Hockey Confidential (20 page)

The mere fact that he made it as a 16-year-old probably should have been enough to declare it a modest success. In the days leading up to the final selection camp, he was perhaps 50/50 in the eyes of the coaching staff to make the team. But when he was the best player on the ice in an evaluation camp game against university competition, it was clear he would make it. Still, only Gretzky dominated the tourney as a 16-year-old. Lindros played very well at it when he was 16; Crosby was more of a depth player (two goals and five points in six games); and Spezza and Bouwmeester played only sparingly.

McDavid played out of position, at left wing instead of centre, but started the tourney in a relatively prominent role on one of the top offensive lines. He had three assists in the first two games, showing flashes of brilliance, but took a pair of minor penalties in that second game, against the Czech Republic. Head coach Brent Sutter benched him for most of the third period and all of overtime, but took him off the bench for the game-deciding shootout. McDavid missed on his attempt, and the Czechs won the game. Canada lost a game it was supposed to have won, and the McDavid angle was front and centre. It was a tough night for the 16-year-old, and even though he bounced back to score a key goal in a 3–2 win over the Americans, as the tourney wore on, his role on the team steadily diminished. When it was over, Team Canada was branded a loser; McDavid was judged by many to be a non-factor, betrayed by his youth.

The first judgment was accurate. Canada hadn't gone without a medal at the WJC for 14 straight years, but now had done it in back-to-back tournaments. The second was perhaps somewhat true, though maybe unreasonable when weighed against expectations, given that Gretzky and Lindros were the only 16-year-olds to have ever made really strong contributions at the WJC.

It's all just part of the torture test the truly exceptional players go through. McDavid was hailed as a hero at the Under-18 World Championship, and then dismissed as a zero at the 2014 WJC. Build them up; tear them down. There hasn't been a young Canadian hockey superstar who hasn't experienced it. It's like a rite of passage.

The relentless judgments passed on a talented teen who is just trying to find his way in the world unquestionably builds up a tough outer layer of skin—“if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger” seems to be the applicable catchphrase here—but for both the player and his family, it's also about trying to maintain degrees of normalcy, to keep from becoming too cynical or bitter in the process.

The McDavids are really quite nice people. Brian is a hockey dad, no question about that. Kelly is the furthest thing you'll get from a hockey mom; if she had her druthers, when the kids were young, they would have skied instead of playing hockey. As competitive as they were when they were younger, older brother Cameron is supportive of his little brother. Connor is a warm, friendly kid, obviously intense and driven to be successful, but the whole family recognizes they're all being constantly measured and judged to ensure they don't violate the Canadian hockey culture's cardinal sin: displaying cockiness. Confidence is okay; cockiness, no way.

The McDavids are constantly striving to be normal in what is so clearly not a normal situation.

How many 16-year-olds, for example, have yet to get their driver's licence, but do have a family trust bank account with tens of thousands of dollars in it—the by-product of a five-year endorsement deal with RBK Hockey signed when Connor was just 15—to say nothing of a deal with a trading card company and other paid business opportunities? Still two or three years away from actually playing professional hockey, Connor McDavid didn't have a six-figure annual income as a teen in junior hockey, but it was quite likely in the range of $50,000 to $100,000.

“My dad has the bank card and I don't have the password,” Connor said with a smile. “But, yeah, I know there's money there if I need it.”

“It's in a family trust,” Brian added. “There's a separate business company for Connor's endorsements. We pay taxes on it. It's his money. He has access to the money, more access to much more money than kids his age.”

Within the McDavid family, there is certainly an awareness of how Connor is perceived from the outside looking in. That, because he has more fame and talent and money than not only average teenagers, but many of those he plays with and against, there's an effort made to demonstrate he's a good guy, a good teammate, a good person. But he doesn't have to try too hard.

“Kind of, yeah, that's a really big fear of mine,” Connor said of sometimes feeling like he should go the extra mile not to be perceived negatively. “One of my own biggest pet peeves is cocky people, people who think they're so much better than everyone else. I cannot stand that, I really can't. I certainly don't look at myself any differently than anyone else. It's not too hard at all for me [to project a positive image]. I don't feel like I have to go out of my way to do that, because it's who I am, it's what I believe in and it's what is right.”

•   •   •

You may be wondering what ever became of Pierre Dupuis.

His story was told as part of a book,
Selling the Dream: How Hockey Parents and Their Kids Are Paying the Price for Our National Obsession
, by Ken Campbell, with Jim Parcells, which was published in 2013.

