This would be the latest in the irregular series of "Videos that fascinate me for no obvious reason." The gentlemen in question is named Pravit Suebmee, a 27-year-old from Thailand who makes his living as part of an alligator show. I'm gotten close to a few 'gators (and by "close" I mean maybe 30 feet away) on my annual Myrtle Beach golf trips, and there's nothing I could think of that would ever make me want to do what Pravit does in this video. I'm imagining the job interview went something like this:
Interviewer: So, you'd like to work with alligators, huh?
Pravit: Yes, they're magnificent animals, and I have a degree in Animal Science from UT-Bangkok.
I: So, we need someone who can clean their habitat area, make sure the 'gator is fed every day and lead them around a couple times a day for the tourists. Can you do that?
P: Certainly. Sounds like an ideal job.
I: One more thing. Twice a day we'd like you to get down on all fours and put your head in the gator's mouth.
P: Okay....Um, wait, what?
I: You know, just stick you head in the gator's mouth.
P:Why would I do that?
I: Well, the tourists seem to like it, and it makes for a great picture. Fun for everyone.
P: But these things have really powerful jaws, you know. Having them bite you is supposed to be like having a pick-up truck parked on top of you.
I: Yes, but it probably won't really bite you. You're not a bird, or fish or one of its natural enemies so it will probably just leave you alone. Probably.
P: I don't like the way you keep saying 'Probably.'
I: Well, nothing is totally foolproof, you know. 99.999 percent and all of that.
P: If you're absolutely sure it's safe...
I: Positive. So you'll take the job? Great, you can start Monday.
P: I forgot to ask...why is this job open? Did the last guy who had it get promoted or something?
I: Ummm....yeah, something like that.
Don't be alarmed; He was not seriously injured. I wonder if this is a Workman's Comp claim under Thailand law?
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Taking the race card out of the deck
One of the hallmarks of dictatorships through the ages (think Stalin's Russia or Mao's China or Castro's Cuba) is that citizens cannot rely on any sort of consistent legal system or code of conduct. What those in charge find acceptable one day is subject to change simply by the personal whim of Dear Leader.
Wearing, say, a red shirt might be considered illegal. So, in order to avoid the wrath of the authorities a person could spend years wearing only blue shirts. Then one day, those in power would decide blue shirts were illegal, and poor Boris/Jose/Chang would find himself hauled off to the gulag based on the whim of a dictator.
Even today in Cuba, people are frequently arrested on charges of being a "Pre-criminal danger to society," which might just mean the cop didn't like the look on your face, or it might mean your neighbor reported you for saying something bad about the government. The average case results in a four-year sentence in a Cuban prison, which is not to be confused with the relative country club conditions at Guantanamo.
One of the hallmarks of a free society is a legal system devoid of arbitrary, capricious power, whether that power is wielded by an all-powerful dictator or by an angry mob.
With the Not Guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman case, America has taken an important step back from turning its legal system into a banana republic-like farce, and we can be hopeful that we are getting closer to the point where the "race card" is relegated to the ash heap of history.
To be clear: George Zimmerman should never have been made to stand trial, and would not have without the poisonous race-mongering of people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and the complicity of an equally immoral and incompetent media.
(The idea of Sharpton, a man with considerable amounts of blood on his hands - click here - crying for "justice" is particularly sickening. The man is a cancer on American society.)
A number of cities have seen "protests" over Zimmerman's acquittal in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and it's hard not to consider those protesting as simply a group of stupid people who are either A) Ignorant of the law, B) Ignorant of the facts of this case or C) So driven by irrational racial animus that they don't care about the law or the facts. And all along the way they've been misled by unethical journalists who are always happy to invent black/white conflicts, even if there isn't a white person involved.
The facts we know in this case are:
- Zimmerman was acting in his role as a neighborhood watch captain in a neighborhood that had seen a high number of break-ins and other criminal activity
- Zimmerman spotted Martin moving through the neighborhood and called police
- Zimmerman and Martin ended up having a confrontation. Anyone who tells you that Zimmerman "stalked" or "hunted down" Martin, or claims that Zimmerman initiated the confrontation, is saying something that they have no way of knowing to be true. The only evidence presented was Zimmerman's claim that Martin attacked and "sucker punched" him to begin the altercation, and no evidence to the contrary was ever presented. Or exists.
- The altercation resulted - according to the only eyewitness - with Martin on top of Zimmerman, repeatedly bashing his head against a concrete sidewalk, resulting in head injuries and a broken nose for Zimmerman. At that point, fearing for his life, Zimmerman was able grab his gun and shoot Martin in what seems to be a classic case of legal self-defense.
After the shooting, the local authorities investigated and cleared Zimmerman of any wrongdoing, ruling that he acted in self-defense. Given the facts, it's hard to imagine they could have done anything else.
