Gordon Monson: This masked man might now be the most important pro athlete in Utah

The man behind the hockey mask has a story behind it, as well.

It’s quite a mask, a work of art, and it’s quite a story. His story.

Let’s say it like this: Karel Vejmelka took the long way home, home to the NHL and now home in goal for the Utah Mammoth. His actual home — his homeland, his hometown — is some 5,000 miles away, a small burg in Czechia by the name of Trebic.

In Salt Lake City and around the NHL, his goaltending has been one of the key factors in the Mammoth’s rise to playoff contention. The club at the break for the Olympics is 30-23, with four overtime losses and 64 points. As even casual students of hockey know, if a team has a hot goalie, or even a warm one, its prospects for winning soar. But for purposes here, that’s jumping too far ahead too fast in Vejmelka’s narrative.

Best to stop the puck and begin again.

Vejmelka’s circuitous path from way over there to right here started not so much at birth, although, yeah, that was important, but back when he was a kid, when others around him told him he should take up Jaromir Jagr’s game. Needing no prodding at all, he and his friends made their regular trips in winter months from their houses to a small patch of ice covering, as they say it in the old country, a jezero, or perhaps it was a rybnik. A lake or a pond, it matters little. It was a solid, slippery surface to a dream.

Vejmelka threw whatever was handy — a hat, a sweatshirt, a glove — down on the frozen expanse to mark the goals. In the summer months, the young Vejmelka played tennis and soccer. A bit of a Renaissance child, he also studied hard and played the piano and the guitar. But he was a better athlete than he was a musician, and he excelled at most of the games he played. But the one on the ice whispered his name and pulled him in. It was somehow different than other sports, other pursuits, as was the position he chose to play.

He could skate and he could handle the puck. But that wasn’t his calling.

That came from the space — 72 inches in width, 48 inches in height — between the pipes.

Vejmelka wanted to stone goals, not score them.

When he approached his father, also named Karel, and himself a gifted hockey player, a forward, asking if he could acquire the equipment necessary to give tending goal a try, you would have thought he’d asked Pops if he could wear a fluffy feather boa and a flapper outfit on the ice. In so many words, his dad said not just, “No,” he said, “Hell, no.”

“My dad said, ‘That’s the worst position in hockey,’” Vejmelka says now, all these years later, with only half a laugh.

The 7-year-old Vejmelka’s response: “I cried.”

Eventually, the senior Karel relented. And a road to the NHL was graded. “That was my dream,” the junior Karel says, noting that he had pictures of NHLers, such as Jagr, plastered on the walls of his room. “[Being a goalie] is the most exciting thing I ever did in sports.”

One man’s dream is another man’s nightmare. More on that in a few paragraphs.

Climbing the ladder through lower-level hockey to the top of the Czech League was arduous, but Vejmelka has fond memories of being and playing and living in Czechia. His memories live on and on. His family still resides there, and he returns every offseason — to train, to relax, to be around family and friends, to live his blessed life. He left this week for Italy to play for his country in the Winter Olympics.

Vejmelka labored at various escalating stops in Czechia for years, often playing against older opponents. He signed his first pro deal in the middle of all that as a 15-year-old, continuing to fantasize of one day making it to the NHL. But, curiously enough, when the Nashville Predators drafted him in 2015, when he was 19, and he attended a few developmental camps with the club, he decided the best path to the world’s premier hockey league would be for him to remain in Czechia to grow his body, his mind and his skill set there.

“That was a hard decision,” he says. “My parents wanted me to finish high school and go to college. Education was important to them.”

But he wondered if that was the right decision. In truth, he says he was “pissed off” about it.

“I always believed in myself,” he adds. “But you never know. You can dream about the NHL, but you’re never sure about what will happen.”

He stayed and studied. He played. Season after season, he grew his game in goal. He caught and batted away what seemed like a hundred-thousand pucks, more than a few bouncing off his pads and mask. Then, a few years later, what to him felt like an eternity, he was offered and signed an entry-level deal with the Arizona Coyotes, ranking on their roster as the club’s fifth- or sixth-string goalie. That was in 2021. He arrived in Utah before last season when the club moved here. And from there, he ascended to the team’s No. 1 goaltender.