Campbell wrote that, after Dupuis quit junior hockey, he took a job as a hydro lineman in northern Ontario, getting married and raising a family, but also struggling for a time with what might have been—what never was—for him in hockey.

But he was able to let go of his resentment. One night, he packed his hockey bag, and off he went to the local arena.

Campbell wrote:

It wasn't long before Dupuis was once again leaving people amazed with his skills—on a much smaller stage. Playing against huffing and puffing recreational players whose best days had passed them by, Dupuis was once again filling the net and gaining legions of fans. People from town—and even from other small towns nearby—flocked to the arena to watch him play. Kids asked for autographs.

“Pierre became the little superstar all over again,” [wife] Nicole Dupuis said. “He was doing what he loved to do and I saw that twinkle in his eye like it was when he was younger. Then Pierre was happy. He realized, ‘You know what? I've got my kids coming to see me and the kids at school were talking about Pierre Dupuis.' It was fun because people would come from all over to watch him play. It came back to what it was.”

•   •   •

The year 2014 was noteworthy on the exceptional-player
calendar.

That's because there wasn't one. After Ekblad (2011), McDavid (2012) and Day (2013), no one applied to Hockey Canada for exceptional status in 2014. Therefore, no one crowned; no one rejected.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to predict when the next kid will willingly vault himself into the glare of the hockey world. Or from where in Canada he'll emerge. There was talk of a young Quebecois star who dazzled the prestigious 2014 Quebec International Peewee Tourney. Might it be him, three years later, in 2017?

The cub reporter turned Hockey Insider does the math. Pierre Dupuis was 12, the same age as the young star from Quebec who turned so many heads at the Peewee Tourney.

All in good time . . .

•   •   •

There are two questions often asked about an exceptional
player. One doesn't have an answer, at least not a very good one. The other is a question you hope never comes into play.

It's not hereditary. Not really. Brian McDavid played Junior A hockey with St. Mike's back in the day, and still loves to play whenever he can. He has a real passion for the game. He may have passed
that
along to Connor, but Brian was not a great player, never mind a star or superstar. Bobby Orr's dad, Doug, played some hockey, but he was, uh, no Bobby Orr.

“I'm not sure you can ever explain it,” Orr said of why Wayne Gretzky is Wayne Gretzky or what makes Mario Lemieux Mario Lemieux. “There's something there. There has to be. I have no facts to back it up, but when you watch Gretzky or Lemieux or Sidney Crosby, go look at the video of them, and I think they just ‘see' the game differently, they think so far ahead, they process things completely differently than everyone else. I don't know how you quantify that. Everything in our game happens so fast, but the special few can process it faster and better than everyone else. That, to me, is what separates them. They can take a really fast game and slow it down in their mind so they know where every player is on the ice.”

What if these extraordinary teens don't turn out to be as great as their billing? Or, more important, what is it that could prevent them from getting to where they're expected or ordained to go?

“I can tell when a kid is having a great time, and my biggest fear is we take that love and passion out of the game,” Orr said. “We have to be so careful with our kids who play now. My biggest fear is always that they'll stop enjoying it. When Connor plays, you can see he is having fun. We have to be really careful to protect that for all the kids who play. We screw up a lot of players with the pressures. Connor is going to feel pressure, it's everywhere he goes, and I never had that—no one who played in my time did. I can't imagine what it's like now. If pressure is worry, I didn't feel any pressure until I couldn't skate anymore [because of knee injuries at the end of his career]. . . . My greatest fear with Connor is he's a young boy who won't get a break, and everyone is on him all the time. That's why we all have to work together to protect him and just let him play.”

It's something Brian and Kelly McDavid have thought about, too. What is the job description of parent, after all, if not to be concerned or worried for their child's future well-being? We all want our kids' dreams to be realized, not crushed. Yet we also know there are so many variables, so many hurdles to overcome, so many holes they can fall into. There's nothing exceptional about that. That's life, as they say.

“I worry about injury sometimes. I do,” Brian said. “But there's no control over that. I've known for a long time Connor has a shot to play [in the NHL]. His demeanour, his passion, I've always felt it he would have that chance. . . . The other thing that worries me a bit is that Connor can be really hard on himself. I worry that he sometimes doesn't give himself the luxury of making a mistake. I'm sure he feels the pressure—that's his ‘normal'—but we talk to him a lot about that to make sure we don't let the negative things affect him. He's got lots of good support from a lot of people, and he's matured so much in the last couple of years. It's really heartwarming to us as parents to hear him say, ‘I don't like cocky people,' because we've always tried to raise both our boys to be humble and sincere.”

