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ESPN Magazine, April 2015
ACE IN THE HOLE
Exclusive: Kent Parson speaks out on junior hockey, his meteoric rise, and what really drives him.
Chuck Spezna Reports.
When the NHL announced a four team expansion plan for the 2004-2005 season, heated debate quickly broke out concerning the choice of locations.
In Seattle, Providence, and Houston, consistent attendance at other local hockey games indicated that NHL franchises had a great chance of being successful.
Concerning Las Vegas, however, fans were doubtful.
A city without another professional sports franchise—and one in which several previous attempts at minor league hockey teams had failed—many frustrated fans argued that there were any number of better options for the fourth franchise, while Canadian fans expressed outraged at having been snubbed, having had at least two appealing locations, Quebec City and Winnipeg, turned down as possibilities (The Atlanta Thrashers were not relocated to Winnipeg until the 2011 season).
But one man, Aces owner Walt Mitchell, had enough confidence for the whole league. “Projections are very good concerning attendance,” he told a local radio host in 2003, after the plans were announced, “We’ve sold about 10,000 season tickets to locals, and we’re expecting a very large tourist crowd, as well. The franchise will not only be a contender within the league, but will attract people to and ultimately benefit the city of Las Vegas. In this city, you have to be willing to gamble, but we view this as an acceptable risk and expect a huge payout.”
Mitchell was right. Winning the franchise’s first Stanley Cup in 2010, the first expansion team to do so only five seasons after their first NHL game, the Las Vegas Aces proved everyone wrong.
On that winning team—Kent Parson, a rookie who had led the league in points and put up a hat trick in game four of the Stanley Cup Finals, a nineteen-year-old who knew exactly how it felt to defy expectations.
After all, he’s been doing it his entire life.
“Just Being at the Rink Was Like Freedom”
Born on Independence Day, 1990, Parson has always been a bit of a surprise. “I was born about two weeks early,” he tells me, and then laughs. “My mom definitely wasn’t expecting it. She was at a family barbecue when her water broke.”
Parson has the healthy good looks of an all-American quarterback; a strong jaw and floppy blond hair with a smattering of freckles and an impish grin. He arrives to our interview five minutes early, wearing an Aces t-shirt and one of his ubiquitous backwards caps. It’s not just an aesthetic choice, he tells me—“They have to spend about three hours putting enough crap in my hair to get it to stay down for photoshoots and stuff,” he says ruefully, “I can never get it to work out on my own.”
Parson’s easy to talk to, sharing personal anecdotes about his cat and his teammates without much prompting. He hardly seems like a professional athlete with an enormous amount of pressure resting on his tanned shoulders as he cheerfully signs an autograph for the little girl who approaches him and breathlessly says that he’s her favorite player, but his laid-back surfer persona disappears when he steps on the ice.
“It’s always been like that,” he says. “Whatever was going on at home, or at school, stepping on the ice was like having a clean slate. Nothing mattered but the game. My mom always said I was like someone else out there, but I don’t think that’s true. I’m always me, but skating definitely does bring out a different side of me.”
Parson’s talent for using hockey as an escape has benefitted him throughout his career as he’s been able to put aside media scrutiny and outside pressures—of which there have been many—to focus on the biggest games of his career, and it all began when he was young.
He started skating only a few months before Parson’s parents divorced in 1994. He was only three years old at the time, and he says that he hasn’t spoken with his father, Troy, who managed a department store, since. Before the divorce, though, the rink was a place for Karen Parson to escape a tense home life and bond with her eldest child.
“I owe everything to my mom. She was a single working mother with two kids, and then I got into hockey, which is one of the most expensive sports out there. She spent basically whatever free time she had, which wasn’t a lot, shuttling me to and from the rink. And Jess, my sister, she was always there too, and I know she missed out on a lot because of my hockey. It wasn’t always easy, but we were and are a close family. They’re my two favorite people in the world.”
Parson spent his childhood playing in local leagues in Buffalo, but quickly realized that if he wanted to become better, he would have to follow the hockey. Even after taking part in development camps and joining travel teams, he knew that if he wanted his game to reach its full potential, he would have to look elsewhere.
