Being a Dad Is Murray’s Passion

The Kings are off, but their coach is on.

Standing behind the boards at the HealthSouth Training Center, he holds a stopwatch and barks at the three hockey players sprinting in front of him.

“Big strides! Big strides!”

“Go! Go! Go!”

One player has shoulder-length hair streaming out the back of the helmet and you wonder, how can this person play for Andy Murray?

Then you realize, it is his 13-year-old daughter, Sarah.

The other two players are his sons, Brady, 17, and Jordy, 12.

The children are in town for two weeks on spring break.

Being their dad, as he is doing Tuesday in an otherwise empty rink, is Murray’s greatest strength.

It is also what nearly killed him.

Being a dad is the reason that, for the three years Murray has been the Kings’ coach, his family has stayed in familiar surroundings in Minnesota.

Being a dad is why he is a tumultuous traveler, rushing to the airport at the drop of a puck, routinely taking a three-hour flight to watch two hours of a youth hockey game.

Being a dad is why, last month, after arriving home on a red-eye flight less than 24 hours earlier, he left his driveway in icy weather at 4 a.m. and his truck later wound up skidding and tumbling into a ditch.

“When he told me he was going to try to make my game at 8 in the morning, it made me think,” says Brady, who was playing for his prep school team in a tournament four hours away. “He had just gotten home, and the weather was bad....”

He shakes his head.

“My Dad sacrifices everything for us.”

Every devoted father carries scars. Andy Murray’s are now real.

On one of his first days back in town since the Feb. 15 accident, you can’t see the effects of the four broken ribs, the separated left shoulder and the fractured left wrist.

But you can see the faint red scar on his forehead from the 28 stitches.

You can see the bright red scar on his right wrist from where he punched out the truck’s window.

You can see the lost weight and even paler-than-normal complexion.

He is considered one of the most driven coaches in the NHL.

Yet, because of the severity of his concussion, he is not allowed to drive a car.

He is considered one of the best strategists in the league.

Yet, because a hard fall could be fatal, he is not allowed to even step on the ice.

He says he still has occasional instances of fogginess. It is clear he is still in almost constant pain.

The other day, he raised his left arm to open a trunk and nearly passed out.

“This does give you a sense of mortality,” he says. “But it doesn’t make me want to change anything. There were lots of parents driving to the game in that early morning, and they all made it fine.”

But there was surely only one parent whose accident could have evoked this reaction from his son’s teammates:

“When they heard about the crash, they all said, ‘Man, we’re surprised your dad didn’t crawl up to the highway and hitchhike to the game,’” Brady recalls, shaking his head. “My dad, he’s a die-hard.”

Almost literally.

You want a really compelling story?

Here’s what would have happened to Andy Murray if his truck had not crashed.

He would have driven from Faribeault, Minn., to Madison, Wis., for Brady’s Friday morning game.

Then he would have driven to Chicago for Jordy’s tournament Saturday night.

Then he would have returned to Faribeault to watch Sarah play Sunday.

All of this, less than three days after coaching the Kings into the middle of the playoff race before the Olympic break.

As it was, he returned home from the crash in time to watch Sarah’s game.

But it was the last game he would watch for two weeks.

The next day, he began suffering from post-concussion syndrome.

He was dizzy, vomiting, couldn’t focus, couldn’t think.

“I’d had one thought for 10 seconds, then my mind would shift to another thought,” he says.

He desperately wanted to close this eyes. But when he did, the nausea would overwhelm him, so he couldn’t.

“I didn’t get much sleep,” he says.

He tried watching the tape of a King loss to Columbus. He couldn’t focus long to finish it.

He was stuck into an MRI machine for the first time. He felt helpless for the first time.

“It gave me a new appreciation for the problems of players with head injuries,” he says. “You could never imagine.”

When his head finally cleared, he joined the Kings in Nashville with a new emotion.

Fear.

“I thought about just watching the first game from the press box; I was scared I would screw it up,” he recalls.

Of course, he stayed downstairs with the team. And of course, Nashville being Nashville and Murray being Murray, the Kings won.

If it hadn’t been for a last-minute ricochet in Denver, they would have been unbeaten in three games since his return.

“This just shows I have good assistants,” he says of Dave Tippett, Mark Hardy and Ray Bennett.

He just hopes he won’t have to rely on any of them to do his job.

He hopes that his head problems are history.

He hopes.

“The doctors say I’ll be fine, that what I’m going through is normal for this sort of injury,” he says.

While the rest of his life remains distinctly abnormal for a dad.

He phones home three times a day. He flies home whenever possible, even if just for the night.

A couple of years ago, that night was spent on the floor of a Las Vegas airport after his late connection was canceled.

A King fan walked past and saw this lump on the ground and was stunned to realize that it was the head coach.

Andy “Red Eye” Murray.

“This is not an ideal situation,” he acknowledges. “Families should not operate like this. But we’ve moved around enough. My kids are comfortable. I don’t want to change that.”

His wife, Ruth, however is starting to have second thoughts. “It sure does change the way I think now,” she says. “Things can change in a few seconds. We should really be together.”

Because of the summers, Murray says he spends more time with his children than most fathers, and he’s right.

And Brady acknowledges that, having attended “at least six schools” before his current junior year in high school, it is nice to stay in one place.

But for a few frightening moments last month, the only place that mattered was a patch on a frozen Wisconsin highway, miles to go before Andy Murray would sleep.

“My father puts it all on the line for us,” Brady says.

Making some wonder if it was only a matter of time before he went skidding across it.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.