Chara’s drive to do ‘whatever it takes’ inspired Bruins on way to Hall of Fame

The 2025 Hockey Hall of Fame induction is Nov. 10. This year’s class includes Jennifer Botterill, Zdeno Chara, Brianna Decker, Duncan Keith, Alexander Mogilny and Joe Thornton in the Players category, and Jack Parker and Daniele Sauvageau in the Builders category. Here, NHL.com senior writer Amalie Benjamin profiles Chara.

BOSTON -- It was dark that evening, outside and in, as Zdeno Chara entered the rink, a single spotlight illuminating the ice surface. A friend, a Zamboni maintenance worker, had let Chara and his father, Zdenek, in the building, a local rink near where the family lived in Trencin, then part of Czechoslovakia.

Hockey players were being recruited and, though the sport had not been a part of the six-and-a-half year old’s life to that point, he was an active kid from an athletic family.

“We went on the ice and that was like my first contact with the ice, and I remember the smell,” Chara said. “It was just a very unique smell of the arena, the ice, and that cold presence. I came home, I was like, that was so cool. I want to do it again.”

It is one of the most unlikely stories in hockey, the way the 6-foot-9 behemoth -- the tallest player to play in the NHL -- fashioned a career based on sheer will and work ethic, the way he created a lasting culture for an Original Six franchise, the way he dominated on defense, playing mind games with himself and his opponents.

As Boston Bruins general manager Don Sweeney put it, “Zdeno built himself into one of the best players that ever played in the National Hockey League, and his personality and his commitment to everything he does, it just speaks for itself.”

Chara played 24 seasons in the NHL, covering 1,680 games, the most ever for a defenseman and seventh-most all time, playing for the New York Islanders, Ottawa Senators, Boston Bruins and Washington Capitals, amassing 680 points (209 goals, 471 assists) while averaging 23:30 on ice.

He was a towering figure, known for his strength, his fierce competitiveness, his smarts and his leadership, in a career in which he won the 2009 Norris Trophy as the best defenseman in the NHL, the 2011 Mark Messier Leadership Award, and took the Bruins to the Stanley Cup Final three times, lifting the Cup in 2011. Now, he has reached the Hockey Hall of Fame.

But it started in that rink, when the cold and the smell and the idea of what hockey could be first took hold of him.

“That was what got me,” Chara said. “I got hooked.”

* * * *

There is no question that Chara was blessed with certain gifts, starting with his frame and wingspan, his athleticism, but it is also true that the defenseman was among the hardest workers in NHL history, a player routinely kicked out of gyms and arenas, a player who coach Claude Julien once had to sit down and order to relax, a player whose mind was perhaps his greatest weapon, but also a player whose success was far from a given.

“No one could see that he would be a Norris Trophy winner and a Hall of Famer,” said Rick Bowness, who coached Chara in his rookie season with the New York Islanders in 1997-98. “Everybody talked about his [lack of] foot speed. Well, he was 6-foot-9. You couldn’t get around him regardless of foot speed. The reach and the strength of the man was incredible, so I never worried about those things, I just knew he would do everything in his power to keep getting better -- and he did.”

That was his superpower.

“I think that my will and work ethic is my talent,” Chara said. “… I was willing, no matter what, to do whatever it took, and I would never stop my training, workouts, and took them to the extreme [so] that I knew that I was outworking everybody in my age group or anywhere. I just knew.”

It started early. When Chara was 11, in 1988, his father -- who competed in the 1976 Olympics for Czechoslovakia as a wrestler – woke him up one morning to watch the Games in Seoul. He turned on the 100-meter sprint and encouraged his son to note that at the 60 or 70-meter mark, the best sprinters in the world would be neck and neck.

It was only in the last 30 meters, his father said, that a select few would go “beyond the pain.”

As Chara watched, rapt, that was exactly what happened. He saw the sprinters pushing through the discomfort, through that threshold, saw them ignoring what might hold others back.

He vowed to do the same.

“Everything I’ve done in my career, it was always by being really self-disciplined and driven and accepting that it’s going to take some time and you’ve just got to stay patient and be consistent, but in a way I really loved it,” he said. “I loved the hard work and the grind.”

He would play tricks on himself, mind games, envisioning an invisible person next to him in the gym, on the ice, someone who was better, someone willing to do more, to work harder.

He would chase that ghost.

It wasn’t always healthy.

At one point, early on in their tenure together, Julien sat him down on the road and cautioned him: He was great. He was going to win the Norris Trophy. But he needed to slow down.

“He was working his butt off, but to the point where I ended up having to tell him that he was probably trying to do too much, he was trying to do everybody’s job,” Julien said. “If you look back at his first year, as good of a leader as he was, he wasn’t getting the results that he wanted.”

He was always on the edge, creating that competition within himself, ever able to calm down, never able to relax.

It was a weakness. It was also his greatest strength.

“If you look at him, he wasn’t the smoothest skater, he wasn’t the prettiest stickhandler, so everything he had he had to work for,” former defense partner Dennis Seidenberg said. “That was his mentality. … That’s what made him so strong, his attitude and the will to win every game, every battle. I think that’s why he made it that far.”

