Hockey magic strikes with 35 seconds left in the first period. Before that, this Ontario Hockey League game between the London Knights and the Plymouth Whalers is clunky and scoreless. Nazem Kadri's father, Sam, mutters with exasperation in his first-level box.
“Come on, Naz,” he grimaces each time the Knights' star forward lets the puck get away.
Nazem's mother, Sue, watches quietly but no less intently, fielding bathroom requests from her youngest daughter, Rayanne, 5, and organizing plates of chicken fingers. Sister Yasmine, 20, the eldest of the five, is texting, glancing up once in a while at a play. “Boys,” her mom sighs.
Nazem Kadri at practice with the London Knights of the Ontario Hockey League.
For nearly 15 years – from the winter Nazem first donned a hockey jersey at age 4, and promptly helped lead his team to a championship victory, to the day this summer when the Toronto Maple Leafs called his name as a first-round draft pick – hockey has been the Kadris' full-time business.
Sam shines with pride as he recalls the day Nazem was born: As he raced into the hospital parking lot, he heard Tom Cochrane's Big League on the radio. “It just came right on: ‘My kid is going to play in the big league,'” he says. “I swear to God.”
Today, Sue still sends Nazem to games with spaghetti in Tupperware and frets about injuries and how soon he is likely to leave the basement of their home in the north end of London, Ont. Before his 19th-birthday party earlier this month, she found herself thinking, “This might be my last year putting balloons up.”
The extended Kadri family – typically 60 aunts, uncles and cousins at each game – is scattered around the John Labatt Centre. Sam's own, elderly parents – his mother easily spotted in a white hijab among clumps of hockey jerseys – are across the ice, two rows up.
They don't speak much English – Sam's father refers to the penalty box as habis , Arabic for jail – but having arrived almost empty-handed 40 years ago from Lebanon, where they'd never heard of hockey, they understand the feat their grandson has achieved. They don't miss a game.
As the clock runs down on the period, No. 91, dancing on his skates, snatches the puck in a pass up the ice. Enough is enough, Nazem's body language says. He sweeps the puck gracefully around a Whalers defenceman, catches it again on the other side, skates in front of the net and flicks it in above the goalie's outstretched glove.
“Now that was pretty!” says Sam, when the cheering has died down. “That's what I'm talking about.”
The next night, on Coach's Corner , a gushing Don Cherry will play a clip of this goal and criticize the Leafs for sending Nazem back to the OHL for experience despite a pre-season run in which he scored three goals and five assists.
But it's more than fancy stick handling that makes him special: He has a fairy-tale story that hockey, more than ever, wants to tell. Nazem Kadri is not the first Muslim to be drafted into the National Hockey League – perhaps his most prominent predecessor was Montreal's Ramzi Abid, a left-winger who played several seasons before heading to Europe in 2007. But none has faced such expectations of stardom.
It comes at a time when both minor and professional hockey are intent on drawing ethnic communities into the game.
