The McDavid Effect by Marty Klinkenberg

Author:Marty Klinkenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

A FRUITFUL HOCKEY CAREER IS a collection of moments strung together by the physical feats they require and the objects involved in making them happen. The sweater worn for a first shift in a first game in a first season. The puck that found the back of a net for a first goal. The stick that puck was shot with. Skates that helped carry a Stanley Cup. For athletes, the items are keepsakes that link material and memory. For fans and collectors, they represent their love of a player or team, a moment in time, an investment even. For the Hockey Hall of Fame, they are pieces of history.

A player like McDavid comes along rarely. If he performs and develops as expected, there could be scoring records, Stanley Cups and individual awards to go along with an abundance of other, smaller milestones. His first game seemed like a shrewd time to start putting pieces away. The Hall of Fame already has a jersey he wore with the Erie Otters. The Hall will likely soon find itself with much more.

“Normally, we ask for a particular item at the completion of a season, or if there is a milestone of note we are aware of,” Craig Campbell, the manager of archives for the Hall of Fame, said leading up the start of the 2015 season. “It’s better to plan now than to try to go back and find things twenty years later.”

After Gretzky announced his retirement in 1999, sticks from his final few games at Madison Square Garden were collected. At the end of a shift or during a stoppage in play, number ninety-nine would hand them to one of the Rangers’ equipment managers to be set aside.

Panic grips the hockey world when one of these prominent mementos suddenly goes missing. Reebok offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward and set up a tipline after Sidney Crosby lost a glove and a stick in the aftermath of scoring Team Canada’s winning goal in the gold-medal game at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. The stick was found, mistakenly placed in a shipment of items headed for the International Ice Hockey Federation Hall of Fame in St. Petersburg, Russia. One of Crosby’s teammates, Patrice Bergeron, discovered the glove in his equipment bag. In 2005, one of Crosby’s jerseys went missing after Team Canada’s gold-medal victory at the World Junior Championship in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Some significant articles never show up after they go missing, but luckily, Crosby’s jersey was found in a mailbox outside a post office in Lachute, Quebec.

In the days before Connor’s first game, the Oilers discussed grabbing a piece or two of his equipment following the match, either as a souvenir for him, the Hall of Fame or for their own purposes. The team planned to have an exhibit of historic Oilers items at their new arena, and something from McDavid would fit nicely along with the Stanley Cup banners and retired sweaters, connecting the past with the future.

Brian McDavid had already considered the implications of his son’s first game.

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