19
Pardubice, Czech Republic — Every once in a while Canadian junior goalie Steve Mason is visited by an angel.
They haven't conversed. The angel simply appears above his bed, and usually the next day something good happens. On New Year's eve the angel became visible again and the next day Mason heard the best news of his young career, that head coach Craig Hartsburg had selected him to be the go-to goalie the rest of the way in Canada's quest for a fourth consecutive gold medal at the world junior tournament.
"He probably doesn't want me to tell this story, but he sees an angel every once in a while," Mason's mother Donna said from the family's home in Oakville, Ont., yesterday. "The only one who can relate is my sister [Debbie] because she has seen it, too.
"He saw it in Calgary [at the selection camp] and the next morning he was told that he had made the team. He saw it again [Monday night]. He said that he reached out and tried to touch it and felt something."
Canada's goalie Steve Mason makes a save during play against Denmark at the 2008 IIHF U20 World Junior Hockey Championships in Pardubice on Monday. (Shaun Best/Reuters)
Related Articles
Goalies are said to be a different and Mason, angel or no angel, certainly took the path less travelled to junior stardom. Several years ago, when he began playing house-league hockey, he played four seasons as a forward and then defenceman before switching to goalie, a decision that wasn't too popular with his mother.
"Even today she hates going to games because of the pressure on the goaltender," Mason said.
"I find it very difficult," confirmed Donna, who added that she used to take shots on her son in the driveway when he was younger. "I guess I would just rather see him score goals than being scored on."
Donna said that she'll leave work early today at the Oakville Ford dealership where she works to watch her son when Canada plays Finland in the quarter-finals. Before the tournament, she handed her boss a schedule, stating she would likely be leaving early on the days Canada played, so she could watch her remarkable son.
Mason, 19, has had quite a ride to the top. While other elite-level goalies at age 16 were rookies in major junior in 2004-05 or at least playing tier II, Mason, an 11th-round pick of the London Knights in June 2004, started at the bottom.
After briefly attending Knights camp in August of 2004, he tried out for the Burlington Jr. A Cougars training camp and was the last cut. But he landed a spot in Junior C with the Grimsby Peach Kings because general manager Don Kilgallen and coach Dave Brownridge saw something in Mason that others had not.
It was Mason's first job as a No. 1 goalie and he played so well that the Cougars came crawling back midway through the season to see if Mason wanted to play for them. He turned them down and the next season won the backup job with the Knights, but made only 12 appearances behind talented Adam Dennis.
Last year, working hard with Knights goaltending coach Dave Rook, Mason became the man. He won an OHL record 45 times, goaltender-of-the-year honours and beat Hartsburg's Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds in seven games in the Western Conference semi-finals. That's a big reason why Hartsburg has such confidence selecting Mason over Jonathan Bernier, who began the season with the Los Angeles Kings but struggled with a third-period meltdown against Sweden.
Mason, a third-round selection of the Columbus Blue Jackets, performed well enough in the preseason, going 1-2 with a 1.76 goals-against average and .913 save percentage, to begin the NHL season as the Jackets' third-string goalie before being returned to the Knights in early October.
And now, after stopping 37 of 38 shots in round-robin victories over Slovakia and Denmark, Mason has the job to lead his offensively challenged teammates to the promised land. He's obviously pumped because at the end of practice yesterday he stopped 14 consecutive shooters before defenceman Luke Schenn finally beat him.
Mason's meteoric rise is something that makes him smile. "I think about that all the time," he said. "It's humbling and you can't get too full of yourself. I had a great time playing Junior C in Grimsby. It's kind of funny, but I was kind of a nobody back then. I was an underdog. I kind of use that underdog thing as motivation."
