Miracle in Manchester: The Wade MacLeod story
After four brain surgeries to remove a cancerous tumor and three years away from the game, a 34-year-old minor league journeyman gets a chance to play, and leave hockey on his own terms this time
Three years ago today, Wade MacLeod was in the operating room of the Vancouver General Hospital undergoing emergency brain surgery. Doctors made a four-inch incision from the base of his left ear over the top of his head. It was a path they knew well. After all, this was the fourth time MacLeod was having his head sliced open to remove a growth on his brain. It was actually the second time in just a couple of months.
But this one was different. The three previous tumors caused uncontrollable seizures, but were all benign. This one wasn’t. It was full of cancer, aggressive and lethal. “That pesky tumor regrew,” MacLeod said, “and it regrew aggressively.” That was his fourth brain surgery, after each of which he had to relearn to walk and talk, and he calls it a “pesky” tumor. Man, hockey players. But this tumor was more than pesky. MacLeod’s wife, Karly, was reviewing his doctors’ reports with the Canada Revenue Agency to arrange for disability payments when something the CRA rep said floored her. “He was saying, ‘Oh, yeah, you actually qualify for this because he’s grave,’ ” Karly said. “And I’m like, ‘What? What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘It says right here his condition is grave.’ ” At another meeting with an oncologist, who didn’t exactly excel in bedside manner either, MacLeod was told he should have undergone radiation and chemotherapy cancer treatment years before and that he had three to five years to live.
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Fast-forward to the summer of 2021. MacLeod is in his condo in Port Moody, B.C., and Karly is preparing a dinner of perogies and broccoli for their four-year-old daughter, Ava. Little Georgia is a mop-headed six-month-old and a going concern. Things are busy there because in a couple of weeks, 34-year-old Wade MacLeod, who hasn’t playing hockey in three years and is coming off four brain surgeries, will resume his professional hockey career, again, this time with the Manchester Storm of the Elite Ice Hockey League in Great Britain. The guy can play. We know this. After scoring 51 goals and 105 points in the British Columbia Jr. League in 2006-07, MacLeod played four years at Northeastern University, then embarked on a seven-year pro career that took him from the American Hockey League to the ECHL to Germany. Never had an injury, except for those tumors. Those pesky tumors.
Going on two years cancer-free, MacLeod hasn’t had a seizure in 18 months. For 2 ½ hours every day, he works with a personal trainer by the name of Kai Heinonen, a black belt in karate and professional poker player who is renowned for his punishing workouts. When he’s not working out, MacLeod is skating in the Vancouver area with a group of local pros. Just the other day, Heinonen watched MacLeod go bar-down on a backhand with a defender on him. Brain cancer may have robbed MacLeod of a good portion of his hockey career, but his hockey-player confidence remains firmly intact. When asked how he thinks he’ll do in the British League this coming season, he said, “Top 20 in scoring. And I’m being modest. I actually think I’m going to be in the top five in scoring and I’m saying top 20 in case I have kinks I need to get through.”
A 34-year-old guy coming off brain cancer who hasn’t played in three years believes he’s going to finish among the top five scorers in a league that is filled with former players who have played in both the top European leagues and the minors in North America. Given how Wade MacLeod keeps persevering in the face of almost insurmountable adversity, it would be very wise not to bet against him
It was Valentine’s Day in 2013 and MacLeod was in his second pro season with the Springfield Falcons, the AHL affiliate for the Columbus Blue Jackets. Never drafted by an NHL team, MacLeod was on a one-way AHL deal, but was hitting his stride. The NHL had gone back to work after a half-season lockout, and with the likes of Cam Atkinson, Ryan Johansen, Matt Calvert up with the Blue Jackets, he was getting a chance to display his skills in the AHL. MacLeod was on a seven-game point streak and had already registered an assist in the game when he took a hit that pushed up his helmet, which caused his head to violently collide with the glass. With his wife and mother in the crowd, MacLeod began to shake uncontrollably on the bench and was put on a stretcher. “They brought someone from the team to find us in the stands to bring us down,” Karly recalled. “No one ever finds you and brings you down. We had no idea what to think of it. Wade was confused and couldn’t answer what day it was.”
‘Top 20 in scoring. And I’m being modest. I actually think I’m going to be in the top five in scoring’
As it turned out, his head hit the glass precisely where the tumor was located and triggered the first of dozens of brain seizures MacLeod would endure over the next six years. Doctors had no idea how long the tumor had been in his head. Could have been one year, could have been 10. But it had to be removed, so he underwent brain surgery at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital in Boston. Thinking his health problems were behind him, MacLeod secured a tryout with the Toronto Marlies of the AHL and made the team as a walk-on. But he had another seizure that season, missed three weeks of the 2013-14 campaign and was sent to the ECHL to finish the season.
With no interest from AHL teams because of his history of seizures, MacLeod played the 2014-15 season with the Idaho Steelheads of the ECHL and finished second in league scoring. After that season, like many other minor pro players in North America, he took his game to Europe. MacLeod played for the Rosenheim Starbulls in the second division of the German League, where he led the team in goals and finished second in points. But he also experienced another seizure there, had off-season brain surgery to remove that pesky tumor, and worked to come back again, this time with the Allen Americans in the ECHL.
