LAS VEGAS — The world-class smile stretching across Adam Klapka’s face looks like that of a man who has just been told the team bus is stopping for ice cream.
It almost never disappears, which is just a small part of why the Calgary Flames winger is the nicest six-foot-eight, 235-pound man you’re ever likely to meet.
However, one of the keys to his longevity in the NHL revolves around knowing when to ditch his charm to make somebody regret wandering into his postal code.
“You just have to be mean,” he said, somewhat unconvincingly.
“I don't like the fights on the streets and this kind of stuff. But somehow, on the ice, I'm able to switch and be mean, kind of. I think it has to be inside you a little bit. If it's not, you just have to find a way how to wake it up inside you because I think everybody inside them can be mean.”
Somewhere, Mr. Rogers just felt a disturbance in the force.
For Klapka, finding that switch has been a work in progress. Picture the challenge of transforming a guy who looks like he’d apologize for stepping on your shadow into somebody who might separate you from your helmet.
So, he's been working on it.
For six or seven years, Klapka has taken boxing lessons. This summer, he stepped things up in Prague, where his coach found him a sparring partner who could match him physically — a former professional MMA fighter who now works with a police SWAT team.
A fellow giant. A professional puncher. A man whose day job involves situations in which being nice is probably not the first priority.
“He was the same size like me, and he knows what he's doing,” explained Klapka.
“He sometimes hit me hard to the head and kind of like get me used to everything. So I was really appreciated to him that he uses free time to spend time with me, and it was awesome. He was a great guy.”
Of course he was.
Only Klapka could describe getting punched in the head by a professionally trained pugilist as a lovely summer experience with a wonderful fellow.
You can almost hear him offering to help the guy move apartments.
The point, however, was serious. Klapka knew that as he climbed the professional hockey ladder, being enormous and being nice could only get him so far. At some point, he had to become a problem for the opposition.
When he was younger, he said, he led teams in scoring. The game was different then. At the professional level, he needed another way to make himself indispensable.
“You’re a big guy, you have to understand that you can be nice until you don't score like 40, 50 goals a season,” said the 26-year-old, whose toe-drag snipe against Colorado last week demonstrated his gifted hands.
“I mean, you have to understand how you can help your team, and sometimes it doesn't work with the hockey, so you have to find out a way to help to win.”
On Tuesday at the Duck Pond, he did both.
After scoring his team-leading second goal of the season, he followed it up with a second-period fight with Jeff Malott that had him an assist away from his first Gordie Howe hat trick.
This, just a handful of games after he and Luke Schenn duked it out in Vancouver, where he accrued 25 minutes in penalties due to his ongoing displeasure with the Canucks defender and friends.
He's among the team leaders in hits and has become increasingly comfortable deciding when to step in, protect a teammate and give his club a jolt of energy.
And now he's sitting atop the NHL's penalty-minute leaders, which is a strange little corner of the statistical universe for a man who looks as though he'd return a shopping cart from the far end of a parking lot.
“I'm not proud of it,” he said, smiling, of course.
“But at the same time, it's kind of my role. What am I supposed to do sometimes?”
Klapka understands the distinction between being a fighter and being the guy who makes it clear his teammates aren't on their own.
“I feel like if there's the guy who's supposed to do it, it's me on the forward side,” he said, acknowledging defenceman Jake Middleton as another player capable of filling that role.
“I still know I can play hockey. But sometimes you have to say, ‘Hey, the hockey doesn't work, so we have you to show other guys what you have in the pocket.’
“If you see some of your guys getting hit from behind or something, like everybody would do the same thing on the ice, you know? We just have to protect each other. It doesn't matter who is it. Like, just play like a team, not like the individual.”
The nicest guy in the room is learning how to be the toughest guy on the ice.
Ice creams all around.