At just fourteen, Parson moved to Maine to play for a prestigious Bantam Team in the Portland area. When I ask him about the adjustment period, going from living with his mother and sister to sharing a home with a new family, he tells me that he loved his billet family, but that, “It was definitely a hard adjustment. I think that was the point where I really decided that hockey was it for me, because if I was going to move away from home, then it wasn’t going to be to play for fun. It was going to be to play in the NHL.”
Parson doesn’t regret leaving home so young, he says, but he did have to make sacrifices to play the game he loved. “I haven’t lived at home since then, and I definitely feel that some days. No matter how great your billet family is, or how close you are with your team, you miss your mom at that age. My sister was only twelve, and I missed a lot of her growing up.”
So what was the upside? Parson credits moving away so young for making lifelong bonds with teammates. “When you’re not at home with your real family, you learn how to make anywhere home. I’m still in contact with some of those guys from ten years ago, I’ve been to some of their weddings. You learn fast just how crucial building relationships with your teammates really is.”
And, of course, the hockey. Always a talented player, Parson was on lines with some of America’s best young hockey talent, being coached at a high level, and was facing equally talented competition. He also comments that it was in Portland that he first started to gain the work ethic he’s been applauded for as a professional, saying “I had to work harder than the other guys because I was smaller than all of them.”
At an age where most of his teammates were rocketing upwards, Parson was only 4’9 his first year on the Portland Phoenix, and while he admits that everyone—including himself—was waiting for a major growth spurt, it never came.
“He just sort of inched upwards,” Phoenix head coach Matt McCain recalls, “He was growing all the time, but he wasn’t one of those kids who comes back after the summer six inches taller. It was almost comical out there on the ice, because he was a foot shorter than some of those guys, but he always outplayed them.”
Is his size still a sore point? Parson says it doesn’t bother him anymore. “You learn to work with it, because you obviously can’t change it. In some ways it gives me an advantage out there. I’ve learned to outrun the other team because I can’t out-check them. I’m harder to block because I can kind of weasel my way out of it. Sometimes I get chirped for it, but when my team’s three points up, who really cares?”
And while Parson was a good player—a very good player—with the Portland Phoenix, it took another team to make him a star.
“We were painted as rivals when in reality, we were best friends.”
Even after two successful years of junior hockey, Parson was prepared for disappointment in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League draft. “I knew they didn’t always pick a lot of American guys, and our games hadn’t been scouted very heavily. I was telling myself, ‘okay, if you don’t get drafted, it’s not the end. You can play for other junior teams, you can play in college.’ But I would have been crushed, in hindsight. In my eyes, the CHL was the pipeline to playing in the NHL and I really didn’t have a backup plan.”
Parson went in the tenth round of a twelve round draft to the Rimouski Oceanic, and while he says that the experience itself was excruciating, just being drafted at all made waiting through the long list of other players worthwhile.
It was in Rimouski, after all, that Parson would meet the player with whom he’s been linked ever since—Jack Zimmermann.
On the surface, Parson and Zimmermann could hardly be more opposite. Parson is the boy-next-door American upstart, while Zimmermann is Canadian hockey royalty. Parson credits his single mother with pushing him to play his best hockey, while Zimmermann has fought hard against the long shadow cast by his famous parents. Parson followed his best hockey away from home at fourteen, while Zimmermann had access to the best hockey tutelage available locally—including private sessions with legends such as Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky—and lived with his parents in Montreal until he himself was drafted to the Oceanic in the first round.
Even their style of play was different. Parson was small in stature but had incredible raw talent; Zimmermann’s solid position as a center and eye for the game put scouts in mind of Sidney Crosby.
“I think we were kind of both intimidated by each other in different ways,” Parson admits. “We approached the game from a very different place—I always wanted to prove everyone wrong while Zimms had to fulfill these crazy expectations. I was used to living away from home and making new friends quickly and handling that aspect of it, and meanwhile he was definitely the better of the two of us on the ice. My teammates had always been my best friends, and we were all afraid that he would have this huge chip on his shoulder because of his ‘lineage.’” Here, Parson uses air quotes and snorts a little. “In reality, he’s one of the most quiet, unobtrusive guys in the dressing room. He definitely doesn’t have an ego. We figured out pretty quickly that we both just cared a lot about hockey and we both had a lot to prove, and we got along pretty well after those first few days.”
