Duhatschek: Danielle Goyette's journey from a Quebec village to the Olympics is unmatched

CALGARY — One day, in the fall of 2001, I covered two hockey practices on a single morning that drove a point home about the difference between the men’s and women’s game. The first was out at Father David Bauer Arena, and featured Canada’s national women’s hockey team, as they prepared for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. I was there to speak to Danielle Goyette, the goal-scoring hero of Canada’s 1998 Olympic team, who was making ends meet by working for Home Depot as part of a program for Olympic athletes that permitted her to work 20 hours per week, but get paid for 40.

After speaking to Goyette and some of her colleagues, I then adjourned to the Saddledome, where the Calgary Flames were practicing. Unlike Goyette, once the NHL players were done, they didn’t rush off to work at a second job, but went home for their afternoon hockey naps.

What struck me most about these back-to-back assignments wasn’t necessarily what I witnessed on the ice — a lot of really good hockey players, at the top of their respective professions — but what I saw in the two parking lots. The women’s lot at Father Bauer mostly consisted of aging Corollas and Civics, a lot of vehicles that had seen better days. By contrast, the men’s lot at the Saddledome was populated by expensive trucks, SUVs and luxury sedans. Geographically, the two teams were practicing just a few miles apart. Economically, the gap between them could be measured in light years.

Goyette had nothing but nice things to say about her Home Depot gig, which she believes added five or six years to her playing career. But before she ever landed that placement, when Goyette first moved to Calgary in 1996 as a unilingual Francophone to try out for the national women’s team, she worked a minimum-wage janitorial job to pay for her living expenses.

“I was a cleaning lady for a year,” explained Goyette, in the sort of matter-of-fact tone that suggested she wasn’t looking for any sympathy. “Because I couldn’t speak the language, I worked at the Olympic Oval and cleaned the dressing rooms and the bathrooms. I’d get up at 6 in the morning and come to the Oval to train for an hour. I’d go back home and sleep. I’d come back at noon, because we were on the ice from 1 to 3, and then I’d work my shift from 4 to 11.”

There are many heartening anecdotes to spin approaching the Hockey Hall of Fame’s 2017 induction weekend, but not many feature a rags-to-riches narrative more compelling than Goyette’s. On Monday, Goyette will become the fifth female player to become an honorable member, joining Cammi Granato, Angela Ruggiero, Geraldine Heaney and Angela James. Goyette enters in a 2017 class that also includes Paul Kariya, Teemu Selanne, Mark Recchi and Dave Andreychuk in the male player category, plus builders Clare Drake and Jeremy Jacobs.

Unlike her male peers, who were immersed in hockey at an early age, Goyette spent most of her formative years playing the sport recreationally. It wasn’t until she was past the age of 25 — a time when many careers are winding down these days — that Goyette turned her attention to becoming a full-time player, with a national team dream.

“Coming from a small village in Quebec (St. Nazaire, population: 2,114), hockey was a religion and a big part of our culture,” Goyette said. “I just started to play on the outside rink with boys and girls. I didn’t have to grow up with the fact of, ‘you’re a girl, so you can’t play hockey’ because we didn’t have a lot of kids in the village, so if someone wanted to play hockey, they could. Girls and boys played together — and I played that way until I was 14. My first real team, I was 15, playing for Ste. Hyacinthe, where I went to high school, and we played once a week, with no practices. I was 15 and I played with ladies at that time who were 40. There was a big gap in ages. Women’s hockey existed, but you didn’t have levels like bantam and midget and junior. We just all played together.

“We had tournaments on weekends, but it was more of a social thing. After that, I went to school in Montreal and played in a league once a week, but nobody there expected to go to world championships, because those things didn’t exist. I just kept playing and the more I played, the more I liked it. I wanted to get better.”

In Montreal, Goyette crossed paths with speed skater, Sylvie Daigle, a two-time Canadian Olympian and five-time world champion, whom Goyette befriended and eventually became both a role model and a mentor to her. Watching Daigle’s commitment to her sport gave Goyette an idea of the work required to evolve from a rec hockey player to someone on the radar for the Canadian national women’s program, which was in its infancy in the early 1990s.

