from Gare Joyce of Sportsnet,

Life looks pretty damn good at a glance. Couldn’t be easier. That’s what people who don’t know Bobby Ryan think. And people in Ottawa don’t know Bobby Ryan. He was drafted there in 2005, but he’s been back to the city only once, with the Ducks, scoring the winner in a shootout a couple of years ago. At this point, Bobby Ryan is just a name in Ottawa. Sens fans will get to know him better, but the first thing they should know about him is that while “Robert Ryan” is on his U.S. passport, it’s not the name on his birth certificate. It was a name he had to remember to use for fear that his whole world would crumble.

It goes back to Cherry Hill, N.J., a suburb of Philly. They were the Stevensons: Bob, who worked in the insurance business, his wife, Melody, and their son, Bobby. They had a good quality of life and financial security, but they weren’t just like any other family in Cherry Hill. Bob was a driven guy, high-compression, like a golf ball. He pushed himself, pushed his son, wanted the absolute best, took control of everything within the bounds of family and still couldn’t be satisfied. He saw bad influences on the fringes where no one else did. He saw them around Melody’s life, around his son’s. And a lot of people in their neighbourhood knew little Bobby Stevenson, a precocious hockey talent on the ice or on Rollerblades. They thought Bobby would go places in the game. Bob was convinced that he could make it happen. Or, rather, that only he could make it happen.

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