FINDING POWER AS A PEST

BRAD MARCHAND, BOSTON’S BALL OF HATE, IS NOW A TOP SCORER

a penalty or score a goal. It was a gamble, but it benefited me.”

Lately, it’s been more of the latter. At the World Cup of Hockey, a player called a “little ball of hate” by the president of the United States — a guy who received a three-game suspension for an illegal hit last season and was fined US$5,000 for a sucker punch — was suddenly playing on Canada’s top line with Sidney Crosby and Patrice Bergeron.

Not only that, but the 28-yearold led the best-on-best tournament in scoring, potting the winning goal while killing a penalty in the final minute of the championship game.

“That was definitely a (career) highlight,” said Marchand, who signed an eight-year deal worth US$49 million with the Boston Bruins the day before the World Cup final. “I don’t think anything will really compare to winning a Stanley Cup (with the Bruins in 2011), just with what you go through the whole year with your team, but that was definitely second on the list. Playing with Sid and Bergy at that level at a tournament like that was an incredible experience.”

How did Marchand, who scored 37 goals last season and is in the upper crust of the NHL’s leaderboard with 27 points in 32 games this year, go from being a fourth-line pest to a highly paid producer? How did a player who was the last kid to make his triple-A team and was a healthy scratch for the final game of his junior career even get to the NHL?

Again, it started with a slash — quite of few of them, actually.

Growing up in Lower Sackville, N.S., a suburb of Halifax, Marchand was a risk-taker and boundary-pusher, the kind of kid with bottomless energy who would jump on the trampoline just to see how high he could soar before falling off. Hockey, which he began playing at age two, was his outlet. It was a place where, fully padded, he could roughhouse without getting into trouble.

Even then, however, there were questions about whether he would play by the rules.

Marchand was the first of his friends to fight in a game when he was just 13 — “Brad was hollowing off on the guy’s cage like a bonehead,” Bodnarchuk, a childhood friend, told sportsnet.ca in 2009 — and games of shinny on his family’s backyard rink usually ended with someone or something getting damaged.

“One time they were playing mini-sticks in the basement and Brad checked his buddy through the drywall in between the studs,” Marchand’s father Kevin said. “He always had excessive energy, there’s no question about that.” From an early age, Marchand had an appreciation for boundaries and how far they could be stretched. If he was on a dirt bike and his parents warned him not to go too fast, he would start pedalling as hard as he could until they screamed at him to slow down. He’d listen at first, but would soon start pedalling faster again until they said something — or, more often than not, simply gave up trying. It was the same on the ice. Some referees were quick with the whistle, while others let Marchand run wild.

As a smaller player with limited ability, playing with one foot on the line — and other clearly over it — gave him an advantage. Often, he exploited it. Sometimes he’d go so far he lost track of where the line was. The slash that dented his opponent’s face mask earned Marchand an automatic ejection, but it also earned him considerable clout in hockey circles. If you didn’t know who Brad Marchand was before then, you did now. That wasn’t always a good thing.

“I would never make reference to being embarrassed, but there were a couple of instances where Brad would actually use his stick on the ice that might almost injure somebody,” Kevin Marchand said.