A/N: I make no disclaimer here. All of the information within is true to my knowledge. This is a biography collected from my own research. If you would like a bibliography ask and I will email you one.

Chapter 1: He Liked the Pads

As a professional hockey player in the 1970’s, Peter McNabb remembers one game he played in which the goalie was left in net even after he had allowed a ridiculous number of goals. Outraged, the disgraced goaltender finally took the initiative to remove himself from the game. Up in the stands a young Patrick Roy sat with his mother, and as the humiliated goaltender marched off the ice, he looked up at her and said, “If that were me I would have done that too.”

Sports and competition were staples of the parents Patrick Roy was born to on October 5, 1965. His father, Michel Roy, was a successful executive on a Quebec insurance board and his mother; Barbara Miller was an Olympic swimmer. The first year of Patrick’s life, Barbara remembers, the baby spent sleeping in a carriage at the poolside of the swim team she coached. As he grew she began coaxing him into the water, her hope being that he would follow her footsteps as a swimmer. “By the age of six,” she said, “he was competing in an age group national level and definitely showed potential.”

But there were other things in life for the boy and other influences. This was Canada, and hockey was inescapable. Every Saturday the family gathered to watch Hockey Night in Canada. Patrick’s nanny and grandmother Anna Peacock was a fanatical follower of the Montreal Canadiens and the rest of his family held allegiance to the hometown Quebec Nordiques.

Patrick watched the games and soon found himself drawn to the player on the ice that was so much more different than the others. The goaltender.

“He liked the pads,” his father Michel Roy remembered about him. He noticed this in the boy when Patrick had begun pilfering the cushions off the couch and tying them to his legs with his father’s belts, hobbling around the house and declaring himself to be Daniel Bouchard. Bouchard was the goaltender for the Quebec Nordiques at that time and Patrick idolized him. As a Christmas gift, Michel gave Patrick a goaltender’s catching glove. “You could tell right away,” Michel said, “that he liked wearing it and felt comfortable with it.”

So the boy was enrolled in an organized hockey team for his age group. The excited Patrick begged to be the goalie on the team but because of his small size they refused to let him. It didn’t take long, however, for Patrick’s wish to come true.

“One day,” Patrick said. “Our goaltender got hit in the leg with a puck and he started crying and he said he didn’t want to play goal anymore. I said I wanted to play goalie and they let me... I loved wearing the pads, even though they were heavy, I thought they were cool!”

The excited six-year-old won the first game he played in, 2-0.

Patrick was still competing in swimming. He remembers how he and his younger brother Stephane would shiver at the poolside during frigid Montreal winters, thinking about the hockey rink next door and wishing he were there.

“After school,” Stephane said. “We would always play hockey. Any spare time we would have, we played hockey. Patrick was a bad loser. He was a fierce competitor. It was good that we were close brothers... we were best buddies.”

Day after day, Patrick would simulate hockey games with his brother, making chaos as the swatted a large chalkboard eraser at each other down a long hallway. Patrick still wonders that they didn’t get in more trouble than they did because of the noise they would make. Sometimes, Stephane would be too tired to play or unavailable and Patrick would then be by himself.

“He would simulate games on his own,” Michel remembers. “He would lay down on the floor and pretend to be Guy LeFleur. He would be the shooter and the goalie at the same time. He would describe the game to himself just the way they do on the television and the radio.”

As the years went by, Patrick became more and more enthralled with goaltending and he began to resent the swimming pool and tennis courts that were taking him from what he loved to do.

“When he was nine years old,” Barbara remembers, “he confronted me and said, ‘I will never be a swimmer so forget it! I want to concentrate on hockey, it is my priority!’ From that day his father and I gave him our support and accepted his decision.”

Out of all the sports their son could have chosen, both Barbara and Michel knew that hockey was the most difficult, stressful and least likely that he would break through in, especially as a goaltender. Still they indulged him and hoped that this would perhaps be a phase he was going through. The boy was an uncanny math genius and already Michel was making plans for his future as a lawyer or someone of status in the insurance company he worked for.

