By Budd Bailey
The statistical lines for right winger Sean McMorrow are striking. It’s quite obvious that he never had much of a scoring touch, Instead, he handled the rough stuff – particularly when he reached the pros. His life was side-swiped by a different type of rough stuff along the way.
Sean was born in Vancouver in 1982, but soon the family moved to suburban Toronto and he spent his entire junior career in the Ontario Hockey League. McMorrow split the 1999-2000 season between Sarnia and Kitchener, with no goals and two assists and 142 penalty minutes in 62 games. The Sabres must have liked his 6-foot-4, 225-pound frame. After Calgary drafted him in the eighth round, Buffalo gave up an eighth-rounder in 2001 for his rights.
The right winger had two more seasons in the OHL, and he certainly saw a lot of the league. He played with Mississauga, Kington, London and Oshawa. McMorrow had no goals with the first five teams on that list, but he suddenly figured out how to find the net in Oshawa. He had six goals in 27 games, and even added a goal in a playoff game.
McMorrow signed with the Sabres’ organization that summer, and spent most of the season with the Rochester Americans. There he had no goals and one assist in 64 games, but he piled up 315 penalty minutes. Indeed, he had 43 majors along the way. In that first season, he was called up for a game … in Toronto no less. It was on March 22, 2003.
“I can’t begin to explain to you the feeling and the excitement that rushed over me when I got the call,” he told The Hockey Writers website. “My dream had come true.”
Alas he wasn’t on the ice long – 1 minute and 27 seconds over two shifts. Sean didn’t have time even to pick up a penalty. But he had appeared in an NHL game. Toronto won that contest, 3-2.
It was back to Rochester after that. McMorrow spent the next three seasons with the Americans, scoring eight points in 156 games to go with 705 penalty minutes. The Sabres let him go in 2006, but he wasn’t done with hockey. Sean played in a Quebec semi-pro league for the next two years, rolling up some massive penalty minute numbers (527 in 48 games in 2007-08 alone) in the process. He also spent part of the 2008-09 season with Rockford in the AHL and headed to the United Kingdom for two years right after that.
His first season in Belfast was rudely interrupted when he was charged with drug trafficking after an FBI investigation. “I was in shock when I heard about the charges, but knew that I had to return home and face them like a man,” he said. “It was totally crazy because these newspapers used to print pictures and articles about me in the community and now they were calling me a psychopath. To wake up to that was a real blow for me. I wasn’t a choir boy and had definitely made some mistakes up to then but I was never a drug kingpin.”
On May 30, 2012, McMorrow signed a plea deal and was sentenced to two years in prison, but was released four months early because of good behavior. He returned to the Quebec league, and played for parts of five seasons through 2020.
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