In April of 2010, Daniel Alfredsson was the 37-year-old captain of the Ottawa Senators, still a point-per-game player and perfectly graced the cover of The Hockey News' 2010 Playoff Preview issue.
Hall of Famer Daniel Alfredsson is almost as popular in Ottawa today as he was back his playing days. Two months ago, fans were thrilled to see him return to the club in a meaningful new role in player development and coaching. Over the weekend, with the Senators playing two games in Sweden, the club asked him if he'd like to be behind the bench for the weekend. Alfie agreed and the Senators won both games, so it will be interesting to see if that becomes a full-time thing for Alfredsson.
Today at The Hockey News - Ottawa, always hungry for Sens nostalgia, we dipped into the THN Archive and pulled out our preview issue from the 2010 playoffs. With head coach Cory Clouston at the helm, Alfredsson and the Senators were gearing up for the playoffs and a meeting with Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins.
In this cover story from THN's April 26, 2010 playoff preview edition – Vol. 63 Issue 23 – writer Ken Campbell beautifully profiled Alfredsson and his career to that point, along with Alfie's fabulous April Fool's gag on the city of Ottawa.
(To read more great stories like this one, you can gain access to THN’s 76-year archive by subscribing to the magazine.)
"STEELY DAN" by Ken Campbell
If you want to see Daniel Alfredsson’s bad side, beat him at something. Other than that, he’s as honest a Senator as you’ll ever find. Alfredsson has never been more loved, his status never more iconic than it is in his 14th NHL season.
It’s debatable which was more amusing, the practical joke or what followed it. On the morning of April 1, Daniel Alfredsson announced on the local CBC radio station his intention to run for Mayor of Ottawa with the slogan ‘Number 11 in 2011’.
He certainly sounded convincing enough. He said he was inspired to run for mayor after reading the biography of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who decided to step down in 1984 after a very famous long walk in the snow. Alfredsson said he was skating one day on the Rideau Canal when his political epiphany occurred.
“I can do that,” Alfredsson said. “One day my face won’t be plastered all over this town as a hockey captain, so I thought, ‘Why not become captain of the city?’ Mayor Alfredsson… it definitely has a nice ring to it.”
The horse manure detector should be operating on overdrive right about now. If not, wait until you hear about his platform.
Eleven percent tax increase, 11 percent wage cut for city employees and 11 new arenas to be built in the city. As well, Alfredsson said he would establish a policy of trilingualism, forcing every city employee to learn Swedish, along with English and French. Defending his tax increase, he said he recently co-authored a study with a university professor for some policy wonk magazine that proves, “higher taxes encourage teamwork among citizens.”
When asked how he would juggle his hockey career with the full-time job of running a major city, he pointed out that Sean Avery did an internship with Vogue magazine recently. He also said he could monitor meetings from his hotel room on the road and, “from the bench between shifts. One shift is only 45 seconds long. And I could manage a few ticket giveaways for my most loyal supporters.”
After practice that day, Alfredsson and his brother, Henric, met up at a Starbucks to celebrate Henric’s 31st birthday. Apparently, there wasn’t enough baloney in Alfredsson’s proclamation to tip the baristas off that the bid for mayor was an April Fool’s Day gag.
As they were waiting for their order, one of the baristas recognized Alfredsson and told the other that Alfredsson was running for mayor. The other barista asked him, “What are you doing now before becoming mayor?”
“I was just laughing my head off,” Henric recalled.
Actually the notion of Alfredsson running for mayor of Ottawa and winning isn’t that much of a stretch these days. As is the case in a lot of major cities, municipal politics in Canada’s capital has its share of follies. In fact, the sitting mayor was acquitted last summer on two counts of influence peddling.
At the same time, Alfredsson has never been more loved, his status never more iconic than it is in his 14th NHL season. He is easily the greatest player in the modern history of the franchise and is a cinch to have his No. 11 hung from the rafters of Scotiabank Place shortly after he retires. On April 10, the night of the Senators’ last game of the regular season, the team was scheduled to honor Alfredsson for playing his 1,000th NHL game and that day was declared Daniel Alfredsson Day in Ottawa by a city proclamation. On the day he played his 1,000th game, one of the local newspapers dubbed itself the Ottawa Alfred-Sun and on its website posed the following question for a reader poll:
There’s little doubt Alfredsson has it over on Woods, at least in the character department. The 37-year-old captain doesn’t appear to have too many serious skeletons in his closet, unless of course you count that he’s a big suck when it comes to losing. (Cynical Toronto Maple Leafs fans counter that Alfredsson should be accustomed to losing by now.)
