Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Dave Cameron's First Job As A Paid Hockey Coach

10/05/2016 at 8:12am EDT

from Scott Cruickshank of the Calgary Herald,

When, while in charge of the Detroit Falcons, Cameron was forced to turn in a masterful display of in-game direction — ice management, player deployment, line matching, life preservation.

Post-win, he even gave himself a well-deserved back-pat.

Why?

Because he’d succeeded in making sure that the team owner’s boy, foisted upon him prior to puck-drop, survived.

“(Owner) Doc Afr was always telling me that his son played at Michigan University – so a hell of a player, right?” says Cameron. “So I asked our manager, ‘Why isn’t this kid on our radar?’ He laughed and said, ‘No, he plays intramurals at Michigan.’ ”

Which is plenty funny, till Cameron is ordered to stick Tamer Afr, only 20, in his lineup.

“Now my big fear is that this kid gets hurt – how am I going to answer to this?” he says. “So I kind of protected him, used him some. He got into a fight, but he hung on and he was all right. I didn’t play him much the last part of the game. But we won and he was all excited. He was all happy. Good.”

Cameron’s reward — a phone call placed to his home the following day.

It was the boss himself on the line, not tickled.

“Basically, he gave me crap for not playing his son enough — I’d embarrassed the family,” Cameron says, still incredulous. “Here I thought I did a hell of a job — he didn’t get killed.”

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Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

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