By JOHN BRANCH
April 4, 2016
ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland — Past midnight on another rainy, windswept night at the farthest edge of the continent, inside a sports bar called Jack Astor’s, the exiled winner of the Most Valuable Player Award at the N.H.L. All-Star Game sat at a high-top table with his minor league teammates. They had just lost to a team called the Lehigh Valley Phantoms.
Several games from the N.H.L. glowed from a dozen television screens that lit the room. But here, especially here, it all seemed so far away — even for, especially for, John Scott.
“I guarantee you I’d still be in the N.HL. if I wasn’t in the All-Star Game,” Scott had said the day before. “For sure.”
There was cheer in his voice, not animosity, because that is how Scott is, facing life with a goofy grin and the self-deprecation that comes with being a 33-year-old journeyman, one with five N.H.L. goals in 285 games with six teams over eight seasons.
But he still felt like a man punished for stumbling into a good dream. He was voted to this year’s All-Star Game by subversive fans as a runaway joke. League officials begged him to decline the invitation, and when he said he wanted to play, he was traded from the Arizona Coyotes to the Montreal Canadiens and immediately banished to the St. John’s IceCaps of the American Hockey League.
Just across the narrow and busy harbor from the team’s arena is the easternmost edge of North America. Guglielmo Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic wireless signal in 1901 from Signal Hill, near downtown. Icebergs float by in the spring.
Scott wondered aloud whether he had played his last N.H.L. game. His contract expires this year. His style of play — lumbering and menacing — is fading from the game. It seemed possible that the All-Star Game would be his final N.H.L. game, the strangest of career codas.
“I lasted a lot longer than people thought I would,” Scott said the day before. “If it was my last game there, I’m O.K. with that. But hopefully not.”
Then, after Saturday had turned to Sunday, his phone lit up on the table. Scott looked at the number, carried the tiny phone in his huge hand and walked out to the foyer to find quiet out of the din. It was 12:38 a.m.
He returned a couple of minutes later and silently set the phone down. He waited for a lull in the conversation.
With a bit of a smirk, Scott uttered the four words that every minor leaguer wants to say.
“I got called up,” he said.
And the strangest of stories had received another twist.
On Friday afternoon, Scott woke from a nap at 4:15 inside the two-bedroom apartment he rented. There were clothes hanging on closet rods and shoes by the front door. The refrigerator was empty. The place had few clues as to who lived there. Scott kept the door unlocked, but there was no one around to come by.
Scott’s family was more than 2,000 miles away, in Traverse City, Mich. Danielle was 8½ months pregnant, with twins, when her husband was traded by Arizona in mid-January. He left their home in Scottsdale for St. John’s. She took their two daughters — Eva, 4, and Gabriella, 2 — to the family’s home in Michigan and waited for the arrival of two more daughters.
He brushed his teeth and found Supertramp’s “Goodbye Stranger” on his playlist. (“I love this song,” he said. “I’m used to listening to rap and techno in the dressing room. Ooh. Painful.”) He put on a shirt and tie and covered himself with a jacket and a beanie to brace against the chill outside. He walked alone to the rink, zigzagging down St. John’s steep streets, past the rows of colorful houses. The last 90 steps down to the arena are concrete stairs.
A decade ago, at the end of a solid four-year career at Michigan Tech and holding a mechanical engineering degree, Scott had no realistic ambitions for the N.H.L. until he received an offer to play in the A.H.L. with the Houston Aeros. He promised Danielle that he would spend no more than three years seeing if he could move up. In his third season, increasingly cast as a willing and able fighter, he was promoted to the Minnesota Wild. Over eight N.H.L. seasons, he went from the Wild to the Blackhawks, then the Rangers, the Sabres, the Sharks and the Coyotes, rarely playing more than a few minutes a night.
Until December, his was an understated hockey career headed toward a quiet conclusion. Then the All-Star votes piled up, and Scott played along with the joke. When the voting ended, he had enough votes to be captain of the Pacific Division. Debates stretched the continent over whether Scott should play. Most seemed to think he should. Friends and family thought so, too.
But then Coyotes General Manager Don Maloney pulled him aside and told Scott that he had been traded.
“The thing that was fishy was that he was, like, ‘We traded you to Montreal, but not because of the All-Star Game,’ ” Scott recalled over the weekend. If it was a legitimate trade, Scott reasoned, why would he bring that up?
Scott was not overly upset at first — many players dream of playing for the Canadiens. But he soon learned that Montreal intended to assign him directly to St. John’s. That looked to end the debate. An A.H.L. player, everyone reasoned, could not play in the N.H.L. All-Star Game. The next morning, Scott left his family behind and flew to St. John’s, taking three segments to get there.
“I’m out of the N.H.L, I’m not going to the All-Star Game, my wife’s pregnant and I’m leaving my family, and I’m going to Newfoundland,” Scott said. “It’s like bang, bang, bang, bang.”
Near and far, it was widely considered a dastardly conspiracy to keep Scott out of the All-Star Game.
“I can tell you that the Montreal Canadiens had no interest whatsoever in getting John Scott in this trade,” the longtime hockey commentator Bob McKenzie told The Globe and Mail in Canada.
A few days later, Montreal General Manager Marc Bergevin gave a confounding explanation that fueled more conspiracy theorists.
“I made a trade that at the time, I had to make that trade,” he told reporters. “I have a reason that I can’t really tell you why, but if I could, you would probably understand.”
