MOTHER’S DAY
With their moms in attendance, the Canucks beat the Avalanche 3-1 in Denver
Fighting Calgary’s Micheal Ferland on Saturday night wasn’t exactly a trip to Maui for Luca Sbisa, but the toughest part of his evening occurred after the game — when he had to report to a higher authority.
“She hates it,” the Canucks defenceman said Tuesday of his mother Isabella’s reaction to his latest scrap. “I walk up and she’s like this (Sbisa shakes his head in a convincing impersonation of a disappointed parent).”
“It’s so weird,” Sbisa continued. “It started in my second game in junior (in Lethbridge). I don’t fight much, but every time I do, my mom’s in town. She’s seen probably 60 per cent of my fights, and every time it’s the same: ‘What are you doing? You’re going to give me heart attack.’
“I say, ‘Sorry, mom. Trust me, I don’t like doing this, either.’ ”
As part of an NHL tradition, the Canucks moms are accompanying the team on their current twogame road swing through Denver on Tuesday and Phoenix on Wednesday. Usually, it’s the dads who take this trip but, after seven such excursions with his father Massimo, Sbisa is making his first trip with his mother and the new dynamic has created some interesting and wonderful moments.
“It’s funny how some guys change from one person to another,” Sbisa said. “We make fun of them. We say, ‘Be yourself.’ But there’s another side to this guy.”
While Sbisa is talking, Ben Hutton’s mother Janet is interviewing her son for the Canucks’ website, while assorted other moms are having their pictures taken with their boys. Isabella opted to take a walk in Denver on Tuesday morning and missed the joys of the morning skate.
“There wasn’t as much card-playing (on the flight from Vancouver to Denver),” Sbisa said. “My mom came over to see me (after a 24-hour travel day from her home in Verona, in northern Italy), so let’s talk a bit. It’s nice to have her around. It’s something special. Usually I only see my family once a year. This is one time I’ll get to see my mom.”
Sbisa, as it happens, comes from an atypical hockey background. His father is Austrian and was a skier and soccer enthusiast. Isabella is Italian/ English and favoured the ballet.
They settled in the Swiss town of Zug, where Luca saw his first hockey game at about age three.
“I was like, ‘Mom, whatever that is, I want to try that,’ ” he recalled of his first reaction to the game.
Zug has a team in the Swiss league, and Isabella began taking her young son to the games. Both mother and son took to the sport, and when Luca started playing competitively, Isabella became “like every other hockey mom.”
“She made the three-hour car rides to tournaments and went to the early morning practices,” Sbisa said. “She really got into it. Hockey became her favourite sport.”
Until her son gets into a fight.