Initially, Zimmermann centered the top line while Parson fought for ice time on the third and fourth. But after a few mediocre games, head coach Guy Beauchamp tried both players on the same line during a practice scrimmage, and the rest is history.
“I don’t know what it was,” Beauchamp says, “Parson wasn’t the best player on the ice that year, but he was magic on Zimmermann’s wing. The chemistry was unbelievable . After that one practice, I thought, ‘this is it. This is how we win the President’s Cup.’”
Beauchamp was right.
“He stuck me on the first line about a month in and I think everybody kind of reevaluated me at that point,” Parson says, “Including myself. I live for that sort of thing. Nobody thought I could go from ten minutes a night on the fourth line to being a first line winger, and when I get that, I push hard. If someone says, ‘that’s impossible,’ then I’m going to turn around and do it. I’m stubborn like that.”
Parson’s play quickly drew the attention of major league scouts.
“It was suddenly like, ‘there’s this tiny little winger over in the Q scoring a point per game,” one scout, who asked to remain anonymous, recalls. “All eyes were on Zimmermann up until that point, and suddenly he wasn’t the only player worth watching on the ice. Not even the only player worth watching on his line.”
“It wasn’t that Parson wasn’t a good player before that,” Beauchamp is quick to clarify, “He was one of those guys on the ice long after practice ended, and he had spades of natural talent. Putting him with Zimmermann simply showcased what was already there. And, of course, he made Zimmermann a better player as well.”
Their first year together, the pair won the President’s Cup and came within one game of capturing the Memorial Cup.
“It was pretty sobering,” Kent says, remembering the loss, “We thought we were untouchable, we definitely got too cocky. Zimms took it really hard. I remember saying, ‘We’ve got one year left, and we’re going to get that cup.’ Neither of us were willing to settle for less.”
When they returned to Rimouski in the fall of 2008 after a summer spent training—together, in large part, Kent relates much to my surprise—they returned on top of the world.
Expected to be leaders in the dressing room as well as on the ice, Zimmermann was asked to take on the captaincy, while Parson wore the A. On top of a season of hard regular hockey, though, both were facing the pressures of the upcoming NHL entry level draft, and, as Parson recalls, the stress could be extreme.
“In the fall, scouts were already releasing their reports and Zimms was consistently number one, I was somewhere around ten or fifteen, I don’t quite remember. By Christmas time I was like number five, and in the spring people started writing stuff about us both being top prospects, debating which of us would go first.”
“It happens pretty much every year,” the scout relates, “There’s a strong forerunner, and then as more rounded reports come in the rest of the players get shuffled around a bit. There was some debate approaching the draft, but it was pretty clear that Zimmermann was always going to go first overall. That didn’t really change.”
Did the controversy surrounding the upcoming draft come between the teammates? If it did, their on-ice performance didn’t suffer, and Kent denies it flat out. “The media kind of made it this rivalry narrative, but it was never like that. Zimms was my teammate and my linemate and my captain, and above all that, he was probably my best friend. The whole season was kind of bittersweet, because we knew that we would both be drafted in the first round to different teams and that we probably wouldn’t be playing together again. I know Zimms probably felt it more than I did, but I was focused on playing the best game I could at the time, and I didn’t really listen to the scouting reports.”
And when I asked him if the prospect of going second bothered him, Parson says earnestly, “I was honestly thrilled to be getting drafted at all. At thirteen, people were saying I couldn’t hack it in juniors and that the NHL was a pipe dream. Even in my first year with the Oceanic, going in the first round seemed like a long shot. For a guy like me, being predicted in the top five was like winning the lottery.”
Even under the watchful eye of NHL scouts, however, the pair never lost their cool. Together, they racked up a league wide point streak, demolishing records across both the Q and the CHL, and led their team to a seemingly effortless repeat of the President’s Cup.
From there, Parson accomplished the goal he had set for himself a year earlier coming off the ice after a crushing defeat—together, he and Zimmermann lifted the Memorial Cup.
“We were on top of the world,” Parson recalls fondly. “We’d promised each other that cup, and we got it.”
But the 2009 NHL entry draft, only a month later, would stun not only Parson, but the rest of the hockey world.