“When we found out in ’96 that women’s hockey would be in the Olympics in 1998, Sylvie said, ‘if you want to make the Olympic team, you have to start training,’” Goyette said. “I’d always been active, but I never trained full-time for hockey. She helped me train, but she was more than that to me – she was a mentor too on the psychology side of the game. She always pushed me to be better, because she’d been in my shoes before; she’d been to Olympics and world championships. She was the one that put me on the right direction, on the right track. I had so much respect for her that I did everything she said to a T.”

Because of her early unfamiliarity with English, Goyette says Cassie Campbell-Pascall and Vicky Sunohara were important influences on her in the first days with the national team. Campbell-Pascall was Goyette’s roommate for the second-ever women’s world championships where she, Stacy Wilson and Goyette played together as a line.

“Stacy was bilingual, so she could talk to her, but Danielle couldn’t speak a word of English and I couldn’t speak a word of French,” said Campbell-Pascall. “We were roommates, but we couldn’t speak to each other, so at our first training camp, we’d communicate by tapping each other on the shin pads. She’d say ‘good morning’ and I would answer, ‘bonjour, comment ca va?’ Over the years, we became best friends, but it wasn’t because I learned to speak French. It was because she learned to speak English.”

According to Goyette, it took five years – from 1991 until 1996 – until she was comfortable enough in English to converse with her teammates in any meaningful way. It was at that point at the end of August 1996 that she moved to Calgary, to enhance her chances of making the women’s Olympic hockey team. The International Olympic Committee had approved women’s ice hockey by then and it was making its debut in 1998 in Nagano, the same year the NHL decided to send its best players to the Olympics.

It was only then, according to Goyette, that she started to understand the game – because she’s never really had a lot of instruction on her way up the ladder.

“I never had a coach tell me what’s a 1-2-2 forecheck,” she said. “I just played with instinct – read and react. That was a problem for me sometimes with the national team – not everybody could play with me because I didn’t know the system.

“When I moved here to practice and train full time and learn English, I thought I’d move for five months, and I’ve been here for 21 years.”

Nagano turned out to be a challenging time in Goyette’s life. Her father was ill and died while she was competing in the Olympics. She led the Canadian women in goals with eight, but Canada, which entered the event as the favorite, lost twice to the U.S. – once in the round robin and again in the gold-medal game.

At the time, an Olympic silver medal felt like a second-place award in a two-team competition – “because we were the team to beat at that time” – but ultimately, she came to realize what she and her teammates had accomplished.

“The day after, when you realize you have an Olympic medal, you go ‘whoa, OK, a lot of athletes don’t ever have one,” she said. “The silver was OK, but it was not good enough.”

Four years later, Goyette, Hayley Wickenheiser, Campbell-Pascall, Sunohara and the rest of the Canadian team turned the tables on the Americans and won the gold medal in Salt Lake City. Goyette also won a second gold medal playing for Canada in Turin in 2006, where she was Canada’s flag bearer at the opening ceremonies. In all, she won eight gold medals at the women’s world hockey championships and retired as the second all-time leading goal scorer in women’s Winter Olympic hockey history, with 15. Only Wickenheiser has more.

Goyette turned 32 a month before the Nagano Olympics, while Wickenheiser was just 19, but they found a chemistry despite the age difference because both were ultra-competitive athletes.

“This is what I really think is important: Danielle Goyette has as good a hockey mind as any male player she’s going into the Hall of Fame with,” Wickenheiser said. “She knows the game. She taught herself the game and she had this great ability to pick up the nuances of the game.

“To do so at such a late age, I just look at her as an incredibly talented person and naturally gifted athlete. No one spelled the game out for her. She wasn’t brought up through this hockey-robot system, where ‘if the puck goes to A, I go to B.’ When I played with her, I think the reason we had chemistry was because it wasn’t A to B. It was unpredictable. We both knew what that was – and how to find each other.”

