Mike Hasenfratz was a third-generation police officer and private investigator in the provincial capital of Regina, Saskatchewan, his hometown. If he had remained on that career path, his life might have been over by now.
Instead, Hasenfratz, who worked his way up from the Canadian junior leagues, became an official in the National Hockey League based out of Nashville. Twelve years ago when he first became an NHL official, he started wearing a $110 heart monitor during training camp as part of league procedure.
Over time, that monitor detected a life-threatening abnormality.
"If I would have remained a police officer, I probably would've still trained," said Hazenfratz, a veteran of 541 regular season games and 31 playoff matches. "I definitely never wore a heart monitor, so for $110, it probably saved me, probably saved me my life…
"I'm the luckiest guy in the world that I wore a heart monitor one time."
Hasenfratz underwent surgery on Oct. 15, 2009, to replace his descending aorta with a synthetic one. While fans love to boo them, officials are an essential part of any game and they do their job for the same reason as players and coaches and anyone else involved in any sport: to stay close to the game they love.
To earn his second chance in life and to get back to, in Hasenfratz's words, the second-best job in the world (with only playing surpassing it) would require nearly two years. The long hiatus from the ice was a result of both a medical complication and the grueling rehab it took to meet the unyielding physical standards for NHL on-ice officials.
"(NHL director of officiating) Terry Gregson said it best, I probably went through the victim cycle and didn't realize it," Hasenfratz said. During his rehab, it made him realize that, "'You know what? I'm not as good as I have to be.'"
An Abnormality
Five years ago, the heart monitor detected for the first time that Hasenfratz's heart rate was higher than normal. He was sent to a cardiologist and an echocardiogram determined that his descending aorta was abnormally wide.
He was told that 1.7 centimeters was normal. His measured at 2.3. A few years later, it had reached 5.3 centimeters – a potentially life-threatening situation. His own father had died at age 61 of a heart attack, but an autopsy was not conducted to determine the cause of death.
So in the fall of 2009, Hasenfratz went to the Cleveland Clinic and underwent open-heart surgery. Hasenfratz was 43 at the time and he knew the procedure would keep him off the ice for an entire season, but he had no idea that it would eventually take him much longer than that. The 6-foot-4, 230-pound Hasenfratz said that for the first few months afterward, he could not lift more than 10 pounds.
His older sister Brenda Bennett had offered to fly in from Saskatoon, Sask., for the operation, but he told her not to. In retrospect, he had no idea what he was getting into.
Bennett said that even in her brother's retelling of the story, he downplays the seriousness.
"He said, 'Oh, no, no, don't come before the surgery," Bennett said. "'Wait until I'm recovering.' Then when he was recovering, he said, 'Oh, no, wait until I get a little bit stronger' and so he never let me come down. We have no parents. They sadly died even before he made his dream of getting into the NHL, which was just months after he got in. We're so excited every time he's on the ice and we get to watch him.
"It was open heart surgery. His heart was stopped while they did the surgery. What could be more major than that?"
Said Hasenfratz: "I didn't realize how serious it was. I just didn't know."
In the fall of 2010, he had to undergo a second operation to drain fluid around his heart, ultimately knocking out a second season of work for him. For someone accustomed to being as active as Hasenfratz was and for someone who got his hockey fix through work, those outlets temporarily were closed. He spent countless hours on the couch watching games and doing what most viewers do – playing official.
"I watched so much hockey in the last two years it was silly," he said. "And I'd go, 'Oh, that's a good call or that's a bad call.'"
All that inactivity also caused him to put on weight and for his muscles to atrophy. When it came to getting himself back in shape, those would rank among his greatest obstacles.
Rebuilding a 'race car'
Dave Smith had spent two decades in sports medicine with NHL teams. Following the NHL lockout that wiped out the 2004-05 season, Smith began working for the league to assist officials with their physical conditioning.
Post-lockout, the NHL instituted a two-referee officiating system. With numerous new rules and, perhaps more significantly, fresh rules interpretations, the league wanted to speed up the game that had suffered a gradual decline in scoring over almost a decade. The idea was that a faster pace would increase the number of goals.
