Living with Asperger's, Brady Boudreau following in his dad's hockey footsteps

As his dad navigated the road during their 35-minute drive from Woodbury to Coon Rapids, Minnesota, last weekend, Brady Boudreau pulled out a pencil and his handy non-spiral notebook that often acts as his security blanket.

Out of memory, he jotted down every Stanley Cup champion in a row from 2018 all the way to the 1880s before the National Hockey League even existed and back when Canadian amateur clubs were awarded the trophy during annual challenges. On the next page, he started writing down every USPHL team, every USHL team, every NAHL team, every OHL team, every WHL team, maybe an NHL team coupled with its AHL affiliate until the Boudreaus finally arrive at the Italian restaurant the 20-year-old Brady commissioned to feed 65 kids daily at the hockey school he personally brought to Minnesota and has been running all week.

“Like I get bored a lot, and I’ll do stuff like this,” said Brady, a goalie on the USPHL Minnesota Blue Ox, as he opens his notebook. “I just like writing lists.”

“I don’t know how, but this kid knows everything about old-time hockey,” piped in his father, Bruce, who has spent a lifetime playing and coaching hockey and is entering his third season behind the Minnesota Wild’s bench. “Like didn’t you ask me the other day who won the Stanley Cup in 1915 or something like that? Wasn’t Ottawa the answer, and they won it six times in a row or something?”

“No, no, no,” Brady said, rolling his eyes. “It was who defended the Cup the most consecutive times, and it was Ottawa. They won the Cup 11 times, but they did it over a three- or four-year stretch because back in the early days it was a John’s Cup, so there’d be like a board, and if you won the game, any team could challenge for it. If the board deemed them worthy, then the game would happen. You could have up to two or three challenges in a year, but they’d also get their name on the Cup if they won their league, so over the course of a few years, Ottawa kept winning it.

“And by 1905 — this is a fun fact — a team from the Yukon (the Dawson City Nuggets) challenged it. It was a huge gimmick, and they got slaughtered in the game, and then they tightened the rules. But in those early years, you’d see teams from Sydney (Nova Scotia) or even a team from Kenora, Ontario. They won the Cup twice, and you see other towns like Winnipeg or Victoria or Vancouver win it. Well, Victoria won it later in the mid-20s, but they’d just challenge for it in the mid-10s. This started when I was nine. I’d watch all these hockey videos and wanted to know who won every Cup. Then, it became every team that didn’t win the Cup or they lost to this team in this many games, and this guy won the Conn Smythe.

“I just get bored and want to see how much I know.”

Brady Boudreau’s list of Stanley Cup champions, jotted down from memory. (Photo: Michael Russo)

“Like ask him who scored the Cup-winning goal in 1951, and he’ll know,” said Bruce.

“Bill Barilko,” said Brady.

“See?”

“Well, you gave me a really easy one.”

“Before he got into all this, he would sit there, and he would tell you every single dog breed in the world,” Bruce said. “Then, he would say every country. He could name every country that exists in the world.”

“I still do that,” Brady says. “Well, I couldn’t name all the dog breeds. Maybe every category, but there’s a lot of dog ones. There’s a website, called Sporcle, in which I’d name all of them, and they had a country game that I used to love. I remember (in eighth grade) I set the website record for naming all the countries and spelling them correctly in the time.”

The trivia continued.

“He tests me,” Bruce said. “He’ll come up with everyday some sort of history trivia hockey thing.”

“He usually gets it,” Brady said, “but I mean, if I really wanted, I could make it outrageous or something, but I don’t. I’ll try to give him something more in his era whether that be when he played or was growing up.”

“What was the trivia question you gave me yesterday, the Glenn Hall one, which I thought was the greatest?” said Bruce.

“Who replaced Glenn Hall as a starter both when his Iron Man streak ended and when he was left unprotected in the expansion draft?” Brady said.

“And how many games was it consecutively that he played, including junior, minor pro and pro?” Bruce said.

“Everybody knows in the NHL Glenn Hall played 502 consecutive games without missing a game, and this is without a helmet,” Brady said. “But dating back to junior and minor-league hockey, he played 1,024 games without missing anything. And the goalie that replaced him both times was Denis DeJordy.”

Bruce Boudreau, mouth ajar, looked up, shook his head and took a bite of pizza.

Brady Boudreau was aware something was a little “off” about himself growing up.

