Boldy's mom serving up smiles during Wild forward's rise to NHL stardom

MANSFIELD, Mass. -- The building is dark and low-slung, the usual neon beer signs in its windows, the word open colored red, white and blue. The billboard-like sign advertises pizza and keno, Lunch, Dinner, and Late Night! Around the U-shaped bar sit a handful of regulars on this Thursday afternoon, one of the first spring-like days to hit Massachusetts.

It was here that Jenn Weir traveled back the night of Feb. 26, directly from Logan Airport, after her flight finally touched down after what had been a longest and most exhilarating and most unusual vacation.

Weir, as a rule, doesn’t take many vacations. She has three jobs: bartending and managing here, at the Catman Café in Mansfield, Massachusetts, bartending and serving at TKO Shea’s Sports Café in Rockland, plus shifts at Strawberry Fair Restaurant in Norwell.

But this was an exception. Her son, after all, was playing in the 2026 Winter Olympics.

She was gone for 20 days, seeing him each night as he would bicycle over to their hotel for a 30-minute hello. That included a diversion to Miami on the Team USA plane after it was decided that an Elbo Room stop was a must, and a mad search to find a plane that would return her to Massachusetts. But while she was in Milan, cheering on Matt Boldy and the rest of the team, she knew what was happening back home.

Catman Café, where Weir has worked for 29 years -- “This is my third owner, I think I come with the building,” she quipped -- had become a hub for Team USA watch parties, a celebration of what Team USA was accomplishing, but also a celebration of Boldy, who scored a highlight-reel goal in the USA-Canada final when the USA took gold.

Matt Boldy’s Minnesota Wild jersey, among other memorabilia, on the wall at Catman Café.

As the Stanley Cup Playoffs round into full swing, the TVs at the Catman Café will once again be tuned to the Minnesota Wild games, sometimes alongside the Boston Bruins, sometimes not, in a bar that boasts a Boldy stick, a Boldy Wild jersey -- complete with Hawaiian lei wrapped around the frame -- and a mother who’s a fixture behind the bar.

Just as Team USA was fighting the narrative of never being able to get over the hump, so too are the Wild, who are tied in their Western Conference First Round series against the Dallas Stars, with Game 3 set for Wednesday at Grand Casino Arena (9:30 p.m. ET; HBO MAX, FDSNWI, FDSNNO, Victory+, truTV, TNT, SN360, TVAS). The Wild have not made it out of the first round since long before Boldy arrived, since they won a round against the St. Louis Blues back in 2015.

Boldy would be picked four years later, selected No. 12 in the 2019 NHL Draft. And though he is seventh in games played in that group, with 361, he is second in points (329) and third in goals (144), including the 42 he has scored (along with 43 assists, for 85 points) in a breakout 2025-26 season.

“I think there’s a deep belief in him -- and a justified one -- that he can be one of the top five or 10 players in the world and have that credibility,” said John Wroblewski, the coach of the gold medal-winning women’s team at the Olympics and Boldy’s coach at the U.S. National Team Development Program. “I think you’re seeing it; it’s getting validated with some of the things that are going on on the scoresheet this year.”

So how much better can he get?

“I’m 25 years old,” Boldy said. “I don’t even think I can see the ceiling yet.”

* * * *

Wroblewski couldn’t help but laugh.

He was in the stands at the men’s gold medal final, watching as Team USA and Team Canada battled it out. And so he was there, live, when Boldy made that move, scored that goal, all of which were amusingly familiar to him.

Matt Boldy splits Cale Makar and Devon Toews and then beats Jordan Binnington to give Team USA the lead in the gold medal game in Milan in February.

“It brought me out of my seat for a second and then I just sat down and had a little chuckle because it’s the same thing that I’ve seen for now a decade and he gets to do it in front of the world,” Wroblewski said, alluding to Boldy’s lifting of the puck, effectively passing to himself to split two Canada defensemen Cale Makar and Devon Toews.

The coach ran into Boldy’s father, Todd, after the second period. The two shared another laugh, a hug, an understanding that before them was the same 15-year-old kid that Wroblewski had first come across at the selection camp for the U.S. National Team Development Program back in 2017-18.

The same player making the same plays. Only the stage was different.

“Hey, we’ve seen that before, huh?” Wroblewski said to Todd Boldy.

He thought back to when he first laid eyes on Boldy, on the undersized, overshadowed kid out of Millis, Massachusetts, a kid who was not Jack Hughes, who was not Trevor Zegras, who was not Alex Turcotte, who was not really supposed to make the team, but who did anyway.

“He was probably only 150 pounds, he was like 5-10, 150 pounds at that camp,” Wroblewski said. “He was lanky, but he was so slippery. He was elusive. Like, you couldn’t put a body on the guy.

“And then he was doing all of these things, like that goal that you saw at the Olympics, when he carves through two defensemen while juggling the puck, he was doing all that stuff back at 15, 16. The things he could do to maintain puck possession, it was transcending all rules of the game at that time.”

Boldy had come in as a “tweener,” on the outside looking in, as an unknown commodity.

He wouldn’t be for long.

He would become a player that Wroblewski likened to Marian Hossa, a player with attributes prized at NTDP and later in the NHL, reliable, dependable, consistent, a player with little risk in his game, and a defensive sense that Wroblewski believes may someday win him a Selke Trophy as the best defensive forward in the NHL.

“He’ll always have a little bit of that chip on his shoulder, a little bit of an underdog mentality and that’s what’s going to keep him going,” Wroblewski said. “That’s part of his superstar component. And his secret sauce is his inner drive.”

