Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (25 page)

“You can't quit on the play, can you?” Kovalev said with a smile. “That's what I was taught. Never quit on the play. Never quit.”

He didn't, and both Alexei Kovalev and the Montreal Canadiens are better for it. He talks now of playing in the next Olympics, of playing enough more years that now that he has passed a thousand NHL games, he might reach two thousand—and will be a member of the Canadiens when they bring the Stanley Cup home to its rightful resting place.

“I think anything is possible in my life,” he said. “Everything comes unexpected.”

Unexpected, indeed. In the summer of 2009 Kovalev became a free agent and, despite an offer from the Canadiens and even a rally by Montreal fans to keep him, he left for a sweeter deal in Ottawa, $10 million over two years. It soon turned sour. The sensitive Kovalev did not like the coach, Cory Clouston, and simply stopped trying. He “floated,” uninterested, uninspired and ineffective, through most of two seasons before the Senators sloughed him off to the Pittsburgh Penguins for a conditional seventh-round draft pick. He scored in his first game and then won the game in a shootout
.

H
e watches it faithfully, at least once every season, and almost always alone: a Canadian kid who was once, but no longer, considered a “natural” in his country's game, stares hypnotically at an American movie on the American game, and based on a story that was written forty years before anyone in Canada had ever heard of Alexandre Daigle.

Just as other hockey players know—and love to shout out—every line of dialogue in the Paul Newman hockey movie,
Slapshot
, Alexandre Daigle can quietly recite every word that is spoken in the 1984 Robert Redford movie of Bernard Malamud's 1952 classic baseball novel,
The Natural
.

“You've got a gift, Roy,” the father in the movie says as he catches a ball thrown by the young Redford. “But it's not enough—you've got to develop it. You rely too much on your gift and you'll fail.”

The Natural
is the story of a handsome, charismatic ball player, Roy Hobbs, who is blessed with both supernatural talent and a mystical bat called “Wonderboy.” The film is a moving, exquisitely photographed account of the great American dream gone temporarily wrong: brilliance thwarted by fate, the long, difficult struggle back, the hero finally proving the doubters wrong with one dramatic, desperate, triumphant swing of the bat.

“It's a sad, sad story,” says Alexandre Daigle. “Not a fun story at all—but it shows you what you can accomplish.”

The book has a decidedly different ending. The final swing of the bat, just as desperate, fails to connect, the final strike followed by shame and disgrace.

Like the mysterious Roy Hobbs, there are a great many things about Daigle that the fans in the stands do not know and may not understand. Roy Hobbs was advised to read Homer. Daigle has lately been reading Shakespeare and Socrates. But he will never read Bernard Malamud, not ever.

Alexandre Daigle is twenty-two years old and as of today has been paid $10,763,000 for playing slightly less than four and a half seasons in the National Hockey League. In 291 games, he scored 73 goals, which works out to $147,438.35 a goal. He has just signed—and negotiated, entirely on his own—a new one-year deal with the Senators that will kick in when his $12.25-million deal finally dies come the end of the 1997–98 season. This season as of Friday, he has scored six goals. For the 1998–99 NHL season, he will receive a raise to $2,736,000.

More than four years after that outrageous deal that in no small part led to the 1994 NHL owners' lockout of the players, the shortened 1994–95 season and the rookie salary cap that came of it, Alexandre Daigle is still defined by numbers with dollar signs beside them far more than by any other statistic. If people point to any of his hockey numbers, it is usually to the minus 33 he registered last season in the plus-minus rating, meaning he was on the ice for 33 more even-strength goals scored on his team than he was for goals scored by his team. It was 19 more goals against than any of his Ottawa teammates, and four more than any other player in the entire league.

One might think, then, that Daigle would like to avoid such a topic, but one would be wrong to think this. There can be no doubt that criticism stings—his closest friends have seen the tears—but Alexandre Daigle has been blessed with a public persona that renders criticism as hard to deliver as to accept.

At a charity golf tournament staged this summer by Senators coach Jacques Martin, the coach had just finished bragging to the dinner crowd about his team's improved goals-against play when a laughing Daigle took to the podium and brought down the house with an extravagant claim, saying, “I'm the guy who instituted the defensive system.” “He had them in the palm of his hands,” says Senators broadcaster Dean Brown, who emceed the dinner. “It was an incredible show.”

It is also a travelling show. While the Senators can claim two NHL All-Stars—Alexei Yashin and Daniel Alfredsson—it is still Daigle whom the fans wait for at the hotels and outside the rinks. His is the autograph most sought, the photograph most treasured, the smile best remembered. He has what is called in the sports world “star quality,” a charisma that was first noticed when he was sixteen and persists today, despite the many disappointments, despite the critics. For every boo that falls down from the stands, an electric buzz still sizzles through the rink the moment Daigle, in full stride, picks up a pass or a loose puck. Most times it doesn't work out, but on those rare occasions that it does, it seems the dream remains possible. Certainly, many continue to believe he will still come true.

The media still gather around his locker for comment. His words still matter, his enormous promise is still worthy of debate while other high draft picks have either blossomed or been dismissed. He sits facing questions and notepads with a ready smile and disarming quip, his shoulders almost always hunched into a blue, sweat-stained T-shirt.

If the cameras could catch those shoulders bare, they would find two small tattoos. On the left shoulder, a red Superman
emblem: “Super-Daigle,” he likes to call it. On the right, a symbol unrecognized in hockey, where the tattoo of choice is more often the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character. On Daigle's right shoulder is a looping circle, one half dark, the other half light. It is the yin and yang from classic Confucianism, the dark side and the light side of the hill of life. The contrast is deliberate: light and dark, heaven and earth, birth and death, matter and spirit. The yin and yang may appear opposite, but they are actually complementary. Each makes up for what the other lacks. To be whole, they need each other.