He’s admittedly socially awkward and can get easily frustrated. He’s independent, extremely intelligent, easily retains information whenever he reads or watches TV, can be a little obsessive compulsive and can be overcome by anxiety.

And then there are those lists. His bedroom is filled to the brim with little hanging Post-its with dozens of lists on them.

“I’ll just get bored and just write certain things,” Brady said. “I don’t know, sometimes they’re just irrelevant, and some of them are just for school. I just like writing them on a Post-it and just writing things down. I have that notebook with me all the time. I remember, one day, I was bored and I wrote 50 ideas in 20 minutes.”

“I may have the only kid in the world that you take him to Toys’R’Us and he doesn’t want anything but take him to Staples and you’ve got to get an extra cart,” Brady’s mom and Bruce’s wife of 23 years, Crystal, said.

One day, about six or seven years ago, Brady remembers watching a TV show and there was a character who had Asperger syndrome. The character was discussing the symptoms, and it sounded familiar.

“I remember saying, ‘Yeah, this might be me,’” Brady said.

“I think everyone who has something like Asperger’s or dyslexia or OCD, or anything like that, once you’re told, it’s a huge relief,” Brady Boudreau says. (Credit: Margo LaPanta)

Brady approached his parents and they took him to the doctor. He took myriad tests and at 14 years old was indeed diagnosed with Asperger’s, which is considered a high-functioning form of autism.

The diagnosis helped his father, especially, relate to him better.

“It was huge for Bruce,” Crystal said. “Like Bruce always thought he was just being difficult or hard. … It helped Bruce a ton knowing how to deal with Brady different and for Brady to realize that he wasn’t different, that his brain was just wired different, that he wasn’t intentionally doing this. It was his own normal.”

The diagnosis was also an epiphany for his mom, who has been together with Bruce for 28 years since his player-coach days with the Fort Wayne Komets.

Six years ago, after Brady was diagnosed, then-42-year-old Crystal also took the test and discovered she too has Asperger’s but never was diagnosed. Brady scored 95 out of 100, and Crystal was on the scale around 78.

“I always knew he was a lot like me, but I was lucky. You learn a lot of things as a kid,” Crystal said. “I had a sister one year older and a sister one year younger.”

Crystal credits growing up in a small Indiana farming town, where there wasn’t a lot of change in her life, with helping her adjust. Socially, she was able to learn from her friends and two sisters. For Brady, he has moved his entire life because of his dad’s coaching and basically was an only child because Bruce’s three older children from his first marriage were out of the house.

Still, for Brady, the diagnosis was a breath of fresh air. Some people may not want to be labeled, but the label helped him understand what he had and what he can do to strive through it.

“I think everyone who has something like Asperger’s or dyslexia or OCD, or anything like that, once you’re told, it’s a huge relief,” Brady said. “I just remember saying, ‘Oh, so it is something. I am not crazy or weird.’ And ever since I think I’m more at peace with myself. If I’m having a bad day, I say to myself, ‘All right, what’s wrong? Oh, that’s why. Just calm down, and I can do this to fix it.’ So, I feel like I’ve done better in the past few years knowing it. Before, I was told I was being difficult. It’s like, why are you being difficult or weird? Why are you reacting this crazy way? Now, I know why.”

Brady takes a daily pill for his anxiety, and there are conscious exercises he can do when he’s being “difficult.”

“I don’t get too worked up over little things anymore,” he said. “My first year I was diagnosed, I didn’t take the pill. And I just wasn’t in a good place where I’d get depressed and just angry at the littlest things. I needed to take three weeks off in the middle of the (hockey) season. They recommended the pills and I don’t get set off by little things like I did before.”

Through it all, Brady has excelled in his studies. The youngest of Bruce’s four children, Brady graduated high school in California at 16. By 19, he already had his bachelor’s degree in sports management from Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Ariz.

He’s currently working on his master’s degree with an emphasis in sports business management. Brady has the class he’s currently taking and two more to go, and by Halloween, still at the age of 20, he should have his MBA and be done with school, which will provide a much-needed break. Since graduating from Orange Lutheran High School in 2015, Brady has taken online classes year-round, seven days a week, except for the 10 days a year the school shuts down around Christmastime. There’s an assignment due every single day, so even on vacations, Brady must log on to do schoolwork and participate in class and group discussions.

