COMPLETED. A university student. A professional hockey player. They've proved they can be friends. Can they be more?
Although they're both in their early twenties and living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, their lives couldn't be more different. Cami...
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When I was born in Pasadena, I was a boy.
When I was in Ann Arbor for the United States Development Program, I turned eighteen and became a man.
Since being traded to Toronto, I have become The Man.
My new teammate Johnathan's words, not mine.
But still—and I never say things like this—I can't say I disagree with him. It's not that I think I've gone under some incredible transformation since I've left Winnipeg and came to this world-class city, but I can see why my teammates and the fans would think I deserved the title.
I made my debut for the Toronto Saints on a Tuesday. If you thought Tuesday was just a regular ol' day, then you didn't know how this city and its fans felt about hockey.
Even a casual scroll through my Twitter feed made that clear as day. First, there was the fact that my follower count had gone up by about one hundred thousand, and I hadn't even put on a Saints jersey yet. I rarely posted on my account and preferred to retweet things that I found interesting; usually just Tweets by the PR accounts of sports teams I liked or by my favourite athletes that I dreamed of being as good as. But Tweets about my own life, and thoughts, and feeling? Not my thing.
That was why I found it odd that my agent, Darren, told me to write a little something about how excited I was to join the Saints. Maybe odd isn't the right word. I understood why he wanted me to do it. The Toronto fanbase was ginormous and I should want them to take me in as one of my own. Surreal is probably a better fit, because all those people now had their radars set to me; because I was already beginning to see why the sports world deemed hockey a religion for Toronto.
Second, was the media. Talking to reporters before and after games and to the television crews during the game's intermissions was just part of the game. Love it or hate it, you had to do at least a little bit of it. The captain of the team typically did the most and the stoic guy who had a bad habit of cursing at the reporter when he or she asked a stupid question—which a lot of them were—did the least. I had done a bit back in Winnipeg, but not a crazy amount. Certainly not enough to make me hate it. When I scored my first goal, the woman from the Winnipeg Sun wanted to speak to me about how it felt and the junior analyst from SportsCast asked me to break down the play. Other than that, they never really asked to speak to me.
I am not exaggerating when I say this, but I have already spoken to the Toronto media in the few days I've been here more than I've spoken to the Winnipeg media. And that was another thing I had heard bits and pieces of, that the media in Toronto is intense.
Yeah, that was a good word for it.
So far, I had participated in one game, one morning skate, and three practices. Not only did I have to face the media after the morning skate, practice and game—the team's general manager put his foot down on before the game—but I had an absolute horde of reporters to entertain. I stood there, either in the locker room or in front of the media backdrop in the hall, and had pretty much every brand and make of microphone close to my face. Men and women from newspapers and blogs and radio stations and sports networks, all there to ask me questions.
