ST. PAUL, Minn. — When you travel a crooked journey, the kind of journey Scott Darling took to reach the top level of professional hockey, it helps to have a traveling companion.
Someone who gets it. Someone to commiserate with, to understand the frustrations, to help keep the flickering dream alive.
Darling, as has been well documented, has turned into one of the NHL season’s endearing hockey stories with his charge out of nowhere to turn in historic goaltending performances for the Chicago Blackhawks in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs this year.
Three years and nine teams ago, he was just an out-of-shape 6-foot-6 goaltender toiling in the Southern Professional Hockey League for the Mississippi River Kings, living in South Haven, Miss., just across the border from Memphis.
He wasn’t just nowhere. He couldn’t even see nowhere from where he was, having spent too much time cozying up to the bottle after being drafted four years earlier by the Arizona Coyotes. At the University of Maine, he played two years but his trouble with alcohol raged, and he was eventually booted off the team.
By the 2010-11 season, he’d put up lousy numbers with the SPHL Louisiana IceGators, spinning his wheels in the lowest rungs of pro hockey. The following season, he was in Mississippi, which is where his hockey career intersected with Deven Stillar.
Now, it would be a vast exaggeration to say Stillar inspired Darling, or ultimately led him to that stunning 42-save relief performance against the Nashville Predators two weeks ago that might have saved Chicago’s season.
It would also be horribly unfair to the truth. Which is more subtle, but better.
When Darling was at his lowest ebb in Mississippi, Stillar was at the highest level he’d ever get to, a kid from Sudbury, Ont. who’d gone west to chase his dream in Melfort, Saskatchewan and Flin Flon, Manitoba, then failed to hook up with a Central Hockey League team in Laredo, Texas.
He’d landed in South Haven and passed a three-game tryout to make $300 a week, thinking he was living the dream, man. Getting paid to play.
“For me, it was, ‘let’s see how far I can take this,’” says Stillar. “I mean, it wasn’t like I’d left medical school to do this.”
Darling had stopped drinking, stopped carousing and was just starting to put the pieces together again. He and Stillar were two hockey players circling different orbits, but temporarily flung together on this remote hockey outpost.
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So they started to talk.
“Deven was my sounding board for all my grievances with life and existence. Poor guy, he put up with me for nine months,” laughs Darling.
“He hadn’t known me when I was struggling away from the rink, but it hadn’t been that long ago. I told him all about it, and he understood. He knew I wanted more, I wanted to move up and be successful and I wanted to do the right things.
“If I didn’t play well, I’d be pretty hard on myself, and we’d go out to dinner afterwards and he’d have to listen to me complain about why I couldn’t stop pucks. He helped me get through it.”
Stiller had his own problems, specifically chronic back pain that kept him tied to the training table. He played 45 games, scoring 13 goals.
“I thought I played pretty well,” recalls Stillar. “Every day was the day you’re thinking, ‘Okay, this is the day I’m off to the next level.’ Scott was a sounding board for me as much as I was for him.
“But we always kept the big picture in our minds. Yes, the goal was to climb the ladder and make it in hockey, but that was only one aspect of our friendship. We would celebrate his recovery in steps, with celebratory dinners or outings to Memphis to mark prominent dates, especially one year of sobriety.
“We both knew by then he was headed in the right direction. You can tell the guys who are in the last stages of their careers, and the guys who are just happy to be in that league. He was going somewhere else.”
At the end of the year, they parted. Darling moved up to ECHL’s Wheeling Nailers the next season, and then had a cup of coffee with the Hamilton Bulldogs (AHL) near the end of the season. He was on his way.
Stillar? He was traded to Pensacola — yep, you can get traded in the SPHL — but failed his physical the following fall. His career was over. His pursuit of an acting career had begun.
“The acting thing had always been on my mind. I’m not overly religious, but it felt like a sign to me when I couldn’t play anymore,” he says.
He packed up, went back to Sudbury, then moved to Toronto. At 25, he’s looking for his big break, and did have a small part in the film “A Fighting Man” with a good cast that included James Caan, Michael Ironside, Louis Gossett Jr. and Famke Janssen.
“It’s not about being a movie star,” he says. “Just a working actor. Doing what you want. You’re surviving. Same as hockey.”
Darling is again backing up Corey Crawford in this second round series against Minnesota, but he was, for a few days at least, the starting goalie of the Hawks in the playoffs. He got a new two-year deal in the winter for $575,000 next year and $600,000 the season after that.
He rescued his career just in time, but still identifies his former Mississippi roomie as someone who was there when the days were the darkest.
“I live vicariously through him. I really do,” says Stillar. “We talk on the phone or text, and he’s brought me along for the experience. It’ll just be little stuff. Being on the team plane.
The morning at the rink when they have the big buffet out.
“He knew my dream was to play. Finally one of us got there.”
Stillar, oddly enough, decided this season to be a goalie in a Toronto men’s league. It was two days before Christmas when a surprise package arrived on his door from Darling.
A new set of Brians goaltending equipment. Pads and gloves, an expense Stillar wouldn’t otherwise be able to cover. Nice.
“Sometimes when guys get themselves on the right path, they forget about the guys that were around them,” say Stillar.
“Scott’s not that guy.”