In 2017-18, he played in Frankfurt, again in the second division in Germany, and had signed to play in Dresden the next season. Everything came to a halt again when he received an email from his doctor telling him the tumor had grown back once again and he again required surgery. Two doctors thought it was malignant and two believed it was benign, so instead of doing chemotherapy and radiation, MacLeod decided to radically change his diet and hope the tumor would not come back for a fourth time.
Two months later, in August 2018, MacLeod was carrying his seven-month-old daughter and he felt a seizure coming on. Two hours later, he had another. He went for a scan and his neurosurgeon told him to go the hospital immediately for emergency brain surgery.
Things got very dark for Wade MacLeod. He accidentally stumbled on medical forms that his wife was keeping from him that described his condition as ‘grave’ and gave him a prognosis of three to five years to live. Suddenly, his hockey career had taken a distant backseat and he was now fighting for his life. But he ignored the statistics, set aside the gloomy prospects. A GoFundMe initiative was established to help with the expensive integrated treatment he would need, which included massive doses of Vitamin C and B12. Meanwhile, through the yearlong chemo and radiation treatments, the seizures were getting more frequent. Doctors told Karly and MacLeod’s mother that they should get alarmed if the seizures lasted more than two minutes. So as soon as he would go into a seizure, they would start their timers.
At the time, MacLeod was a 31-year-old minor pro hockey player who had endured four brain surgeries, including one to remove a cancerous tumor, and had been given a grim prognosis. Prospects for a normal life weren’t looking promising, forget about a pro hockey career. “I ignored all of that and said, ‘Fuck you, cancer. You’re not going to be the reason I retired from professional hockey,’ ” MacLeod said. “I applied my hockey mindset with my mental strength trainer and I said, ‘Hmm, fuck you, cancer. I’m going to live a long and happy life.’ ”
MacLeod, who was sleeping the better part of 18 hours a day in the early days after the surgery, started the process with visualization, going back to recalling goals he scored as an atom hockey player at the Brick Tournament in Edmonton. He would remember the days at Northeastern and in Springfield. He’d play again and again in his mind moves he would make in Germany that would have fans on their feet. When he got strong enough, he went back to Heinonen to work on getting in shape again and enlisted the help of Stephen Raghoobarsingh, a registered clinical counsellor who works with high-performance athletes on the mental side. “On a scale of one to 10, this guy is a 15,” Raghoobarsingh said. “There was one time he and Karly were in my office and it was hard for me to have a tear in my eye, because she was like, ‘I don’t want you to die!’ It was just so heartbreaking. He’s a very driven young man. I’m so super-proud of him.”
On the conditioning side, Heinonen has worked with MacLeod since his college days and had helped him go from not being able to walk or talk to playing professional hockey. Heinonen had major doubts about MacLeod ever returning to play hockey after the fourth surgery, but he put them aside because he had seen what MacLeod had accomplished before. “I think I was in denial and I just kept on treating him the way I had treated him the past 10 years,” Heinonen said. “His speech was gone and I would do the wrong thing. I would finish his sentences for him. I would just keep going and would go to the gym in the basement of his condo and every single time we acted like we were just getting ready for hockey again. And just the other day, we did a quick-feet test and he beat every single one of his personal bests. I said to him, ‘You see? It’s clicking.’ And you could just see how excited he was getting.”
MacLeod was actually physically ready to play last season, but with a compromised immune system due to the chemotherapy, he decided to wait a year. But as this season approached and he began feeling better, he and his agent began networking with contacts in Europe, sending highlight tapes of his play in Germany and talking up his story to potential teams. The Storm, a middling team in the EIHL, signed him to a contract last week.
“I’m not sure if I’m his coach or his biggest fan,” said Manchester GM-coach Ryan Finnerty. “Sure it’s a leap of faith, but with everything that is going on in the world right now, I want to be a part of his success story. It’s hard to not fall in love with this story, man. I could have gone with a 23- or 24-year-old out of the American League, but this is a guy who doesn’t want to be defined by cancer.”
And really, that is what this is all about. Going back to his days in the ECHL, MacLeod established a company called Headway Hockey and has since teamed with both Raghoobarsingh and Heinonen to give young players a complete on- and off-ice preparation formula. So he’s got that going for him after his career ends. But this comeback is not about goals or assists or how long he’ll continue playing. In the end, it’s about Wade MacLeod, whenever the day comes, leaving the game on his own terms, not cancer’s. “My trainer says, ‘34 is your prime,’ ” MacLeod said. “He says I’ll be playing until I’m 44 or 45 and I believe him.”
If that were to occur, MacLeod would have 10 more years and who knows how many more accomplishments ahead of him. He has a lovely picture of him skating on the ice in Rosenheim with Ava in his arms, and he desperately wants to do the same thing with Georgia. Ava, who may now have tangible memories of her father playing hockey, keeps asking if he’s going to skate around the ice with Baby Georgia like he did with Baby Ava. MacLeod feels as though he’s finally conquered cancer and will live a long life. The only thing cancer now has on him is that it stopped his career in its tracks. And that’s all about to change. Karly talks about them once again living the dream. Some players’ hockey dreams don’t include playing in minor pro leagues wondering about the next contract. But dreams are relative. For others, like MacLeod, it’s a way of life, and a great one. And after what he has endured, the next pro contract is the least of his worries.
“If Wade has a chance to play hockey again, he’s going to take it,” Karly said. “Because he’s been ripped off one too many times by cancer. He deserves everything hockey can bring him.”
Great story, Ken, and as always, well written! I’m missing your treatment of the language at THN.. but hey, fab that you’re doing your own thing here!