<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\n If Alexander Ovechkin's first name is perfect\u2014\"the Great\" attaches easily enough\u2014his last name couldn't be more ironic if Alanis Morissette wrote a song about it. It means \"little lamb.\" Little, I repeat, lamb. Not only little, but a female one. In Russian, an ovechka is a girl lamb.\n\nThe man himself looks more like Jaws, the henchman from the Bond films, with a touch of Jaws the shark. His face, a wide, flat Slavic canvas, has been creatively re-arranged by dozens of amateur surgeons so that the nose now sits slightly off center and the wide-set eyes appear asymmetrical; when Ovechkin grins, which is often, a diagonally broken incisor flashes like a fang. One wonders how he avoids impaling his own tongue on it. One wonders how he does a lot of things.\n\nOvechkin is the best hockey player in the world, which means he's just now getting famous enough to be recognized by people who don't watch hockey. But we're in Moscow, his hometown and off-season playground. There should be a mob gathered around him already. Russia doesn't produce too many bests these days; its biggest contribution to world culture in the past decade was a duo of singing bobby-sor goths who pretended to be lesbian on Leno. Ovechkin is as big a deal as it gets. Yet here he sits, all 233 pounds of him, on an outdoor patio of a caf\u00E9 looking onto the crowded Pushkin-skaya Square, unrecognized by anyone but me\u2014and that's only because he has rather touchingly described over the phone what he'll be wearing: a black baseball cap, gray shorts, and a big gold cross.\n\n\"How are you doing!\" he bellows in Russian, using the polite form of \"you,\" vy. \"Hey, young lady!\" A blonde waitress rushes over a quintessential Moscow menu: pasta, sushi, and frat-party cocktails. It's daytime, and Ovechkin seems a tad wary of the press's presence when he orders a mug of beer. I order one, too; Alex beams and immediately switches to the familiar ty.\n\nThe waitress doesn't recognize him, either, which doesn't stop her from checking him out. It's easy for Ovechkin\u2014a.k.a. Ovie, a.k.a. the Great Eight\u2014to go incognito here. A unique presence in his adopted hometown of D.C., in Moscow Ovechkin blends in. He could easily be one of those lumpen youths milling about Pushkin-skaya in similar logo-stamped wife-beaters and with similar heavy gazes, the guys you wouldn't want to meet at night in the ill-lit underpass below the square.\n\nOvechkin is not a thug, but he's got thug appeal. Fans love to see him hit. YouTube is lousy with clips like \"Ovechkin Smokes -Chelios,\" \"Ovechkin Takes Out Sidney Crosby,\" and finally \"Alexander Ovechkin Makes Chuck Norris Cry.\" The Russians didn't used to play like this. The hockey branch of Dynamo, the USSR's mammoth \"sports society,\" where Ovechkin played, was never famous for producing bruisers, but Ovechkin's brutish force makes sense: Russia is a bruiser kind of country now.\n\nThe more sophisticated type of hockey consumer loves Ovie for his stickwork, which is so nimble as to approach fencing. The pat sportscaster line about Ovechkin is that he \"loves to score.\" At first glance, this is a kind of silly distinction\u2014who doesn't?\u2014but when you watch the man in action, you begin to understand the all-consuming hunger this clich\u00E9 papers over. Ovechkin lunges for the goal from any position, any angle: off his balance, facing backward, flat on his ass. It's hard to say whether these are Hail Mary passes or well-considered moves; Ovechkin operates on a kind of genius plane where the two categories blend.\n\nThe third and most passionate kind, however, is the Washington fan. Fair-weather, for sure: The capital wasn't much of a hockey town until Ovechkin came along. But D.C. loves Ovie with the hysterical ardor of a rescued damsel. Barack Obama promised Caps owner Ted Leonsis that he'll come to a game this season. The local sports network, CSN Washington, runs things like \"8 Days of Ovechkin.\" A local blog follows his whereabouts and posts sightings. He gets black-tie parties thrown for him and keys to the city thrown at him. (His acceptance speech: \"Today is a big day. I have a key for the city. And I'm the president this day in the city, so everybody have fun\u2014and no speed limit.\") If you live in D.C., Ovechkin is hockey.\n\nBut for all his wild talent and bearish charisma, there's a whiff of unpredictability about Ovechkin. He can get carried away (it's pretty unusual for a team's captain to amass the most penalty minutes). He can wilt when things don't go his way, like he did in the '08 playoffs. Nobody doubts Ovechkin will be one of the sport's all-time greats, if not the greatest\u2014but that's only if he doesn't derail himself in the process. Unlimited potential tempered by dark petulance: There's only one place where they still make 'em like that. A D.C.-bound Muscovite and a Latvian-born New Yorker, we clink our Siberian Crown lagers to the Motherland.