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Goldman: Start by talking a bit about growing up in Finland and how you realized you wanted to become an athlete. Backstrom: “I think part of it was that my father was a goalie up through the junior-A level, and my grandfather played hockey as a goalie until he was 30 or 34, and he played in the Finnish Elite League. So it’s something I grew up with since as far back as I can remember. We were going to watch hockey games and hanging out at the rinks and playing hockey outside, so I grew up with it, and that’s thanks to my parents and my family. Like hockey and even playing soccer, everything was just being a part of what we were doing. That’s something I was doing since I was two, three, four years old, so it’s something you grow up with. I played soccer until I was like 14 years old, so I played hockey and soccer and all the sports was a big part of growing up. I grew up in Helsinki, but not in the downtown area, maybe 15 minutes from downtown, like in a suburb.” Goldman: So you spent a lot of time outside when you were a young kid? Backstrom: “Yeah, I’m from that generation. I’m 34 years old now so we didn’t have a lot of TV stations, just two or three different channels. We didn’t have video games either, so we were outside every day. I have a younger brother – he’s two years younger than me – and we had great games going on all the time. We were outside all the time doing different stuff, not necessarily sports, but sports were a big part for sure.” Goldman: Do you think your younger brother played a big role in you becoming a gifted athlete? Backstrom: “Yeah, for sure. It wasn’t tough to find a guy or friend to play with every day, but when you play against a family member, you definitely don’t want to lose. You play for the pride too, so it’s easy to become competitive when you have someone like a younger brother with you every day.” Goldman: Do you think it was important to your development that you didn’t really play video games, or that you were outside a lot? Backstrom: “Yeah for sure, but I don’t think you can blame the kids nowadays. You look at the video games now and they’re unreal, it’s like you’re almost playing something real. But for me, it was something where I would come home from school and go straight outside and play, and then go to practice. It was my routine, so for sure it was something that helped me along the way, and for sure I created a lot of great memories making new friends. I think doing that will surely bring some skills, but you can play whatever sport you want. They will all help improve your eye-hand coordination, so yeah it was a big help for me.” Goldman: So you must have become competitive fairly early. How did that transition to goaltending when you finally strapped on the pads? Backstrom: “I think it’s something that, well I don’t know if it’s my strength, but something where I realized how much I hate to lose. You don’t want to lose a board game, you don’t want to lose a card game, and you don’t want to lose at anything. But being competitive for me is more than just hating to lose. It’s more like what I’m ready to do to not lose again. I think it’s something where, if I lost to my brother playing tennis, I would go out and practice tennis so I wouldn’t lose again. It was something inside me, something that said I wasn’t going to give up and accept defeat. I think that’s part of it – you can hate to lose, but you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to win and get better. You can’t be willing to give up and accept defeat.” Goldman: That inner drive to always want to win is an important mental trait for readers to understand. To me, it’s a form of stubbornness, where if we lose, we’re almost in a bad mood and it changes the way we live. Can you try to explain how you would feel when you would lose to your brother? I mean, what exactly was it, mentally and emotionally speaking, that inspired you to work harder? Backstrom: “When you lose, you get pissed off. So it’s just like an inner drive to be the best you can be. It feels like if someone is better than you, I don’t know if it’s a type of jealousy or if it’s like you said, you’re just so stubborn that you won’t accept losing and don’t want to lose. It’s the same for me today. We could have a drill at the end of a practice and someone will score on me, but I’m stubborn and I stay out there so I can beat them and win the drill before it ends. If I lose a hockey game, I’d like to go out there right away and play it again. It’s hard to describe that feeling. It’s anger, and sure it’s maybe a little disappointment, too. But maybe it’s all of that combined, and that’s what makes it what it is. You can get angry that you lose and act disappointed, but it’s also how you handle it mentally that allows you to have that inner-drive to stop at nothing to turn failure into success in the next game.” Goldman: How would you say you personally handle losing? Do you handle it differently depending on the magnitude of the actual game? Backstrom: “I don’t think so. For myself, I go out there and prepare every game like it’s the most important game of the year. It doesn’t matter if it’s the pre-season, a regular season game, or the playoffs; every game is the same for me. I’ve been doing it for a long time, so I prepare every game the same way every day I go out there. For me, part of it is preparing to be my best every day. It’s a long season, but I want to play at the best when it counts, and that’s in the playoffs. For me, the best way to perform my best in the playoffs is if I do this same thing during the whole year and prepare the same way during the whole year. It’s a long run, but it’s going to pay off in the playoffs if you prepare as well as you can in the regular season.” Goldman: So it sounds like what you’re saying is that, to be able to be mentally prepared for a big game, you just keep the same routine and prepare the same way all the time. Then you just carry that same preparation over into the playoffs? Backstrom: “Yeah, exactly. That’s how I feel it works for me. It starts there and you find ways to improve how you prepare during the year by going off of what feels good. If something doesn’t work, you change it. But for me, it’s not like I want to change things from preseason to regular season to the playoffs. For me, it is just 82 games, and when you’re in the playoffs, you don’t think of it any differently because that’s just game 83.”