dad, he would maybe sit me a little more just to teach me a lesson.""
Plenty of kids play hockey growing up and imagine they will make it to the top, with the dream that maybe one day they'll hoist the Stanley Cup or be the captain of one of the game's proudest franchises. According to Rob Ramage, he saw his son had the ability to do that—not just in his mind on an empty rink, but in the pros—when John played for the United States at a tournament in Slovakia.
""That's when the light started to go on, that he really wanted to pursue this,"" Ramage said. ""He always enjoyed the game and wanted to do well, but I think that burning desire started to ignite when he was around 16.""
Russia won that tournament's gold medal, while the United States placed fifth. The games ran from Aug. 14-17, 2007. Two months later, Rob Ramage was in an Ontatio courtroom, listening as a jury found him guilty of driving drunk, missing a turn and taking a life.
A few months after that, a judge sentenced him to four years in prison.
Part two of this three part feature will run in Tuesday' edition of The Daily Cardinal.