The contrast in Alexandre Daigle's life is growing more apparent by the year. While some of his teammates are mystified—some even miffed—by his failure to devote every moment of his life and every ounce of his energy to hockey, to make his game and profession the absolute priority, Daigle's main drive has been to gain some measure of balance in his life. His closest friend in Ottawa does not even play hockey, does not talk about the game, but is instead a twenty-eight-year-old finishing a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Ottawa.

When Yannick Mailloux looks at his friend, Alexandre Daigle, he sees not a hockey player but “
un animal prise dans une cage
”—a caged animal. “Alex is a dreamer,” says Mailloux. “Alex is like anyone else. He has dreams—even if he is playing in the NHL. We all want to become players at some time. But you know, his dreams are more real than our dreams.

“He wants more. He wants to be Alex. And Alex is different.”

There are no secrets to the great Canadian dream that a young Alexandre Daigle shared with millions of others who were then
very much like him: every one of them a natural, a different stick in their hands, though, sharp blades on hard ice, the rest of the known world trailing, the blade of the stick snapping, the puck soaring, the goaltender missing, the Stanley Cup rising.

“Dreams really do come true,” NHL Hall-of-Famer Lanny McDonald later wrote of the first day he reported to the Toronto Maple Leafs. “… I'd finally made it. There I was at the Gardens, about to begin playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs, the team I had cheered for like crazy as a kid. I sat there, realizing that everything I had dreamed about had come true.”

Jean-Yves Daigle shared this common Canadian dream, only his took him to the Montreal Canadiens instead of to the Toronto Maple Leafs. Like most young dreamers, Jean-Yves Daigle would eventually give up on something that just wasn't going to happen and settle down to a different life. He married Francine and began working for a Laval printing company, just outside Montreal. And the dream he simply passed down, as is done in households all over the country every single winter.

“Everyone thinks, ‘My son will play in the NHL,' ” says Jean-Yves Daigle today. “Every father believes that. Even when he says, ‘No, no, no, it's not true.' They all think it. Believe me, I know.”

He tried to interest the first son, Sebastian, and encouraged the girl who followed, Veronique, to play hockey as well. He spent hours building a backyard rink, shovelling and pounding down the snow, levelling the surface and flooding long into the night with pails of hot water and a garden hose that would stiffen the moment he laid it down. But it didn't work. Sebastian and Veronique learned to skate, but were not very interested. By the time the baby, Alexandre, was walking around and wanting to go out to play, Jean-Yves's rink was a memory. What, he had decided, was the point?

The youngest boy, however, was different. He hounded his parents and older siblings to cart him off to neighbourhood rinks and wait for him, and soon he was demanding to be signed up for
hockey. Jean-Yves laughed at the youngster's first attempts to get the stick to move the puck, yet there was something different about this youngster. He could move faster than anyone else. And he also had what Jean-Yves Daigle calls “la
loie de conviction
—if you want something, if you work hard enough, it's there for you.”

The father saw this enormous desire in the son, and decided to do whatever he could to help. “Every parent puts skates on their child,” Jean-Yves Daigle says, “and then it starts. It's a big job, but nobody has any experience. It's like a horse race. Ten horses start out, but only one wins. Sometimes it's a photo finish, the difference between first and second, and the difference can be just a detail.

“That's why I worked for ten years on the details. Skates just right, always new laces, the right way to lace up a skate, black tape on the stick, the right sleep. It's just the details. All the boys are the same, good parents, good boys, good skaters. What's the difference, then? I work on the details.”

This was not Walter Gretzky teaching passing techniques on the backyard rink. This was not the stereotypical hockey parent pounding on the glass and calling the coach at all hours of the night. This was merely Jean-Yves and Francine Daigle doing what they could do to support their child's great dream. “I never said to him to shoot for the top,” says Jean-Yves Daigle. “It's attitude. And attitude is the job of the parent.”

If Alexandre's team lost, Jean-Yves would say to him: “You have to think about losing. Then you go to sleep. When you wake, it's gone. When you win, when you score five or six goals, I want you to think about that very hard before you go to sleep. But tomorrow it is gone. You have to forget a bad game; you have to forget the best game.”

This may seem a small point, but it was to have the most profound effect on the boy as he grew. Instead of being serious and driven, even angry, he was happy-go-lucky, easy-going, confident in himself and content. The parents never pushed, never yelled.
The one time the father did criticize the son's play—for a dumb penalty he took in junior hockey—the boy burst into tears. “When parents yell, I don't understand that,” says Jean-Yves Daigle. “It is important to be positive all the time. He's a hockey player, but first of all he's a child.”

The child had a gift, an extraordinary gift of speed. From the moment he was set down on the ice, he was the fastest in his age group, and soon faster than even the older players. It seemed a phenomenon, but in fact it was an oddity. Alexandre simply raced up the ice and scored, and because of his extraordinary feet, his hands—and to some extent his brain—never had to deal with the traffic and congestion of the game as other youngsters had to. The blessing of such speed was also a curse—but, of course, no one knew this at the time.

By peewee age, Alexandre Daigle was already being noticed, the thirteen-year-old who had scored 150 goals for his Laval team. By sixteen, he was Quebec junior hockey's rookie of the year. By seventeen, he was threatening Mario Lemieux's junior record of 282 points when, dramatically and unexpectedly, he was suspended by the league for a vicious cross-check on another player. The suspension cost him a chance at the scoring record but—as can only happen in hockey—it increased the interest of NHL teams in him. He was not only fast, they thought, but also believed, incorrectly, that he had North American hockey's beloved “mean streak.”