Altering opinions

Eagles' Gannon has come long way

PAT GANNON Solid senior season

The pictures, clippings, and other evidence of Pat Gannon's unlikely hockey path from Arlington High to the Boston Junior Bruins to Boston College occupy a special place on the mantel above the living room fireplace in Arlington.

"One of his older brothers, Chris, calls it the 'Altar of Pat,' " said Gannon's father, Tom, a 1961 BC grad and a teammate of BC assistant coach Jim Logue at Malden Catholic. "Chris is always saying we should have to bless ourselves every time we pass by it."

When you are the youngest of five (two sisters, two brothers), you've got to be a little thick-skinned. You become toughened by all the shots, not just to the body, but also to the ego. It's just part of growing up "the runt of the litter," said Tom of Pat, now 23.

You always know your place, partly because your siblings never let you forget it.

"Why are you doing a story on him? I'm the one you need to talk to," said Chris, jokingly, referring to his "uneventful" career as a BC baseball player who graduated in 2001. "But, yeah, my dad's getting old and he's into hanging up pictures of us in random places around the house. He's got a lot of pictures of Pat around the fireplace, and he's even got a huge poster-sized photo of him upstairs.

"If you come over to the house, he'll bring it down and show it to you."

So why does Pat Gannon, a senior winger on BC's hockey team who has tallied more points this season (19; five goals, 14 assists) than his three previous seasons combined (17; nine goals, eight assists) merit such attention?

Perhaps it is because he dismissed all the negative talk from the skeptics who predicted he'd never play for the Eagles. Gannon, who grew up playing with former BC hockey player Ned Havern on Spy Pond and whose home on Hawthorne Avenue became Arlington's own Hub of Hockey, realized his boyhood dream, earning a full scholarship in December after he joined the team as a "recruited" walk-on.

"Arlington, Mass., there's something in the water, maybe," Pat said. "Spy Pond, everybody asks me where Spy Pond is, and I tell them I don't know. We don't drink that water, but we skate on it, that's for sure."

Gannon is part of a BC senior class with 102 victories, the latest in last Saturday's championship game of the Hockey East tournament, a 4-0 shutout over third-seeded Vermont at TD Banknorth Garden. BC's seniors also claimed their first Beanpot championship there in February, with Gannon getting 3 points (one goal, two assists) in a 6-5 overtime triumph against Harvard.

"I used to look up to guys like Brian Gionta and Mike Mottau, and when we'd play on Spy Pond we used to pretend we were those guys," Gannon said. "One of my best friends - Mark Hurley - was a BU guy. He'd be BU and I'd be BC. He played hockey at Arlington High. Every year when BU would win that Beanpot, he'd call me and give me a shot here and there, but I got him back this year, and it felt good. The Beanpot on the Pond I won a couple of times, but it was good to win the real thing."

Gannon may be part of a vanishing breed: the public school player who goes on to play Division 1 hockey.

"When I played in the mid-'60s, our captain [Thomas Apprille], was from Arlington," said BC coach Jerry York. "We even had three players from Arlington on our team, but it's been a great pipeline, ever since Eddie Burns started coaching there. But, yeah, there's still not a lot of public school players who go on to Division 1 now. There's still a few, and you got to make sure that you don't miss them."

It would be easy to overlook Gannon, who is generously listed in BC's hockey media guide as being 5 feet 6 inches, 163 pounds.

While Gannon has never fit the traditional mold, there was no measuring the size of his heart.

"He was never the biggest guy," said Havern, now with the Pittsburgh Penguins' AHL team in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. "Pat was never one the biggest guys, but he never shied away from anything. He never shied away from competition, and maybe it was because of the older brothers he had. They toughened him up.

"I told Coach York there was no risk in recruiting him. He was going to work hard, he was going to be a good teammate, and he's a guy you want on your team," Havern said. "People would always ask me, 'Will Pat be able to play there?' Well, Pat can not only play the game, he thinks the game. He just has a knack for it."

Even York admitted he initially had a tough time seeing past Gannon's physical shortcomings.

"Sometimes when I watch hockey players, they fit everything else," York said. "They've got the height, they've got the weight, they've got great skills, and they look like players. Pat Gannon doesn't remind anyone of those type players, but he's a hockey player.

"A lot of times you get fooled by guys who look like players, where everything's perfect, but they're not hockey players, they're just players. Pat's a hockey player. He knows how to play."

York credits his development to his former Arlington coach, Dick DeCaprio, now Hockey East's head of officials, and Peter Masters, a former BC player (1993-97) who took Gannon under his wing when he played for the Boston Junior Bruins.

"So, he's had some excellent coaching," York said. "He's not that 6-1, 195-pound, terrifically skilled kid, but he's a player and that's what we're trying to get - hockey players. His heart is gigantic. He's got a fabulous work ethic and the little guy just somehow made himself into a player.

"We were fooled by him, too. He came to us strictly as a walk-on player and he was rewarded with a scholarship this past year. He plays valuable minutes for us now."

While he has taken his fair share of shots at his little brother, sparing him no mercy in his critique of Pat's play ("There's no unnecessary stroking around here, just constructive criticism"), Chris Gannon remains proud of his brother and of how far he's come.

"There were people who told Pat, 'Don't go [to BC] because you're not going to play. You won't even dress,' " Chris said. "It must be funny to those people who said that to Pat, to see him play as much as he has."

What? Have the skeptics not come to worship at the Altar of Pat?

"They need to come and repent," Chris said, laughing. "I don't know if he ever used it as motivation or not, but I don't think he would ever use it as revenge or anything like that, because there's not a mean bone in Pat's body. He would never throw it in somebody's face and gloat about it . . . but he doesn't forget."

NCAA hockey
Northeast Regional
Who: Boston College (21-11-8) vs. Minnesota (19-16-9)
When: Saturday, 7:30 p.m.
Where: DCU Center, Worcester
TV: Ch. 38

Michael Vega can be reached at vega@globe.com.