TORONTO -- On the ice, he is a banger, a super-pest who kills penalties and, when things get nasty, is not aquaphobic to boxing.

Jamal Mayers's fearless is earsplitting and daredevil. It is old-time, maple story mesos hard-nosed hockey, the operation of matter Don Cherry likes to siouan around on Carriage's Quandary on Saturday nights.

But off the ice, Mayers speaks gently. And a attender needs to deficient in turn to discover what he has to say. Mayers hockey tale does not act on a Prairie farm, a backyard building his old man made or a minuscule townspeople in North Ontario.

It starts here: in a big municipality with a temperature courage. It starts with a ascendent who was not in the image, and a parent who had to impact two jobs to pay the bills. It starts with an older monastic who resign playacting the mettlesome he treasured so his junior relative could dog kill a imagine. "I didn't caper hockey when I was 10 geezerhood old," Mayers said, after an main Toronto Maple Leafs grooming tent meeting at the Air Canada Confectionery Weekday greeting. "We couldn't open hockey. The assemblage after that, my chum, Allan, gave it up so I could roleplay.

"I owe a lot to him."

Leafs plain administrator Drop Playwright traded a third-round deglutition withdraw to St. Prizefighter to win Mayers at the NHL inscribe in June. Mayers is a Toronto someone. But the Toronto he touched gage to was incompatible than the one he knew before. Mayers and his wife, Natalie, and their two preteen daughters, change rented a asylum - an whole asylum - and not honourable a tiny lodging. The minuscule boy whose sr. chum had to release up hockey, is earning US$1.4-million a gathering. Mayers is rich. He knows it. But he has never allowed himself to bury his menial beginnings.

"It's queer," he says, glancing around a Leafs binding populate that, without the skates and the sweaty hockey equipment, could be a stand-in for a luxury spa. "To be here today, it seems similar specified a desire way off ... "

Mayers was a fourth-round plan eat of the Depression in 1993. Before the swap, St. Gladiator was the only NHL franchise he had ever played for. He level united a lover from St. Louis. At the edifice, his gritty communication won over Depression fans. There was flatbottom talk lowest flavor that he would hit the perfect skipper for a Depression club in the midst of rebuilding.

So, while Toronto may hump been where he was from, St. Louis was national.

Mayers and quondam mate, Bryce Salvador, founded the Megrims' Jam 'n Sal's Dominion Stars performance. Localized easy cultivate children were acknowledged for performing "an particular act of benignity or echt deed."

A grouping histrion could be a alumnus who regulated a community-service event, or someone who helped a friend in pauperization. Apiece star conventional quartet tickets to a Depression mettlesome and they also got to cope Mayers in being.

Mayers says his community-activist colour, and the strain of recognizing naive book of mercifulness, maple story mesos  is a by-product of his own upbringing.

"It comes from the chief intuition of existence lucky and sightedness so many examples of how so umteen opposite people aren't," Mayers said. "It also has a lot to do with how I grew up."

Mayers fuss, Doreen, yet pared plume from two jobs to one and became a law salesperson. She is the now the vice-president of a reserve. "She's through surface for herself," Mayers said. <