The blockbuster contract did not alter the habits and principles Parise inherited from his father, though. Parise was still a rink rat, the sort of player who showed up early to the Minnesota Wild’s practices to get in extra work tipping pucks, and he stayed late, too, to work on his shooting from in close and around the net. One of the best all-around forwards in the NHL, a player with astonishing offensive skills and leadership, was still, in his hockey heart, a local Minnesota kid, the sort you could always count on to be there at the rink, ready for the game—any game at all—with whoever showed up to play.
And J.P. was right there with him. He came to most of Zach’s games and at- tended practices, too. If he couldn’t make it, there would be a phone call afterward to recap and to chat about the game and life and all points in between. That was how J.P. showed his love, by talking to his son about the inner workings of the sport they both shared, the good and the bad, the goals and the misery. J.P. was al- ways there, ready to listen.
But cancer cruelly changed that.
“My dad was the guy I talked to,” says Parise. “I talked to him after every game. During this season, toward the end when he couldn’t talk or after he died, all of sudden he wasn’t there.”
The worst of Parise’s pain radiated from this void, this silencing of their daily banter where J.P.’s booming voice and laughter once was. Parise was not alone in his grief, either. One of the harshest realities for the bereaved is getting used to our loved ones simply not physically being around anymore. When a person suffers a slow decline from cancer, toward the end when the disease and the treatment eats away at them every day, each treatment becoming harder and harder, each side ef- fect that much more debilitating, their loved ones begin a grieving period even while the person is still alive. We begin to miss them, to prepare ourselves for their departure, all while still able to see them in the flesh.
But after the burial and the memorial, after all the handshaking and hugs, after all the stories have been told, when our loved ones are finally buried, the reality of their loss hits home. Their physical absence is felt in day-to-day moments both big and small, such as holidays, birthdays, graduations, weddings—or, in Parise’s case, his father watching him score a series-clinching shorthanded goal in Game 6 of the first round of the 2015 playoffs versus the St. Louis Blues to propel the Wild into the second round. It is in little moments, too. In Parise’s case, it was a phone number he always called, a vital lifeline that was suddenly nothing more than beeps, then silence.
THE MEDIA JACKALS CROWD around Parise. They press in, recorders out, the hot camera lights warming everything like tanning lamps. Everyone wants to talk about the season that was, to know why the Wild once again lost to the Blackhawks.
“What happened? This year was supposed to be different.”
“What do you think you need to beat Chicago?”
“What went wrong?”
“Are you happy with this team?”
“What does management need to add to the roster?”
Parise’s eyes dart around the circle and meet the eyes of every questioner. He stares directly at them as he answers their inquiry. As always, Parise is straight- forward and honest. “I don’t think as a whole we played well enough to beat them,” says Parise. “I thought Chicago played really well. They didn’t give us much in the offensive zone.”
When asked about the season that the Wild had overall, Parise pauses and seems to sigh as he reflects on everything that has gone on with the team, and with himself as a player and a person.
“A lot of ups and downs,” says Parise. “Just a little bit of everything, I guess. I think we did go through a lot as a group. A lot of injuries, sicknesses, times where there really wasn’t a lot of room for error.”
During the trying 2014–15 NHL season, the Minnesota Wild roster suffered a biblical plague of sorts: Ryan Suter’s dad, Bob Suter, the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” iron horse of a defenseman, died suddenly of a heart attack when the team was about to start training camp; several players contracted the mumps, a contagious disease that has long been prevented by nationwide immunization; Josh Harding, a tal- ented goalie who was fighting back from multiple sclerosis, was expected to vie for the starting goalie job but got into an argument during a preseason scrimmage; the
two other goalies, Darcy Kuemper and Niklas Backstrom, were like sieves; and the roster was at times gutted by a rash of injuries to key players, particularly the team’s hottest scorer, Jason Zucker, who was lighting up the league at a record pace but then broke his collarbone.