In non-Olympic years, Goyette played club hockey for the Oval X-Treme in Calgary. A popular fundraiser was to auction off to corporate Calgary an opportunity to play an exhibition game against the team, which also included many Olympians.

“Guys would come out to play us,” Goyette said, “and we won pretty much all the games and they’d say after, ‘we didn’t know the (women’s) game was that fast.’ I think you have to be on the ice, or close to the ice, to understand the speed. On TV, sometimes, with the big ice, it looks slower. And now, it’s even way faster than that.

“If you look at how the men’s game has changed in 50 years, I think we’re going in that same direction. It’s not going to change in a couple of years, but in 10 or 20 years, look out, wow. We play like guys now.”

Goyette retired in 2007 at the age of 41 and is now in her 10^th year coaching the University of Calgary Dinosaurs women’s team, where Wickenheiser played for her for a couple of seasons.

“The reason she’s still coaching is because she still has so much passion for the game,” Wickenheiser said. “She can break the game down so specifically. They had her running sessions for some NHL players in the summers, like Matt Dumba, because she knew what the players wanted and how to deliver a really good ice session. To me, not every female player can do that, but she can.”

Over time, as Wickenheiser came to know Goyette as a friend, she came to appreciate her rise – and her challenges – even more.

“The family ran a restaurant when Danielle was growing up, so she told me once, she was chubby when she was younger because she ate too much poutine,” Wickenheiser said. “That’s what they had to do – eat at the restaurant and clean up because there were so many kids in the family. Her lifestyle dramatically changed when she came into the national team. She went from being this small-town chubby French-speaking girl to an elite athlete. Her training and commitment was up there with any player I’ve ever played with and her fitness level was always tops, wherever she was. She really understood, and it came from her family, ‘if I was going to be any good, it was all about work ethic.’”

Apart from her family, Goyette says she learned her work ethic from Wickenheiser, two players from different generations, who pushed each other to be better.

“She worked hard, I would try to work harder,” said Goyette. “She’d have a good game; I’d try to have a better game. The fact that I played with her pushed me to play longer too. Trust me, she worked hard. I don’t know anyone that can work harder than her. Her work ethic was amazing.”

Campbell-Pascall says Goyette was the female equivalent to Jaromir Jagr, someone who played at a high level well into her 40s.

“I remember, after she retired, she came back and showed up at our December camp and a couple of players had got hurt, and so they called her and said, ‘hey can you come play tonight?’ because they needed an extra body – and she scored a goal,” said Campbell-Pascall. “She really got better with age. She’s a bit like Jagr. I think she could still play today. Players like those, they’re just smarter than everybody else.

“Had she started earlier, I wonder how good she could have become.”

Many of Goyette’s former teammates held an event in her honor in Calgary last week, celebrating her upcoming induction. It was a roast of sorts in which they let it all hang out, said Campbell-Pascall, featuring the sort of teasing and humor that only old friends can exchange.

“The one thing about Danielle that people don’t know is, she was the smartest player – ever – to play the game,” said Campbell-Pascall. “She made it look so easy out there that sometimes we questioned her effort – because she was just always in the right position at the right time. She played with Nancy Drolet. They were a tandem for many years; and she made Nancy better. She made Wick better. Then I got to play with her – and she made me better. Vicky and I and her finished as a line together – the Old Dogs, they called us, because we were 110 years old – and she made everyone better, everyone she ever played with.”

On the eve of her Hall of Fame induction, Goyette remembered a long-ago conversation with her brother, back when she was contemplating a move to Calgary to pursue her Olympic dream.

“My brother said to me, ‘you’ll never make it the Olympics. No way.’ Coming from a small town – not even a town, it was a village – we only spoke French and we didn’t have a lot of money, so playing in the Olympics is not something you think is achievable. He said, ‘you’ll never make it’ – and I told him, ‘I will prove you wrong.’ He said, ‘I’ll give you 500 bucks if you make the team and go to the Olympics.”

Goyette paused, and let a smile linger on her face.

“I’m still waiting for that 500 bucks.”

(Photo credit: Brian Bahr/Getty Images)