“To do online school, you have to be disciplined, self-motivated and very dedicated because there’s no one there checking on you, no one asking for your assignment, no one in class handing you their notes,” Crystal said. “You have to be willing to learn on your own.”

That sure isn’t a problem for Brady, who says, “If I am into something … I am into it.”

It could be hockey history. It could be video games. It could be his decision to take his father’s 36-year-old Golden Horseshoe Hockey School, one Bruce started in 1982 in his hometown of St. Catharines, Ontario, and create an offshoot in Minnesota inside the same rink he plays his junior hockey.

One of Brady’s bygone passions: solving and collecting Rubik’s Cubes. (Photo: Michael Russo)

Or, it could be Rubik’s Cubes.

Brady has more than 50 and when he first got into Rubik’s Cubes, it wouldn’t be unheard of for him to spend 13 hours a day practicing and solving them with an intensity that concerned his dad. Brady still occasionally messes around with the Rubik’s Cubes just to make sure he can still do them, but the passion has died.

“The passion that he had that I really didn’t like was those cups,” Bruce said.

“Oh, the cup stacking?” Brady asked.

“Yeah! Because it was eight hours straight of noise, noise, noise, noise,” Bruce said, irritated by the memory. “He needed to get through it in a certain time with a timer, but for eight to 10 hours at a time?”

“Yeah, like I said, if I’m into something, I’m into it,” Brady said. “Some things, most of them will die out or it’ll change. Like sometimes I might be really into a specific game. But after a week or so, I’ll shift into something else. … Some things will stay or maybe some things come and go every once in awhile.”

Brady’s debut, week-long hockey school has been a success this week, something that’s a delight after he was stressed about it heading into this week.

“It’s my goal that there won’t be any hiccups, that the kids are happy at the end of the day and that it’ll be good enough to keep it going in the future,” Brady said last weekend. “Even though I’m running it, it’s my parents’ name and 30 years of work that I could end up screwing up if I don’t do good.”

“He’s not going to screw it up,” Bruce said, rolling his eyes.

“I know, but like, I just know it’s sort of your baby I’m trying to take on now,” Brady said.

Both Bruce and Crystal were worried because Brady didn’t come up with the idea about having the school until March, well after the Boudreaus begin organizing the St. Catharines school every year.

“Personally I thought this is too late,” Bruce said. “We start ours in December because it might be a gift to the kid for Christmas. But March seemed insane. But he was insistent he could get it done.”

Brady approached his mom, who runs the Blue Ox, with an entire business plan. He knew how many kids they would need to break even, and he even budgeted money for a hotel so he could stay near the rink all week and for his 33-year-old brother, Ben, to travel to Minnesota and get paid to help coach.

The children were outfitted with jerseys, are fed daily and even get daily Hersheys chocolate donated by the Boudreaus pals from Hersheys (Bruce used to coach the AHL Bears in Hershey, Pa.).

There are four prize drawings every day for two signed hockey sticks (players like Nathan MacKinnon, Alex Ovechkin, Roman Josi and Evgeny Kuznetsov), one autographed jersey (players like Casey Mittelstadt, Patrick Kane and Nicklas Backstrom) and a five-pound Hershey bar.

One of the giveaway prizes at the hockey school — a five-pound Hershey bar. (Photo: Michael Russo)

“The kids love that. The parents not so much,” said Bruce as he handed out chocolate to all the kids Monday.

“The numbers of kids has been really good, which is good because I honestly did not think we’d get enough this year,” Brady said. “I was like (Bruce) and thought we’d get like 30, and we doubled that. I just more wanted to get it set up for the year after, so then I know how to properly do it. But I’m happy. My mom’s helping a lot. And my dad’s doing a lot trying to give me advice, but, it’s for one of those things they’re trying to train me so I can do more next year. So next year maybe I’ll start being the first contact instead of the secondary one.

“I still have a lot to learn but they are giving me, sort of, a bit more freedom like, ‘If you really want to do it, you can do it.”

Added Bruce, “It’s like being the owner of McDonald’s: You have to learn how to do the cash register, then everything else behind the counter, before you can do anything else.”

As for the on-ice instructions, kids are split into ages, some by skill level. Brady’s pretty much using the St. Catharines school as a precise model. And Ben has been an enormous aid.