“You can be playing cards with him and if he loses, he just turns around and walks away from it because he gets so mad,” said Alfredsson’s father, Hasse. “Every time he loses, it’s so fun for me because I like it. You reach a point where you can see he is losing his temper and everyone is laughing.”
Henric, who played junior hockey for the Ottawa 67’s and has lived and worked in the city for the past 12 years, often plays golf with his older brother and sees a sometimes ugly competitive streak in Daniel.
“If Daniel and I are playing golf head-to-head or in match play, there have been times where I have said to myself, ‘I’m going to make a bogey on this hole because I don’t want to see him get too pissed off.’ I’m 100 percent honest,” Henric said. “Sometimes you think, ‘Come on, Daniel. Loosen up a bit.’ But he’s like a drug addict. If you know someone who’s a drug addict, you tell them they have to quit, but if he’s not ready to quit, he’s not going to do it. It’s the same with Daniel. I don’t think he’s going to soften up until he retires.”
If all goes according to plan, that will be after the 2012-13 season when his current contract with the Senators runs out. He’ll be 40 years old by that time and will have earned $62.1 million playing hockey. Not a bad haul for the 133rd pick of the 1994 draft, who thought he would play a couple of years in North America before returning home.
But now Ottawa is home, so much so that Alfredsson is almost certain he and his wife, Bibi, will retire and settle in Ottawa after his career ends, something that is an extremely rare departure for a Swedish player.
All three of his sons – Hugo, Loui and Fenix – were born in Ottawa and yearn to return there by the end of the trip when the family goes to Gothenburg every summer. In fact, it wouldn’t bother Alfredsson one bit if one of his sons ended up playing for Canada in international competition one day.
“I hope they’re proud of their Swedish heritage,” he said, “but they’re Canadian.”
Alfredsson is not exactly at the point where he ends his sentences with “eh,” although it does creep in sometimes. He acknowledges that most of his thinking is done in English, not Swedish anymore. He feels a connection to Canada that he probably wouldn’t have had he played his career in the United States, in that Canada and Sweden are very similar in their social democratic attitudes and have a common theory on providing a similar standard of living regardless of education and income.
“I struggle sometimes now doing interviews about hockey in Swedish.” Alfredsson said. “I have a tough time articulating myself sometimes in Swedish because I’ve been doing everything in English for the past 15 years. It becomes ingrained in you.”
Yes, the times have been very good for Daniel Alfredsson in Ottawa and the Sens have had some tremendous success with Alfredsson as their leader. Even now, he remains one of the better two-way players in the game and despite losing linemate and triggerman Dany Heatley prior to the season, Alfredsson surpassed the 50-assist mark this season for the fifth time in his career. He led the Senators in scoring for the second straight year and for the fourth time in his career.
But it hasn’t all been the big love-in between Alfredsson and Ottawa. He has been a major cog in Senators teams that have been major playoff disappointments, particularly in the form of some classic choke jobs against the Leafs. And there were calls for him to be run out of town in 2006 when, despite winning the Eastern Conference regular season crown, the Senators were defeated in five games by the Buffalo Sabres in the second round of the playoffs.
To make matters worse, Jason Pominville stepped around Alfredsson to score shorthanded in overtime to end the series.
But Alfredsson came back the next year and led all players in the playoffs with 14 goals and 22 points as the Senators advanced to the Stanley Cup final. In the East final, the Senators turned the tables on the Sabres and beat them in five games. Alfredsson provided the overtime winner to decide the series.
“He’s an example for guys like me,” said Daniel Briere of the Philadelphia Flyers. “I was with Buffalo in that playoff series and I don’t think it was justified that a lot of people got on his case. I was so impressed the next year when he came back and the year he had in the playoffs. I just love his character and the way he plays the game. I really look up to him.”
Since then, his place as an icon in Ottawa has been secure. The Senators would not dream of ever trading him and must be ruing the day he will no longer be able to perform for them. For his part, Alfredsson is wholly devoted to the Senators and wouldn’t consider ever playing anywhere else.
To fully understand Daniel Alfredsson, you have to trace his lineage about 4,000 miles east to Gothenburg, the birthplace of Volvo cars and the second-largest city in Sweden.
It’s also where Hasse and Margareta Alfredsson raised their three children in their modest home. A carpenter by trade, Hasse played semi-professional soccer and hockey and was a junior teammate of future NHLer Juha Widing. Margareta was a hairdresser until she was struck about 30 years ago by multiple sclerosis, an incurable disease that attacks the brain and spinal cord. She has been confined to a wheelchair for the past 15 years, but what the disease has robbed from her body, it has not been able to take from her spirit. Daniel derives all kinds of inspiration from his mother, who stubbornly continues to perform beyond what should be her physical capabilities.