This sent the racial grievance machine into high gear. Sharpton, Jackson and the others - who don't seem to care one whit when dozens of young black men are regularly gunned down in Chicago, Detroit or Washington, D.C. - saw a chance to get their mugs on TV and stir the pot by decrying the killing of a black teenager by a white guy.
Except they didn't really have a white guy for a villain. They had another member of an "aggrieved minority," a Hispanic, and that was kind of inconvenient to the narrative. So the media helped them along with a new term, "White Hispanic," to describe Zimmerman.
(One of the wonderful ironies of the situation is that because they each have one white parent, Zimmerman is just as "white" as Barack Obama is. The media began saying Zimmerman "identifies himself as Hispanic." I look forward to the day the New York Times says that Obama is the first president who "identifies himself as black.")
So even though Zimmerman had been cleared by an investigation, and even though there was not one single witness who could say that Zimmerman had begun the altercation with Martin, political pressure from the White House and Justice Department led to the Florida Governor appointing a special prosecutor, who decided to overrule the local authorities, bypass the traditional Grand Jury route and press charges against Zimmerman.
This is where we began wandering into banana republic territory. An innocent man was brought to trial - even though he had already been cleared of wrongdoing - by simple political pressure. When they wrote the U.S. Constitution, the founding fathers were cognizant of the abuses that had taken place in Europe through the use of "Bills of Attainder," a method by which government would simply declare a person or group of people "illegal" and deny them their civil rights. That's why the U.S. Constitution - as well as the constitutions of all 50 states - specifically bans bills of attainder.
The Zimmerman prosecution came very close to that kind of abuse, and the remarkably unethical conduct of the prosecutors (click here to see what respected liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz thinks of the prosecution tactics) left Zimmerman to defend himself against a moving target. First he was charged with murder. When the prosecutors realized they had no case, they asked to have a manslaughter charge considered, and amazingly the judge agreed. When they saw that case crumbling, they tried to add a "child abuse" charge, and even the judge that had been rolling over for them decided that was going a bridge too far.
And the complicit media - always on the lookout for "civil rights" violations - saw nothing wrong with an American citizen being dragged through a Kangaroo Court proceeding, based on political pressure from the White House and a corrupt Justice Department that even spent taxpayer money assisting anti-Zimmerman rallies. (Click here for details on that story, which the Washington Post and NBC News aren't anxious to tell you about.)
Recognizing that there was no evidence for a murder conviction, the media began cheerleading for a "compromise" verdict of manslaughter, as though "compromise" is a credible concept in a criminal trial. Imagine that you're driving down the highway at 55 MPH, and a cop mistakenly pulls you over and writes a ticket charging you with driving 75 MPH. Would you be satisfied if, when you contest the ticket, a judge said, "Let's just compromise on 65 MPH and have you pay that fine"? Would you consider that "justice?"
By the end of the trial, it was clear that despite all the bleatings of Sharpton and the media, there was no choice but to acquit George Zimmerman. The jury did its duty, and America backed away from the precipice of becoming a "nation of men, not of laws."
In the great 1990 movie Presumed Innocent, the judge dismisses the case against Harrison Ford's character by saying, "I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am that any of this has taken place. Not even the pleasure of seeing you free can make up for this, this disgrace to the cause of justice."
That seems a perfect epitaph for what happened to George Zimmerman, and one can only hope that Sharpton, Jackson and all the other race-baiters learn that the value of playing the race card has been dramatically diminished.
Wearing, say, a red shirt might be considered illegal. So, in order to avoid the wrath of the authorities a person could spend years wearing only blue shirts. Then one day, those in power would decide blue shirts were illegal, and poor Boris/Jose/Chang would find himself hauled off to the gulag based on the whim of a dictator.
Even today in Cuba, people are frequently arrested on charges of being a "Pre-criminal danger to society," which might just mean the cop didn't like the look on your face, or it might mean your neighbor reported you for saying something bad about the government. The average case results in a four-year sentence in a Cuban prison, which is not to be confused with the relative country club conditions at Guantanamo.
One of the hallmarks of a free society is a legal system devoid of arbitrary, capricious power, whether that power is wielded by an all-powerful dictator or by an angry mob.
With the Not Guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman case, America has taken an important step back from turning its legal system into a banana republic-like farce, and we can be hopeful that we are getting closer to the point where the "race card" is relegated to the ash heap of history.
To be clear: George Zimmerman should never have been made to stand trial, and would not have without the poisonous race-mongering of people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and the complicity of an equally immoral and incompetent media.
(The idea of Sharpton, a man with considerable amounts of blood on his hands - click here - crying for "justice" is particularly sickening. The man is a cancer on American society.)
A number of cities have seen "protests" over Zimmerman's acquittal in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and it's hard not to consider those protesting as simply a group of stupid people who are either A) Ignorant of the law, B) Ignorant of the facts of this case or C) So driven by irrational racial animus that they don't care about the law or the facts. And all along the way they've been misled by unethical journalists who are always happy to invent black/white conflicts, even if there isn't a white person involved.