“I earned my spot as the first pick.”
In a conference room in Montreal, some three hundred hopeful NHLers and their families held their breath as David Armstrong, the Aces’ director of player personnel, approached the podium. ”With their first pick of the 2009 NHL draft,” He said quickly, “The Las Vegas Aces are proud to select from the Rimouski Oceanic… Kent Parson!”
Parson admits that to him, the draft is a blur of memory that he struggles to recall more than half a decade later. What he does remember, he says, was the silence. “It was like this complete vacuum of sound,” he says looking at his hands, “I stood up and everybody was just staring at me, and it took a few seconds before anyone remembered to clap.”
At his side that day were his mother and his sister, the two women to whom Kent still credits his success at every level. Nowhere to be found was his friend, teammate, and the projected first pick: Jack Zimmermann.
Parson refuses to discuss Zimmermann’s draft—the only questions he avoids through our entire three hour conversation—saying that it’s not his business. I understand this to mean that it’s not mine, either.
But serious fans can’t help but remember the controversy. It’s not that Parson was a bad first pick, or that certain scouts hadn’t recommended him to go first, but rather that the vast majority of the hockey world had been quite certain that he would play second fiddle to Zimmermann—a comment which the NHL scout mentioned earlier noted to be characteristic of the duo’s career together.
To this day, reports vary on whether Parson was legitimately selected first, or was the Aces’ default selection following Zimmermann’s withdrawal from the process. In fact, sources disagree as to whether Zimmermann decided to avoid the draft of his own accord, or was absent for other reasons.
Parson says that to him, it doesn’t matter. “I do think I deserved to be drafted highly,” he says softly, “I don’t think that’s ego. I worked hard and I played good hockey, and I pretty much knew going in that I would have been top five. Nobody knows what that draft might have looked like with Zimms there, but to me, it’s a moot point. It happened years ago, and I just don’t think about it anymore.”
Still, the controversy surrounding that year still follows Parson. “I remember an article published my first fall, ‘the draft with no first pick,’ or something like that. That was before I really learned not to read my own press, and that one stung a little bit. The Aces didn’t settle for the second pick—I earned my spot and I was the first pick and I think I deserve to feel proud of that.”
And as to reports saying that Parson was unhappy with the Aces selection? “Pure fiction,” Parson says firmly. “People were saying, ‘he was already talking to the Islanders, he’d already bought a house in New York’—And here I am bewildered at eighteen, saying, ‘I’m talking to all the teams, just like the rest of the top prospects,’ and ‘They haven’t paid me anything, how could I buy a house?’”
“I stopped minding the comparisons.”
In Vegas, Parson faced a new set of challenges. “I think a lot of guys come in saying, ‘I’m ready!’ I was certainly in that mindset. But NHL hockey is different from every other league. I didn’t know until I started what it would actually be like at that level, night after night.”
Parson, as many young players are, was placed with a teammate his first year—then Captain John Wood and his family. “Woody really helped me out that year,” Parson recalls fondly, “He always kept an eye on me, kept my head in the right place.”
He admits that he needed some minding his first year in Vegas. Though he’d been living away from home for four years, the NHL was a different story, and Vegas was a different kind of city. “It wasn’t that I went crazy partying or anything,” Parson says, “But just kind of dealing with that fast paced lifestyle and balancing it with being a professional athlete, that kind of thing he really helped out with.”
And another thing Wood and his teammates did—help shield Parson from the bright lights of the media.
“He was a good kid,” Wood, who moved his family back to Canada after retirement but still sees Parson frequently, recalls, “He was under a lot of pressure from the media and the fans, and that can translate with other players, too, trying to see what he’s made of on the ice. Parson was my rookie, I definitely felt the responsibility to protect him on and off the ice.”
On the road, Parson roomed with fellow rookie and media darling Alexei “Tater” Mashkov, who had been drafted in 2007 but had only made it to the US two years later following vicious contract disputes with the KHL.
“I think Tater and I had a lot in common that first year,” Parson says, “There were a lot of eyes on us, for different reasons, we were both far away from home and new to the NHL. We bonded over a lot of that stuff. He was an awesome guy to have in the dressing room and the best roommate I could have asked for.”
