Family ties: How John Tavares became the man – and player – he is today (2024)

The head coach of the Oakville Hawks lacrosse team was pulling out of the arena parking lot one night when a pair of gloves came flying out the driver’s side window of the van in front of him.

Rob MacDougall stopped his truck and peered down at what appeared to be crisp, new gloves. Suddenly the van flipped around, scooped up the gear and drove off.

The next night at practice, MacDougall approached the driver: Barb Tavares, the mother of the youngest player on the team, John.

“Apparently,” MacDougall said, “she bought him a brand-new pair of gloves, and all he did was bitch and complain about how sh*tty the gloves were.So she threw them out the window and started to drive home. Then Johnny freaked out, and they had to go pull a U-ie to go pick them up.

“She’s a tough cookie with Johnny,” he said. “Johnny didn’t mess with her too much.”

John Tavares is the biggest free agent signing in the history of the Toronto Maple Leafs and a proud son of nearby Oakville, Ont. He was shaped, more than anything, by the many family figures in his life.

There was Barb, his passionate, protective mother; Joe, his reserved, ever-working father; and there was his idol from the time he could walk, his uncle, the other John Tavares, one of the greatest players in the history of lacrosse.

Uncle John still remembers the time his 14-year-old nephew was heading to a meeting with NHL super agent, Don Meehan. Joe was away on a job with the family’s roofing business, so Barb asked that Uncle John — then a star for the National Lacrosse League’s Buffalo Bandits — come for support.

“Oh my gosh — how John’s head could fit out the door after leaving that agency,” John Tavares, the lacrosse player, said of his nephew. “You need to have good parents to keep you level-headed because you must think you’re the best thing in the world after coming out of that office. Everyone is telling you how great you are, how great you are, how great you are. John has had that since he was 13, 14 years old.

“Barb is a very strong woman. Very loyal, and strong, and I see that in John. Joe’s very quiet, hard-working, and I see that in John. It’s a good mix of both parents, I think.”

The mom

One of 10 children born to working-class Polish immigrants in Sudbury, Barb was the hawk that watched over John as his star grew brighter. She pushed when he needed a push and defended his interests fiercely when vultures circled. She spoke up when he needed tougher competition, shuttled him to hockey and lacrosse, kept him from sleepovers with the other kids — lest he be late for morning practice — prepared his “feedbag” lunches, and fielded calls from agents and reporters.

She did everything.

“My mom really was the ultimate hockey mom,” Tavares said last week as he prepared to his first training camp with the Leafs. “She didn’t just take me to the rink two or three days a week. I asked to be on the ice six or seven days a week in the fall and wintertime. And even playing lacrosse in the summer, in the humid, hot arenas, and just being that committed on a daily basis.”

Barb even served as her son’s agent in the spring of 2008 after the family fired Bryan Deasley.

It was Barb who Pat Brisson — the famed agent to Sidney Crosby — first dialed after Deasley was let go and Barb who peppered Brisson with questions when he came to meet the family a short while later. This past summer, in those tense days when Tavares was deciding where he would play next, it was Barb who Brisson called on the regular.

It was important, Brisson said, to get a feel for things from mom, who was speaking to her son regularly about his decision.

“I think the whole reason Johnny has gotten to where he has is his mom has been his biggest supporter,” MacDougall said. “She has made the right decisions on his behalf. She’s stubborn — when she believes in something, she’s stubborn. I just think that Johnny wouldn’t be in the NHL if it hadn’t been for Barb, that’s for sure.

“She’s the anchor to that family. When it came to Johnny and his sports, she was always the one that was there for him in every aspect – even when it came to negotiating or anything. She was the one who bought his gear. I’m not going to give you any bad stories because there weren’t any bad stories.”

There was a perception in those early years that Barb was overly involved or a classic overbearing hockey parent. The Toronto Star said her move to become John’s agent was “sure to draw comparisons” to Bonnie and Carl Lindros, known for their sometimesheavy-handed approach with Eric, another Toronto-area phenom.

Those who know her well say she was only driving her son toward his goals and that she was nothing like the menacing parent some made her out to be.

