Michaël Bournival’s plan B

In a way, Michaël Bournival’s second life began with a very ordinary game night at the Bell Center in September 2014.

Posted at 12:26 p.m.

Richard Labbe

Richard Labbe
The Press

The young forward was then trying to keep his place with the Canadiens, who had just returned from a 60-game season, his first in the NHL. It was an ordinary evening because it was an uneventful preparatory match, but for Michaël Bournival, it was not an uneventful match.

No way.

“I remember it was against the Capitals and it happened during a face-off, when I got hit,” he explained in a telephone interview.

This game led to a concussion, another for him. He is asked if he can quantify the number of concussions suffered during his career, and he hesitates. Four ? Yes, it is probably four, and it is certain that this was the second.

He is also very certain that he never really recovered.

“When that one arrived, I didn’t feel well, not at all,” he continues. But I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want to lose my place…”

A quick detour to YouTube to quickly watch the game in question, and Michaël Bournival is right: he didn’t say anything, because we can see him finishing the game, he who is on the ice while the last seconds of the match fly away on the screen.

This little lie, he will take care to maintain for very long weeks.

“In a way, it fell well, because the coach (Michel Therrien) left me out for the first 12 games of the season… At the time, I said to myself that it was a good thing , which I was going to be able to recover, but no. I still had to skate in practice, train in the gym, and when I ended up playing my first game that season, I didn’t feel good at all. I had fatigue, headaches, dizziness.

“Besides, that’s when I started having anxiety when I arrived at the arena. Because you show up every morning, and everyone asks how you’re doing. So you say you’re fine. That put pressure on me. It was the same every morning: how are you? I had to pretend to be fine. »

The ex-attacker insists: there is never anyone, neither at the Canadian, nor at the Tampa Bay Lightning, who told him to lie about it. But this pain, these hints of this evening of September 2014, all that followed him until his last outing in 2018-19, at Syracuse in the American League.

“I don’t know how I did it. I was never able to recover 100% while I was playing. At some point, I thought about stopping everything, then I also thought about my dream, about the sacrifices I was able to make, about the discipline I had to have. It is extremely difficult to stop everything. But in my last year, I called my agent Christian Daigle and told him, leave the contract fuss. This will be my last season. »

This is often the moment in the story when the player, distraught and cut off from his bearings, begins to sink into a path that is sometimes dark and dead end. But that’s not the case here, because the hero of the story has always had a very useful weapon in his arsenal: a good plan B.

“I’ve had it for a long time! It goes back to my years in junior hockey, in Shawinigan. I participated in the Subway Super Series and we always had post-career workshops. Finances, school, things like that… The message was that hockey is not forever, and I took that seriously. »

The moment he put his blades away, after 113 games and 22 points in the NHL, Bournival turned to his other passion: coaching. In 2019, he chose to start a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology at UQTR, after an eight-year school break.

We can say that he succeeded in this sequel with the greatest success, he who received the Academic Silver Medal from the Governor General of Canada, due to an almost perfect school average of 4.27 out of 4, 30 !

In his case, and at only 30 years old, the good times are just beginning.

“I’ve always believed in the importance of this plan B, to not be recognized only as a hockey player, he adds. Hockey wasn’t going to define me. I knew I was going to go back to school one day, and I had to stop playing to regain a quality of life, especially with the arrival this summer of a second child. Now I’m doing very well, I have no after-effects from the concussions. Also, when I got out of hockey, I got out of the anxiety that was eating away at me…”


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