Parson quickly fulfilled his reputation for making fast friends with his teammates, saying that he and Mashkov became close off the ice, as well. “It was kind of funny at first because he didn’t speak much English and I could only speak English and really bad French, but he would come over to Woody’s a lot and practice his English watching cartoons with the kids, and we would play street hockey or watch TV together. We didn’t need to talk much, he’s just an easy person to be around.”
Parson’s tactic of ignoring the attention and focusing on building team relationships worked for him, if you believe the statistics—he quickly solidified himself as a forerunner for the Calder Trophy, maintained a point per game average, and scored his first hat trick in November. Despite his accomplishments, however, Parson couldn’t seem to shake the questions about Zimmermann.
“I wouldn’t say it bothered me,” Parson says carefully, and then reconsiders. “Well, my rookie year I struggled with it a little bit. It did get frustrating coming off the ice after a solid game and the only questions I’m hearing are, you know, ‘Do you think you’d still be a Calder contender if Zimmermann were playing?’ or ‘What would it look like if Zimmermann was playing for the Aces instead?’ There were definitely moments where I wanted to say, ‘It’s irrelevant! He’s not playing in the league!’ But I can admit now that that sort of thing was pretty juvenile on my part. It’s part of the game, players are always compared. Hell, Zimms was always compared to players who were compared to Gretzky. I just decided, ‘I’m going to let my game speak for itself,’ and at that point I stopped minding the comparisons.”
Whatever he was doing seemed to work. By March, the Aces—a team which had ranked dead last at 34th overall in the league the year before—was not only a playoff contender, but seemed to be a favorite for at least a divisional title. It was a stunning upset of expectations.
Parson, of course, refuses to take credit. “Did I put up points? Yeah. But it’s a team sport, and a team effort. We worked our asses off that year, and I was only one guy. We did it as a group.”
Still, it surprised no one when Wood chose Parson to lift the Stanley Cup after him in June, after the team rocketed to an unprecedented Championship win, jumping from last in the league to overall winners over the course of only one season.
When Wood announced his retirement in July, following a sixteen year NHL career and his first Stanley Cup win, Parson was the clear choice for the new Captaincy, and his teammates agree that it’s not just because he’s the team’s top scorer or public face.
“Parse is a leader off the ice,” Jeff “Swoops” Schwindeman, who was drafted by the team in 2010 and currently wears an ‘A,’ says, “He takes the rookies under his wing, he makes guys feel welcome in the dressing room. He’s easy to get along with and easy to respect, and then he goes out there and outperforms us all on the ice, which makes us want to try harder.”
Indeed, nobody but Parson himself is surprised that he’s since been asked to captain other teams, including those at the Annual All-Star Games, and the US National Team.
In fact, he captioned the one which won Olympic Gold only last year.
Players across the league speak almost as fondly of Parson as do his own teammates. “Parse is best,” Mashkov, who was traded to the Falconers in 2011, says. “We play good hockey together, and now I say is good night when play Parse, because is good hockey and good friend.”
Parson himself says that the Mashkov trade, in addition to the transitions into captaincy and out of Wood’s guest room made for a rough sophomore year in the league. “My performance didn’t suffer much,” he admits, when I express surprise at this, “but my morale was pretty low. Tater and Woody were the guys I was closest to on the team, and they were gone the same year.” Meanwhile, injuries and point slumps plagued a team that only just eked out a last minute win to clinch a playoff spot and was quickly knocked out in the first round.
“I was pretty hard on myself after that year,” Parson says, elaborating that he’d gone home to Buffalo and—his words—moped on the couch for a few weeks. Newly determined, though, Parson decided that he wasn’t going to rest until he lifted the Stanley Cup again.
And just that June, Parson once again proved his doubters wrong.
As for his 2012 Cup days—as captain, he was entitled to two—Parson’s choices reflect him as a player and as a person. His first, which coincided with his birthday on the Fourth of July, was spent in Buffalo with his family and friends. “My mom and my sister were there, obviously, and all the people who inspired me to play hockey growing up—my old coach, some teammates, community members. It’s important to me to share my accomplishments with the people who made them possible in the first place.” Also among the crowd was hockey legend “Bad” Bob Zimmermann, father of Parson’s former teammate, an appearance which shocked many in the hockey world, but not Parson himself. “I became quite close with him and Alicia [Bob’s wife] when Jack and I played together, because they came up for almost every home game we played. He was definitely like a father figure for me, as well as being an inspiration hockey-wise. I was honored that he chose to come down for my cup day.”
