Goal Oriented

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Checking In With Alex Ovechkin
Just as he did as a small boy in Moscow, Alex Ovechkin dreams. Now, though, he dreams of winning hockey's biggest prize, the Stanley Cup, proving to himself after years of struggle and determination that he can best the world's best players.

Both Alex's parents grew up in Moscow. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Alex's paternal great-grandfather ran a small bread factory outside the city. According to family lore, he survived the post-revolutionary purges because he'd been a benevolent boss. The Ovechkins moved to a Moscow apartment where three families -- 12 people in all -- shared two rooms. "Not two bedrooms, two rooms," recalled Mikhail Ovechkin who, like his wife, was interviewed through an interpreter. The children escaped outside to play soccer, basketball and hockey on makeshift lots and rinks. When Mikhail was 9, his family got their own apartment. It happened to be near the stadium for the famous Dynamo Moscow sports club, and he soon was playing soccer there. The club, founded in the 1920s, operated under the auspices of the ministry of the interior and the KBG. It runs children's leagues and professional sports teams.

In a neighborhood across Moscow, Mikhail's future wife was also entering the Dynamo system. When Tatiana left the hospital at age 8, both her legs were badly atrophied. Doctors initially forbade her from partaking in any strenuous activity and required her to wear heavy boots year-round to protect her legs. She was humiliated.

Sometimes Tatiana accompanied her older sister, who played basketball in the Dynamo children's league, to practice. Once, when Tatiana was 9, the coach invited her to try throwing the ball. From that moment, she became obsessed with growing strong enough to make the team.

Day after day, she sat on a bench behind her family's apartment building, set bricks atop her legs and lifted them -- first one brick, then two, then three. "It sounds primitive," she said. "But you had to understand I had no advice. I had to make things up myself. I don't remember how many bricks I worked up to. I loved basketball so much that I worked until I was beside myself. I would train until I was out of my mind."

At 16, Tatiana joined Dynamo Moscow's professional women's basketball team, soon to become its star. Mikhail also signed a contract to play professional sports for Dynamo, in his case soccer. But a torn thigh muscle ended his soccer career when he was 17.

Mikhail met Tatiana a year later, while waiting for a train at the Dynamo Moscow station. She was 19 and already the national team captain. "She was quite a catch," he recalled. "There were a lot of men who were trying to see her." But it was Mikhail, jovial, kind and outgoing, who won her heart.

Soviet athletes' lives were strictly regimented: They were told where to live, what to eat, how many hours to train. Married women on Tatiana's basketball team were required to live in training barracks, their husbands forbidden to live with or even near them. The Ovechkins received special dispensation to share a room, both recall.

For years, Mikhail drove a cab in Moscow while his wife was a player, then coach and president of her team. When Eastern Europe's largest daily sports newspaper, Sport-Express Daily, recently asked a blue-ribbon panel to select the greatest basketball players of the century, Tatiana was the overwhelming top choice for female point guard.

In the economic chaos following the breakup of the Soviet Union, many sports teams foundered. Mikhail's years as a gregarious cabbie came in handy. "Cabbies know everything," he said, chuckling. "Cabbies know people who leave big tips."

He used his contacts to find financial sponsors for Dynamo Moscow's women's basketball team. The club rewarded him by hiring him as a director of Tatiana's team. It was a job with flexible hours and allowed him to spend more time with their three sons.

The youngest child was a natural competitor. When other children turned cardboard boxes into make-believe forts or castles, Alex turned them into imaginary hockey nets and practiced scoring.

Alexander Ovechkin's earliest hockey memory is one of failure and humiliation. His father drove him to his first hockey practice and stayed to watch. Alex was 8, old to be joining a hockey league. Most other boys at the practice had been skating together for two years already. When the coach ordered the boys to skate backward figure eights, the other skaters executed them neatly. Alex couldn't even skate backward. "I was mad," he recalled. "I tell my dad we must practice and get stronger, stronger."