Joyce, Gare. “The Secret Life of Bobby Ryan – Sportsnet.ca.”Sportsnet.ca. Rogers Communications. Web. 12 Mar. 2016.

This article told the story of a professional National Hockey League player and everything that he had gone through in his personal life which remarkably did not interfere with his goals of playing professional hockey.

Bobby Ryan plays hockey for the Ottawa Senators in the NHL. He is twenty- six years old and is the fourth year of a five year contract after which he will have earned $25.5 million dollars. He had been the second pick in the year he was drafted by an NHL team, but there is much more to his story than his hockey accomplishment.

The article explains how Bobby was born in New Jersey in a suburb of Philadelphia. He was an only child and was a talented hockey player. His father pushed him to train and take extra hockey lessons in the mornings before school. His life was all about hockey until one night when his father drank too much and nearly killed his mother. His father ended up being sentenced to prison, but he ran away. Bobby and his mother changed their names and moved across the country. Spending years of his life hiding from the law meant being homeschooled and only normal thing in his life was playing hockey.

Eventually his dad was caught and sent to prison for years which meant more time to struggle for Bobby and his mother. Playing Junior hockey meant he could live with a family who billeted young hockey players and he actually was able to go to high school. In 2005, Bobby was drafted by the Anaheim Ducks and the General Manager of the club started him on weekly appointments with a professional therapist.

His years of therapy have helped him to deal with the pressures of his past family life and his own issues of playing professional sports at an early age. He is having a great hockey career in Ottawa. His parents are back together and live in New Jersey. His father owns a gym and trains kids the way he trained his son. Things look like they turned out fine for Bobby, but he continues to deal with all the things that he went through in his past family life.

This was a very well- written article. People might have an idea of how hard it is to play hockey and how much a family has to sacrifice for a player to make it as far as Bobby has, but his story is very unique. I was most impressed by how this article was written as a way of presenting the facts instead of placing blame on the family. Since the article was written in Canada, I am sure the readers fully appreciated finding out how Bobby did everything he could to play hockey and they must be happy that he is there. What a great story this is and the article was written to tell a story and not just list the statistics or a timeline. It was a sports story and yet it was a story about someone beating the odds, and I liked both of those elements very much.