SAD Story...MUST READ

A long day's journey to Flyers
Glen Metropolit had hockey to help him get where he is today.

By Sam Carchidi

Inquirer Staff Writer
One brother is a professional athlete who lives in Haddonfield, an upscale town with tree-lined streets.

The other brother lives in a prison cell.

One brother, Glen Metropolit, 34, joined the Flyers this summer as a free agent and hopes to help them win their first Stanley Cup since 1975.

The other brother, Troy Metropolit, 30, is serving a 14-year jail sentence for a carjacking and subsequent kidnapping - and is awaiting trial on a murder charge.

"Our lives," said Glen Metropolit, "are completely different."

Glen and Troy Metropolit grew up in a drug-infested project in the Cabbage Town section of Toronto. When their single mother lost her job, they were shuffled to numerous foster homes.

The boys spent one Christmas at a hostel, sleeping on faded blue mats that were packed together on a gym floor. Their Christmas presents that year were mittens and a hat provided by the local church in a gift bag.

When a fire destroyed the hostel's kitchen one year, the Metropolit brothers, who had been reunited with their mother, moved into a hotel filled with hookers and crack addicts.

"It was, um, interesting," Metropolit said a few days ago in the Flyers' Skate Zone dressing room in Voorhees.

Metropolit talks on the phone three or four times a year with his jailed brother - "I'll always love him," Glen said - but he conceded that the conversations are sometimes strained because of their different situations.

He remains close with his mother, Linda Lafferty, who now works as a bus driver in Toronto.

"She did everything she could for us, and she's just the best," he said. "She's the best mom you could have. She'd give me her last dollar to go to a hockey game. She has the biggest heart of anybody I've ever seen."

Lafferty said she sometimes wonders, with anguish, why her other son gravitated toward trouble instead of sports. She is surprised that Glen remembers so much about his uneven childhood.

"Sometimes, I wish he didn't," she said with a chuckle.

She paused.

"They say everything happens for a reason, and I guess it built character in him," she said. "He was always upbeat and happy as a child, and he's still that way. If you're feeling down, Glen is the one who picks you up."

Metropolit said he didn't care that he lived in poverty, didn't care that he lived like a vagabond in crime-filled neighborhoods. He had plenty of friends. And, unlike his younger brother, he had a sport that kept him focused and out of trouble.

"Hockey was my outlet," he said, his soft smile displaying a hockey trademark - a missing upper tooth. "I'd always go to the rink. With everything that was going on at home - problems or whatever - that was your outlet. That was your happiness - being at the rink. And I'd be there every day after school until they turned the lights off. I'd go home, go to sleep and back to school the next day, then right back to the rink. That was just a way of life for me."

"Hockey was his world," said Lafferty, whose daughter Nikki is 24. "Watching hockey. Playing hockey. He'd be sitting watching TV and playing with a hockey stick and a ball. Everything was hockey."


http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/...to_Flyers.html

Cool story. Hope he makes at least the Phantoms squad