Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Goldman: Talk more about the better balance you have now that you’re a family man. Achieving balance is easily one of the all-encompassing themes of this book and being a mental warrior. Can you talk about that influence on your life as an elite goaltender? Vokoun: “It helped me tremendously. If you look at my career and all the years I’ve played, the years I hit my stride was when I settled down with family and kids. They don’t care if you have a good or a bad game, you just have to come home and be a dad and a husband. You can’t bring that negativity home anymore. When it was just me and my girlfriend and we lived together, I would come home and I wouldn’t speak for hours – I was just being mad and dealing with my OCD and thinking about stuff. But you can’t fix the past. You can’t change anything. Right after a bad game I would depress myself and make myself miserable, but it’s not going to change anything to what happened, and it’s definitely not going to help you in the future. And it’s such an easy thing to say and everyone knows it, but it’s so hard to do in real life when you know you’re not playing well. It’s the NHL, so you’re competing with the best players in the world, and you know there are other goalies waiting for you to make a mistake so they can take your job, so it’s not easy. But if you want to stay in the NHL as a goalie, you have to be able to forget about the past. It’s just as important as knowing how to play the position and having the best style to suit your skills. If you can’t forget about things and you can’t start over and come back every morning with a positive and fresh outlook, you won’t succeed.” Goldman: Most of us couldn’t imagine playing under such scrutiny. How did you handle the stress, especially as someone who battles with OCD? Vokoun: “I don’t remember who told me this saying, but I always tell myself now that there are a billion people in China, and they don’t give a rat’s ass about hockey games. They don’t care what happened in the NHL and they don’t see the games, so it’s not that important. So you keep that in mind and wake up the next day – it’s a brand new day and you can’t go back and fix anything. If you complain about it and push yourself further down the ladder, soon you’ll get to the bottom and then you’re done. For a goaltender, you play with a lot of guys and you see there’s unbelievable talent, but so many guys don’t succeed because it’s hard to be mentally tough. I was fortunate enough to play for a long time now, so I know how hard it is. Some people are just not capable of doing it because it’s just that hard. Mitch Korn told me from the start in Nashville that it’s not a sprint, it’s a long-distance run. When people tell you this stuff you might roll your eyes, but it’s true, and it proves to be true over the years when you come to realize and find out who you are and how you can be mentally tougher. Sometimes it’s hard to know what you’re doing wrong, and you have to deal with it. People can help you, but it’s still something you have to learn by yourself.” Goldman: You spoke earlier about how you’ve worked with sports psychologists to cope with your OCD. Between them and coaches like Mitch, and besides what we’ve already discussed, what’s another one of the most important lessons about mental toughness that you’ve learned? Vokoun: “Anybody who knows how I started knows this was my lesson. When I was 20, out of those 20 years, I had been playing hockey for 15. So I worked every day for 15 years to play in the NHL. I was playing in the AHL for the Canadiens at the time and I finally got called up to the big team. We played that night in Montreal and we lost the game. Then we were traveling to Philadelphia that same night for back-to-back games and the coach decided to put me back in. I had just been called up the day before the game, and you go, ‘well this is my chance.’ In that moment, I thought either I’m going to play well and stay in the NHL, or I won’t and I’m never going to make it. So I get the start in Philly and I give up a goal just 36 seconds into the game. I got pulled after the first period after giving up four goals on like 14 shots and I was crushed. I got sent down after that game and I couldn’t play well for like a month, even in the minors. I was just mentally so down on myself because I felt like my dream got crushed in a matter of 20 minutes. It feels embarrassing, too. People talking about it in the papers, and all of your friends and teammates and family are talking about it, so it was just so hard. It either breaks you, or you won’t let it and you find a way to keep going. I never got called up to Montreal again, but I did get traded to Nashville, and I went there with a different attitude. I worked harder and got myself in better shape and I said, ‘You know what, until they tell me I can’t do it anymore, I’m going to try as many times as it takes to get back in the NHL.’ For me, that was the hardest moment in my hockey career. But that short time span with Montreal pretty much changed my life. If we would’ve won that game against Philadelphia, honestly I don’t think I’d be sitting here talking to you about how long my career has been. I would never want to go through that feeling I had after that game again, but it was probably the one thing that I experienced that helped me realize what I really wanted, and what I really needed to do to get there. Unless you’re willing to do that after you fail, it’s just not going to happen. So for me, that was a hard-learned lesson, but it pretty much saved my career.” Goldman: Just hearing you talk about it seems so intense. It also seems like every pro goalie I talk to says something similar, that adversity is a necessary component to success. What has this adversity taught you about being a mentally tough goaltender? Vokoun: “Adversity is key, and once you get to this level, you must have dealt with it before. It’s just a part of being mentally tough. For all of the great games and the embarrassing performances you have growing up, you’re just trying to keep them as far apart as possible. For me, I think the toughest thing was to recognize that I couldn’t control everything. You can prepare the best you can and you can feel the best ever, but you go into a game, an uncontrollable thing happens, and you will skate to the bench wondering what the hell just happened. Sometimes you just have to say, ‘you know what, I can’t control everything, bad things are going to happen.’ I think the biggest thing for a goaltender is to be consistent. I don’t think it’s about playing unbelievable for three games and then being average for the next three because you want to know what you’re getting from a goalie every day. If you look around the league, all the guys who are good at being consistent on a nightly basis have good careers because they’re able to do it year after year. For that very reason, you have to be able to let things go, and know how to get through bad games. When you have them, you have to let it go and know you can come back. You have to believe that, and like I said, everything we’ve talked about is easy to say. But once you’re out there and you know you’ve had a couple of bad games and the team is losing, and you know the other team is coming right after you, it’s up to you. There’s no help at that point, and yeah maybe once in a while you may luck out, but you have to make it happen for yourself. You have to breed your own success.”