The facts we know in this case are:
- Zimmerman was acting in his role as a neighborhood watch captain in a neighborhood that had seen a high number of break-ins and other criminal activity
- Zimmerman spotted Martin moving through the neighborhood and called police
- Zimmerman and Martin ended up having a confrontation. Anyone who tells you that Zimmerman "stalked" or "hunted down" Martin, or claims that Zimmerman initiated the confrontation, is saying something that they have no way of knowing to be true. The only evidence presented was Zimmerman's claim that Martin attacked and "sucker punched" him to begin the altercation, and no evidence to the contrary was ever presented. Or exists.
- The altercation resulted - according to the only eyewitness - with Martin on top of Zimmerman, repeatedly bashing his head against a concrete sidewalk, resulting in head injuries and a broken nose for Zimmerman. At that point, fearing for his life, Zimmerman was able grab his gun and shoot Martin in what seems to be a classic case of legal self-defense.
After the shooting, the local authorities investigated and cleared Zimmerman of any wrongdoing, ruling that he acted in self-defense. Given the facts, it's hard to imagine they could have done anything else.
This sent the racial grievance machine into high gear. Sharpton, Jackson and the others - who don't seem to care one whit when dozens of young black men are regularly gunned down in Chicago, Detroit or Washington, D.C. - saw a chance to get their mugs on TV and stir the pot by decrying the killing of a black teenager by a white guy.
Except they didn't really have a white guy for a villain. They had another member of an "aggrieved minority," a Hispanic, and that was kind of inconvenient to the narrative. So the media helped them along with a new term, "White Hispanic," to describe Zimmerman.
(One of the wonderful ironies of the situation is that because they each have one white parent, Zimmerman is just as "white" as Barack Obama is. The media began saying Zimmerman "identifies himself as Hispanic." I look forward to the day the New York Times says that Obama is the first president who "identifies himself as black.")
So even though Zimmerman had been cleared by an investigation, and even though there was not one single witness who could say that Zimmerman had begun the altercation with Martin, political pressure from the White House and Justice Department led to the Florida Governor appointing a special prosecutor, who decided to overrule the local authorities, bypass the traditional Grand Jury route and press charges against Zimmerman.
This is where we began wandering into banana republic territory. An innocent man was brought to trial - even though he had already been cleared of wrongdoing - by simple political pressure. When they wrote the U.S. Constitution, the founding fathers were cognizant of the abuses that had taken place in Europe through the use of "Bills of Attainder," a method by which government would simply declare a person or group of people "illegal" and deny them their civil rights. That's why the U.S. Constitution - as well as the constitutions of all 50 states - specifically bans bills of attainder.
The Zimmerman prosecution came very close to that kind of abuse, and the remarkably unethical conduct of the prosecutors (click here to see what respected liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz thinks of the prosecution tactics) left Zimmerman to defend himself against a moving target. First he was charged with murder. When the prosecutors realized they had no case, they asked to have a manslaughter charge considered, and amazingly the judge agreed. When they saw that case crumbling, they tried to add a "child abuse" charge, and even the judge that had been rolling over for them decided that was going a bridge too far.
And the complicit media - always on the lookout for "civil rights" violations - saw nothing wrong with an American citizen being dragged through a Kangaroo Court proceeding, based on political pressure from the White House and a corrupt Justice Department that even spent taxpayer money assisting anti-Zimmerman rallies. (Click here for details on that story, which the Washington Post and NBC News aren't anxious to tell you about.)
Recognizing that there was no evidence for a murder conviction, the media began cheerleading for a "compromise" verdict of manslaughter, as though "compromise" is a credible concept in a criminal trial. Imagine that you're driving down the highway at 55 MPH, and a cop mistakenly pulls you over and writes a ticket charging you with driving 75 MPH. Would you be satisfied if, when you contest the ticket, a judge said, "Let's just compromise on 65 MPH and have you pay that fine"? Would you consider that "justice?"
By the end of the trial, it was clear that despite all the bleatings of Sharpton and the media, there was no choice but to acquit George Zimmerman. The jury did its duty, and America backed away from the precipice of becoming a "nation of men, not of laws."
In the great 1990 movie Presumed Innocent, the judge dismisses the case against Harrison Ford's character by saying, "I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am that any of this has taken place. Not even the pleasure of seeing you free can make up for this, this disgrace to the cause of justice."
That seems a perfect epitaph for what happened to George Zimmerman, and one can only hope that Sharpton, Jackson and all the other race-baiters learn that the value of playing the race card has been dramatically diminished.
Sunday, July 7, 2013
A feel-good story from the Wild's NHL draft day
As you may have read, the Wild recently signed (how to describe him? Pest, agitator, thug...I'm not sure) Matt Cooke. Cooke has long been considered a villian in these parts, going back to his days playing for Satan's Team in Vancouver, and it's going to take me a while - like, say, at least until he scores his first goal - to totally accept him as a member of the State of Hockey.
