It’s a cold morning, January 1, 2015, and the sun has revealed the wreckage of last night’s New Year’s Eve festivities on West Seventh Street in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota: Dirty gray snow littered with cigarettes cakes the edges of the city side- walks, a pedestrian ashtray. The trash cans on the corners have had enough, too; crushed plastic cups spill out of their mouths and lie all around. Cars have been left abandoned and are moored to the curb until their owners return. Last night’s revelers are now today’s stragglers, and downcast people shuffle clumsily along the sidewalks with their jackets and hats pulled down tight, hooded in what appears to be regret, searching for coffee or a way home or something greasy to eat. The streets themselves are no better. The trucks that rattle down the avenues are driven by the blue-collar folks who are made to work while the greater world takes the day off, and they’re pissed about it so they just go right on ahead and crank up the tunes and blow through red lights and say the hell with it.
Then you enter the Xcel Energy Center, home of the Minnesota Wild, and every- thing changes. On New Year’s Day, the inside of the “X” has the sanctity of a church. The stands are completely empty, every row an unclaimed pew, while the massive rows of stadium lights burn with a celestial glow from up high. Under- neath the lights a great stillness rolls down deep from the rafters, cascading down . . . down . . . down . . . until it soothingly washes over all the dark-green seats in the lower bowl. At first, the silence is slightly jarring. This arena, voted best NHL rink by Sports Illustrated in 2006 with a record 230 straight raucous sellouts, is typically throbbing with eighteen thousand Minnesotans, a fan base that is equally knowledgeable and nervy as they pack the stands to support a team and, more important, a town that is desperate for wins.
On Minnesota Wild game days, the X is your typical modern arena, and it be- comes a buzzing cauldron of noise: the shouts of beer, pretzels, and peaaaaaanuts pepper the air like buckshot; the metallic wailing of stadium rock peels back the walls and eardrums at nearly every stoppage of play; and overcaffeinated announc- ers demand the crowd to GET UP . . . AND . . . MAKE . . . SOME . . . NOISE!
But not today. Even the famous lighthouse, the shiny tower encased in glass at the top of the arena that blasts a deafening foghorn when the home team scores a goal, stands silent. Right now everything is clean and bright and in its right place. There’s not a single nacho tray or soda cup littering the ground. The Zamboni qui- etly slips off the end of the ice, and the freshly cleaned sheet radiates possibility.
The Toronto Maple Leafs are in town to play the Wild the next day, and Leafs players begin to trickle onto the ice for practice. They won the previous night in Boston, and by beating the Bruins they grabbed a sliver of light in a season that is once again slipping toward the abysmal. Toronto is currently mired in a near- decadelong slump of mediocrity. And this is made all the more painful by the fact that we’re talking about the Toronto Maple Leafs here—one of the most storied franchises in all of hockey, a bedrock team in the history of the NHL. This isn’t some newborn warm-weather expansion team. No, Toronto fans don’t show up to games in shorts. Their fandom is so serious it’s ancestral, a provincial allegiance that is the birthright of nearly the entire populace, generations of glory and suf- fering and rooting for not only the team but the city and a way of life. If you’re a Leafs fan, you want the team to win in the same way you wanted to get the girl, a mix of tingling love and sheer desperation and desire and, at times, loathing and hatred.
Due to lukewarm player drafts, the routine parceling out of draft picks, free- agency acquisitions gone awry, and just plain old bad business decisions in the form of bloated contracts, recent years haven’t been kind to the Leafs. After a pun- ishing drought of seven years, the Leafs finally made the NHL playoffs in 2013. The city, the province, and all of Leafs Nation once again puffed up their chests and pounded the drums of optimism. Then, in an epic Game 7 in the first round versus the Boston Bruins, the Leafs had a three-goal lead in the third period, and those drums of optimism were pounded like thunder sticks in the hands of John Bon- ham . . . until . . . until . . . the Bruins, led by their indefatigable alternate cap- tain Patrice Bergeron, scored four consecutive goals and beat the Leafs in overtime. The holy hockey heart of Leafs Nation was once again bereft.
But today they believe. Last night’s win in Beantown was a huge one for the struggling team, a positive step forward. Now, in this place, on this clean sheet of glowing ice, fresh off the victory over a loathed rival, anything is possible. It is New Year’s Day, after all, a day when people traditionally take a moment to reflect on the past and make resolutions for improvement. This is a day of renewal, and a prac- tice that has been set aside for the stroking of their mojo. The practice moves at such a fast clip and with such precision and positivity that as I sit alone in the vast sea of green seats, I can feel a heavy tide moving out. Even the badly injured Toron- to player David Clarkson is seen moving across the ice with ease, laughing it up, hope in his heart that his future will be brighter than his past.
Of all the people who will be in the stadium today and tomorrow, Clarkson is looking for better days ahead now that the calendar has turned. He suffered a grisly facial injury two months ago at the hands of the Buffalo Sabres’ Cody McCormick when the two engaged in a spirited preseason fight in October. The right side of his face was clobbered with a punch that left him with two fractures in his cheek and eye socket. Clarkson knew immediately that he was in trouble when he went to open his mouth and felt liquid flood in. He was seen rubbing his face as he skated toward the penalty box. X-rays in the following days revealed the damage.
