Enrico Ciccone was on the phone with Kent Hughes on Tuesday morning, checking in as friends do. As he hung up, Hughes extended an invitation to his longtime pal: “He told me he was going to be in Montreal very soon and we should go have a beer…”
Posted at 4:54 p.m.
At the end of the line, Ciccone laughs again. At the time, he did not realize that Hughes, a childhood friend with whom he skated on the ice in the west of the city, was preparing to return to Quebec to go and settle in the director’s chair. General at the Bell Center.
“Our friendship dates back to bantam AA, when we played together at 14 with the West Island Royals,” he adds. We played like that for three years, including the last year, with the Lac Saint-Louis Lions.
“He’s a guy who has always spoken French, whose parents spoke French too. He’s a guy from here who ended up going to the United States for his career, as many others have done. Martin Brodeur also did that, and do we say that he is not a Quebecer? We should stop with that…”
Kent Hughes’ hockey career will be in French for a long time. Before going to make the jump to university hockey at Middlebury College, in the State of Vermont, Hughes will make a stop at the Cégep de Saint-Laurent, to play there for a season with the Patriotes, in 1987-1988.
This is where Gérard Gagnon met him. Gagnon, a long-time hockey coach in Quebec, remembers above all a young man who already had a solid head screwed on his shoulders at that time.
“In those years, there were very few 17-year-old players who managed to find a place with a AAA Collegiate League team, but he had succeeded,” recalls Gagnon. He was a short player, not very fast, but skilful and super smart on the ice. His hockey intelligence was very high, he immediately understood what was explained to him. »
At Cégep de Saint-Laurent, Kent Hughes of course studied in French, and most of the time with great success. “He was a very good student, and he achieved very good academic results,” added Gérard Gagnon.
According to Enrico Ciccone, this link with Quebec, Kent Hughes never lost it. Ciccone remembers his years as a player with the Lightning, where he had to host a young Vincent Lecavalier in Tampa. Hughes had caught wind of the situation, “and soon after, Kent became his agent,” he adds.
It is this man that the Canadian hired. A man who has never forgotten where he comes from, but also a man who has made a reputation for himself through dozens and dozens of evenings spent trying to find the rarest pearls in all the arenas that he could find on his way.
“His agency, Kent, built it brick by brick,” adds Ciccone. I met him often in arenas when I was also working as an agent, and I think he had to make a very difficult decision when it came to saying yes to the Canadian. When you are an agent, you become a bit like the father of these players, the big brother. Your players, they become your family, you don’t want to let them down, they trust you, confide in you. There, it’s as if he were being asked to part with his children… it’s probably the most difficult decision of his life. »
But Enrico Ciccone has no doubt: the Canadian has just made an excellent choice.
“When we played together in the West Island, Kent was always the captain of our clubs. Because he’s a unifier, and also because he’s a guy who has leadership. Anyone who thinks the Canadiens just named a guy who’s only going to say yes to Jeff Gorton doesn’t know Kent…”