The N.H.L. denied involvement. But when Scott learned that there was no rule stating that an A.H.L. player cannot play in the N.H.L. All-Star Game — why would there be? — he got a call from a top league executive, whom he declines to name, urging him not to play. As Scott recalled in a first-person essay for The Players’ Tribune, the official asked if deciding to play in the game would make his daughters proud.
“They said some other stuff, too, that was probably worse than that,” Scott said Friday. “But that’s what resonated.”
At the end of the call, Scott said, the person told him, “Well, we’ll be happy to have you.” The N.H.L. released a statement saying that Scott’s “assignment to the American Hockey League created a unique circumstance that required review,” but confirming that he would be an All-Star captain.
Scott outshined the game’s biggest stars from the start. Charmed by his story and his good humor, reporters swarmed him in advance of the game. He took part in the skills competition — “I’ve never been so nervous,” he said — and held his own with a 96-m.p.h. slap shot and a nearly successful spin move in a shootout contest. Fans gave him their biggest ovations.
The next day, Scott scored twice in the game’s three-on-three tournament to lead the Pacific Division to victory. He and his teammates earned first-place checks ($ 90,000 each). Scott accepted the oversize cardboard check from Commissioner Gary Bettman in a deliciously awkward moment. He was awarded a Honda Pilot for winning M.V.P. (He turned down the Odyssey because he had just bought a van for his growing family.)
Scott was lifted on to the shoulders of teammates at center ice. Four days later, the twins, Sofia and Estelle, were born. Then Scott went back to the IceCaps.
St. John’s embraced him like no city before. The team sold dozens of his replica jerseys for up to $ 300 Canadian (about $ 230). At a fan festival, the line to get Scott’s autograph circled around the rink. During games, fans chanted “M.V.P.”
Playing in the A.H.L. again took some adjustment. Minor league road trips are notoriously taxing. Unlike the N.H.L., there are no chartered jets outfitted with buffets. When the IceCaps went on the road, usually for more than two weeks at a time, they flew commercially to Toronto, 1,300 miles away, and bused hundreds of miles to cities like Portland, Me.; Wilkes-Barre, Pa.; and Utica, N.Y.
Scott, the anti-star, never minded it. He wielded the unwritten rules of seniority among his teammates to get out of middle seats on the airplane and to get full back rows on the bus to stretch his 6-foot-8, 268-pound frame.
But the IceCaps season was ending bleakly. The last road trip ended last week. By Friday night’s home game, the first in nearly three weeks, the IceCaps dangled near the bottom of the standings.
Scott tried to keep the mood light. He was the oldest player on the roster, by several years, and often seemed to be the only one having any fun. During warm-ups, looking a head taller than many on the ice, he playfully bumped teammates into the boards, repeatedly shot pucks at a goalie stoically stretching, fist-bumped a young fan and pretended it hurt, and shouted at Phantoms forward Chris Conner, a former teammate at Michigan Tech whom Scott had not seen in years.
The IceCaps played Scott at forward, putting him on the fourth line — N.H.L All-Star turned minor league grinder. From the bench, he chatted up and teased opponents. A teammate made a quick midice move to get past a defender and made a celebratory “wooo!” sound as he went. When the player got back to the bench, Scott lectured him to never do that again.
At one point on the ice, Scott oversaw a scrum in front of the Lehigh Valley bench. He thought it might be a rare fight. In his first A.H.L. season a decade ago, Scott had 11 fights. He has had three with the IceCaps.
“Stay away from him!” the Phantoms assistant Riley Cote, a former N.H.L. enforcer himself, shouted at the Lehigh Valley players.
The 4-1 defeat knocked the IceCaps out of playoff contention. On Saturday, with Scott playing defense, the IceCaps sustained an equally uninspired 4-0 loss.
“We’re terrible,” Scott said as he emerged from the dressing room, showered and in his suit. He smiled and headed for the exit. The moment he stepped out a side door of the arena, he was greeted by four young women standing in the rain. They giggled and asked for photographs. He invited them inside the arena to do it, then stepped back into the rain laughing.
Scott and most of his IceCaps teammates went to Jack Astor’s. The sports bar was crowded, but they found a couple of big tables and blended into the dense crowd of 20-somethings. Only Scott drew the silent gawks and knowing nods of people throughout the room.
Scott wore a suit, the one that he bought especially for the All-Star Game, because that is the way you dress in the big leagues, before and after games, and it did not matter that the nearest N.H.L. franchise was more than 1,000 miles away and that he might have played his last N.H.L. game. He tucked his tie into his shirt as he drank a beer and ate a bacon burger, a pile of chicken wings and a heaping order of poutine, the Canadian staple of fries, gravy and cheese curds.
All the tables were full, and Scott could feel the eyes of strangers on him. A few mustered the courage to shake his hand and take a photograph with him, the most famous man in town, the most unlikeliest star in hockey. When others saw that he smiled and joked with them, they got the courage, too, and Scott was glad to have their company.
The beers slowed. The younger players began pondering other stops in downtown St. John’s.
“They usually want to go out and get drunk and stay out all night,” Scott said. “I just want to have a couple of beers and go home.”
It was about then that Scott’s phone lit up on the table. Vincent Riendeau, the IceCaps assistant general manager, was on the other end. He told Scott that he was booked on a Sunday flight to Montreal and would play Tuesday against Florida. His time in St. John’s could be over.
Without fanfare, Scott told a couple of teammates the news, then slipped through the gaze of fans and walked back into the rain. He needed to get to the apartment and pack. After nearly three months at the end of the continent, he was going closer to home.