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Do you speak hockey?

By Terry Frei
Denver Post Sports Writer

Oct. 8, 2000 - Late in the Colorado Avalanche practice Friday, coach Bob Hartley gathered with a five-man backup power-play unit wearing the red scrimmage jerseys. First, with his hands resting on his stick, and then with one arm waving, Hartley discussed the nuances of what he wants to get done with the man advantage.

Hartley's native language is French. He was talking to two French-Canadians (Stephane Yelle and Alex Tanguay), two Czechs (Martin Skoula and Milan Hejduk) and one Anglo-Canadian (Adam Foote).

The conversation, as is virtually all discussion on the ice and bench during Avalanche practices and games, was in English.

In the NHL, the most internationalized of the major North American professional sports leagues, English is the game's Esperanto.

On the Avalanche roster alone, the 23 players have six "native" languages - French, English, Czech, Russian, Swedish and Swiss-German. General manager Pierre Lacroix, Hartley and assistant coach Jacques Cloutier are French-Canadian.

Thirteen Avs - five Americans and eight Canadians - speak English as their first language. Even one of those, Joe Sakic, is the son of Croatian immigrants to Canada and spoke Croatian as a youngster before beginning school.

The potential for misunderstanding, whether involving social interaction or strategy-based communication, is one of the perils in any NHL dressing room these days.

Yet to varying degrees, and in many cases with stunning swiftness and skill, all members of the Avalanche have learned enough English to follow lockerroom and poker-game conversations. It isn't a repudiation of their heritage and national loyalties, but a realistic - and necessary - step in their professional survival.

In some cases, the players have studied English since childhood, since the rest of the world is much more cognizant of the advantages of multilingualism than the United States. But in other instances, members of the Avs have been been self-taught, through television, through reading, through the immersion of everyday life in a sport in which English dominates.

Only Russian defenseman Alexei Gusarov professes not to be able to speak English well enough to be interviewed, but has been overheard talking on the telephone in English and spotted laughing in all the right places as his teammates kibitz. It's also a running joke that Gusarov, who played five seasons in Quebec before the franchise moved to Denver, long has pretended not to understand a word of French. The members of the Avs' French-Canadian contingent, though, love to tease Gusarov by saying something around him in French and watching him react as if he were born in Paris.

It can be harder for Russians to learn English because of Russian's Cyrillic alphabet, but other Russian veterans - such as the Florida Panthers' Igor Larionov - sound almost professorial when they speak English. Former Avs defenseman Sandis Ozolinsh, who is Latvian, also spoke Russian but picked up English after arriving in the United States in 1992, using newspaper crime stories as his lessons.

"It's pretty simple," said Hartley, who was raised in Hawkesbury, Ontario, a model bilingual community near the Quebec border. "You can't pick two languages and use them to run a team. Just look at our team. We have so many nationalities. It has to be one language.

"It's gotten funny for me. I can be with Pierre Lacroix or Jacques Cloutier, and we'll be by ourselves, and we'll stop and laugh because we're speaking English. It's getting to a point where it's so normal for us. I think that's a good sign. I'm even finding that it's hard for me to do interviews in French, because I'm searching for words sometimes."

Of the NHL's 30 head coaches, four are French-Canadian - Hartley, Montreal's Alain Vigneault, Ottawa's Jacques Martin and Minnesota's Jacques Lemaire. Some "Anglo" coaches, including Vancouver's Marc Crawford and St. Louis' Joel Quenneville, also speak French.

Chicago's Alpo Suhonen is Finnish and Pittsburgh's Ivan Hlinka is Czech. The grand experiment is at Pittsburgh, since Hlinka played only one year in the NHL and was coaching in his Czech Republic homeland before the Penguins hired him for this season. Nearly half the Penguins' players, including star Jaromir Jagr, are Czech. So while the Penguins' primary strategic language also will be English, there will be a lot of Czech being thrown around.

Elsewhere, English is dominant.

Hartley had quit his job in the Hawkesbury windshield factory and embarked on a coaching career. He first coached the local Hawkesbury Hawks in Junior A, then stepped up to the Laval Titans of major junior's Quebec League.