The Cooke signing came as part of a flurry of Wild activity that included the departure of fan favorites Cal Clutterbuck and Pierre-Marc Bouchard, the trading away of Devin Setoguchi, the return of Niklas Backstrom and the signing of defenseman (and former Gopher) Keith Ballard.
Couple all that with the recent NHL draft, in which the Wild selected possible future stud defenseman Gustav Olofsson with their first pick (which came in the second round) and there has been a lot of news vying for the Wild fan's attention.
By the time the NHL draft reaches its third round, most fans have stopped paying attention. The big names, the guys who might help your team immediately, have already been selected. Because the NHL drafts players at a young age - 18 to 20 years old - the guys selected later in the draft are not likely to come right to the big club. Most of them will go on to college (Olofsson is headed for Colorado College) or Canadian Junior hockey, where the NHL team that drafted them hopes that they will mature, develop and eventually compete for a spot in the NHL.
Most of them don't. For players chosen in the third round and below, only about half ever play even one game in the NHL, and only about 15% of them stick around long enough to play 200 career games (less than three full seasons.)
And while not all of those players chosen late on draft day have the pedigree of a first-round pick, they all have ability, they all have a dream and they all have a story. This year, in the third round, the Wild chose a 20-year-old kid named Kurtis Gabriel, who had been passed over in his first two years of draft eligibility. That's right; All 30 teams had a chance to take him, and none of them did, either in 2011 or 2012.
Gabriel has good size (6-foot-4, 206 pounds), but he scored just 13 goals last season for his junior team, the Owen Sound Attack, a stat that hardly screams out "future NHLer." So why am I writing about him? Well, as I said, every player has a story, and I find Gabriel's quite compelling. Rather than try to tell it myself, I'm just going to give you this story via the Owen Sound Attack's web site, written before the recent NHL draft, and then add some comments below.
(Story courtesy of www.attackhockey.com)
---------------
The Kootenay Ice and Owen Sound Attack were skating in warm-ups at the Hershey Centre in Mississauga, Ont., 25 minutes before the third-place tiebreaker game at the 2011 Memorial Cup. Fans were still filing in but the buzz had started long before the arena was half-filled, the buzz that went with the knowledge somebody’s season was going to end that night. Up on press row, Canadian Hockey League staff passed out the lineups to reporters: The Attack’s top two forwards, Colorado firstrounder Joey Hishon and captain Garrett Wilson, were both scratched with concussions.
Who was out was, for the media, the story. Who was in was not even a footnote, not with a stat line of one goal and two assists in 40 games. Nobody knew who Kurtis Gabriel was, at least nobody who started to pay attention to Owen Sound during the Attack’s improbable run to an Ontario Hockey League title. Those who followed the team all season knew that the 18-year-old had been a healthy scratch since January. They knew that, even when dressed at the start of the season, he saw only a couple of shifts a game. The coaches and players knew more. They knew all about his stint in purgatory: the miles he had skated after practice, the hours spent on the ice working with assistant coaches when others were in the dressing room, the tons he lifted in the weight room. “I could have quit every day, a hundred times,” Gabriel says. “It might have looked like I made a big mistake going to Owen Sound.”
He was finally going to be in the lineup but it wasn’t the first time he had walked in from the cold. If he went on to score the winning goal that night it would have been the end point of an amazing story. Didn’t happen: Kootenay, the Western Hockey League champs, rolled 7–3 and Gabriel was held off the score sheet. As it turned out, though, this was just the halfway mark of an impossible sequence of events.
This is a story about the longest of odds. Those who would splash cold water on a peewee or bantam who dreams of playing in the NHL would remind him that the odds are long for a kid in triple-A even making it to major junior and two or three kids out of every hundred in the CHL will land in the NHL, even for a cup of coffee. So what would a realist say to a teenager who never played triple-A hockey, who spent seasons playing in single-A? You’d laugh at a movie starring a kid who’s skating with a smalltown Jr. C team one fall and landing in an NHL camp a year later. But this isn’t a movie, so don’t laugh. Follow the story. Odds are it will never happen again in our lifetime.
Gabriel can’t recall how many times he had gone to triple-A tryouts. But he instantly recalls the number of times he had a sniff of interest from a team, a look past the first skate. “None,” he says. The biggest hole in his game was skating. He struggled to keep up and was pushed off the puck too easily. “There were times when I was out there and I couldn’t wait to get off,” Gabriel says. “I knew I wasn’t making it. I was a double-A player. There were 15 guys better than me every time I stepped on the ice.” But he didn’t know and the coaches who cut him couldn’t see what his best asset was.“The first thing I think of is his focus,” says Joe Pacione, Gabriel’s coach in double-A. “I had to push other kids but not him. Nobody was harder on himself than Kurtis. I went to him before tryouts one year and said that I thought he could play on our blueline. He looked me straight in the eye, dead serious, and said, ‘If I can’t make it as a forward, I don’t deserve to be on this team.’”
