Early Life
Ron Hextall was born on May 3, 1964 in Brandon, Manitoba, the third and youngest child of Bryan and Fay Hextall. Hextall is a third-generation NHL player - his grandfather, Hall of Famer Bryan Hextall, played 11 seasons with the New York Rangers, and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1969. His father, Bryan Hextall, Jr., played in the NHL for 10 seasons, most notably for the Pittsburgh Penguins, and his uncle, Dennis Hextall, played 14 seasons of NHL hockey, not staying with any one club for longer than five years. During his youth, Hextall saw his father and uncle often roughed up by the Philadelphia Flyers, whose aggressive style of play for much of the 1970s gave the team the name "Broad Street Bullies". Hextall later reflected that during this period he "hated the Flyers."
Because of his father's career, Hextall's education was far from stable; each year began at Brandon, and once the hockey season commenced in October, he moved to a school nearer to where his father was playing. At school, he achieved B and C grades, putting in the minimum amount of effort, but his mind remained on hockey, and specifically goaltending. "Everybody else would be working and I'd be drawing pictures of Tony Esposito and Jimmy Rutherford," he recalled. Hextall came to mostly enjoy the constant moving, later saying "I got to hang around NHL rinks. What more would I have wanted?"
Although both his father and grandfather played as forwards, his father was happy for him to play in goal, but insisted that he try other positions to improve his skating: Bryan believed his son would have made a good defenceman. Hextall's mother thought her son's love for hockey exceeded that of her husband's teammates and believed it would drive him to achieve his aim of goaltending in the NHL. Each summer, Hextall received training at the hockey school at which his father taught, but the hockey programs in Pittsburgh and Atlanta were sub-standard, and meant that during his teenage years, he was behind many of his fellow players. He describes himself as " what you would call real polished" in his first year of junior hockey, aged 17.
Read more about this topic: Ron Hextall
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can’t go at dawn and not many places he can’t go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking—one sport you shouldn’t have to reserve a time and a court for.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)