A DREAM COMES TRUE FOR SAM THE WARRIOR
Young cancer patient inks one-day deal, joins favourite Habs for special practice
The Canadiens gained MONTREAL a new fan on Monday.
Clark Smith has always been a huge Toronto Maple Leafs fan, but his 11-year-old son, Samuel, cheers for the Canadiens.
“I blame it on my wife,” Clark said about his son being a Canadiens fan. “She’s a francophone, so my kids are francophone.”
The family hails from Fredericton, N.B., but on Monday morning they were at the Bell Sports Complex in Brossard, thanks to the Children’s Wish Foundation of Canada. Last June, Samuel’s parents learned he had Stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He underwent a very aggressive form of chemotherapy and radiation treatment at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax and at the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital in Fredericton, and had his final surgery on Nov. 30. While in hospital, the family was put in touch with the Children’s Wish Foundation.
Samuel didn’t have to think long before coming up with his wish.
“They say that 60 per cent of their wishes are Disney World, but I didn’t want to go to Disney,” Samuel said. “I wanted to pick something that I know you can’t pay for. You can pay to go to Disney, but you can’t just pay to practice with the Canadiens.”
On Monday morning, just before the Canadiens started their practice, Samuel was on the ice for about 15 minutes along with his three favourite players: Carey Price, Brendan Gallagher and Max Domi, who were joined by Shea Weber and Charles Hudon. Samuel passed the puck around with the players and took some shots on Price.
“Scoring on Price was pretty cool,” Samuel said afterward.
Before taking to the ice, Samuel met general manager Marc Bergevin in his office and signed a oneday contract with the Canadiens.
“I would have liked around $8 million for eight years, but I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Samuel said with a smile.
The smiles on Samuel’s parents while he skated with his hockey heroes were priceless.
“I don’t have words, to be honest,” Samuel’s father said. “Breathtaking. This is definitely a highlight for the whole family just to see him smiling and being a kid again. For us, this is a big day, too, because it’s been a hard year. To see him so happy … I mean, this is as excited as I’ve seen him since the diagnosis. A big, heartfelt thank you to the Montreal Canadiens, because I know ultimately they had to to say yes to this (or it wouldn’t have happened). So I’m probably now not a Maple Leafs fan anymore, I’m probably a Montreal Canadiens fan.”
Samuel no longer has any active cancer cells, but will require regular checkups for the next seven years to make sure the cancer doesn’t return. The prognosis is good.
“It’s a 95 per cent chance that he lives a cancer-free life,” Samuel’s mother, Leanne, said. “He’s so happy and excited today, he’s almost vibrating.”
When asked what it was like to first find out her son had cancer, Leanne’s eyes welled with tears.
“The greatest fear that you could ever feel,” she said. “I don’t have words for it. It’s pure terror.”
“Horror,” Samuel’s father added. “It was just pure heartbreak. I can’t even explain it beyond that. Fear. Just a really dark, dark time. You struggle to remain positive, but you had to feel for him. You still wake up every morning with the same fear and go to bed every night with the same fear, trying to sort out what our new normal is.”
Samuel, a Grade 6 student at École Les Éclaireurs, returned to his Fredericton Kings peewee hockey team just before Christmas and has resumed practising taekwondo, something he started at age 4. He has already won a provincial championship in the martial art and dreams of playing for the Canadiens or going to the Olympics in taekwondo.
Samuel’s father said the boy’s taekwondo training and positive attitude helped him through some difficult times.
“His taekwondo coach (Craig Doucet) spent a lot of time with him during treatments,” the father said. “He would come and sit with him at the hospital and talk to him about inner strength. To focus, he would say: ‘Pain is just fear leaving the body. Let the fear go.’ Sam really took that to heart and hung on to it. I would say a lot of his attitude absolutely goes back to his martial arts background.
“In Fredericton, his moniker is Sam the Warrior. He’s been our warrior. In a lot of ways, he’s kept me positive just because he’s been so positive throughout. He had some bad days, too, but not very many, to be honest with you. He was pretty upbeat.”
Said Samuel: “I just tried to be positive because as soon as it was over I could just go back to my regular life and have fun again.” Like he did on Monday.
As for his father being a Maple Leafs fan, Samuel shook his head and said: “That was a stupid choice.”