MacDougall said Barb Tavares never called to “give me sh*t on anything — anything!”

“Barb was like a dream parent – which not a lot of people believe,” said James Naylor, who coached Tavares with the Toronto Marlboros hockey team.“I don’t ever remember, ever, having any altercations with them.”

Barb mainly asked that her son be treated fairly, Naylor said. Like insisting John, born in September of 1990, be allowed to continue playing with the ’89 birthdays as they moved into the OHL.

“He can’t go back to playing with his own (age) group,” she told theStarin 2005.“That would defeat what he’s gained all along.”

Naylor contends that the perception of Barb was rooted in history.

“Any time there’s been an elite athlete like him, there’s always been either a father or mother behind it pushing,” Naylor said. “And she would push John, but she didn’t ask for anything other than what every other player was receiving.”

Barb wouldn’t allow her son to become entitled or arrogant, however. To this day, those who know Tavares well talk endlessly about his continued humility in the face of an already esteemed career which has seen him rack up the most goals ever in the OHL, go No. 1 at the NHL draft, and become a finalist for the Hart Trophy in 2013 and 2015.

“He’s one of those guys that if you’re around him enough, you realize what the word ‘professionalism’ is,” former Islanders head coach Jack Capuano said. “He was obviously brought up the right way – he understands values of life, he understands the importance of family and team. There’s no ‘I’ or ‘me’ in John.”

Capuano saw it firsthand when he was fired from the Islanders in early 2017. Tavares had only 32 points in 42 games to that point for a last-place New York squad. He was first to call.

“It’s a phone call that I won’t forget because, again, as I was talking to this young man I felt like I was talking to a 40-plus-year-old lawyer,” Capuano said. “He took all the responsibility of being a .500 team — that he wasn’t good enough.

“But that’s just the type of guy he is. He puts a lot of pressure on himself because he wants to be great.”

Naylor says he’s never met anyone more competitive.

One former classmate at St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary School in Brampton remembered the time someone scratched out more chin-ups than Tavares early in the school year. Tavares wouldn’t let go until he claimed victory when time came to repeat the drill.

Vancouver Canucks forward Sam Gagner grew up five minutes away from the Tavares family in Oakville and says he saw Tavares’ competitiveness plenty when they were kids. John would beg his mom to drive him over to the Gagner house so the two boys could rekindle their never-ending 1-on-1 battles on the backyard rink Sam’s father, former NHLer Dave Gagner, had built.

With no goalies, scoring meant firing the puck off the post or back-bar and into the net. One time, Gagner remembers scoring a hotly disputed winner.

Tavares “just kind of snapped,” Gagner said.

From the dressing room near the ice, where the two boys would often wolf down pizza, Tavares fetched a skate that was lying around and whipped it at Gagner.

“And it just missed me,” Gagner said. “It was like, if you lost, there was no losing. If I beat him three games in a row or he beat me three games in a row, we weren’t stopping playing until the other guy won.”

Gagner believes Tavares got his fiery side from Barb, who moved to Toronto from Sudbury to look for work at 18 years old.

In those days, the Marlies team that featured Tavares and Gagner started practice with a five-minute scrimmage that Naylor would occasionally join. He remembers waiting in front of the net for a pass during one of those warm-up sessions when he felt a hard whack to his shin. It was Tavares.

“What are you doing?” a surprised Naylor asked.

“Don’t go in front of the net,” Tavares responded.

Tavares was known to slam his stick in frustration on the bench during the early days of an NHL career that began at 19. Capuano, who took over as Islanders coach early in Tavares’ second season, advised his young star to cool it — which he eventually did.

“On the flip-side of that,” Capuano said, “if I got hotheaded and the Italian came out in me and I f*cking blew a gasket, he’d be the first guy, ‘Cap, all right we got it. Cap, we got it, we get it.’

“He’d be the type of guy you want your daughter to marry.”

The dad

When he first started with the Islanders, Capuano found Tavares to be “avery, very reserved guy,” although he eventually opened up.

“If I cracked a joke early on he might smirk or not say much,” Capuano said.