That’s because he was never satisfied. Even when he felt he was hitting his prime, it wasn’t enough.

“I was never OK with it, I was never comfortable with it,” Chara said. “I knew I was. I felt I was. But I tried to always hold myself back and tell myself, ‘You can be better.’ It’s a dangerous place to have that self-confidence and not to be aware that everybody else is hunting for you, everybody else is coming.

“That’s how I approached it. I knew I was one of the dominant forces in the League and probably at one point the most dominant defenseman, but I never really let that sink in. I always gave myself a little bit more -- I don’t know how to describe it -- but almost convincing, like you can be better, they’re coming. I always kept saying, you have to be ready.”

* * * *

When Chara signed with the Bruins as a free agent, on July 1, 2006, the team was coming off of a 29-37-16 season, having missed the playoffs. But that day, that summer, would change everything for player and team, with the newly minted captain vowing to lead the franchise into its next phase.

He did exactly that.

As he put it, when asked to sum up his career, “I’m most proud of what I was able to bring to the Boston Bruins.”

That started with the battles. When Chara would walk up to Patrice Bergeron at the start of practice, Bergeron knew what was coming. He knew it wasn’t going to be fun. Not for him, anyway.

“He would come to me and be like, ‘Hey, let’s set the tone today,’” Bergeron recalled, of the legendary 1-on-1 battle drills between the team’s two leaders. “Let’s be honest, that meant I was going to be on my butt for 15 seconds. He would basically torture me.”

The idea traced back to the message that Chara had received upon signing with the Bruins, upon agreeing to become their captain. It was, as Chara put it, “fairly loud and clear that things needed to get better and change for the better. The most common feedback I heard [was] that the intensity and the culture was not there.”

He set out to change that.

And he knew that if that started with him, or better yet, with him and Bergeron, it would make the deepest, most lasting impression. So his message to Bergeron was this: “I said, I’m gonna go hard, I’m gonna battle these drills and I don’t want you to be intimidated, I don’t want you to be scared, I’m just going to be practicing hard and it’s very important to show the way that we’re going to be practicing,” he said.

So that’s what they did.

“He would always come back to the line and be like, ‘Good job,’” Bergeron said. “I’d be like, ‘Good job? What do you mean? You’re the one that destroyed me over there.’”

But it worked.

It created a team that practiced as hard, if not harder, than it played, that took no shortcuts. It created an environment in which Chara’s standards were everyone’s standards.

“He was a really good leader,” Julien said. “Just because he was captain doesn’t mean you’re an automatic leader, but he led so well.

“When you have a captain who is in such great shape, such a hard worker and doesn’t take days off and is always giving 100 percent in practice, you don’t have much of a choice but to follow.”

They played by Chara’s rules. And those battle drills? As Brad Marchand put it, they were “just an all-out war.”

“It would be after a couple of losses or a practice where we really needed to put in the work and lead by example, show that, hey, we’ve got to go back to our details, really taking care of practice what you preach and practice the right way,” Bergeron said. “A lot of it was driven by ‘Zee,’ so Zee always started every drill.

“That was his way of saying, this is my team and follow me.”

* * * *

Chara would lead the Bruins to the Stanley Cup Final three times in his 14 years, producing two of the signature moments of his career. He would lift the Cup in 2011 and, not long after, find himself so weakened that while his Bruins teammates were cracking beers and celebrating with family in the visitor’s dressing room in Vancouver, Chara would stumble into the trainer’s room and be hooked up to an IV, as Julien delayed his speech.

It would happen again, in 2019, as Chara, with his broken jaw wired shut, stood on the ice at TD Garden for introductions before Game 5 of the Final against the St. Louis Blues. His jaw had been shattered in multiple places by a puck in Game 4, had required surgery, but with his body sustained on blended food, Chara would play 16:42 in that game, after one of the longest and loudest ovations in Garden history.

“Even when he was sick, you almost felt like he had to be dead not to be on the ice,” Seidenberg said.

It filtered down.

There was a sense, among his teammates, of not wanting to disappoint him, of wanting to “do right by getting the opportunity,” as Seidenberg put it, to live up to his standards.

“We did have a motto in the locker room, whatever it takes,” Chara said. “That’s what it took.”

It took every ounce of his being, every ounce of strength, every bit of will. It took a steely approach to the game, to training, to diet, to gutting through pain, to fashion a player who started so far behind as a seven-year-old that other kids were stickhandling around him as he clung to the boards into an all-time great.

“I saw firsthand how far he came as a player and the incredible work ethic the man had,” said Bowness, who was an assistant coach on the 2011 Canucks. “… You see very, very few athletes that have the work ethic and drive that ‘Big Zee’ had. I love the man and couldn’t be happier for him.

“You talk about a man who worked his way to become a better player, he did it. He worked hard enough to become a Norris Trophy winner and certainly deserves the Hall of Fame induction, without a doubt.”