Saturday, February 23, 2002
Play like women, Quinn advises
By STEVE SIMMONS -- Team Sun
SALT LAKE CITY -- Pat Quinn held a meeting Thursday night and told the players on Team Canada something they never figured to hear.
He told them he wanted them to start acting more like women.
To be specific, like the Canadian women's hockey players at the Winter Olympic Games.
Quinn was so impressed with the poise shown by the Canadian woman against Team USA in their gold-medal hockey game, with a pro-U.S. crowd and a pro-U.S. referee, that he passed this wisdom on to the men's team the night before its game against Belarus.
Quinn said that controlled emotion may provide the key for Canada's gold-medal game tomorrow against the U.S.
"It can be one of our biggest enemies and one our best friends," Quinn said of Canadian emotion. "I saw in two days how emotion can work for you and against you.
"The Swedish team, in my opinion, the best team here, started to lose concentration (in game against Belarus), they started making defensive mistakes, slamming gates, barking at each other. They lost their focus.
"Then I watched our (women's) team. I thought I've never seem homerism like this in all my life (in hockey). But they never lost their poise. It was amazing. You lose your poise, you give in to the circumstances, that's what loses it. You lose your focus and we spoke about that in our meeting."
Quinn spoke about that and how much all this means to his players and to Canada.
Quinn has been hearing in the past few days from previous gold-medal winners in hockey. Harry Sinden, the Team Canada '72 coach and a former world champion, called. So did Billy Warwick, one of the central players on the 1952 Edmonton Mercurys team that won the most-recent men's hockey gold for Canada.
"We knew coming in this can be an awful albatross," Quinn said of the Canadian focus on hockey. "We're carrying the hopes of the nation. Somehow in Canada, we expect more.
"I don't know if we'll win (tomorrow) but we're there. We plan on (winning)."
Quinn, meanwhile, has enjoyed his time at the Olympics, even if it doesn't look like it.
"I've been sitting outside smoking my cigars and some young athletes come by just to talk, that's nice," Quinn said. "A young snowboarder who expected to win gold and finished dead last talked to me one night."
When asked what the snowboarder was smoking, Quinn laughed and said: "I would have broken my cigar in half for him, if I'd had a clip."
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2002 Games Men's Hockey Coverage
