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.

Father and son began rising at 6 a.m. so the boy could skate a few hours before going, late, to elementary school. After classes, Alex had formal practice with his hockey league, then kept skating, often at a makeshift rink behind the family's apartment building. "He would skate there until his legs fell off," his dad recalled. "He'd come home every evening just completely exhausted. He would drop in the hallway, and we'd pick him up and just carry him to his room." Alex recalled that when he slept as a boy, he dreamed about chasing the puck.

His father, who accompanied him to every practice and game, helped him collect NHL cards -- since the fall of the Soviet Union, the American hockey league was the greatest aspiration of many Russian skaters -- and obtained copies of all-time great Wayne Gretzky's game tapes so they could dissect them together.

"It's a delicate thing, child psychology," the dad said. "You don't want to push too much on him." That would have been difficult in Alex's case. "The biggest punishment we could ever think of for him if he did anything wrong, or when he had bad grades in school, was to make him skip practice. He would immediately burst into tears and beg for forgiveness."

Tatiana Ovechkina -- who calls her youngest son Sasha -- recognized her own determination in him and nourished it. "I was very demanding of myself as an athlete when I played," she said. "I always tried to instill in Sasha to be as demanding as I was."

He quickly grew stronger and more skilled at hockey than other boys his age. His parents urged him to work harder still -- and always for the team, not his own glory.

"I tried not to praise him," his mother said. "After a win . . . the next morning over breakfast I could tell him: 'You know, you did okay. But right there you made a mistake. And there you didn't skate hard enough. And there you didn't go all the way to fight for the puck. And you were lazy in that episode, so work on that.'"

On September 17, 1995, Alex turned 10. Two days later, his oldest brother, Sergei, 22, who'd been recuperating after a car accident, died suddenly of unforeseen complications. The next day, Alex's youth team was scheduled to play a game. "His brother wasn't even in the ground yet," the father recalled. "We decided he shouldn't skip the game. He played while tears were flowing down his cheeks. He cried the entire game, but he played. He wanted to play. We were obviously not thinking about hockey that day. I don't even know what the score was. We didn't really think of it as a lesson. We didn't want him to sit at home and dwell, and to cry and to poison himself with his thoughts."

Alex was only 15 when Don Meehan, the Canadian sports agent, sent an emissary to talk to the family about representing the young hockey player. Two years later, Capitals general manager George McPhee arranged to meet Alex in a hotel lobby in the Czech Republic. McPhee wanted to get a sense of the teenager, even though Alex wouldn't be eligible to play in the NHL until he turned 18.

To capture the hockey world's attention Alex had forsaken almost every soft distraction of youth. He had done nothing but play hockey. It was a price he was happy to pay, he said. Just being on the ice with his teammates was always, "sort of a high for me," he said through an interpreter. "It's like a child getting his most secret dream achieved. For example, if you always dreamed about a toy transformer robot and you finally get it. That's what I feel on the ice."

Scoring, of course, feels even better. "You can imagine a situation when you are running away from an angry dog," Alex explained. "You've got a bit of adrenaline in your blood, right? Combine that with a sense of accomplishment, and you've got a goal."

Like his mother before him, Alex began his professional sports career at age 16 with Dynamo Moscow. That same year, he set scoring records in the World Under-18 Junior Championships and helped lead the junior national team to a gold medal. At 17, he became the youngest skater in history to play for the Russian national team.

Russian professional sports are notoriously tough. When one high-profile Russian hockey star complained that he'd been psychologically pressured to sign his contract, the team president famously scoffed that real pressure was when you banged a skater's head against a radiator.