Ovechkin.Indb 2 20/08/10 1:25 PM T H E Ovechkin P R O J E C T
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Ovechkin.indb 2 20/08/10 1:25 PM T h e Ovechkin P r o j e c T Ovechkin.indb 1 20/08/10 1:25 PM Ovechkin.indb 2 20/08/10 1:25 PM T h e Ovechkin P r o j e c T A Behind-The-SceneS Look AT hockey‘S MoST dAngerouS PLAyer dAMien cox & gAre joyce Ovechkin.indb 3 20/08/10 1:25 PM Copyright © 2010 Damien Cox, Gare Joyce All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval sys- tems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1-800-893-5777. Care has been taken to trace ownership of copyright material contained in this book. The publisher will gladly receive any information that will enable them to rectify any reference or credit line in subsequent editions. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Cox, Damien, 1961– The Ovechkin project : a behind-the-scenes look at hockey’s most dangerous player / Damien Cox, Gare Joyce. ISBN 978-0-470-67914-2 1. Ovechkin, Alexander, 1985-. 2. Hockey players—Biography. I. Joyce, Gare II. Title. GV848.5.O95C69 2010 796.962092 C2010-901895-8 Production Credits Cover design: Ian Koo Cover photo credit: The Canadian Press Images/Nick Wass. Interior design and typesetting: Natalia Burobina Printer: Friesens Printing Ltd. Editorial Credits Executive Editor: Karen Milner SW-COC-001271 Production Editor: Pauline Ricablanca John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd. ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS STATEMENT John Wiley & Sons - Canada saved the following 6045 Freemont Blvd. resources by printing the pages of this book on chlorine free paper made with 100% post-consumer Mississauga, Ontario waste. GREENHOUSE L5R 4J3 TREES WATER SOLID WASTE GASES 264 120,853 7,337 25,093 FULLY GROWN GALLONS POUNDS POUNDS Printed in Canada Calculations based on research by Environmental Defense and the Paper Task Force. 1 2 3 4 5 FP 14 13 12 11 10 Manufactured at Friesens Corporation Ovechkin.indb 4 20/08/10 1:25 PM Contents PrOlOgue 1 chaPter 1 vancouver “it’s a Dangerous game and he’s the Most Dangerous guy” 9 chaPter 2 Dynamo “if You Won’t Become a Player, i Don’t know Who Will” 19 chaPter 3 Selkirk, Stonewall, Piestany, halifax, Moscow “like a Wild Stallion” 37 chaPter 4 Washington “how could Something Which on Paper looked So right Be So Wrong?” 59 chaPter 5 helsinki, Moscow, Pittsburgh, Washington, toronto “is Pittsburgh Beside the Ocean?” 73 chaPter 6 Washington “it Was On from the First time he Stepped on the ice” 91 chaPter 7 Madison avenue, Washington, the champs-Élysées “You Basically just Signed the Babe ruth of hockey” 123 chaPter 8 vancouver “like gorillas out of a cage” 147 chaPter 9 Buffalo “this is a crazy Business” 183 chaPter 10 chicago “i respect everybody, but on the ice it can’t Be everything” 207 chaPter 11 Washington, Montreal “it’s not going to happen. it’s not going to happen.” 221 ePilOgue las vegas “he is not alone Over there” 253 acknOWleDgMentS 271 inDeX 273 Ovechkin.indb 5 20/08/10 1:25 PM To Frank Cooke and Kim Nossal, Teachers distant but not forgotten who inspired and believed. —Damien Cox To my friend, Jim Kelley, the most honest and decent guy in the business. —Gare Joyce Ovechkin.indb 6 20/08/10 1:25 PM prologue ALExANDER OVECHKIN was lounging in his suite at the Manda- rin Oriental hotel, forty floors above Central Park on a glorious late summer day. Caviar, blini, and splits of champagne were on the night- table. There was enough for both of them—Ovechkin and Cheyenne Tozzi, a blonde model from Australia, who was currently wearing only a sheet from the bed and a practiced come-hither look, though her attention seemed to be divided between him and the Washington Capitals sweater thrown over the end of the bed. Ovechkin had his back turned to her. He was in a simple white shirt, undone down the mid-chest, and pin-striped pants—whose clothes he was wearing he couldn’t keep track of because there was a full rack of designer items for him to select from. He was looking at the camera, trying to ignore the stylist charged with bed-head maintenance and the photographer’s assistant bouncing the flash so that it would light his blue eyes just right. Ovechkin was staring into the lens with a brooding expression that he seemed to have lifted from a Calvin Klein billboard