Zach Boychuk is no stranger to fantasy drafts.
During the hockey season, the Carolina Hurricanes/Charlotte Checkers forward would sit with his teammates, scope out the competition of a particular event and try to pick the winner each week.
But this wasn’t for a sporting event. Oh no … it was for The Bachelor, a reality TV dating show that airs most Mondays during the second half of the hockey season.
“There’s lots of drama and I’m sure people would probably find it funny having that many guys watch a show like this, but I guess it’s something to do on a Monday night,” Boychuk said.
This past season, Boychuk’s attention to the series spanned further to The Bachelorette, which airs during the summer. There, he noticed a former hockey player named JJ Lane who was trying to win the heart of Canada’s most eligible single, Kaitlyn Bristowe.
JJ brought up this hockey love to Kailtyn upon their first meeting, saying he wanted to ‘puck’ her. And he kept up his hockey persona throughout the season and into Bachelor in Paradise, the last show of this romance series for the year.
Boychuk and Lane struck up a friendship on Twitter, sometimes direct message each other.
“I think he seems like a pretty decent guy and reminds me of my hockey playing buddies,” Boychuk said.
He’s not the only hockey player who has come in touch with Lane. Eric Tangradi also follows Lane on Twitter. Granted, it’s not like Boychuk and Tangradi are P.K. Subban and Roberto Luongo – superstars with tremendous online social media personalities – but quickly getting the attention of two NHL players through a stint on a reality TV dating show is quite impressive.
“I’m not in this for all the hot girls tweeting at me. I just want these pro hockey players I’ve looked up to to acknowledge my existence,” Lane said jokingly. “So Zach Boychuk reached out to me and followed me and favorited one of my tweets. So I was like, ‘OK, I finally made it!’”
We chatted and joked with the 32-year-old Denver area investment banker about his hockey story, Claude Lemieux playing in the Avalanche/Red Wings Stadium Series alumni game, whether the sport helped in his wooing of Bristowe (Spoiler: it didn’t, though he did make it to Week 7) and of course … which hockey player would make the best Bachelor.
Sadly, nobody at ABC listened to our list from earlier in the year. The network picked Ben Higgins. For shame!
Editor’s note: Yahoo has pretty extensive coverage of the series. Check it out here. Show host Chris Harrison writes a blog for us here.
Bachelor in Paradise airs Sunday and Monday on ABC.
Q: So, what did you think of our list of NHL players who made make awesome Bachelors?
LANE: The name that stood out to me that would probably be the most entertaining to watch would be Tyler Seguin. Unfortunately I think Seguin is a little too similar to me. Women of America love the Ben Zs, the Ben Hs, the Jareds, the ‘Cupcakes’ and all those guys from my season on The Bachelorette. They’re all lovable. They don’t have any edge to them let alone sleeve tattoos. Sidney Crosby would be blameless. Nobody would find fault with Crosby. I’d pay to watch Seguin, he’d be fun to watch as The Bachelor.
What would you think of Phil Kessel?
Had Nick Viall not decided to start training his ass off and doing abs and getting all ripped like he recently has. He and Kessel remind me of each other. I don’t know why. There’s like a weird connotation I see between them, but I think Kessel … he’s the everyday man. He has kind of a dad bod, but somehow still scores 40 goals.
You know JJ, Ovi was our No. 1
But he would be like Juan Pablo. Nobody would understand what he says. He may make insensitive comments to the women because of cultural differences, and it would be a huge gong show but would be entertaining.
Paul Bissonnette, would need his own show. I don’t think The Bachelor would be a good outlet for him. If he does get his own show I just hope I could cameo in that because it would be amazing.
It would be like Entourage, hockey/The Bachelor style
Yes! Yes! Sign me up! Where can we finance this and get this thing going. Wouldn’t TSN want to broadcast something like that?
So you say you’re a hockey fan, what’s your hockey story?
I didn’t start until later in life. We had the Denver Grizzlies and the Colorado Avalanche came to town shortly after. I was a baseball player up until that time and then really picked up hockey when I was 14 or 15 years old and was obsessed with it. I played in Syracuse and Binghamton in juniors. I got hurt, and missed my last year of junior eligibility and that was all she wrote for it. It was a quick, kind of competitive career, which sucked. But I matriculated into beer league rather nicely and found kind of a nice home in the beer leagues around Denver. It sucks, but at the same time it’s just a passion whether it’s playing or watching, just kind of the hockey culture. It has been my life since I was 15, so like 17 years, obviously. I wish I had started much younger. I started my daughter on skates at 18 months. That’s the difference, I wish I’d had that opportunity. Hockey had never been my face until 1995.
