Being Connor Bedard: the inside story of how a family raised a once-in-a-generation hockey phenom

REGINA—So Connor Bedard is home with his mother, Melanie, in Regina and she is a little annoyed at him over a messy room or something, normal parent stuff. She had taken international students into their home in North Vancouver for years, always around the same age as her own kids, and sometimes those students made messes or bad decisions; hey, it happens. And in moments of frustration Melanie would say to Connor and his older sister, Madisen, who raised them?

And on this day she repeats that: she says, if you were billeting with someone right now that’s what they would say, Connor. They’d say, who raised him? And it’s my job as a mother to prepare you.

And one of the best 17-year-old hockey players we have ever seen says to his mother, completely seriously, “Don’t feel bad, mom. Madi turned out great.”

He’s doing OK, too.

Bedard’s age-17 junior hockey season numbers with the Regina Pats are in the same ballpark as a few other 17-year-old CHL seasons: Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Eric Lindros, Sidney Crosby, Connor McDavid. He already broke the individual tournament and career Canadian records for points at the world junior championship. Canada’s hockey machine spits out a generational player every eight to 10 years, dating back a long ways. Bedard may be this generation’s model.

“I’m very cautious about labelling players as generational,” says Craig Button, the former NHL general manager who is now a broadcaster for TSN. “And I’m right there, ready to step over the threshold. And this is a hard thing to say for me, but it’s something that I believe. I haven’t seen something like Connor Bedard since Wayne Gretzky in 1977-78.

“I’m not saying he’ll do what Gretzky did in his career. What I’m saying is the brain, the processing power, and the brilliance playing against players all older than him despite his diminutive stature, that’s why I haven’t seen a junior player like this since Wayne Gretzky.

“When I watch Bedard, he doesn’t have the speed of McDavid, he doesn’t have the size of Lindros, he doesn’t have the grace of Lemieux, he doesn’t have the shot of (Alex) Ovechkin. But what was Gretzky’s greatest quality? He beat people up with his mind.

“I’m blown away watching him, and it’s not about him being the biggest or the fastest or the strongest, or the most graceful. But he beats you up with his mind.”

Some would disagree on the shot, of course. Bedard isn’t tall — five-foot-nine, a little more — and he’s got the beginnings of Crosby’s bank-safe build, with serious legs. He’s competitive, even fiery, on the ice. His shot is his life’s work, along with a creative electricity and vision in his game, and god save the NHL if he ends up playing in a rink that’s close to half the size of Regina’s, in Arizona.

And he’s still a normal kid, in the ways he can be: laughing on the phone with his old friends, still adoring of his family.

But Connor Bedard does not have a normal life in many respects, and won’t in the future. That’s what he wants, and what it takes.

Bedard fell in love with the game with minimal help. His first skating lesson at four years old went badly — “I was crying when I got off the ice,” he says — but at the end of the second lesson there was a stick-and-puck session, and he asked his father Tom if he could try.

“I mean, ever since I kind of first touched the puck it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do,” says Bedard. “And I mean, I’m 17 now and that hasn’t changed.”

He learned to skate. He rollerbladed on their rare flat street in hilly North Vancouver, but with purpose: self-made drills. He rollerbladed in the house. And lord, he practised. To save the windows out front Tom built a shooting box in the backyard, and Connor still shoots there when he’s home. Tom heard there were open ice hours at the North Shore Winter Club, which was relatively affordable: he joined, and took Connor. Unlike most places in Canada, there’s not much outdoor winter ice in North Vancouver.

“He’d stay there eight hours at a time,” says Tom. “More, sometimes. He’d come off, eat, go back on. His feet would be literally bleeding. I would go on once in a while, but normally I would just let him do his thing.

“He’d do drills on his own, he’d set up drills. And that’s the great part of it: a lot of guys at the time were more strict on edges and pylons and drills, drills, drills. They didn’t like open ice where you’re fooling around and stuff, but I was the opposite. I liked that he’s just out there doing, playing, creating, being creative. I’m not dictating how he should think. He’s got to be himself. It’s not about me.”

Button, by the way, notes there are some dim echoes of Wayne and Walter Gretzky in there, except Walter could be much more of a taskmaster.

Connor would take the stick and ball to Madi’s gymnastics training, where she was putting in hours every day. He would take a stick and ball and his rollerblades to Hawaii, on one of the two family trips the Bedards ever took that wasn’t related to their kids and sports. (On the other, the parents surprised them with a trip to Disneyland.) Connor broke his arm once; he shot one-handed, and strengthened the other arm. It may have helped.