Things weren’t any better for Parise, as he suffered two gruesome injuries. The first came in New York against the Rangers. Parise was in on the forecheck and grinding for the puck behind the net. His teammate Mikko Koivu’s stick blade came up and pitchforked Parise straight in the face. He returned to the game min- utes later with a gruesome line of stitches that resembled a fuzzy caterpillar cross- ing the right side of his lip.
After he got stitched up, Parise, of course, didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. He simply shrugged off the pain as part of his job. To the veteran leader, playing in pain was no different than paper getting jammed in an office copier or rush-hour traffic. Yeah, it stinks. But what are you going to do?
“It’s all hockey players. It’s just one of those things,” says Parise. “You want to play. You feel like if you can keep going, you keep going. I got hit in the face. That’s a part of the game. It happens.”
When he returned from the East Coast road trip, Parise had the eight stitches he received in New York taken out because they were too thick, and he had the cut restitched with a thinner thread. The scar is still a ruddy and jagged line that ex- tends from under his right nostril to the top of his lip.
Months later in Edmonton, Parise caught a puck straight in the mouth, which knocked a tooth clean out.
“He picked his own tooth off the ice!” says Erik Haula, a young Minnesota Wild teammate. “He shows what guys have to put on the line. It doesn’t matter what happens. Keep battling, keep playing for your teammates.”
Parise simply bent over, retrieved the errant tooth, and then underwent a brutal, toe-curling partial root canal between periods; the nerve was yanked out while he was still in his pads. Then he started the second period.
This was expected, though. Parise was following, as always, the blueprint J.P. had laid out for him.
“Those always hurt,” said Parise at the time. “Getting the nerve yanked out never feels good. I’m getting kind of used to them. It doesn’t matter, though. Those al- ways hurt. It’s a part of the sport. You get hit in the face. That’s how it is.”
Parise may be one of the best forwards in the world, but he routinely takes more punishment than almost anyone in the league. He takes the abuse and shoves it right back in opponents’ faces with his hustle and industrious pursuit, and by scor- ing goals even after they have done everything in their power to stop him. In the game versus Edmonton when Parise got a tooth knocked out, he was seen minutes later, fighting for the puck in the crease. The usual post-whistle scrum broke out, and an Oiler player grabbed him from behind and tugged at his right cheek. Whether it was deliberate or not, it had to hurt.
The very next game, in Calgary, Parise scored a goal right on the doorstep, fight- ing his way through an angry mob of sticks and arms and legs, and celebrated his tally with his freshly acquired jack-o’-lantern smile. Despite being repeatedly stitched and bloodied, Parise continued to go into the areas of the ice where the danger was highest and score huge goals, each one of them in high-traffic and high-conflict spots.
“Toughness isn’t always fighting,” says Chris Nilan, a man who amassed more than 3,000 penalty minutes during his career, nearly all earned the hard way in fights and bench-clearing brawls. “Bob Gainey was tough, and he never fought. Mats Naslund was tough and a goal scorer and playmaker. Toughness is going into the corners and going to the net. Getting cross-checked, getting slashed, and keep playing and not fucking packing it in just because you’re getting beat up a lit- tle bit.”
On the ice, Parise could take anything dished his way. He never packed it in. Not once. Off the ice, though, was a different matter entirely. J.P.’s lung cancer began to spread, and his treatment started to take its toll on him, which emotion- ally bore down on his son.
“I didn’t want to come to the rink,” says Parise. “So many different things, so many triggers would make me think of him there.”
J.P. was at Regions Hospital in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, near the Wild’s home rink. Parise’s daily hockey life was bookended with devastating visits to the hospital: Parise would visit his dad before heading off to practice or immediately afterward, sitting with his father as the cancer slowly ate away at the hockey legend.
“He was always on my mind,” says Parise. “But there would be certain things. I’d go out for practice and be in a haze. I remember a couple times almost breaking down and start crying on the ice.”
This was especially painful because Parise was in the middle of an NHL season when his father passed, and yet he continued to go to the rink. Each practice, each game, was another day to play hockey, and that had always been Zach’s dream. But all of the happy hockey memories that Zach had of his father were being obscured by snow.
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