Ten years ago, at a golf course in suburban Virginia, Alexander Ovechkin tried golf. After several whiffs and a few scuffs, he scored a hole-in-one while just fooling around.
"This was my first time playing golf," he told the late Dave Fay of The Washington Times. "I guess it's easy."
Earlier this month, at the Huntley Curling Club in Carp, just outside of Ottawa, Ovechkin went curling, his team losing by a close measure to Calgary-born Jay Beagle's team. Ovechkin said the loss ranked as one of the worst of his career.
We're talking competitive – extreme competitiveness.
"Just as he is on the [hockey] ice, he's that way with the game of curling," says Washington Capitals head coach Barry Trotz.
The "natural athlete" is an accepted reality, but little understood. John Bale, who has written academic treatises on athleticism and sport, says that "on the evolutionary scale of Social Darwinism, the natural athlete could be associated with the initial stage of 'savagery' – close to 'raw animal existence.'"
As for Ovechkin's personal evolutionary scale, he is the son of a former professional soccer player, Mikhail Ovechkin, and a two-time Olympic gold medalist in basketball. His mother, Tatyana Ovechkina, led the Soviet Union team to gold in Montreal in 1976 and in Moscow four years later. She never lost a game in international competition and was chosen as the century's best point guard by readers of Russia's biggest sports publication. According to her son, she keeps her medals in the garage.
Her son so desperately wants his own gold medal that he has been saying for years now that he will play next year for Russia in the Pyeongchang Winter Games no matter what the dithering NHL and NHLPA decide.
So despondent was he said to be after Russia's failure in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics that his NHL goal total fell to 32 from previous years of 50, 56 and 65.
Now 31, the 2004 No. 1 draft pick began this season essentially out of the conversation for best player in hockey.
That torch belonged, beyond argument, to two-time Stanley Cup winner, golden-goal-scoring Olympic champion Sidney Crosby, with a teenager named Connor McDavid reaching for it and other kids moving quickly up the ranks of the very best the game has to offer.
But this month has seen Ovechkin's Washington Capitals take over top place in the NHL, heading into Tuesday's match with the Ottawa Senators with 70 points in 48 games. And Ovechkin himself has been on the move, coming into the match with an eight-game scoring streak (four goals and nine assists). Of his 22 goals this season, six have been game winners.
When he signed that incredible 13-year, $124-million (U.S.) deal eight years ago, the Capitals were said to have lost their senses. Today, it looks almost sensible. The massive forward – 6-foot-3 and 245 pounds – has proved remarkably durable over his 12-year career, never missing more than 10 games in a season. He has also consistently scored.
Last week, Ovechkin hit the 1,000-point level, only the 84th player to reach that mark. As if to make a point, he did it by scoring 35 seconds into a match against Crosby's Pittsburgh Penguins in a game the Capitals won decisively, 5-2.
It was a week in which he also passed the legendary Maurice (Rocket) Richard on the goal-scoring list, with 547 and counting.
"It means I'm still in good shape, still here," he told ESPN.com after passing Richard's total. But, he added, the "No. 1 goal for me, for the team" is to win the Stanley Cup.
That seems as much a possibility this year as it was back in 2009, when a tremendous Capitals team met a rising Penguins team in the Eastern Conference semi-final. It stands as one of the greatest series ever played, with Crosby finishing the series with 13 points and Ovechkin with 14, but the Capitals lost in seven games.
Led by Ovechkin, slick centre Nicklas Backstrom and goaltender Braden Holtby, the Capitals were 12-0-2 when the puck dropped against Ottawa.
"They're the toughest opponent now in the league," Senators head coach Guy Boucher said before the game. The Senators themselves have been hot as well – and wound up beating the Capitals 3-0 Tuesday night.
Washington coach Trotz, who has watched and coached Ovechkin for years, says people still don't realize what an all-round player he has become.
"Everybody thinks of him as a pure shooter," Trotz says. "One of the things I saw when I first arrived in Washington is that he can pass the puck. He's got real good vision. If the play's there, he'll rip it. If not, he'll pass. He is an underrated passer. He's got exceptional hands.
"There's different parts to his game. I think he goes through stretches where he gets real hot and then he's one of the top guys in all of hockey."
And right now he's hot and right back where he has been for so long. All that is missing, as he knows only too well, is that Stanley Cup ring and, to match his mother, an Olympic medal.
As for his curling, that's still a work in progress.
"He's getting better," Trotz says with a laugh. "Next year he might actually have his own team."
Roy MacGregor