Ducks’ O’Sullivan Knows Score

Eleven children, five bedrooms, one bathroom--yeah, you could say John and Ann O’Sullivan’s brood had to be fiercely competitive growing up in their modest home in Boston’s working-class Dorchester neighborhood.

And certainly, it would be easy to anoint Chris, the eighth of the 11, as the best and the brightest, since he signed a contract with the Mighty Ducks just last week.

After all, he is the only one of the O’Sullivans in the NHL, having spent 11 games last season with the Vancouver Canucks and 49 games with the Calgary Flames between 1996-97 and 1998-99.

But that’s overstating matters a bit. The fact is the O’Sullivans--seven boys and four girls--are a tight-knit hockey family brought closer by the cancer-caused deaths of their parents in the early 1990s. So, to pick one O’Sullivan as the most competitive or most resilient or most successful is simply ridiculous.

Chris, 26, merely happens to be the best hockey player of the bunch, and even that might be open to some family debate.

Stephanie, 28, a member of the U.S. national women’s team, was the last player cut from the 1998 Olympic team and a four-time national champion while playing for Providence University.

Shaun, 35, tended goal for a time in the East Coast Hockey League, but four knee surgeries cut his minor league career short. Any hopes of a comeback ended when John and Ann died two years apart.

It was then up to Shaun to take charge of the family. His hockey career ended in favor of a job with Boston Edison, where John O’Sullivan had worked for 36 years.

Chris was 15 when his father died of lymphatic cancer in May 1990, and 17 when his mother died of brain cancer.

“It’s weird now to look back and think about how we did it,” he said. “A lot of the schools we went to were very kind, as far as giving us a break on tuition and all that.”

Coping with the deaths of their parents was another matter.

“The best way I could cope was to step up,” Shaun said of assuming the role of family patriarch. “It hurt a lot more to see the pain in my brothers’ and sisters’ eyes.”

Chris, coming off a remarkable senior season in which he’d scored 26 goals and 49 points in 26 games at Catholic Memorial High, turned to hockey.

“Growing up, I was a huge [Boston University] fan,” he said. “It definitely made the decision [to attend BU] a lot easier. It ended up working out quite well.”

Six months after his mother’s death, however, Chris crashed headfirst into the boards and broke a vertebra in his neck. A lengthy operation in which two vertebrae were fused together followed and Chris missed most of his freshman year at BU.

It proved to be only a temporary setback. A fully recovered O’Sullivan led the Terriers to the 1995 NCAA title, scoring two goals in a 6-2 victory over Maine and being named the Frozen Four’s outstanding player. Eight O’Sullivans were among the sellout crowd of 12,155 at Providence Civic Center for the championship game.

All 10 of O’Sullivan’s siblings were on hand in Vancouver for his NHL debut in 1996 with the Flames. They also witnessed Chris’ first NHL goal a couple of nights later against the Buffalo Sabres.

To be sure, no one in the family will forget the significance of Oct. 6, 1996.

“The night Chris scored his first NHL goal, it was our father’s birthday. He would have been 65,” Shaun O’Sullivan said. It also was youngest son David’s birthday.

“So it was a really special day,” Shaun added.

It might make for a better story if Chris had settled comfortably into a role as a productive offensive-minded defenseman for the Flames. But that was not the case, particularly after Brian Sutter became Calgary’s coach before the 1997-98 season.

“The two years Brian Sutter was there were tough for me,” O’Sullivan said. “I was the odd man out.”

The Flames already had Phil Housley and Derek Morris entrenched in the roles of offense-minded defensemen, so Sutter decided to move O’Sullivan to left wing, a position he had played with some success in college. The move didn’t pan out this time, and O’Sullivan was traded to the New York Rangers and sent to the minors on March 23, 1999.

Vancouver signed O’Sullivan last summer and he managed to record five assists in 11 games. However, it was in the minors that O’Sullivan really turned heads last season, scoring 18 goals and 65 points in 59 games.

Despite being the Syracuse Crunch’s second-leading scorer and earning a starting spot in the American Hockey League All-Star game, O’Sullivan was not in Vancouver’s plans for 2000-2001.

The Ducks, trying to upgrade their roster after finishing last in the Pacific Division and missing the Stanley Cup playoffs last season, signed O’Sullivan to a one-year contract worth $450,000 last week.

Pierre Gauthier, team president and general manager, said he expects O’Sullivan to battle at training camp for a spot on Anaheim’s roster.

“He gives us depth of a different kind,” Gauthier said of adding O’Sullivan to a defense corps made up primarily of hard-nosed defense-minded defensemen.

“He’s a guy who seems to have improved every year to the point where he was a dominating defenseman last year in the minors. He’ll be right in the mix [for a job at training camp]. He keeps improving, so that shows character. You always look for guys who are persistent and keep improving.”

Gauthier’s words are encouraging news for O’Sullivan.

“With Anaheim, it looks like I’ll be given a decent shot to make the team,” he said. “It sounds like they’re excited to get me.”

O’Sullivan wasn’t sure when he would leave the family’s home for Anaheim to begin preparations for training camp, which begins Sept. 7.

Foremost on his mind this week was wrapping up a camp of another kind. In recent summers, the two-week-long O’Sullivan Hockey Academy in nearby Quincy has become serious family business.

“We work with the city of Boston on it and we take in quite a few kids who couldn’t really afford it otherwise,” O’Sullivan said. “I grew up in Dorchester and we were never a family with a lot of money, so this is so much fun for our whole family.”