Fehr skates fine line old-fashioned way

The ancient story of the outdoor-raised hockey star is among the game’s most cherished founding narratives.

You know the bones of the mythic tale. Gordie Howe, Mr. Hockey himself, was only sufficiently toughened after a youth buried in Saskatchewan snowstorms, just as Bobby Orr only skated circles around the league thanks to rocket-ship speed honed over boundless wintry waterways. And Wayne Gretzky only arrived at his transcendence after ceaselessly circling those carefully placed bleach bottles in his famous backyard.

Today’s emerging greats come with vastly different origin stories. The Arizona desert only birthed a phenomenon named Auston because Brian and Ema Matthews invested in six or seven on-ice sessions a week with a skills coach named Boris.

So Maple Leafs forward Eric Fehr is a throwback in more ways than one. At age 32, he’s hardly an old man. But in some ways, the details of his biography sound quaintly bygone.

On Saturday, Fehr made the somewhat shocking admission that he partook in his first lesson with a skating coach this past spring. Recovering from the surgery on his left ring finger that kept him out of the mix of the Maple Leafs’ playoff run after his trade-deadline arrival, Fehr said he spent hours refining his stride with Leafs in-house instructor Barb Underhill.

Save for those sessions, the educational grounding of Fehr’s admirable success — including his 2016 Stanley Cup ring as a member of the Pittsburgh Penguins and approximately $19 million in career salary (all dollar figures U.S.) — can be traced back to a frozen pond on his family’s cattle farm in rural Manitoba. Fehr said the skills that made him a high-scoring star with the Brandon Wheat Kings, and in turn got him picked 18th overall by the Capitals in the 2003 NHL draft, were mostly honed alongside his brothers, Matt and Justin, on that naturally frozen-over relic of hockey mythology just outside Winkler, Man.

“It’s a little bit different than a lot of guys now,” Fehr said. “I’d never gone to a hockey school, never done a skills camp. It was just show up for the season and play. And that’s the way it’s always been for me. But the game’s changed a bit. You have to adapt, and that’s what I’ve been doing.”

For all his staying-with-the-times effort, though, there’s a strong likelihood Fehr won’t be a significant part of Toronto’s plan for the season that begins Wednesday night in Winnipeg. While Leafs coach Mike Babcock has mentioned Fehr among those in the running for the job of fourth-line centreman, Toronto’s depth at the position is considerable. More likely candidates for the gig include Dominic Moore, the 37-year-old veteran who was signed as a free agent this past summer, and Miro Aaltonen, the 24-year-old Finn plucked from the KHL.

“I think (Aaltonen is) right there. Alts has learned tons in camp and really made good progress,” Babcock said after a workout that preceded Saturday night’s final preseason game, a Ricoh Coliseum matchup with the Detroit Red Wings. “So now we’ll just decide in the next few days what we’re going to do.”

Not that decisions made in the season’s opening week will be final. The Maple Leafs, after all, are deep by design. Injuries happen. Slumps occur. Trades aren’t out of the question. So a season that begins with the AHL Marlies doesn’t necessarily need to end in the minor leagues.

“You can send guys down. You can bring guys up. You can do lots of things here. So it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get it right on the first day,” Babcock said. “And just ’cause you get it right the first day doesn’t mean it’s right 10 games in.”

That Fehr might not have a firm grasp on an NHL roster spot isn’t necessarily surprising. He’s in the final year of a contract that pays him an annual average of $2 million, which means Aaltonen and Moore, who are slated to earn $925,000 and $1 million as NHLers, respectively, count as less-caponerous options.

The league, meanwhile, continues to get younger and faster. And Fehr’s career-long dossier of injuries is extensive, including multiple shoulder surgeries, elbow surgery and a disk ailment that nearly ended his career about a decade ago.

Such was Fehr’s luck that he broke his finger blocking a shot in his only game as a Leaf back in March. He said it took most of five months until he could grip a stick this past summer. Pulling his left hand out of the pocket of his team-issued sweat pants on Saturday, Fehr revealed a well-scarred ring finger that still looked visibly swollen around its middle knuckle.

“It still doesn’t close all the way, but it’s enough to get around the stick, which is all you need to play,” Fehr said. “But I won’t be a hand model any time soon.”

Neither, he figures, will his road to the NHL be a model for tomorrow’s pros. As Fehr said Saturday, it’s safe to say that most recent NHL newcomers have done considerably “less farming” than he did before he left for Brandon around age 16.

“I don’t think you’re gonna see too many farm kids from Western Canada that just kind of come out of small towns to play,” Fehr said. “They’re gonna have to move to cities where they can train with specialized people. I think that’s kind of the way the league’s going now.”

A season that begins with the AHL Marlies doesn’t necessarily need to end in the minor leagues.