'Guys don't believe me': How David Bell's wild hockey journey got him to Belleville (2024)

BELLEVILLE, Ontario — David Bell settles into the chair behind his desk at his office inside CAA Arena and is ready to hold court.

He offers his guest a bottle of water and excitedly retrieves one from the red mini fridge across from his desk.

Bell usually doesn’t like the focus and attention on himself, which is why many of his media sessions as the interim head coach in Belleville are short, strait-laced and serious.

But on this day, he appears eager to share some colourful stories from his past with a reporter who would certainly appreciate them. When Bell tries telling some of his anecdotes and personal stories to Belleville players, the twentysomethings inside the locker room often roll their eyes at the coach.

“They just think I’m a grumpy old man, talking about walking uphill both ways in the snow,” laughs Bell. “But I tell these stories and the guys don’t believe me.”

You can understand the skepticism from the players, because some of the yarns Bell spins are so colourful and wild, they border on fictitious.

Like the one about his fight with former NHL tough guy Rocky Thompson. It was New Year’s Eve in 1999, with Thompson’s Saint John team hosting Bell’s Springfield AHL club. The two pugilists got into a nasty, heated fight that left both players bloodied. They each required stitches, but Thompson received medical attention first from the in-house doctor since he was on the home team.

As Thompson was being stitched up, Bell was getting extremely antsy inside the visitor’s dressing room as the game concluded.

“It was New Year’s Eve and we wanted to get out and have some drinks,” says Bell.

So in order to enjoy the Saint John nightlife with his teammates, Bell agreed to have his defence partner Brad Tiley and the team’s equipment manager stitch up the cut near his eye. Obviously, neither had the requisite medical training, but Bell was satisfied with their makeshift performance.

As he tells the story with a laugh, Bell takes his right finger and points to multiple scars around his eye.

“I actually forget which one it is,” Bell says. “But you can see it. It’s not a very clean scar.”

Remarkably, that might not even be the wildest story involving Bell and a botched attempt at stitches.

He recalls another instance in which he suffered a nasty gash on the top of his head during a game (he wouldn’t say where he was playing in this story). He went to the trainer’s room to get stitched up, finding the attending doctor enjoying a whiskey and a cigar.

“So I actually held his whiskey and ashtray while he stitched me up,” says Bell, recalling the doctor still had the cigar in his mouth while he was working.

When Bell returned to the bench, his defence partner looked at him and said, “Hey, you’re still bleeding.”

Bell removed his helmet and discovered the original cut was still there. The doctor had somehow managed to give him stitches in the wrong spot.

“I guess the doctor had too many whiskeys because he didn’t even stitch me up right,” says Bell. “But hey, those were the old days.”

In his first season as a 17-year-old with the Ottawa 67’s, David Bell had a special routine at the Ottawa Civic Centre.

The defenceman would find an excuse to hang around the home dressing room for as long as he could, just so he could catch a glimpse of the NHL players coming into the arena. At the time, the 67’s were sharing the same facility as the Ottawa Senators, allowing Bell a peek inside the NHL world.

He particularly enjoyed watching Bill Huard, the Senators’ rugged winger, prepare for home games.

“I just remember watching him amping himself up in the hallway,” recalls Bell. “It was so cool to see.”

Bell naturally gravitated towards the blue-collar, gritty players. He could see himself in the mold of those players — short on skill, but overloaded with grit, determination and intangibles.

“I always wore a letter with my teams and I wasn’t a very good player. So there had to be a reason for that,” says Bell. “My quality was my leadership quality, because I wasn’t very good.”

Brian Kilrea appreciated his rugged defenceman’s skill set and on the odd occasion where Kilrea’s personal schedule conflicted with the 67’s, he would actually outsource the practice duties to Bell.

“I would run practice. It’s probably not typical, but it’s just something I enjoyed,” says Bell. “I could run the room and do the right thing. And that’s what a coach is supposed to do.”

The relationship with Kilrea continues to this day, with Bell still phoning his old coach on a regular basis to pick his brain about hockey-related matters. But there were certainly some rough patches between the two, with Bell’s stubbornness being the bone of contention.

