As we count down these last eight games of the 2024-25 regular season – the 50th season of Capitals hockey – and as we get ready to celebrate the end of Alex Ovechkin’s chase of Wayne Gretzky’s goal mark this past weekend, we’re going to share a personal memory of these last 20 years with the Gr8 Eight every game day until season’s end.
Today, we keep it local, turning the clock back to a beautiful late summer day in 2007, and a different kind of Ovechkin celebration, a service project to commemorate his 22nd birthday. Days after the opening of Caps training camp in 2007, and a day after Ovechkin turned 22, he and a handful of teammates pitched in to help beautify a local junior high campus, and the afternoon concluded with Ovechkin eating his cake, and wearing it, too.
Seeing the swarm of 895 grade school kids who came out to Caps’ practice Wednesday to celebrate Alex Ovechkin’s unforgettable record-breaking weekend reminded me of busy stretch and a fun birthday celebration with some slightly older kids long ago, very early in his career and early in Washington’s 2007 training camp.
The Caps opened their 2007 preseason slate with a Sunday game against the Hurricanes in Carolina, Sept. 16, 2007, a game in which Nicklas Backstrom made his Caps preseason debut; Backstrom skated on a line with Tomas Fleischmann and Francois Bouchard that day he first pulled on the Caps’ sweater to face another NHL team, and he scored on a second-period power play in what was a 4-3 Caps loss.
Ovechkin celebrated his 22nd birthday the next day on Monday, Sept. 17, 2007, on the same night many of his teammates accepted an invitation from the Washington Nationals to come out to the ballpark early, take batting practice and shag some flies in the outfield.
The same opportunity was extended a year earlier, in 2006, and Caps defenseman Jamie Heward made it a memorable visit when he jacked one over the wall during batting practice. Ovechkin came along on that night in late September of 2006; he took batting practice and threw out the game’s ceremonial first pitch as well, slinging southpaw from the mound at RFK Stadium.
Five Caps – Chris Clark, Steve Eminger, Matt Pettinger, Tom Poti and Brian Sutherby – went to Nats park for that Sept. 17, 2007 game with the Mets. Baseball Hall of Famer Tom Glavine, who was a fourth-round draft pick of the LA Kings in 1984, and who played one game as a pro with the ECHL Gwinnett Gladiators, was in the latter stages of his own career at the time, and he graciously chatted with the Caps about hockey and posed for some photos with them around the batting cage.
On the day after Ovechkin actually turned 22, he and several teammates took a ride to Shaw Junior High in DC for a service project in honor of Ovechkin’s birthday. The project – a beautification of school grounds – was done in conjunction with Serve DC, part of the executive office of the mayor of Washington, DC.
Ovechkin and a group of teammates – including Sutherby, the only one doing double duty after spending the previous night at the ballpark – pulled on red T-shirts with Ovechkin’s name and number on the back, and with a small logo on the upper left front of the shirt reading, “Alex Ovechkin’s Birthday/Shaw Junior High School/ 2007.”
Along with Ovechkin and Sutherby, were a 19-year-old Backstrom who was still weeks away from making his NHL debut, Matt Bradley, Donald Brashear and Mike Green. Those six Caps, a handful of team staffers – like myself – and a crew of students at SJHS spread out over the school grounds to plant flowers and spread mulch to spruce up the look of the campus.
On a bright, warm and sunny day, dozens of hands of all sizes collaborated to dig and plant, and the students chatted up the players as they worked, asking questions about life as a pro athlete. I remember vividly Ovechkin and Brashear developing a quick rapport with the kids, something I’ve seen countless times since from the Gr8 Eight over the years. But this was when he was essentially still a kid himself; he was still more than a decade away from becoming a father for the first time, and less than a decade older than these kids.
This service project took place during the days of Ovechkin’s fixation on the Dolce & Gabbana brand, so he sported D&G track pants and sandals as he worked the crowd and the soil that afternoon.
As the afternoon wore on, kids lined up to have the players sign their t-shirts. I wonder how many of those kids remembered and thought back to that day when they saw or heard about Ovechkin’s record-breaking weekend a few days back; that September day in 2007 is more than half a lifetime ago for those youngsters now.
Real work was being done, but real conversations were taking place too, and I remembered thinking how cool it must be for these kids to have this opportunity on such a glorious day, and being outside all afternoon on a school day to boot.
Hours after the first shovel hit the dirt, all the plants and flowers were in the ground, and all the mulch had been spread. But before heading back across the river to Arlington, two large birthday cakes were brought out, one featuring Ovechkin’s own likeness emblazoned in icing and piping, and the other featured the Caps’ newly minted red, white and blue logo, which was introduced a few months earlier.
Ovechkin cut those cakes up and began handing out slices to the hard-working horde as they serenaded him with a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday.” One of the students playfully pushed a piece of cake into Ovechkin’s grill, resulting in our photo accompaniment for today’s Gr8 Eight memory.
After Wednesday’s practice, Caps forward Connor McMichael remarked on how big a deal this would have been for him when he was a kid. That drove it all home for me; I had the same feeling that day almost 18 years ago, and I’ve witnessed so many times since the magnetism of Ovechkin.
The bond between Ovechkin and his youngest fans has always been so natural, and that’s even truer now that he has two young boys of his own.
