panoo

Mike Downey
June 28, 2007
The Chicago Tribune

His name is Patrick Kane. He is 18. His friends call him "Kaner." His father used to call him "Buzz."

Ask which he prefers and he tells you: "Pat's fine."

His father's name is also Patrick Kane. He lives in Buffalo, where he sells cars. Everybody there calls him "Tiki."

When young Pat was 9 or so, he was so good at hockey the other kids' parents asked if Pat's would please take the boy to go play someplace else.

A huge Sabres fan, he collected NHL souvenirs.

"For every Christmas and birthday, we'd get him a jersey of an up-and-coming player," his father remembers. "I think he has one from all 30 teams. They're all down in the cellar."

Tiki Kane, also a hockey lover, decided one day to go buy an authentic jersey for himself—just one.

He looked at them all and bought the one that he thought looked best, a Blackhawks one.

Coincidence or omen, it was half his son's lifetime ago.

Older yet still a teenager, Patrick Kane this week pulled on a red Blackhawks sweater—his own—bearing the number of his birth year, 88.

He stood tall, or as tall as a 5-foot-10-inch (if that) athlete can stand, as the No. 1 pick in the entire NHL draft.

"All those years ago, we would never have thought it," his dad said. "Six months ago we would never have thought it. Three months ago we wouldn't have."

Pat Kane wasn't born to be a Blackhawk, but he was bred to be a hockey player.

His father once drove him to four rinks in one day to play in four different games.

"My dad pushed me really hard when I was a kid," he says. "My mom would be the good guy of the family. She'd calm me down after."

At 14, he was sent away to Michigan to play for a "Midget" hockey team and develop his skills. He lived there with a former NHL player, Pat Verbeek. He phoned his mother, Donna, at one point and pleaded to come back home.

Hockey could be hard on the whole family at times.

"My sisters were the fun ones I could talk to," Pat says. "They were forced to come to all my tournaments when they didn't really want to. There definitely were sacrifices."

It isn't easy being both a child and a prodigy.

Another time, also at around age 9, Pat went to a Sabres game. He spent much of the night trying to urge Ron Francis of the visiting Carolina Hurricanes to give him a stick.

Pat was carrying it out proudly when he spotted a fan in a wheelchair. He asked if was OK to go up to the stranger and give him Francis' stick.

It was one of the proudest off-the-ice moments of his father's life.

The boy grew up, not very large, but extremely skillful. He became a sensational goal-scorer.

By the hour of the NHL's draft Friday, there was talk Kane could go to the venerable but woebegone Blackhawks, who had never had the No. 1 pick before.

Some questioned his lack of size, but big deal. Kane could point to a number of NFL stars—Wayne Gretzky, Steve Yzerman, Joe Sakic, Martin St. Louis and the favorite Sabre of his youth, Pat LaFontaine—who didn't measure up to 6 feet.

Even his coach-to-be, Denis Savard, was a Hall of Famer who was hardly a giant.

What very few knew was that the Blackhawks' general manager, Dale Tallon, had made up his mind as far back as January to make Kane his first choice.

"We kind of kept it secret," Tallon said.

Savard even said, "Dale kind of kept it secret from me too."

Everybody liked the kid's stickhandling, his passing and his attitude.

He had a nice combination of politeness and pizazz. After a goal tied a big game, Kane dropped to one knee, gripped his stick like a bow, pulled out an imaginary arrow and pretended to shoot it like an archer.

Young, yes, but what a tremendous upside this boy clearly had.

That baby face will not go unnoticed. On draft day, ESPN's Bill Simmons pointed out Kane's resemblance to an altar boy. He added: "I hope his tremendous upside involves puberty."

Younger yet were Kane's three sisters, Erica, 17, Jessica, 16 and Jacqueline, 13.

"I was joking with them the day before the draft," Kane said, "saying I might not go until the fourth pick or the third. They were getting pretty upset."

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