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MONTREAL — He has no idea what others see in him.
Mark Messier, who played with the teenage Kovalev in New York, says he is a true "thoroughbred." Wayne Gretzky, who watched the now 35-year-old Russian when Kovalev's Montreal Canadiens met Gretzky's Phoenix Coyotes, says the veteran forward's play this season is at a level that deserves consideration for the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL's most valuable player.
"I don't know," Alexei Kovalev says.
He has no idea what it looks like, but does have a strong sense of what it feels like when everything comes together exactly right, as it has so often this surprising season in Montreal.
Alex Kovalev with his plane at the small St. Hubert airport here on the South Shore of Montreal. (Club de Hockey Canadien)
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- Montreal Canadiens
- New York Rangers
- Phoenix Coyotes
- Pittsburgh Penguins
- Saku Koivu
- Andrei Kostitsyn
- Ilya Kovalchuk
- Alexei Kovalev
- Evgeni Malkin
- Andrei Markov
- Tomas Plekanec
- Carey Price
- Sergei Samsonov
- Tiger Woods
When he tries to explain the sensation of skating so effortlessly, it does not even require thought, he talks of that one moment of weightlessness he looks for when he pulls back on the controls of a Cessna 172 and climbs until the plane is perfectly vertical, the engine on the verge of cutting out and, just for the most fleeting of moments, the G-force lifts his body clear of the seat and he finds himself floating in space. But when he thinks of what it is like to control hockey's most potent power play, he no longer thinks of airplanes, but of helicopters.
"Manoeuvrability," he says.
"I love the way you can make them go anywhere."
He has been known to rent helicopters and do nothing but 360-degree spins down the length of an open runway. He has mastered, he says, the difficult move of taking off and then backing down on precisely the same plane to land the machine on the very dime on which it took off.
He is so in love with precision it is even reflected in his nickname: AK-27. He is Montreal's attack weapon, No. 27 on the back of Les Glorieux, who are once again glorious.
Only short months ago, the experts were saying the Canadiens would, once again, miss the playoffs. Kovalev, they said, was aging fast and slowing down, a $4.5-million (all currency U.S.) disappointment last season, in which he scored only 19 goals and seemed uninterested in his team and listless in his play. The smart move would be to get rid of him. Today, Alex Kovalev is leading the team with 77 points, including 33 goals, and quarterbacks a dominating power play that has put the Canadiens in first place in the Eastern Conference before last night's games. The team is not only going to make the playoffs, but may well be Canada's best hope to win the Stanley Cup, which has not landed on this side of the border since the Canadiens won in 1993.
In this year of the Russians in the NHL — 22-year-old scoring leader Alex Ovechkin in Washington, 21-year-old sophomore star Evgeni Malkin in Pittsburgh and 24-year-old sniper Ilya Kovalchuk in Atlanta — the relatively elderly Kovalev often passes notice in the media. But not among those who, like Gretzky, understand the true meaning of a player deemed most valuable to his team.
"He knows better than anybody what it takes," Kovalev said of the Gretzky compliment, "so it's nice to hear."
What Kovalev has managed in his 15th NHL season is astonishing. He has taken a line composed of himself, an aging veteran, third-year centre Tomas Plekanec and Andrei Kostitsyn, in his first full year with Montreal, and he has turned them into a line ranking with the likes of prime veterans Spezza-Alfredsson-Heatley in Ottawa and Datsyuk-Zetterberg-Holmstrom in Detroit.
But how he did it is even more amazing.
He used Tiger Woods as his model.
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Alexei Kovalev is stubborn. To say he follows his own mind is to understate the situation. When the native of Togliatti, Russia, arrived in New York to play for the Rangers, he thought he could decide his own ice time. When head coach Mike Keenan thought he could teach the youngster a lesson by waving him to stay on the ice at the end of another ridiculously long shift, Kovalev took it as a compliment for how well he was playing.
Slava Kovalev, Alexei's father, had been a weightlifter and wished his son to follow in his footsteps. He even installed a chinning bar on his child's bedroom door so the youngster could work out before bed and as soon he woke up in the morning.
When Alexei insisted on hockey instead of weights, his father devoted his spare time to creating the perfect hockey player, organizing a training regimen that would knock out a grown man, let alone a growing child.
But very soon it all seemed for naught. When Alexei was 8, a routine medical checkup discovered a heart abnormality, a problem with rhythm.
