On Dec. 11, the Nashville Predators issued a press release announcing that defenceman Adam Pardy had been “assigned” to the Milwaukee Admirals of the American Hockey League. Pardy had appeared in one game for the Predators this season and was, at best, a peripheral NHL player — reliable, but not irreplaceable — and, at 32 years old, a journeyman whose NHL journey looked to be nearing its end.
Pardy’s demotion was neither a surprise nor an event of any great significance to hockey people. It did not trend on Twitter, fill up Facebook feeds or warrant mention on the major sports networks. Players on the margins come and go. Adam Pardy was gone.
But in Bonavista, N.L., where he was born, and in Mount Pearl, where Jack Lee, the head of Hockey Newfoundland, would feel a lump lodge in his throat upon hearing of the demotion, Pardy wasn’t just another hockey player. In St. John’s, Brendan McCarthy, a sportswriter with The Telegram, noted Pardy’s demise in “Newfoundlanders Away.” It is a list the local paper has been publishing weekly since the early 1990s to track the careers of Newfoundlanders playing in major junior and minor professional leagues, American universities, Europe and, most importantly, the NHL. Pardy’s banishment, in this arena, wasn’t merely a footnote. It was an ending, since, upon his departure from Nashville, there was not a single Newfoundlander left playing in the NHL — a sorry state of hockey-affairs the province hadn’t witnessed since 1995.
“It was a sad day for us,” Jack Lee said. “Look, if you make the NHL from Ontario or Quebec or B.C., it is just not the same impact as a kid from Newfoundland and Labrador making it, because everybody from Newfoundland and Labrador, no matter if they like hockey or not, will follow that kid.
“We are a different people here. We live on an island. We are all connected to this rock, and we are used to leaving it — to go away to work – no matter what that work is. But, at the end of the day, we are still connected.”
Hockey came late to Newfoundland, arriving in what was then a British colony around 1900. That is 25 years after the first organized hockey game was played at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal and about 100 years after shinny took hold on Long Pond, in Windsor, N.S. Only 29 Newfoundlanders have made it to the NHL; three have won the Stanley Cup and just one, Harry (Moose) Watson of St. John’s, is in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Watson got there, in part, by leading the Toronto Granites to an Olympic gold medal at the 1924 Games in Chamonix. The Moose had been a First World War flying ace and scored 36 goals in five games at the Olympics. He later spurned offers from the nascent NHL, thus preserving his amateur status.
I don’t want to say the passion for a hometown player is stronger here than, say, in Saskatchewan, but I’d say it is wider spread.
But amateurism is no longer an end goal. The NHL is the place to be. Five years ago, seven Newfoundlanders were in the league. Times were good, and now they are not. McCarthy, the sportswriter, said in an email that the original intent of Newfoundlanders Away wasn’t to focus on the NHL so much as it was to answer the question, where are they now for all the elite players who left the province. Every October, just as sure as the coming of another hockey season, the veteran reporter will start receiving emails from readers asking him when “the list” is going to start up again.
“I don’t want to say the passion for a hometown player is stronger here than, say, in Saskatchewan, but I’d say it is wider spread,” McCarthy said. “There is a definite and different nationalism here. I’m originally from New Brunswick and I don’t believe someone from Moncton, for example, is as interested in a player from Campbellton, N.B., as someone from St. John’s would be in a player from Gander.
“It’s not a hometown-thing, it’s a home-province feeling.”
It is about being from the same rock, if not the same town, and going away for work — but never truly leaving home. Pardy bounced around the minors before breaking into the NHL with Calgary in 2008. During his NHL rookie season he lived with his two older brothers, Neil and Todd. Both were electricians who moved away to Alberta to find work. The boys’ father, Stan, worked construction jobs in Lloydminster, on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Stan has since returned to Bonavista, where he and his wife own a small hotel with ocean views. Lorraine says that they get guests from as far away as Germany and England.
The couple’s youngest son has built himself a new house in town. But his mother says he won’t be home for Christmas. On Dec. 19, Adam Pardy was recalled to Nashville.
He was back on the list.
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