DJ Bean
The year is 2000, maybe 2001.
In Halifax, Nova Scotia, a middle school student with something of a spotty record for having his homework in on time is writing feverishly. In the upper left-hand corner, he starts with his name. Rather than moving to the right and jotting down the date, he writes his name again… and again and again until both sides of the paper are covered.
Brad Marchand is not doing his homework. He is practicing his autograph. In the seventh grade.
To say that’s the most outrageous thing Marchand has ever done would be to lie. With Marchand, that word manifests itself in many ways. Between a childhood obsession with the Ninja Turtles that’s lasted into his late 20s, his legendary summer of 2011 after winning the Stanley Cup and the ability to pick a corner while shooting through a defender’s legs off the rush, Brad Marchand is, simply put, outrageous. He always has been and he probably always will be.
“He was mischievous,” Marchand’s mother, Lynn, said recently of Marchand’s autograph-practicing days. “You could always see the devil in his eye and a smile on his face when he knew he was about to do something that would probably get him put in timeout.”
Yet for everything else that’s contended with Marchand’s skill for headlines – wiseass comments, cheap shots, those damn pictures – the contest is over. Marchand is one of the game’s premiere players on the ice, and as a 28-year-old married man, an actual adult off it.
“I’ve done a complete 180,” Marchand said. “Well, I wouldn’t say 180.”
STUDENT OF THE GAME
Marchand is the oldest of Kevin and Lynn Marchand’s four children, a group of siblings all born within a four-year span. As Lynn recalls, he was the typical older brother; he’d jump on his little brother, Jeff, all day, but would be the first to intervene if anyone else laid a finger on him.
In school, Brad did enough. He got his homework in, sometimes late and frequently with less than his full effort. An eighth-grade teacher at Marchand’s middle school, Lynn had the opportunity to teach Brad, but something came up.
“He said he would run away from home,” Lynn, who did end up teaching two of his siblings, recalled with a laugh.
Marchand had school, his friends and his Ninja Turtle toys, but Lynn says it was always about hockey.
Here’s an example: Typically, the worst part of youth hockey for its participants is getting up for early practices. Parents often have to drag their children out of bed for such sessions, but without fail, Brad would bang on father Kevin and Lynn’s door, ready to go so early that the rink would still be closed for the night when they arrived.
Since Brad was skating at two years old, Lynn says the reason Marchand was so drawn to hockey was because he was always certain that he was great at it.
“It came so quickly for him at a young age that he always thought, ‘Hey, I can do this,’” she said. “I think that mindset followed him right through, even when he was being told, ‘You’re too small, you’ll never make it.’ Brad’s heart was bigger than that to let that get in his way.”
MIND ON HOCKEY
That heart has obviously been an attribute to him in his career, but Marchand has also worked on his mind and behavior over the years.
As a teenager, he had to do anger management to control a short fuse.
“I just remember I’d snap over little things when I was younger a lot,” he said. “It was more just trying to control yourself in certain situations and learn how to harness that anger.”
Marchand is a firm believer in utilizing a sports psychologist. He first saw one as a junior player while dealing with “some off-ice stuff,” as he’d known a teammate had used one. Though the word “psychologist” might scare off young men preoccupied with being macho, Marchand’s experience with anger management and his hunger for any advantage on the ice made him more than willing to give it a try.
“It’s something I’d always heard, that Olympic athletes are so strong mentally, and they work with sports psychiatrists; they’re able to bring themselves to a whole new level to compete and to train, so I figured it would benefit [me],” he said.
Upon going pro, Marchand took a break from seeing one, and his early success in the NHL might have suggested that was the right choice at the time. Yet when frustrations ran high as an always-improving career showed signs of potentially plateauing after the 2013-14 season, the Bruins asked him to try it again.
The next season, Marchand credited improved play and an improved mindset to the decision. Even with him becoming one of the best players in the league, he still sees one.
“The mind is such a powerful thing, and when you learn how to control that it really turns a lot of things around,” he said. “That’s one thing I learned and I know a lot of guys still do it. It’s something I’d recommend to any young athlete. There’s so much to benefit from being able to control your mind in certain situations and it just keeps you even-keel all the time when things are going well and when they’re not. That’s one thing that I’ve always had a bit of a tough time doing. When I get up, I get excited. When I’m down, I get pretty frustrated. It’s more about just balancing everything.”
OFF TO A BAD START
Marchand is a smartass; he knows that. He’s been known to be less than professional to guys in different sweaters; he’s well-aware. He gets suspended because he takes cheap shots; it’s happened before and it will happen again.
He wears all of the labels, as long as they’re accurate. He was given one label at the end of his junior career – one that bled into his pro career – that he still maintains misrepresented him.
