Johnny Gaudreau and the Calgary Stampede …
Rasmus Andersson was introduced to both at the same time.
The result was a string of late nights, a few sleep-deprived training sessions and one of Andersson’s many cherished memories of a superstar friend gone far too soon.
“I’ve obviously been thinking a lot about him this past week and it was like, ‘When was the first time I actually met Johnny?’ ” said Andersson, one of the few roster holdovers from Gaudreau’s nine-season stint with the Calgary Flames. “It was me and Mangy (Andrew Mangiapane), we were at development camp, and the team called us and said, ‘Hey, can you guys stay in Calgary for an extra week and do the power-skating and all that kind of stuff?’ Me and Mang were like, ‘Alright, whatever.’
“We didn’t even know what Stampede was. People told us, ‘It’s this party downtown. It’s a festival kind-of-thing.’ So we’re like, ‘Alight, development camp is over. Sure, we’ll go.’ We got introduced to Johnny and then we went out with Johnny every day for a week. We’d get home at 3 a.m. and we had power-skating at 6:30.
“And then we’d go home, take a nap and wake up and … ”
To illustrate this story, Andersson peeks at his phone, pretending he has an incoming call.
“It was like, ‘Oh (bleep), it’s Johnny calling again,’ ” he continued with a wide smile. “Mang would say, ‘Well, we gotta go, it’s Johnny.’ Alright, we’re going.”
Andersson and a couple of current teammates, along with their better halves, booked a private plane so they could attend Monday’s funeral service for Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau — struck and killed by a suspected drunk driver while riding bicycles along a rural road in Salem County, N.J. — and be back to tee it up the following morning at the Flames Celebrity Charity Golf Classic.
As Andersson put it: “There’s no way I would have missed (the funeral). We were too close of friends to miss that.”
Johnny will be missed by so many. He was only 31, was adored by teammates and staff in both Calgary and Columbus and, as his wife Meredith revealed during Monday’s eulogy, was eagerly anticipating the arrival of their third child.
A pair of former Flames — Mangiapane, who was traded in June to the Washington Capitals, and Sean Monahan — were among Johnny’s pallbearers.
“I’ll remember the person Johnny,” said Andersson, who spent parts of seven seasons with the puck-whiz left-winger, the two of them suiting up together for 300-and-some games in total. “He was obviously a hell of a hockey player, but that’s the last thing I think about.
“I was in Stockton for two years but every time I got called up, Johnny was one of the first guys I talked to. And once I actually made the team, we sat next to each other on the flight for four years. Every road-trip, we were next to each other. It was me, Johnny, Lindy (Elias Lindholm) and Mony, sitting together for four years, playing cards.
“In the COVID year, me and Johnny and Buddy (Robinson) and Mangy, we used to go into each other’s hotel room and play video games,” continued the 27-year-old Andersson, now an alternate captain for the Flames and a likely candidate to lead the team in average icetime for a fourth straight season. “Because we were in a city for five days and you weren’t allowed to leave the hotel. So we all bought computers and we’d sit and game for, like, nine hours straight.
“Johnny tricked Mang that he had a thing in his contract that he had to have a suite in every hotel. So Mangy always played that card, too. He’d order room service, because it was ‘on the team.’ So they played each other on that. It’s memories like that will always come up with Johnny. I’ll always think about our good times we had together and I will remember him with a smile on my face. You’re sad now, but I’m going to try to remember him with a smile on my face. My wife and Meredith are really close so whatever she needs, we’re going to be there for her and the kids. We’re always going to be there for the Gaudreaus.”
Chatting with two reporters prior to tee-off at the Flames Celebrity Charity Golf Classic, which raised $365,000 for the Flames Foundation, it was clear Andersson has hours and hours of stories about Johnny.
He marvelled that the star forward needed only a minute or two to don his gear, snapping his fingers for effect and saying teammates often joked all his equipment must be on a single zipper.
He laughed as he recalled that “I accidentally hit him one time in practice and he did not talk to me for, like, 10 days.”
He mentioned how thankful he was that he spent an entire weekend with Gaudreau in July, when both were among the groomsmen for Mangiapane’s wedding.
“Once you got to know him, he was such a funny dude,” Andersson said. “He was a quiet guy in the room. But once you got to know him, you’d see the real side. And once you got to know him, you had a friend for life. That’s really how he was.”
In this case, a friendship forged over a few late nights at the Calgary Stampede.
What an introduction that must have been.
These are memories that Andersson will hold near and dear, even if he’s skating with a heavy heart.
“He is always going to be by my side when I’m on the ice,” Andersson said.