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n There are two easy narrative arcs to an athlete's life: \"scion to a dynasty\" or \"up from the mean streets.\" Ovechkin manages both. On the one hand, he was an heir to Soviet sports royalty: His mother, Tatyana, was a basketball star and an Olympic gold medalist twice over, in 1976 and 1980. His father, Mikhail, had played serious soccer. Both parlayed the experience into great careers within the vast Soviet sports machine, with Tatyana presiding over the Dynamo women's basketball team. By the standards of the time and place, the family was more than comfortable.\n\nAt the same time, though, the world around him was rough and getting rougher. Ovechkin was born in 1985, the year the Soviet Union began its collapse. Soon after his birth, the family moved to the capital's outskirts, into the tenth and top floor of a homely brick building in a tough neighborhood. Its public school, number 596, was famous for armylike discipline and a tyrannical principal, and not much else. (It is now famous for one more thing: Ovechkin's portraits line the walls of its auditorium.) \"I'm not a real central-Moscow kid,\" says Ovie, waving at the opulent storefronts along Tverskaya Street from our caf\u00E9 perch. \"I'm not used to luxury stuff.\" At the tail end of the Soviet Union, neither was anyone else.\n\nOvie's schooling would fall on what the Russians now like to call \"the roaring 1990s,\" a carnival of raw greed and criminality. Moscow '92 was Chicago '29, with less sausage. Nascent capitalists got gunned down in the streets by former Young Communists. \"You did what you had to do,\" shrugs Ovechkin. The country had found new icons: the banker, the gangster, the dollar itself. In a 1992 survey of Russian high school students by two Western academics, 60 percent of girls said they would exchange sex for hard currency. Such was the world into which Ovechkin would be released. For a guy with not much in the way of academic achievement\u2014and Ovie, let's be honest, was a genius only on the ice\u2014career options were limited: Driver. Bodyguard. Hit man.\n\nLuckily there was hockey. There was always hockey, despite the family's basketball gene. Tales of Ovechkin's childhood brim with prophetic apocrypha: When he was 2, he grabbed a toy hockey stick at a store and wouldn't let go; at 5, he glimpsed a Dynamo game on TV and cried until Dad switched the channel back; at 10, he hit a goalpost so hard the puck broke in half. (His coach kept the halves as a kind of religious arti-fact.) Hockey got him out of P.S.\u00A0596, where he made it through eight and a half grades -before switching to Dynamo's \"sports school.\" The twice-daily training sessions\u2014morning and night\u2014left little time for anything else. He'd be up at 6 a.m., eat a bowl of porridge served by Dad (Tatyana was often on the road with her team), and head into the dawn. When he got home from hockey, he played more hockey\u2014with neighbors' kids, in the yard, in a hallway with the furniture moved to one side. \"You dive into sport with your head and arms and legs, and there's no time for anything else,\" he tells me. \"There's no other career.\"\n\nBy the time Ovechkin reached his teens, his eldest brother, Sergei, had died in a car crash at 25. His first coach, Vyacheslav Kirillov, was dead from heart failure at 29. His friends were getting high and getting dead. College was a distant fantasy. When I ask Alex where his school peers ended up, he recalls only one success story: a guy who \"plays in a rock 'n' roll band.\" And the rest? \"Some are in prison. A lot of them are dead. Drugs and all that crap. When you leave school and try to find work, your priorities immediately change. That's when the drugs get you.\"\n\nThe stakes were real. Hockey was both a destiny and a salvation. He had the talent\u2014untrammeled, electric talent that seemed to require reining in more than training. At 17, Ovechkin became the youngest-ever member of Russia's national team. And as befits a guy growing up in the newly materialistic world, Alex quickly realized how much that talent was worth. The dream was clear: the NHL. He loved the Penguins (the future home of his nemesis Sidney Crosby, who played his first NHL game a day after Ovechkin). He was a fanboy and a peer at once. Even as he collected their cards, Alex had a pretty good idea of his own growing ability to go toe-to-toe with any one of them, including his idol, Mario Lemieux. The signs were there. Scouts were circling. Interviews were lining up. In 2004 came the ultimate proof: He was the number one draft pick, Dynamo's first since the fall of the USSR. (The club tried to get the NHL to pay ten times its normal price for his release.) So hot was Ovechkin that the Florida Panthers tried to draft him two days before his eighteenth birthday, making a rather creative case that he had lived through four leap years and was thus, if you really think about it, of age. Then the Washington Capitals came with an offer\u2014$12 million with incentives for three years\u2014nobody could refuse.