Born to skate

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/06/2017 (2492 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The scouts agree. He’s big, he’s strong and he’s got an extended reach he uses effectively as both an offensive and defensive threat.

He’s got skilled hands that turn scoring opportunities into goals at an unusually high rate, but curled into fists those same hands become weapons of a different kind capable of pounding an opponent into submission.

And he’s got uncommonly good vision on the ice, an ability to be where the puck is going to be rather than where it is.

Above all, what Nolan Patrick has that most people don’t is a genetic makeup researchers increasingly believe puts a tiny sliver of the population on the path to athletic greatness long before they even learn to walk.

Selected second overall by the Philadelphia Flyers Friday night in Chicago, Patrick becomes the third member of his family to be drafted in the first round of the NHL entry draft, joining father Steve Patrick, who was selected 20th overall in 1980, and uncle James Patrick, who was selected ninth overall in 1981.

Hockey, in other words, is quite literally in the 18-year-old’s genes.

But his extraordinary athletic genes run deeper — much deeper — than even that. His mother, Carrie Patrick (nee Chernomaz), played volleyball for the University of Winnipeg Wesmen. Her brother, Rich Chernomaz, also played in the NHL, for both Calgary and New Jersey. His aunt, Tara Patrick, played Wesmen volleyball and in 1990-91 was the CIAU rookie of the year.

Then there’s his grandfather, Steve Patrick, who played 13 years for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, won four Grey Cups and is a member of both the Manitoba and Bombers halls of fame.

If you were a mad scientist looking to create the ideal conditions to produce an elite athlete, you’d set up your petri dishes and test tubes in the Patrick family.

 

All men not equal

There are good, solid, even indispensable reasons why we as a society cling to the delusion all men are created equal: any alternative viewpoint tends to produce a politics that gets very dark, very quickly.

But it is a simple point of fact — easily verifiable with a quick stroll through a maternity ward — we are not even remotely all created equal; on the contrary, we are all born, for better and worse, quite different.

That means that while we are all born with the same basic rights and protections, we don’t all begin life from the same starting line, a cold reality most easily seen in the way our varying physical attributes limit our athletic abilities long before we ever even learn to walk.

Short and stocky? You’re going to have to work extra hard if your lifelong dream is to be an Olympic sprinter. Tall and lean? Odds are the short and stocky guy is going to be able to bench press more than you, even if you do spend more hours in the gym.

There will be exceptions, of course, and that’s the fun part of being people on this planet: we surprise each other — and ourselves — all the time. But as a general principle, there are solid reasons why some thoroughbreds are sold as yearlings for millions of dollars and others aren’t worth what it would cost to ship them to the track — horse people realized years ago that breeding does, in fact, count for a lot.

And not just in horse racing. While everyone loves an underdog story about a guy who overcame his short stature with a huge heart to make it to the big leagues, there is increasing research to suggest that athletes — at least at the elite level — are often born at least as much as they are made.

Consider: A study by the Wall Street Journal last summer found NBA basketball is, quite literally a “family business,” with 48.8 percent of active players in the NBA related to an elite athlete.

That’s a staggering number and it’s testimony at least in part to how important height is in the NBA, where it is almost a prerequisite to be well over six feet tall to play. Simply put, if you’ve got to be 6-6 just to play, the odds are going to be pretty overwhelming you’ve got relatives in your bloodline who will also be uncommon physical specimens.

Even in other sports, there’s a strong familial correlation: just under 18 per cent of NFLers have elite athletes in their families, while 14.5 percent of major league baseball players do.

The Journal study didn’t look at NHL players, but the anecdotal evidence from a hundred years of hockey — from the Richards to the Espositos to the Hulls to the Sutters and now to the Patricks — suggests elite hockey also runs in elite families.

Now, clearly some of this is a nature vs. nurture argument: Did, for instance, six Sutter brothers play in the NHL — and five get drafted in the first round — because they were genetically gifted? Or was it because they were surrounded by hockey from the earliest age and given every opportunity to succeed in the game?

It was no doubt a bit of both and we’ll get to the role of environment in Nolan Patrick’s development in a moment.

For now, let’s ponder this: Is there a way to quantify how big a role genetics played in Patrick’s development as a first rounder?

