Back behind Nathan Legare’s grandmother’s house in St. Pierre de Wakefield sits a small pond where ducklings splashed in the summertime.
As the seasons changed and the surface hardened, Nathan’s father, Martin, cleared the snow. It was here that a 3-year-old future NHL prospect took his first steps onto the ice.
It lasted all of about a minute. Nathan whined and cried, begging to go back inside.
“I can’t believe my son doesn’t like to skate or play hockey,” Martin said.
The father decided to give it one more shot the next year, signing Nathan up for a team he coached. Same thing.
“He came back crying and told me, ‘I don’t like this,’” Martin said. “All year long, he was a poor skater. I told my wife, ‘I can’t believe my son’s not going to be able to skate.’”
Martin thrived as a natural athlete who played baseball and hockey as a kid. As an adult, he eventually turned into a slugger on Canada’s premier men’s league softball team. Evidently, those genetics must have skipped a generation. The father resigned himself to the fact that maybe hockey wasn’t for his son after all.
However, just one year later when winter rolled around, something changed. All at once, the kid who lagged behind teammates had somehow blossomed into the fastest player on the team, so quick he started training with kids four and five years older.
“I said, ‘Oh yes, my son is going to be good at hockey,’” Martin said, beaming.
If he only knew.
From those rough beginnings, Legare grew into an NHL prospect with a wicked right-handed shot and a deep disdain for losing. Almost from the minute the Penguins traded up in the third round of the 2019 draft to select Legare, he has been one of the most-intriguing forwards in the organization’s prospect pool.
The knock on him, ironically, has been his skating. This offseason, he weighed and measured his food to shave 15 pounds off his muscular frame. The 6-foot, 205-pound forward joined the Penguins for camp noticeably leaner and faster.
“I definitely think he’s picked up a step,” Penguins coach Mike Sullivan said. “Or two.”
On Friday, he was assigned to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, where he’ll begin his professional journey in the AHL. However, at some point in the not-so-distant future, he’ll take one more step and become a key piece of the Penguins’ future.
Before he does, here’s the story of how the son of a plumber learned from his setbacks and climbed the ladder to the cusp of his NHL dream.
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Days began before dawn for Martin Legare, with a 5 a.m. wake-up call and a cold shower.
Martin got into the plumbing business in his 20s. It’s no secret that hockey is an expensive sport often played by kids from affluent families. So as his son began picking up the pace on the ice, Martin did the same, adding 20 to 30 hours a week in side jobs to supplement his typical 50-hour work week.
Nights. Weekends. Holidays. Martin never said no to a job, working seven days a week, year-round, for an average of 65 to 80 hours a week.
That may sound like a lot. For a plumber, it’s just part of the job in a profession where you’re used to putting up with other people’s crap.
“To have a decent life, I needed to work to make sure everything is going to be okay,” Martin said.
By the time Martin got home from work at 10 or 11 p.m., his son was often already sound asleep. The price of putting food on his family’s table and providing an opportunity for his son also meant Martin missed many of the moments he was working so hard to make possible.
“One time I told Nathan, ‘Do you remember that time I was there to see you score a goal?’” Martin remembers. “And he looked at me and said, ‘But you’re never there.’ I started crying because in my mind, I know I’m never there.”
The handyman in Martin fashioned a net in the family’s garage, with a tennis net behind the goal to catch errant pucks. That’s where Nathan began to develop what remains one of the signature elements of his game — an elite shot.
By the time he was 8 years old, the future sniper could fire a puck from center ice and hit the glass behind the net. Once in a youth tournament, Nathan uncorked a shot from just inside the blue line that was so hard, it ripped the goalie’s glove off and landed in the back of the net.
As Nathan grew up, he started to not only appreciate the sacrifices his father made, but he also adopted a similar mentality. He was not the biggest player. Not the fastest skater, either. Instead, out of necessity, he grew into a hard-nosed, power forward with a workman-like approach to the game.
“It’s always the same as I’m doing in my life — work harder than anyone around you,” Martin used to tell his son. “When you go to the gym and it starts to hurt you, that’s a good thing. That means it’s the beginning of where you’re going to be better after this.”
Those lessons proved valuable, as Nathan soon learned that painful moments often spark the most growth.