Hold the narrative right there.

As Vejmelka’s father said it, being a goalie is nothing short of weird, in the best sense of that word, especially playing it in the NHL, against the planet’s best puck scorers. When asked what other position in the wide world of sports he could compare it to, Vejmelka draws a blank. It compares, he says, to … nothing. When asked what it’s like to have a hard rubber disc fired at his face at speeds in excess of 100 mph, he says he doesn’t spend much time thinking about such things, not anymore. Before his first pro game, he was so nervous he was shaking.

That was then, this is now.

When Vejmelka settles into goal in practice and in games, he just reacts: ”I try to stop the puck. That’s my job, that’s just part of my life.”

If Vejmelka doesn’t think about it, all the rest of us can. Even for seasoned hockey fans, the challenge for goalies seems remarkable, in some ways, inconceivable. Imagine squatting in front of a frame, your assignment being to catch or wipe away whatever comes at you, letting nothing get by, regardless of how fast it’s sliding or soaring, no matter how far or close its launch point is, no matter if the required reaction time is slivers of a nanosecond.

Stop the durn puck.

Like Vejmelka says, that’s the job, that’s what he does. He throws his hands, his arms, his shoulders, his legs, his feet, his face, every part of his body and being, his stick, his glove, his pads, his skates at that rocketing object, even with other bodies circling and swirling all around, sometimes obscuring his view and, come what may, preventing it from hitting the net, or crossing the line in front of it.

All with the pressure that comes with being the single most important player on any hockey team, being the last line of defense, being the force that so often is the difference between a team and teammates winning and losing. How many Stanley Cup champions have been crowned on the backs of a hot goaltender? More than a couple of fistfuls.

Most humans, were they faced with doing any of that, even a few rounds of it, would wake up in the middle of the night, flinching with and panicking at flashes of blurs spinning straight at their nose.

While the Mammoth have not come close yet to getting the Cup — they might make the playoffs this time around — much of the above is what Vejmelka has mastered.

“It’s fun,” he says.

He’s not the best tender of goal in the world, but at age 29, he’s getting better.

“Vej shows up every day, wanting to improve, wanting to refine his game,” says Corey Schwab, the Mammoth’s goalie coach. “It’s been fun to watch. He expects to be one of the best goaltenders in the league.”

It’s not unusual for goalies to improve with experience. Vejmelka says he’s moved in that direction from years of practice and playing, from studying and gaining mind and body control, from exceptional hand-eye coordination, from learning to focus on the puck, where it is, where it’s going, and, foremost among all of that, staying in the here and now. If he has a bad moment or a lousy game, he analyzes it and then leaves it behind.

As significant as his physical abilities are, he says much of successful goaltending against NHL-level players is what’s in the mind, his mind. He’s trained his to relax, to allow the nervous system signals and synapses to fire away to necessary body parts without his thoughts getting in the way.

His extremities do what is necessary almost automatically. So, they’ve been trained. His goals against average per game this season sits at 2.6, his save rate at .901 percent. Not the best, but not bad. His total wins thus far this season — 27 — tops the NHL.

“He’s also started the most games,” Schwab says. “He’s willing to be there every night.”

Evidence of that came last year, when the Mammoth were in a scramble in the season’s final weeks to qualify for the playoffs. Vejmelka started 23 straight games, a ridiculously rare run.

“He’s a likable, easy-going guy with an even-keel personality,” says Schwab, a former NHL player himself who’s been coaching in one form or another for 21 years. “He’s grateful to be in the NHL. He’s here to work, and he gets rewarded for it.”

Vejmelka signed a five-year, $23.75 million contract extension last March.

A final outward expression of what’s happening inside his goaltending soul is Vejmelka’s mask. It’s as much a work of art as it is a bit of safety and utility. He switches them out every season, but this year’s version is aggressive, featuring a vicious, windswept image of a Mammoth, menacing tusks raised, with white chunks of ice floating all around a blue background.

“The kids like it,” Vejmelka says. “I like it.”

His teammates also like it — because they know the face and the story behind it means what they care about the most, namely:

“The puck stops here.”