But there was something else Wroblewski gave him, something that Boldy called back to in that biggest of moments. Because it was Wroblewski who taught him that, as Boldy said, “you can play with the puck in the air a little more, it’s a little harder to defend.”

It’s something Makar and Toews will likely never forget. 

* * * *

And yet, none of this is enough for Boldy.

Not the goal in the Olympic final. Not the gold medal.

“I feel like the longer you play, the more responsibility you want and the more of a difference you want to make,” he said. “When I first started playing and I was 20, you look up and you see  and Jared Spurgeon and all these guys that are so good and dominate games and make such a big difference, it seems so far away. But the more you play, the more it kind of seems (like) reality.”

“For me, I’m competitive and I don’t want to waste my opportunity that I get, I think. That’s the biggest thing. I want to be the best player. I want to have the puck. I want to make a difference. I want to help our team win, that’s the biggest thing for me.”

They all do.

Matt Boldy helped the Wild take Game 1 of the Western Conference First Round with two goals on Saturday.

After years of disappointment in the playoffs, including missing them entirely in 2023-24, the Wild are ready for an extended run, for a chance to prove themselves.

That includes Boldy, who seems to be just hitting his stride, including two goals in Game 1 against the Stars. Though, he believes, he’s far from where he can and will go, and that is especially true for his ability to seize his chances. It was evident in that gold medal game, evident again in Game 1.

“It’s kind of how my parents raised me and all my siblings: You’re going to get opportunities. It depends on what you do with it,” Boldy said. “And I think that’s the biggest thing, like don’t let the stage be too big for yourself. Be confident in yourself and let your game speak for everything.”

He hasn’t yet, especially this season.

“You never want to sit there and put limits on what you’re capable of, and I think that’s my mindset more than anything,” Boldy said. “I want to be a difference-maker and a superstar in this League and you see these guys that do it and that are and I think there’s a lot of areas in my game that can get better, whether that’s scoring more goals, making more plays, better on the power play, penalty kill, the whole thing.

“So, no, I don’t really see myself as having a ceiling.”

John Hynes, the Wild coach, ticks off the ways in which Boldy impacts their team, the competitiveness, the offensive abilities, the work he does on both sides of the puck, the steadiness of his details.

And yet, Wroblewski believes, people still don’t quite register Boldy on the level they should. 

“As good as he is, I still think he’s underrated on the League radar,” Wroblewski said. “He’s so dangerous from the perimeter. His one-timer and his release are exceptional, as good as they can get. And then he’s got that massive frame and the hands in tight. It’s such a unique combination.”

* * * *

The bar at Catman Café was crowded on that early February morning, the 22nd, after opening at 8 a.m. There were eggs and beer and USA jerseys, regulars and hockey fans, standing shoulder to shoulder between the bar and the red-cushioned booths, red-white-and-blue ballons hanging above.

They were there to watch the United States beat Canada, of course.

Matt Boldy with his mom and dad in Milan after Team USA won the gold medal over Team Canada.

But they were also there for Weir, for Boldy, for one of their own.

“They’ve watched him turn pro,” she said. “All the ups and downs.”

Weir wasn’t there. She was in the stands in Santagiulia Arena, wearing a Boldy No. 12 jersey in a sea of Canadian red. But she knew what her coworkers had done for her, led by Tiara Martin, who organized the watch party, who made the fliers, who decorated the restaurant and who, on this day in April, is wearing a Wild hat as she walks by.

It was, in so many ways, a tribute to her, to what she’s meant to this place.

Weir had wound up at the Catman, then owned by a friend of hers, when she was pregnant with Matt’s older brother, Mike. Her previous employer didn’t want a pregnant bartender, so she moved here, though they made “hardly any money” at the beginning.

She never left.

“I’ve worked here for like 29 years,” said Weir, who works behind the bar two days a week and manages the rest of the time. “Everyone knows me. When (the kids) were younger, it was a lot. But I always worked here because it was such a nice job because I didn’t miss a lot of their time. You know what I mean? I was exhausted, I don’t remember a lot of it, but there’s time to sleep when you’re dead.”

It has come far enough that the watch parties were packed, regulars and not. Far enough -- and popular enough -- that when Weir finally returned from Italy, she had a request.

She asked for, and received, a raise.

* * * *

This has been a magical year for Weir, for Boldy, for the Wild, the winners in the Quinn Hughes sweepstakes, when they traded for the Vancouver Canucks star defenseman on Dec. 12.

It’s a run they hope will continue in the playoffs, where they are more than ready to win a series, to make it beyond the first round, to change the narrative.

“That’s the story everyone’s got for us,” Boldy said. “That’s not the story that we’re living with. We’ve played some great teams, we’ve played some great series, and haven’t made it out. It is what it is. We need to turn that page and I think it starts in our locker room and our mindset going into it that those pressures aren’t going to get to us.

“We’re going to go and play our best hockey and let our game speak for ourselves. And whatever happens, happens.”

And when they next take the ice, for Game 3, at home in front of their own fans, with Boldy and his Wild teammates hoping they can prove that they can come up big in the biggest of moments, Weir might just be behind the bar of the Catman Café.

She’ll look around then, use her practiced eye on the patrons sitting in front of her, those she knows and those she doesn’t, and maybe – likely – she’ll flip the TV to the game, the Wild and Boldy coming to life on the screen in front of her.

Maybe they’ll win.

It’s hard to even imagine what it would be like if the Wild can advance, if they can challenge for the Stanley Cup, if the high that Weir has been on since February could continue.

“I swear I have not stopped smiling,” Weir said. “I can’t ever remember a time in my life that I was so happy.”

Top photo: Jenn Weir with a collage of photos of her son, Minnesota Wild and Team USA star, Matt Boldy.