Prologue

“I barely can read or write, but I can skate fast, assist and score goals.
And that’s how I got into college.” John Figo

For many boys, hockey isn’t actually a choice — or, at least, it’s not only a matter of choice. Sometimes it’s simply there. And you’re simply there too and when you realize, you’re already playing the game, be it on a pond, on the backyard with your father, on a frozen street with your homeboys or in a peewee league.

Years burn, kids grow and life separates the actual players from the occasional ones. Most of the boys will focus on studies and anything else. Some of them stick with the sticks and you don’t have a single reason for that. For each pair of skates, one or several good reasons. They want to play for Montreal, they want to win the Cup, they want to be rich, they want to be famous, they want to be loved, they want everything. Or they just want to play for a team, no matter if major, farm, minor, semipro…

But some of them just don’t seem to have reason or even choice. John Figo would say “It’s like… nature, eh? I don’t know why or how, but if was always there for me since I remember. It’s not that I chose to be a hockey player. I was born on the blades”.

And Figo never had more from life than his skills to handle the puck, deke, assist and score goals. Not that he was a great player, but a very devoted one. His childhood and early teen age were lived much more on the ice than at home — an alcoholic father and an absent mother would make the worst of rinks more comfortable than his own room.

Figo wasn’t a very friendly person away from the rinks and he never went good at school so the chances of going to college were close to zero. He wouldn’t be approved to Canadian public Universities and no American University would accept him, a dumb guy and hockey player that wouldn’t be worth to NCAA Division I nor even Division III hockey teams.

So when he finished school, Figo plans were to play for a Junior C or maybe Junior B league until he turns 21, then getting a bad-paying job and play semipro hockey. Maybe he could make it to a minor league! It would be a dream coming true! Fair enough and Figo seemed to be very comfortable with this perspectives.

Everything changed with an e-mail from his old midget coach, Eli Quinn, inviting him to play for the lesser University of Greenville. Never heard of it, but… whatever, eh!

Figgy, I just got this job as the head coach of Greenville Grasshoppers. I need a henchman here, someone I can trust to be my heart on the ice. I can recommend you to the faculty.
What do you say?

And that’s how, and more important, why a quite illiterate boy got into college. As Figo always says, hockey is always there for him.