Brant Blackned’s face lights up when he remembers playing hockey in the annual Val d’Or tournament. “Those were fun times/’ he smiles. “There was no pressure.” Things have changed. Blackned is still having fun, but six days a week he puts himself through a torturous three-hour workout in the hockey rink and the gym – not to mention sweating through gruelling matches as a player on one of the best major junior leagues in the country.
Blackned, 19, is a front-bench left-winger for the Laval Titans, the team known in the hockey world as the major junior league’s equivalent to the Montreal Canadians.
Blackned, who has lived away from his home in Wemindji for four years, has high standards to live up to. Hockey greats like Mario Lemieux, Michael Bossy and Robert Sauve all sharpened their teeth playing for the Titans. Last year, the Titans finished first in Quebec’s 13-team major junior league and came in third at the nationally televised Memorial Cup playoffs.
The Titans are all but certain to get another shot at the cup this year. They are six points ahead of second-place Verdun, and it’s half-way through the season.
Blackned is up to the challenge. With 29 points (13 goals) so far this season, he’s one of the team’s scoring leaders. The day of our interview outside the Montreal Forum, a major daily newspaper devoted an entire page to the Titans’ spectacular record. The paper noted that Blackned had made a game-tying assist in a close contest against Beauport the previous day, plus a goal against Hull the day before that. It’s Blackned’s third year with the Titans, and he says he has a good chance of being drafted by a professional hockey club this year. He says he owes a lot to the encouragement from the Ti tans organization and his family.
“They expect a lot out of you. The owners are self-made men and expect the team to do well because they worked hard for what they got,” he says, adding that he also gets a lot of support from his team-mates. “The team is really close. We work together six days a week.”
That support comes in handy during long seasons away from family and friends back home. “During the first two years away, I was very homesick,” he says. “Those were hard times for me. I felt like moving back, but my parents were always pushing me.”
Blackned left Wemindji when he was 15 to play hockey and go to school in Hull, after an impressive record playing for Cree local teams. In his last year playing in Wemindji, he racked up 72 points in just 16 games. He spent one season with a Hull Bantam AA team, then another year on a Midget AAA team in Amos. The year after that he moved again – this time to Laval. Blackned said all the moving around was “a good experience,” but added, “It helps when you have family here.” Blackned is now staying with his aunt in Dorval.
He needs just one more course to get his high school diploma, something that will come in handy if his pro career doesn’t pan out. In that case, he already has an alternative plan: he’ll become an electrician.
Does Blackned think of himself as a role model? He smiles. “Well, when I went home last time, a lot of kids came over with my brother to see me,” he says. “All the games in the Memorial Cup were on TSN.”
Although neither of his younger brothers have any NHL ambitions (one is still a toddler), Brant has some advice for other aspiring Gretskies: “If you want it badly enough, you can do it. There are players who aren’t very good, but still turn pro just because they’re so committed. You can do it if you put your heart into it.”