Margareta can eat on her own, but cannot bathe herself or go to the bathroom without assistance. Before being confined to a wheelchair, she fell several times, breaking her arm on one occasion and her leg on another.
Both Daniel and Hasse said the Alfredsson children were initially ashamed of their mother because she couldn’t walk properly and her body was failing her for reasons they couldn’t pinpoint at first.
“Sometimes you would wonder, ‘Why is my mom not normal?’ ” Alfredsson said. “Then you look back at it and they weren’t that open with it either. She wanted to be like anybody else and she tried to compensate. She wouldn’t say, ‘I have MS and I can’t do this.’ She tried to do everything. There is a lot of stigma attached to things like that.”
Alfredsson knows all about stigma. His younger sister, Cecilia, was diagnosed 10 years ago with general anxiety disorder, which has at times crippled her emotionally. She is doing much better now and has two children, but her situation prompted Alfredsson to become involved in a high-profile campaign with an Ottawa hospital aimed at easing the stereotypes associated with mental illness.
“I haven’t been able to give her the support a brother should because I’ve been on another continent,” Alfredsson said wistfully.
With respect to his wife, Hasse Alfredsson can see why she would be so instrumental to her son’s character.
“If you get injured, you don’t complain because you know if you take it easy, you’ll get better again,” Hasse said. “But my wife, she’s always getting worse and worse.”
If Alfredsson inherited his stubbornness from his mother, his father passed down the competitive gene to his oldest son. In today’s everybody-gets-a-trophy culture surrounding children, most parents think allowing their kids to win in games is a good way to boost their sense of self-esteem.
Not Hasse. Even when his children were young, he would never, ever allow them to win at anything, so they never experienced the sense of victory against their father until they had truly earned it. It often resulted in Daniel coming home with a broken tennis racquet after playing against his father. He would say that he dropped it, expecting his father to be gullible enough to believe it.
“As long as I could beat him, I did it,” Hasse said. “He had to learn to fight for everything. If he wanted to win, and sometimes he could do it, it was on his own terms. And because of that, he was always so determined. He could break you. Even if he was tired, he never showed anything in his face that he was tired.”
In fact, Hasse remembered the first time Daniel ever beat him at something. Daniel was 15 years old and the two would run through the woods to a track near their home. One day, Daniel ran two laps around the track and his father ran one-and-a-half.
“It was then that I realized,” Hasse recalled, “I didn’t have anything to give him anymore.”
Just so you know, Alfredsson isn’t perfect. He is reviled in Toronto and is even booed in his own building when the Maple Leafs are the visitors. Much of that has to do with his hit from behind on Darcy Tucker in the 2002 playoffs, which came just seconds before he scored the winning goal. During the 2007 Stanley Cup final, Alfredsson deliberately drilled the puck at Anaheim defenseman Scott Niedermayer in the dying seconds of a period.
“It didn’t bother us because right there, we knew we had them where we wanted them,” said Flyers defenseman Chris Pronger, who was playing for Anaheim at the time. “He was frustrated.”
Much of the vitriol for Alfredsson stems from one of the most innocuous events of his career. Just prior to the all-star break in 2004, Alfredsson infuriated Leaf fans by motioning to throw a broken stick in the crowd during a game at the Air Canada Centre in which Leafs captain Mats Sundin was suspended for doing that very thing in the previous game.
The fans were livid with Alfredsson and the Leafs players were enraged after the game, with the exception of Sundin. When Henric showed up with his brother at the all-star festivities in Minnesota a few days later, one of the first things Alfredsson had to do was go to a room and sign memorabilia. It was there that he had a chance meeting with Sundin.
“Mats got there pretty much the same time we did and the first thing Mats did was give him this great big smile and laughed his head off and gave Daniel a big high-five,” Henric said. “Mats was saying, ‘Oh my God, that was the funniest thing ever.’ I remember reading in the newspapers that this was the biggest insult ever. They wrote in (Swedish newspaper) Aftonbladet that Daniel and Mats Sundin hate each other. They’re supposed to be teammates with Team Sweden and they hate each other. Some people’s perspectives are completely different than reality.”
For the most part, though, that’s not really the case with Daniel Alfredsson. There are no airs about him and what you see is pretty much what you get. He’s as comfortable with heads of state as he is with his engineer and pharmaceutical salesman buddies back in Gothenburg. His home in suburban Ottawa is modest, not nearly as opulent as the one owned by Senators grunt Shean Donovan in the same neighborhood. He’s private, but not to the point of where he’s obsessed. As his father said, he doesn’t have his nose in the air.
“You always treat people with respect,” Alfredsson said, “and you don’t take anything for granted.”
Sounds as though he’d make a great mayor someday