He played some soccer and liked it, but not like hockey. His dad thinks Connor had a natural baseball swing — Tom was a pretty fair baseball player — and golf swing, too, but Connor was born with the same obsession that every great player has to have. The street was full of young families and Connor would spend days outside being a kid, playing tag and running through sprinklers, but working at hockey most of all. He has never owned a video game console.

“I don’t know if anybody develops a Connor, or develops a McDavid, or a Crosby,” says Jon Calvano, who coached Bedard with the Vancouver Vipers for nine years in spring hockey, along with West Vancouver Warriors in bantam, and at his skills academy, Elite Level Development. “I think we just got lucky that finally we got our generational player (in B.C.).”

Even now Connor gets on the ice on optional morning skates or off days, accompanied occasionally by teammates: he works from different areas, tries different shots, pantomimes celebrations. He sometimes sneaks out of the makeshift school classroom at the Brandt Centre in Regina — a room left over from the COVID emergency era, where the players would gather — and the teacher retrieves him by following the sound of a puck ringing off the bar, shot by a young man wearing flip-flops on the ice.

“I think he’s obsessed, possessed by it,” says John Paddock, the veteran hockey man who is the coach and general manager of the Pats. “He’s so meticulous in his daily routine, game day, other days. It’s just another part of his game.” Paddock does say he has tried to dial Bedard back.

“I tell John I don’t believe in them, in days off,” says Bedard. “But he makes us, a little bit.”

Bedard talks about shooting almost as a science, as something to master; he watched a lot of Auston Matthews on YouTube, among others: that toe drag and release from his feet. Right now Bedard can probably shoot a puck as well as anybody on Earth, and might have more ways to shoot at an elite level than anybody else. This season he scored 71 goals in 57 regular-season games, 10 more in seven playoff games, and nine in seven world junior games for good measure.

At the end of a morning skate in March, after an hour out there with two teammates, the Zambonis come out and the players head for the bench. On the way off the ice Bedard picks one puck out of the bag, skates it to the net being held by a coach near the bench, takes one last shot and then puts the puck back. NHL teams tanked for him: Anaheim, Columbus, Chicago and San Jose have the best odds and a winner will be decided Monday with the lottery. He’ll still be 17 when he is taken first overall at the NHL entry draft in June. All those shots have added up.

“It’s relaxing for him, right?” says Tom. “It’s peace. Especially as this has evolved into insanity.”

To Connor’s parents, he was both confounding and familiar. Madi had the same enveloping drive with gymnastics: Tom says it was like pulling teeth to miss a day of practice.

Melanie and Tom both grew up in B.C.’s interior, in small towns. Tom’s dad was a logger and he became a logger, too, but he felt a pull from the coast. He and Melanie met in 1995 in Sicamous, were married and bought their current house in North Vancouver the year Connor was born, before the prices got crazy. Before Madi was born, Tom had worried. He was 37 and had never thought about having kids.

“I don’t know if I’d be a good dad,” says Tom. “Will I care about this other person? And boom, as soon as it happened, that was it.”

The kids became the centre of their world, and Tom instinctively grasped the simplest truth of parenting: they grow up so fast. Melanie and Tom decided to help their kids pursue whatever it was: soccer, violin, art, whatever. Whatever was good for them, and made them happy. For Madi it was gymnastics; for Connor, hockey.

But Melanie and Tom weren’t raised in the church of hockey, though Tom enjoyed watching it on TV. When Melanie showed up to register Connor for five-year-old hockey the clerk laughed and said, there’s a one-year waiting list; a friend set them up at the North Shore Winter Club, and Connor climbed from there, playing up against older kids, excelling. When the Hockey News called to write about Connor when he was just 13, Melanie and Tom were reticent; the writer, Ken Campbell, was a little surprised, because Toronto parents tended to jump at the chance. Eventually, he convinced them.

Melanie had already started staying away from the games after experiencing the fierce currents of youth hockey on the moneyed North Shore. Connor was always a very thoughtful and almost overly unselfish teammate — he would pass to other kids even though they weren’t at his level from a young age, telling coaches it was the right thing to do — and to this day, he is the go-to quote in Regina for effusiveness about the other Pats.

