He has been known to rent helicopters and do nothing but 360-degree spins down the length of an open runway. He has mastered, he says, the difficult move of taking off and then backing down on precisely the same plane to land the machine on the very dime on which it took off. He is so in love with precision it is even reflected in his nickname: AK-27. He is Montreal’s attack weapon, No. 27 on the back of Les Glorieux, who are once again glorious.
Only short months ago, the experts were saying the Canadiens would, once again, miss the playoffs. Kovalev, they said, was aging fast and slowing down, a $4.5-million disappointment last season, in which he scored only 19 goals and seemed uninterested in his team and listless in his play. The smart move would be to get rid of him. Today, Alex Kovalev is leading the team with 77 points, including 33 goals, and quarterbacks a dominating power play that has put the Canadiens in first place in the Eastern Conference before last night’s games. The team is not only going to make the playoffs, but may well be Canada’s best hope to win the Stanley Cup, which has not landed on this side of the border since the Canadiens won in 1993.
In this year of the Russians in the NHL—twenty-two-year-old scoring leader Alexander Ovechkin in Washington, twenty-one-year-old sophomore star Evgeni Malkin in Pittsburgh and twenty-four-year-old sniper Ilya Kovalchuk in Atlanta—the relatively elderly Kovalev often passes notice in the media. But not among those who, like Gretzky, understand the true meaning of a player deemed most valuable to his team. “He knows better than anybody what it takes,” Kovalev said of the Gretzky compliment, “so it’s nice to hear.”
What Kovalev has managed in his fifteenth NHL season is astonishing. He has taken a line composed of himself, an aging veteran, third-year centre Tomas Plekanec and Andrei Kostitsyn, in his first full year with Montreal, and he has turned them into a line ranking with the likes of prime veterans Spezza-Alfredsson-Heatley in Ottawa and Datsyuk-Zetterberg-Holmstrom in Detroit.
But how he did it is even more amazing. He used Tiger Woods as his model.
Alexei Kovalev is stubborn. To say he follows his own mind is to understate the situation. When the native of Togliatti, Russia, arrived in New York to play for the Rangers, he thought he could decide his own ice time. When head coach Mike Keenan thought he could teach the youngster a lesson by waving him to stay on the ice at the end of another ridiculously long shift, Kovalev took it as a compliment for how well he was playing.
Slava Kovalev, Alexei’s father, had been a weightlifter and wished his son to follow in his footsteps. He even installed a chinning bar on his child’s bedroom door so the youngster could work out before bed and as soon as he woke up in the morning. When Alexei insisted on hockey instead of weights, his father devoted his spare time to creating the perfect hockey player, organizing a training regimen that would knock out a grown man, let alone a growing child.
But very soon it all seemed for naught. When Alexei was eight, a routine medical checkup discovered a heart abnormality, a problem with rhythm. His parents were advised to take him away from hockey and let him skate “easy” once a week, at most. “I’m not stopping,” the determined eight-year-old told his mother.
He decided he would repair his own heart. He set up a strict diet of fruits and vegetables for himself, made sure he got extra sleep, drew up his own exercise program and returned to hockey. The condition, he said, still exists, “but it’s not dangerous.”
He was remarkably gifted as a child: bright in school, exceptionally musical and a champion swimmer. But it was hockey that he excelled at, to the point where, just as in Gretzky’s case, others grew jealous of him and coaches regularly berated him for what they saw as selfish play. There were many tears, and he grew increasingly shy and quiet.
Kovalev’s early experiences with coaches were not always good. One particularly tyrannical coach in Togliatti put fourteen-year-old Kovalev’s team through such a gruelling workout—first running fifteen kilometres cross-country in sweltering heat—that one of his teammates and best friends dropped dead when the coach made them practise immediately after.
Last season, it seemed Kovalev had had an irreconcilable falling-out with Canadiens coach Guy Carbonneau when a Russian sports newspaper ran an interview claiming to quote Kovalev at length criticizing the Montreal coach for his defensive systems and claiming Carbonneau was anti-Russian. Kovalev, who had never before backed down from controversial statements, denied there had ever been any such interview, and no tapes were ever produced. He said it never happened, though not many then took him at his word.