“Ben is the closest son to (Bruce’s personality) out of all of us,” Brady said. “He has the knowledge and the jokes and the social aspect that me and (brother) Andy don’t really have. Ben can walk in a room like my dad and chat with everyone and make them feel like they’re buddies. Me and Andy aren’t really like that, but it’s important because Ben can make all the kids feel good. He knows how to talk to people and do all those things like my dad.”

Bruce is no doubt proud that Brady, like Ben and the 31-year-old Andy (a player development coach for the Banff Hockey Academy), is following in his footsteps. Brady doesn’t remember when he first fell in love with hockey, but he there are tons of photos of him as a kid holding a stick or wearing a hockey jersey as a baby. At 18 months old, there’s a sweet snapshot of Brady sitting behind Bruce’s desk when he coached Lowell in the AHL.

A young Brady Boudreau, 18 months old, sitting in his dad’s office chair. (Courtesy the Boudreau family)

“He just crawled up there, and it’s like he never left that desk,” Crystal said. “And now he’s running a hockey school.”

Added Bruce, laughing, “Yeah, he’s basically been working our hockey schools since he was a month old. Crystal would do the work with him in the pouch. She’d be running the front desk, and either he’d be in the pouch or sleeping in the baby seat right beside her.

“So he’s been there every year of his life.”

“Right,” said Brady. “I must have paid attention.”

On the ice, the entire Blue Ox coaching staff is there, including head coach Jay Witta. Ben, an assistant coach for the Fort Wayne Komets, takes the reins on a lot of the skill drills while Brady works with the goalies. Power-skating instructor Margaret Ann Erwin has been on the ice. So has new Wild forward Matt Hendricks. The Wild assistant coaches and mascot Nordy showed up Wednesday, and Wild defenseman Nick Seeler came to coach Thursday.

But the kids, who largely hail from Coon Rapids and get to watch Brady play goal during the Blue Ox’s season, flock to Brady. In fact, assistant rink manager Cindy Evensen’s 11-year-old son, Lucas, was more excited heading into camp that he’d get to skate with Brady Boudreau, not Bruce — the second-best regular season coach in terms of points percentage in the long, rich history of the NHL.

This makes Brady’s dad beam with pride even though Brady isn’t consciously trying to be some inspiration that a kid with Asperger’s can do anything.

“You know I’m your dad, but when people hear and read about what you’ve had going on with this stuff and how you don’t use it as a crutch or a form of, ‘Poor me,’ it is inspirational to young child who might have it but think, ‘Oh, I’m stuck in a cocoon somewhere,’” Bruce said to Brady. “I think you should be proud that kids see people like yourself who are very active and outgoing and they use Asperger’s to their advantage.”

Brady agreed: “If there is a kid who might be a bit confused or like a family that doesn’t know how to handle it, then I’ll be more than happy to help them out with it. I feel, from what people keep telling me, I’m getting more and more adjusted. And that’s because we’ve sort of done things to make it easier because I have such a supportive family.

“So, if I’m an inspiration then that’s cool. But I just try to be me. I just try to be a good guy.”

What Brady has discovered is Asperger’s is very manageable. He’s able to play hockey at a high level, and because of that, he can be part of a team and make friends like Bailey Emery and Philip Schader, who are two of many Blue Ox teammates helping Brady at his hockey school this week. At the school, they say they see a different side of Brady, one who actually is serious and not the goofball he can be during hockey season.

“You struggle socially but tend to have more intelligence or just higher passion,” Brady said of people with Asperger’s. “Most people with Asperger’s, they’re not physically gifted. They are very awkward physically, as I was. But I just love sports so much, that’s how I got over it, I think.”

Brady said he doesn’t make it a habit of telling teammates he has Asperger’s. He doesn’t want them to treat him differently, but eventually he opens up.

“Usually I’ll tell the coach, but I just want them to try and see me as me,” Brady said. “I’ll usually eventually tell them because socially, trying to get slang or terms or sarcasm, I’m really bad at trying to read that. It’s like, Does it mean that? What does this mean? I’m just really bad at reading physical and social cues.

“Like I can’t tell, at all, if a girl’s flirting with me. Which, I don’t know, if every guy feels like this, but I’ve had guys say, ‘She was so into you.’ And I cannot tell. I had to take an emotional intelligence test for a class once, and I think I did like 30 out of 80. Like, I was awful. I just don’t know what things feel like, if that makes sense. People with Asperger’s have trouble understanding social things or social cues and understanding emotions. Like they feel certain ways but they don’t know how to explain it.”