But when he was very young, Connor told his parents, “I get along really well with all the kids on the team. But I don’t think their parents like me.” Melanie figured rink politics would become the topic at the dinner table every night if she and Tom both lived it, and they didn’t want that.

So Tom would get up as early as 2:30 in the morning and drive up the mountain way past Whistler, back when the Sea to Sky Highway was a truly treacherous road. He’d fell trees for hours; about 6 1/2 hours was the maximum, because it’s not a job where you can afford to lose focus. Tom knew a lot of loggers who were killed on the job and has been at the site of one logging fatality. He once broke his collarbone and neck when hit by a falling tree; his partner drove him out with Tom lying in the back seat of the truck, bumping down the road. It was all hard work.

“Yeah, it was hard, but you know struggle is not a bad thing, really,” says Tom, a solid man with blue eyes. “It makes you close. It makes things more important, it makes things real. You know, if you have it too easy, usually it doesn’t work out very well. So I don’t mind struggle.”

He would drive back and stop at Madi’s gymnastics in full backwoods gear, take her home, and drive Connor wherever he needed to go, while Melanie would make healthy snacks and co-ordinate everything. For a long time Connor’s drive could be channelled into teams and open ice and backyard shooting, but eventually the Bedards did what every parent of a serious hockey kid has moved toward in the last 10 years or so: trainers, skating coaches, hockey academies. Tom has friends who have their own kids in hockey, and he tells them he wishes he could say they don’t have to spend the money to keep up, but that’s how it works now.

“When you look at Connor, he did everything,” says Calvano. “When people ask, is he naturally gifted? I don’t know. He’s naturally gifted with the willingness that you’re not going to outwork him, and that if you’re gonna put in two hours he’s putting in six. So you’re just never gonna catch up to his output.”

Melanie and Tom gave their kids everything they could, but they were being pulled along as much as anything. A couple days before Bedard had to apply for exceptional status to play in the WHL as a 15-year-old, Melanie was driving him to the gym.

“I did not sleep the day before,” she says. “And I said Connor, I don’t think you should do this. And I know it’s what you really want. I know. But I feel like as your mom I’m going to be taking something away from you that’s so special; just the ability to make stupid mistakes that we make, and have regret.”

She worried that under the spotlight, in the age of social media, people would root for him to fail, as they did when he was a young phenom. She said she’d still get mad at him if he did something stupid, went to a party he shouldn’t go to, whatever. But she would understand he was a kid, too.

“And he said, ‘I don’t care if I go to a party,’” says Melanie. “‘This is something that I want. You can’t. As my mom you feel bad about that, but you don’t feel bad about taking away something that’s so important.’

“So we did decide to go ahead with it.”

On a bitterly cold day in Regina, Bedard is in a relative slump. The week before the top-ranked Winnipeg Ice came to town and went up 3-0 — they had already beaten the Pats five times this year — and then Bedard scored four goals, including the game-winner and an empty-netter, and Regina won 5-3. Then he got a goal and three assists over the second-place Red Deer Rebels.

But then came a rare scoreless game in a loss to Saskatoon, and on this night, a loss to the last-place Edmonton Oil Kings. Bedard scores No. 60, but a gloved puck in the crease at the death goes uncalled and Regina loses. Paddock says Bedard was a little too individual, though in fairness he did set up teammates twice for surefire goals that weren’t finished, once on a spinning piece of magic on a rush. Bedard, for his part, doesn’t blame the refs.

Melanie moved to Regina to be Connor’s billet the past two seasons, because nobody knew what it would be like for a kid of his calibre, and as Paddock puts it, “His whole preparations are based around perfection, and she’s the only one that knows it.” (Another Bedard youth coach, Dan Cioffi of Burnaby Six Rinks, recalls Bedard would be the kid ordering chicken caesar salad and a mineral water at age 12, surrounded by kids enjoying burgers and pop.)

Melanie has enjoyed Regina — the people have been wonderful, she says, and she loves the big skies. Renting a townhouse has been another expense, though, and being apart is tough. Tom has Madi at home this year, at least, as she attends Simon Fraser University. When Connor’s grandfather Garth died in 2021 in a car accident — Tom’s father, a devoted rock for the family — it was a deep, voiding shock. Connor was in the COVID playoff bubble, cut off. He stayed, and played, because he thought his grandpa would have wanted him to play. He pointed to the sky after he scored the overtime winner.