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Every kid in Canada dreams of playing in the NHL. For the son of a plumber, that began to become just a pipe dream when he was 13 years old.
Playing for Mille-Îles Seigneurs’ Bantam AAA team, Nathan Legare skated alongside his childhood friend, Alexis Lafreniere, the eventual 2020 first overall draft pick. Years earlier, Martin Legare and Lafreniere’s father, Hugo, were teammates on one of the best slow-pitch softball teams in Canada.
Now, in 2014-15, their sons were teaming up on the same line. Legare paced the team with 12 goals and 13 assists — six points more than Lafreniere — as the club won five of the six league championships.
The progression continued, as Nathan debuted in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League as a 16-year-old and quickly became one of Baie-Comeau’s premier players. His career appeared to be taking off.
Then he got a hard dose of reality.
Following his 16-year-old year, Nathan tried out for Canada’s Ivan Hlinka Memorial Tournament team. The yearly event, which features the best under-18 player in the world, often has a huge impact on NHL draft position.
And Legare got cut.
“It was the first time in my life I got cut from a team,” Nathan Legare said. “It was kind of a slap in the face.”
Legare considers that a “turning point” in his career. Motivated to prove the selection committee wrong, he fine-tuned his diet and focused on his sleeping habits.
“I told myself that I would be one of the good prospects of that year,” Legare said. “I will make all the sacrifices to get drafted in the NHL. The cut just motivated me to the best version of myself on and off the ice.”
Sure enough, on June 22, 2019, former Penguins general manager Jim Rutherford exchanged fourth-, fifth- and seventh-round picks to move into the early third round and select Legare.
Some athletes are motivated by the thrill of winning. Others are possessed by a hatred for losing. Legare falls into that second category.
When he returned to the QMJHL, Baie-Comeau careened into a rebuilding mode, selling off many of the teammates that Legare skated with during their formative years. After Christmas, with a new-look roster, coach Jon Goyens promoted Legare to team captain.
The “C” fit. Goyens watched Legare emerge into an “emotional leader” who “wore his heart on his sleeve” and held himself to a high standard.
“Right after a bad period, he could pop in and be like, ‘I got this coach. Just come in with five minutes left. I got it,’” Goyens remembers. “He really understood the heartbeat of the room.”
Legare was never reluctant to raise his voice in the dressing room. But when he got on the ice, he backed it up by raising his own level of play. Goyens made certain to put his captain on the ice for the first shift of the next period to set a new tone.
“It’s not that we’re looking for guys to fight or this or that,” Goyens said. “But for a guy who is known for putting up points, he was the first guy to forecheck to start that next period. He was the first guy to really lay the body. From time to time, he ended up dropping the gloves, too.”
The kid who once cried on the ice and begged to go inside had learned to harness his emotions and keep fighting long after others thought it was time to quit.
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The COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench in many prospects’ plans, as seasons were paused and cities were locked down.
Legare returned to his family home in Saint-Eustache, Quebec, where the government-imposed shutdown had forced his father to dial back his workload for one of the first times in his life. That tough moment came with a slim silver lining. All together under the same roof, Nathan, his two sisters and his parents played cards around the kitchen table and shared stories from childhood.
With rinks closed, Nathan returned to the garage where his dad built the net, riffling shot after shot to the point that he broke the pipes and burst through the net.
The Penguins sent each player a personalized workout plan to keep them in shape during the downtime. Martin, the father who was once “never there,” was right by Nathan’s side, sweating through the same exercises.
“Sometimes, when you don’t know when you’re going to wear skates again, the motivation is not there,” Nathan said. “He was with me to give me motivation.”
As an adult now, Nathan can look back with respect for his father, who pushed him onto the ice for the first time and then helped fuel the dream with his own work ethic.
“My dad is my hero,” Nathan said. “You have to make sacrifices to be at the best level. My dad did everything in his power to give back to me and help me be the best player that I can.”
Now, as he approaches his NHL dream, Nathan is heeding the lessons of his father and pushing himself to take yet another step to finish the journey that started on the pond.
Mike DeFabo: mdefabo@post-gazette.com and Twitter @MikeDeFabo.
First Published: October 8, 2021, 4:54 p.m.