Still, Kovalev could hardly blame Carbonneau for his season even if he had wished to. He played badly. He was heavy—playing at 225 pounds, when he had come into the league at 185—and he was playing a rather jazz-like Russian version of the game (he prides himself on never having a plan) that simply was not working in Montreal. “He was playing a style that had a high degree of difficulty with too low a degree of success,” Montreal general manager Bob Gainey said.
Those close to the team point to a long “walk in the park”—actually a stroll along the Montreal waterfront—with Gainey early last summer as the pivotal moment that turned Kovalev’s attitude around. “It’s not like I stopped playing or anything,” Kovalev said. “But people thought I had lost interest. Bob said that. We sat and talked. He asked me: ‘What is the problem? What do you think?’ Bob just let me talk. He solved the problem. I needed support and I needed people to believe that I could do the job.”
Gainey, however, believes something else played a more significant role. Not only had Kovalev’s NHL career taken a dive, his international career seemed at an end. Kovalev is one of the more patriotic Russian stars, having won gold in the world junior championships, gold in the Olympics in 1992 and three gold medals in world championships—the last time as the captain of the 2005 Russian team. Last spring, he wasn’t even invited.
“I think it was far more these factors,” Gainey said, “than it was any walk in the park with Bob Gainey. He’s proud and he’s resilient. He wanted to prove himself.”
“I wanted to prove something,” Kovalev agreed. “I couldn’t do anything about what people had said about me, but I could do something at the world championships. It was my only chance. When I didn’t get asked to play, that really kind of killed me. I was lost.”
But then, a third factor, almost by accident, came into play. The highly sensitive Kovalev had his feelings stung by his own agent, Scott Greenspun. When Kovalev explained to Greenspun that he planned to work extra hard, get in great shape and show them that he was good as ever, Greenspun, meaning well, happened to say, “Don’t forget, Alex, you were nineteen then.”
“It really pissed me off,” Kovalev said. “I said, ‘Just watch.’ ”
He tore himself apart and rebuilt from scratch. He began working out almost fanatically. He lost weight and added muscle. He tracked down and found old game tapes of how he had played in his prime with the New York Rangers and the Pittsburgh Penguins and he studied the tapes, took notes and then set out to put what he had learned into practice.
If one of his sporting idols, Woods, could take apart his swing and rebuild it, then Kovalev would do the same in hockey. Not only would he adjust the way he played and fix the shape he was in, he would recast his attitude. Sullen and angry the season before—partially blaming himself for the disastrous addition of another Russian, Sergei Samsonov, to the Montreal lineup—he came into this season determined to serve as a mentor to the younger Russians in the organization: the Kostitsyn brothers, Sergei and Andrei, and defenceman Andrei Markov.
“He’s cross-cultural now,” Gainey said of the Russian. “He can translate those things—not necessarily words—for the others.”
“The young guys see his hunger on the ice,” Markov added, “and they try to do what he’s doing. He’s a good example.”
Led by Kovalev, all the Russians—along with Plekanec, the young Czech—have been pivotal players in Montreal’s impressive season of recovery
. “He’s like a dad to them,” said Murray Wilson, the former Hab who now does colour commentary on the Montreal broadcasts. “It’s like they’re joined at the hip—five guys all surrounding Alexei as they walk out of the rink. He’s the father image for those guys.”
He also reached out to fans, at one point flying his Cessna 414 from its base airport at White Plains, New York, to a small town in the Gaspé region where the mayor, a fanatical Canadiens fan, had invited the star. He arrived with signed jerseys and sticks and stayed for days—at one point smacking up the mayor’s beloved motorcycle.
But no matter, the story got out and impressed people. “There are players who come from right here in Montreal,” one hockey reporter said, “who wouldn’t make an effort like that.” Booed in 2006–07, he became a name they chanted in 2007–08. “He has been our best player,” Gainey said. “Our MVP.”
When captain Saku Koivu was briefly injured, coach Guy Carbonneau took the captain’s “C” and gave it to Kovalev when the team was headed to New York on a trip. Why? “He deserved it,” Carbonneau said.