“I always worry,” Kelly McDavid said. “I'm his mother. That's what mothers do. I just want him to be a normal kid. If he's going to shoot pucks for two hours, I want him to not feel like he has to do it. He's so focused on hockey all the time, I didn't want him feeling like he missed out on being a kid. That was always my big worry with Connor. But I've learned over time this is what he wants, this is what makes him happy. If he's happy, I'm happy.”

The formative years—from Connor McDavid's emergence into the hockey world's consciousness at age 14 to when he'll turn 18, eligible to be taken six months later in the 2015 NHL draft—are quite likely the most difficult and challenging he'll ever face. The mercurial world of being a teenage prodigy will steel him and test him. If he's able to successfully navigate the choppy waters as a boy, like John Tavares, you would have to think he'll be ready for whatever awaits him as a young man. That isn't to say there aren't a plethora of pressures in store for a potential first-overall pick in the NHL, but just getting there without cracking under the enormous weight of expectation is a tremendous accomplishment in its own right.

Then again, maybe it's not so different for Connor McDavid than when he was six years old, crossing stairs off the diagram his mom had made for him as he eagerly anticipated ascending from house league to AAA rep hockey. Single-minded, focused and driven; intent on getting to that next level, but one step at a time.

“It all seems so far away,” Connor McDavid said in November 2013 of his NHL draft in June 2015, “but at the same time, it's hard to believe I'm already in my second year in the OHL. It's weird. The years seem to be flying by, but the NHL draft, that still seems so far away. And it
is
far away. There's still a lot of hard work to be done.”

The NHL's self-made man always knew, even as a young
boy, that he was going play professional hockey. He told his parents exactly that one night while watching an NHL game on TV. He wasn't sure how it would all come to pass, but he never doubted it would.

You could even say Brandon Raymond James Prust was destined to be an NHLer, but for a young player whose skill set and physical tools were decidedly average, and as someone who believed far more in self-determination than fate, he still isn't entirely sure where he comes down on the destiny thing.

There's no debating this: the extraordinarily ordinary young man from London, Ontario, has gone on to do ordinarily extraordinary things as a highly valued, uniquely talented member of the Montreal Canadiens, one of the toughest players in the entire NHL, in spite of not quite being six feet tall and weighing less than 200 pounds.

“I always believed I would find a way to do it,” Prust said on the eve of the 2014 Stanley Cup playoffs, his ninth year as a professional hockey player. “So I guess that means I was destined for it, but when I was growing up, I never really believed in fate, to be honest.”

Looking back on it now, though, he's not so certain what he does or doesn't believe, though he most certainly will acknowledge he needed a little help along the way.

And he got it from the most unlikely sources: a broken-down Zamboni, a bad golf shot and a sound beating.

Brandon Prust's career in minor hockey was somewhat
undistinguished.

Oh, he was a good player in the Forest City Hockey League, always playing up a year against older players, but he was never one of the really high-end players for his age who played on the prestigious London Junior Knights AAA team.

In his major bantam year, when he was 15 years old, he decided if he was going to get noticed for the Ontario Hockey League draft and truly begin the quest to be a hockey player, he needed to play AAA. So he tried out for the Junior Knights.

He got cut.

Rejection would become a recurring theme.

Disappointed, he planned to return to his Forest City team, but the coach of the London AA team asked him to play. He had a good year playing AA, but still not good enough to get drafted into the OHL. The following year, his 16-year-old season, he tried out and made the Junior Knights AAA midget team. He had an excellent season in his first year of AAA, but London was no match for its rival from Kitchener. London lost the first two games of its playoff series against Kitchener by lopsided scores, and what would almost assuredly be the last game of the season was scheduled for Kitchener.

Minutes before game time, though, the Zamboni in Kitchener broke down and effectively ruined the ice. “Burned a hole in it,” Prust said. The game had to be postponed, rescheduled for the next night, but back in London. The inevitable occurred—Kitchener wrapped up the series with its third straight decisive win—but Prust had a strong game. Staff from the London Nationals Junior B team happened to be in the arena that night. After the game, Prust was invited to finish the season as a practice player with the Nationals, a team for which he would play full time the following season.

“I wonder sometimes, if the Zamboni hadn't burned a hole in the ice in Kitchener, what would have happened,” Prust said.