His mother signed him up to play for a midget triple-A team in Ste. Foy, the wealthy suburb in which he lived. After a bad try out they suggested he try at a lower level team and when that team suggested he play at still a lower level team that had no goaltender, the youngster became irate.

“I quit!” he yelled and locked himself away in his room, avoiding all phone calls from the team and stewing.

“My career could have ended there,” Patrick remembers.

His mother’s priority however, was her son’s happiness. So she contacted a friend of hers who coached a team in nearby Cartier Laurentium. When the woman heard of Patrick’s situation, she immediately snatched him up as her team’s goaltender. Patrick happily took to the new team and led the youth league with an obscene 0.40 GAA for the season.

“Patrick was competitive right from the start,” Ed Miller, Patrick’s grandfather said of him. “It didn’t matter what he played, hockey or ping pong he always wanted to win.”

Daniel Bouchard remembers watching Patrick lose a tough game as a youngster and at his mother’s request, he surprised Patrick by giving him one of his old goaltending sticks as a consolation. The boy was overjoyed to receive such a treasure from his idol and he promptly slept with the stick for good luck.

“I don’t know what happened to it,” Patrick says of it now. “I think I may have played with it too much and it broke or maybe my mom threw it away.”

Patrick continued improving as a goaltender into his adolescence and it was slowly becoming obvious how immersed into it he was. He was passionate about playing and that didn’t go unnoticed by a budding sports agent, Pierre Lacroix. Lacroix remembers that it was Patrick’s passion and intensity in playing that attracted him to the youth, and he soon convinced his parents that it would be a good idea to start thinking about getting him an agent.

It was around this time that Patrick fell into another passion of his. He remembers walking home from school one day and finding some left over grocery money in his pocket. With it, he bought a few packs of hockey cards, one of which included a Wayne Gretzky rookie card. It sparked an obsession with card collecting that continues to this day. Patrick’s mother remembers how often she tried throwing his cards away only to find the boy digging them out of the trash can.

He continued to play with his siblings too. His sister Alexandra, nine years his junior remembers how often she used to play with her brothers, “We were all involved in sports and whether it was card games or hockey we were all pretty competitive. My brothers would always ask me to play hockey with them. I was the goalie. I would get hit with hockey pucks in the legs and stomach and then my brothers would play hospital if I got hit in the stomach.”

By the time he was seventeen, Patrick had an agent in Pierre Lacroix and he had dropped out of high school to free more time for hockey. His parents could only breathe a sigh of relief when in 1984, the eighteen year old was drafted by the Montreal Canadiens in the fourth round. Although as a Quebec Nordiques fan, Patrick had always detested the Canadiens, once he heard his name called he quickly became a fan.

Patrick was now playing for the minor league Granby Bisons, an incredibly bad team. Patrick was assaulted with up to 40-50 shots against him per night. As a result, his GAA ballooned from 4.44 to 5.55 to 6.26. It was a cold bucket of water for a boy who couldn’t abide losing.

One night the Granby defense was playing especially horrible and Patrick was seeing what would end up being 82 shots in three periods. It was enough to try anyone’s temper. A boy came in on a breakaway and when Patrick made the save he threw the puck back at him. “Take another shot!” Patrick cried.

The boy did and then he skated back to his coach, Pat Burns and told him, “That goalie’s crazy! He threw that puck at me and told me to take another shot!”

It was that tenacity that prompted the Canadiens to call up Patrick as a back up in February. On the 23d Patrick was called in to play the third period of a game they were losing. He held a shut-out period and as a result collected his first NHL win when the Canadiens scored the gamewinner.

Later, in March, Patrick was called up for a roadtrip. He saw no ice time but he watched the veteran players around him and absorbed all he could from it. As the team returned home and was getting off the plane, Mario Tremblay, a fiery veteran defenseman leaned to Patrick and snapped, “Now you can go back with the rest of the animals.”

Patrick understood no English at the time and perhaps, considering his own fiery temper, it was best he hadn’t understood Mario’s words.