Not many hockey dreams are cultivated in Odessa, Texas, the home of “Friday Night Lights”, but this is where United States Olympic hero Connor Hellebuyck was first told he was good enough to make it in the big time.
Joe Clark, his general manager and position coach with the Odessa Jackalopes, had told some of Hellebuyck’s teammates that they needed to get his autograph while they still had a chance. During one video session, the GM turned to the teenage goaltender and said, “You’re going to play in the NHL.”
“Really?” Hellebuyck replied.
Really.
The Jackalopes play their games in the Ector County Coliseum, site of a couple of Elvis Presley concerts in 1976 and some rodeo and oil shows in the years since. While the high school football rivalry that inspired a book and later a TV series — Odessa vs. Permian — could bring in 20,000 fans at Ratliff Stadium, the Jackalopes would draw 4,000 to the Coliseum on good nights. The paying customers did appreciate how the physicality on the ice mirrored what they saw on the gridiron.
In 2011, financial losses compelled team ownership to transition from the professional ranks of the Central Hockey League to the second-tier junior ranks of the North American Hockey League. That year, Odessa scout Craig Sarner, the leading scorer on the silver medal-winning 1972 U.S. Olympic hockey team, was watching high-powered AAA prospects in a Michigan tournament when he wandered over to an adjacent rink and spotted a tall, lanky goalie playing for a struggling high school team from suburban Detroit. Hellebuyck was better than the AAA kids.
“I’m not going to draft you,” Sarner later told him, “because I don’t think anybody knows about you. It’s my job to put as many good people in front of you as possible, and I’m taking the chance that you’re not going to be drafted.”
Though Hellebuyck was heartbroken when he wasn’t picked by any team in the NAHL or the upper-tier United States Hockey League, Sarner’s gamble paid off. Clark said Odessa invited Hellebuyck and seven other goalies to a Minnesota camp. “He was a nobody then,” the GM said, “but I saw him make things look easy. He looked like he was in control and knew what he was doing.
“I later told Sarner, ‘If you knew Helly was this good, you wouldn’t have gambled by not drafting him. Don’t BS me on that one.’”
Lee Scheide, sports editor of the Odessa American, remembered Hellebuyck as a quiet workhorse who carried the 2011-12 Jackalopes to the postseason. Though it was hard to fathom a future gold medal-winning goalie and NHL MVP emerging from the West Texas hockey scene, Scheide, who regularly covered the team, said there were obvious hints back then of Hellebuyck’s greatness.
“At 6-4, his size was dominating, and it was hard to even find any space around him,” Scheide said. “The more he played, the better and more confident he became. He was always going to make the routine saves, and he also made the spectacular saves to keep them in games. It was a lot of fun to watch.”
Hellebuyck wasn’t ranked among the top 36 North American goalies by NHL Central Scouting entering the 2012 draft, but the Winnipeg Jets did take him in the fifth round with the 130th pick. Hellebuyck first played two major college seasons at UMass-Lowell.
Clark warned him that the school had a talented veteran goalie in place and that he would need to be patient.
“Connor looked me square in the eye and said, ‘I’ll have his job by Christmas,’” Clark recalled. “And he did.”
Hellebuyck led UMass-Lowell to the Frozen Four seven years before he won his first of three Vezina Trophies with Winnipeg, and a dozen years before becoming the first American-born goalie to win the Hart Trophy.
At 32, Hellebuyck was already a Hall of Famer before he left for Italy and these Winter Olympics.
“And then,” Clark said, “he became a national treasure overnight.”
Thirteen years before the Olympics, Connor Hellebuyck led UMass-Lowell to its first Frozen Four as a Division I program. (Justin K. Aller / Getty Images)
As a coach, scout and executive in the U.S. and abroad for the better part of four decades, Clark, 65, has remained a mentor of Hellebuyck. He visited the goalie’s Winnipeg home last month and sat in the stands for a practice, watching him hoot, holler and chirp at teammates — having a blast in the middle of an extended Jets winless streak.
“I don’t think the coaching staff really liked that; they didn’t say that, but that’s the vibe I got,” Clark said. “But (Hellebuyck) isn’t going to do it any other way. I was sitting around his kitchen table one night talking about it. … I don’t mean to sound brutal toward the organization, but this year they’re circling the drain, and he wasn’t going to allow himself to circle the drain.
“Connor said, ‘The day I can’t have fun, I’ll quit. I won’t play. I have to have fun.’”
Clark told his former goalie that he needed to pack that attitude with his bags on the flight to the Winter Games in Italy.
“That’s exactly what I plan to do,” Hellebuyck replied.
Goalie and coach have had these conversations for years. On the website for Clark’s company, InsideEdge Goaltending, Hellebuyck says in a video testimonial that Clark is his go-to person when his physical or mental game is off.
“I would call him up, and he would fix me up, and I swear to you in one phone call,” Hellebuyck says. “I’d feel great the next day, and I’d feel like the whole world came off my shoulders.”
Connor Hellebuyck maintains a close relationship with Joe Clark, right. (Courtesy of Joe Clark)
Sunday morning, Clark woke up too late to watch the first two periods of the U.S.-Canada Olympic final. He had a good reason: He was dealing with the after-effects of his first chemotherapy treatment for Non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
A former editor in the Omaha World-Herald sports department, Clark wasn’t about to miss one of the most compelling sports stories of his time. He joined his wife at a neighbor’s house in McCool Junction, Neb., to watch the rest of the game. He saw Hellebuyck make that astounding save against Devon Toews early in the third period. He saw a goalie known for his big-game setbacks in Winnipeg, in Clark’s words, “conquer the skill of having fun. The key is dealing with stress and the big moment, and now Connor has mastered the big moment.”
The Americans’ overtime victory moved Sarner to tears as he watched with a friend outside of Minneapolis. “Did I see this coming in Odessa? Hell no,” he said through a laugh.
Clark sent Hellebuyck a text with heart and muscle emojis and the simple message, “Congrats, Connor. But I’m not surprised.”
