NEWARK, N.J. — Dustin Penner is leaning on a cinder-block wall talking on a cell phone, and the guy with the oversized puffy yellow crown in the purple Kings jersey and the salt-and-pepper Fu Manchu moustache is a foot away, yelling into a cell phone of his own, on the same call.
“Your beard is the best, man!” bellows Vic the Brick, a Los Angeles radio personality. “Your growth is insane! Your growth can go all the way from here to New York City, and the Devils would still bow down! This man, Penner, has been rejuvenated! He is a revival meeting! I’m laying down the red carpet for Dustin Penner! Laying it down, laying it down!”
Vic bows, and mimes laying down a carpet. Penner grins, one front tooth missing, his voluminous playoff beard tickling his ears. The revival of Dustin Penner is not a bad deal these days.
“I’m getting to where I want to be,” he said in a quiet hallway of the Prudential Center on Friday, one day before Game 2 of the Stanley Cup final between his Kings and the New Jersey Devils. “When you hit figurative rock bottom … ”
Rock bottom arrived in February, when he was a healthy scratch five times in six game nights after coach Darryl Sutter took over; Penner softly calls it “the abyss.” His wife filed for divorce in late February; he had already hurt his back in famous fashion. Penner managed just four points in his final 18 games, and 10 goals and 17 points in 65 games overall. Kings fans were merciless, and he heard it. It was a tough year.
Now, though, Vic the Brick is singing hymns in his honour, and Penner is three wins from a second Stanley Cup. As the Kings have coalesced, Penner has bloomed again with three goals and 10 points in 15 games. One cousin sent him a text message calling him Claude Lemieux, because as Penner put it, “I’m doing now in the playoffs what I should have done during the regular season.”
He has used what he calls his “6-foot-4, two-mmmmrrrmm” frame — he is listed at 245 pounds, but when you have been accused of being overweight, garbling your weight is allowed — and he has produced, adding one more chapter to a voyage that didn’t really start until he was in his late teens, as a tiny kid with a quick wit in Winkler, Man.
“I was 5-6, 120 pounds until I was Grade 11, probably,” said Penner, 29. “And then my first year of [junior] college, I was maybe 6-3, 215, 210. By my third year in college at Maine, I was 6-4, 225 …
“Especially at an early age, you soak up so much more body knowledge at a young age. Even when I go out and skate with younger kids, they can pick up drills and certain movements a lot easier than adults can. Your feel is that much better. So I learned to play as a small player when I was young, and then when you get to a big size, you have to learn that. That’s something I had to learn in college, and I continue to learn.”
That’s why he never played major junior in Canada; he went from a high school pipsqueak with good hands to an Eric Lindros-sized winger at the University of Maine, to a free-agent signee who wound up scoring 29 goals for Anaheim’s 2007 Stanley Cup-winning team, and 32 goals after Edmonton signed him to a big contract as a restricted free agent.
And he travelled along the cycle of boom and bust, of disappointment and revival meetings. Fans find his inconsistency maddening, given his gifts; he finds his gifts to be a little overstated, in the big picture. Hell, when he got the University of Maine, he had to redshirt while he figured out how to skate again.
“Like a baby deer on ice, yeah,” he said. “You seen Bambi? … The jokes were always like, ‘You just started playing hockey last year’ … I’ve always had a quick wit; I’ve always been a smartass. It used to get me beat up when I was five or six. You can get away with a lot more when you’re 6-4, 225.”
It was, he says, like his first year in hockey. Kings general manager Dean Lombardi traded for him in 2011 after his inconsistency helped him fall out of favour in Edmonton, and Penner is still trying to figure out how to be big, how not to be that little smartass with his head on a swivel, how to be what he had become. When asked if growing so fast changed who he was, Penner shakes his head. “It changes how others see you,” he replies.
Penner has learned that the hard way. He knows other people see his frame and his skill and think he should be a sort of Lindros. He heard the criticism along the way: from coaches, fans, the media. He’s funny and smart in interviews, but often crosses his arms a lot when he talks in front of microphones, like he’s trying to wall himself off, just a little. He says, in a quiet moment, that he is coming to terms with a critical distinction: as he puts it, “the difference between what you can achieve, and what other people expect you to achieve.”
“Yeah, I think from my standpoint, it feels good to prove people wrong, but to actually prove people right, the people that believed in me. Guys like Dean, Darryl, teammates,” Penner says. “Because when you’re taking that criticism, the people that love you, care about you, it’s a part [they’re] taking, too.
“I think everybody comes with a reputation, and I had to try and beat mine.”
And yet, this year, he never even considered lying about the pancakes. He had grown cautious dealing with the media in Edmonton, where whispers became whirlwinds, where the fans called into the local radio station and called him “Dustin Penne.” In L.A. the media was laid back — not all crowns and Fu Manchus — but Penner still just came out and said it: He strained his back eating a pile of delicious pancakes that his wife made him.
As people made fun of him, he made fun of himself. He still does, on his popular Twitter account and elsewhere. It helps to have a sense of humour, in the end, and for the moment he’s happy, his beard a rainforest, his pale blue eyes bright. Whether it seems like it or not, he is still growing.
