Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  “Look,” says Mailloux, “with all the things Alex has had to deal with, he didn’t fall into drugs or booze or anything. It would have been easy for him. But he didn’t. He always stands up in front of the critics. For this, we owe him respect.”

  Guy Lafleur’s early response to the growing pressures was to drink endless cups of coffee and chain smoke cigarettes all the day of a game, including between periods, with plenty of beer to follow after. He hid in his apartment, watching The Three Stooges and writing poetry. In one that he entitled “Candle,” Lafleur might have been speaking for Alexandre Daigle, as well:

  By your light you make us dream

  In your glow we lose our cares

  Tell me why you don’t burn always? …

  Alexandre Daigle’s response has been decidedly different. He has surrounded himself with a small circle of friends, men and women, who are intellectuals and artists. Very privately, he has sought to repair an education that ended, as so often happens in hockey, in high school. Where he once bragged he was learning English by watching Beavis and Butt-head cartoons on television, his television show of choice now is Biography. He now reads the classics—Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet this past summer—and is working his way through a thick book on the great philosophers of history: Socrates, Plato …

  “That’s one of my dreams,” Daigle once told Yannick Mailloux. “Having a degree in something.” Three years ago, during the lockout, Daigle secretly enrolled in courses at the University of Ottawa, hoping to study administration. Had he not been advised to return to his junior hockey club in Victoriaville, he would have kept up the studies, delighting in the fact that, in the few classes he attended, no one had asked him a single hockey question. Perhaps it was because, when they went around the classroom and asked each student to talk a little about himself or herself, he told them he was a “dancer.”

  Harriet Bird—who shot Roy Hobbs in The Natural—would find a far different athlete in Alexandre Daigle, for it is he who is constantly asking the pivotal question of both the book and the movie: “Is that all?” It is for others to say he might have been better off if he had never signed that contract that branded him for life. Asked endlessly if he would do it all differently if he could, Daigle has always smiled and replied, “I would not be so foolish.

  “My first contract was a big thing,” he says. “But I never wished I’d never signed it. I’m twenty-two years old and I’m secure for life. In the long run, I’m a winner.”

  “Money,” Jean-Yves Daigle had said, “is not the most important thing in life. The most important thing, être heureux—to be content.”

  Had it not been for money, Alexandre Daigle might never have found the contentment he came across almost by accident, and by paying dearly, two summers ago. He was coming off the worst season of his life. Five goals, a dozen assists, injury and ridicule. He wanted nothing to do with Ottawa, nothing to do with Quebec, nothing to do with friends or teammates or the omnipresent, inquiring media.

  He flew to Los Angeles and checked into the Ritz-Carlton. He rented a car deliberately unlike his image—a green Cadillac Fleetwood. He hired a personal fitness instructor and became what he calls a “gym rat,” working out obsessively. He put on muscle and weight. He went out and purchased the finest pair of Roller Blades that money could buy and put them in the trunk of the big Cadillac and began driving out to the boardwalks of Venice Beach and Marina del Ray, where he would strap them on and skate for miles in the sunshine.

  When people stared at him, he felt they were looking at a different Alexandre Daigle, and he liked it. “They were looking at me,” he laughs, “because I had good skates.”

  Not because he was the hockey player with the big contract. Not because he wasn’t working out. Not because he was on the front of the sports pages. He made friends in California who knew nothing of hockey. He began to date different women. He started to see more of the actors and artists who lived there, and liked their company. And they liked him. “Alex has entregens,” says Mailloux. “He’s good with people. He’s easy to approach.”

  He found he fit in there better than he had ever fit in anywhere before. Here were people who shared his passion for fashion—Daigle and Mailloux once made a “pilgrimage” to the Miami home of designer Gianni Versace, who was gunned down this summer in Florida—and who could talk about the things he was becoming interested in: design, museums, travel, film. He even began to fantasize of a second career: he would come back, he would take acting lessons, and one day he might even become a movie star.