Well, if Patrick is like many other elite athletes, the research suggests Patrick’s extraordinarily athletic genes account for at least half of his development as a hockey player.

“The genetic component appears to be around 50-70 percent, depending on what aspect of ability one is talking about,” Dr. Alun Williams, director of the Cheshire Sports Genomics Laboratory, told Euronews a while back.

“Even a very favorable set of genes will not automatically make someone a good athlete, let alone a champion…But certainly, if someone has a very unfavorable set of genes, in many sports no amount of training and diet will make them a champion.”

Scientists have to this point isolated at least 200 genes they believe are associated with athletic performance, but they concede they’re still just scratching the surface of a human genome that has about 20,000 genes.

According to Scientific American, as much as 50 per cent of muscle strength is determined by genetic factors and, just like people, not all genes are created equally when it comes to their effects on athletic performance.

There is, for instance, a gene identified as ACTN3, a variant of which in elite athletes has been found to be associated with the production of the protein alpha-actinin-3.

That particular protein has been shown to help muscles contract both at high speeds and especially powerfully and researchers seem to find, in layman’s terms, a lot of it in Olympic sprinters, among other elite athletes.

The correlation between the presence of the alpha-actinin-3 protein and elite athletic performance is strong enough that it’s even led one company to develop a test that they claim will detect variants of the ACTN3 gene in children under the age of 10.

Now, you have to wonder about the motivations of a parent testing an 8-year-old for the presence of an athletics-related genetic variant — the mind boggles at the implications of that kind of knowledge in a parent convinced little Johnny is the next Usain Bolt.

But what is interesting is that researchers have found that kids such as Patrick — children whose mothers and fathers were both elite athletes — are sometimes found to have double doses of an ACTN3 variant. And that, the research says, uniquely predisposes those kids to strength, speed and endurance — or, put another way, exactly the three qualities you would want in an NHL hockey player.

Hocus pocus? Maybe. Even the researchers admit that a lot of the evidence is circumstantial. A lot of elite athletes seem to have some very particular genetic variants; those variants are associated with some very particular proteins; those proteins are known to boost various types of athletic performance.

But how, or even if, all this stuff comes together on the field of play, they concede, remains hazy.

Still, it’s worth noting the former chair of the World Anti-Doping Agency is on the record as saying he believes “gene enhancement” of various kinds has already been used by competitors at the Summer and Winter Olympics to gain an edge.

That’s maybe the safest guess ever. Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that the cheaters will have figured out a competitive edge to this genetic stuff long before the authorities figure out a way to test for it.

Nature-nurture

All of which brings us to the nurture part of this nature versus nurture argument; or, for our purposes today: How to raise a first-rounder.

“To be honest, I really have no idea what role — if any — we’ve played in Nolan’s development as a hockey player,” Patrick’s father, Steve, told me this month.

“I don’t think Carrie and I did anything different with our kids than any other parent does. Your whole life revolves around your kids schedule. But that’s just like many families: You’re driving them, feeding them, paying the costs because it costs money to play hockey.

“But everybody is doing that stuff. And there are a lot better athletes than us whose kids aren’t hockey players or in athletics.”

Now, Patrick is being modest.

It is not every family, for instance, that moves the family cars outside into a Winnipeg winter so that they can permanently convert the family garage into a gym and indoor space to work on their shot for their three kids — Nolan has an older sister, Madison, who plays hockey at UBC and a younger sister Aimee, who is a promising young hockey player locally.

It is not every family that, just for kicks, holds a family ironman triathlon at the family cottage at Falcon Lake every summer.

You know that ski hill at Falcon Lake? The Patrick family likes to run up it in the heat of summer for no other reason than, in the words of Sir Edmund Hillary, because it’s there.

Fun for the entire family? Not my family or, probably, yours.

And it is certainly not every family that has three former NHLers in it, with over 1,500 games of NHL experience and wisdom they can share — and do share — with their kids on a daily basis.

Throw in the experiences of two nationally ranked volleyball players in the family and those four Grey Cup rings of Grandpa’s lying around the house for inspiration and Steve Patrick’s contention Nolan Patrick’s upbringing was just like any other Winnipeg kid’s upbringing is, of course, preposterous.

