by Bob Mckenzie
Again, a positive performance by McDavid presented new challenges. He was so dominant, so off-the-charts good at the Under-18 World Championship, it set the bar that much higher again.
The following October, early in McDavid’s second OHL season, a Canadian sports magazine came out with a front cover sell line boldly stating: better than crosby. It wasn’t a question; it was a declaration. The story inside the magazine was a fine and reasonable account of McDavid’s exploits at the U-18 tournament and how not even Crosby at the same age had done what McDavid did in Sochi, how McDavid was, in the eyes of some NHL scouts, perhaps tracking ahead of No. 87, who had been playing prep school hockey when he was 15.
Still, Brian and Kelly McDavid cringed when they saw the magazine cover.
The New York Times, USA Today and Sports Illustrated had all published McDavid stories and features in the spring of 2013. But that one magazine headline—better than crosby—left a mark.
“We were really upset by it, Connor was upset by it,” Brian said. “The story was fine, but it was referencing just one tournament where Connor did something Crosby didn’t. That’s all it was.”
The McDavids went into protective mode. A scheduled interview for a feature story on CBC’s The National was cancelled by the McDavids after that. So were a number of other interviews that had been arranged.
“We just felt we all needed to take a step back and give Connor some space,” Brian added. “Connor’s focus was trying to make Canada’s team at the World Juniors, and we didn’t need to be adding to the pressure. Connor can be a sensitive and introspective kid. He’s very guarded about attention being on him. He doesn’t crave to be the exceptional guy all the time.”
There’s no avoiding it, though.
It was demonstrably clear early in the 2013–14 OHL season that McDavid was so much bigger, faster and stronger than he had been in his rookie season. He struggled to score goals in the first half of his OHL sophomore season, but his improvements in speed and power were noticeable.
“It’s weird looking back on that first year,” McDavid said. “I felt like a little rat on the ice. I felt that way all season. It bothered me. This year, I can challenge people physically. I can hold off a defenceman and drive the net. Last year, I would have just got pushed outside. Last year, when we played three games in three nights, it was embarrassing. I might as well have not even played that third game. I had no legs.”
Erie went from being one of the worst teams in the Canadian Hockey League in McDavid’s rookie season to being ranked No. 1 in the CHL on and off in 2013–14. It wasn’t all because of McDavid—the Otters assembled a deep, talented lineup from top to bottom—but McDavid was clearly the catalyst.
In his second OHL season, McDavid achieved one of his goals by becoming only the sixth 16-year-old to play for Team Canada at the World Junior Championship, joining the exclusive company of Crosby, Eric Lindros, Jason Spezza, Jay Bouwmeester and Wayne Gretzky. But it was a difficult tournament for Team Canada, who finished fourth and out of the medals for the second consecutive year. And it produced, at best, mixed results for McDavid.
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 li
ke 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.
WHY ARE THESE EXCEPTIONAL PLAYERS SO, UM, EXCEPTIONAL?
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?
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.”
CHAPTER 7
Warrior Elite
Brandon Prust Fights the Good Fight, and All Comers,
to Fulfill His NHL Destiny
* * *
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.