by Bob Mckenzie
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.”
The Canadiens paid handsomely for it, too, giving Prust more than three times the $800,000 annual salary he was earning with the New York Rangers.
There were those who suggested Prust was simply chasing the dollars, looking to cash in. If that were the case, who could blame him? Fighting in the NHL is oftentimes a high-risk, low-reward proposition, with a short shelf life. There was much more to it for Prust. It was gut-wrenching to leave New York and his posse of close friends that included Brad Richards, Brian Boyle, Michael Del Zotto and Henrik Lundqvist.
“The contract . . . for sure, if you asked me when I was 18 years old, could I ever envision making $2.5 million a year . . . a guy like me, not the most skilful. . . . No way. I couldn’t imagine it,” he said. “But it wasn’t just about the money.”
Ironically, Prust had met the lovely Maripier in New York while he was with the Rangers. The Canadiens knew he might look favourably on moving to his girlfriend’s hometown. He was also hopeful of an expanded role, maybe more minutes of ice time, a chance to get in on the ground floor of a new culture in Montreal being established by a new general manager (Bergevin) and new head coach (Therrien).
“I loved New York City, the organization, the players. I knew I was leaving a very good situation,” Prust said. “It was the weirdest time for me. For two days after I signed, I was the happiest and saddest, all at the same time, I’ve ever been in my life. So happy to be part of something new in Montreal, so sad to be leaving New York.”
The Prusts didn’t just talk about family values; they lived them.
When Kevin Prust’s father, Raymond, died—Brandon was 11 years old at the time—Kevin moved the whole family from their home in London to nearby Thorndale, where Kevin’s mother, Georgina, was still in the family cottage overlooking Lake Fanshawe. They built an addition to the cottage—one big, happy, mixed-bag family.
Raymond Prust, Brandon’s Papa (grandfather), was of Welsh-English origin. During World War II, he met Georgina Miliardi in Italy. Their relationship was frowned upon in Naples, so Raymond and Georgina left for Canada and got married. Brandon’s Nonna (grandmother)—or as he called her, his Nonni—was as Italian as Italian could be. Brandon’s mom, Theresa, was born and raised in Glasgow until age seven, when the family moved to Canada. She was a McQuillan, the daughter of a colourful Scotsman, Glaswegian Jimmy McQuillan.
“Italian and Scottish,” mused Prust. “I grew up with Italian home cooking and kilts. I lived with my Nonni. My Granda was a real Scot, one of the funniest men you would ever meet. My family, all we ever did—and all we ever do when we’re together—is laugh and have fun. That was instilled in me from a very young age.”
Brandon and his sister, Carla, three years his senior, came by their love of hockey honestly. Their home on the lake provided some of the best outdoor skating imaginable, no doubt part of the reason why Carla, who grew up to become a schoolteacher, not to mention a mother of three, played varsity hockey for the University of Western Ontario.
Brandon’s dad worked as a salesman for a safety company, travelling throughout southwestern Ontario; his mom spent more than 35 years with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
When Brandon, at age 18, finally made the hometown OHL Knights, it was a cause for celebration for the whole family. Well, almost the whole family.
“My Nonni, she would come to the games or watch them on TV, and as much as she liked me playing [for the Knights], she didn’t like me fighting,” Prust said. “She would say, ‘You don’t have to fight. Why do you fight?’ She tried to offer me money [$20] for any game I didn’t fight. I never took it, but it was always offered.”
Meanwhile, there wasn’t a game Prust played as a Knight that he didn’t give or get a high five from his “Granda,” Jimmy McQuillan, whose Knights season tickets were right on the glass, alongside where the players would walk out onto the ice.
“He loved it, and so did all the guys [on the team],” Prust said. “He had front-row seats and I’d say, ‘Hi Granda,’ every night on my way to the ice, and we would all
give him high fives.”
Jimmy McQuillan wasn’t offering Brandon money not to fight. Neither was Kevin Prust, who Brandon said was a “little more naturally aggressive off the ice, with more of a temper, than me.”
The Hunter brothers, meanwhile, were instilling in Prust, and all the Knights, their own set of hockey family values.
“[The Hunters] taught me what it is to be a professional,” Prust said. “That’s what they do there—teach all the kids who go through there how to be pros. I was like a sponge, soaking it all up.”
It was in Prust’s second season in London, when he had 35 fights, that his game blossomed, and not just the face-punching part. He showed more dimension than many imagined he possessed. He scored 19 goals and 52 points, with 269 minutes in penalties, in 64 games. In the playoffs, he scored seven goals and 20 points in 15 games and was named the Knights’ playoff MVP.
“He showed he could play,” Mark Hunter said. “He wasn’t real big, he wasn’t real fast. He killed penalties, he made plays. Tough? Oh, yeah. He could fight. Totally fearless. He was a leader. He cared so much for the team.”
The combination of pugilism and production didn’t go unnoticed. The Calgary Flames drafted Prust in the third round, 70th overall, in the 2004 NHL draft. It was an amazing step forward for a kid who had played Forest City hockey before one year each of AA and AAA without being drafted into the OHL.
“That’s when I knew [he was going to fulfil his destiny to be an NHLer],” Prust said. “I needed some luck, some breaks—the broken Zamboni, my dad golfing—to get to that point, but once I’d been noticed, once I was drafted, I knew it was in my hands now. I could take it from there.”
The real dream season was Prust’s overage year, 2004–05. The lockout wiped out that entire NHL season, so all eyes were on junior hockey’s most dominant team. London was a star-studded group—future NHLers Corey Perry, Rob Schremp, David Bolland, Marc Methot and Dan Girardi, amongst others. The Knights started the season with an OHL-record 31-game undefeated streak, went on to win the OHL championship on home ice, and hosted—and won—the Memorial Cup, beating Sidney Crosby’s Rimouski Oceanic in the championship game before a rabid hometown crowd.