  “I’m fascinated by actors,” Daigle admits now. He goes to movies and, on his own, studies film. He is intrigued most by those actors who take on a role completely, immersing themselves in the character they must play. “It can be a three-month project, just doing the research,” he says. “Say you were going to be a policeman. You’d want to go out on patrol. You’d want to find out what it is to feel like a cop.”

  “In life,” says Yannick Mailloux, “we all have an ideal, something we want to be. For Alex, it’s not being a hockey player. He wants to be Alex. And Alex is different. And the Alex he wants to be doesn’t fit the criterion of hockey player.

  “He’s so much more than Alex the hockey player.”

  There is something about this comment that does not wash well in Canada, where the value system is such that most parents would rather have their child grow up to play in the NHL than become a neurosurgeon. How could there be more, some will ask, than being drafted first overall and signing two consecutive multi-million-dollar contracts to play hockey? Because Alexandre Daigle seems to want so much more, his own best friend has become convinced that Daigle will probably never become the player that was envisioned that June day in Quebec City when his name rang out first, and loudest, in the packed Colisée.

  “I don’t think so,” says Yannick Mailloux. “Not because he doesn’t have the talent to be a great player. He does. But it’s deeper than that. If I tell you you’re doing the greatest job in the world and you’re getting paid a lot of money to do it, but in your mind it’s not the greatest job in the world, well—if it’s a problem for you, it’s a problem. He wants to be so much more.”

  Now that Daigle has discovered that in himself, Mailloux says he will be like a “warrior” in pursuing it. He has seen it before with women; he sees it lately with learning. “Alex knows what he wants—and he knows how to get it.”

  As an example, he points to the highlight of Alexandre Daigle’s fall, which had nothing to do with either scoring goals or winning hockey games. “I was watching the music awards on TV,” says Mailloux, “and there was this guy on who looked a lot like Alex, I thought. Same style of clothes, same way of carrying himself. ‘Maybe you should play an instrument,’ I said to Alex. Next day I came back from school and there was a message on my answering machine. It was Alex: ‘Yannick, I bought a piano—and I’ve already taken my first lesson!’ ”

  “I believe we have two lives,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Roy asked.

  “The life we learn with—and the life we live with after that.”

  Alexandre Daigle never did become an NHL star. The Ottawa Senators eventually gave up waiting for him and, in 1997, traded him to the Philadelphia Flyers, where he started with a splash but soon faded. He played for the Tampa Bay Lightning and the New York Rangers before quitting the game in 2000 to seek out a career as a Hollywood film producer. In 2002 he returned to hockey, playing for the Pittsburgh Penguins and in 2003–04 probably had his best season with the Minnesota Wild, scoring twenty goals while performing as a defensively responsible forward under coach Jacques Lemaire. In 2006, with no further opportunities in the NHL, he left for the Swiss leagues, where he found success (twice winning the league championship) and, presumably, happiness.

  THE POWER OF THE PEST: BRAD MARCHAND

  (The Globe and Mail, April 23, 2011)

  MONTREAL

  He looks more li
ke an extra in a theatrical production of Oliver than a National Hockey League player. He looks sort of, well, sneaky with those quick, darting, dark eyes and prominent nose. Listed at five-foot-nine but likely fudging, he seems tiny for hockey. Yet twenty-two-year-old rookie Brad Marchand could well be the best thing the Boston Bruins had going for them as they fought back to tie their best-of-seven playoff series with the Montreal Canadiens at two games apiece.

  Even as the Bruins were losing the first two games in Boston, it was Marchand who was continually in the face of the Montreal players, Marchand who never stopped trying even when it seemed futile. Thursday night in Montreal, Marchand did the early lifting that ultimately turned the table.

  Montreal was up 3–1 when he began creating problems along the boards and behind the net, his preferred work stations. First he set up defenceman Andrew Ference for a goal, then he flipped a puck from behind the net that forward Patrice Bergeron ticked in to tie the game. More than anyone else, he took the game from lost to opportunity, the Bruins winning 5–4 when Michael Ryder scored on Boston’s very first shot of overtime. With just over twenty minutes, the rookie led all Boston forwards in ice time, and his three blocked shots were second only to defenceman Johnny Boychuk.

