Mario Lemieux

📍Ville-Émard, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

“Mario Lemieux was born in Montreal in October 1965 and grew up in a red-brick house on rue Jogues in Ville-Émard, a working-class, French-speaking neighbourhood in the south-west of the city, near the Lachine Canal. His father, Jean-Guy, was a construction worker, and his mother, Pierrette, kept house; he was the youngest of three boys, after Alain and Richard, and hockey filled their lives. The brothers started young, playing in the basement with kitchen spoons for sticks and bottle caps for pucks. In winter, the family famously packed snow onto the carpet in the front hallway so the boys could skate indoors. They spent hours every day at the outdoor rink beside the Saint-Jean-de-Matha church nearby, and their father later built a rink in the backyard. Mario played for the local team, the Ville-Émard Hurricanes, with his childhood friend Marc Bergevin, and his talent was obvious from the start: he was big, skilful and saw the game like no one else. At fifteen he left school to concentrate on hockey and joined the Laval Voisins in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, where in 1984 he scored 133 goals in a season. That year the Pittsburgh Penguins chose him first in the NHL draft, and he led them to two Stanley Cups, coming back from cancer treatment and serious injuries, and later becoming the team's owner. Ville-Émard remains proud of the boy who learned to skate in his family's snow-packed hallway.”

Sources: ebsco.com espn.com nhl.com Wikipedia: Mario Lemieux