This story, excerpted from a 1999 issue of ESPN The Magazine, touches on how his parents' substance abuse impacted Theo Fleury's life.

Even in New York, they tell Theo Fleury stories. How when he came up, every goon took turns trying to squish the mouthy pest. How Fleury kept coming, bobbing and taunting like a young Ali: "Is that your best shot?" How last year his Calgary shirt got so bloody, a fan took off his Fleury jersey and gave it to him to play in.

Did you hear the one from San Jose? He had whupped the Sharks single-handedly in a playoff game, and when he was introduced as the star of the game the Shark Tank shook. Skating off under a storm of fan debris, he flashed his little-boy-from-Manitoba, missing-teeth smile as if to say, watch this. Then he skated back out, stick high, bathing in beer, grinning and hollering, "I stuck it so far up your a-- tonight, you'll never get it out."

These things happened. But none is truer about Theo Fleury than the slight man he is searching for in the stands. The man is looking back at his son and seeing himself. "Finally made it to Madison Square Garden," says Wally Fleury, and if you want to know where Theo Fleury comes from, why he had to end up in New York City (it really was more than the money), you must go with them. Walk a mile in Western Canada to feel the crush. See how large the winter sky is, pressing down on the endless pale prairie, pressing on anyone who would challenge its gray authority. See how dark the sky gets and how early, and how cold its winds blow through the bone-rattling night. No wonder they duke it out here. This sky gives every guy the small man's syndrome. You've got to rip the life from the hard land with your hands.

"My mom and dad told me, 'Keep going, don't give up,' " says Wally Fleury, a small, sad-eyed man of 59. He is saying this in Madison Square Garden, while watching his son sweat to make something on ice, but his eyes are in Manitoba.

That is where Wally's grandfather once hitched horses to clear a space on the frozen Assiniboine River. He gave Wally a pair of skates he bought for a buck off a guy who needed a drink. "That's all I'm doing for you," said his grandpa. When Wally Fleury fell, his grandpa gave him his only advice: "Get up."

Wally was damn good, small and fast with heart. All his father told him was, "Go hard, son." He went hard enough so that the Rangers signed him in '59. He was expecting a call-up in '63 when he broke his leg playing baseball. "I was catching," he says. "Guy slid. I didn't give." His pro dream also shattered. That's when his hard drinking roared. To help matters along, Wally got a job as a bartender. He met Donna, a sweet, nervous girl, at a bowling alley, and they married. Theoren Fleury was born in June of '68.

Plenty of hockey players come from small towns. But even by Western Canada standards, the Fleurys were isolated, bottom-of-the-stick laborers stuck in government housing in a barley-and-wheat town called Binscarth. Wally Fleury is a Metis Indian, and Metis long were targets of scorn in the hardscrabble prairie.

Theoren was dressed in hand-me-downs. When his kindergarten pal invited him to go skating, all Donna Fleury could find was a rusty pair of skates buried deep in a closet. He walked to the rink carrying the skates in a torn pillowcase. He put them on sockless feet and set off on ice for the first time. Theoren was on his own after that. A doctor gave his mother pills for her fears. She got strung out on Valium and mothered in a fog. "I canned food in the summer, I saw the boys [including brothers Ted and Travis] to bed, I did my best," she says.

They moved 12 miles north to Russell, where Wally drove the town garbage truck. Theoren would pop up with him at 5 a.m. when Wally had to clean the ice in the town rink for the figure skaters. The boy skated in a corner while his father drove the Zamboni. Like his grandfather and father, Wally didn't coach the boy, didn't give him tips. "I didn't have to," he says. "It's all inherited."

By the age of 10, Theoren was skating circles around bigger boys, who taunted him because of his size. Off the ice, Theoren was a pleasant kid who never sassed his elders. But his eyes never looked down in deference or shame, not even when he skipped hockey banquets because his clothes were so ragged.

On the ice, he carried a big chip on his shoulder. Twerp, went the snickers. Heh, heh, look at his family. Indian, what do you expect? Opposing teams' fans came to see the yappy runt get his block knocked off. He loved shutting their big-town mouths. (A big town, says Fleury, "was a place with a McDonald's.") He baited, punched, hotdogged, skating and scoring by the path of most resistance.