After scoring 29 goals in his draft year for the Moncton Wildcats and being selected in the third round in 2006 by Boston, Marchand continued an impressive junior career with 33 goals the next season for the Val d’Or Foreurs. By the time his final year in the league came, he was, as 19-year-olds often are, better than pretty much everyone else.
So when the hometown Halifax Mooseheads made a trade in an effort to win the President’s Cup, they went all in. After trading David Gilbert and a second-round pick for then-B’s prospect Max Sauve, they flipped Sauve, two first-round picks and three other draft picks to Val d’Or for Marchand. The move would add a star to a team that already had Jakub Voracek. It would also reunite Marchand with childhood friends Ryan Hillier and eventual Providence Bruins teammate Andrew Bodnarchuk.
While the goals dropped off, the production was there for Marchand, who put up 29 points in 26 regular-season games for Halifax. When the Mooseheads dropped the first three games of the QMJHL semifinals against the Gatineau Olympiques, they faced a do-or-die Game 4.
Marchand led the team in postseason points with 18 points in 14 games, but had just one assist over the first three games of the semifinals, a stretch in which the Mooseheads totaled just five goals.
As Marchand and his teammates got off the bus for Game 4, coach Cam Russell, then in his second season as head coach, gave Marchand the shocking news: He was scratched for the game.
“I was given the runaround,” Marchand said. “The coach told me to go see the GM, the GM told me to go see the owner, the owner told me to go see the coach.”
All these years later, Russell says the benching was his decision, but one he regrets.
“I think [Marchand] put a lot of pressure on himself,” Russell said. “I think he tried to do a little too much on his own. The other side of that is I was a young coach and I could have possibly handled that differently. It wasn’t just him. I take some of the blame, too.”
The Mooseheads lost Game 4 and Marchand’s junior career ended in embarrassing fashion. Marchand was furious, especially when it cost him professionally. Rather than have him play a couple of games in Providence to end the season, as junior players typically do when they’re ready to go pro, the Bruins told Marchand to stay home and that they’d see him for training camp.
Without an explanation as to what he did wrong, Marchand had to start his pro career with a reputation to repair.
“From rumors, or what I was told from the Bruins, it was my attitude, but that was never addressed to me by [Halifax],” he said. “If they would have had an issue with that, you’d expect the coaching staff or someone from management, even a captain, to approach me, sit down and discuss what the issue is. But it never arose and I had to deal with it from the Bruins side of things.
Added Marchand: “I think they thought I was bigger than I was and that I thought the rules didn’t apply, even though I didn’t break any rules or anything. I don’t know where the attitude thing [came from]. I did my work. I’ve always been a guy that worked hard. I never got in any arguments with the coaching staff, and no one ever approached me about anything. The fact that I was sat out without being talked to about anything at all, any situation, any attitude problems, anything, and then for it to come up after the season, I was definitely blindsided by it.”
It’s interesting to hear Marchand talk about the ordeal these days, as he clearly still feels he was wronged. Whether he was or wasn’t, he did everything he could to turn a bad ending to his junior career into a strong start to his pro career.
As it turned out, he did. In his first camp, his competitiveness caught the eye of someone he’d get to know rather well in the coming years.
“I remember we were doing a [3-on-2 drill], but we had to kind of let the first guy make a play before the drill would start, but Marchy would not let that happen,” Patrice Bergeron said. “He would always kind of be there, go through his legs or make moves. I was like, ‘What’s this guy doing?’ but that’s just the way he is. He wants his name to be out there. He wanted to leave a mark and I noticed him.”
WORK HARD, PLAY HARD
Here’s the scene: Marchand, early on his career, has been drinking with his teammates and they’re playing Frogger. Harmless, no? Better they stay inside and play video games than go out and do something stupid.
Except they’re not inside, and they are doing something stupid.
“Real-life Frogger,” Marchand clarifies, “where we’d crawl around in between moving traffic.”
I had a friend who did something like this back in the day. Back when Taxicabs were more prominent, he would try to slap them as they went by after the bars had closed and we froze while looking for a ride. My worry for him was that, because it was dark out and he was a drunken idiot, a car would hit him.
I explain this to Marchand and ask if anyone there had a similar worry.
“That was actually a 1 p.m. thing,” he said. “One in the afternoon. Broad daylight.
“I’m sure there were [close calls],” he adds. “I was more told about it than remember it.”
As the reminiscing continues with head-shaking, laughing and perhaps some grimacing, Marchand turns serious when it comes to his post-Cup partying in 2011.
“I wouldn’t change that for a second,” he says. “If I was to go back, I would have went even harder. I had some good times.”
Well, there actually is a second he’d change. Reminded of the team’s 2011 breakup day -- a day he very well might have not remembered -- Marchand shared how a hilarious day actually turned into something of a bummer for him.
