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Well, lets not ruin the party for him now. Gomez and the Devils still have several teams to beat before that could happen, but for the meantime, Gomez is loving his first year in pro hockey. "Man," he said yesterday morning, his eyes wide, his cheeks flushed from a morning skate. "What an incredible couple of months." Gomez is as good a reason as any to care about these Devils, to follow their latest championship quest, because he is everything you'd like to believe you'd be if you were good enough to play sports for a living. He lingers at the morning skate, working on one-on-one drills with Devils assistant Viacheslav Fetisov. He moves with the speed and blissful freedom of a kid whose knees have yet to meet a scalpel in person. And he smiles an awful lot, a pleasing reminder that sports don't always have to be a cynical, slug fest on ice.. "Tell me what I have to be upset about?" he asked. Yeah. Remember when you were 20? Far back as he can remember, hockey was always the central element in Gomez's life. His dad, Carlos, took him to Sullivan Arena when Scott was 5 years old, introduced him to the University of Alaska-Anchorage Seawolves, and Scott was hooked. Permanently. The Seawolves had a forward named Dan Larsen a few years later; all Scott Gomez wanted in the world was to be as good as Dan Larsen. His devotion could be extreme sometimes. Once, when he was maybe half as big as his stick, Gomez was at a camp, in the middle of some drills and, well, he had to go to the bathroom awfully bad and, see, he didn't want to leave the ice, and, sheesh, he really didn't want to bother the coach by asking for permission ... "So I left a puddle on the ice," he said, "and I blamed it on one of the other kids." He brings a tamer version of that fervor to the rink now, and it has made him an overwhelming favorite to win the Calder Trophy as the league's top first-year player. It earned him a spot in Toronto for the All-Star Game, where he mingled as equals with Tony Amonte and Jeremy Roenick and Ray Bourque, guys he idolized as a kid. And it brought him to the moment when he was sitting in the locker room, chatting easily with Wayne Gretzky, when Mark Messier wandered over and extended his hand. Gomez isn't quite sure what happened then, though he's fairly certain he stopped breathing. "Sometimes," he said, "It can be kind of overwhelming." Which is why he'll wait until summer, when he's back on his boat, fighting for space on the river with a thousand other people trying to muscle a salmon out of the water. Maybe then it will all sink in. Maybe then it will all seem real. "It's been awesome," Scott Gomez said. "Completely awesome."
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Luck has little to do with the positive spark Scott Gomez provides for
the NJ Devils. The new and only Latin sensation of Hockey is ready to sip champagne from the Stanley Cup
this spring.
An event of which Gomez himself wouldn't be able to legally partake, because
he's not of drinking age until next December when he turns 21. |
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