Those might be small advantages in the grand scheme of life, but they are huge advantages in a world in which there’s a very fine line between good athletes and great athletes: the former are a dime a dozen in any high school in town, the latter are NHL first rounders.

So what does Nolan think? Well, long before he became a first rounder, he was just an unpolished 16-year-old turning heads in Brandon for the Wheat Kings.

I drove out one weekend that winter to spend some time with him and we got talking about this whole nature vs nurture thing and whether all hockey players really are created equal.

His take? Being a Patrick simultaneously meant nothing — and everything — to his development as a hockey player.

“I just love the game,” Patrick told me. “They introduced me to it when I was younger, obviously. But it’s not like they’ve been pushing to play a game I didn’t love. I was in the garage every day working on my shot by myself. My dad didn’t push me to do that.

“But they’re also obviously huge helps. My uncle and dad are both talking to me every day and giving me tips on both ends of the game. If I was a Jones or Smith, I wouldn’t have a father or an uncle who could help me out every day with my game. It’s helped me a lot.”

 

Season derailed

While the kid clearly had advantages growing up — genetically and otherwise — what everyone can agree on is Nolan Patrick would be nowhere today unless he put in the work.

He was given every opportunity to succeed, just like a lot of kids in our society. The difference with Patrick is he grabbed every one of those opportunities by the throat and choked it out.

And it is not like there wasn’t adversity to overcome along the way. Patrick broke his collarbone as a youth — twice — and his final season of junior turned out to be a nightmare.

With the entire hockey world watching — TSN’s Bob McKenzie proclaimed last September that this year’s draft would forever be known as the “Nolan Patrick draft” — Patrick had his final season as an amateur derailed by a hernia.

Patrick revealed this month that a surgery he had to repair the right side of his groin last summer overlooked there was also damage to the left side.

That oversight ultimately led to Patrick missing over half his final season with the Wheaties, not to mention the World Junior Hockey Championship last Christmas that would in all likelihood have been his coming-out party to the hockey world if he’d been healthy.

On a point-per-game basis, Patrick was more or less the same offensive player in 33 games this past season as he was in a break-out season the year before in which he scored 54 goals and 132 points in a 93-game marathon of a 2015-16 season that saw Patrick lead the Wheaties to a Memorial Cup appearance.

With all the missed games this past season, stories began resurfacing about those two broken collarbones when he was a kid. It wasn’t much, but it was a seed of doubt and some in the hockey world the past few months began whispering about Patrick’s durability.

It was poison to Patrick’s prospects as a first overall selection, a spot that is reserved — or at least supposed to be reserved — for stone cold locks.

Add to that a breakout season this past winter for Swiss sniper Nico Hischier and what was “the Nolan Patrick draft” in September had become instead “the Nolan Patrick draft?”

In the end, a first overall selection that many had been saying was Patrick’s to lose was, in fact, lost and the New Jersey Devils opted instead for Hischier with the first overall selection, leaving the Flyers to take Patrick with the second pick.

While 383 Manitobans have played in the NHL according to hockey-reference.com, there has never been a Manitoban drafted first overall — a drought that will now continue into the foreseeable future.

But it was still a historic night for Patrick in Chicago Friday — he joined Foxwarren’s Pat Falloon (1991) as the only Manitobans ever drafted second by the NHL. (Jonathan Toews, if you’re wondering, went third in 2006).

The general consensus is this year’s draft wasn’t as strong as the last couple, although that’s less of a commentary on the depth of this year’s crop of rookies and more a testament to a remarkable two-year run that produced generational players in Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews (not to mention the Winnipeg Jets Patrik Laine).

I asked Steve Patrick what this moment has been like for his family. I wondered if there is a tremendous sense of satisfaction right now, the payoff for all those long hours of driving and early mornings in cold hockey rinks.

Does it feel, I asked, like you’ve just gotten paid for the hardest job of your life?

“I don’t look at it like that,” Patrick told me. “Winning a Stanley Cup would be rewarding. But all this draft means is we now know who the next team Nolan has to try out for will be.”

Nature. Nurture. And some parents to keep him grounded.

The rest, starting today, is up to Nolan Patrick.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek