CLASS OF 2012
Feschuk on life after the cheering for NHL legends, Crosby on lockout twists, and how the class of 2012 compares by the numbers.
Mats Sundin called it a “different step in life.”
On the day he was to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, the long-time Maple Leafs captain was describing the domestic bliss he is currently creating in a homestead outside Stockholm, where he is living out his post-hockey days with a wife and 3-month-old daughter.
It was at this point that Gord Stellick, the former Leafs GM who was acting as the emcee of the Hall’s Monday media chatfest, piped in with a requisite dose of reality.
“Bet you’d like to get on the road again when you have kids — that’d be a bit of a break,” Stellick said. “But I guess you can’t do that.”
Maybe there are successful second acts for NHL legends. Maybe Mario Lemieux is happy in the owners’ suite and Wayne Gretzky is content making corporate appearances for cheques. And maybe Sundin is enjoying tip-toeing around the house so as not to wake the baby from her nap.
Still, there is no shortage of ex-players who have found themselves at a loss to cope with a new life that doesn’t include wee-hours charter flights followed by early-morning skates followed by evening romps in raucous buildings. So goes the oft-repeated mantra of the sporting retiree: There is nothing like being a player.
And so it is that Hall of Fame Monday, as much as it’s wonderfully celebratory, also serves up a dose of melancholy alongside the champagne and canapes. For the chosen few, their moment in the spotlight at the hockey shrine amounts to a grand last “we love you” from the fans, one last rousing ovation for a class of athlete that has known too many to count. It’s a retirement press conference without the tears
— but with far more knowledge about what it means to be truly done as a duespaying member of an athletes’ union.
“What do I miss?” Pavel Bure said Monday before joining Sundin, Adam Oates and Joe Sakic as members. “I miss, probably, when you’re scoring a goal and you’re winning the game, how the crowd (supports) you, and people are happy and they give you this great energy.”
The Hall’s 2012 class members were all easy enough to define in a phrase or two. Oates, an undrafted Etobicoke native, was a passer supreme. Sundin played in a town that’s infamous for overrating its locally based hockeyists, yet for him the term “great Leaf,” mostly an oxymoron in the post-1967 era, rings true enough.
Sakic, for his part, was a leader among leaders. On Monday, Pat Quinn, the head coach of Canada’s 2002 Olympic squad, thought back to that memorable goldmedal victory against the U.S. and pronounced Sakic “the best player in that game by far. . . . Offence, defence, you didn’t want to take him off the ice.”
And as for Bure — Quinn, who coached the young Russian in Vancouver, called him the second-most exciting player he’d ever seen after a defenceman named Orr.
“Lightning,” is the word Quinn used to describe him.
Bure, 41, saw his vast talent diminished by knee injuries that limited him to just 702 NHL games. His four best seasons saw him score 60, 60, 59 and 58 goals. But the end came too quickly. Three seasons after he potted 59 goals for Florida in 2000-01, he was done. But he’d seen difficult athletic endings before and was determined to master the art of the exit.
“My father (Vladimir) was a professional athlete (a swimmer who won four Olympic medals for the Soviet Union), and I knew when I saw he was retiring, it was maybe a little bit difficult for him,” said Bure. “Mentally, I was ready. I knew I had a great time, but you have to move on. So I can’t say it was terribly difficult for me, because I was prepared.”
Bure comes across as a private man who isn’t fond of sharing tales of his presumably fabulous life. So Monday didn’t bring any juicy revelations of his days as an Anna-Kournikova-dating gossip-column mainstay. That baby face of his playing days has been replaced by a version etched with wise lines and a receding hairline. His bent toward secrecy, on the contrary, was holding firm. So while Bure claimed that finding a post-playing purpose had been easy enough, he was short on details. Like, what, precisely, does he do every day? “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. A little bit of everything, I guess. I travel a little bit. I spend time with my friends. I do sport a little bit. I play hockey seldom, but I play maybe a few times a year,” he said. What else? He said he plays tennis. He’s a purple belt in jiu-jitsu. Oh, and he spent a few years earning a law degree in his native Moscow — a fact that’s a surprise to most everyone, including Quinn, himself a member of the bar. “I didn’t know that,” Quinn said. Does Bure plan to use his lawyerly skills in the coming years? “We’ll see,” he said. “It’s always good to have another education. You learn something new, you have an education, you meet different kinds of people that have nothing to do with hockey. I guess you just grow as a person.” Post-career self-improvement: Not every sporting immortal can claim to have dabbled in the same. Legends reside in the Hall of Fame for eternity, after all, but reading and rereading one’s induction plaque doesn’t exactly fill the days.