Georges Laraque - Georges Laraque: The Story of the NHLs Unlikeliest Tough Guy

PENGUIN

GEORGES LARAQUE

GEORGES LARAQUE is a retired Canadian professional ice-hockey forward, who last played with the Montreal Canadiens. He is now a vegan, part owner of two raw vegan restaurants in Montreal called Crudessence, is a TV sports analyst for TVA Sports, and is deputy leader of the Green Party of Canada. During his NHL career, he played for the Edmonton Oilers, Phoenix Coyotes, Pittsburgh Penguins, and the Montreal Canadiens. The son of Haitian immigrants, Laraque was born in Montreal. Georges Laraque was published to much fanfare in 2011.

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First published in Viking hardcover by Penguin Canada, 2011

Published in this edition, 2012

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Copyright Georges Laraque, 2011

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ISBN: 978-0-14-318101-9

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For Milayna Julia

and Marcus Oliver

CONTENTS

GEORGES LARAQUE

THE GOOD EXAMPLE

F ebruary 1, 1999. Edmonton. Skyreach Centre is crackling with anticipation.

Im lined up for the faceoff along the boards.

Im shoulder to shoulder with Tony Twist. He is a beast of a

man. Two hundred and forty-five pounds of intimidation and aggression. His job is to scare grown men.

And Im just a rookie.

The puck drops, and the play moves away from us.

There we stand, nose to nose, our gloves dangling. All eyes are on us now.

In a moment I will drop my gloves and do battle with one of the toughest guys in the NHL.

Why?

That is a question that will take a whole book to answer.

The short answer is that I had dreamed my whole life of making it to the NHL. But that doesnt explain much. Thats a dream I shared with millions of other kids.

The longer answer is that dreams are complicated things, and maybe I dreamed mine a little differently from the way my friends and teammates dreamed theirs. Maybe I was a little more competitive. Maybe my dreams had a slightly sharper focus.

And maybe thats because someone called me a nigger.

I heard that word a lot I heard people shouting it at me. Even when it was whispered, it would create a deafening noise deep inside.

And always, that word was preceded by another word. Fucking was the most common among them. Sometimes, people would put it in a degrading short sentence. Above all, it was never pronounced entirely. With contempt, people would modify its last syllable, pronouncing it nigga.

Ive thought about that word a lot. Its not the word itself that needles meits what people mean when they use it. Today Ive come to understand all the intrinsic beauty and strength of that word. The writings of the founders of Ngritude, the literary and ideological movement that preached solidarity in a common black identity in the 1930s, have enlightened me as to what truly constitutes the essence of the word Negro. Those extraordinary writers bravely refused the inferior condition into which slavery and colonialism had put them and all black people. Negro means black, and there is nothing insulting about that.

Lopold Sdar Senghor, for instance, who in 1960 would become the first president of a liberated Senegal, wrote an article in 1936 in which he said, The concept of Ngritude includes all the black world cultural values, whether they are expressed in everyday life, in institutions or in works of art created by black people. It is a reality: A knot of realities.

Then came the ceaseless battles led by Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and dozens of other great individuals. History may have forgotten most of their names, but their actions were crucial in black history.

Thanks to them, I know for certain that all men are created equal. Thanks to them, I know for certain that all the cruel and racist words that buzzed around my mind during my youth were only meant to soil a beautiful word, a word full of history.

Thats whats perverse about the corrosive words I faced when I was youngthey werent just about me. They were about something bigger than me.

But heres the thingand Ive thought about this a lot: if I hadnt heard that word so often when I was young, I wouldnt have been there that night, a scared kid squaring off with a guy whose reputation was enough to intimidate just about every professional hockey player in the world. If I hadnt faced the threats I had growing up, I might not have had the courage to try to make a living facing other peoples fears. And if I hadnt been confronted by challenge after challenge as a kid, I know I wouldnt have had the willpower to do what it takes to make it to the worlds best hockey league.

So thats why I was about to tangle with Twist in front of 18,000 people that night. Not because he had insulted me, or because I was angry. I wasnt angry at all. I had achieved what I had set out to accomplish. I was where I had dreamed of being since I first fell in love with hockeyunder the bright lights of an NHL rink. As a kid, I dreamed of scoring goals to lift my team. I dreamed of being a leader in the dressing room. I dreamed of making big plays to change the game. Even if my dreams didnt take exactly the shape I wished for so passionately as a kid, I would one day do all those things. And though the most cherished moments of my career were still in front of me that night, the fact that Tony Twist was glaring at me was proof of my success.