Here, Bedard is a celebrity. The Pats were a middle-of-the-pack playoff team in the Western Hockey League, despite Bedard’s 71 goals and 143 points in 57 games, but everything around it is practice for what’s next. Bedard’s 17-year-old existence is freighted with responsibility.

“I think there’s a lot of places where you’re just with your friends or you’re at home — I think you can kind of put yourself in situations,” says Bedard. “But you go to a restaurant, you go to a mall or something like that, obviously it’s a little different. I think it’s good, though: it makes you mature, and in Canada — not grow up quicker, but just kind of learn that you’ve got to be responsible, and know your surroundings. It’s different, but there’s definitely positives to it.

“I think what’s been nice about having my mom here is, you know, when I go home I’m just at home, or when I’m at the rink I’m myself and everything. You appreciate those little moments.”

There are other moments, though. The mom who passes him her daughter’s phone number. The letter that purported to be from a boy who was paralyzed who asked for a jersey, but whose address pops up in other, vaguely similar letters with different names. The yahoos driving by the house at 3:30 a.m. yelling: “Toe drag and release!” The autograph hounds here and on the road, pros, everywhere they go, forcing the team to change some of its protocols. After one uncomfortable incident that Bedard laughed off in the moment, he came home and told his mom about it.

“He said, ‘You know, I’m kind of realizing in some ways I have to be just a robot. Because you know that certain people are just wanting you to say this one thing that they can pass on,’” says Melanie. “And I said to him, I feel kind of upset, but I’m also proud that you’re mature enough to be aware of that. Because it’s so important.”

“I think it’s a small sacrifice to make,” says Bedard. “I mean, I’m myself most of the day; I’m at the rink and home most of the time. If I’m walking to the car and someone wants a picture or something, that’s all good. And you know, for me, I think if I had to change things — which I haven’t much, but just a few things to try to achieve my lifelong goal — I think I’d do that in a heartbeat.”

He goes through two more quiet games — one goal, no assists — then reels off nine goals and 17 points in his next four games as the Pats clinch a playoff spot for the first time since 2018 (there were no WHL playoffs in 2020 or 2021).

Paddock had non-Hodgkin lymphoma last year and then caught COVID while his immune system was suppressed by the treatment, and it was serious enough that his four daughters all came to visit in the hospital; coming back to coach this year was the right decision, he says. But getting to coach Bedard one last time was in the back of his head, too.

Off the ice, Connor gets rave reviews. He’s had two-hour autograph sessions that went 5 1/2 hours. When he heard local columnist Rob Vanstone left the Regina Leader-Post after nearly 36 years, Bedard sought out Vanstone, shook his hand, congratulated him and wished him well. When Paddock asked Bedard to meet with a friend of a friend’s family, three young boys who had lost their mother, Bedard was all in and the kids were thrilled. When Pats PR man and radio voice Dante De Caria backed into a coach’s car and the team was chirping him, Bedard was the one who came over and tried to be reassuring — it’ll be OK, things happen, don’t feel bad. De Caria is still young, but he says Bedard is the best kid he’s ever dealt with.

Coaches say that from a young age, Bedard was the kind of kid who was really attentive to his teammates, and it wasn’t correlated to how good they were. He could have asked for a trade from Regina at the deadline. He didn’t want to leave; he felt a responsibility.

“I think I’ve just always been almost sensitive to other people’s feelings,” says Bedard. “You know, I never want to hurt someone’s feelings or make someone feel bad about something. I’m still young, and if there’s something I need to say no to, I try to get my agent or someone to do it for me; I feel bad about that.

“But it’s part of it. I mean, I think there’s a balance: sometimes you can’t sign something and a kid’s gonna be upset, as unfortunate as that is, it’s part of it. And you know, I think for me, I want to leave a mark on all my teammates, coaches, family and everything. I want to be seen as a good player and someone who gave it everything they had every time they touched the ice. But you also want to be seen as someone who was a kind person, and someone that left an impact on people.”

Bedard’s parents still worry. Melanie worries about school taking a relative back seat — in the room at the Brandt Centre, a chart of Hamlet’s characters is the only real indication it’s a classroom. Tom thinks about the kids of the people he works with, and how they’re growing up.

“Their kids play hockey, but they hunt, they fish, they motorcycle, they snowmobile and they’re good at all of them,” he says. “But they’re not great at any of them. But is that better in the long run? Maybe it is.”

