When he was younger, Steve Bégin was not a model student. Learning difficulty, attention deficit, he was a “little monster”, according to his own words. It was only as an adult and a father that he realized he was dyslexic.
• Read also: Mission accomplished
• Read also: “I gave my all to everyone present”
“The teacher often told me: “you’re just less intelligent”. I was the least sharp pencil in the box,” says the former Canadiens player in an interview with Newspaperwhile he was going to the North Shore to give a conference in an indigenous community.
“It wasn’t known at the time. The teachers just thought you didn’t want to work, didn’t want to improve, that you were a coward. If we had known what I had in the 1980s, and if we had been able to use tools we have today like Lexibar, I would have had a better chance of succeeding,” Bégin is convinced.
More confidence
Knowing that his 16-year-old daughter, Maylia, experiences the same problems, it is not surprising that he agreed to be spokesperson for the “I love my dys” awareness campaign, along with the actress and content creator Olivia Leclerc.
The initiative comes from the Quebec company Haylem Technologies, behind the Lexibar software, which helps young people with writing and reading problems in 87% of the province’s schools.
“The difference is incredible, not just academically, but in confidence as well. It was difficult for my daughter to go to school, she found it hard. We had to fight in the morning, it was difficult,” says Bégin, who remembers how afraid he was, when he was young, to go to the blackboard, at the front of the class.
“I shakais, I was not well. I wanted to die,” he says.
Thanks to her daughter
It was during meetings with specialists when Maylia was in primary school – she is in secondary five today – that the former CH striker from 2003 to 2009 had two revelations: his daughter was dyslexic and so was he.
“I was listening and I was like, “That’s me, that’s me!” My wife told me that we weren’t there for me! But I had just discovered something important. For me, reading was so difficult and I didn’t understand why. After reading a paragraph, you no longer remember anything,” explains the 45-year-old man, medicated for attention deficit disorder.
Steve Bégin against Martin St-Louis, of the Tampa Bay Lightning, in 2003.
REUTERS archive photo
Work more than others
Bégin has always been a hard and persevering worker, which made him a crowd favorite in Val-d’Or, Saint John, Calgary, Montreal, Hamilton, Dallas, Boston, Milwaukee and Nashville. A character trait forged by his father.
“I told my daughter that if you want to succeed, you have to work 2, 3, even 10 times harder than others. My daughter, every time she passes, when she has 75, 80 or even 90%, she is so proud,” emphasizes Bégin.
This type of language development disorder does not disappear when you leave school. But that didn’t stop Bégin from having a great hockey career.
“It caused me a lot of problems learning English. If I had to fill out a questionnaire, I wouldn’t understand the meaning of the sentences. I am better today than when I was in an English-speaking environment on a daily basis. I was not able to remember the words I was taught. It wasn’t easy,” says Bégin, who believes that Cole Caufield will score between 35 and 40 goals, and that CH will participate in the playoffs in only two seasons.
Fueled by challenges, the Trois-Rivières native obtained his high school diploma in 2018, completing his exam on his 40th birthday.
“It’s been 22 years since I went to school! I hardly sweated. I studied every day and weeks before exams, I studied from morning to evening, from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., and sometimes more. My wife was so excited for me to finish!” says the man who recently discovered the pleasures of reading.
“Before, it could take me six months to read a 300-page book.”
Like glasses
If Steve Bégin became spokesperson for “J’aime mon dys” on this International Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) Day and at the start of Quebec TDL Week, it is to make known the reality of people affected. dyslexia or others.
“There are parents who ask why a child has the right to a computer and why he has more time than others. I tell them that we are going to remove their child’s glasses for the exam! They tell me: “well no, he won’t see”. It’s the same thing. Why would your child be allowed to have a tool and not mine?”
The different “dys”
Dyslexia: Difficulty understanding written messages and expressing thoughts in writing
Dyspraxia: Difficulty planning and reproducing a movement
Dyscalculia: Mathematics learning disability
Dysgraphia: Difficulty learning to write
Dysorthography : Difficulty recognizing words as a whole and reading irregular words like sir, son, wife, etc.
Source: “I love my dys” awareness campaign