Bell recalls Kilrea ordering him off the bench one night because he had injured his shoulder during the game. When Bell went to the dressing room to be examined, the doctor asked him which shoulder was bothering him.

“Stupid me, I purposely told him the wrong shoulder,” says Bell.

The doctor manipulated the shoulder and after further examination concluded, “It’s not that bad. I think you can go back out there.”

Bell says, “I thought to myself, ‘Damn. That’s my good shoulder and he’s saying it’s not that bad.'”

Bell returned to the ice but immediately suffered an injury to the shoulder that was actually problematic in the first place. He recalls being chewed out by Kilrea.

“I got in big trouble for that because I lied about which shoulder was hurting, just so I could go back and play,” says Bell. “But I guess thatwas an intangible. I was willing to play.”

Kilrea could distinguish between whether a player was hurt or actually injured and Bell now finds himself echoing his former coach.

“I just dropped a Brian Kilrea quote this morning in the training room,” says Bell. “I just asked a player, ‘So are you hurt or are you injured?’ That’s a classic Kilrea line.”

While Kilrea helped create the foundation for Bell’s coaching philosophy and career, he also set him on a path that kept his playing career alive. As Bell was concluding his time with the 67’s in the OHL, he was studying to become a police officer in Ottawa. He was roughly three months away from achieving his certification when Kilrea and local player agent Larry Kelly alerted Bell to an opportunity for a professional tryout with the San Jose Sharks.

The Sharks were so impressed with Bell’s hard work and determination that they offered him a professional contract. He was assigned to the Louisville Riverfrogs of the ECHL.

“I signed it because it’s not too often you get offered a pro contract,” Bell says.

What Bell didn’t realize at the time is that it would be the launching point for a bizarre and colourful journey throughout North America on the minor professional hockey circuit.

David Bell played a grand total of 10 games with the Louisville Riverfrogs in 1997-98, opting to return to the Ottawa 67’s for his overage season.

In the summer of 1998, the Riverfrogs franchise folded and the players were selected in a dispersal draft by other ECHL clubs.

The Miami Matadors chose Bell and the 21-year-old was brimming with excitement over the possibility of playing professional hockey in South Florida.

“Miami? Are you kidding me? I’ll go to Miami,” says Bell.

And when he arrived in Florida, Bell was stunned at the five-star treatment he was receiving.

Players were put up in immaculate apartments in Coral Gables. On game days, the team hired limousines to drive the players downtown to the old Miami Arena. The team put the players up at the waterfront Hyatt hotel, so they could take their game-day naps without having to go all the way back to their apartments. After the games finished, the limousines would drive the players back to their apartments in Coral Gables.

But right away, there were warning signs this type of treatment from a fledgling ECHL club was unsustainable. On opening night, the Matadors organization wasn’t sure how many fans were going to show up, so they staffed the arena as if full capacity of 14,000 might show up. There were ushers in every single section of the Miami Arena — upper and lower deck.

However, when the puck dropped that night for the game against the South Carolina Stingrays, Bell estimates maybe 100 fans showed up to watch.

“I’m not kidding when I say there were more ushers than fans,” says Bell.

Slowly, the luxurious amenities started disappearing one by one.

“Twenty games into the season, the limousines stopped. Thirty games in, they stopped putting us up in the hotel,” recalls Bell. “By the 40-game mark, our games were now happening at the practice arena.”

Bell remembers sitting in the Matadors dressing room and a random man just strolled in, put the soda machine on a dolly and carried it out. Nobody batted an eye.

“We were bankrupt. Nobody was getting paid,” says Bell. “It ended up being a fraudulent company.”

Once again, Bell was part of an ECHL team that folded and he was placed in yet another dispersal draft. He was selected by the Greenville Grrrowl.

But this time, Bell found a home in South Carolina, with neophyte fans who appreciated his blue-collar style on the ice.

“If you smashed the glass and made a big noise, they loved you,” Bell says. “So they loved me.”

Bell spent parts of three seasons in Greenville, playing more than 150 games for the franchise and captaining them to a Kelly Cup championship in 2002. He paid a heavy physical price to lead his team to a title that spring.