In his early- and mid-teens, hockey was just a game. In the summer, he was on the baseball diamond or soccer field. In the winter, he split time between the ice and the hardwood. At 15, it might have looked like his prospects were brighter in hoops than in hockey. He was a rangy forward with Denison Secondary in Newmarket, Ont., a provincial roundball powerhouse. Gabriel says he thought he would top out as a Canadian university player but his best friend and then-teammate disagrees and he’s entitled to his opinion. “Kurtis could have had a shot at a scholarship, maybe to a small school,”says Kevin Pangos, the former Denision star who has started at the point the past two seasons for Gonzaga University, one of the NCAA’s top-ranked schools.“I’ve never been around anyone who worked harder in the weight room. He just wouldn’t accept anyone going as hard as him. He’d just find another level.”
At 16, though, Gabriel made a decision to focus on hockey. He saw it as his best shot at an NCAA scholarship, but it was hardly a given. The first step was Midget triple-A, a no man’s land for hockey prospects. The top players in that age bracket have moved on to major junior. The second rank land in Jr. A, waiting for promotion. Midget triple-A is for those left behind. Gabriel went out and was cut by the York-Simcoe Express and had to travel to Markham to play with a weaker squad, the Waxers.
He showed enough for the Jr. A Newmarket Hurricanes to invite him to their training camp in the fall of 2010. The Hurricanes let Gabriel know about a tryout for a Jr. C team in Georgina, Ont.“They told me that if I wanted to get in a skate, I could go up there, get into a scrimmage,” he says. It ended up being a lot more than that. He racked up three goals, dropped the gloves with a guy who burned his toast and made a guy in the seats do a double take. “I saw him win all these battles in the corners and score. I asked the coach who he was,” Bryan Denney, a scout for Owen Sound, says.“I thought he was a 19-year-old.”
Denney went up to him when he came out of the dressing room and introduced himself, inviting him to the team’s tryouts. The 17-year-old Gabriel thought someone was pulling a prank on him until Denney showed him a business card. His mother, Kim, asked Gabriel who had been talking with him.“OHL scout,” he whispered, not wanting anyone else in the arena to hear it in case it all fell through.
Still, word leaked out.
The first to hear was a police officer—Gabriel was behind the wheel when the family car was pulled over as part of a spot-check. Next was Pangos, who remembers “just dancing around almost out of control, one of the happiest times of my life.” Then the Hurricanes coaches heard and tried to talk him out of the tryout, telling him he had a chance to be a big-time player with his hometown team, maybe even a chance to play for a national championship. The secret was completely out of the bag when Gabriel showed up to the tryouts, specifically when the players went through fitness testing. “It wasn’t just that he had the highest score there,” Denney says. “He set team records by a big margin and that includes guys at 19 and 20. Everyone was just sort of shocked by it. Eventually, there were guys just yelling, telling him to ‘go for it.’”
Gabriel’s story would be amazing enough if it had ended there, with him landing a spot on the Attack roster, or that season, when he spent all those hours in practice and in the gym while waiting for a spot, or that final game, getting a chance to play at the Memorial Cup. But, no, after that, the impossible happened.
The NHL called.
Gabriel wasn’t picked in the 2011 NHL draft. That just doesn’t happen for forwards with a goal and two assists. But Jeff Twohey, then a scout with the Phoenix Coyotes, phoned Gabriel and asked him if he would come out to the team’s rookie camp that fall. From a Jr. C practice to an NHL camp in a little less than 12 months after having played so few shifts in games that he could count them. Though the Coyotes liked what they saw, a league-owned team doesn’t have the pockets to sign projects. “I apologized to him because I didn’t think we gave him enough of a chance to show what he could do,” says Twohey, who’s now GM of the Oshawa Generals. And Gabriel didn’t get invited to a rookie camp last fall—they were scuttled by the NHL lockout. He might not have anyway, not off a 17-point second season in Owen Sound.
But he can count on at least that this fall. His numbers from this season won’t blow anyone away—13 goals and 15 assists in 67 regular-season games—but his is an exceptional case. “I’ve never had a player whose statistics tell you less about his value to the team,” Attack GM Dale DeGray says. “You have to see him every night, every practice, to see the energy he brings to the team. I don’t know where Kurtis gets it.”
Those who know him will hazard a guess. When Gabriel was 10 years old, he and his younger brother Iain were called out of class early and their mother was waiting for them. Kim told her boys that their father had died. Only that. No details. Kim would wait a few years before telling the brothers that their father had taken his own life. No further details. And not so long ago, she told them that he had left a letter but didn’t show it to them or get into what his last words had been.
