Written by Steve Farnham, AllHabs.net
MONTREAL, QC. – Meet Donald. Donald is a goaltender who was drafted by the nonexistent nobodies of the Fake Hockey League (FHL). At training camp, Donald didn’t feel like the veterans on the team were making him feel very welcome, most notably the teams number one goaltender, Lars Sul. For the most part, Donald felt that Lars barely acknowledged his existence, and when he did, it was only to put him down in condescending fashion. It was as if Lars made Donald feel, or at least wanted to make Donald feel that he didn’t have his place on the team, or that his number one spot was not in question.
Time to let you in on a big secret; all characters appearing in the above paragraph are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Fooled you right? Right…
What I’m getting at is that most people who have played competitive sports, or probably any type of competitive team sport have gone through what Donald went through, to a certain degree.
I’m one that believes that some of it is acceptable; we’ve all been that rookie player who’s had to fill up the water bottles before games or pick up the pucks at the end of practice. There’s a hierarchy within a team of players, which pretty much equates to rookies having to do all the little things veterans don’t want to do. That’s fine, the great majority of rookies accept it and it’s no cause for concern.
Then there are initiations. Who hasn’t had to drink warm beers during an initiation? Who hasn’t been locked into a bus bathroom, naked, with five other rookies? Who hasn’t had to then do a lap dance, naked to another naked player? Who hasn’t had to walk into a McDonalds wearing only boxers, to be told by the manager that you need shoes and a T-shirt to enter the joint? Who hasn’t had to go into one of the busiest nightclubs in Saint-Hyacinthe, wearing a diaper, with Vaseline in their hair, covered in marker, only to later appear naked on the dance floor, dancing a slow song with a girl? [Editor’s note: TMI, Stevo]
Oh wait, was that just me? Good memories Dragons!
We’re, more correctly, I’m getting a little side-tracked here so I’ll put the train back on the tracks. The point is that it’s nothing new to have an established veteran rub a rookie the wrong way, and during Tuesday night’s game between the Florida Panthers and Montreal Canadiens, RDS gave us quotes from both Jose Theodore and Carey Price, which gave us a glimpse of what appears to be a little bromance between the two.
So to translate:
Carey Price: “Jose Theodore has always treated me well. We don’t see that very often with number one goaltenders. I’m very grateful towards him.”
Jose Theodore: “Younger, I saw how certain goaltenders that I admired treated me. I was disappointed. I told myself I would never compose myself in that fashion.”
Can I just say BOOM!
Theo fired a shot across Patrick Roy’s bow! You can go and say all you want that he could have been referring to anyone, but come on, we know who he was referring to. Theodore grew up in Laval, which is closer to Montreal than most areas in New York City are to New York City. Theodore was drafted in 1994 and Patrick Roy was with the Canadiens up until December of 1995.
Simply put, Patrick Roy was the veteran goalie in Montreal when Theodore attended his first training camp, and it would only make sense that he would have been that guy that Theodore admired.
Je Me Souviens / December 6, 1995: Patrick Roy traded to Colorado by Montreal with Mike Keane for Andrei Kovalenko, Martin Rucinsky and Jocelyn Thibault.
I couldn’t help but to be reminded of Formula Once Racing, back in 2003 when Jenson Button joined the BAR team whose lead driver was Jacques Villeneuve. Button was the new kid on the block and Villeneuve said in the media that Button had been hired mainly for marketing, and also went on to compare him to a boy band member. Villeneuve now plays guitar and Button is considered one of the top drivers in Formula One Racing. I digress (again.)
That being said, what I always like to see is a goalie bromance. As entertaining as it might have been for many (myself at times) to see Roberto Luongo and Timmy Thomas exchanging verbal jabs at each other in last year’s playoff post-game interviews, I much prefer to see goalies throwing flowers at each other.
Apparently Anders Lindback has been trying to teach Pekka Rinne how to play the guitar in Nashville. I would love to see a YouTube video of that!
That’s what we need more of in hockey. Headshots and concussions have taken up too much headline space. Not that I want to move focus away from the issue, but rather, what I’m saying is that we need to hear more about these stories, the feel good stories that they are.
If you have any goalie bromance stories, I’d love to hear about them below.
And Stevo’s little heart grew three sizes that day…
Thank you to @Sarnia_Surfer for the screenshots!
(Images from RDS)