“My arm was purple by the end of that playoff run,” says Bell. “But at that point, I knew I was never going to make it to the NHL, so that was the highlight for me.”

By the time he was 27 years old, Bell’s body was ravaged from the physical toll of playing the game in such a punishing manner. He had surgery on his knee, shoulder and ruptured discs in his back. His nose has been broken so often he cannot even hazard an educated guess on how many times it’s happened. At one point, his hand was so damaged that he couldn’t even properly close it to make a fist.

“The most painful thing ever was when they inserted needles into each knuckle of that hand to try and break up the scar tissue,” says Bell. “That was crazy.”

Despite what his body was telling him — which included a fairly new neck issue — Bell had agreed to a contract to continue playing with Port Huron in the United Hockey League for the 2004-05 season.

But a conversation with a different OHL coach firmly pushed Bell’s trajectory towards coaching.

The summer of 2004 was a typical one for Bell.

He returned to his Wiarton, Ontario, hometown to spend the summer working at a campground. After a gruelling season of professional hockey — that didn’t exactly pay well — Bell undertook more intense, physical labour in the summers. From each summer when he was 14 until he turned 30, Bell returned to Wiarton to work on a campground owned and operated by the family of former NHL player Paul MacDermid.

Bell called it “hard, hard work,” often involving moving heavy slabs of concrete and doing hours of manual labour in the blistering heat.

At the end of that summer, Bell joined the OHL’s Owen Sound Attack for some of their informal practices. It wasn’t uncommon for local professional players to skate with the OHL players before departing for their own cities. During these sessions, Bell would often instruct the younger players on positioning or give them certain tips during drills.

Mike Stothers — who was Owen Sound’s head coach — was watching this unfold and immediately noticed Bell’s uncanny abilities to be a natural teacher on the ice. So he invited Bell into his office after one of the skates and asked him a simple question.

“What are you going to get out of playing another year and making 800 bucks a week in the United Hockey League?” Stothers asked him. “Why don’t you get into coaching?”

Bell was flattered, but responded by asking, “Where am I going to coach?”

“Here,” Stothers said quickly. “I’ll give you a job. Why don’t you quit and be my assistant coach.”

Bell’s professional playing days officially ended that day, as he put on his coaching hat at the age of 27.

“I owe Mike a lot in hockey and my personal life,” says Bell. “He’s been pretty influential in my life.”

Bell spent three seasons as Stothers’ assistant in Owen Sound, helping develop teenage prospects like Bobby Ryan and Andrej Sekera. He moved along to the AHL and then found himself back in the OHL and working under Dale Hawerchuk in Barrie for the 2009-10 season. Bell called it “transformational” to work with such a talented offensive mind like Hawerchuk, who scored 518 goals during a brilliant Hall of Fame career.

Hawerchuk opened up Bell’s mind to the offensive side of the game, showing him the game from a completely different vantage point. He employs many of Hawerchuk’s offensive strategies and tactics in his game today.

“He grew my game and my offensive philosophies,” Bell says. “These guys I’ve coached, they have Dale Hawerchuk’s knowledge without knowing where it came from.”

Bell says he constantly repeats two phrases that Hawerchuk would always say as a head coach: “Play hungry” and “play on the end of your nose.”

Hawerchuk would refer to “playing on the end of your nose” as the ability for players to get down low and put their body into the play. He would constantly be frustrated by players who stayed back and reached for the puck with their sticks — without putting their body into the play.

After one game in which Hawerchuck was exasperated at his players’ effort, he instructed the Colts equipment staff to cut off eight inches off each player’s stick. He then made the players participate in a full practice with the short sticks, forcing them to get down low.

He then kept those short sticks on hand in the locker room, as a constant reminder for what he wanted.

“Do you need me to bring those short sticks out again?” Hawerchuk would tell his players. “Play on the end of your nose.”

After a season with Hawerchuk, Bell felt confident in his own ability to run a program by himself. And in the summer of 2011, Bell received an offer that he couldn’t believe. The Quad City Mallards of the Central Hockey League offered him a three-year contract to be the head coach and general manager.

