THN: "Ray Emery - Eye of the tiger"
Die
Titelstory der neuesten Ausgabe der nordamerikanischen Fachzeitschrift
"The Hockey News" beschäftigt sich mit Ottawas heißblütigem Goalie Ray
Emery:
Ray Emery - Eye of the tiger
By Ken Campbell
The year was 2004 and Ray
Emery was gaining a reputation as something of an on-ice lunatic. The Ottawa
Senators were growing deeply concerned about their prospect’s violent
outbursts, concerns that became full-blown fears after Emery two-handed Michel
Ouellet of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins with his stick, then punched him
in the face in an American League game.
The AHL gave Emery a choice
– a 10-game suspension that would be reduced to five if he agreed to attend
anger-management therapy.
So off Emery trudged to a
psychologist to tame the beast within.
“I went for a half-hour to
this shrink, pretty much,” Emery said. “And after 10 minutes, he says, ‘Well,
you don’t really need to be here. You seem pretty well put together. You play a
contact sport and you let your emotions kind of ride out there sometimes.’ But
I had to go to two more sessions, so I went and just kind of shot the (bull)
with the guy.”
Watching Emery tuck into a
couple of spring rolls at a downtown Toronto
hotel, he certainly doesn’t portray the angry young man image very well. After
Emery earned a three-game suspension this season for whacking Maxim Lapierre in
the face with his stick, one Montreal columnist compared Emery to Mike Tyson, a
convicted rapist whose image for a brief time adorned Emery’s goaltending mask.
Among the seven tattoos Emery has on his body, one of them reads, ‘Anger is a
gift.’
But it turns out Emery has
about as much reason to be angry as Alanis Morrissette did. He grew up in a
quiet little Ontario town called Cayuga, near Hamilton, living a
simple, rural lifestyle in a family filled with unconditional love and support.
He was a terrific athlete and an outstanding student, taking, as he says, “all
that enriched stuff in school. Not that I particularly liked it, but I guess I
was pretty good at it.”
Race has never been a
significant issue for him, unless you include the time in the AHL when he
attacked Denis Hamel for uttering a racial slur at him. At 24, he makes $925,000
a year, dresses impeccably and drives a limited edition white Hummer.
But there he was on Feb.
22, after dusting Buffalo
goalie Martin Biron in his first career NHL fight, trading punches with
enforcer Andrew Peters. The fists were flying and through it all, Emery had a
maniacal grin on his face. It’s difficult not to think Emery is wired a little
differently, but it turns out that’s an easy answer to a more complicated
question. There are goalies in the NHL (see Belfour, Ed), who are truly surly,
walking around with emotions bubbling at the surface and no real indication
when things will spill over.
To read the rest of this story and other great features from the world of
hockey, you can buy this issue
http://www.zinio.com/singles?issn=0018-3016U&ns=zno
or subscribe at
https://secure.indas.on.ca/care/hnc/digital.php?key=W06LDN73
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