Busy summer sees Gorges tying the knot
Habs defender also had time to heal
One of many reasons why Canadiens defenceman Josh Gorges is unlike us dull, porky normals:
When Gorges stops training for a few summer weeks, dissolves into the couch and allows himself to indulge in all the “garbage” food — his word — that he won’t permit himself during the NHL season, he loses weight.
“I try to eat five or six meals a day during training and the season,” Gorges said Wednesday from his home in Kelowna, B.C. “During the few weeks I’m not training, I’m not eating that much, maybe just a couple of times a day. So I actually lose weight.”
There’s no hesitation identifying his go-to junk food.
“Pizza,” he said, laughing. “It’s just so easy.”
For an hour Thursday afternoon, Gorges will allow himself “just a small taste” of a Blizzard ice-cream treat at his parents’ Dairy Queen restaurant in Kelowna, his first such snack this summer.
But it will be for a good cause — at participating restaurants continent wide, proceeds from the Thursday sale of the popular Blizzard will be donated to Children’s Miracle Network hospitals.
Gorges is mostly back on the nutrition rails, already skating and moving into more serious training with the start of the Canadiens training camp a little more than a month away.
It’s been a busy summer for the veteran, who enters his seventh season with the Habs since being acquired in a Feb. 25, 2007, trade with San Jose.
In a ridiculously one-sided deal, he was packaged with the Sharks’ first-round draft pick that June, which would be Max Pacioretty, in exchange for Montreal defenceman Craig Rivet and the team’s 2008 fifth-round pick (Julien Demers).
Gorges mended his bruises after the Habs’ 48-game schedule and five-game quarter-finals loss to Ottawa, his body having taken its traditional beating from opponents and the 116 team-leading shots he blocked during a compressed, lockout-shortened season.
He watched bits and pieces of the playoffs during the month he spent in Montreal following the Canadiens firstround exit.
And then he flew off to Hawaii last month to wed Maggie Morrison in a storybook wedding.
“It was everything I hoped it would be, and more,” Gorges said of the nuptials. “We wanted a small, intimate wedding and that’s exactly what it was, just closest of family and friends there (about 55 in all).
“When Maggie and I decided to go to Maui to be married, she took on all the work. I just kinda sat back and did whatever she told me to do that would help,” he laughed, echoing the words of grooms the world over. “It wasn’t much. It was all Maggie.”
The newlyweds will be in Washington state in a few weeks for the wedding of Canadiens goalie Carey Price and his fiancée, Angela Webber, dear friends of the couple who were at Gorges’s ceremony, and will then travel back to Montreal to finetune preparations for next month’s training camp.
It took considerable time and effort for Gorges to heal his hockey-blistered body and bring it to the Maui altar in one piece. Players all have different routes to again become human beings following the physical torture of a season and playoffs.
“I don’t know if I’ve started to feel like a human being again, to be honest,” Gorges said, laughing again. “You feel better than when you ended the season.
“A few other guys I’ve talked to agree that you have things that don’t quite heal. You’ll be 100 per cent, you’ll be able to move and be fine after a couple of weeks. But the older you get, things that used to go away after a day or two nag you for a couple of weeks, or maybe for a month. It takes a good two, three weeks before you start to feel good about yourself again.”
A good part of the reason for Gorges’s aches and pains is his willingness to block pucks. He led the NHL with 250 blocked shots in 2011-12 and 116 this past season, seventh-most in the league. It was 60 up on second-ranked rearguard Andrei Markov.
Gorges hasn’t missed a start since the 37th game of the 2010-11 season, ACL surgery needed to repair a knee he shredded in junior. He’s the Canadiens iron man with 130 consecutive regular-season games, five more against Ottawa in the playoffs.
That’s not to say that Gorges no longer gives the knee any thought.
“It is a consideration,” he said. “Not that it’s bothering me, but I want to make sure that I keep it healthy and strong so that it doesn’t bother me.”
The Canadiens blue-line is a virtual ACL assembly line, Markov twice having his rebuilt and, last spring, a scalpel dipping into the knee of rearguard Alexei Emelin.
Upcoming is a full 82-game schedule, of course, plus a handful of pre-season games and — Gorges and every Canadiens fan hopes — many more in the playoffs.