NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr is in Montreal to attend a charitable event this weekend, but before doing so, he spoke to the Montreal Gazette's Dave Stubbs about the lockout, his new-found passion for hockey and the fact that he's glad you're not reading about or seeing him in headlines these days:

“No, it does not feel as if the lockout never happened,” Fehr said with a laugh this week from New York in a wide-ranging talk. “If you live through it every day, if you go to the meetings and do everything you have to do, it’s not something which fades from memory very fast.”

Fehr will be in Montreal this weekend, honoured as sports personality of the year at Sunday’s Cummings Jewish Centre for Seniors Foundation sports celebrity breakfast. The ninth annual event, sold out weeks ago with an expected crowd of 600-plus to mingle with many from the city’s professional and amateur sports scene, past and present, will again benefit seniors in need of financial aid.

Comfortably out of the spotlight since the NHL lockout settlement was reached in early January, Fehr doesn’t often make appearances at such events.

“What I’ve learned is that someone who actually played the sport is better (to attend) than someone who worked for someone who played the sport,” he said.

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