In honour of Team USA facing off against Team Canada, here is an article about the late Gaudreau brothers.
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Johnny & Matthew Gaudreau - Sep. 9, 2004 - Vol. 78, Issue 02 - Ken Campbell
THE KEY QUESTION I’VE WRESTLED WITH LATELY IS NOT NECESSARILY, ‘WHERE WAS GOD?’ BUT, ‘CAN I TRUST A GOD WHO MIGHT NOT TELL ME WHY THIS HAPPENED?’ AND I HAVE TO BE OK WITH THAT– PASTOR SEAN BRANDOW, WHO PRESIDED OVER A VIGIL FOLLOWING THE HUMBOLDT BRONCOS BUS CRASH IN 2018
OUTSIDE GATE D at Alumni Stadium on the campus of Boston College is a six-foot statue of Doug Flutie, even though the guy was no more than 5-foot-10 on his best day. Which is fitting, because at big-time American schools, the great ones are always larger than life. Right beside Alumni Stadium on the main campus, a stone’s throw from the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, sits the Silvio O. Conte Forum, where the Boston College Eagles’ hockey and basketball teams play their home games. That’s where Jerry York wants the statue of Johnny Gaudreau. And with 28 years behind the Eagles’ bench, where he won four national championships and nine Hockey East titles and sent dozens of players to the NHL, you’d think the Hall of Famer might have some pull there.
If York manages to convince the school’s administration to erect a permanent monument, a re-creation of Johnny Hockey’s backhander over the shoulder of Ferris State goalie Taylor Nelson to seal the 2012 Frozen Four title is a natural choice, just as the depiction of Flutie cocked back and about to release his Hail Mary pass against Miami in 1984 was the only way to go. And for time immemorial, two undersized guys who proved all their critics wrong and rose to become the best players in the nation en route to remarkable pro careers would be immortalized.
“That’s something I’d really push for,” said York on the morning of Aug. 30, barely 12 hours after Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau, who both played for York at BC, were killed by an alleged drunk driver on a country road in Oldmans Township, N.J., when they were struck on their bicycles returning from their little sister’s wedding rehearsal party.
The day after the accident, Katie Gaudreau was to marry Devin Joyce in an event that would have brought the Gaudreau family all together, which was always their happy place. When we plan our families, we all want what Guy and Jane Gaudreau had, don’t we? We envision our kids being successful people and decent human beings who want nothing more than to be close to home and to enjoy spending time with one another.
All of that is gone. Not forgotten, but gone. Multiple families have been shattered. Two-year-old Noa and toddler Johnny Jr. will have to rely on their mother, Meredith, to tell them how their father’s sublime hockey talent was surpassed only by his character. Tripp Gaudreau, who will come into the world later this year, will have to be told by his mother, Madeline, how his dad never allowed skating in his big brother’s shadow to bother him and how, after playing pro hockey, he came home to pass on what he’d learned from his father to other young players. “It’s just devastating,” said former Columbus Blue Jackets GM Jarmo Kekalainen, who signed Johnny as a UFA in the summer of 2022. “I don’t think you can write a sadder story than this one.”
As the best league in the world prepared for the start of training camp, it did so reeling from an unfathomable tragedy that was impossible to understand. Brian Burke, who signed Gaudreau to his first NHL contract with the Calgary Flames in 2014, lost his son Brendan in a car accident in 2010, and not even he was able to fathom the grief the Gaudreau family would be enduring. “It’s the perfect storm of misery,” Burke said.
Players who were close to both Johnny and Matthew expressed their shock and devastation, and many donated to a GoFundMe for Matthew’s unborn child. Cole Caufield of the Montreal Canadiens, who played with Johnny on Team USA at the 2024 World Championship, announced he would be changing his number from 22 to 13 to honor his childhood hero. There will be many, many other tributes to both Johnny and Matthew.
A lot of this is to be expected when two people with so much of their lives ahead of them lose everything in one second of selfish and terrible decision-making. Johnny was a great hockey player, and Matthew was a very good one, but the grief everyone is feeling goes much deeper than that loss. You cannot fake what the Gaudreau boys had, and that was authenticity. They were truly loved by those with whom they came in contact. “The better the person, the greater the loss is,” Burke said. “When something like this happens, they always say, ‘He was a great kid.’ Well, they’re not all great kids. Some of them are average kids. Some of them are bad kids. When you have someone like Johnny and Matthew, who were great kids, it’s really a puzzling loss. Impossible to comprehend.”
