My First Goal: 50 Players and the Goal That Marked the Beginning of Their NHL Career - Softcover

Brophy, Mike

 
9780771016820: My First Goal: 50 Players and the Goal That Marked the Beginning of Their NHL Career
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0771016824 ISBN 13: 9780771016820
Verlag: MCCLELLAND & STEWART, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Every player who ever scored in the NHL has a different story about his first goal. For some, like Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe, or Phil Esposito, their first goal was just one of many they would score in their long and illustrious careers. For others, their first goal was also their last. Sports journalist Mike Brophy has interviewed fifty players about their first NHL goal, and the result is a wide-ranging wealth of personal stories that include high-profile former NHLers and many of the game’s best players from today. Some players, such as Chicago Blackhawks captain Jonathan Toews, scored in their first NHL game. Others were not so lucky. Jim Vesey, for example, scored his only NHL goal into an empty net. With lots of direct quotes from the players themselves and Brophy supplying the tantalizing background information and career highlights, this book is a treat for hockey fans young and old.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mike Brophy is a hockey analyst for Rogers Sportsnet, a syndicated columnist and twice-weekly analyst for The Team 990 in Montreal. Brophy covered junior hockey for the Peterborough Examiner for 14 years and served as a senior writer with The Hockey News for 17 years. The Hamilton, Ontario, native has been writing about hockey for more than 30 years and won six Ontario Newswire writing awards for his coverage of junior hockey. Brophy won the Benjamin Franklin Award for best new voice for his book Curtis Joseph: The Acrobat. Mike has collaborated with Ralph Mellanby, renowned Executive Television Producer of Hockey Night in Canada, on two bestselling books The Legends of Hockey and Let The Games Begin. Brophy and his wife, Marilyn, live in Pickering, Ontario, and have three children, Chase, Blair, and Darryl.

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BOBBY ORR
OCTOBER 22, 1966
 
There have been many superstars in the history of the National Hockey League, but when it comes down to the question of the best player ever, the debate generally centres around two players: Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky. And it’s a close race, too. Gretzky set just about every scoring record you could imagine in his illustrious twenty-year career and is the NHL’s all-time leading scorer. He wasn’t the fastest skater, nor the hardest shooter, but he had unimaginable vision on the ice, and nobody made players around him better than Number 99.
 
Orr, on the other hand, had a tragically short career—just nine full seasons. In the three ensuing campaigns, one with Boston and two with the Chicago Blackhawks, Orr played a total of thirty-six games. Knee injuries cut short what could have been one of the most amazing and productive careers ever. Still, the case could be made that nobody revolutionized the game to a greater extent than the shy young man from Parry Sound, Ontario.
 
In an era when most defencemen worried mostly about preventing the opposition from scoring, Orr wanted more from the game. Sure, he loved to shut down the other team’s top players—that was his number-one priority. But it didn’t mean he wasn’t interested in joining the points party. When he got the puck, he didn’t simply fire it off the boards or glass and out of the zone. He looked for openings—like a football running back looking for daylight beyond his monstrous linemen as they cleared a path for his rush—and headed up the ice on a mission. His goal was to score—and if he could not do that himself, he aimed to at least help one of his teammates get on the board. The result was a new way of thinking for defencemen. Bobby Orr had been the sport’s golden boy from the time he first joined the Oshawa Generals of the Ontario Hockey Association as a fourteen-year-old, so why wouldn’t others follow his lead? Orr said nobody stood in his way when he started rushing the puck as a youngster. When he would gobble up the puck in his team’s zone and turn up ice, fans would move to the edges of their seats. What will he do? How far will he go?
 
“I didn’t have anybody who discouraged me from playing the way I played,” he said. “Don’t forget, they didn’t have the draft the way they do today, so when I was playing in Oshawa, when I was fourteen, the coaches there were hired by the Bruins. They didn’t discourage me or suggest I change my style. I just always played like that. Maybe it comes from playing river hockey or bay hockey. We scrimmaged . . . played shinny. That’s how I learned to play.
 