Much to the consternation of most of his Laval players, Hartley decided English would be the language of the locker room. The coach himself had studied English only for about 30 minutes a week in school. "That doesn't make you a real good Shakespeare," Hartley said, smiling. Yet he had picked up a lot of English from his friends and through sports.

"When I got to Laval," Hartley said, "we had two or three English-speaking kids from the Maritime Provinces, and that was it. That first year or so, I asked the French kids who went to pro (training) camps and then came back, what they got out of it. The kid would say, 'I don't know. I couldn't even understand the coach.' It opened my mind."

Hartley's best player was Martin Lapointe, a Red Wings draft choice and prospect at the time, who since has become an entrenched pest in the Detroit-Colorado rivalry. In those days, Lapointe didn't speak English.

"I talked to Marty and those guys and said, 'Why don't we make this room an English dressing room?'" Hartley said. "At first they told me, 'Bob, you're not serious. There are three English guys here and it's up to them to learn French.' But I told them that I had come from Ontario, where like it or not, English is the universal language. And it's that way in hockey."

By 1994, after Laval had won a QMJHL championship, Hartley was coaching in the Avalanche system and using his self-taught English more often.

Hejduk and Skoula, the two young Czechs, are inseparable. They always have side-by-side lockers, at home and on the road, and they speak Czech to each other. But they took different paths to the NHL.

At 17, Skoula came to Canada to play two seasons with the Barrie Colts of the Ontario Hockey League. He boarded with an English-speaking family, played on a nearly all-English-speaking team and gradually picked up the language. He is shy by nature, and even more so when he's expressing himself in English. Yet at 20, he isn't overwhelmed - and seems to be able to follow all the strategic discussions.

Hejduk remained in the Czech Republic for four years after the Avs drafted him in 1994. And when he came to Colorado in 1998, he had virtually no clue what anyone was talking about when the language was English. By the end of his rookie season, though, he had taken English lessons and was able to converse and do postgame interviews in his new language. By now, he doesn't seem selfconscious at all.

"For the first two or three months over here, it was a weird feeling not to know what the other guy was talking about," said Hejduk, 23. "I was kind of lost. It's a great feeling to be able to understand pretty much everything that's going on."

Rookie goaltender David Aebischer, 22, is Swiss and presumably will be called upon to neutrally arbitrate any lockerroom disagreements while serving as Patrick Roy's backup.

Aebischer was raised speaking Schwyzerdutsch, or German-Swiss, but also speaks German, French and - haltingly - English. He didn't know any English until after the Avs drafted him in 1997, then brought him over to begin his pro career with Hershey of the AHL, and also Chesapeake and Wheeling of the East Coast League, in '98.

"At the start, when I came over, my English was pretty bad," Aebischer said. "I think I knew five words."

(Timeout: And if those five words were acquired through hockey, they probably cannot be listed in a family newspaper. Just imagine a scene from "Slap Shot.")

"But I think I learned pretty quick," Aebischer said, "because I had to survive. I think my English now is pretty good. I think it helped me to be able to speak French and German, because there are a lot of words that are similar."

The Avs' only Swedish player, center Peter Forsberg, studied English in school and is fluent. Yet occasionally a colloquialism will sail right over his head, as if it's a high slap shot. Then again, a lot of Americans don't know that in their early days, the members of Abba used to phonetically bluff their way through their English lyrics.

The French-Canadians tend to be the most impressively bilingual among the Avs. English-speaking Canadians, like English-speaking Americans, tend to be apathetic about learning another language, and that's reflected in the Avs' dressing room.

When Roy and Claude Lemieux joined the Montreal Canadiens during the mid-1980s, neither spoke much English. Lemieux now speaks it so well, even his accent is almost unnoticeable. During his Avalanche tenure, he told the story of how he learned English by watching "Let's Make A Deal," though he stopped short of dressing up as a garden vegetable and beseeching Monte Hall to pick him as a contestant. Roy also watched a lot of television, and his English was passable in bilingual Montreal during the first 10 years of his career. It also has improved since he was traded to the Avalanche in December 1995.

