I will declare my interest up front. I love Michel Laplante.
He’s my nephew’s godfather, I played hockey with him for a long time (I tried), he gave me pitching lessons when I was 14 and he became a friend. For his departure from Les Capitales, I decided to release nine (like his number) stories which will allow you to better understand this phenomenon or this “superhero”, as many of those close to him like to call him.
I witnessed some of his anecdotes, but, otherwise, I asked his friends, players and ex-teammates Jean-Philippe Roy, David Glaude, Charles Demers, Steve Jobidon, Patrick Scalabrini and Olivier Lépine to tell me help.
The time he wanted to do Capi after the helicopter crash
On September 4, 2016, Laplante and his friends Frédéric Décoste and Bob Bissonnette were victims of a helicopter crash. Michel was the only survivor. Three days later, the Capitals began their series at home and paid tribute to the two victims. But there was no way Michel Laplante was going to miss this evening.
However, he didn’t want anyone to know he was there to avoid distracting attention. Obviously, hospital staff in New Brunswick, where the accident occurred, were against the idea. It was too dangerous for his health. Michel Laplante was still in bad shape. But no, he decided to sign a waiver, leave and get in a car for six hours to be present.
His idea was to wear the Capi costume, which the Capitals doctor forbade him due to the risk of infection in his numerous wounds. Michel therefore got into a vehicle with tinted windows which circulated on the field before the match as a promotional vehicle for the sponsor, the JD Group. No one knew except a few relatives.
The one-man band of Capitals
It was much more than the president of the Capitals, Michel Laplante. It was he who watered the flowers on the terrace, who sometimes poured the beer for the customers, who cleared the snow in winter, who emptied the trash cans, who put up the seat number stickers at the beginning of the year, who installed the sponsor signs, who was the sound technician during the matches, who ensured the safety of children in the inflatable games and who, after each match, greeted each fan as they exited. He wasn’t doing this alone. But that’s one of the tasks you could see him doing during a match.
The annoying athlete
It’s annoying to see Michel Laplante in all sports. Because he is good at everything and he will do everything to beat you at everything. In tennis, he was an exceptional talent. You will talk about it to Maria Sharapova, who was surprised to see him return several balls to her in 2003 as part of the Coupe Banque Nationale du Québec. Or when he started playing volleyball for fun and within a few weeks, the Rouge et Or of Laval University wanted to recruit him. Or when he became one of the most dominant pitchers in his draft with the Pirates in 1992 before getting injured and making his way to the major leagues. And he had been playing organized baseball for three years.
In golf, he doesn’t play par often, but he will play par the one time you tell him he can’t play par. And he started playing the piano and playing the guitar and singing…and he’s doing well at it. It’s almost frustrating. The late Bob Bissonnette would have a lot to say on this point. At Laplante’s “bachelor” party in 2016, Bob had to beat Michel at bowling, but the latter had to play with his bad hand with an oven mitt. Bob lost…
The doggie who symbolizes that everything is possible
We are in the early 90s. Michel and his wife, Francine, are in their early twenties and arrive in Florida while Michel is playing in the Bradenton area, near Tampa Bay, with the Pittsburgh Pirates organization. One evening, the two go to a small amusement park and Francine falls in love with Snowy, Tintin’s dog. But it’s a doggy about a meter tall. To win it, Michel must throw a ball into a shark’s mouth. He doesn’t speak much English, so he’s not sure he understands and he wonders if it’s not more like 20 balls in a row that he has to throw. But no, it’s $2, a ball, and if he succeeds, the dog is his. He takes the ball, puts it directly into the shark’s mouth and Francine to her dog. In his beautiful naivety, Michel explains to the game employee that he should not give away his doggies like that so easily and the employee replies that it is the first time that he has given a doggie, that he This is an optical illusion and there is almost no chance of success. Big Snowy stayed with Francine and Michel for many years. For the couple, it meant that we must not back down from the impossible, Michel told me.
The first meeting between Lépine and Laplante
One of Michel Laplante’s best friends is former receiver Olivier Lépine, with whom he formed a formidable duo. Their first meeting was in 1999. Lépine is very young. He is 20 years old. He arrives from the Charlesbourg Alouettes and doesn’t really know this very good, but a little strange, pitcher: Michel Laplante.
