Hamburglar nabs team’s Masterton nod
The next time a National Hockey League player or coach resorts to the time-honoured clichés of “getting their hands dirty” or “putting the work boots on,” think about The Hamburglar.
He has been there, done that. Literally. It’s not just a figure of speech.
“I’m probably one of the few players in the league that’s had a legitimate full-time job before,” says Ottawa Senators goaltender Andrew Hammond, nominated Wednesday as the club’s Bill Masterton Trophy candidate by the Ottawa chapter of the Professional Hockey Writers Association. The award goes to the NHL player best exemplifying the qualities of dedication, perseverance and commitment to hockey.
On Wednesday, the NHL also awarded him with first-star honours for March, a month where he posted a 10-1-1 record, 2.09 goals against average, .930 save percentage and tied Frank Brimsek’s 76-year-old record for allowing two or fewer goals in his first 12 starts.
Hammond has put in his time — taking detours and hitting plenty of potholes — to make it to the big time.
Long before the 27-year-old Hammond rolled off his 15-1-1 record as a starting NHL goaltender, becoming the toast of the NHL and the backbone behind the Senators’ unlikely run towards a playoff spot, he was on his hands and knees in lawns around the greater Vancouver area. He was also on the other side of the counter at a sports store, selling merchandise to kids dreaming of one day becoming regulars on sports highlight shows.
Funny how life works out, isn’t it?
“I was, well, not an assistant manager, but a key holder at a sports store and it was full time, it really was my job,” Hammond says of life in his late teens. “And other than that, I worked full-time as a irrigation installer for an irrigation company, and that wasn’t much fun work.”
All of that came during the stage of life where Hammond was wondering about what comes next. After being cut from a junior A team and quitting hockey for three weeks, Hammond re-dedicated himself to hockey, making the decision to commit everything he had to keeping a foot in the game for as long as possible.
From there, it was a long and winding road to the NHL.
He took a step back to Junior B, before winning a pair of national junior A championships with the Vernon Vipers. He received a scholarship to Bowling Green State University, but lost the first 14 games of his collegiate career and never once enjoyed a winning season. He signed a professional contract with the Senators and took over the top job in Binghamton of the AHL before his first year was out. This season began with plenty of struggles — including the infamous night he allowed three goals in 21 seconds — before he was thrust into the Senators net as an emergency injury replacement.
Today, he’s a household name in Ottawa for his remarkable run in the Senators’ net. Looking back, he says he wouldn’t change any of it, including all the 9-to-5 grunt work.
“You realize pretty quick that hockey is a lot of hard work, but you have fun with it,” Hammond says. “And that (non-hockey jobs) is a lot of hard work and you don’t have much fun with it. That, in itself, are two things that teach you some life lessons. “It’s easy to think sometimes that things aren’t going well and life’s hard, but at the end of the day, you have to realize you’re playing a game and this is something a lot of people have fun with and love to do.”
Hammond is honoured to have received the nomination for the Masterton, named after the former Minnesota North Stars player who died in 1968 as a result of injuries sustained during a game.
“It’s about perseverance and for me, it’s something where, I guess, things don’t necessarily have to go your way to start. For me, it’s a little bit about staying the course and working hard over the years where a lot of people might be turned away.”
Skill, Hammond says, can only take a player so far.
“I had just been taught too many lessons from different people that if you don’t do it every day, it’s just not going to work out for you,” he says. “There are a handful of guys in the world that are good enough just based on God-given ability and I don’t think I necessarily fit into that. I have to pick up the slack in other ways. I think that’s just hard work, something I had to learn the hard way, in a lot of ways.”