The Finnished Flash

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This article was published 09/01/2015 (3908 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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ANAHEIM, Calif. — After a stellar 22-year NHL career that took him to unimaginable heights, the Finnish Flash is falling in love with doing things on Teemu time.

Retirement very much agrees with him, 44-year-old Teemu Selanne told the Free Press on Thursday during an afternoon sit-down at Honda Center.

That’s where the Anaheim Ducks and Selanne’s fans will honour him Sunday by raising his number to the rafters prior to the Jets-Ducks NHL game, which is the conclusion of “For8ver Teemu” week here.

“Obviously my free slot, (free) time is between 8 and 3,” said Selanne, looking tanned and relaxed. “We drive our daughter (Veera, 7) to school. Our two boys (Eemil, 18, Eetu, 17) are driving so my third one (Leevi, 14) goes with them. And I play either golf or tennis or both, then 3 o’clock life pretty much starts with the kids, hobbies and the homework and stuff.

“I’m really enjoying every day. Obviously for so many years playing with the schedule and the disciplined life and everything. And now when you don’t have it, I’m really enjoying it. Every morning. Plus my body has been feeling great. Obviously the older you get, like the last couple of years, after the games, next morning you took a couple of steps and tried to find the sore spots. No more of that.

“So far, I’m actually surprised. The game itself, I haven’t missed much at all. Obviously my teammates, and the locker-room life and some dinners and stuff.

“The game? I played enough.”

Part of Selanne’s free time is spent spearheading two foundations that help kids — one in southern California and another in Finland. They are patterned after the Winnipeg Jets 1.0 charitable foundation Goals For Kids, he said.

“We try to support families who can’t afford to play hockey and buy gear and stuff,” Selanne said. “Here we help a lot of kids to keep in hockey and play hockey. Same thing back home. We all know it’s a very expensive hobby. To be able to help them means a lot. I always believed the charity work for the children’s hospitals has been very important for me, too. So giving back, it’s so important for me. It’s always been.

“I remember in Winnipeg when we had Goals for Kids, when I went home the next summer, we created that for Jokerit, my team there. Then we started working even harder for the children’s hospital in Helsinki. We have raised like 50, 60 million since we started. It has been fun. But the boom, it started from Winnipeg.”

Selanne, who started his NHL career in 1992-93 by scoring 76 goals and 132 points, both NHL rookie records, called it quits after last spring’s playoffs, ending with 684 goals, 773 assists for 1,457 points in 1,451 regular-season games. That places him 11th on the NHL’s all-time goals list, 15th on the points list, and made him the highest-scoring Finnish player ever.

The Flash, who won the Stanley Cup in Anaheim in 2007, is also the all-time leading scorer in Olympic hockey and has three bronze medals, one of them earned last February when he was voted the tournament’s MVP in Sochi.

Mixed in with all those special accomplishments, Selanne said Thursday the final two games he played in Winnipeg — one in December 2011 and the other in October 2013 — hold a very special place in his heart.

When he made it known last year would be his last, a sort of farewell tour began around the NHL.

“Obviously the most special city was Winnipeg,” he said. “I still… I can’t stop wondering how the people were so excited, especially when I went there the first time a few years ago (2011). I left there a long, long time ago, in ’96, and coming back, what I got, it was overwhelming. It was unbelievable.

“It was really special. I really loved that. Too bad we were there only one day.”

He has thrived in southern California but Selanne said he never wanted to leave Winnipeg in the first place. And that 1996 trade to the Ducks still riles him a little to this day.

“Richard Burke was the (incoming) owner at that time and he called me just 10 days before that and said, ‘You’re not for sale. Don’t worry about the rumours,’ ” Selanne said, a little fire still in his eyes. “So I didn’t expect to get traded. And then it happened. I was so mad, so disappointed.

“Like I said, I didn’t want to leave. I was happy there. I knew that Winnipeg was going to go to Phoenix and I was really looking forward to being a part of that.

“And the first trade, like they always said and it’s so true, you feel so disappointed. You feel like you have failed. And when I got over with that, everything was great. But it as a tough day for me. And I don’t think that trade was very good for them but you never know. That’s easy to say.”

Things were a little hard to say in Anaheim for a while this fall. Selanne, along with Finnish writer Ari Mennander, published Teemu, a book released in Finland last September, one that had some harsh words for Ducks coach Bruce Boudreau and captain Ryan Getzlaf, mostly over Selanne’s diminishing role with the team last season.

Peace has been made, Selanne insisted on Thursday.

“The way that it came out, it came totally the wrong way,” he said. “If you read the whole book, the way things went last year, I tried to explain things honestly, what happened and how I felt about it. Whoever did the translation was very poor, too. There’s no… I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. I just tried to tell how things went and how I felt.

“I said many times in the book that Bruce is a great guy. The problem we had was the vision about what kind of player I am. I felt that I should be on the first power play. He said no, I shouldn’t, or 20 minutes per game.

“It was only professional problems. It was hockey-related things. It was nothing else. Obviously when you take one line here, one here, one here, it looked pretty bad. I was disappointed about it. I talked with Bruce. We are OK. No hard feelings. The thing is, I felt bad also, because that’s not my style, to try to rip anybody. I just tried to be honest about what happened and how I felt with it. Everything’s fine here. This is an important relationship between the club and myself. I tried to live life having no enemies. I don’t have any.”

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca

in praise of teemu C2