Pickle Barrel
IF PAUL ROSEN were a vastly
different man, he would probably be
a blues singer. You could read his
tale and imagine someone on a stage
under a lone spotlight warbling a
soulful tune. After all, he’s lost a leg,
battled addiction and can’t read or
write very well. It doesn’t sound like
the autobiography of a world-class
elite athlete. But then if Paul’s story
says anything, it’s that looks can be
deceiving.
“It certainly hasn’t been the average life,” Rosen says with a wry smile, “but then I don’t think the average life would have sat very well with me.”
Paul Rosen is definitely not prone to self-pity. Within a year of losing his leg, he became the oldest rookie on the Canadian National Sledge Hockey Team and is now the topranked sledge goalie in the world. He won gold in Turin, and his equipment from the gold-medal game is now part of the Hockey Hall of Fame collection. He also made the news recently when his gold medal was stolen at a speaking event. (It was returned after a mass public appeal where Don Cherry gave the “rat” who stole it a serious shaming.) Rosen is also a soughtafter motivational speaker, with upwards of 100 engagements each year, inspiring all with his tale of triumph over adversity. And, of course, he’s in training for Vancouver’s 2010 Paralympics, too.
“It’s all sort of taken me by surprise,” Rosen says. “I guess the best things in life often do.”
While his reputation as an athlete is international, many of the major events of Rosen’s life have been local. His family moved to Thornhill when he was 10, and he’s never left (none of his family have: his parents, sister and brother are all still in the area). “When we moved here originally with my parents, it was like a small town next to a big city even though now it’s not really a small town anymore,” he says. “But everybody still knows each other, as much as you can.” He also met his wife Cheryl in Thornhill and raised his three kids there.
As a kid himself, Rosen was already driven toward a career in professional sports and played on most teams at Thornlea High School. But at 15, the promising hockey player caught a rut with his skate during a game and shattered his right leg. Twenty-three operations and 24 years later, it was finally amputated above the knee.
So, it’s a turn of dramatic irony, then, that only after his leg was amputated did he attain a professional hockey career.
Sitting at his kitchen table, Rosen holds in his hand the most difficult piece of equipment he’s had to learn to use. It’s not his artificial leg, and it’s not any of his sledge hockey equipment. It’s his BlackBerry.
“I have a serious problem reading and writing. I’m probably at a Grade 6 level,” Rosen confesses, after a slight hesitation. “In high school, back in the ’70s, if you were good at sports and you couldn’t read or write and you didn’t care, they didn’t care,” he says.
After high school, Rosen struggled. “I was bouncing around a lot of [jobs] because I had many situations with my reading and writing,” he says. “If I had a great job, and I got it through the way I could sell myself, eventually I would have to quit because it would go to a level where I would have to have some form of reading or writing involved.”
While Rosen has become adept at seeing obstacles as positive, his literacy skills are a problem he continues to face. “Whenever I’ve done any TV shows, I memorize the script. I can’t read off the teleprompter,” he says. “It’s very hard at times — really, really hard — and can be very embarrassing.”
He now speaks to young children about the importance of staying in school, which should come as no surprise to anyone.
Rosen has a commanding presence, with a confidence and an intensity that dominate, and is talkative and open. But his new second career as a motivational speaker was hard won. Before his leg was amputated, his health deteriorated sharply, and his family watched him go through repeated hospitalizations and surgeries.
“From 1997 to 1999, I was just concentrating on living. There was nothing, no life,” he says. “I was on every possible medication that you could be on.” In 1999, his doctors looked at his badly infected knee and gave him an option: three months to live or amputation.
“I wanted the leg amputated [long before that], and they wanted to try more,” he says. “Even if they could have saved my leg, what would have been there would have been useless for the life I wanted to lead.” And at the risk of highlighting a pattern of redundancy, I should point out that he now speaks to doctors’ groups about how to listen to what a patient needs.
He lost his leg but gained another hurdle: an addiction to painkillers that lasted more than a decade, persisting until 2005. “This May the fifth will be two years: not one pill,” he says, proudly. “It was the toughest thing in my entire life.”
He credits his wife Cheryl for helping him kick the habit. “Since she’s the most important person in the world,” he says. “So that was it, I stopped cold turkey the next day. From taking 14 pills a day to throwing 200 pills in the toilet.”
But Rosen faced further difficulties on the ice. “There’s not a lot of Jewish athletes out there, and I took a lot of anti-Semitism over my career and I still take it today,” he says. “You never hear about it. It’s the culture of sport.”
But part of this story is not just overcoming obstacles but gaining perspective. “Players do it to get me off my game, but I’ve been through so much. You know, when you lose your leg at 39, and you don’t know whether you’re going to live, and now you’re playing in front of 10,000 people, playing the greatest game in the world for the greatest country in the world, you can try anything. It’s not going to get me.”
While Rosen may seem like the unlikely optimist, the expert makerof- lemonade-from-lemons man, it hasn’t all been adversity awaiting triumph. He is known among teammates for his knowledge of the sport and his quirks. “I’m a very superstitious semi-crazy type of guy,” he admits. Among dozens of rituals, he doesn’t wash his gear when he’s playing well, and once he is checked into a hotel, he bars all cleaning staff from entering his room for the duration of his stay.
He’s also famous for his mimicry, particularly of Mrs. Doubtfire. “I have the full outfit, and I dress up in the dress and the underwear and the bra and the high heels,” he says. “I did a Hockey Canada Christmas party two years ago.” (His son, Sammy, 20, is an actor-singerdancer and credits his dad as the source of his talents.)
Now 46, Rosen is looking beyond his hockey career. “I was seriously thinking about retiring after Italy,” he says. “We won the gold, I had one of the greatest games of my life in the gold medal game, and then I thought about it and one real big thing came to mind. In Salt Lake City in 2002, the U.S. team won gold and I saw the reaction … to win it in your own country on your own soil. So [I decided] to stick around four more tough years to have my family there in Vancouver.”
What’s next? Well, something else completely unexpected, especially for someone who’s battled problems with literacy. “I’ve always wanted to write a children’s book,” Rosen says. “It wouldn’t be just one. It would be a series of books: the adventures of Rosey the Raccoon. It would be a story of a little raccoon who loses his leg and tries to teach everybody that it doesn’t matter what you look like. It matters who you are.”
Kind of like a blues song with a
storybook ending. 
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