York remembers both Johnny and Matthew as people who could light up a room. He refers to Guy and Jane as, “Hall of Fame parents.” Johnny was definitely the more skilled player, while Matthew would go to the dirty areas of the ice and absorb punishment to get the puck.
York remembers first seeing Johnny play hockey at a summer festival, and he turned to his assistant coach and asked him why they hadn’t recruited this kid. He was told that Johnny had committed to Northeastern at 16, after assistant coach Albie O’Connell saw him playing high-school and under-16 hockey in South Jersey. Matthew followed the next year and committed to Northeastern at 15. But when current Anaheim Ducks coach Greg Cronin left Northeastern to take a job with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Johnny and Matthew asked to be released from their commitment and joined the Eagles.
Johnny left the decision up to Matthew, who turned to Johnny after their Boston College visit and said, “Hey, let’s go here.” (“God bless Matty for that,” York said.) At the first team meeting in 2011, Kevin Hayes asked York if Johnny was really the same kid he’d been raving about. After the first practice, Hayes informed York that he had the right guy, and the two of them went on to make a mockery of their opponents on the ice and form an indelible bond off it.
Whenever the Eagles won a Hockey East or Beanpot Championship and posed for a team photo, you’d have to search to find Johnny in it. “It was like ‘Where’s Waldo?’ ” York said.
After games, Johnny would try to blend in with the rest of the students, always uncomfortable with being the center of attention, even though he’d do things on the ice that would make him that. But the thing that separated Johnny from other players was the passion with which he played the game. Never seemed to have a bad day. Felt like the luckiest guy in the world most days, even the less-than-stellar ones the past couple of years in Columbus. “There were days Johnny would come off the ice and say, ‘Thanks, coach. That was a great practice today,’ ” York said. “You expect that from a fourth-liner or a backup goalie, but this is your best player. You want to get 100 percent out of a kid, and all of a sudden, you get a kid like Johnny who steps on the ice, and Matt later on, and he just lifted the whole practice up.”
IT’S JUST DEVASTATING. I DON’T THINK YOU CAN WRITE A SADDER STORY THAN THIS ONE– FORMER COLUMBUS BLUE JACKETS GM JARMO KEKALAINEN
Burke first saw Johnny in his draft year when he was playing for the USHL’s Dubuque Fighting Saints. Then the GM of the Leafs, Burke went to a weekend series to watch Zemgus Girgensons, and the more he watched Girgensons, the more he liked Gaudreau. By the time Gaudreau turned pro, both were with the Flames, and Burke, who was Calgary’s president of hockey operations and acting GM, signed Gaudreau just hours after he had won the Hobey Baker Award and the a day after Eagles were eliminated in the Frozen Four semifinal.
The Flames flew Gaudreau to Calgary on a private jet in time for him to appear in the team’s final game of 2013-14, and he scored a goal on his first shot. “The happiest you would see him was when he was playing hockey,” Burke said. “Always smiling, always in a good mood. He would say, ‘I can’t believe I’m playing hockey for a living.’ Very popular, very unselfish and a hard, hard worker.”
When it came to that, he and Matthew had a great template. Their father, Guy, is in the Norwich University Hall of Fame for both hockey and soccer and has a burning passion for the game. Guy, a former dairy farmer from Vermont, went to work at the Hollydell Ice Arena in Sewell, N.J., near the Delaware River that separates the Jersey Shore from Philadelphia. Because he ran the rink, Guy oversaw programs and coached teams and had the ice to himself and his two sons when nobody was using it. He taught them both to skate by placing Skittles on the ice and having Johnny and Matt chase them. They both became terrific players, but how could they ever make it as hockey players, these wispy, little guys from suburban Philly who couldn’t put on weight and were the smallest guys on the ice?
What nobody accounted for was their passion, which came through in everything they did. The same passion they displayed on the ice, they also had for their families.
