Background

Lemieux was born on October 5, 1965 in Montreal to Pierrette, a home-maker, and Jean-Guy Lemieux, an engineer. He and his older brothers Alain and Richard grew up in a working class family in the Ville-Émard district.

The brothers would practice in the basement using wooden kitchen spoons as hockey sticks and bottle caps as pucks until their father created a rink on the front lawn.

Career

Lemieux starred in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League as a teenager, setting a league record by scoring 282 points in 70 games during the 1983–84 season. He was chosen by the Pittsburgh Penguins with the first overall selection in the 1984 National Hockey League (NHL) draft. Lemieux had an outstanding rookie season: he scored 100 points, was named to the All-Star team, and was awarded the Calder Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s rookie of the year. He scored more than 100 points in each of his first six years in Pittsburgh and was named NHL Most Valuable Player (MVP) for the 1987–88 season, but the Penguins only qualified for the play-offs once during that period and were eliminated in the second round.

Lemieux missed 54 games of the 1990–91 season after undergoing back surgery in the off-season, but a reconfigured Penguins team featuring future Hall of Famer Paul Coffey and rookie sensation Jaromir Jagr finished a surprising first in their division. Lemieux returned for all but one of his team’s play-off games and led the Penguins to their first Stanley Cup championship, earning play-off MVP honours in the process. The Penguins repeated as champions the next season, and Lemieux earned a second play-off MVP award.

Lemieux led the NHL in scoring during the 1992–93 season and was named league MVP despite a midseason diagnosis of Hodgkin disease that caused him to miss 20 games for radiation treatment. Fatigue from the treatment and a recurrence of his back pain forced Lemieux out of all but 22 games the following season. Lemieux skipped the 1994–95 NHL season to recover from his radiation treatment, but he returned at full strength in 1995–96, leading the league in all scoring categories on his way to a third career MVP award. He captured his sixth career scoring title the following season, but the effects of his cancer treatment and his dissatisfaction with the style of play in the NHL led Lemieux to announce his retirement in 1997 at age 31.

The small-market Penguins’ long-standing financial struggles worsened in Lemieux’s absence, and the team declared bankruptcy in 1998. In 1999 Lemieux converted years of his unpaid Penguins salary to equity and led a group of investors that jointly purchased the team. He came out of retirement and returned to the Penguins during the 2000–01 season, becoming the first player-owner in NHL history. Though not as dominant as he was in his earlier stint with the Penguins, Lemieux was named to the NHL All-Star team in his first season back, and he led his team on an unexpected run to the conference finals in the play-offs. In 2002 he captained the Canadian Olympic hockey team to a gold medal at the Salt Lake City (Utah) Games. Health problems forced Lemieux out of a large number of games during his last seasons in the NHL, and he retired for a second and final time midway through the 2005–06 season. Despite missing five full seasons for his cancer treatment, his first retirement, and the 2004–05 NHL labour lockout, Lemieux placed 9th on the NHL’s all-time goals scored list, 10th all-time in assists, and 7th all-time in total points at the time of his second retirement. The Penguins won their third Stanley Cup in 2008–09, and Lemieux became the first person to win the cup as both a player and an owner.

Achievements

• 

  Lemieux led Pittsburgh to consecutive Stanley Cup championships in 1991 and 1992. Under his ownership, the Penguins won additional titles in 2009, 2016, and 2017. He is the only man to have his name on the Cup as both a player and an owner. He also led Team Canada to an Olympic gold medal in 2002, a championship at the 2004 World Cup of Hockey, and a Canada Cup in 1987. He won the Lester B. Pearson Award as the most outstanding player voted by the players four times, the Hart Trophy as the NHL's most valuable player (MVP) during the regular season three times, the Art Ross Trophy as the league's points leader six times, and the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoffs MVP in 1991 and 1992. He is the only player to score one goal in each of the five possible situations in a single NHL game, a feat he accomplished in 1988. At the time of his retirement, he was the NHL's seventh-highest ranked career scorer with 690 goals and 1,033 assists. He ranks second in NHL history with a 0.754 goals-per game average for his career, behind only Mike Bossy (0.762). In 2004, he was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.
  