\n\nOn October 4, 2005, a year delayed by the lockout, Ovechkin\u2014his wide cheeks still carrying a sprinkling of teen acne\u2014skated onto the ice in a Caps jersey, against the Blue Jackets. His goal for his first NHL game was, of course, just that: to hit a goal. He hit two, four minutes apart, and checked a guy so hard he broke the glass partition.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n The pyramid was Ovie's idea. It is a cheesy joint, decorated with ankhs and hieroglyphics, that functions as a dance club after dark. It's been here forever, which in Moscow's case means since the 1990s, and it reeks of the era: a quick and dirty mock-up of Western excess not quite gotten right. \"I used to go to this place a lot when I played for Russia,\" explains Ovechkin. \"I would spend whole days here. I used to date this girl then.... See, they have these sofas on the second floor. So I used to take her up to those sofas, you know?\" He glances around the patio\u2014we're practically alone, bored waitress notwithstanding\u2014and looks dismayed. \"There used to be a line in front of this place,\" he adds almost apologetically. \"It was the hippest place in town.\"\n\nThese days, when Ovechkin hits Moscow, his nightlife itinerary is more varied. He is 25, single, a multimillionaire, handsome in a brutal way. This summer the Russian edition of Tatler called him the country's most eligible bachelor\u2014a case, perhaps, of belaboring the point. Ovechkin's main hunting grounds are Sunrise, Rai, and Soho Rooms, three of Moscow's flashiest bottle-service clubs. \"In Moscow, if you have money, you're king,\" he says with a lopsided grin. \"If you don't\u2014sorry, man, get lost. I mean, it's like this everywhere. But in Moscow, it's much more hard-core.\"\n\n\"There's some quality action at Soho Rooms, real high quality,\" he says when we start talking clubs. \"You should go pick up some telochki.\" The word literally means \"calves\" and semantically falls somewhere between \"chicks\" and \"bitches.\" \"Especially if you've got your own table. Just go up to the girls, say, 'I've got a table,' and they'll hop right along.\"\n\nI do that smug thing married guys do, where you stick out your hand and use the thumb to wiggle the wedding ring on the ring finger.\n\n\"Aw, come on, who's gonna see?\" pushes Ovechkin.\n\nRight on cue comes a phone call from Ovie's current girl. The ringtone is a song by Zhanna Friske, a Russian pop star with whom local tabloids have been \"linking\" Ovechkin for ages; the woman on the other end of the line is not, however, Zhanna Friske. Awkward. Figuring he's opened the door, I ask Ovechkin about his relationship with Friske; he cracks up, then switches to robotic press-conference English. We're very good friends. No more questions. \"You know,\" he continues in Russian, \"the papers always say I'm seeing this or that person. Zhanna and I laugh at this. Like, I was dating this girl once and came to the airport to pick her up. I go to the restroom, she buys the paper. I come out, and she's like, 'You asshole!' I'm like, 'What?' Turns out there's a picture of me and Zhanna in the paper. I'm like, 'Calm down.'\"\n\nIn Washington, where he spends most of his time, Ovechkin's life is infinitely more placid. He is on his best behavior there, mindful of his stature. In Moscow, he can't help but revert to his teenage self. Hence the silly Pyramid, hence the giddy telochki talk. \"Moscow is a big city,\" he says. \"It's all nerves\u2014something's always happening somewhere. D.C. is a quiet, calm family town.\" He lives in a house in Arlington, Virginia, he bought his rookie year; his parents, who keep a home base in Moscow, and his brother, Mikhail, who works with the WNBA, are frequent guests. And if Ovechkin's exploits don't reach American tabloids, perhaps that's because he's simply not into American girls. \"If you compare Russia and America,\" he explains sagely, \"they are two different worlds. People, cars, clothes. Girls' figures. Especially girls' figures. Why do you think that is, that when an American goes to Russia for a week, he stays for two extra weeks? Girls! And when a Russian goes to America for a week, he leaves in five days. I'm serious! There's a statistic! Ask any American about Russia. You know what they'll say.\"\n\nThe conversation ends abruptly. Ovechkin's dangerous-looking friend Magomet, whom Alex has been texting throughout our talk (he texts nonstop, with prodigious -smileys), has rolled up in an Audi SUV painted a scabrous matte black. For a while, we cruise down Tverskaya. Each time he sees a pretty girl walking by, Ovechkin shouts \"BOOM!\" at the top of his lungs.\n\nBetween the explosions, we decide on our next outing. Once again, the place is Ovechkin's idea: a skating rink. I've never skated in my life.\n\n\"I've never skated in my life,\" I say.\n\n\"Great,\" says Ovechkin. \"So we'll all laugh at you.\"\n\n\"Great.\"\n\n\"BOOM!