Sportsnet magazine preview: Jonathan Bernier was drafted in 2006 to be a star goaltender. Eight years later, it hasn’t happened, and in Toronto the pressure is only building.
The gravity of the situation didn’t hit until Jonathan Bernier got home.
He’d been at Pierre-Le Gardeur hospital in Lachenaie, Que., for two days, which didn’t seem that long in the grand scheme of things, considering his fiancee, Martine, was a week past her due date and his son, Tyler, was taking his sweet time making an exit. When the couple first arrived Friday morning, the doctors told them Tyler’s stubbornness meant it was time to induce labour. They came back that night around 8 p.m. and the contractions started three hours later. The next afternoon, Martine was given an epidural, but shortly after that Tyler’s heart rate began dropping with each contraction, a frightening development that necessitated a quick Caesarean section to make sure Tyler came out before anything else went wrong.
And he did—at 6:30 p.m. Saturday night, all 6 1/2 lb. of him. The emotions calmed a bit after that, and Bernier could finally relax, staying with Martine until Sunday night, when they left after the most intense 48 hours of their lives.
That’s when it finally hit. At the hospital, everything’s monitored. There are nurses. Doctors. People who can help. But once you get home, you’re on your own. All you know is all you know. That’s why, when Bernier pulled his Porsche into the driveway of his home in Terrebonne, a suburb just north of Montreal’s Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, he turned around, looked at little Tyler sleeping in the back seat and thought to himself, “Oh, this is real. We’re in for one now.”
He really is. This is the most important year of Jonathan Bernier’s life. A year that has already shifted who he is as a man. And one that could soon shift who he is as an NHLer, as the most important player in the most tortured, hockey-mad, overreactive city in the league—as the goaltender for the Toronto Maple Leafs.
There are few jobs in hockey that come with as much pressure and as many demands as his. It isn’t lost on Bernier that since two-time Vezina Trophy winner Ed Belfour left Toronto in 2006, the Leafs have qualified for the post-season exactly once (losing in the first round in crushingly heartbreaking fashion, in case you forgot) and, in the process, have marched a long line of doomed goaltenders to their crease, from Andrew Raycroft to Vesa Toskala to Jonas Gustavsson. Bernier’s being asked to put an end to that. To be impeccable, to seize the Leafs’ net, and, if he wouldn’t mind, to help bring an end to hockey’s longest Stanley Cup drought.
And he’s fine with that. He really is. He asked to be moved from his last team—not necessarily to here, but to anywhere—so he could have a chance to be a No. 1 goalie in the NHL. So he could do what he’s been dying to do since he was a teenager. But every time he thinks he’s making progress, something gets in the way.
Read more of the story in our Nov. 10 issue, available in our tablet edition, and on Next Issue and newsstands now.