The best thing about his two seasons of hockey in Russia is that Fred Brathwaite stood out for more than being black in an overwhelmingly white -- and sometimes xenophobic -- society.
"I'm sure there was probably a lot of name-calling going on, but the good thing was that I didn't really understand," said Brathwaite, whose two seasons in the Russian Super League were noteworthy because of his stellar play in goal. "They could have been saying that I was great or that I should go away. I had no real idea.
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| Fred Brathwaite last played in the NHL in 2003-04, with Columbus. (Getty Images) |
Brathwaite still has to earn it, despite signing a contract last week with the Atlanta Thrashers, a team that has also signed Johan Hedberg as part of a summer mission to add experienced NHL goalies to the depth chart.
Atlanta netminders, including young star-in-the-making Kari Lehtonen, were injury prone last season, so much so, the Thrashers had to mine the Double-A level ECHL at times for starters. It arguably cost them a playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.
"There's no question that goaltending was our Achilles' heel and we said this year we had to get deeper," Thrashers GM Don Waddell said. "Freddie helps us in that regard. We had three people in our organization go over and watch him play for a while, and our Russian scout said he was the best goalie in the league."
The numbers support that argument for Brathwaite, 33, who played 254 NHL games, mainly in backup roles for Edmonton, Calgary, St. Louis and Columbus over nine seasons beginning in 1993.
Last year in Russia, he led the league in goals-against average and several other individual categories and won the championship with Ak-Bars Kazan, a team that is so well-funded it had more than a dozen high-priced NHL'ers -- including Ilya Kovalchuk, Alexei Yashin, Alex Kovalev, Vincent Lecavalier, Brad Richards and Dany Heatley -- on its roster during the lockout.
Brathwaite was the goaltender on that team as well, posting a 20-9-2 record and nine shutouts in 34 games before losing his job late in the season when Stanley Cup winner Nikolai Khabibulin decided to come home to play for a while. Khabibulin handled the bulk of action from then on, and the star-studded Kazan team suffered an embarrassing first-round loss in the playoffs.
Kazan quickly offered Brathwaite another contract last summer, one that did not include an escape clause. He hesitated initially as thoughts of returning to the NHL danced in his head. But the lockout had yet to be settled and Brathwaite was up against a signing deadline, so he accepted the deal.
"I thought maybe I could get out of it," he said. "But I was stuck there."
The good thing for Brathwaite, a bachelor, was being relatively comfortable in Kazan, an old, industrial city about 400 miles east of Moscow. There were still a few NHL types like Alexei Morozov and Gennady Razin around to help with translation, and Brathwaite knew the area from the previous year when the large lockout contingent provided insights about where to go and, more important, where to avoid.
"There are five restaurants that had English menus and we didn't really venture off to other places because you didn't know what you could get," Brathwaite said. "Over there, they have no problem eating cow tongue. That's not my thing."