Interrupted Bruce: “Like some girl would have to hit you over the head with a hammer to tell you she likes you for you to get it.”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Brady said. “Unless they physically say, ‘I like you and want to go out on a date with you,’ I probably would not read the cue.”

Brady figures deep down he became a goalie because he’s a “loner kind of guy,” so the idea of being the last line of defense attracted him to the position. He loves the thinking part of the job and the quick reflexes and overall flexibility needed to play the position. Even when he used to play soccer and lacrosse, he was a goalie.

Most fascinating, he’s got vision issues where the glare of the rafter lights affects his already blurry eyes. So he plays wearing a pair of tinted Oakley sunglasses.

“Actually, he’s blind as a bat,” Bruce said. “I used to watch him play and I’d keep saying, ‘All these long shots go in, all the time! You can’t catch anything.’ And so, we took him to the eye doctor and found he’s half blind. So, he got the glasses on and all of a sudden, he could see pucks from the blue line.”

Watch Brady play, and maybe the funniest moments come when there’s a scrum around the net. He nonchalantly rests his arm over the crossbar and watches the fray from the crease even if it’s directly in front of him.

It’s something his dad thinks Brady picked up from watching old Ken Dryden videos.

“I used to be a lot more angry and aggressive and combative like I guess today (Calgary Flames goalie) Mike Smith or something, but more like (combustible Hall of Famer) Eddie Belfour,” Brady said. “But I realized that as soon as I played like that, I was awful. After a while I realized, I play better when I’m not distracted. If I play calm, I feel like it’s more assuring because every once in a while I’ll snap, usually about once a year there’ll be something that I don’t agree with, and I’ll snap. It happened last year, but I mean usually with me I try to stay calm and stay out of it. I also can’t fight, so …”

Brady uses Wild goalie Devan Dubnyk’s Bauer Vapor stick and has become the Blue Ox’s kinda, sorta equipment manager.

Wild equipment manager Tony DaCosta taught Brady how to sharpen skates, and Brady has taken it upon himself to sharpen all of his teammate’s. He won’t even let them touch the machine.

“It’s a bit relaxing for me,” Brady said. “If I’m not playing, sometimes we’ll have a guy who loses an edge during the game, and I’ll be the one to fix it. I’ve even had guys on nights I’m starting ask me five minutes before warmups, ‘Hey, can you sharpen my skates?’ I’ll usually do it after. I’ll just take off my top gear and do it during Coach Witta’s talk.”

Witta coached Boudreau on the New Ulm Steel, then snatched up Brady for the Blue Ox after meeting with Brady’s dad and mulling over the idea of starting a USPHL team. Brady knows his goalie career could be a season from wrapping up — it’s his final year of junior eligibility in the United States — but he would like to at least play some brief minor pro hockey like his brothers, Ben and Andy.

“He doesn’t want to be the only brother, only son, that didn’t play some form of pro hockey, so he says, ‘I’d look for a team that has a great No. 1 that wants a No. 2 to sit on the bench for every game, and that would be me,’” Bruce said, laughing hard, before looking at his son. “I think you’re better than that though.”

Whenever the playing days are over, Brady has bigger aspirations.

He wants to own his own junior team. He doesn’t want the money handed to him from his parents. He’s saving to either someday buy a junior team or purchase the Blue Ox from his parents, says Crystal.

“I want to stay in junior hockey because I know a lot about it,” Brady said. “Being at the NHL level doesn’t seem like for me. I like the minor or small level because you have a lot more control of the things day to day where you get to do so much more, so it might not be glamorous hours, but you’d get to do a lot more whereas you’re more specialized if you work with an NHL team. That doesn’t seem very interesting to me.

“I’ve thrown around the idea where there’s one owner in our division that owns multiple teams, and I suggested well, ‘What’s stopping us from doing that?’ So maybe in the future, we open other teams in other markets.”

In times of boredom, Brady, naturally, makes lists of what cities he thinks could work.

— Reported from Coon Rapids and Woodbury, Minnesota

(Top image, from left: Ben, Brady, Crystal and Bruce Boudreau at the Golden Horseshoe Hockey Camp. Credit: Margo LaPanta)

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