or, more likely, a scene out of Zoolander. Okay, it wasn’t an intimate moment, just a recreation of the every- day life of a sports superstar—or, at least, an imagining of what it’s like Ovechkin.indb 1 20/08/10 1:25 PM 2 Ovechkin Project to be Alexander Ovechkin, age 24. How fans imagine his life must be and how he imagines his life should be. Ovechkin later rifled through the rack, trying to find the right look. Ms. Tozzi was a little easier to fit—one shot would capture Ovechkin looking admiringly at her as she emerged from the bathtub wearing only a discreet lather of bubbles. She’d later don his Capitals sweater— okay, don isn’t quite the right word—she strategically draped it over herself to cover the bare minimum required to keep the September is- sue of Men’s Journal on the magazine racks of suitable-for-family news- stands. A fashion shoot is a good measure of celebrity. They ask you to pose and look natural in the most unnatural positions. They ask you to submit to inane question-and-answer sessions (Q: “Jessica Alba or Megan Fox?”? A: “Definitely both.” Q: “What bores you more than anything?” A: “This. [Smiles.] Most boring thing ever.”) That’s when you know you’ve made it or, at least, are making it. It was hard to imagine any other player in the NHL circa 2009 doing this. Some had a sense of fashion. Henrik Lundqvist, the New York Rangers’ goaltender, is ranked among the best-dressed athletes, and probably one of the best-dressed New Yorkers of any stripe, but his tastes run to the high formal. Other NHLers look good when they wear suits to the arena. But Ovechkin’s fashion in this Men’s Journal spread was nothing that Lundqvist would wear and nothing that most players in the league have hanging in their closets. The look was more rock star than hockey player, that of a jet-setter who was looking to burn his way through his millions as quickly as possible, a celebrity rebel thumbing his nose at authority. His face said hockey. It always had and, short of getting work done by a surgeon to the stars, it always will. His crooked nose, his uneven hair looked like it had been sitting under a helmet. The rest of him said hockey, too. He was as thick through the chest as any two size- 44s. Never mind suits, any shirt he put on looked like it had padded shoulders. His bare feet, visible in one shot, looked like something that you’d find in the dinosaur wing of a museum. But this fashion spread didn’t say hockey at all. It said star. Four years before, when he came to North America, to begin his NHL career, he was a kid who just couldn’t get enough. When he Ovechkin.indb 2 20/08/10 1:25 PM Prologue 3 went to the NHL’s draft combine, he already had the top slot in the NHL entry draft locked up, but just for the fun of it, attacked the most grueling of stations of the physical testing and posted the biggest numbers of the 100 prospects who tried it—it was like a new video game was being passed around. When he first joined the Washington Capitals months later, he had been like a kid on his first visit to Disneyland—a kid with millions in his pocket. Back then he was just 20, a man-child, seemingly determined to soak up every bit of a new culture at every opportunity. When he met his future employer, Ted Leonsis, Ovechkin ate a whole cantaloupe over the course of a short conversation—his family was one of the few he knew that was able to get fruit during the winter, but he had never had a cantaloupe and went through it like it was an oversized orange. In Leonsis’s pool, Ovechkin did lap after lap underwater for up to two minutes at a time—“like a torpedo,” the Capitals’ owner said. When Ovechkin stayed over at George McPhee’s, the Washington general manager let him borrow a bicycle to go out for a ride—which seemed like a good idea until Ovechkin pulled away from him on the hilly country roads and faded from view well up ahead. McPhee, a former player still at his playing weight, was beat by the time he got back to the house but Ovechkin was already there, playing hockey in the driveway with his hosts’ kids. He was almost desperate to fit in with his new teammates. In the dressing room after the first practice in his first training camp, he walked up to the erasable board, copied down the names from the nameplates over the players’ stalls, and then tried to say them.