To the people in his life who knew him the longest or the best, he went by John. That’s how his tightly knit family and his very closest buds addressed him; his nieces called him Uncle John. But to everyone else, he was Johnny—or one of many silly variations.
JohnnyGaudreau! was a classic, usually said as all one word, with the emphasis inherent and the name so fun to exclaim, especially if you were watching one of a long list of absurd Gaudreau goals. “Johnny-on-the-Spot!” yelled one impressed announcer at a 2003 tourney, when Gaudreau was just a little boy dangling and weaving and wrapping his way around the best age-10-and-under competition on the continent. Among college hockey enthusiasts who got to see Gaudreau win the 2012 national championship as a freshman at Boston College and the Hobey Baker award as a junior, he became “Johnny Hockey,” a name he’d eventually go on to trademark. Sometimes when Gaudreau scored, whether in college or throughout his 11 NHL seasons, arena loudspeakers would blare the song “Johnny B. Goode.” And holy moly, was Johnny ever.
A diminutive name for an enormous talent, that Johnny; a term of endearment for a world-class, award-winning hockey player who always felt more like a universal little brother—and not just because he was listed at a mere 5-foot-6 and 137 pounds when he was drafted by the Calgary Flames in 2011.
Sly and improvisational, Gaudreau moved with a signature playfulness on the ice that was only enhanced by his charming puckishness in life. And I say that last part literally, because that 137-pound official combine weigh-in I just mentioned? Well, it might have been like two pounds lighter had the then-teenaged Gaudreau not stuffed five pucks down his pants right before hitting the scale, an act of classic little bro ingenuity and benign disobedience.
And Gaudreau was, indeed, a little brother, the second of four kids raised in a big loving New Jersey family by his parents, Guy and Jane. But an important part of Gaudreau’s identity—the part of him that just went by John—was being a big brother, too. Gaudreau was two years older than his brother Matty, his next-in-line sibling and occasional teammate and motivator and best friend.
The brothers grew up playing hockey, with their rink manager dad scattering Skittles around the ice to encourage them to skate and bulking them up with extra doses of PediaSure. They both suited up for Boston College, even overlapping there for a year, and while Matty was never the player his older brother was, there was no matching their off-ice chemistry: “As remarkable as Johnny was,” BC coach Jerry York later said, “Matty kind of pushed him all the time. There was a great dynamic from the two young guys.”
More recently, when Matty retired from minor league hockey, he moved back to New Jersey to begin coaching; Johnny left Calgary and signed with the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2022 in part to be somewhat closer to the big and growing Gaudreau clan. The two brothers each got married and started families of their own: Johnny’s children are 2 years old and 6 months old, respectively, while Matty’s wife is five months pregnant. Late last week, Johnny and Matty, aged 31 and 29, were together, as ever, in their happiest place—among friends and family—to stand proudly as groomsmen and watch their little sister Katie get married.
Instead, after attending the wedding rehearsal on Thursday night and heading home on their bicycles, John and Matthew Gaudreau were struck and killed by a suspected drunk driver who was attempting to pass another car on a two-lane road in South Jersey, right near where they grew up. It was a ruinous, sudden event, the kind of storm with no silver linings, just the sweeping destruction of lives and families and memories and dreams. Sisters lost brothers, babies lost fathers and uncles, wives lost their visions of a shared future, and two of the nicest parents you’ll ever meet, in hockey or otherwise, lost two sons. And as the shock of what happened reverberated beyond the immediate Gaudreau family over the weekend, the scope of the devastation quickly widened to include the broader sporting world.
Athletes that Matty had played with or coached spoke of his empathy and kindness; a GoFundMe set up for the benefit of his wife and unborn son raised more than half a million dollars. LeBron James tweeted his sorrow; MLB and college football games around the country observed moments of silence for the brothers. And in both Calgary and Columbus, NHL hockey rinks became memorial sites to the player they knew as JohnnyGaudreau! with fans showing up to leave flowers or sticks or other mementos in no. 13’s honor. (Some stores in Calgary reportedly ran out of purple Gatorade, Gaudreau’s favorite.) Candlelight vigils are planned for Wednesday night at Nationwide Arena and Scotiabank Saddledome.
Grieving fans took solace in trading cherished memories of Johnny Hockey online: The time he neutralized Brad Marchand with the merriest smile you’ve ever seen. His Game 7 OT winner in the 2022 playoffs. That one postgame broadcast in which his parents surprised him on set and tousled his hair. The neat fact that he had the primary assist on Jaromir Jagr’s final NHL goal. His finicky appetite and water bottle hoarding.