But what they decided to support above all was the happiness and growth of their children, so the family sacrificed, and sacrifices. When Connor and Madi went to Sweden on their own during the pandemic so he could play — one of Connor’s trainers in Vancouver was best friends with one of the assistant coaches in Sweden, which gave Bedard’s parents some comfort — Madi, three years older, would attend virtual classes all night and look after her brother, being the really organized one. (He was on his own for breakfast.) She had always helped him with homework, and been the older sister. But she had come to admire how Connor handled the responsibility of Being Connor Bedard.

But she also sees the pressure he puts on himself, or rather the expectations, and how his team’s results, more than his own, can hit him like life and death. Madi wants to tell him: you’re human, you’re young, you’re still growing, it’s OK. She also figures when he’s like that it may not help.

“(Caring like that) is, like, a great thing,” she says. “But sometimes it’s not the best thing.”

They are grounded people, the Bedards, and always have been. Maybe that’s the secret of embracing the hockey machine without becoming consumed by the hockey machine: keeping the focus on the person in the machine. Melanie especially goes out of her way to empathize with the sacrifice of other hockey parents, and to say their own family is not special.

But she believes strongly in how she and Tom have approached this. In Connor’s first year of spring hockey, at five or six, Connor wasn’t feeling well — they found out later it was his stomach — and didn’t react well. And Tom said something like, “Oh, you shouldn’t cry if you haven’t given your full effort.”

“So a few days later, Tom and Connor were somewhere, and Connor referenced what he’d said,” says Melanie. “‘Dad, remember when you said that?’ And Tom came home after, and he just said to have this little person repeat that to me ... he felt so horrible.

“Like it makes me emotional, because I am so grateful. (Tom) learned so much in that moment. And he never has critiqued Connor. They talk about things, because Connor is his biggest critic. And I’m so grateful for their relationship, because what I’ve seen, and a big part of why I wanted to step away, was I would look at these dynamics ... Connor would say some of his teammates would be crying because they didn’t want to go on the car ride with their dad, with their parents.

“And I thought, all these people in this machine, you are losing sight of the most important thing: your relation. Because even if they are the next Crosby, they’ll probably be done in their 30s and you’ve damaged that relationship that you could have had the rest of your life. Like, you’re gonna make everything in your world with your child about whether they scored a goal or not? That always was strange to me in that world.”

When Connor met his future agents from Donnie Meehan’s Newport Sports before he was drafted into the WHL, agent Greg Landry told the family Connor was the best 15-year-old hockey player in the world. On the car ride home, Madi turned to her brother and said, “Connor, I knew you were pretty good, but I didn’t really know.” In the front seat, Melanie and Tom felt like that was about the greatest compliment, as parents, that they could get.

Connor still calls his dad before every game. They have a routine.

“He just called me,” says Tom, “How are your legs? ‘Terrible.’ Did you do your arm (exercises)? ‘No, I just sat around.’ Did you do your ice bath? ‘No, I didn’t feel like it.’ Did you stretch? ‘No.’ How are the legs, the pistons? ‘Terrible, tired.’ OK, well, have a good one. Have a great one. Love you, talk to you later.”

Tom’s smiling by the end.

Connor Bedard is still just 17, but he is a culmination. He isn’t intimidated now because he wasn’t intimidated at 10, doing drills with No. 1 pick and fourth-year pro Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and other pros in the summer under Calvano’s watch. He invents things in games because he invented them out alone on the ice, without too much coaching or even instruction in the way.

“I think what’s happened to him when he was younger than he is now is, it doesn’t seem like anybody tried to take his creativity away,” says Paddock.

He loves teams and teammates partly because it reminds him of growing up on a street full of kids, of staying out until the street lights came on at 10 in the summer; when his parents bring up the idea of selling the house, Connor can’t abide it. He cares about other people because that’s how his sister and his parents are. He works partly because he saw how his parents and his sister worked, and he and his sister were the same.

“I think we’re both hard on ourselves, and expect a lot from ourselves,” says Madi. “But I think maybe it’s almost like, because we didn’t have this expectation from our parents, or this force, I guess that just makes you find it within yourself.”

It’s not that the Bedards tried to make the next Gretzky or Crosby or McDavid. They tried to make a happy and grounded and fulfilled set of kids, and one of their kids happened to love this game so much — and was loved so much — that he is 17 years old and a household name, carrying all kinds of grown-up weight and happy to do so. Connor Bedard is the story of a phenom, but he’s the story of a family, too. And he is turning out great in his own way.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur