The media jackals are out, and they are starving. The Minnesota Wild have been swept in the second round of the 2015 Stanley Cup playoffs by the Chicago Black- hawks, losing to their dreaded conference rival for the third year in a row, and now it is the official last day of the season and of media availability. Packs of Twin Cities reporters arrive at the Wild locker room scrounging for answers now that the dust has settled. Everyone wants to ask the players what the hell happened as they clean out their lockers and pack up their equipment before heading off into the abyss of summer. All the print and television media folks huddle in the hallway just outside the closed locker room doors, ready to pounce as soon as they open. They are eager to pick some last scraps of meat off the carcass of Minnesota’s season.
The media scrum grows by the minute, and they are all there: veteran newspa- permen slumping along in sensible brown shoes and Dockers, their crumpled flip notebooks in hand, doing old-school, ink journalism for the two newspapers in town; the NHL insiders and Twitter kings sniffing for any crumb of information that they can blast into cyberspace to their legion of followers in a never-ending pursuit of hits and clicks and online shares and faves; the television men spritzed up with Old Spice and blinding-white teeth shining against tans far too dark for a lukewarm Minnesota spring; the camera crews looking for a face and a voice to use on the evening news one last time before all eyes turn toward the Minnesota Twins. There are outliers, too—the online reporters and website wonks who hang on the fringes, not quite in and not quite out, microphones fastened to the ends of long ski poles and held aloft from the back of the pack, getting close enough only to still get their quotes. And then there’s me, the admittedly dim-witted journalist working on a book, rummaging around for story lines.
After a few minutes of small talk, the locker room doors swing open and the media hounds spill into the empty Wild locker room and eagerly wait for the public relations department to furnish a few Wild players. From behind a closed door at the far end of the locker room, a solitary player appears and fights his way through the throng of media to get to his stall. Before the player is even settled at his locker, the pack of reporters pounce and swarm, the beat writers jockeying with the tele- vision crews, the long tentacles of microphones stretching everywhere. The bright lights of the numerous news cameras come alive in an instant, illuminating the player’s tight grimace. He sits in the harsh and ugly spotlight of defeat.
The scene repeats itself over the course of an hour. One at a time, a Wild players drift out through the doorway, and the media swarms.
After some time, my busted nose leads me away from the pack and toward the far end of the dressing room. I find myself standing at forward Zach Parise’s stall. No one pays any attention to it. His nameplate has been removed, but the locker looks exactly like it has all season. The helmet is still mounted in place on the top of the locker; it is a crisp white, and the visor is as immaculate as a church window. The skates hang upside down on hooks, laces slack, the boots open and yawning
and waiting for his feet to slide in. The jersey hangs just so.
Off to the side of the stall dangle Parise’s shoulder pads. His CCM pads are the same kind his linemate Jason Pominville wears, which are hanging two locker stalls down. But what makes Parise’s shoulder pads different from Pominville’s and most of his other teammates’ is the heavy wear and tear in a specific area. The part of the shoulder pad that hangs over Parise’s lower back has been worn through; the layers of foam and cloth and heavy stitching are completely frayed and blown out, a testament to the staggering amount of abuse Parise absorbed over the course of the 2014–15 season as he battled for every square inch of ice, particularly the area in front of the net where opposing defensemen like to perform angry drum solos on his lower back while he screens goalies and looks for tips and deflections.
But the worst pain of all occurred when Parise lost his beloved father, J. P. Parise, in January 2015, a wound that even the vaunted Wild medical staff couldn’t heal.
Over the course of his career, Parise has been known for his remarkably high pain threshold, and he is pound-for-pound one of the toughest players in the world. He is an elite talent who has the uncanny ability to absorb every blow his opponents throw at him, blows that have knocked his teeth out, shattered his bones, and cut his flesh. But as he watched his father struggle with cancer and the horrifying treatment that came with it, the emotional pain was unrelenting. In the end, J.P. lost his brave battle, and Zach felt the heavy, saturating grief that comes from losing one’s father.
The physical scars and lost teeth and worn-out pads were one thing. They were on the outside, and were easy to recognize and understand. The narrative was clear: there was a blow of force, and it caused damage that required medical atten- tion or for things to get fixed in the equipment room. More important, the scars on his flesh were not signs of weakness but rather of great strength. His visible scars were a sign to the world that he had taken hits and was still standing. The scar on his heart, though, was the wound no one could see, and it tore him apart on the in- side. Every grieving process is different and built around its own unique circum- stances. What made Parise’s so difficult was that his memories of his beloved fa- ther, a legendary NHL forward, were triggered continually by the game of hockey it- self, a sport they shared, and he had to visit the source of his deepest pain every day in practices and games and road trips. When J.P. was struggling with cancer, Parise would go to the rink, to his place of work, and grieve; everywhere he looked, memories sprang up, one after another, from the ice, from the locker room, from the stands, until they were as thick as the North Woods.
This was where Zach Parise was for the majority of the 2014–15 season. He en- dured both severe physical pain (he suffered a gruesome cut across his lip and also lost a tooth and underwent a brutal midgame root canal) and the emotional pain of losing his father. At times, the pain was so intense that Parise could barely bring himself to the rink to do the one thing he’s always wanted to do. Parise kept battling, though, just the way he always had, and his strength was a source of inspiration for his team as they charged through the second half of the season. And after a disappointing start, Parise led the team in goals, and the Wild rallied to make the playoffs.
But now there are no more games to play. It is moving-out day. The off-season has arrived. The reporters interview teammates Thomas Vanek, Mikko Koivu, Ryan Suter, Matt Cooke, and goalie Devan Dubnyk in intervals, but then start to sniff the air, openly wondering when Parise will show up so they can ask him what the hell happened.
Then a back door in the Wild locker room creaks open and the reporters perk up. Parise appears out of a side door close to his locker stall. It is a veteran move, because he has to stroll only three feet out of the darkness and he is already in front of his locker, avoiding the mass of reporters entirely. For a few seconds he is draped in the shadows of a restricted area in the locker room, and the horde doesn’t see him. But then they pounce, three-deep, with recorders out, and the spotlight of a disappointing season is upon him.
Parise is known for being the ultimate competitor, never giving up, always stay- ing in the fight till the bitter end. The whole world got to see that when he scored one of the biggest goals in American hockey history to tie the Canadians in the final seconds of regulation in the gold medal game at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010. He followed that up by leading the underdog New Jersey Devils to the Stanley Cup Finals. But today that resolve has dissipated ever so slightly. His disappointment in having to find answers for why his team suffered the same fate in losing once again to the Blackhawks is palpable.
He stands before the media scrum with the sacrifice written all over him: a large, ruddy scar is still prominently visible under his nose; a new tooth is firmly planted in his lower row; and immediately behind him and to his left dangle his battered shoulder pads.
The season is over, and the damage to Zach Parise has been done, and it is permanent.
TO UNDERSTAND PARISE’S PAIN you have to first understand the source of his happiness. For Zach Parise, family life was largely centered on the ice rink. Zach’s mom was the two-millionth fan to attend a Minnesota North Stars game at the Met Center, and she won the opportunity to go on a road trip to see the Stars play in Boston. During her prize-winning trip she met Minnesota player J. P. Parise, and the rest is history. Sons Zach and Jordan began their lives as rink rats, an affec- tionate term for kids who spend all their free time at the ice rink. “The first time I skated was at the Met Center,” says Parise fondly, referring to the legendary home rink of the North Stars, where his father was a favorite player and coach. “My dad used to take us out onto the ice at the Met Center and taught us how to skate there.”
Like a lot of Minnesota fathers and sons, the bond between the Parise men was forged in the frosty confines of the hockey rink. J.P. immersed Zach and Jordan in the vibrant world of hockey from an early age. They spent their time in locker rooms down in the bowels of ancient stadiums, where they ran around unimpeded.
“My dad knew all the security guards,” says Parise, smiling. “And they just let us go.”
A sheet of ice, a puck, and a net have been Zach Parise’s home since the begin- ning. After J.P. retired from professional hockey as a player, he stayed at the rink working for the Minnesota North Stars, and then became the director of hockey operations at Shattuck–St. Mary’s, a prep school in Faribault, Minnesota. J.P. helped Shattuck become a world-renowned hockey incubator, one that produced Jonathan Toews, Sidney Crosby, and countless other NHL and Division I talents.
Zach was right there next to his dad the whole time at Shattuck–St. Mary’s, shooting pucks and playing pickup at every turn. Parise was on the ice all day and night and was given special access to the ice rink to satisfy his near-constant jones for puck time. He even learned how to drive the Zamboni so he could always have fresh ice, even late at night.
“When my dad became the director of Faribault,” Parise says, “he gave us keys to the ice rink. We were so lucky.”
In that hockey cocoon, though, Parise inherited something from his father that was far greater than the keys to the castle. Stemming from his own career in profes- sional and international hockey, which was built on doggedness and sweaty forti- tude, J. P. Parise provided his son with an athletic blueprint for his own career in the sport. Although Zach never saw his dad play live, he learned his father’s lessons well.
“Zach is just like his dad,” says Lou Nanne, one of the godfathers of Minnesota hockey, who was a close friend of J.P.’s. “He’s relentless, and he’s got J.P.’s work ethic. Same thing. They both work extremely hard, and they’re guys you know every second they’re out there they will be working.”
J.P. was an old-time hockey legend, a gregarious NHL player whose raucous, swashbuckling playing style was beloved by fans and teammates in the 1970s. Zach’s balls-out, inexhaustible puck-pursuit style is a replica of his father’s, albeit with slightly less mayhem. J.P. was a key member of Team Canada when the Cana- dians squared off against the mighty Soviet Union in the legendary Summit Series in 1972. Zach inherited his dad’s tenacity, which has resulted in a stellar career in the NHL and captaincy of the U.S. men’s hockey team at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in 2014 (yes, that’s right—Zach Parise is literally Captain America).
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