  A statue in his honour, created by sculptor Bruce Wolfe, was erected in Pittsburgh on March 7, 2012, outside of Consol Energy Center.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Mario Lemieux: The Final Period

Views

Mario created the Mario Lemieux Foundation during the same year he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma (1993), to fund medical research projects. Additionally, the foundation supports other organizations, including the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the Leukemia Society, the Lupus Foundation and the Children's Home of Pittsburgh. In 2007, he was among the well-known athletes who founded Athletes for Hope, a charitable organization which helps professional athletes get involved in charitable causes and inspires non-athletes to volunteer and support the community.

With their son, Austin, being born prematurely in 1996, the Lemieux family spent quite a bit of time in the hospital with Austin, including 71 days after his birth. The family found that the older children didn't have a place to play in the hospital. Using the Lemieux Foundation resources, driven by Nathalie's idea and vision, founded a program called "Austin's Playroom Project". The project builds play rooms in various hospitals across the US to give both children who are patients and their healthy siblings a place to play and "be kids" and concentrate on being normal and healing. On 31 January 2014 the foundation announced the opening of the twenty-ninth Austin's Playroom at the new Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton, Camp Pendleton, CA.

Quotations: "Hockey is a tough, physical game, and it always should be."

"A month before the season I stop putting ketchup on my french fries."

"Since the beginning, I always loved the game. When you grow up in Montreal, one day you want to be a professional hockey player. When I was six or seven, I knew that was what I wanted."

"Depending on how we start the season, I can play center or wing... It doesn't matter to me."

"I can no longer play at a level I was accustomed to in the past."

"I've gone through back surgery a couple times, and of course, my radiation treatments for six weeks got me to the point where I was not able to play at the level that I was accustomed to."

"When I'm able to see the ice ahead of time when I get the puck, I'm able to make some pretty good plays."

"I think we need to do as much as we can to give back to these young kids growing up. I think we've done a pretty decent job so far."

"My son, he is the reason I got involved. It's been a joy to be around him and teach him the stuff that I know, and to the other kids as well. When he started playing I wanted to be involved in his hockey career. It's a lot of fun for both of us."

"When it comes to hockey, it's been in my blood since I was 3 or 4 years old. I love coaching the kids, especially at that level."

Personality

Off the ice, Lemieux smoked a half a pack of cigarettes daily. He finally gave it up, perhaps due to Hodgkin's Disease.

Physical Characteristics: Height: 6 ft 4 in (193 cm)

Quotes from others about the person

• "Notwithstanding Gretzky's abiding majesty, posterity will never forget that no athlete—not even the sainted Lou Gehrig—has ever before Lemieux been struck down by a deadly disease at the very moment when he was the best of his sport at the best he ever would be. And since: Lemieux has achieved miraculously in remission, struggling, on the side, with a back injury so grievous that it has benched him after he merely laced up a skate. That is the stuff that answers people these days when they wonder where all our sports heroes have gone."
  
  — Frank Deford, Newsweek

Interests

• charity

Connections

Mario Lemieux married Nathalie Asselin in 1993 and they have four children: Lauren, Stephanie, Austin Nicholas and Alexa.

Father:

Jean-Guy Lemieux

Mother:

Pierrette Lemieux

Spouse:

Natalie Asselin

child:

Lauren Lemieux

Son:

Austin Nicholas Lemieux

He was born in 1996. Austin was born prematurely, weighing just two pounds, five ounces, but he is perfectly healthy today, and plays college hockey for Arizona State University.

Daughter:

Stephanie Lemieux

She was born in 1995.

Daughter:

Alexa Lemieux

Brother:

Alain Lemieux

He is a retired ice hockey player.

Brother:

Richard Lemieux

coach:

Dave King

He is a Canadian hockey coach who has been head coach in the National Hockey League (NHL), the Russian Super League, the Winter Olympics, and the IIHF world junior championships.

Friend:

Marc Bergevin

He is a Canadian professional ice hockey executive and former player.

References

• Legacy Of Excellence: Mario Lemieux’s Impact on the Penguins and the City of Pittsburgh
• On the Ice with... Mario Lemieux
• Mario Lemieux: Best There Ever Was
• Mario Lemieux: Over Time
• Hockey Heroes: Mario Lemieux