If the zest came from Barbthen John Tavares’ more reserved side definitely came from dad. (Though Barb argued to NHL.com at one point that John’s toughness came from his sisters, Barbara and Laura, who “really kept him in line.”)

Born in the Azores — a series of Portuguese islands in the Atlantic — Joe Tavares came to Toronto with his family when he was eight years old. He liked baseball and would often fire so many pitches to his younger brother John that he would finally ask him to stop.

There wasn’t much time for Joe to play sports. The family needed his help making ends meet.

There were 11 of them living in the Tavares’ home at the time: five kids (Joe, Rita, Danny, John and Peter), their parents (Manuel and Dorotea) as well as both sets of grandparents. Grandpa and grandma on mom’s side would often look after the young ones when their parents were at work, which was often enough until the family moved to Mississauga and mom stayed home full-time.

Before that, Dorotea Tavares worked as a seamstress. Manuel Tavares was a carpenter. Both parents cleaned offices on the weekends.

Joe would do his part wherever he could — in Kensington Market, say, or even picking worms overnight.

“It was not an important part of their lives for them to have their kids play sports; it was their job to help pay for bills,” said the elder John Tavares, who is 10 years younger than Joe.“That kind of rubbed off on all of us. We’re all hard-working, and you just never know what tomorrow holds, so you just do your best and make sure you save your money and put things away and make sure you support your family.”

While Barb drove John and his two younger sisters around and oversaw the nuts and bolts of the family business, often poring through paperwork in the stands of various arenas, Joe was out in the field doing manual labour, often working six or seven days a week. He couldn’t attend most games but introduced John to the basics of hockey when he was young and mustered up the energy after long days on the job to strap on the pads and play goal.

“He’d be whatever goalie I asked him to be that day – and have some fun,” Tavares said of his father. “He wasn’t able to come to many games because he was working and providing for the family, so when he was there I knew it, and it was really special to me and I always wanted to make sure I played a little better than usual when he was in the stands.”

Putting his handyman skills to good use, Joe also created a haven for John to improve. In the family’s basem*nt — complete with boards, lines and nets — was a miniature rink for John to practise his two preferred sports.

Sidney Crosby had his dryer, but John Tavares had his basem*nt — “John Tavares Gardens” as former lacrosse teammate Dan MacRae remembers him dubbing it.

John would beg family and friends to join him launching tennis balls into nets using hockey and lacrosse sticks — or even to call the action as the play-by-play voice.

“You could tell by the markings on the wall, the holes in the boards, and all that stuff that he’d shot thousands of shots down there,” said MacRae, now the captain of the NLL’s Calgary Roughnecks.

John Sr. describes his brother Joe as quiet and strong with a good heart. Joe might not say much, but he’s an observant type, and along with Barb, set a tone for hard work that permeated throughout the family.

John Tavares would come to be known as “I-Robot” (after the 2004 sci-fi film) by Gagner and some other offseason workout buddies for his fanatical commitment to things like training, nutrition and sleep.

John’s food tastes were influenced by his Portuguese and Polish roots. Barb would often pack up patyczki, breaded meat on a stick, for life on the road with John and his sisters, though John most enjoyed barbecued sardines.

Mom and dad

Paul Dennis wanted to meet Barb and Joe when he was helping determine whether John was ready for the OHL at 15 years old.

A sports psychologist who worked for the Leafs at the time, Dennis was tasked by OHL commissioner David Branch with devising a plan that would evaluate Tavares’ readiness for the league. A three-person panel, which included former Leafs great Doug Gilmour, was ultimately responsible for the decision.

Along with reports fromTavares’ teachers and minor hockey coaches, as well as an essay from Tavares himself on why he wanted to play in the OHL,Dennis filed his own impressions on Tavares.

“I insisted when I met with John that his family be there at the same time,” Dennis said.

Dennis wanted to know whether a then-14-year-old Tavares had a solid support system, whether his parents were more likely to bark when times were turbulent or encourage their son and build resilience.