I started with roller hockey. My parents didn’t want me to play ice hockey, so I paid for myself. I had a lawn mowing business paying for my league season, and ended up taking to the sport rather quickly. I played club level here in Denver in midgets and then did the whole tryout circuit, which in the early 2000s or late 90s, it wasn’t the same scene, at least in the States here in Denver. We had to go out of state to find the tryout program stuff. Now with all the rinks here, my friend’s kids who are 14 and 15, hockey in Denver has changed so dramatically. Even with the Triple-A teams and junior scouting programs that they have coming through the town … Denver hockey scene has changed insanely since I was back in high school.
What junior teams in Binghamton and Syracuse?
The Binghamton Tornadoes and then a cup of coffee with the Syracuse Crunch.
Wow, you played at a decently high level?
Yeah, literally lasted one week in Syracuse, like I tore my hip flexor and that was it.
Do you have any glory stories? Did you score on anyone awesome or deke out anyone cool?
No, sadly no. My glory story comes from my best buddy who lived in the Cul-de-Sac with me. He played at college hockey at Colorado College. He also played against Sidney Crosby when Crosby was at Shattuck St. Mary’s. His glory story was ‘I stopped Crosby on two breakaways … but he had five goals that game.’
Has any hockey player ever tweeted at you that caught you off guard?
I’m not in this for all the hot girls tweeting at me. I just want these pro hockey players I’ve looked up to to acknowledge my existence, so Zach Boychuk reached out to me and followed me and favorited one of my tweets. So I was like ‘OK, I finally made it!’ All of the drama was finally worth it!
Mike Reilly reached out to me.
Eric Tangradi followed me. It would be like a random one would pop up and it would be like, ‘These guys are normal guys.’ I feel bad they’re wasting their time watching me on TV, but if hopefully I’m entertaining them.
Are there any hockey haters?
Not a single one of the hockey guys, or anyone who appreciates hockey or appreciates me for having played hockey or been a fan of hockey has not been negative on any level. It has been only positive stuff. I’m very thankful for that. The hate usually comes … we sign up for this show and we’re on display for everyone to form snap judgments love or hate. It brings a lot of emotions out of people. Nobody that tweets at me negatively affects me at all. I’m more shocked you took time to find my Twitter account than type something mean up. It doesn’t bother me at all. It would bother me if one of the people I looked up to said something. Then I’d be upset.
Did being a hockey player help or hurt your ability to woo Kaitlyn Bristowe?
Yeah, it’s funny, so when I went on the show we didn’t know who The Bachelorette would be. So, I was already basically committed and fully in, and found out with the rest of America who The Bachelorette would be. So I was like, ‘All right, we’re all in.’ Knowing it was Kaitlyn I had some form of a head start because we have a commonality that we share. I heard her ex-boyfriend had played hockey. So I was like, ‘OK, at least she knows this mentality. She grew up watching it. Her dad is probably a fan.’ I went in fairly confident. My limo move was based around giving her a puck and going, ‘I’d love to puck you.’ I learned pretty quick that was going to get me so far and kind of … there had to be other tangible relationship qualities we shared. It only helped a little bit.
It never even led to talking about it. When we’re in this situation, there are so many other guys talking to her, the amount of uninterrupted conversation you have with her is very minimal, and so you have to really focus on important details. You’re trying to get to know this person, so you’re trying to ask without being too over the top. There were a lot of important questions. With me it was, ‘Are you interested in stepping into a relationship where there’s already a kid involved and an ex-wife?’ We gravitated towards that more. Kaitlyn was awesome and always asked about my daughter. The conversation went down that direction as opposed to hockey.
No hockey with her? Really?
Once I did talk hockey with her. We were talking about the Oilers in Ireland on an island where I eventually got sent home.
About 15 minutes later she sent my ass home. So it didn’t help me.
