Patrick Hat Trick

Turns out, Patrick Kane didn’t have to grow a full beard – or even a scrawny mustache. He didn’t have to bulk up. He didn’t have to stop ordering ice cream with chocolate sauce after every meal or taking long naps or playing video games.

Kane, the top draft pick in the National Hockey league last year and a 20-year-old who still looks like he’d mow your lawn for a couple bucks or babysit if he had a free night, is a full-fledged, full-grown star.
 
Monday night, Kane had three goals and an assist to help the Chicago Blackhawks clinch their playoff series against Vancouver and advance to the Western Conference Finals for the first time in 14 years.
 
A year ago, I stood with his parents in Kane’s bedroom in Buffalo, N.Y., looking at his trophies and pictures on his wall. I looked at the jerseys and the blankets and the posters and hockey cards. I leaned on his bed to get a better view of some stuff framed behind it.
 
And then I ate baked spaghetti at the family’s favorite restaurant and drove through a blizzard to London, Ontario, Patrick’s last stop on the junior hockey circuit before the big-time.
 
It is where, I believe, I came to fully appreciate the relative wholesomeness of the sport compared to others, which may sound a bit odd when you are talking about a group of men whose vast majority are missing their front teeth and sport scars that would make hardened felons blush.
 
Watching Kane pose after Tuesday’s thrilling victory with his three pucks, I knew that his parents were beaming. And not because their prodigy had fulfilled their every dream, but because their boy – 18 when he was drafted by the Hawks last season – was fulfilling his.
 
Patrick’s father, Pat Sr., whom his friends and family refer to by his childhood nickname, “Tiki,” owned an auto dealership in Buffalo until one day while on his cellphone with his wife Donna.
 
“Patrick just scored,” she told her husband from a game when Patrick was competing in Detroit for one of the top junior programs in hockey. “Oh wait, he just scored again.”
 
“My heart is breaking,” said Tiki, describing the oft-repeated scene. “What am I doing?”
 
So he quit a job and sold a business that had consumed him.
 
“Our goal was to be No. 1 in sales and I don’t know if that [competitiveness] rubbed off on Patrick but it was very important to us,” he said. “But I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
 
Though Patrick was more than dedicated to his sport, this was not a kid wearing skates by age four. At four, he spent a year refusing to wear anything but a Batman cape and hood. At six, he learned to skate. Just skate. No stick for a year until he could handle himself on the ice.
 
By 10, the other kids were asking Patrick for his autograph.
 
Still, they continually questioned the kid’s toughness. He was tiny, even smaller compared to the older kids with whom he consistently competed. But he excelled because he learned to evade the checks, to be more agile, to become a gifted passer and an even more gifted scorer.
 
He also grew up with three younger sisters, and that will toughen up anybody.
 
“I always tried to get my sisters to play hockey,” he said. “I remember one time they said ‘OK, we’ll play hockey with you, but only if you play dolls with us.’ It worked like that with my sisters.”
 
His dad had taken his son to Buffalo Sabres games from the time he was two, sitting along the glass with Patrick propped on his lap.
 
“I’d sit right on the glass,” Patrick recalled, “and I could see everything right in front of me, all the players. I got to see the ice, see what those guys were doing. I went to so many games when I was little that you fall in love with the great players. We’d go to warm-ups and see what the great ones did, how they stick handled and stuff like that, just to learn.”
 
Only once did the son rebel against his father’s “enthusiasm.”
 
“He’d definitely get on me if I wasn’t playing up to my potential,” Patrick recalled. “I remember one time when I was in Detroit, the coach was really tough on me, a real big motivator and if I didn’t have a good shift, he’d be all over me.
 

“Looking back on it, it was really good for me because he’d get the best out of me. But I remember one time, he ripped me too hard after a game or something and I kind of went to my dad upset, and said ‘It would be nice for you to be my dad now instead of giving me advice.’ That was it. And it’s been like that ever since.”
 

When Patrick left home for junior hockey as the great ones do — 14 years old but looking like eight according to those who knew him — Donna Kane’s little boy couldn’t stand it.
 

“I remember the first night I was crying and called my mom and said, ‘I can’t do this,’ ” he said. “But give her credit. She said later she wanted to turn around and come get me, but she decided to keep going and let me gut it out for a bit and see where I was after a couple weeks. And after a couple weeks, I was fine.”
 

In the meantime, his parents drove the five hours to Detroit at least once every week to see him play and he’d come home for weekend visits briefer than the drive.
 

Hockey players stay with “billet” families (the phrase comes from the practice of lodging military personnel in private homes), and Patrick had surrogate moms and dads and siblings in Detroit and Ontario.
 

When he woke up one night in London in horrible pain from a horribly infected wisdom tooth, it was Sylvie Richer, his billet mom, who sat up with him.
 

“He was just a gem, we just absolutely adored him,” Richer said.
 

I saw Pat Sr. and two of Patrick’s sisters after a Hawks’ game I was covering for the Tribune recently. I asked him how Patrick’s mouth was after his son had severed off his front teeth in a collision with teammate Jonathan Toews several days earlier.
 

Patrick has a habit of taking his mouth guard out on the ice and letting it dangle from his mouth. A bad habit, evidently, as he was doing that when he ran into Toews.
 

His father shook his head. And how about Donna, I asked? How does she handle it when her son gets clobbered?
 

“She’s very strong in front of him, then she’ll walk away and collapse,” said Pat Sr., acting out his wife’s body language as he sunk into a corner, his head in his hands and a smile peeking out.
 

A year ago, Patrick lived in the basement of Stan Bowman, who was in the Hawks’ front office and is the son of Scotty, famed Stanley Cup coach and now Senior Advisor to the Hawks. Kane’s parents were making the car payments on his Jeep Wrangler.
 

His parents came to nearly every game.
 

“I think it was even tougher on me when Patrick left home because I was the one who took him to the rink,” Pat Sr. said. “When I’d go to Chicago practices, Patrick would say, ‘Dad, why do you want to go to practice?’ But he doesn’t understand how much I enjoy just watching him skate.”
 

After Kane was drafted, then-Blackhawks’ coach Denis Savard joked to me, “When I was 18, I didn’t know how to make toast.”
 

And at 5-feet-10, 175 pounds, Patrick Kane still looks like your little nephew.
 

“But my thought on that,” said Donna, “is that if Patrick was 6-4, 200 pounds, he wouldn’t be the player he is today.”
 

The player he is today is a playoff hero.
 

The player he is today, is all grown up.