For his second day, Parson chose to share the special occasion with the people of Las Vegas. “The hometown crowd really deserved it,” he says. “We all shared that victory. Here was an expansion team that nobody said would work, and we not only beat out the other expansion teams for our first cup, but also won a second. We couldn’t have done any of it without our fans behind us.”
Parson’s own special guests were the children that had benefitted from his largest charity endeavor to date, a program which he calls ‘The Little Aces.’ “I realized growing up that I was unusual in the hockey world,” Parson tells me, referring to the fact that he grew up lower-middle class and with no connections to the NHL. “A lot of guys are the children of retired players or other wealthy parents, because hockey’s an expensive game. I never had that. I got lucky a few times with hand-me-down skates and cheap second hand pads because that was all my mom could afford at the time, and I realized that if I hadn’t had people who were donating kids like me their old gear, I probably couldn’t have made it past the recreational level. There are tons of kids like that out there, who want to play the game but don’t have the resources.” The non-profit foundation distributes second-hand gear to underprivileged children in the Las Vegas area who otherwise could not play hockey, and uses cash donations to compensate coaches and purchase ice time for local teams in addition to purchasing skates and gear. Since its foundation in 2011, Parson has donated three million dollars himself to The Little Aces and pledges to spend another three million over the next three years.
“I think we have a responsibility to give back to the community,” Parson says, “As public figures, we can do a lot.” Parson also asks fans to donate to local no-kill shelters, like the one from which he adopted his famous cat, Kit Purrson. “The name was a joke at first,” Kent acknowledges, but admits that he’d like to set the record straight, “The shelter employees named her that because of my donation, so I decided it was pretty much meant to be and adopted her the same day.”
“I want to do all there is, and go past that.”
Nothing about Parson’s two Stanley Cups, Olympic Gold, or countless other trophies and records has made him less hungry for victory.
“I’m a professional athlete—if I wasn’t competitive, I wouldn’t be here. Of course I want to win more. I want to be the best. I want to do all there is, and then go past that and somehow win something else.” Parson laughs. “But I also want to, you know, be a decent guy, a good teammate, a role model, that sort of thing. There’s nothing like winning a game, but when a kid says, ‘I want to be just like you,’ that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, because I remember being that kid.”
As always, Parson’s eye is on the prize—A World Championship Gold, another Cup, another record-breaking point streak—and he’s not focused on the reports that once again involve his old teammate, Jack Zimmermann, who is rumored to be speaking to teams as a free agent in preparation for the 2015-2016 season.
“Zimms is playing great hockey with one of the best NCAA teams out there right now,” Parson says when I comment upon the rumors of him joining the NHL, “He’s definitely going to play great professional hockey, and I’m excited to see that happen.”
Will he play for the Aces, reuniting with Parson once again? “That’s really up to Jack and the GMs,” Parson says with a chuckle, “He’s going to land with a great team no matter where he chooses to go, and I’m excited to get back out on the ice with him.”
Concerning Zimmermann, Parson admits that they aren’t nearly as close as they used to be, but that it’s simply because they’re both busy people. There’s no bad blood, just the inevitable distance of time and space and of two lives diverging.
And when I ask if it annoys him, that Parson’s still facing comparisons to a player that has yet to set a foot on NHL ice after his own wildly successful five year career, Parson just laughs.
“Zimms has always pushed me to play my best, and I’m sure that will be just as true now, even if we’re on different teams. I’m excited to see what this season brings.”
If anyone had asked one of Parson’s coaches fifteen years ago whether they thought that this scrawny blond kid had a shot at the NHL, much less at the Stanley Cup, Parson is the first to admit they would have been laughed out of the building. But here in Vegas—a desert town with a champion ice hockey team the world was sure was doomed to fail—Parson has made a career of defying expectations.
In that, it seems, Kent Parson and the Las Vegas Aces are a perfect fit.