I know fights don’t happen super often on the show, but I think Joe (Bailey) was really scared of you in Bachelor in Paradise. Do you think he was afraid you would pull his shirt over his head and start punching him? And would that have been your preferred method if you had to fight him?
What people don’t really get was that I had a secondary sunburn on my head and my shoulders. I had just put some cream on and I was in so much pain from the sunburn, then all of a sudden the Joe thing happened. I was already irritated and I just wanted something to happen at that stage. I was like, ‘Please make the first move, say something to insult my daughter or my mom.’ I was kind of looking for it but wasn’t obviously going to throw the first punch.
I’m lucky enough to play in a men’s league in Denver that’s not regulated at all and they kind of let us get away with everything, so we had a lot of fights, especially for a men’s league. I enjoy it. It’s fun to have that side of it, especially being in finance and a corporate conservative life. It’s fun to get outside of yourself. I was looking forward to it and Joe knew that and Joe wanted nothing to do with it.
You didn’t have any foil on you sadly …
I didn’t foil up. It was a situation where he would have had to literally knock me unconscious with the first punch, or … Joe knows. I joke I have a dad bod. Joe is the epitome of dad bod. I don’t think he’s seen the inside of a gym or a squat rack in five years.
So I imagine you’re a pretty big Colorado Avalanche fan?
Die hard Avs fans, yes.
Were they your first favorite team? How did you transition into being an Avs fan in the mid-90s?
I probably first watched hockey in 1994, so right before the Grizzlies came to play in Denver. I was a big fan of Pavel Bure, Patrick Roy and Sergei Fedorov were my favorite players. Before the rivalry happened between the Avs and Red Wings, I was obsessed with Fedorov and his Nike skates. I had the Nike skates. Right now I wish I had the white Nike Fedorov skates. That would be amazing. Those were the players I followed. It was hard to fully relate to a team, but you would collect cards and hope ESPN would show one game per-week of one of those guys.
So you had to suddenly hate Detroit when the Avs moved to Denver?
Yeah, after the whole 1996 playoffs and Claude Lemieux/Kris Draper thing, yeah I could never, ever like a Red Wings player again in my life. That got real, real fast.
Would you shake Claude Lemieux’s hand?
Oh yeah, Dino Ciccarelli … what a great line, right? I don’t take a lot of pride in the Lemieux hit necessarily. That is what it is. I wasn’t pumped about that necessarily, but being able to grow up watching that rivalry was very formative. The cheapest hit of all of them was Slava Kozlov on Adam Foote when he threw his head straight into the glass and Foote started bleeding out of the forehead. That was intent to injure there. I don’t think you really expected to have the Draper situation happen the way it did.
If Lemieux plays in the Avs/Red Wings Stadium Series alumni game, how do you think that will play out?
Well, the bigger question is will (Darren) McCarty get time off from the pawnshop he’s working at so he can play in the alumni game?
Whoa! Shots fired!
At this stage of the game they almost need to just script it out, all shake hands in the locker room and be like, ‘Boys let’s give them what they want’ and go out there with one last hurrah, because we know we’re not going to see a rivalry like that in the NHL again.
John Grahame (former NHL goaltender) works with you at your company Capital Hour. How did that come about?
First of all, I want to say something about John Grahame. He was a goalie in his career, but he skated out a few times on our team, and he has the hardest shot I have ever seen in person. He’s like 250 pounds right now, but he puts all of it in these shots. He can just crank it from the top of the circle in the men’s league. I love him to death. Watch out if he has the puck real close to the net, he’s probably slapping it. Working with him has been good. I worked with St. Charles Capital, which is an investment bank in Denver. He popped up on my Linkedin account and I was like, ‘No way!’ His father worked at University of Denver in town and was my best friend’s goaltending coach. So I knew his dad growing up a little bit. We all knew of John Grahame, but he had left the state well before we all got to know him. So I reached out and was like, ‘Hey man, seeing if you’re doing something working in the business world, want to grab coffee?’ So we met and it has been a mutually beneficial relationship for my industry and making network connections for him and vice-versa. He sits on the board of a company I run in town. He’s amazing. He can open any door here in Denver. I think the Grahames between his mom, his dad and him are kind of the first family of hockey in Denver.
He’s a great guy to know here in hockey circles.
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Josh Cooper is an editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @joshuacooper
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