For officials, that meant that they, in turn, had to keep up with the quickened speed of the game. The league employs less than 40 full-time officials and their minimum workload is almost equal to that of players, with the league assigning 73 games per referee per season. Unlike players, officials do not come off the ice to rest. They're out there for the full 60 minutes.
Consequently, they're not like NFL officials who have other full-time jobs and who work once a week about 16 times a year. Nor are they like Major League Baseball officials who can grow notoriously rotund. NHL officials need to be in shape, top shape. It's Smith's job to make sure that they are.
After he had recuperated from the second operation, Hasenfratz began traveling to Buffalo, N.Y., where Smith is based, to get back in shape. The two men, both somewhat stubborn in their own right, did not exactly have a meeting of the minds from the outset.
Smith had set up several tests, or protocols, with minimum standards that each of the league's officials had to meet. During physical testing each year, Smith would collect data on the officials so that, as they aged, he would be able to help them to improve in whatever area they might need. The data was used to create a history on each official.
"I had to change him around to not have him look at me like I'm holding him back," Smith said. "But I'm actually only working for one reason. I told him, 'Look I don't care if you never officiate again. I want to make sure you have a good life. That's more important to me than going on the ice. You gained weight and the weight you gained is not lean muscle. As you know, you gained weight because of inactivity and so that weight you gained does nothing for you except gives you more mass and we don't need that mass.'"
Smith said that Hasenfratz had lived off a "big-man image." When he worked for the Florida Panthers, Smith said he once helped with the physical training of a local police department. He wanted the policemen he worked with to be able to project authority through the way they carried themselves physically – just as he wants with NHL officials. He sought to eradicate the image of the slovenly, donut-eating cop with his gut spilling over his belt just as he wants officials to "show good presence."
He explained to Hasenfratz that he wanted his physiognomy to be like that of a race car: A small chassis with a huge engine. Hasenfratz had a huge chassis, but, after his operation, he lacked the horsepower to push it up and down the ice. Let alone being able to call a hockey game, Smith feared for Hasenfratz's health if he did.
"I try to get through to people: Just because the doctor clears you, he's giving you the medical OK, but that doesn't mean that you're, functionally, in the sports world, ready to go," Smith said. "That's a hard thing for people to understand. OK, the doctor says your knee is OK after an operation, but now, we as coaches, you might not have all the necessary needs to go….
"What was happening with Mike was he was physically cleared, but he wasn't physically strong enough stamina-wise, strength-wise, whatever, and his heart rates were going off the wall and what I had was I had nine years, or probably only eight years, of data. Protocols he wasn't even close to those. I said, 'I'm not going to take a chance on this guy, I'm not going to let anything happen to him until he gets himself in better physical shape.'"
'You're ready to make a comeback'
Smith said that if it came down it, he had the authority, under Gregson's auspices, to block Hasenfratz's return to work. Smith wanted Hasenfratz to drop about 15 pounds.
Among the various tests, the one that proved the most vexing for Hasenfratz was the stationary bike. After a three-minute warm-up and two two-minute intervals of increasing resistance, Smith amps up the resistance for one-minute segments while the test subject has to maintain a pedaling pace of between 88 and 92 revolutions per minute.
For Hasenfratz's body mass – there's that race car metaphor again – Smith wanted him to be able to sustain 400 watts for a minute without his heart rate fluctuating wildly afterwards. The Website Livestrong.com, a partner of cyclist Lance Armstrong's foundation, advises that a "moderate" pace of 150 watts serves as a warm-up and that it will burn 609 calories in an hour.
Early on, 400 watts proved challenging.
"We got to 400 and I was like, I thought I just had to get the 400 stage, so when I got to the 400 stage and I was struggling and then he goes to me, 'You were so close.' I was like, 'I thought I got there? Are you serious?'" Hasenfratz said. "… I was very frustrated at that point."
Smith said the conditioning process took longer than anticipated.
"We battled for a while there," he said. "Personally, I was looking out for the best interest of Mike Hasenfratz, his health. Not the official."
Eventually, Smith got through to Hasenfratz once Hasenfratz saw that Smith was rooting for him. From there, Smith said it was "clear sailing." Hasenfratz began working out more on his own. In June of last year, Smith came down to Nashville to do his tests once more.