  But there is much more to his game. Marchand is the sandpaper that grates, the mouth that distracts, the player even his own teammates call The Rat and, among themselves, The Little (expletive). He is to today’s Bruins what Ken (The Rat) Linseman was to the Bruins of the 1980s: beloved teammate, despised opponent. Marchand takes pride in irritating the other side. “I always tried to,” he says. “I wanted to. It was kind of my game. It gets me more emotionally involved, and when I do that, I play a little better.”

  When did this attitude begin? The Halifax native has become a “pain” to play against in his first year of the NHL, was a noticeable pain through two world junior gold-medal victories, and was known as a pain playing for three different teams in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. “All the way back to novice or atom,” he says with a laugh. “I used to try to hit guys. I wasn’t supposed to, but … it just kind of stuck with me.”

  He knows he sometimes pushes too far. As this regular season wound down, after scoring a short-handed goal against the Toronto Maple Leafs, he celebrated with an exaggerated golf swing—symbolic of the Leafs’ lost season—and it cost him and his team. Not only did the riled Leafs come back and win the game in a shootout, but his coach, Claude Julien, tore a strip off him in the dressing room.

  So far these playoffs, in four hard-fought games against the Canadiens, Marchand has picked up but a single minor penalty. He doesn’t want to hurt his team. When they introduced him as part of the starting lineup for Boston, the Bell Centre crowd booed him louder than any other Bruin. He makes that much of an impression, just as fellow rookie P.K. Subban of Montreal gets the loudest boos in Boston and the greatest cheers at home. Both were considered candidates for rookie of the year, though neither made the final list of three. Marchand, however, outshone Boston’s prize rookie and 2010’s No. 2 draft pick, Tyler Seguin, this season, as Seguin has yet to dress for a postseason game.

  Marchand and Subban were teammates when Canada won the world junior tournament in the Czech Republic in 2008. They’re friendly but not close, perhaps because there is only room for one yappy irritant at a time on a team. “He’s a good guy off the ice,” Marchand says of Subban, “but everything changes when you’re out there.”

  Even so, he acknowledges their kinship in spirit. “Some guys have it, some guys don’t,” Marchand says matter-of-factly. “It can work against you, though. You can get too caught up in it and then take penalties. At the same time, it’s a lot of fun doing it and it can be effective.”

  So far, it certainly has been, without the usual negatives. He says he is aware of the costs of going too far. “I tend to get too emotional and I just kind of go,” he says. “And whatever happens, happens.” He was suspended in minor hockey, benched during the junior Super Series, reamed out in American Hockey League, all for acts he happily acknowledges were foolish and ill-considered. “Come playoff time,” he says, “you do definitely have to watch yourself and watch how much you do, and if you cross that line.… You have to keep it in your head all the time.”

  Fortunately, he has help keeping it there: a mentor in forty-three-year-old Mark Recchi, who joined the Pittsburgh Penguins the year Marchand was born. “Any time he talks,” Marchand says of Recchi, “everybody just quiets down and listens. He has an air about him. He said, ‘I’ll get upset with you, but it’s not going to be about you missing a pass or you should have given it to me at this time or playing your position or little things like that.”

  Instead, Recchi “critiques” Marchand: where to go on the ice, how to behave off the ice. Marchand finds Recchi to be the equivalent of “another coach” on the ice, a father figure off. Recchi has even let him know when, during a game, it’s okay “to chirp guys,” meaning unleash the mouth and see if Marchand can draw someone into a penalty.

  Whether the effect was all Recchi’s guidance or not, Marchand had a year no one expected. Up for twenty games a year earlier, he had but one assist to show for his effort. Listening to Recchi, often playing with him, Marchand scored a remarkable 21 goals this year.

  He had even told Boston general manager Peter Chiarelli that he’d reach 20 goals this year, something Chiarelli did not believe possible at the time. “I don’t know if I believed it at the time,” Marchand says. “I was just trying to say anything I could to get on this team.

  “Thank God I did. I’d hate to have that hanging over my head.”