Wally would show up at Russell games, leave around the first period for the Queens Hotel bar and return later to brag about his son. It wasn't often that his parents attended road games. They had little money to travel. But once his parents showed up for a tournament in Regina. After the game, Theoren told the guys he wasn't going for pizza with them because his parents were there. But his father disappeared, and his overwhelmed mother said she was tired and went back to the hotel room. Theoren was alone.

"I never held it against them," he says. "We all got something." You're short or you're drunk or you're nervous and you keep going the best you can.

Theoren learned to perform for others -- coaches, crowds, scouts. He loved the life, the team meals, the very idea that a brood could sit together as one. And then one night it was over. His rag-tag Russell team had beaten the big, better-off boys from Portage twice, so Portage challenged them once more. Late in the second period, 13-year-old Theoren ran up the right side with the puck. There was an accident. A defenseman's skate slashed Theoren's upper right arm. Blood spurted in big, thick arcs. Some in the tough crowd fainted. Some players cried, some vomited. Theoren Fleury kept going because it is in his bones. He staggered on his skates, bleeding toward death.

They saved his life, but the artery and the nerves were severed. He could lose the use of his right arm. When Wally Fleury got the call at home, he knew it was the end of his son's hockey career, just like he knew his had been smashed by drink. What would the boy do with his life?

"I'm going for it," he told his father. Watching their boy battle, his parents, for the first time, went to rehab to face their demons.

***

"Every summer, I go back to Russell to get my head screwed on straight," he says. "I mean, there are so many people around blowing smoke up your rear end, I have to remind myself who I am." He runs a hockey school for kids there, searching out the ones who think they're too small or too poor. He misses those days when he played road hockey, when he broke into the league, when -- home or away -- they all ate lunch together after practice. "I'm old school," he says.

In its way, New York is as old school as Russell. This joint is just his mug of belligerence. Manhattan and Manitoba share a brutal landscape. They prize the same toughness. Broadway just bellows a lot louder.

"Ranger fans are intense," he says. "I feed off it. I need the challenge."

He knows they'll boo his $28 million hide if he fails. So he builds the rage, builds the stage: "I'm not one of those superstars who goes out half-assed, plays some games, takes off some games. I'll do it every night, whatever it takes."

They watched his every scrappy move in the home opener, groaned when a stick in the stomach knocked him down, cheered when he got up and attacked. But he came up empty all night. "Same old Rangers," some fans muttered as they left to catch the Yankees' playoff opener. Next game, Fleury had a goal and two assists and everyone outside the Garden was celebrating the Mets win. But somewhere around February, when the New York wind is as wicked as Manitoba's, Theo Fleury will stand alone. If the Rangers are winning -- and they're starting to -- then this belligerent Billy Martin on skates will cross over to big-time glitz. And no one can blow smoke up your rear end like New Yorkers.

That's why when he moved into the fancy Greenwich, Conn., house, he brought Russell with him. He flew in his mother and father for the first homestand. They are sober and proud now. So there was Wally Fleury, hunched over the balcony at Rangers practice, watching and thinking he had finally made it to New York. And there was Theo, seeing his dad, being reminded of how he might easily have ended up as a laborer in Russell, another lug with a bad arm from a teenage hockey injury.

"How's the ice?" someone asks Theo as he talks off with his father. "Fine," he says. " 'Course, it's not like Russell." Not like when Wally Fleury drove the Zamboni, and Theoren spun in a rough corner. Not like the nights when he'd clock the big-town kids who thought they'd crash the twerp.

Some people in the game, watching Fleury snake around the rink with speedy giants, believe he has taken too many hits on the little body. The league's bigger and faster now. Maybe he'll put up numbers from the safety of the outside, but he won't be the impact player in the grisly high-traffic areas anymore. But that's just what Theo Fleury wants to hear.

"Tell them not to worry about that," he sneers, gathering a head of steam. "Just tell 'em to watch."

This story is excerpted from the November 1, 1999, issue of ESPN The Magazine.