(Andy McDonald, or as some of have taken to calling him, Little Andy McDonald, broke the heart of the Sens Army last night in the Ducks' dramatic 3-2 win in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup final. Here's our original Aug. 26, 2006 post on his then-little-known ties to the Kingston area.)
This space likes to give pub from time to time to athletes, singers, writers from the Kingston/Napanee area that yours truly hails from.
Turns out there's one NHL player that I'd been unaware of, and as an old friend tells it, almost no one in the vicinity of Kingston seems aware of his tie to the area. Last night, while dining with some friends who have also migrated to Ottawa, we were doing the whole where-are-they-now routine when an one of my friends asked if I remembered Andy McDonald.
Geek that I am, my mind flashed on a kid -- small for his age, but a lightning-fast skater -- who played for the Ernestown Township atom hockey team which won an all-Ontario title in 1989, the year we turned 12.
"You mean Andy McDonald from the all-Ontario team?"
My friend dropped the punchline: "Don't you mean Andy McDonald of the Anaheim Ducks?"
Who knew? As noted above, few people in the Kingston area seem aware that McDonald -- a 29-year-old centre who was Anaheim's second-leading scorer in '05-06 -- played some of his early minor hockey in the area in the same Ernestown Township minor hockey organization yours truly played in. (Yours truly wasn't part of that all-Ontario atom team. I played house league that winter and every other winter, for reasons of personal preference. Well, that, and a general lack of hockey ability.)
Yet this seems to have slipped through the cracks. McDonald lists Strathroy, Ont., as his hometown, plus his family moved away from the Kingston area not longer after that championship '89 season. This is embarrassing to admit for someone who used to cover sports for something resembling a living, but until yesterday I didn't have a clue the Andy McDonald who was often the defence partner of a tall kid named Jay McKee on that Ernestown rep team is the same man who is now Anaheim's projected first-line centre and one of the NHL's best faceoff men.
So it turns out Ernestown Township once had a team that boasted two future NHLers. Who knew? Can the old rivals, Gananoque and Napanee, beat that? No, they can't. (Gananoque's teams in that age group did include current NHLer Alyn McCauley, so that's not half-bad.)
That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.
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