By Ryan Pyette, London Free Press

Before going in for the most important back surgery of his life two months ago, Guelph Storm GM and head coach Jason Brooks' phone rang.

It was London Knights assistant and former Ontario under-17 benchmate Jacques Beaulieu.

A pep talk amidst all the pain.

"I just told him I knew a little bit about what he was dealing with," Beaulieu said Wednesday during a break in his busy schedule of picking apart Brooks' team to help the Knights win their OHL first-round playoff series starting Friday.

"I needed surgery on my spine, too. The neck was bad and I had some discs taken out. But it wasn't the lower back like his (Brooks needed some vertebrae fused and fixed by steel).

"That's worse."

Early in the 2003-04 season during his first go-round with the Knights, Beaulieu suffered from serious neck pain. It turned into an emergency after he was checked in a practice drill by Knights defenceman Danny Syvret.

"It all added up, but I couldn't even hold a water bottle," Beaulieu said. "It would fall right out of my hand. I went in right away (for surgery). They went through my throat."

Not a pretty picture. But there was a rainbow at the end of it.

"Jacques told me he felt better immediately after his surgery," Brooks said, "and that's probably something I needed to hear at the time."

Brooks, a former London Knight who suffered the infamous 3-60-3 season of 1995-96, has been through the ringer with his back.

He needed crutches to prop himself up on the bench. Much of the time, he wasn't healthy enough to run Storm practice. At one point, he needed help from friends and family in his commute from Listowel to Guelph. And he felt awful about his personal struggles because he wasn't able to be a better dad to his young daughters.

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