Some might have questions but Gabriel hasn’t asked any. What he already knows he has pieced together from memories. He knows what he needs to know, he says. He has some memory of his parents’ breakup when he was seven. Some memory of his visits with his father. Of his father selling his car and guitar, his beloved possession, because money was tight. Of he and Iain having to walk everywhere. “I didn’t know at the time, but looking back there were signs that he was having trouble,” Gabriel says. He doesn’t see his father as a victim, doesn’t think life conspired against him. He thinks his father failed because he was “lazy,” a high school dropout who lacked ambition. Gabriel will tell you he’s moved past any difficult time. He’ll reject in the strongest terms possible that he’s a survivor. He will say that he’s his own man. And yet, others see his father’s suicide as shaping his character. “He has amazing inner strength,” Denney says. “His father’s death is a source of that strength. It’s a driving force in his life.”
Gabriel doesn’t know where he’ll be next season. He’s spoken with some NHL scouts and he hears that others have taken an interest in him. It goes week to week. “Thirty teams will probably hate to see this story,” DeGray says. “They think Kurtis is a secret, but just about everybody has asked us about him.”
Gabriel hopes his name will finally be called this June after having been passed over twice at both the OHL and NHL drafts. He hopes his story will play out like Andrew Shaw’s. An Owen Sound teammate of Gabriel’s, Shaw had gone undrafted twice before Chicago picked him in the fifth round in 2011. Failing that, he’ll hope to get another rookie-camp invitation. Maybe it will be a chance to sign on as a pro free-agent in the minors. Maybe he’ll go to the CIS and hope to follow the route Washington Capital Joel Ward took to make the NHL. He believes he still has room to grow. He just needs someone else to believe the same thing.
Kurtis Gabriel knows only one thing for sure. “I’ll work harder than anyone else,” he says. “I won’t quit. It won’t end here.”
--------------
To put this in terms a Minnesota hockey fan might more easily relate to, this is the kid that dreamed of playing for the Gophers, but couldn't even make his high school varsity team. So he played JV hockey, or club hockey, wherever they'd give him a jersey, and he kept working and working until someone finally noticed him and gave him a chance.
That kind of work ethic earned Gabriel the opportunity to have his name called in the NHL draft, and this week he'll be in St. Paul to take part in the Wild's three-day "Prospects Camp." He'll be there with guys like Brett Bulmer and Matt Dumba - who have already had a taste of life in the NHL - Gopher star Erik Haula and Zack Phillips, the 2011 first-round pick who played last year for Houston in the AHL.
All of them have reached the doorstep that can lead them to the NHL, and while it's obvious that I'd like to see every Wild prospect become a full-fledged NHLer, it's not likely to happen. But I love a good story, and there's no doubt I'll always be rooting for a kid who says, "I'll work harder than anyone else," and then actually goes out and does it.
The Cooke signing came as part of a flurry of Wild activity that included the departure of fan favorites Cal Clutterbuck and Pierre-Marc Bouchard, the trading away of Devin Setoguchi, the return of Niklas Backstrom and the signing of defenseman (and former Gopher) Keith Ballard.
Couple all that with the recent NHL draft, in which the Wild selected possible future stud defenseman Gustav Olofsson with their first pick (which came in the second round) and there has been a lot of news vying for the Wild fan's attention.
By the time the NHL draft reaches its third round, most fans have stopped paying attention. The big names, the guys who might help your team immediately, have already been selected. Because the NHL drafts players at a young age - 18 to 20 years old - the guys selected later in the draft are not likely to come right to the big club. Most of them will go on to college (Olofsson is headed for Colorado College) or Canadian Junior hockey, where the NHL team that drafted them hopes that they will mature, develop and eventually compete for a spot in the NHL.
Most of them don't. For players chosen in the third round and below, only about half ever play even one game in the NHL, and only about 15% of them stick around long enough to play 200 career games (less than three full seasons.)
And while not all of those players chosen late on draft day have the pedigree of a first-round pick, they all have ability, they all have a dream and they all have a story. This year, in the third round, the Wild chose a 20-year-old kid named Kurtis Gabriel, who had been passed over in his first two years of draft eligibility. That's right; All 30 teams had a chance to take him, and none of them did, either in 2011 or 2012.
Gabriel has good size (6-foot-4, 206 pounds), but he scored just 13 goals last season for his junior team, the Owen Sound Attack, a stat that hardly screams out "future NHLer." So why am I writing about him? Well, as I said, every player has a story, and I find Gabriel's quite compelling. Rather than try to tell it myself, I'm just going to give you this story via the Owen Sound Attack's web site, written before the recent NHL draft, and then add some comments below.