  With Brad Marchand continuing to play well, the Boston Bruins advanced to the 2011 Stanley Cup final, where they met the President’s Trophy–winning Vancouver Canucks. Marchand scored nine playoff goals, a team record for rookies, two of those in the Bruins’ Cup-clinching game-seven victory in Vancouver.

  SIX

  BAR DEBATES

  THE LIGHTNING-ROD COMMISSIONER

  (The Globe and Mail, January 29, 2011)

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  Impossible not to think of Canada here on the fifteenth floor of a building that sits, appropriately, on the Avenue of the Americas.

  Snowflakes the size of pucks are floating down this late January day, turning everything from Times Square a block over to Central Park, visible straight down Sixth Avenue, into a northern winter delight. Canada’s national game is on display everywhere—from photographs of famous Canadian hockey players to replicas of every name that has ever appeared on the Stanley Cup. There are Inuit sculptures on the shelves and a coffee table that holds a handsome book on the Americans’ northern neighbour that has been signed “To a great friend of Canada—Stephen Harper.”

  The prime minister’s great friend is none other than Gary Bettman, commissioner of the National Hockey League these past eighteen years and a figure who, not unlike Prime Minister Stephen Harper, causes wildly fluctuating emotions among those he encounters. While the changes in the professional game Bettman oversees have been dramatic—new franchises created in the south, teams moved from Quebec City to Denver and from Winnipeg to Phoenix, the players locked out by the owners for the entire 2004–05 season, the game reinvented to reward skill and speed, a salary cap put in place, Gretzky and Lemieux replaced by Crosby and Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby sidelined with the game’s current curse, concussion—Bettman himself seems barely to have changed at all since he took office in early 1993.

  He remains, at fifty-eight, a trim, smaller man whose dark brown hair remains precisely in place as well as space. His dark suits are as much a certainty as Dick Tracy’s. He speaks with hands that often pound points home with fingers. He moves with an agility fully recovered from last fall’s arthroscopic surgery on his knee and, this snowy day in Manhattan, he is off to a hockey game between the New York Rangers and the Florida Panthers.

  It is a see-saw game, fast and turning, the crowd in Madison Square Garden ris
ing and falling with every goal, Florida with the lead gained and lost, then the Panthers winning on their own comeback. Fans all about leap to their feet, sag in their seats, scream and sigh as the game moves on. He watches carefully but, watching him, it would be impossible to tell what is happening on the ice or, for that matter, what is happening in his thoughts.

  “I never cheer,” he says. He has trained himself not to show emotion during a game. “I can’t cheer. If I show emotion one way or the other, people get upset.”

  He does, however, from time to time attend NHL games as a “regular fan.” It happens in New Jersey, close to where Bettman will sometimes take his four-year-old grandson—a Devils fan—to a match, the crowd unaware that the unshaven, sunglass- and cap-wearing man in jeans and an old sweater high-fiving with the little kid is actually the commissioner of the league.

  This night, however, he is in familiar uniform: dark suit, crisp shirt, red tie. He sits where the fans sit, and when he moves through the crowds and corridors the reception is, to a Canadian, somewhat surprising. “Great job, Gary,” a man cries out. A woman wants a photograph with him. “Love the product!” a man shouts as he passes by.

  What would they shout in Canada? One man swilling a beer in one of the Garden corridor bars shouts sarcastically from a distance—“Where’dya play yer hockey, Gary?”—but all the rest in those most American of venues are polite and approving.

  Bettman’s image in the country that calls hockey its national game and treats it as national religion is, at times, as polarized as Sarah Palin’s in the United States. He is blamed for everything from the demise of the Quebec Nordiques and the Winnipeg Jets to the league’s endless debates on what to do about headshots, one of which is threatening the year, if not the career, of Sidney Crosby, Canada’s golden Olympic hero. Bettman has been accused of denying Hamilton its chance at an NHL franchise when BlackBerry billionaire Jim Balsillie was rebuffed in attempts to take over the Pittsburgh Penguins, Nashville Predators and Phoenix Coyotes, potentially bringing an NHL franchise to Hamilton.