Bell knew this would be a grind. Quad City was based in Illinois, but some of their opponents were located in opposite parts of the country. At one point, the travel itinerary called for them to travel from Quad City to Loredo, Texas on the border of Mexico. The very next game was in South Dakota. All told, he and his Mallards players were on the bus for 40 hours.

Still, he was excited at the prospect of running his own program and putting his personal stamp on things.

“It was a dream job,” says Bell.

However, that quickly morphed into a nightmare that he says was “worse than what I experienced in Miami.”

Bell knew there were issues when his first paycheck bounced.

“They said to me right away, ‘We’re sorry. We’re a new organization. Don’t worry, we’ll get that fixed right away,” says Bell. “There were red flags everywhere. But I was so eager to be a head coach and GM, I just looked past a lot of it.”

The team was so financially strapped they couldn’t even afford to buy plastic bags for ice in case a player was injured and required a cold compress. Bell recalls finding a unique workaround solution, by sending his trainer to the grocery store to get extra plastic bags from the produce department.

“We didn’t have the money to even buy plastic bags for ice. We would sometimes give the visiting team used produce bags, so their ice bags actually had tiny little broccoli shards at the bottom,” says Bell.

More important equipment issues started to pop up.

“At one point I went to an opponent and told them, ‘Hey, we’re out of right shot sticks. Can we trade you some extra left ones that we have?'” he recalls.

When Christmas rolled around, Bell had only received one paycheck. The league took over complete control of the team, but it was purely chaotic behind the scenes. When the team would be away on extended road trips, Bell’s wife was tasked with going around to various staff members’ apartments and removing the eviction notices placed on their doors. They weren’t being paid by the team, so in turn they couldn’t afford to pay their rent.

Bell knew his time was done when he forced his wife — who was then almost nine months pregnant — to return to Canada to have their baby.

“Our insurance was cancelled. I told her, ‘Get back to Canada to have this baby,” says Bell. “We couldn’t afford $30,000 to pay for a baby in an American hospital.”

At the end of the regular season, most of the Mallards players were stuck in Quad City — unable to pay for plane tickets to their respective homes. So in the home finale, Bell devised a plan. At the conclusion of the game, he and his radio play-by-play person held a live auction in front of the fans. The players took the jerseys off their backs and Bell conducted an impromptu auction, with one important rule.

“It was a cash-only auction,” says Bell. “That way, I could take the fistful of cash and hand it to the player and say, ‘OK. Here’s your money to get home.'”

That summer, Quad City management tried to lure Bell back for another season. Bell gave them a simple ultimatum: Pay him $5,000 in cash by June 15 or he was out the door. The deadline passed without Bell receiving a penny.

“They didn’t pay me,” says Bell. “So I just resigned.”

When you’ve experienced the full range of bizarreness and absurdity in professional hockey, taking over for Troy Mann as the interim head coach in the middle of an AHL season doesn’t even register as strange or awkward for Bell.

He’s trying his best to make the transition from assistant coach to head coach without creating too much of a stir. Bell remembers anecdotes from Kilrea, Stothers and Hawerchuck that he tries to bring inside his dressing room in Belleville.

“You don’t want to berate players and you don’t want to be a dictator. Because I hated that as a player,” says Bell. “So I’ve tried to do that as a coach. You have to draw a line on certain things, but you have to find the balance.”

He finds himself in awe of the comforts and luxuries the Belleville players take for granted on a daily basis. On this day, for example, a full omelette station is awaiting the players after they leave the practice ice at the CAA Arena. The menu is prepared with allergies and sensitivities — to such things as gluten and lactose — in mind.

Bell recalls his final season in the OHL, where Kilrea’s wife, Judy, would often cook a full ham and then make sandwiches for the players. At the end of a game, there would be a brown paper bag waiting for each player, with a ham sandwich wrapped in tin foil inside.

Bell says he relayed this story to Jacob Bernard-Docker this week and the young defenceman couldn’t believe that high-end hockey players were getting brown paper bag lunches made by the coach’s wife.

“Can you imagine telling these guys today there’s a ham sandwich waiting for you after the game?” laughs Bell. “Back in the day, if we played really well we might stop the bus and get treated to Arby’s.”

(Top photo: Courtesy of David Foot / Belleville Senators)