(Story courtesy of www.attackhockey.com)
---------------
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| Kurtis Gabriel, the Wild's 3rd-round draft pick |
Who was out was, for the media, the story. Who was in was not even a footnote, not with a stat line of one goal and two assists in 40 games. Nobody knew who Kurtis Gabriel was, at least nobody who started to pay attention to Owen Sound during the Attack’s improbable run to an Ontario Hockey League title. Those who followed the team all season knew that the 18-year-old had been a healthy scratch since January. They knew that, even when dressed at the start of the season, he saw only a couple of shifts a game. The coaches and players knew more. They knew all about his stint in purgatory: the miles he had skated after practice, the hours spent on the ice working with assistant coaches when others were in the dressing room, the tons he lifted in the weight room. “I could have quit every day, a hundred times,” Gabriel says. “It might have looked like I made a big mistake going to Owen Sound.”
He was finally going to be in the lineup but it wasn’t the first time he had walked in from the cold. If he went on to score the winning goal that night it would have been the end point of an amazing story. Didn’t happen: Kootenay, the Western Hockey League champs, rolled 7–3 and Gabriel was held off the score sheet. As it turned out, though, this was just the halfway mark of an impossible sequence of events.
This is a story about the longest of odds. Those who would splash cold water on a peewee or bantam who dreams of playing in the NHL would remind him that the odds are long for a kid in triple-A even making it to major junior and two or three kids out of every hundred in the CHL will land in the NHL, even for a cup of coffee. So what would a realist say to a teenager who never played triple-A hockey, who spent seasons playing in single-A? You’d laugh at a movie starring a kid who’s skating with a smalltown Jr. C team one fall and landing in an NHL camp a year later. But this isn’t a movie, so don’t laugh. Follow the story. Odds are it will never happen again in our lifetime.
Gabriel can’t recall how many times he had gone to triple-A tryouts. But he instantly recalls the number of times he had a sniff of interest from a team, a look past the first skate. “None,” he says. The biggest hole in his game was skating. He struggled to keep up and was pushed off the puck too easily. “There were times when I was out there and I couldn’t wait to get off,” Gabriel says. “I knew I wasn’t making it. I was a double-A player. There were 15 guys better than me every time I stepped on the ice.” But he didn’t know and the coaches who cut him couldn’t see what his best asset was.“The first thing I think of is his focus,” says Joe Pacione, Gabriel’s coach in double-A. “I had to push other kids but not him. Nobody was harder on himself than Kurtis. I went to him before tryouts one year and said that I thought he could play on our blueline. He looked me straight in the eye, dead serious, and said, ‘If I can’t make it as a forward, I don’t deserve to be on this team.’”
In his early- and mid-teens, hockey was just a game. In the summer, he was on the baseball diamond or soccer field. In the winter, he split time between the ice and the hardwood. At 15, it might have looked like his prospects were brighter in hoops than in hockey. He was a rangy forward with Denison Secondary in Newmarket, Ont., a provincial roundball powerhouse. Gabriel says he thought he would top out as a Canadian university player but his best friend and then-teammate disagrees and he’s entitled to his opinion. “Kurtis could have had a shot at a scholarship, maybe to a small school,”says Kevin Pangos, the former Denision star who has started at the point the past two seasons for Gonzaga University, one of the NCAA’s top-ranked schools.“I’ve never been around anyone who worked harder in the weight room. He just wouldn’t accept anyone going as hard as him. He’d just find another level.”
At 16, though, Gabriel made a decision to focus on hockey. He saw it as his best shot at an NCAA scholarship, but it was hardly a given. The first step was Midget triple-A, a no man’s land for hockey prospects. The top players in that age bracket have moved on to major junior. The second rank land in Jr. A, waiting for promotion. Midget triple-A is for those left behind. Gabriel went out and was cut by the York-Simcoe Express and had to travel to Markham to play with a weaker squad, the Waxers.
He showed enough for the Jr. A Newmarket Hurricanes to invite him to their training camp in the fall of 2010. The Hurricanes let Gabriel know about a tryout for a Jr. C team in Georgina, Ont.“They told me that if I wanted to get in a skate, I could go up there, get into a scrimmage,” he says. It ended up being a lot more than that. He racked up three goals, dropped the gloves with a guy who burned his toast and made a guy in the seats do a double take. “I saw him win all these battles in the corners and score. I asked the coach who he was,” Bryan Denney, a scout for Owen Sound, says.“I thought he was a 19-year-old.”
Denney went up to him when he came out of the dressing room and introduced himself, inviting him to the team’s tryouts. The 17-year-old Gabriel thought someone was pulling a prank on him until Denney showed him a business card. His mother, Kim, asked Gabriel who had been talking with him.“OHL scout,” he whispered, not wanting anyone else in the arena to hear it in case it all fell through.
Still, word leaked out.
The first to hear was a police officer—Gabriel was behind the wheel when the family car was pulled over as part of a spot-check. Next was Pangos, who remembers “just dancing around almost out of control, one of the happiest times of my life.” Then the Hurricanes coaches heard and tried to talk him out of the tryout, telling him he had a chance to be a big-time player with his hometown team, maybe even a chance to play for a national championship. The secret was completely out of the bag when Gabriel showed up to the tryouts, specifically when the players went through fitness testing. “It wasn’t just that he had the highest score there,” Denney says. “He set team records by a big margin and that includes guys at 19 and 20. Everyone was just sort of shocked by it. Eventually, there were guys just yelling, telling him to ‘go for it.’”