When Kovalev is on his game, it seems he was created solely to skate and stickhandle and shoot. “What was it they used to say about Tom Watson?” Gainey asked. “That ‘his hands were made to fit a golf club.’ Same for Kovalev in hockey. He looks like he was built for the game.”
What he does in games often pales to the wild and inventive plays he will come up with in practice. He considers himself a freelancer, a player so creative he delights in having nothing in mind until the precise moment when something happens. He is at his happiest when he is surprising even himself. “He does things with the puck you’ve never seen before,” Montreal’s sensational rookie goaltender, Carey Price, said. “It just seems impossible what he does sometimes—but for him, it’s just like walking and chewing gum.”
Kovalev’s centre, young Plekanec, says there have been times on the ice when he and young Kostitsyn find themselves laughing so hard at plays Kovalev has just pulled off that they forget they are part of the equation. “You just start laughing on the ice,” Plekanec said. “You can’t help yourself. We were playing Boston and he goes through half the team, drops his glove, leans over and picks it up—and then stickhandles through two more guys.”
“You can’t quit on the play, can you?” Kovalev said with a smile. “That’s what I was taught. Never quit on the play. Never quit.”
He didn’t, and both Alexei Kovalev and the Montreal Canadiens are better for it. He talks now of playing in the next Olympics, of playing enough more years that now that he has passed a thousand NHL games, he might reach two thousand—and will be a member of the Canadiens when they bring the Stanley Cup home to its rightful resting place.
“I think anything is possible in my life,” he said. “Everything comes unexpected.”
Unexpected, indeed. In the summer of 2009 Kovalev became a free agent and, despite an offer from the Canadiens and even a rally by Montreal fans to keep him, he left for a sweeter deal in Ottawa, $10 million over two years. It soon turned sour. The sensitive Kovalev did not like the coach, Cory Clouston, and simply stopped trying. He “floated,” uninterested, uninspired and ineffective, through most of two seasons before the Senators sloughed him off to the Pittsburgh Penguins for a conditional seventh-round draft pick. He scored in his first game and then won the game in a shootout.
THE DREAMER: ALEXANDRE DAIGLE
(Ottawa Citizen, December 21, 1997)
I’m different. But it’s okay now—people know I’m different.
—Alexandre Daigle, December 1997
He watches it faithfully, at least once every season, and almost always alone: a Canadian kid who was once, but no longer, considered a “natural” in his country’s game, stares hypnotically at an American movie on the American game, and based on a story that was written forty years before anyone in Canada had ever heard of Alexandre Daigle.
Just as other hockey players know—and love to shout out—every line of dialogue in the Paul Newman hockey movie, Slapshot, Alexandre Daigle can quietly recite every word that is spoken in the 1984 Robert Redford movie of Bernard Malamud’s 1952 classic baseball novel, The Natural.
“You’ve got a gift, Roy,” the father in the movie says as he catches a ball thrown by the young Redford. “But it’s not enough—you’ve got to develop it. You rely too much on your gift and you’ll fail.”
The Natural is the story of a handsome, charismatic ball player, Roy Hobbs, who is blessed with both supernatural talent and a mystical bat called “Wonderboy.” The film is a moving, exquisitely photographed account of the great American dream gone temporarily wrong: brilliance thwarted by fate, the long, difficult struggle back, the hero finally proving the doubters wrong with one dramatic, desperate, triumphant swing of the bat.
“It’s a sad, sad story,” says Alexandre Daigle. “Not a fun story at all—but it shows you what you can accomplish.”
The book has a decidedly different ending. The final swing of the bat, just as desperate, fails to connect, the final strike followed by shame and disgrace.
“Say it ain’t true, Roy.” When Roy looked into the boy’s eyes he wanted to say it wasn’t but couldn’t, and he lifted his hands to his face and wept many tears.
Like the mysterious Roy Hobbs, there are a great many things about Daigle that the fans in the stands do not know and may not understand. Roy Hobbs was advised to read Homer. Daigle has lately been reading Shakespeare and Socrates. But he will never read Bernard Malamud, not ever.