Here’s the way it was seen from the perspective of someone covering it: The B’s had been at Fenway to throw out the first pitch ahead of their season-ending availability. Marchand was destroyed. As players walked past the media in the hall of TD Garden to enter the dressing room (the location for the availability), Marchand was wearing a Mike Cameron jersey and a crooked Red Sox hat, bottle of tequila (unopened, in his defense, so maybe a gift) in hand.
“Who loves baseball?” Marchand asked absolutely nobody while walking by. “Me.”
Breakup day then commenced, with players shuttling into the dressing room from the attached player’s lounge a few at a time. Typically, every player is made available, healthy or not. After all, this is the last time for months that the media is guaranteed access to the team.
Marchand does not come out. Every now and then, as the door from the players’ lounge opens, a seated Marchand can be seen trying to get up, with teammates providing watch and promptly shoving him back down. He is trying like hell to get into that room and, probably, give some absolutely bonkers quotes, but that team had some tough guys and he never got past them. When all was said and done, Marchand was not made available to the media.
To someone who only observed that much of it, the story was hilarious and harmless. Yet as Marchand tells the rest of it, an interesting nugget of Bruins history is revealed.
Go back and watch the Bruins’ 2011 Stanley Cup DVD. Tell me if you notice one of Boston’s most prominent players missing from it.
As it turned out, the players, coaches and management were shooting their interviews for the DVD that day. If you’ll remember, they all generally looked terrible after days of celebrating, with Peter Chiarelli and Nathan Horton looking borderline deceased. With Marchand, however, they couldn’t even attempt it.
“I didn’t get to be a part of that because I was too intoxicated,” Marchand said. “That’s something I wish I could change and go back and do, because that’s something I could keep forever and be part of and go through all those memories. I missed out on that, but there’s not a whole lot I would change from that time.”
Marchand was coming off his first full season in the NHL, so it makes sense that fans and media alike didn’t know him well enough at the time. Having seen the partying, there were questions of just how out of shape he’d be when he showed up to camp. To the surprise of many, that wasn't the case at all.
“Yes, he [partied], but we won the Stanley Cup. Someone had to do it,” Bergeron said. “A lot of talk was about that, but he went home and he trained, and he got ready for the season and he was ready. He’s one of those guys that will always put hockey first. He’s always going to show up. “
Marchand still drinks and says he goes hard. He just does it less frequently, citing more difficulty recovering as he ages.
That makes sense. After all, as one gets into their late 20s, the two-day hangover becomes a thing.
“Two?” he responds. “I get a whole week.”
As funny as the stories are, Marchand picking his spots these days falls in line with everything else about him. He drank like crazy when he could get away with it, and he slowed his roll at the thought that it could get in the way of his hockey.
“When I was younger, I was very arrogant,” he said. “I enjoyed every second and any opportunity I had to have fun, and I wanted to enjoy the lifestyle and have a good time. I made the most of it, especially in the minors and my first couple years in the league.
“But when you see guys that do that, you see where their careers lead, it’s never good. Those guys get moved around a lot and they’re out of the league quick and that’s kind of what I realized. I didn’t want that to happen to me. I wanted to have a long career; I didn’t want to have a short one, so I had to turn it around.”
ALL GROWN UP
Marchand used to be so much funnier. He was never particularly sophomoric a la Rob Gronkowski, but he looked for any joke he could make, any question he could turn into something inappropriate, any opportunity to get in a dig at somebody.
He was a reporter’s dream.
Now, Marchand is still every bit as friendly and courteous with the media. He just used to be a lot funnier. And he knows it.
As Marchand explains his maturation, he points to his career. Earlier, he says, he was generally carefree. Now, having spent years around Bergeron and Zdeno Chara, he has an understanding of professionalism and understanding everything for which he plays. He’ll always look like a 14-year-old by comparison because he spends so much time next Bergeron, but he’s come a long way.
“If you want to be on a team for a long time, you have to be a certain kind of person, you have to be a certain kind of player,” Marchand said. “The management, the coaching staff has worked with me a lot on that and really shown me the way of how they need me to play and how they want me to play if I want to remain here. I think with age and with marriage, all that responsibility comes and you start to realize what’s important and what you want in life.”
Lynn gets choked up as she talks about her son now. He’s still a “big kid,” as she lovingly calls him (lovingly because Marchand isn’t really a “big” anything), but the middle schooler who felt he needed to practice his autographs was right. He grew up into not only a star player, but something resembling a professional.
“We see him as an adult; he’s grown into a really fine young man,” Lynn says. “A lot of people judge him based on some of the things that have happened on the ice, but who Brad is off the ice is someone who’s got a really big heart and is really generous and kind. He would give you the shirt off his back.”
Any excuse to take the shirt off.