So much goofiness, so much glory, so many goals scored and plates of sauceless noodles consumed along the way. (He would eventually grow a bit, from those 2011 combine stats to an imposing 5-foot-9 and 163 pounds.)
I didn’t know Matty and never spent any one-on-one time with Johnny, but I have my own vivid, favorite memories of the elder Gaudreau. Covering the NCAA Frozen Four in 2012, I was “left dazzled and a little bit delirious,” in my own words, by the “tiny terror” Boston College freshman who, rather than dump and chase the puck with a 2-1 lead and a few minutes remaining in the national title game, instead slashed and weaved all the way to an unforgettable insurance goal.
In early 2013, I again crossed paths with Gaudreau in Ufa, Russia, of all places, as he not only played on a USA team that won gold in the World Junior Championship but truly thrived under the pressure, finishing the tournament with seven goals, including a successful “saucy toe-drag” in a two-goal performance against rival Canada in the semis. And in 2014, the feel-good story continued. Gaudreau decided to return to BC for his junior season so that he could be teammates with this new freshman kid who was joining the roster—his brother, Matty.
That spring, Johnny Hockey won the Hobey Baker, traveled to join the Flames for a late-season game, and scored a goal in his NHL debut. (There were reports that team employees who saw him show up to the rink that day thought he was a kid seeking autographs; at least one of his own teammates assumed he was, like, the equipment guy’s son.) When he entered the league, I was thrilled to see a fine American lad (with even finer Jerz roots) like Gaudreau getting his shot at the big time, but was also unsure how he’d do there, knowing that collegiate success doesn’t always translate to the NHL. I needn’t have worried. Over the next decade, Gaudreau would become an elite NHL producer and one of the sport’s most respected pros. He was a 40-goal scorer and a Lady Byng trophy winner; he was a revered figure in the history of two different franchises.
He earned this stature both in spite of his size and because of it, playing a game that was wholly his own, unafraid to let his inner child out onto the ice. (During a breakaway competition at the 2015 NHL All-Star Game, one player picked up an actual equipment guy’s son and skated around the rink with him as a gag; soon after another player brought the house down when he pretended to do the same thing to Gaudreau.) In Calgary, Gaudreau was part of a cadre of talented young players like Sean Monahan and Matthew Tkachuk who helped the Flames advance past the first round of the playoffs for the first time in over a decade. But as the years passed and he grew not-so-young-anymore, Gaudreau had big-boy choices to make.
After Gaudreau left the Flames and signed with Columbus in the summer of 2022, on the heels of his best season ever, he wrote a letter in The Players’ Tribune to explain why. He identified two things in his life that had changed his mindset. One was a heart attack that his dad had survived in 2018, which clarified for Johnny that “I needed to do more to center my family in my life,” he wrote. Meeting his wife Meredith, a NICU nurse, was similarly instructive. “I’ve learned a lot about the person I want to be,” Gaudreau wrote, “which is a good son, a good husband, and (soon!) a good father.” It was far simpler, Gaudreau believed, to achieve this in Ohio than in faraway Calgary. Columbus represented a place where he could grow beyond his perception as the hockey world’s kid brother.
This upcoming Blue Jackets season was supposed to be one of new beginnings for the franchise. (It was only three summers ago that Columbus faced another tragedy when 24-year-old goalie Matiss Kivlenieks was killed by a firecracker while relaxing in a hot tub with teammates on Independence Day.) The Blue Jackets have a new coach and a new GM and a great new player who was personally recruited by Gaudreau: Monahan, his former Flames linemate and one of his best friends. (They even have matching Doodle doggies.) For Gaudreau and Monahan, the opportunity to team up again in a new season of life was too good to pass up. “To come back and be able to play with him again is pretty cool,” Monahan gushed on a podcast released just last Wednesday. “We both have sons that are two or three months apart, so they get to grow up together.” To Blue Jackets fans long accustomed to free agents wanting to leave their franchise rather than join it, Monahan’s acquisition had been one more thing to thank Gaudreau for. Now, it’s one of countless hopes destroyed.
“The entire world knows there would never have been a John without Matty or Matty without John,” Katie Gaudreau wrote on Instagram on Monday. “It was always Matty and John,” Matty’s wife Madeline posted over the weekend, adding that the Gaudreau brothers were always “each others biggest cheerleaders.” (And best dance partners.)