Alexandre Daigle is twenty-two years old and as of today has been paid $10,763,000 for playing slightly less than four and a half seasons in the National Hockey League. In 291 games, he scored 73 goals, which works out to $147,438.35 a goal. He has just signed—and negotiated, entirely on his own—a new one-year deal with the Senators that will kick in when his $12.25-million deal finally dies come the end of the 1997–98 season. This season as of Friday, he has scored six goals. For the 1998–99 NHL season, he will receive a raise to $2,736,000.
“You’re not fascinated by the almighty dollar?” the fixer asks in the movie. “I never gave it much thought,” says Roy Hobbs.
More than four years after that outrageous deal that in no small part led to the 1994 NHL owners’ lockout of the players, the shortened 1994–95 season and the rookie salary cap that came of it, Alexandre Daigle is still defined by numbers with dollar signs beside them far more than by any other statistic. If people point to any of his hockey numbers, it is usually to the minus 33 he registered last season in the plus-minus rating, meaning he was on the ice for 33 more even-strength goals scored on his team than he was for goals scored by his team. It was 19 more goals against than any of his Ottawa teammates, and four more than any other player in the entire league.
One might think, then, that Daigle would like to avoid such a topic, but one would be wrong to think this. There can be no doubt that criticism stings—his closest friends have seen the tears—but Alexandre Daigle has been blessed with a public persona that renders criticism as hard to deliver as to accept.
At a charity golf tournament staged this summer by Senators coach Jacques Martin, the coach had just finished bragging to the dinner crowd about his team’s improved goals-against play when a laughing Daigle took to the podium and brought down the house with an extravagant claim, saying, “I’m the guy who instituted the defensive system.” “He had them in the palm of his hands,” says Senators broadcaster Dean Brown, who emceed the dinner. “It was an incredible show.”
It is also a travelling show. While the Senators can claim two NHL All-Stars—Alexei Yashin and Daniel Alfredsson—it is still Daigle whom the fans wait for at the hotels and outside the rinks. His is the autograph most sought, the photograph most treasured, the smile best remembered. He has what is called in the sports world “star quality,” a charisma that was first noticed when he was sixteen and persists today, despite the many disappointments, despite the critics. For every boo that fa
lls down from the stands, an electric buzz still sizzles through the rink the moment Daigle, in full stride, picks up a pass or a loose puck. Most times it doesn’t work out, but on those rare occasions that it does, it seems the dream remains possible. Certainly, many continue to believe he will still come true.
The media still gather around his locker for comment. His words still matter, his enormous promise is still worthy of debate while other high draft picks have either blossomed or been dismissed. He sits facing questions and notepads with a ready smile and disarming quip, his shoulders almost always hunched into a blue, sweat-stained T-shirt.
If the cameras could catch those shoulders bare, they would find two small tattoos. On the left shoulder, a red Superman emblem: “Super-Daigle,” he likes to call it. On the right, a symbol unrecognized in hockey, where the tattoo of choice is more often the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character. On Daigle’s right shoulder is a looping circle, one half dark, the other half light. It is the yin and yang from classic Confucianism, the dark side and the light side of the hill of life. The contrast is deliberate: light and dark, heaven and earth, birth and death, matter and spirit. The yin and yang may appear opposite, but they are actually complementary. Each makes up for what the other lacks. To be whole, they need each other.
The contrast in Alexandre Daigle’s life is growing more apparent by the year. While some of his teammates are mystified—some even miffed—by his failure to devote every moment of his life and every ounce of his energy to hockey, to make his game and profession the absolute priority, Daigle’s main drive has been to gain some measure of balance in his life. His closest friend in Ottawa does not even play hockey, does not talk about the game, but is instead a twenty-eight-year-old finishing a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Ottawa.
When Yannick Mailloux looks at his friend, Alexandre Daigle, he sees not a hockey player but “un animal prise dans une cage”—a caged animal. “Alex is a dreamer,” says Mailloux. “Alex is like anyone else. He has dreams—even if he is playing in the NHL. We all want to become players at some time. But you know, his dreams are more real than our dreams.
Wayne Gretzky's Ghost Page 18