Today Clarkson motors around the ice with straight-line speed, hammering shots and zipping passes despite the fact that his face hasn’t completely healed. After the high-tempo practice on the first day of the new year, Clarkson stands in the visitors’ locker room sweaty and resilient. He sits down at his locker stall and clears out some stuff next to him.
“Take a seat, man,” Clarkson offers.
“Really?” I reply in shock. (Note: I’ve interviewed a lot of hockey players over the years, and Clarkson is the first one to ever offer me a seat.)
“Of course,” he replies, his arm extended.
His unpretentious demeanor is no act. Clarkson is a native son of Toronto and was raised in the Mimico neighborhood, where he learned to play hockey in a blue- collar caged-in ice rink simply named the Rink Behind the Beer Store because, well, that’s where it was located. He’s ruggedly handsome, cut from the hard edges of his working-class upbringing and the manual labor he’s endured, and seems like a guy who would be just as comfortable driving a forklift as he is on the forecheck.
More important, he is a third-generation Leafs fan and now plays for his home- town team, wearing the jersey he loved as a child. This is why he continues to bat- tle bravely. Quitting or skipping practice is not an option, because he doesn’t want to let down his hockey team, his family, and his town, arguably the holy trinity in most Canadians’ lives.
Clarkson slips off his practice jersey, hands it to an equipment man who hovers in the middle of the room, and thanks him. Then he slides off his shoulder pads and hangs them up. A bright green tattoo of a hand grenade is visible on his bi- ceps, and his torso still heaves with adrenaline as the spirited practice works its way out of his system.
“So, how’s the face?” I say to begin our interview.
“It’s okay,” Clarkson answers lightly. “It’s the first time for me with an injury like this. I’ve fought a lot in my career and have never had this happen.”
“You continue to play with it, though. Where did you learn to play in pain?” I ask.
Clarkson rubs a chapped hand across his scarred chin and wipes a sheet of sweat off his face with a towel. Then he says, “As long as you can play and it’s not prohibiting you too much, it’s something you want to do. You want to push for- ward.”
Even though he still doesn’t have feeling in the cheek area of his face, already nicked with numerous scars, his legs and hands still work so that means he’ll play on. He officially received clearance from the Toronto medical staff and team man- agement to continue playing, because they have been able to protect his face with a
series of cages and masks. But this medical clearance came with a few restrictions, primarily that he stop fighting for a while. They’ve advised him that if his face hasn’t fully healed and he continues to fight, he runs the severe risk of suffering an injury even worse than before, one that could lead to possible surgeries and rehab and, ultimately, missed games.
“Obviously, I want to play,” Clarkson says. “Just getting the feeling back in my face will be something. I have another scan coming up soon. I have to let it sit. The orbital bone is a small bone and takes time to heal. We luckily have really good doctors here, and everything has gone smoothly.”
In order to keep playing, for the last two months of 2014 Clarkson tried to adjust to the various face masks and visors that have been attached to his helmet to pro- tect his face. Although the cages and visors allow Clarkson to keep playing with a broken face, they severally limit his vision and, more important, tamp down his naturally pugnacious style, in which fighting and sticking up for his teammates play integral roles.
Now, on the first day of the new year, Clarkson is on the verge of getting all of his facial protection removed, which ultimately means he’ll be given full medical clearance soon after to continue fighting if called upon. For most people, a new year represents a fresh start. We look back at the previous year’s highs and lows and we make promises to change our ways. But all talk of resolutions and renewal is lost on Clarkson, for he will not shy away from his past, even the very thing that has caused him so much pain. Instead he’ll eagerly return to his previous form of fists and scrapes and raising all sorts of hell out there on the ice.
“I’ll still play that role,” Clarkson says. “Whether it’s running around hitting or fighting, I’m going to keep playing the same way. I’m going to finish my checks, and, if need be, stick up for a guy. I’m going to keep doing what got me here.”
What got him to the Toronto squad is a playing style filled with aggression and relentless pursuit. At 6'1" and 220 pounds and with an on-ice disposition full of ire (think Braveheart on skates), Clarkson plays a game of constant verbal and physical contact. But when there is a cheap shot or other deliberate act of violence against his teammate, or even a small, offhand slight against his goalie’s water bottle (more on this later), Clarkson boils over into vengeance and frontier justice. If there is a defining trait in Clarkson’s game, it is his unrestrained desire to defend his teammates. On top of all that he possesses a decent scoring touch. He’s had a 30-goal year and consistently has scored between 20 and 50 points per season.
Clarkson is going to stick up for his teammates. This is what he’s always done, from the Rink Behind the Beer Store with its chain-link “boards” and yellow-painted pipes for goal markers and Lord of the Flies rules where he fought off the runts who bullied his little brother and his friends to the gladiator arenas of the Canadian minor leagues, where he racked up hundreds of penalty minutes fighting for his teammates, to the pristine ice of the NHL, where in New Jersey he went through doors and faces to clear space for Zach Parise to his role in 2014–15 riding shotgun for Toronto superstar Phil Kessel.
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