“I actually started out as a right winger when I first started playing hockey, and I don’t remember why I was moved back. But I guess it all worked out in the end. I believe it was Bucko McDonald who coached us in Parry Sound who moved me back to defence, but I don’t recall why.”
 
McDonald coached Orr during his peewee and bantam years. When Orr’s dad, Doug, asked why he moved Bobby to the blue line, McDonald responded, “Bobby was born to play defence.”
 
Truer words have never been spoken.
 
Being identified as an amazing hockey player at a young age can be a double-edged sword. For Orr, growing up in a small town in Northern Ontario, it meant having to move away from home at fourteen. Most parents won’t let their fourteen-year-old sons walk to the bus stop on their own nowadays, but in 1962 it was different. His quest to play in the NHL meant leaving home.
 
It wasn’t easy.
 
“I was so homesick,” Orr said. “It was tough being away from my parents, my friends, but I understood it was the next step and I was looking forward to it, so even though a part of me wanted to go home, I just fought through it.”
 
Orr joined the Oshawa Generals as a prodigy playing against young men up to five years his senior. Although he was baby-faced and looked every one of his fourteen years off the ice, Orr was an instant hero on it. He had 6 goals and 21 points that first year with Oshawa, and in his second season, at fifteen, he was third in team scoring with 29 goals and 72 points in 56 games. By now, the entire hockey world was aware of the young fearless defenceman who was changing the way the game was played.
 
In Orr’s third season with Oshawa, he upped his numbers to 34 goals and 93 points, good for second on the team, and in his final season of junior he scored a whopping 38 goals and 94 points in 47 games—tops on the club. His 92 penalty minutes in his fourth season was a good indicator that he would not be pushed around.
 
“People ask me why I had the success I had in the game, and I think it really comes down to the love and passion I had for the game,” Orr said. “Unfortunately, I think we suck the love and passion out of our kids by humiliating them for foolishness. I never had that taken out of me. It was never a job to me. It was never a big effort to go to practice. I couldn’t wait to get on the bay or the river. When my turn came to play indoors, I couldn’t wait to get to the rink to have some fun and be with my friends. It was a way of life, and I loved it. I was never told by my parents that I was going to be a pro hockey player and make money. I just had a great love and passion for the game and couldn’t wait to get on the ice. I was one of the fortunate ones who got to the NHL.”
 
As a youngster attending high school at R. S. McLaughlin Collegiate Vocational Institute, Orr proved he was more than a one-trick pony. Asked by the track and field coach if he’d be interested in running, Orr soon joined other runners for 7 a.m. training sessions. He found it pretty tiring to be getting home from road games in the wee hours of the morning and then having to get up to run through the halls at McLaughlin, so he packed it in.
 
“The coach then asked me if I could do anything else, so I tried my hand at javelin,” Orr said.
 
How did that work out?
 
“I still hold the school record for longest throw,” Orr said with a laugh.
 
After four years with the Generals, Orr was ready for the NHL. The Bruins held his rights, and boy, were they ever in need of an infusion of talent. Prior to his arrival, the Bruins had finished fifth out of six teams in 1965–66 and dead last the five seasons before that. Fans in Boston were aware of this teenage scoring phenom playing junior in Oshawa and couldn’t wait to see him for themselves. Although the Bruins dipped back to last place in his first season, with a 17–43–10 record, there was no denying he was a special player.
 
Even though he missed nine games with a knee injury, Orr managed 13 goals and 41 points with 102 penalty minutes and won the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s best rookie. New York Ranger veteran Harry Howell won the Norris Trophy as the league’s top defenceman, and upon accepting the award, said he was happy to have won it that season because Orr would own the trophy in the years to come. Howell’s off-thecuff comment turned out to be quite prophetic, as Orr won the Norris Trophy in each of the next eight seasons.
 
In Orr’s first game, on October 19, 1966, against the Detroit Red Wings, he didn’t score, but he got to know first-hand why people respected and feared Mr. Hockey, Gordie Howe. “I was watching a pretty pass that I made, and Gordie wanted to let the young player know the old guy was still around,” Orr recalled....

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Verlag
MCCLELLAND & STEWART
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0771016824
ISBN 13 
9780771016820
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

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Trebbin
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