TWICE AS HARD TO SAY GOODBYE
Sedins, part of the city’s identity since 2000, are retiring
Eric Baker, a Vancouver Island youth worker, figured he probably wasn’t the only lifelong Canucks fan to reflect Monday on Henrik and Daniel Sedin’s 18 years in Vancouver, and decide the Swedish stars’ efforts away from the rink mattered even more than their brilliant play.
Just last month, Baker led a group of 15 First Nations youth and four chaperons from Port Hardy, a remote community on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island, to Metro Vancouver for a four-day Indigenous youth leadership training conference. The Sedin Family Foundation funded their travel and conference attendance.
Many of the Port Hardy teens had never ventured south of Campbell River, let alone to the mainland, Baker said. Last month’s trip, which included a Saturday night Canucks home game and a post-match visit with the Sedins, had a profound effect on the kids from Port Hardy, Baker said.
“A lot of them have mentioned that this opportunity changed their life,” he said.
“Everyone knows (the Sedins) are phenomenal hockey players. But what they did off the ice, like for our youth in Port Hardy, that’s what’s really going to cement who they are. To me, that’s going to stand out a lot more,” Baker added.
“They’re not just pro athletes. They have big hearts and they care for more than just themselves. … It speaks volumes.”
The Port Hardy youth group’s trip isn’t the largest example of the Sedins supporting community causes, just one of the most recent.
While the 37-year-old twins from Ornskoldsvik became the most decorated players in Canucks history, their philanthropic contributions form an even longer list than their hockey awards and achievements, too lengthy to summarize in a single story.
As tributes poured in Monday following the announcement of the Sedins’ retirement from hockey, almost all of them repeated the same six-word phrase: “both on and off the ice.”
It’s an expression commonly used to praise hockey players, but rarely has it been applied so unanimously.
In an emailed statement, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson wrote: “Henrik and Daniel have inspired Vancouverites for almost two decades as world-class gentlemen both on and off the ice.” Premier John Horgan declared it the “end of an era” in a Twitter post, thanking the brothers for “everything you have given our province both on and off the ice .”
After being drafted by Vancouver as teenagers in 1999, the Sedins learned how to conduct themselves from veterans like former Canucks captain and current president Trevor Linden and fellow Swedes Markus Naslund and Mattias Ohlund, Daniel Sedin said at a press conference Monday.
“When you become a Vancouver Canuck, doing things in the community is part of being a Canuck, and that means a lot to us,” Daniel said. “It’s a special team that way.”
Since arriving in Vancouver, the Sedins have reportedly helped more than 50 charities, including the Ca nu ck sf or Kids Fund, the Ca nu ck Place Children’ s Hospice and the YWCA. Daniel’s wife Marinette and Henrik’s wife Johanna regularly joined in the efforts.
Their two families call Vancouver home, they said Monday, and they plan to remain for the immediate future in the city that embraced them.
Year after year, the Sedins supported The Vancouver Sun’s Raise- a-Reader program, promoting literacy programs, with Vancouver Sun and Province editor-in-chief Harold Munro calling it “one of the many lasting contributions they made to our community.”
“The start of the NHL season is a busy time for players and their families,” Munro said. “But the Sedins found time to support literacy through The Vancouver Sun’s Raise-a-Reader campaign in September.”
The brothers’ $1.5-million donation to B.C. Children’s Hospital made headlines in 2010, although that was the opposite of their intention.
In characteristically quiet fashion, the Sedins initially wanted to donate anonymously, The Vancouver Sun reported in 2012. It was only after the hospital’s fundraisers pleaded with the Sedins that they agreed to let the foundation make it public, hoping others would be inspired by their example.
It worked. Soon after the announcement, B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation president Teri Nicholas told The Sun in 2012, “people from all over the province started sending in cheques of $22 and $33 (the Sedins’ jersey numbers), some of them with little notes saying, ‘I can’t give as much as the Sedins, but I can give something.’”
Reached Monday, Nicholas said the Sedins “met with literally hundreds of patients and their families over the years” at Children’s Hospital, and called them “leaders for the team and the entire community of British Columbia.”
Daniel Sedin made a point of mentioning B.C. Children’s Hospital at Monday’s press conference, saying: “When you go there, you see the kids and how happy they are, you meet their families, and I think you realize that hockey, it’s a game.”
It was the game that brought the Sedins to Vancouver, but the city they came to call home will remember them for a lot more.