| Subject: mESSIER GETTING MARRIED |
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Date Posted: 12:17:32 01/08/06 Sun
By JOHN DELLAPINA
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Mark Messier will have his No. 11 raised to Garden rafters Wednesday for his part in bringing Stanley Cup to Rangers in 1994.
Number 11 goes to the Garden rafters Thursday night.
No, they won't have to rip it off Mark Messier's clenched body in order to put it up there - though the common wisdom is that an intervention wouldn't be out of the question.
Messier, after all, was the quintessential "eats, sleeps and breathes" hockey player. Others talk cavalierly about living their game 2-4/7. Messier truly did.
Soon after breaking into the NHL as a long-haired, cycle-driving, slim-chance-of-making-it winger who had scored a grand total of one goal in his first season of pro hockey, Messier emerged as one of the league's top players. Almost as quickly, inherent leadership qualities nurtured by a father who had played and coached in rough-and-tumble minor pro leagues manifested themselves.
The way Messier saw it - the way he felt it - was that leading an NHL team was not just a full-time job, it was an all-consuming mission. All that other "real life" stuff that the rest of the world - and most of his teammates - indulged in? Messier figured there'd be time for that when - and if - he ever stopped playing.
And as the Cups began piling up and the decades passed and he became more and more involved in every aspect of the day-to-day operation of whatever team he was captaining, it became harder to imagine whether he really would ever stop playing and make a life for himself outside the game, even after he took a series of tear-filled bows at center ice at the Garden following his last game of the 2003-04 season, a 43-year-old well past the height of his athletic powers still commanding center stage.
When he announced his retirement on Sept. 13, 2005, there were more than a few who speculated that Messier would see the promise in this year's Rangers team and succumb to the allure of taking one more run at Garden glory.
Little did they know that he hadn't just moved on, he had done it the way he played the game: utterly and completely. Mark Messier has a new all-consuming life mission. He's a dad.
* * *
"As we speak, he's having a bath with Douglas," Kim Clark says over the phone from their Hilton Head, N.C., home. "He's in there with him."
Messier has immersed himself in every aspect of fatherhood over the last three years - ever since his long-time live-in girlfriend and soon-to-be-wife Clark convinced him that the time indeed was right for them to begin having children. Douglas was born in the summer of 2003. Daughter Jacqueline Jean arrived five months ago.
"I was ready to have children at a certain point in our relationship and he wanted to wait," Clark says. "Part of it was that it does take him a while to decide things - I've never known him to be impulsive about anything and not give everything he decides to do tremendous thought and commitment.
"Because, once he makes a commitment, he's fully there like no one I've ever met."
He puts the kids to bed. He takes them to the beach. Takes them fishing. Changes diapers.
"And he's just so patient," Clark says. "He never sees Douglas as in his Terrible Twos. He just says, 'Wow, he's talking so much.' He's amazingly patient and gentle with his children. He's just unreal. He does everything."
Which, to hear Messier tell it, was the only way he ever envisioned settling down. But he concedes that the legendary will that lifted teams to championship heights had less to do with his life change than kismet and good timing.
"I thought about it, but you've got to have the right partner," Messier says of Clark, the Vancouver girl whom he met while playing for the Canucks in 1998.
"It was lust at first sight," Clark says, jokingly, "but the dating was slow-going, a slow courtship, which was kind of nice."
By 2003, with his second tour of duty with the Rangers growing increasingly frustrating and thoughts of retirement becoming more prevalent, Messier decided that it was time to allow himself to begin the transition from puckhead to head of a household.
"I used to play (in Edmonton) with Randy Gregg, who had four kids in five years and he was able to do that," says Messier, who also watched close friends and Rangers teammates Adam Graves, Brian Leetch and Mike Richter balance career and family. "I think, for me personally, it would have been difficult to do that because of how much I needed to put into it, how much I took home with me and how much the game consumed me each year from September 'til the end.
"And I felt that my last year (as a player), with Douglas and not being able to completely immerse myself in the team. So for me, the timing has kind of worked out perfectly."
Not that it always has in this aspect of his life.
In the late '80s, Messier had a son with Leslie Young, a Virginia woman with whom he was having a relationship, .
Lyon Messier spent summers with his dad and the incredibly close Messier family in Hilton Head. But with his parents' relationship having ended and Messier in all-out-hockey mode, contact between father and son was limited while Lyon was young.
Those close to Messier claim that not being able to be a more active participant in Lyon's upbringing was one of the torments of his life. All concerned are happy to report that the two now are close, with 18-year-old Lyon - an offensive defenseman who patterns himself after Brian Leetch - playing junior hockey in Texas and eligible for the NHL draft in June.
"I knew it was a difficult situation for him and me because we were both playing hockey and doing our thing," Lyon says. "But we both loved each other. It was just really difficult because of our hockey careers, that's all."
Over the last two years, Messier has found that another delightful benefit of retirement is being able to attend many of Lyon's games. Suffice to say, the legendary father isn't shy about giving advice to the aspiring son - who, by the way, craves the input.
"When he's come to my games, he tells me a lot of stuff - what I need to do, if I made a mistake," Lyon says. "He tells me and I want him to because I want to get better. And if I do something wrong, I want to know so I don't do it again."
Says Messier: "I think now the thing I'm looking forward to is getting to see him play a lot more and being able to steer him in the right direction as he gets into these years now - especially this being his draft year. And hopefully, some of the experience that I've had I can send his way and help him.
"I think the most important thing in anything is that your child knows that you love him and I think that stands alone through anything. And I think he knows that I love him and would do anything for him. Once you've got that established, you can work through anything."
Once Messier had a lockout-produced year off to ponder the crossroads of his life, the path became clear to him.
As usual, since he decided on that path, there has been no looking back.
"The lockout was so terrible for the league and the players and everybody, but I think for Mark, it was probably in some ways a saving grace," says Mary Kay Messier, his younger sister and business manager. "When he played that last game, he probably knew somewhere in his heart that that was his last game, yet there was no way he could come to terms with that.
"The year off allowed him all that time to settle down and take a deep breath and experience his family. Not that it's easy - it's something he'll miss forever. But he's come to terms with it. He understands that it's time for new players to make their name. And it's time for him to get on with something else."
That something else has transformed Mark Messier from fearsome champion to doting dad. The Rangers will honor him for the former Thursday night. He'll be clutching his kids while they do.
Originally published on January 8, 2006
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