At the very least, it was a break. Practising with the Nationals at the end of his midget year got him a spot on the team for the next season as well as an invite to the London Knights' Ontario Hockey League training camp in the fall of 2001. Of course, the Knights cut him. That was okay; Prust was thinking he might like to try to get a scholarship to a U.S. college, so a full season with the Junior B Nationals was the perfect situation. He had a solid year as a 17-year-old in Junior B—17 goals and 52 points with 38 penalty minutes in 52 games—and played well enough in his own mind, by season's end, to consider playing in the OHL the next season instead of going the college route.

It was the week before the OHL Knights' 2002 training camp, and Prust was still waiting for his invitation to try out. He was getting a little anxious. Prust's father and mother—Kevin and Theresa—were out golfing that summer week in August when they had a close encounter of best kind.

“[Knights' co-owner and head coach Dale Hunter] was golfing at the same course as my parents,” Prust recalled. “He and my dad will argue about who hit the ball into the other guy's fairway—it was Dale's into my dad's—and they crossed paths. My dad introduced himself to Dale and said, ‘Why haven't you called my son?' Dale told him they thought I was going the school route, and my dad told him, no, that I wanted to go to [the Knights'] camp. A couple of hours later, I got the phone call inviting me to the Knights' camp. That was a weird one, for sure.”

Another break.

So Prust attended his second OHL training camp.

He was cut. Again.

This time, though, before being sent back to Junior B, Prust made a plea to Knights co-owner and GM Mark Hunter and his brother, head coach Dale: “I told them, ‘Just put me in, you'll never take me out. Just give me a chance.'”

Prust went back to the Nationals, though not for long. A few games into the OHL season, the Knights ran into injury problems. They recalled Prust. He went into the lineup.

“And he never came out,” Mark Hunter said.

Finally, at age 18, two years after the really good 1984-born hockey players made it to the OHL, Prust had arrived. He wasn't a big kid, not highly skilled by OHL standards. He had a lot of heart and a work ethic, not to mention a special quality that set him apart from pretty much every other player.

“He's got charisma,” Mark Hunter said. “When Brandon walks into a room, he lights it up. He doesn't have any bad days. He's a very special person, he cares about everyone he comes into contact with, he's always smiling, laughing, having fun. You could see that right away.”

What no one could have seen, though, was the average-sized late bloomer with modest skills would become a way-above-average NHL tough guy who would fight more than 260 times over 12 junior and professional seasons, an average of more than 20 fights per year.

“Outside of a couple of scraps when I was really young, in elementary school, I'd never been in a fight in my life,” Prust said. “It wasn't my nature to fight [off the ice]. I never had a hockey fight [before playing in the OHL]. I always played the game hard. I loved to hit people, I could really hit. My favourite player growing up was Wendel Clark.”

If a broken-down Zamboni and a chance meeting on a golf course helped to steer Prust on his chosen path, so, too, did getting beaten up in a fight.

The hockey fight website
HockeyFights.com
identifies Prust's first OHL fight as taking place on November 2, 2002, against Plymouth's Nate Kiser. Though that isn't exactly how Prust remembered it.

“It wasn't much of a fight,” Prust said. “Kiser jumped me. He beat the crap out of me. That was the fight that scared me. I said after that one, ‘I gotta learn to fight.'”

Prust had already become good friends with the Knights' designated tough guy, Chris Bain. After every practice, Bain and Prust would stay on the ice and fight—or at least, Bain would teach Prust how to fight, show him the tricks of the trade. Prust was like a sponge, soaking up all that fistic knowledge.

“I felt I needed to protect myself,” Prust said. “I was hitting [body-
checking] people hard, I crushed some guys, and I realized if you hit people hard, they're going to want to fight you.”

Under Bain's tutelage, Prust started feeling more comfortable, much more confident. He wasn't just ready to protect himself; he was prepared to initiate, to do battle, to protect teammates and fire up his team.

“My first real fight was against Guelph,” Prust said of his bout in a game on December 20, 2002. “We were at home. The guy had a really long last name [Steve Zmudczynksi]. I started that one. Guelph had just scored. He lined up beside me. He was a pretty big guy. I knew he wasn't their toughest guy. That was my first ‘Let's go' moment, and we squared up.”

Prust won the fight. He fought some more that season (13 fights in total), even more the season after that (35 fighting majors), moving up in weight class to take on legitimate OHL heavyweights. He won a lot more than he lost.

“I had a knack for it,” he said. “It seemed to come naturally to me, even though I'd never done it before.”

The truth is, he liked it.

“Off the ice, I would always do anything to avoid [fighting], and still do,” Prust said. “But in hockey? The switch goes off.”

