Over the holidays we’ll be re-visiting staff writers’ favourite pieces from 2015. Today: Gare Joyce explains how a trip to the emergency room couldn’t stand between him and his Connor McDavid feature.
All season long I had kept a conversation going with Connor McDavid‘s parents and his agent.
In Erie. At the world juniors. Through the regular season. Through the playoffs. At various awards ceremonies. And right up to and including the combine.
Obviously the magazine was going to have to have a story on McDavid in advance of the draft. I had written a bunch over the years and had pretty well run out of adjectives and adverbs to describe how McDavid plays.
So as strange as it sounds I wanted to do a story about him basically hockey-free. No skates, no ice, though if he had put on Rollerblades, I would have worked around it. I also wanted to do a story on the impact that he had on people in the circle around him – teammates, but only a representative few, and adults in particular, coaches, billets and parents. I talked to him for two hours at his home in Newmarket for the principal interview after the season and that day his father Brian was supposed to be there.
When I rang the doorbell, Connor let me in and I asked if Brian was en route. Connor told me his father had been checked into emergency, violently ill with an infection. I told Connor that we could arrange something later (though I had a flight to Quebec for the Memorial Cup the next day). Connor said that it was OK to talk, that his father was hooked up to an IV and stable.
Two hours later, after Connor had almost, but not quite talked himself out, his parents came back. I told them that I’d let them get settled away and come back another day.
Brian would take no offence if I said that he looked like death warmed up. I even saw a trickle of blood on the gauze covering his IV incision. Bathed in a cold sweat, and unable to lift his head off a pillow on the couch, Brian provided the colour commentary while Connor’s mom Kelly did the play-by-play of her younger son’s life: from the cradle to that very morning.
Two things stand out from that day.
One: what a great job Brian and Kelly did raising a bright, well-adjusted 18-year-old.
Two: a rickety net was leaning against the garage of the home where the NHL’s next superstar grew up.
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Excerpt: What’s it like to be Connor McDavid?
Like all other prospects for the draft, McDavid filled out a questionnaire for NHL Draft Central Scouting Service. On the line beneath “Ambition outside of hockey” he printed: “I would like to be a lawyer if my hockey career does not work out.”
And while NHL GMs and scouts mention him in the same breath as Gretzky and Crosby, on the questionnaire McDavid compared himself to a player in an entirely different category.
“I think I am comparable to a player like Tyler Bozak because he is a good skater and is more of a pass first type of guy.”
Those who know McDavid say these answers are entirely consistent with his personality: He sees himself differently than anyone else because he thinks of himself as no different from anyone else. Stephen Harper, the one who wore the Erie sweater, often tells a story from McDavid’s rookie camp: “He had come in as an exceptional player and is the first pick in the draft, signed a contract with the team, everything, but when we go on the ice he’s wearing his [Toronto] Marlies stuff because, he says, he ‘hadn’t made the team yet.’ And that’s just how he is. He doesn’t presume anything.”
This goes a long way to explaining his reaction on the draft-lottery show. It could have been that he wasn’t uncomfortable with the idea of going to Edmonton so much as Strombo’s suggestion that he was automatically going No. 1. After all, McDavid went to Erie when the franchise was regarded as the league’s worst, when other top prospects had advised management that they wouldn’t report if the Otters drafted them.
He went from a Marlies team that won more than 70 games and lost just three in a season, to an overmatched doormat that practised in an Erie arena where the ice was cracked, uphill in one end and banked like a motor-speedway along the boards.
He’s the antithesis of the entitled hockey brat.
Full story: What’s it like to be Connor McDavid?
More of Gare’s most-read from 2015:
How Flint Firebirds firestorm came about
What’s made Crosby great may be costing him
How NHL stars answered draft questionnaires
Lou Lamoriello: Genius or yesterday’s man?
