from Alex Prewitt of Sports Illustrated,

When he was 12 or 13 years old, Frk ripped a slapper that struck the opposing netminder in the glove and knocked the kid out of the game. That was the first period. In the second, another howitzer from Frk pummeled the backup in his stomach. “So we had to stop the game halfway, because they didn’t want to go back to the net,” Frk says. “Their head coach was like, ‘Well, we don’t have any more goalies, you hurt both of them.’”

It was one of the earliest instances that Frk, now 26, recalls sticking out for how fast pucks zoomed off his stick. The latest example came Sunday at the AHL All-Star skills competition where Frk, a right-handed winger for the host Ontario (Calif.) Reign, set a professional hockey record with a 109.2 mph blast, breaking Bruins defenseman Zdeno Chara’s old mark of 108.8, which had stood since 2012.

Perhaps this was eye-opening news for casual fans, if only because Frk doesn’t resemble a classic cannonballer; listed at 6’1” and 205, he is giving up eight inches and 45 pounds to the towering Big Zee. But few who have crossed Frk’s line of fire were surprised, least of all those who were tattooed with bruises after doing so.

“You don’t forget it,” says former goalie Mike McKenna, now a TV analyst for the Vegas Golden Knights. “When somebody shoots the puck that hard, it’s not something that goes out of your mind. There’s an elite grouping of players in professional hockey that catch your eye when they shoot the puck. And there’s usually one at the top of the list. For me, it was Martin Frk.”

read on