Ian Mendes

I guess you can say I’m used to being the minority around here.

For example, in three of the past four years, I’ve won the “Best Vijay Singh Stunt Double Award”, presented annually by the Ottawa media. (To be honest, I think Brent Wallace unfairly swayed the voting panel when he blatantly stole the award in 2007).

But as I write this, I can tell you I am really in the minority today, because I think I might be the only person in the Ottawa media who thought Dany Heatley was a pretty nice guy when he was here.

I certainly didn’t agree with Dany’s trade request and how it played out this summer, but I don’t think he’s a bad guy just because he was prickly with the media when he was in Ottawa. Most members of the media got their impressions of Dany during quick scrums, when he chose not to reveal his true personality.

And while I certainly wasn’t privy to a close relationship with Dany, I wanted to pass along four quick stories that might paint a slightly different picture of the Dany Heatley you might have heard about over the past three months.

-- At the end of last season, the Senators staff allowed us to bring our kids to a practice on Good Friday, since it was a holiday. I decided to let our five-year-old daughter tag along to the rink with me. As I walked into Scotiabank Place, Dany walked around the corner and walked right up to us. He immediately crouched down to my daughter’s level and began asking her questions about the stuffed animal she was carrying. He spent a couple of minutes talking to her and posed for a picture. I was struck by the fact that he came over to us and not the other way around. The thing about Dany is that he genuinely seems to love younger fans. I never once saw him stiff a kid for an autograph in a hotel lobby or walking into a rink - and I was around him a lot in those situations. In other words, I’d never confuse him with Alex Rios.

-- In February 2008, Dany was recovering from a shoulder injury that cost him six weeks of playing time. On the day he was returning to the lineup, he agreed to do an interview with me in the dressing room. Shortly after starting the interview, my cell phone rang in my pocket and I had to restart the interview. Dany was giving me the gears for leaving my phone on and we both had a chuckle about it. But for some reason, when I restarted the interview, I couldn’t stop laughing. So I restarted the interview again. And again. And again. With no word of a lie, I restarted this interview seven times. I just couldn’t stop getting the giggles. But Dany stood there (not laughing after about the fourth take) and did the interview in the end. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he walked away, but he stuck out my seven false takes. When I look back at his time in Ottawa, he never once turned me down for an interview request and that was something I appreciated.

-- One of the first times I met Dany was at a Sens charity event in 2005. I was walking around the charity casino when he leaned over to a Sens PR person and said, “Hey, what’s Farhan Lalji (TSN reporter) doing here?" When I heard that story, I had to make him feel terrible for that comment. So the next morning at practice, I walked over to him and he cut me off before I said anything and he apologized. He actually claimed the lighting in the room was bad and he couldn’t see who I was. I told him he was only digging a deeper hole by using poor lighting as an excuse. For the next four years after that, he often greeted me with a semi-sarcastic “Hello ... Mendes.”

-- I also had a chance to see a little more of Dany’s personality when doing Senators broadcasts for Sportsnet. I am often stationed between the two benches for games and Dany used to try to freak me out by pretending to shoot the puck at me during warmups. He would let a shot fly that would hit the top of the boards. If he wasn’t a two-time 50-goal scorer, I would have been a little more concerned about my safety. I’d like to think he knew where he was shooting. And one night in Denver, Dany accused me of using a fake broadcast voice when I was taping the intro of our show. I had to retape the intro because of Dany’s trash-talking. (And for the record, I do use a fake broadcasting voice, but I don’t like being called out on it).