I can imagine exactly the way it must have been said, by their best friends and loved ones, over decades: MattyandJohn!, the two brothers, all one word, the emphasis inherent, so fun to exclaim, for a time. “Some days it felt too good to be true,” wrote Johnny’s widow, Meredith—a woman he was so into that he snuck out of his own bachelor party multiple times just to hang out with her on the couch—in an exquisitely sad recollection of her own in the days after his death.
Meredith was referring to their personal life, but in doing so she also illuminated what it always was that made her husband’s career in hockey so captivating to the public. Even as it was happening, it sometimes felt like it couldn’t possibly be real.
In the outpouring of emotion and anecdotes and photos from players and supporters that has been going on since Thursday night, a few tributes from the NHL community have stood out. Some were a welcome reminder of Gaudreau’s deep and lasting influence on a generation of athletes: Trevor Zegras posted a photo of himself as a youngster, geeking out over getting one of Gaudreau’s sticks, back when Johnny Hockey was still a babyfaced rising star; Cole Caufield, a player comparable to Gaudreau’s size, changed his number to pay his respects to a fellow short king; and Kent Johnston—who idolized Gaudreau as a kid to the point that he wore no. 13 and who could scarcely believe it when he found himself playing with him on the Blue Jackets all these years later—put up then-and-now pictures and wrote: “Dream come true to play with you.”
More acutely crushing were the words of Kevin Hayes, a BC teammate of the Gaudreaus who lost his own hockey-playing brother, Jimmy, to a fentanyl overdose in 2021. Hayes posted a photo of Johnny Hockey yukking it up with Jimmy’s young son Beau, just two dudes chilling in formal wear—one a rowdy guy who’d danced around on people’s shoulders at Hayes’s wedding reception, and the other in preschool. “Love you John!” Hayes wrote, his choice of name a gut punch. “Say hello to Beau’s Dad for me.”
For those of us who will always know Gaudreau better as Johnny, there’s one other key variation on his name that deserves a mention: “Johnny Ham-and-Cheese.” Unlike most of Gaudreau’s nicknames, this one didn’t originate from a hockey rink, but rather a sushi restaurant where Gaudreau found himself with some of his buddies back in college. Repelled by everything on the menu, he pivoted in a way that best suited his personal idiosyncracies and returned to the table with his hard-won spoils: a ham and cheese sandwich. Thanks to some old-fashioned ball-busting from the fellas—the realest way one can get a nickname—Johnny Ham-and-Cheese was born.
But was that really an accurate nickname? In an interview released by the NHL in 2019, speaking in that unmistakably South Jersey twang and flashing that beautiful smile, Gaudreau admitted a little secret: his Johnny Ham-and-Cheese moniker actually probably gave his basic palate too much credit. “I don’t even like the cheese on it,” he recalled, so he removed it. What he brought back to the restaurant was a sandwich of champions: nothing more than “just ham, on a roll,” Gaudreau said with a smirk.
Gaudreau never had the look or the heft or the appetite of a typical professional athlete, much less a bona fide star. And yet he had an advantage all his own. He was always so seemingly secure: in his inspired on-ice maneuvers, in his Halloween costumes, in that long-ago decision to stuff his jock full of pucks. He was confident in knowing exactly what he hated (tomato sauce! going to bed without the TV on!) and exactly whom he wanted to make more time to love.
To have gotten to witness Johnny-on-the-Spot play hockey, to have been able to boogie along with Johnny B. Goode after another wraparound Gaudreau goal—for a hockey fan, that felt like everything. And yet we don’t even know the half of it. All that on-ice achievement is inspiring, but for the extended Gaudreau family, a number of the most beautiful and everlasting memories of their boys will be the ones that even the most devoted fans were never there to see. The first steps and the I dos; the dance floor huddles; the fevers and the backseat squabbles; the rank athletic equipment and the sticky, chubby little baby hands. The daily chaos—and the searing grief—of unconditional love.
It bears repeating that there are no silver linings here. No one can return what’s been taken from a family, from a community, from a sport. But reading Johnny’s essay about centering his nearest and dearest, and seeing snaps of Matty bottle-feeding his newest nephew, I’m left moved by and grateful for the example the Gaudreau family has always set: of loyalty, and working hard, and remembering to stop to tousle your son’s hair on TV sometimes. The enormity of what we’ve lost is a testament to everything they built. There never could have been a Johnny Hockey in the first place, after all, if it hadn’t been for all those years of John and Matty, chasing Skittles and each other around the ice like so many dreams.
