Future Greats and Heartbreaks by Gare Joyce

Author:Gare Joyce [Joyce, Gare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-67273-3
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2007-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

December 4, 2006, Smitty’s, Swift Current

Before I head out of town I meet up with Myles Rumsey for breakfast. Rumsey was drafted, though he’s no lock to get a contract offer from Calgary, who selected him in the seventh and final round, 221st overall—220 picks after Sidney Crosby—in 2005. If he had been a priority item for the Flames at their training camp last fall, they might have assigned him to their American Hockey League affiliate in Omaha.

“If I made it to Omaha next year, that would be great,” he says. “Just a chance to show what I can do—to find a role and learn to fill it. That’s what I want.”

In his voice, there’s a resignation. It’s not just that it’s a longshot to get to Omaha; to get past Omaha is one longshot parlayed after another.

It’s easy to see why the Broncos would want Rumsey as an overage player and as their captain. He’s soft-spoken, not gregarious; but there doesn’t seem to be anything the least bit impulsive about him at all—in contrast to Leavold, who’s almost manic in his energy. It’s not simple maturity. He might not seem mature by the standards of twenty-year-old university students or twenty-year-olds who’ve had to go to work on the farms outside of Swift Current. No, Rumsey seems old for a junior hockey player. He has been around. He has accepted his lot. He’s fallen into line. He has soldiered on.

The old saw is that players make the best scouts, that there’s nothing you can observe as a scout that players don’t already know about those they play with and against.

I ask Rumsey who the best player in the Dub is this season, and he doesn’t hesitate. “Peter Mueller, hands down,” he says. “He’s just so good with the puck. Everett is the toughest team right now and he’s the one who makes them go.”

I ask Rumsey about Postma. He says Postma’s “a good kid,” but he says so without enthusiasm. Rumsey also says that he likes the other defenceman, Derek Claffey, more than Postma. I’m suspicious of false witness. It sounds like Claffey is tighter with Rumsey off the ice. It also sounds as though Postma’s draft pedigree—a first-rounder—and his connection with the Sutter family might rub the honest workman/plugger in Rumsey the wrong way. Maybe he sees himself in Claffey.

I ask Rumsey about Geordie Wudrick, a sixteen-year-old rookie from British Columbia. Wudrick isn’t a prospect for the 2007 draft—born in 1990, he’s not eligible until 2008. I’m just interested in the tall poppy syndrome—how players look at a young teammate who comes in hyped and heralded. Wudrick became the highest draft pick in Broncos franchise history when the team selected him No. 2 in the Dub’s bantam draft in 2005. Wudrick also became, as far as anyone can remember, the first out-of-town player to arrive in Swift with his mother—the first who didn’t move in with a billet.

Rumsey has only good things to say about Wudrick. “A big kid who can be a power forward when he fills out … a smart kid for sure.

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