Matty Fire Junior Review

[mattyIceman 1,031]

Matty Fire has matured into an adult even before considering a hockey career.  Sure he's played when he was younger, but he was mostly just an average player at best, mixing into the teams he's played for but never standing out, never looking out of place either.  He claims he has some potential to surpass his peer group but the motivation was never really ever there.

 

He held some regular day jobs that paid the bills and figured his destiny was to make a living doing just that.  Ordinary job, ordinary salary, ordinary apartment, nothing to really brag about.  Everytime he went above and beyond, he excelled at what he did, only to discover that his aptitudes would be taken advantage of at no extra compensation.  Thus he would get fed up, quit, go work somewhere else, rinse and repeat.

 

He did get a job working at a rink as a regular maintenance guy, doing odd repairs and some purchasing of arena supplies, sometimes even tending to the pro shop to sell equipment and sharpen skates.  At the end of the day, he would occasionally go skate on the rink instead of go home, just to skate around with the zamboni driver and the janitor.  They would fire some pucks, do some skating and passing drills to stay in shape and just have fun.  He would sometimes get more competitive with them and outdo everything they did until he was better than them.  Then he started staying every night sometimes going solo, and he would try to outdo himself from the previous day.

 

He forgot how much he loved hockey.

 

One day, during his shift, there was a junior tournament happening at his rink, and there were some scouts watching in the stands.  It wasn't too high of a level of hockey but skilled hockey nonetheless.  He would still go out on the rink every night after the last game was played, and one scout took note of the young man just tearing up the rink by himself.

 

That scout was VHL's MattyIce.

 

He would watch him more and more as the tournament came to a close and finally approached him, and they just talked hockey, exchange life stories, banter this and that.  They did take a liking to each other, and MattyIce would take him under his wing to train properly with a semi-pro team. He saw something in the man, wasn't sure what it was, but he had to get him playing competitively.

 

Matty Fire on a breakaway in practice

 

Matty Fire was completely hooked on hockey this time, more so than when he was a teenager.  His training evolved with time and he finally got himself a deal playing with a semi pro team in Montreal.  He played only part of the season, around 20 games or so out of the 40 the teams in the league played.  He did get 8 goals and 14 assists for over a point per game, then MattyIce got him a deal with the Ottawa Lynx during the VHL's S78 season.