When Ray Bourque joined the Boston Bruins as a rookie in 1979, he was so quiet that some of his former teammates decided the young French-Canadian couldn't comprehend or speak English.

And 21 years later, those unfamiliar with his background can hear him speak for the first time - on television, perhaps - and not realize that English is his second language.

"My parents are bilingual," Bourque said. "They come from New Brunswick. My whole family kind of grew up speaking both languages. I went to French school, but I spoke English growing up, too. I had French and English friends. I know some people say I couldn't speak English when I came up, but that wasn't the case. I just didn't speak much."

Tanguay, the Avs' 20-year-old winger, was born in Ste. Justine, Quebec, and indeed didn't speak much English until he went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for his major junior hockey at age 16.

"I went to an English high school there," he said. "And the first few months, I felt like I wasn't doing anything right. The first semester, my English grade was 22 percent or something like that. I didn't have much choice except to get better. I was the only French guy on the team, and I was the only French guy in the high school, so I had to work a little harder at it and pick it up a little quicker than anyone else.

"The only thing was that my junior coach was French, too. With the team, everything would be in English, but when he talked with me one on one, we would use French."

And now, with Hartley?

"When he's mad at me, he talks to me in French," Tanguay said, laughing. "But everything else is in English. I think everybody in here is pretty good at English, and nobody really is struggling. It's nice, and everybody even knows a few words in every language."

So does Tanguay know some words in Czech, for example?

"Uh, yeah," he said, smiling. "But I can't tell them to you."

(There's the hockey vocabulary again.)

Yelle, 26, was raised just outside the Canadian national capital of Ottawa. He also is from a French-speaking home, but was taught English from Grade 1 on at his French school. When the Avs came to Denver, he was 21 and seemed to struggle at times with English. Five years later, though, he also seems almost perfectly bilingual.

"After taking it for a few years, I could understand and read it pretty well, but I was a little shy to speak it," he said. "When I played junior hockey in Oshawa, I went to a French school, but my friends outside school were mostly English. I started speaking it more and more, and now it's second nature.

"Now when I'm with the other French guys and we're along, we speak French. But sometimes you even get away from that. And then you look around and listen, and it can be kind of fun. Over the years, I've talked with Gusarov and (former Avs winger Valeri) Kamensky, and I've tried to learn some of the Russian words. I'll watch movies with some Russian words in them, and I can pick out one or two. And I listen to Milan and Martin talk, and I just wish I knew more than two languages. I went to Italy this summer, and I think it would have been awesome to be able to speak Italian."

In the locker room, though, English is the language of record.

Copyright 2000 The Denver Post. All rights reserved.

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Languages of the Game

Avalanche native languages (and citizenship)


D Aaron Miller (USA), D Nolan Pratt (Canada), D Greg de Vries (Canada), LW Chris Dingman (Canada), C Dan Hinote (USA), RW Dave Reid (Canada), RW Adam Deadmarsh (Canada-USA), C Joe Sakic (Canada), D Jon Klemm (Canada), RW Shjon Podein (USA), RW Scott Parker (USA), LW Chris Drury (USA) and D Adam Foote (Canada). Assistant general mananger Brian MacDonald (Canada), assistant coach Bryan Trottier (Canada), video coach Paul Fixter (Canada), trainer Pat Karns (USA), Kinesiologist Matt Sokolowski (Canada) and strength/conditioning coach Paul Goldberg (USA).


(All Canadian) G Patrick Roy, C Stephane Yelle, LW Eric Messier, LW Alex Tanguay, D Ray Bourque, coach Bob Hartley, assistant coach Jacques Cloutier, general manager Pierre Lacroix, vice president, hockey operations Francois Giguere and vice president, player personnel Michel Goulet.


RW Milan Hejduk, D Martin Skoula


D Alexei Gusarov


C Peter Forsberg


G David Aebischer (Switzerland)


Massage therapist Gregorio Pradera (Spain)

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