On Frozen Blog

If you’ve roamed the concourse of Verizon Center during a hockey game in the past 10 years, there’s a terrific chance you’ve passed a Capitals’ king holding court with team officials, press, season ticket holders, or just about anyone who’s had anything to do with youth hockey in greater Washington the past 30 years, and therefore has benefitted mightily from the efforts of Yvon Labre. It’s difficult to imagine an ex-athlete amassing a larger body of community involvement and commitment in our region since about 1980. My buddy Mike and I took in last night’s victory over Dallas with Labre, and in between discussions of walleye fishing in upper Ontario and Labre’s dances with the likes of Terry O’Reilly and Larry Robinson, we learned a good deal about the in-game nuances of NHL hockey — Yvon knew, for instance, that Alexander Ovechkin was dead to left on his penalty shot attempt the moment he saw the Stars’ big netminder Mike Smith come all the way out to the hash marks to challenge him.

At 7:10 last night I found myself perched next to what I thought was a bigshot; at 9:10 I was high-fiving with a new puck chum.

Labre I think is like just about every other accomplished hockey player I’ve met or heard about: easy-going and humble, gregarious and chock full of terrific tales, seemingly more flattered to talk to you than you are to him. Twice last night Mike rang his wife Marleen, who was watching the game at home in Southeast and wanted to know how our evening with hockey royalty was progressing. In the third period, while Mike and I were deep in Alexander Semin stickhandling analysis during a stoppage in play, Labre whipped out his cell phone and, unbeknownst to us before we could react, dialed Marleen himself.

“Marleen, this is Yvon Labre,” he said, looking over at us with a sparkle of mischief in his eye and a wide grin, “will you leave your husband alone so that he can enjoy the hockey game!”

Labre hails from a region of Ontario, near Sudbury, that is north and east enough to Quebec to make French the common tongue of the towns. In fact, Labre spent all of his primary school years immersed in French-speaking classrooms. This however wasn’t enough to initiate him for inclusion in photographs with French Canadians on 1970s Caps’ teams. Regionalism so was entrenched in the NHL of that era, he explained, that French and English-speaking Canadians posed in segregated fashion for most photographs.

“I was a hockey player without a country,” he joked.

Labre was joined at the game by his son Corey, who’s thriving in his career in the insurance industry. Today both work for New York Life, but last night the Labres wanted to talk hockey, and living life outside of business suits. I asked how often they get back home to Ontario.

“My wife hates the drive, but Corey and me . . . we get in the car at 5:00 and drive through the night and are at my brother’s place by 7:00 the next morning for breakfast.” Hockey brought the Labres to Washington, they put down roots and maintain them here to this day, nearly 30 years after the end of Yvon’s playing days, but it was clear to me last night where home for #7 truly was.

The ex-captain hadn’t caught up with the full details of current Captain Chris Clark’s recent mouth-battering injury, one that his coach described as being accompanied by the most courageous reaction he’d seen in a player in 30 years. I explained to Yvon as best I could the fullest rendering of it as I remembered from the press accounts, expecting him to wince a bit.

“You ever see anything that bad when you played?” I asked.

“Bad? That bad?” he immediately replied dismissively. Then he reached up and removed about a third of the top row of his teeth for me to inspect.

Mike asked Ivon about big-league fights. Labre, as any Caps fan over 30 knows, often was Washington’s designated enforcer on those first, victory-starved ’70s teams.

“Nobody really likes to fight,” he told us. “You couldn’t back down, and you wouldn’t necessarily go looking for trouble . . . but you think working all I did to get there [to the NHL] I was gonna be run out of it?” I thought this just about the most poignant perspective on the game’s tough stuff I’d heard. Then Yvon told us about one specific dance with considerably taller Canadien Larry Robinson.

“I had a hold of his sweater and I wasn’t letting go, and I told him ‘You do what you gotta do, but if it comes to it, I’ll find a way to get up there.’”

Mike and I roared imagining that scene.

The evening closed in a high drama more than any of us would have sanctioned, with the Stars pelting Kolzig’s cage and nearly coming all the way back from a 4-1, third period deficit. For Mike and me it meant something tangible and of a keepsake sort that this special night included a Caps’ victory, over a strong club. And that it was a well-played game. Soon Mike and I will return to eastern Canada for vacation, where we’ll tell the locals of our special hockey night in late November. They’ll think us lottery winners.

So too should the rest of Washington.