The Original: Living Life Through Hockey

By Norm Beaudin and Kim Passante

Canadian former professional hockey player Norm Beaudin is best known for being "The Original Jet"-the first to sign with the Winnipeg Jets Franchise in 1972. He played twenty-five games in the National Hockey League (NHL) and 335 games in the World Hockey Association (WHA). Beaudin also played for the Minnesota North Stars and the St. Louis Blu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Briley & Baxter Publications
• Release date: Jul 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781954819504

Norm Beaudin

Canadian former professional hockey player Norm Beaudin is most known for being "The Original Jet," being the first to sign with the Winnipeg Jets Franchise in 1972. He played 25 games in the National Hockey League (NHL) and 335 games in the World Hockey Association. Beaudin also played for the Minnesota North Stars and St. Louis Blues. At 80 years old, Beaudin still plays hockey and is an active advocate of the sport, coaching younger generations of players.

Book preview

Chapter One

A HOCKEY PLAYER IS BORN

It was a cold day, I’m told. The coldest day in memory for my uncle. Fifty degrees below zero he would say that November 28, 1941, in Montmartre, Saskatchewan, Canada—the day I was born. Many a time have I heard about how my mom almost died birthing me. They actually gave her the last rites, thinking she wouldn’t make it through, but pull through she did, and she lived to give birth to many more. Sometimes I would hear from people that I was her favorite, and while I never wanted to be favored over any of my siblings, I wonder if perhaps I was. Maybe she was thankful that we had pulled through together or perhaps she was scared of me? I don’t know, but it seems things worked out in my favor. Whatever the influences were, I seemed to slide straight from birth into hockey skates and haven’t hung them up to this day.

I came to learn early on that in the game of hockey, sometimes we get where we’re going because of things we do control and sometimes because of things we don’t control. There are times when we win using tactful diplomacy, sometimes by the clever manipulation of organized rules, sometimes simply because of a lucky flip of the puck, or a variety of other such factors. And sometimes, it’s just because you want it more than anyone else and you just physically outdo your competitors. It is in life as it is in hockey.

Many of my early days skating could be summed up by those last sentences, and undoubtedly, my siblings would agree—especially two of my sisters, who for a while wore the same size skate as me. Unfortunately (for them, usually), in our world of limited resources and hand-me-downs, that meant only one of the three of us got to skate at a time. As much as I had been taught to be fair and tactfully diplomatic, fair is, to be honest, a relative term. To me, it was fair that I got first shot at those skates until I grew into the next bigger pair. It was I, who loved hockey with every cell in my body, who should wear those skates. Sure, I was occasionally hit with a bout of conscience—and perhaps the tap of an elder’s stick—and relinquished control of the skates to the girls for a turn, but I was a kid, and a kid with a passion, and it only seemed fair that those skates were on my feet.

In talking to my sisters in our later years, I have realized that my parents did show preference for the boys in our family. My sisters would cook the meals and make sure we would all be fed, and once our bellies were full, we boys would naturally take off and the girls were left to clean up and finish the chores that we did not do. My poor sisters would pick up the slack receiving no thank-yous or even a goodbye. Now that we talk about it, my sisters certainly were begrudged at the time, but now we can laugh about it. It helped me a lot that they were there to do all that work. Once I learned things from their perspective, I tried to make it up to them. Sorry about that, sisters!

Being born in Canada gives one a good start in the field of hockey. Hockey blood seems to course through the veins of nearly all Canadians and even though I was the ninth of thirteen children born to a family of limited means, we had a closet full of skates and sticks. We may not have had the best of gear, but we made do with what we had. We also learned to take good care of and maintain our equipment. We had a homemade skate sharpener that we used to sharpen our skates. It was a hand-cranked grinder that needed to be watered manually, so it took multiple kids to sharpen a pair of skates. We took great care to preserve the equipment that we had.

My wife Linda, raised as an only child, recalls heating potatoes when she was young and stuffing them into her skate boots, leaving them in there to heat the cold, stiff leather. When she was satisfied that the boots were wearable, she would pull the spuds out and stuff her cold toes into the warm boots, nicely prepared for a trip to the frozen pond with her friends. In our family, no one would have wanted to eat boot-seasoned potatoes, and we didn’t have enough to spare to warm dozens of boots and then throw those potatoes out, so we braved the cold without such luxury.

Those around me tell me that I started skating around the age of three. My parents didn’t encourage us to play hockey, and while some of my family played, none of them seemed to have the passion for it that I did. I skated with a dedication and intensity that none of them matched. We skated on a dugout or slough (pronounced in Canada as slew), which in the warmer seasons was a pond on our property for our animals. In the cold season, I would spend six to seven hours a day on the ice if I could. For the life of me, I can’t remember what I did as a young kid during the time of year when it wasn’t frozen over. Maybe I was like a reverse bear who slept through the summer season. No, I guess, when the ground was warm and fertile, the summer months were reserved for farming, and I was probably so busy learning how to till, sow, and reap that I didn’t have time to do much more than dream about