Brendan Shanahan, the star left wing for the New York Rangers, is 38 and substantially decorated—three Stanley Cups with the Detroit Red Wings and an Olympic gold medal, with Canada, in 2002—but he was 25 and playing for the St. Louis Blues when he told the team's media department that he had spent his summer playing saxophone at the Canadian Jazz Festival. He also said that he had run with the bulls in Pamplona, visited his cottage in Ireland, and auditioned for the voice of Dino the dinosaur in the Flintstones movie, all of them fabrications he assumed they would dismiss. A few months later, however, he was taken aback when an interviewer for ESPN, on the afternoon before a game, asked him to reproduce the voice of Dino. "No, because I wasn't very good at it," Shanahan said uncomfortably. "That's why I didn't get the part."

The interviewer, Gary Thorne, pressed Shanahan about the cottage in Ireland and running with the bulls. Finally, he brought up the Canadian Jazz Festival. To Shanahan's dismay, he handed him a saxophone. "So, Shanny," he said, a trifle smugly, "we wanted to have the opportunity to hear you do it."

Shanahan, cornered, stood the saxophone on his thigh. He turned strangely calm, and he spoke without hesitating. "I would," he said earnestly, "except the coach says, 'No sax before a game.' " Such suave aplomb is only one reason I admire Shanahan.

Since he began in 1987 with the New Jersey Devils as the second player chosen in the amateur draft, Shanahan has played 18 seasons, a long time for a hockey player. He is six feet three inches tall and weighs 218 pounds. He looked like an altar boy when he was younger, but now he looks like an oil-field hand. His face is lean and narrow. It is also deeply scarred. He says that a hockey player gets about 20 stitches in a good year, 40 in a bad one, and that he has had about 400. The scar tissue sometimes protrudes through his skin, like ribs through the upholstery of an old sofa. He has brown hair with a few strands of gray, high cheekbones, and small, brown eyes. His right eye sometimes droops, and his right cheekbone is slightly recessed, from an injury.

During his fourth season, a teammate on the Devils took a slap shot while Shanahan was standing in front of the net. Traveling close to 100 mph, the puck struck a stick and changed direction. "I saw something black coming at me," Shanahan told me. "It knocked me on my back, and I thought, That was the puck. When I got up, my teeth didn't meet anymore in the same place. I felt like I was wearing someone else's face. I started skating to the exit, and you know it's bad when your teammates come up to you, and it looks like they're going to be sick." The puck broke Shanahan's jaw, his cheekbone, and his sinus cavity in six different places. The girls he knew growing up in Canada always used to tell him that he had a baby face, but now they said he had lost it.