BEHIND THE MASK
Netminder Frederik Andersen blocked Twitter and other social distractions in pursuit of “mindfulness” — which includes recording his goals and dreams and things he’s thankful for in a simple notebook. It’s paying off. Arthur,
Frederik Andersen tries to be Zen, to channel his furnace, to sand down his own rough edges until he is at home in himself, honed and smooth. But sometimes, he flinches. The big Dane will be watching a hockey game and someone takes a shot, and Andersen knows what the save is, and somewhere his neurons automatically fire: the start of a glove save, a pad save, a shoulder, a leg.
The Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender likes that, actually. The reaction is the Zen.
“You’ve got to feel it,” says Andersen. “It’s a second-nature thing. You’ve got to get it into your spinal system or whatever you call it, your nervous system, and it’s a reaction. I’ll look and kind of play the game, just as a mental thing.”
As the Leafs head toward the Christmas break with three home games in four days, Andersen is delivering his finest season: a .923 save percentage, seventh in the league, while second in shots against per game at 32.5. He is the horse this team rides almost every night and the pressure in on his shoulders.
“It’s always, you never feel like you’re on top of your game,” says Andersen. “You always feel like you have to work on it. And the same goes for the mental. You’re always trying to find an answer and find a way to be at peace with what you do.”
He used to be so far from peace. As a child in Denmark he was famously fiery, smashing sticks in games, in practice, in street hockey. Now he is mostly cool but trying to get cooler, to sort things out. Andersen has tried to escape the magnetic pull of his phone: He deleted Twitter and a couple of other apps, and limited his notifications to actual people, trying to text or call him. He tries to watch TV shows that require your full attention. He likes Game of Thrones.
“Everybody’s got noise in their life,” says Andersen’s backup, Garret Sparks. “Everybody has coping mechanisms, everybody has distractions. But in this position, you don’t want to be distracted. If it’s not a phone, it’s something else. It really boils down to, what do you focus on?”
Andersen has tried to focus on this, on now.
“Yeah, mindfulness,” says Andersen. “Even in the experience I had in the playoffs, and having an elimination game against Boston, you don’t think ahead to Game 7. When you’re warming up you can’t even think about the game, because that’s not what’s important now. That’s a good lesson.”
He is trying to live step by step, save by save. He points out you never know which save will be the one you need, but mostly you need every one of them. It’s a maddening chase for the impossible, with a team on your shoulders, and every mistake can haunt you. So, the notebook.
“For me, a good way of letting go of things is just writing stuff down after games,” says Andersen. “Just to have your few minutes of thinking about the game and then once you’re done, you can put it to rest. Just looking back at the game. It’s not that I’m afraid that anyone’s going to hack into my phone, but I just like having it in the notebook, and then I know where it is. And that way you spend less time on your phone too.
“Another thing that I’ve worked on with Scot (Prohaska), my trainer, is gratitude. Writing down at night things that you’re thankful for, and you appreciate. And then in the morning, you can write down your goals and your dreams, and that’s going to send you towards work in the right direction that day. But then again, a game like (a 6-3 loss in Boston on Dec. 8) … if you don’t move on from that, that’s going to haunt you for a while. The same goes for every loss, and even a win.”
That Boston game was the first time he leaked serious oil all season, and was followed by two not-quite-great games in Florida. Andersen’s career used to be characterized by swings, month by month. He’s at .897 so far in December. He used to hold onto things longer. He is trying to let them go.
“Yeah,” says Andersen, “you get better at it.” Really, Andersen is trying to improve his goaltending by improving himself. His escalating work in the gym is a continuing correction of his body; his off-ice Zen is a way to smooth out his mind. He read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz last year, once recommended by Oprah, and thinks a lot about its four tenets, which include not taking things personally. In other words, don’t flip out. “When someone says something, someone cuts you off in traffic, honks at you in traffic, it’s really not because of you,” says Andersen.
“It’s because of something that’s going on in their lives. And it’s really a way of having compassion too, because you need to maybe look from someone else’s perspective, and I think that’s something that can put everything in perspective. Is it really worth being pissed off because you missed a green light because the guy in front of you was a little slow?”
The book is also about how children are taught conditions of worth by their parents, and confined by that framework throughout their lives. An- dersen has tried steadily to shed what he was, and to become who he wants to be.
“I think once you feel like yourself … I have a tough time explaining it to someone who’s not been a goalie for a long, long time,” says Andersen. “I think, you feel better in your own skin when you’re seeing the puck well, and it feels like you’ve already beaten the guy before he shoots it. And it takes so much to get to that level. That’s really what you go out here to work for every day, is to try to get that edge, and to try to be that.
“I can look at myself any game, and when you look at yourself you’re still looking like yourself. In the Boston game I’m still making some great saves, when I’m still looking like myself. But it’s those small moments that maybe cost you. And you just kind of — you’ve got to stay on top of being at a better level. It’s really hard work, obviously. It’s just life of a goalie, I guess.”
Frederik Andersen was given a day off practice Wednesday. He did extra work on the ice before practice instead.