Hasenfratz passed.
"I had no choice," Hasenfratz said. "It was either I'm not going to referee again or, if you want to referee, I'm going to do this."
Smith said that when Hasenfratz passed the test, he got goose bumps all over his body.
"I can't tell you the feeling he had and the feeling I had," Smith said. "It was like, 'We've done it. No, no, Mike, you did it. You did it. I was just here to help you and now we can go back and tell the people you're ready to make a comeback.'"
Back on the ice
When Hasenfratz returned to the ice, he changed his number from 30 to 2 -- signifying two surgeries and a second chance on life. When he called his first preseason game, Hasenfratz said he felt like "a fish out of water."
The speed of the game was overwhelming after being away for so long. Smith said Hasenfratz's greatest advantage is what is between his ears, that "he knows what to call." However, the first time Hasenfratz went to call a penalty, the message got lost between the gray matter and his extremities. He forgot to raise his arm and blow his whistle to signal a call.
He was working with Dan O'Rourke. The two were friends from having worked together in the Western Hockey League in the Canadian junior ranks. O'Rourke made the call and checked with Hasenfratz to see if he were all right.
"The first call -- that was so obvious and I didn't react to it," Hasenfratz said.
That led to the realization that, "'Oh, boy, I've got a long way to go here,'" Hasenfratz said.
Hasenfratz's first regular season game came on Oct. 7 at the United Center in Chicago with the Blackhawks hosting Dallas. That night, he went through an unwanted test.
Still growing used to the speed of the game and his positioning still a work in progress, Hasenfratz said he was behind the net when Chicago's Jonathan Toews delivered a heavy check on a Stars defenseman. Hasenfratz took an errant step and the defenseman crashed into him, compressing his chest. Instinctively, he thought back to the surgical table, his ribs cracked open and reached for his heart.
"I guess there was a little skepticism in my own head that, 'Can I take a hit?'," Hasenfratz said. "I'm not a small person. So anyways, I took the hit and I immediately grabbed my chest and just brushed my hand down and went, 'OK. I'm all right.' I ended up with bruised ribs.
"It was probably me not being in the right position and just scared of what happened. No matter what you do, as much as you want to put it behind you, the first hit you want to know if you can survive it and I did, so, obviously, I'm healed. You have to get out of the victim cycle."
Another pivotal moment of his recovery came on Dec. 3, 2010, when a number of family members flew to Edmonton for the occasion, including his daughter and his sister and her family.
Bennett said hockey was such a big part of her family's upbringing. Her father organized a large local tournament, which was how Hasenfratz began officiating when he was 13. The family always gathered to watch "Hockey Night in Canada" and the theme song, to her, would evoke warm memories of her father and brother arguing about hockey.
But during Hasenfratz's two years off, Bennett did not watch hockey.
"I was sad," she said. "And now when I know where he is we try and watch it on TV and we get to go to the odd game when he gets up into Canada. We flew to Edmonton a couple weeks before Christmas… It was a big deal and my son was going through cancer treatments. He's 23. His goal was to be well enough that he could get to watch my brother…
"We were all thrilled to be there."
Recently, Bennett has gone for her own heart test, as Hasenfratz told her that what happened to him was genetic.
With Hasenfratz back to a full recovery, players greet him on the ice and ask where he was. When he tells them how long he was gone and the reason why, they tend to react with disbelief, so he tries to downplay it.
One thing he doesn't downplay is the feeling of being back at his dream job. He said enduring what he has has created a greater appreciation in him for almost everything in life -- from his kids to hockey itself.
"It's so exciting every night, going on the ice and hearing the crowd and dealing with the play and everything," he said. "You get late in the game, you get into a building, whoever runs the clock or the announcing or whatever, whatever they do -- in Washington it's 'Unleash the Fury.' In Winnipeg, it's the second period and they're yelling 'Let's go Jets' and you sit there and go, 'This is awesome. Why would I want to be anywhere else?'
"It is awesome to say I got the second-best job – best job besides the players'. End of the day, there's a minute left and the goalie is pulled and you're the down-low referee and you've got the weight of the world on you. Right now, that's what we live and die for right there. We want to be in that position and if you don't want to be in that position, you shouldn't be a referee."
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