\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n As the Caps' season nears, Ovechkin finds himself in a unique situation. For all his undisputed genius, he has yet to lead the Capitals to the Stanley Cup or Russia to Olympic gold. He'll tell anyone who'll listen that these are his twin goals in life, and so far he's fallen short on both. The humility is not false. It is learned; there's a difference. In 2009 the Capitals fell to his former idols, the Crosby-led Penguins; this April, with Ovechkin as the captain and everybody's hopes sky-high, the Capitals shockingly squandered a 3\u20131 playoff lead to the Montreal Canadiens. Ovechkin was crushed. \"You know, it's hard for me, but for everybody,\" he mumbled to the press after the defeat, his shaky English halfway out the window. \"We know we can win, but we don't win it. It's pretty hard.\"\n\nIn Ovechkin's life, the Cup is what English professors call a structuring absence. So far he's only won it playing NHL2K10, the video game whose cover he graces in all his gap-toothed glory. Ovechkin is masochistically prone to steering the conversation back to it from anywhere. When the Caps owner Ted Leonsis asked him what he thought of his Hart and Pearson awards (both essentially MVPs), Ovechkin immediately said he would \"trade them all for one Stanley Cup.\" When I mention his feud with a fellow Russian and former roommate, Evgeni Malkin of the Penguins, Ovechkin visibly deflates and says he considers Malkin the winner: \"He's got the Stanley Cup, and I don't.\"\n\nThe fate of the Caps depends on whether Ovechkin's palpable hunger will take them farther this season than it did before. Ovechkin himself knows better than to make any promises. \"He's still pissed [about 2009],\" says Bruce Boudreau, the Capitals' head coach. \"He's going to have an extra chip on his shoulder. And he's getting better every year\u2014he is still on the upswing.\"\n\nRussia, meanwhile, appears patient with her son: The 2008 World Championship he helped win will tide the fans over for a while. On the horizon, however, looms Sochi 2014, Russia's second home-turf Olympics and the first since the fall of the USSR. At the last Russian Olympics, the Americans and Canadians stayed home\u2014and Ovechkin's mother snagged the gold. Knowing Ovechkin even a little bit, the way his brilliance is laced with moodiness, it's not hard to imagine his reaction to anything less than gold in Sochi. It would destroy him.\n\nSo far, however, Russia is still his candy store. Next day, we meet at Evropeisky (\"European\"), a mega-mall complete with an enormous food court, ravelike lighting, and a bank of elevators made to look like golden-domed Orthodox churches that slide up and down. The rink, poignantly, shares the top floor with Barbie's World and Build-a-Bear Workshop.\n\nOvie can't help himself. He shows up with two very young telochki, Lera and Olesya, that he's picked up at Soho Rooms. They're dressed like snow bunnies and have clearly had at least some skating classes between them. A stray thought visits me that Ovie has brought one of them to keep me company, but before I can figure out which one, it becomes rather obvious he's planning to keep both. Dressed in all white, complete with a white cap, he whooshes down the slushy ice\u2014spraying a frozen margarita's worth on each dramatic stop\u2014twirls, parodies figure-skating moves (impressively), snaps souvenir photos, rolls video, and takes turns making out with Lera while Olesya documents the proceedings and making out with Olesya while Lera does the documenting. While the calves and the lamb cavort, I hug the boards for an hour and a half. The girls giggle. The whole tableau is a high school nightmare come to life. Finally deliverance arrives in the form of a crone entrusted with the task of closing down the rink for the night. She doesn't recognize the hockey star and rudely shoos Ovechkin away, and it's fun to watch him go totally meek when faced with the fury of a Russian babushka.\n\n\"So, did you understand anything about skating?\" Ovie prods me in the locker room, unlacing his rented skates.\n\n\"I understand that I can't do it for shit.\"\n\nOvechkin gives me a look of genuine pity. It only lasts a split second. Then, Lera and Olesya hanging off his biceps, he leaves \"to grab some food.\" There are forty-five days left until the 2010 season, and from the looks of things, he's going to spend them well.\n\nThis is probably not the most obvious moment to pity Ovechkin back. Yet it's not easy to be where he is: in the gap between star and legend. All the perks are his (the next time I call him, he's midshoot on a Reebok commercial), but true glory is proving slippery. No matter how materialistic this post-Soviet boy comes across, he has signed up for more than this. And so have the fans. Ovechkin's massive fame is still a kind of loan, and it matures soon. This year better be legendary. This year better boom.\n\nMichael Idov is a contributing editor atNew York magazine and the author of the novel Ground Up. This is his first piece for GQ."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/alexander-ovechkin-nhl-washington-capitals?currentPage=4>