There were a lot of pictures and videos circulating after the accident – Johnny on Brady Tkachuk’s shoulders at Hayes’ wedding; Johnny and Matthew being goofballs and dancing to Finesse by Bruno Mars; Johnny beaming with his two kids in front of a birthday cake with No. 31, taken just two weeks before his death. In all of them, there’s an unbridled passion for life that simply cannot be faked. “Seeing John as a father, it was clear his family meant everything to him,” said Blue Jackets captain Boone Jenner. “I’ll miss seeing his joy coming up to our family room after every home game to greet (Meredith) and the kids. Despite being one of the last to join us after a well-earned sauna and a beer, the smile on his and Noa’s faces when they saw each other was unmatched, followed by a, ‘Hey, Reg,’ to Mere.”
THE BETTER THE PERSON, THE GREATER THE LOSS. WHEN YOU HAVE SOMEONE LIKE JOHNNY AND MATTHEW, WHO WERE GREAT KIDS, IT’S REALLYA PUZZLING LOSS. IMPOSSIBLE TO COMPREHEND– FORMER CALGARY FLAMES PRESIDENT OF HOCKEY OPERATIONS BRIAN BURKE
Matthew shared that passion for his family, and it was what brought him back home a couple of years ago to coach hockey and pass on what Guy had taught him and so many other kids. “He would say, ‘Everybody 1989 birth year and older all learned to skate from my dad,’ ” said Justin Hale, the coach and GM of the Philadelphia Rebels of the North American League, where Matthew was an assistant coach. “And that was a badge of honor for him, to be around family and be there for his child, but he still wanted to give back to the game. That was his dream.”
Matthew left Hollydell and the Rebels after last season for the opportunity to become a hockey director at the PNY Sports Arena in Pennsylvania, where he would’ve been running youth programs and serving as an assistant with the West Chester Wolves in the U.S. Premier League. He was also the coach at Gloucester Catholic High School, where both he and Johnny played and Guy coached back in the day. “Every day, it was common to find a group of guys in his office hanging out and joking around,” Hale said. “Because of his playing background and passion, he could’ve made it a long way if he wanted to do the junior/college route, but it was more about giving back to those younger players. It was more about teaching the love of the game to those guys.”
This would’ve been Johnny’s 11th full season in the NHL. In all that time, he missed a total of only 20 games. He scored some huge playoff goals for the Flames. He made the all-rookie team in 2014-15, won the Lady Byng Trophy in 2016-17 and was a first-team all-star in 2021-22. Though he didn’t win a Stanley Cup, he won almost everything else, including a USHL Clark Cup, an NCAA title and a WJC gold medal. He was the most outstanding player in college hockey. Picked 104th overall, he’s second only to Nikita Kucherov in points among players drafted in 2011. His final assist last season was the 500th of his career. He was a point-per-gamer at a time when it’s really hard to score goals. Yes, he benefitted from a league that was far more welcoming to smaller, skilled players, and he used those conditions to thrive. He might’ve one day found himself in the Hall of Fame. Now, it seems as though it should be a given.
It was all right there in his name, ‘Johnny Hockey,’ a moniker he never asked for nor perpetuated, despite attempts from his handlers to capitalize on it. In its criteria for selection, the Hockey Hall of Fame lists, “Playing ability, sportsmanship, character and contributions to his or her team or teams and to the game of hockey in general.” Johnny Gaudreau checks all of those boxes. Playing ability? Seriously? Let’s not waste time on that one. Sportsmanship? How about four penalty minutes and the Lady Byng Trophy in 2016-17. Contributions? He was a proven winner, a guy who made players around him better and, in the words of Blue Jackets alternate captain Sean Kuraly, was “good to the core.”
“John leaves us a life’s example of simplicity and joy,” Kuraly said. “He expressed that to the masses through hockey and personally through his relationships, which explains why he was universally adored by the communities and lives that were lucky enough to enjoy No. 13.”
There will be time for that later, once the grieving subsides. There will be number retirements, tributes and reflections. But for those who knew both Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau, this is still so, so difficult. You could see it in the anguished faces of Columbus teammates Jenner, Kuraly, Erik Gudbranson and Zach Werenski as they spoke about Gaudreau in the days after the accident.
As the family, friends and hockey world process their grief, they will learn in time to cherish the memories, as we all do when we lose someone. But as Blue Jackets GM Don Waddell said, Gaudreau’s death leaves a massive chasm in Columbus’ room and an even larger one in everyone’s hearts, whether they knew Johnny and Matthew or admired them from afar. “There are so many days in life that are golden days,” York said. “You love it, and everything is perfect. But then there are some nightmares you wake up to and just wish they weren’t there. And this is one of those nightmarish days.”