“The biggest red flags were those parents who made excuses for their kids,” Dennis said. “I looked for those things. I want to see them. But I didn’t have any of those (concerns).”

Over the course of a meeting that lasted close to three hours, Dennis found Barb and Joe to be supportive, nurturing people who were well-grounded in their outlook for their son.

Joe seemed “incredibly quiet, wouldn’t say very much at all,” Dennis remembers, and Barb, he gleaned, was a wise hockey parent.

“She was aware of, say, the envious teammates or parents towards her son, but she didn’t shelter him from that type of thing,” Dennis said of Barb Tavares, who declined to be interviewed for this story. “She was the type that said, ‘You know what, you’ve got to learn how to deal with this. There are going to be a lot of people that are going to be envious of you. How are you going to deal with it?’ That’s not sheltering. If you shelter them, you just make excuses.”

Dennis had Tavares fill out the same questionnaire he would give to NHL draft prospects and quizzed him on his responses. It asked all sorts of hypothetical questions which sought to measure things like emotional control, receptiveness to coaching, collaboration within a team, and mental toughness — the qualities that almost all NHL head coaches had told Dennis were important back in 1996 for an ultimately unpublished study.

In one such hypothetical, Dennis would offer a candy. Take it and you’ll be drafted in the first round and win a Calder Trophy, you’ll capture a Stanley Cup, and rake in millions of dollars in endorsem*nts. But taking this pill means you could die by the age of 30.

“John Tavares would never take it,” Dennis said. “He would never take it.”

Tavares once told an inquiring NHL team at the draft combine that his greatest fear in life was not “fulfilling the things I wanted,” by which he meant success and, eventually, a family.

“To me, that tells me about a young man who sees hockey as a part of his life, but it’s not the rest of his life,” Dennis said.

There was no official process for evaluating “exceptional player” cases like Tavares, who, Dennis says, set the bar on what was required mentally of a player seeking the exception. He’s found that the roots of success for prodigies like Tavares — and later Connor McDavid — come from their upbringing, both by parents and minor hockey coaches.

“The one quality that really stood out for me was humility,” Dennis said. “He was so focused on his goals that he just left all that (hype and attention) for other people, not for him. He didn’t use it to motivate him. He was incredibly motivated to begin with. He knew what he wanted, how to achieve it.

“And that, combined with his perseverance, his dedication to the game, the number of hours that he spent practising and playing and loving every minute of it, these are really special qualities for young athletes to have. And he had them all.”

The uncle

He had it from an early age.

Five-year-old John Tavares couldn’t take his eyes off the ball or the action on the field the first time he saw his uncle play with the Bandits. John would eventually join the team himself as a ball-boy and soak up everything he saw — from the way teammates treated one another to the way the pros prepared to play.

During their time as teammates with the Marlies, Tavares and Gagner played as much hockey as possible every weekend. After the Friday night game ended, the two would head back to Gagner’s backyard rink, lace up the skates again and play until the neighbours complained or Sam’s dad insisted they quit for the evening. Saturday morning was Marlies practice and then back outdoors again for hours and hours.

Rinse and repeat on Sunday.

“We’d play probably, I want to say, 10 hours-plus every weekend,” Gagner said.

At one point during the World Cup of Hockey in 2016, Capuano, an assistant on the American squad, bumped into Mike Babco*ck, Team Canada’s head coach.

“How’s Johnny doing?” Capuano asked of Tavares, who was playing for Canada.

“Man,” Babco*ck responded, “I never realized how much this kid loves the game.”

Even when he wasn’t actually playing, Tavares had his mind on the game. One time he came to lacrosse practice and handed the coach a list of plays.

“I’m still coaching today and I don’t have a kid that’ll ever do that,” MacDougall said. “It goes back to his uncle. He used to eat, sleep, lacrosse because his uncle was at the top of his game. All it takes is inspirationand that was Johnny’s inspiration for sure.”

In between games, MacDougall would often catch Tavares dissecting video of his uncle’s moves on a small TV in the family van. “He wasn’t watching our tape,” MacRae said, “but he’s pretty much studying tape… which is crazy to think.”

