Two hours before the Blackhawks-Oilers game last weekend, Connor Bedard walked down the hallway — away from the visitor’s locker room in Rogers Place — to do his pregame stretching in peace.
The moment he hit the floor and his right leg extended to loosen his hamstring, an Edmonton radio pregame show began blaring through hidden speakers. Suddenly, peace was no longer available.
“Tonight, Connor Bedard and Connor McDavid face each other for the second time ever…”
Bedard didn’t flinch, though. He, after all, has constantly heard his name spoken in the most dramatic tones for years now. And his hamstrings still needed to be stretched.
“I’m not really thinking about it,” he said during a quieter moment days later. “If I hear something about myself, I don’t really care too much. Especially if it’s right before the game, I’m focused on what I’m doing.
“That’s a good thing about having a routine. You’re focused on whatever you’re doing next, and you’re not really thinking about anything else.”
All pro athletes must learn how to block out the noise surrounding them — the idolization, the criticism, the privacy invasions and everything else — and athletes with the star power of Bedard cannot survive without being especially good at that. He’s certainly not the only player in the NHL inundated by attention at all times; McDavid, for one, can confirm that.
But there’s something about the 19-year-old Vancouver native’s personality that makes him exceptionally talented at paying no mind to any of the hoopla. He’s almost as talented at that as he is at scoring goals.
He has constructed a figurative shield around him as tough as crocodile skin. It doesn’t seem like a veneer, either; the noise doesn’t even affect him internally, regardless of his stoic exterior.
He’s so singularly focused on hockey and accustomed to the pressure that it’s genuinely irrelevant to him at this point. He mentions that the fact it started at such a young age — The Hockey News magazine labeled him the “future of hockey” at age 13, for example — actually worked in his favor.
“Right from the start, I was pretty good with it,” he said. “It was nice for me that it was a gradual progression. It wasn’t like, overnight, you’re getting a bunch of attention. It was a slow [progression]. Every year, you get a little bit more. That helped me out.”
During his rookie season, Bedard seemed more bothered and fatigued by the sheer time commitment of all of his interviews and content-creation obligations than by the pressure and noise that followed those interviews and videos.
The negative impact that the baseless Corey Perry rumors had on his parents seemed to (understandably) fluster him far more than any critiques of his own play. He often credits his parents’ wisdom for shaping him into the person he is; they remain very close.
So far in his second season, the volume of those off-ice commitments has subsided somewhat (although it’s still sizable) and he’s also opening up slightly more in them (although he’s still guarded). His public persona is a little less robot, a little more human.
But has he done any more self-reflection on the bizarreness of his situation? He is, after all, a superstar and celebrity whose name is discussed daily from Edmonton to Chicago to Montreal — but ostensibly also a regular 19-year-old who just happens to excel at hockey.
The answer is no, he hasn’t. Perhaps that’s one ingredient in the recipe that produces immunity to noise.
“Your life is so busy and you’re so focused on what you’re doing, it’s almost harder to step back and look at it,” Bedard said. “I think I probably should — and will — here and there. Maybe after my first game [I did] a little, or after my first season. But you’re just in the flow of things, so not too much.”