Connor Bedard was about to jet off to a sunny destination. He wasn't happy about it. With minor hockey tryouts just around the corner, Bedard — the projected No.
1 pick at next week's NHL draft, but at the time simply a youngster with big dreams — begrudgingly agreed to his family's Hawaiian vacation.
There was a caveat: a couple of extra items needed to be packed, namely some sticks and his in-line skates. "He didn't really want to go," Tom Bedard, Connor's dad, recalled with a laugh. "Only gone 10 days or something, but for him that was a lot. "Not thrilled." When the Bedards rolled up to the airport, the stick bag set to be loaded on a plane heading to a chain of islands in the Pacific Ocean raised some eyebrows.
And once they arrived in paradise — Tom, wife Melanie, daughter Madisen, and Connor — the hockey-mad youngster quickly laced up and hit the seawall. "He was flying around," Tom Bedard said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "We eventually got our beach time.