Gabriel’s story would be amazing enough if it had ended there, with him landing a spot on the Attack roster, or that season, when he spent all those hours in practice and in the gym while waiting for a spot, or that final game, getting a chance to play at the Memorial Cup. But, no, after that, the impossible happened.
The NHL called.
Gabriel wasn’t picked in the 2011 NHL draft. That just doesn’t happen for forwards with a goal and two assists. But Jeff Twohey, then a scout with the Phoenix Coyotes, phoned Gabriel and asked him if he would come out to the team’s rookie camp that fall. From a Jr. C practice to an NHL camp in a little less than 12 months after having played so few shifts in games that he could count them. Though the Coyotes liked what they saw, a league-owned team doesn’t have the pockets to sign projects. “I apologized to him because I didn’t think we gave him enough of a chance to show what he could do,” says Twohey, who’s now GM of the Oshawa Generals. And Gabriel didn’t get invited to a rookie camp last fall—they were scuttled by the NHL lockout. He might not have anyway, not off a 17-point second season in Owen Sound.
But he can count on at least that this fall. His numbers from this season won’t blow anyone away—13 goals and 15 assists in 67 regular-season games—but his is an exceptional case. “I’ve never had a player whose statistics tell you less about his value to the team,” Attack GM Dale DeGray says. “You have to see him every night, every practice, to see the energy he brings to the team. I don’t know where Kurtis gets it.”
Those who know him will hazard a guess. When Gabriel was 10 years old, he and his younger brother Iain were called out of class early and their mother was waiting for them. Kim told her boys that their father had died. Only that. No details. Kim would wait a few years before telling the brothers that their father had taken his own life. No further details. And not so long ago, she told them that he had left a letter but didn’t show it to them or get into what his last words had been.
Some might have questions but Gabriel hasn’t asked any. What he already knows he has pieced together from memories. He knows what he needs to know, he says. He has some memory of his parents’ breakup when he was seven. Some memory of his visits with his father. Of his father selling his car and guitar, his beloved possession, because money was tight. Of he and Iain having to walk everywhere. “I didn’t know at the time, but looking back there were signs that he was having trouble,” Gabriel says. He doesn’t see his father as a victim, doesn’t think life conspired against him. He thinks his father failed because he was “lazy,” a high school dropout who lacked ambition. Gabriel will tell you he’s moved past any difficult time. He’ll reject in the strongest terms possible that he’s a survivor. He will say that he’s his own man. And yet, others see his father’s suicide as shaping his character. “He has amazing inner strength,” Denney says. “His father’s death is a source of that strength. It’s a driving force in his life.”
Gabriel doesn’t know where he’ll be next season. He’s spoken with some NHL scouts and he hears that others have taken an interest in him. It goes week to week. “Thirty teams will probably hate to see this story,” DeGray says. “They think Kurtis is a secret, but just about everybody has asked us about him.”
Gabriel hopes his name will finally be called this June after having been passed over twice at both the OHL and NHL drafts. He hopes his story will play out like Andrew Shaw’s. An Owen Sound teammate of Gabriel’s, Shaw had gone undrafted twice before Chicago picked him in the fifth round in 2011. Failing that, he’ll hope to get another rookie-camp invitation. Maybe it will be a chance to sign on as a pro free-agent in the minors. Maybe he’ll go to the CIS and hope to follow the route Washington Capital Joel Ward took to make the NHL. He believes he still has room to grow. He just needs someone else to believe the same thing.
Kurtis Gabriel knows only one thing for sure. “I’ll work harder than anyone else,” he says. “I won’t quit. It won’t end here.”
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To put this in terms a Minnesota hockey fan might more easily relate to, this is the kid that dreamed of playing for the Gophers, but couldn't even make his high school varsity team. So he played JV hockey, or club hockey, wherever they'd give him a jersey, and he kept working and working until someone finally noticed him and gave him a chance.
That kind of work ethic earned Gabriel the opportunity to have his name called in the NHL draft, and this week he'll be in St. Paul to take part in the Wild's three-day "Prospects Camp." He'll be there with guys like Brett Bulmer and Matt Dumba - who have already had a taste of life in the NHL - Gopher star Erik Haula and Zack Phillips, the 2011 first-round pick who played last year for Houston in the AHL.
All of them have reached the doorstep that can lead them to the NHL, and while it's obvious that I'd like to see every Wild prospect become a full-fledged NHLer, it's not likely to happen. But I love a good story, and there's no doubt I'll always be rooting for a kid who says, "I'll work harder than anyone else," and then actually goes out and does it.
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