A star hitter in the league comes up to bat, his name was Ryan Kane. Michel goes to see Olivier and he says to him: “I’m going to throw a slider right in the middle and he’s going to let it pass, then a slider on the ground, and he’s going to take off. It’s going to be zero balls, two strikes and I’m going to throw a quick one inside to knock him off home plate and then another sliding one to the ground and he’s going to run into the butter. Make sure you block the last slippery one,” Olivier told me. This is exactly what happened. It’s been 25 years and Lépine still tells me this with an astonished look.
Not just a little funny
Michel Laplante doesn’t really have any limits when he wants to make people laugh or when he decides to play tricks. To help a player who was trying to please a spectator, he already went to tell the lady that the player was really one of the most popular on his team, because he was going to buy Mr. Freeze for the whole team when he was too hot. Or he has already advised a supporter to take the famous shortcut to go from Quebec to Val-d’Or in five hours instead of eight, passing next to a church in La Tuque. A shortcut which, obviously, does not exist. But this fan believed him, lost a lot of time and came back to the stadium to tell him that he had never found him.
We can also talk about the time when he told fans that the Videotron Center had been designed to stretch over the summer to transform into a baseball stadium for the Capitals. This joke turned into a rumor, so much so that several Remparts fans contacted the Capitals to find out if their hockey subscription could also be used for baseball.
He also liked to play “thick” in his early days in professional baseball to caricature his Abitibi character. He asked his coach the first time he flew if he was going to see the Canada-US border line from the sky. Or he would scream every time a ball was hit because he was afraid the ball would hit a plane when he played in Orlando near the airport. Many people in the North American baseball world know him for his hilarious side.
The craziest project
Michel Laplante brought Éric Gagné, the Cubans, the championships… but his greatest success or legacy is the synthetic field and the dome which is used during the winter at the Canac stadium. Before this project, the stadium was used exclusively for the Capitales and the Quebec Diamonds. Today, the Capitals use the field 13% of the time. Otherwise, it’s minor baseball, sports studies, soccer, frisbee, etc. This project, which had never been seen elsewhere in Quebec, made it possible to use the stadium all year round, but also, and above all, to justify public investments for the stadium.
The City was no longer just going to help the Capitals by injecting money into the stadium, it was now doing it for the entire amateur sports community. And it snowballed. This made it possible to give the stadium to the population who, in return, began to fill the Canac stadium for the Capitals match. This whole vision is Michel Laplante. The project almost never saw the light of day, because everything had to be signed a few days after his helicopter accident. From his hospital bed, Michel Laplante contacted the stakeholders to tell them that he was not going to abandon this project.
Everyone’s boyfriend
The Wayne Gretzky of baseball in Cuba is Lourdes Gurriel Sr. He is one of the country’s most decorated players since the revolution. He’s a hero there. He is also the father of two major league baseball players. When Michel Laplante achieved the diplomatic miracle of having Cubans play in Quebec, he was so successful in having a good relationship with Lourdes that he even slept at his house and became her boyfriend. We can talk about Felipe Alou too. If you have already come across the former manager of the Expos in Old Quebec with his fishing rod, you have not dreamed, it is because he was returning from a fishing trip with Michel Laplante and liked that we leaves him far enough from his hotel to walk.
Not like the others
As a journalist, if you thought you could find a good story before a Capitals game when he was manager; good luck! “It didn’t make any sense. He talked about anything. He called one of his friends from Val-d’Or who was able to say sentences backwards instead of talking to us about baseball. We came out of there and scratched our heads,” my colleague Stéphane Cadorette, who covered the team when Laplante was manager, told me. Jean-Philippe Roy was an assistant coach with Laplante and he is adding more. “At one point he said to me, ‘Look, I’m going to go to the pitcher, but I’m going to keep him in the game and everyone is going to boo me. But it doesn’t matter, I want this pitcher to feel that I have confidence in him.” He went to see the pitcher and people started shouting to boo him. It just shows how much he put others before himself and defended his world.”
Patrick Scalabrini has also long witnessed his particular approach. “You have no idea what he could say to a player, whether it was true or not, just to make that player feel invincible and brimming with confidence. And it worked!” Even his vision of the future, without income with the Capitals, exposes how he does not see life like everyone else. He sincerely says he doesn’t have a plan and trusts in life. “I’m going to work at Subway if I have to and I’m going to be happy! In the sense that I don’t see anything as a sub-job.” You can be sure that there will be several chasing him.