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.
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