Some called him “Fly” for his leaps across the crease, often attempting (but usually failing) at the moves his uncle had perfected in the NLL.

The younger John Tavares even insisted on playing for the Mississauga Tomahawks because of his uncle.

“No matter how bad the team was, he’s like, ‘No, I’m going there and I’m going to make them good,'” Dylan MacDougall, another former lacrosse teammate, said. “I think he helped them get to the playoffs his second year, which has never happened in Mississauga in like 20 years.”

Playing with older kids from the time he was nine, Tavares got bigger and better over the years, to the point that he won back-to-back provincial tournament MVPs. MacDougall, his coach, urged him to forget hockey.

He didn’t think John “could skate worth a sh*t” and figured that he could eventually carve out a pro career in lacrosse.

But Tavares had long ago decided that hockey was where he would shine. He would often tell people who insisted he choose a sport that his uncle had already made a name for Tavares in lacrosse. He would do the same in hockey.

That didn’t mean he didn’t want to impress his uncle. MacDougall once invited Big John to play with the Hawks for an exhibition against another Oakville team with players as old as 21. Just 14 at the time, the younger Tavares somehow lit up the scoresheet anyway, to the point that, after a period, Tavares Sr. pulled aside the coach, in complete awe.

“Holy,” he said, according to MacDougall’s recollection, “I never knew he wasthatgood.”

The younger Tavares paid close attention to how his uncle — a high school math teacher and the NLL’s all-time leader in goals, assists, and points — handled expectations and how he made sure that every teammate felt important no matter their role.

“I didn’t realize it at the time,” the younger John Tavares says now, “but when you have an athlete in the family, as close as I am with my Uncle John and (for him) to be the best in the world at what he does as a professional athlete, that’s really special. And I didn’t realize how fortunate I was to have that. I don’t think many kids have that opportunity.”

Though they share a name only by coincidence, John Sr. says, the two have similar personalities. They’re both on the quieter side but also intensely driven to succeed.

“I’m in the unique position because I’ve been through sports and I’m family as well,” Uncle John said in trying to pinpoint the source of his influence.

He tried to pick his spots when it came to passing along wisdom he was uniquely fit to deliver. Like the time before John was about to play his first NHL game against Crosby’s Pittsburgh Penguins:Always respect your opponents, but don’t be in awe of them,Uncle John advised. (Tavares scored his first career goal seven minutes into the second period after setting up one in the first.)

Or, this past summer, when Tavares was deciding whether to leave the Islanders: Do what’s best for you and your family,the elder Tavares suggested.

Even more recently, John wanted to remind his nephew of his importance as a role model, telling him to continue to take time when a youngster popped by for a selfie.

Capuano, to that point, says he never once saw Tavares turn down an autograph request.

“Not once did I ever tell him what to do,” Uncle John said. “I’d just remind him of things in life that are important.”

Unlike his nephew, who would left the NHL team he started with after nine years this summer, John Tavares Sr. played his entire career in Buffalo — 24 seasons in all. He had his contract repeatedly franchised by the Bandits, and because of the convenient location of the team — just down the QEW from his family’s home in Mississauga — he never left.

“But if the opportunity came for me to play in Toronto, would’ve I considered it? I probably would’ve,” he said.

He knows from talking to John about his difficult decision and from his own experience staying with Buffalo what it must have been like to leave. Teammates, coaches, fans, equipment staff, management, scouts — they all become family over the years.Doing what’s best for the family is ingrained in the Tavareses, as the influence of mom, dad and uncle suggests.

“It’s just in our blood that we’re like that,” the elder Tavaressaid.

It’s why Capuano wasn’t surprised when he heard Tavares left the Island. He was leaving one family to get back to another, to build a family of his own with his new wife, Aryne, back in the place that’s actually home.

Plus, Tavares was always a huge Leafs fan, as those famed pajamas indicate.

“If anybody never really thought Toronto could’ve been a destination for him, they’re crazy,” Capuano said. “Because if you know John, and you know how much he cares about his family, it had to be in the equation.”

(Top photo composition: Adrian Guzman)