In the span of about a year, the charismatic kid who was so caring and congenial off the ice, this late bloomer of average size and skill, had charted his course. He knew where he wanted to go and how he was going to get there, and no one was going to get in his way.

Destiny? Whatever.

Brandon Prust was on his way to establishing himself as a member of hockey's warrior elite.

A four-year, $10 million contract with hockey's most storied
franchise, the famed
bleu, blanc et rouge
of the Montreal Canadiens?

Check.

A home in the hip Plateau neighbourhood that he shares with his stunningly beautiful girlfriend Maripier Morin, a Montreal television personality and model?

Check.

A hometown charitable foundation, Prusty4Kids, which finances the Kids Kicking Cancer program at the Children's Hospital in London?

Check.

A respected leader on his hockey team, a model citizen in the community and a close-knit family that taught him to love life and laugh, that it's as important to care for others as yourself?

Check, check and check.

Life's good for Brandon Prust; he's living the dream, and then some.

“How can I not be happy?” Prust said. “I'm so fortunate. I've been blessed with good people in my life and a life that is so unbelievably fantastic, I'm not sure I could even dream about having it.”

Well, there are the nights when his heart pounds so hard with anxiety before he drops the gloves to fight a foe who may be as much as six inches taller and 40 pounds heavier. And there are those mornings when Prust hauls himself out of bed and feels like he's 100 years old, when he tries to block the pain of myriad injuries suffered in what is, without any doubt, hockey's most physically and emotionally taxing job, that of an NHL tough guy. It can be a good pain, though. Reminds him how lucky he is to be in the NHL, though there have been too many occasions to count over the years when Vicodin or a shot of Toradol was required to numb the physical misery, just to allow him to stay in the game and do his job.

Fighting, hockey's dark science, can be scary and gut-wrenching. It can eat away at the soul of those who embrace it. For however much it may wear on Prust—and at times it does (see the interview that follows this story)—the smile on his face, his eternally sunny disposition, a legitimate
joie de vivre,
suggest he's found a way to stay on the right side of that fight.

Prust is good at it, too. Fighting, that is. He's not just a face-puncher, though that is the platform on which he's built his career.

One-dimensional palookas don't make $2.5 million a year. Disposable 13th forwards with no discernible hockey-playing skills don't get courted by the head coach of the Montreal Canadiens, who on the first day of unrestricted free agency in the NHL showed up at the Prust family home on Fanshawe Lake in Thorndale, Ontario, carrying a Habs jersey with
prust
and the number eight on the back.

“It was actually [Habs coach] Michel Therrien and [director of player personnel] Scott Mellanby who came to the house,” Prust said. “They had a bag with them; they pulled out this Canadiens jersey with my name and number on it, gave it to my dad [Kevin]. It was funny. We grew up in our house as [Toronto] Maple Leaf fans. My dad was the biggest Leaf fan ever. He held it up, he looked at it . . . they were looking at him and he was looking at them, like ‘What am I supposed to do with this?' I hadn't signed anything yet, hadn't made a decision. So my dad just hung it over the chair. I knew I wanted to go to Montreal, but I still asked my dad, ‘Would you be okay with this?' And he just told me, ‘I'm behind you 100 per cent whatever you decide. Whatever is best for you.' Once I signed, he put on the jersey.”

Montreal, known as a skilled but undersized finesse team, had targeted Prust as their primary free-agent consideration on July 1, 2012. They wanted to get bigger, stronger and tougher. They wanted a robust winger who could get in on the forecheck and bang bodies, someone to block shots and sacrifice his body for the team. They wanted someone who would fight for the right reasons, to stand up for teammates. They wanted a character leader, on and off the ice, a presence in the dressing room, a player who would relish fourth-line duty and minutes but have the skills and wherewithal to play on any line at any time, as required, with a chance to play as much as 14 or 15 minutes a night. They wanted intangibles; they wanted a role model for their younger players; they wanted someone tough as nails.

They wanted Brandon Prust.

“He was the guy,” said Montreal general manager Marc Bergevin. “He was the guy we really wanted. We were looking to establish a new identity and new culture in our dressing room and on the ice. Brandon is a glue guy. He changes the dynamic of a room when he walks into it. Players look up to him.”

Bergevin had just one fear. “After [Brandon] signed, I had a conversation with him and told him, ‘Don't change who you are because of the contract, the money. We're paying you to just be yourself, to be the same guy you were in New York.' Some players get a big contract and they try to change to live up to it. All we wanted from Brandon was the same thing he's done for any team he's played on. That's what we needed, and that's what we got.”