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***sköldpaddor*** · 07-23-2021, 04:04 PM

S60 Regular Season Wrap-up Interview - Gunnar Söderberg

CHICAGO, IL — It’s been three full seasons since I last sat down for an interview with Gunnar Söderberg after the conclusion of the S57 regular season, and to say the time since has been eventful is probably an understatement. We have a lot to talk about, and Gunnar seems aware of that as well, because he’s even earlier for our meeting than usual, settling in across from me with the same warm smile I’ve come to expect from him in the past. I start with the easy questions first - the ones about hockey.

Chicago went on to win the Challenge Cup in S57 after our last interview, with Gunnar himself taking home a Razov Award for his postseason performance, but then found themselves short of a playoff berth in S58. Last season (S59), they were eliminated by Buffalo in the conference finals, a disappointing finish to a 100-point campaign in which they came out of the gate with an impressive 19-0 start.

“Yeah, that was…” He seems to be searching for the right word, wrapping the end of one of the strings of his hoodie around his thumb. “That was kind of devastating, not going to lie. I don’t think you can find much more of an emotional roller coaster than coming off a Cup win, missing the playoffs the next year, then nearly winning 20 straight games to start the next season. For a minute there, I think we felt invincible, and then we just came up short when it counted. That was shitty. Sorry. That was really difficult.”

I assure him there’s no need to apologize, and move on to brighter things - namely the present and future. This season has seen the Syndicate finish at the top of the west with a 45-19-2 record, and Gunnar himself accrued a career-high total of 67 points in those 66 games. While that was only good enough for 24th in scoring league-wide, he was second only to Martijn Westbroek on a Chicago roster that is loaded with offensive talent. Another standout stat from Gunnar’s season - he blocked a total of 98 shots, exceeding last season’s total by more than 50.

“That was almost as surprising to me as how many points I managed to put up,” Gunnar says, laughing. “You know, I’ve struggled defensively the past couple of seasons before this, and to turn it around that dramatically…I was like, are you sure the knee is all they fixed, are we sure they didn’t add some upgraded programing in there?” It certainly seems like Gunnar found a way to elevate his game to another level this year, which is especially impressive given the events of the last off-season - especially the injury he’s referencing. (Gunnar suffered a torn ACL near the end of the S59 playoffs, and underwent reconstructive surgery on that knee following Sweden’s elimination in the S59 IIHF tournament). I ask him if he’s surprised at how successfully he bounced back from that.

“Well, for starters, I didn’t bounce back,” he corrects me, grinning. “I mean, if you look back at the first half of my season, I got off to a really slow start. It was definitely a thing where like, you know, I’m fully cleared to be back out there, but I’m still kind of feeling it out. You practice, you have scrimmages, all that, but you really just don’t know until the first time you’re actually out there on the ice playing in a game that means something. So I think it took me some time to hit my stride, but there was a point in the season where everything kind of clicked and I really got rolling again.”

The point Gunnar is referring to is likely somewhere around the halfway mark - 33 games into the season, he was sitting at 24 points, compared to 43 in the back half. I ask him if there was anything specific that really seemed to come together for him there, and the smile that crosses his face is a little different then, almost secretive.

“I was just working really hard,” he says, “and I think that’s when it all started to pay off. I also…and this isn’t as easy to talk about, but I was dealing with a lot of stuff personally early in the season, and after I was able to work through some of it and get myself into a better headspace, I think my game improved as well.” I ask if he’d like to elaborate on any of the “stuff,” and he shakes his head. “No need right now, I’m sure you’ll get to it eventually,” he laughs.

I do have a list of some of the major changes in Gunnar’s life this season that aren’t news to anyone who’s been following his career, so he’s probably right that we’ll get around to discussing most of it. The next thing I want to address, though, is his somewhat unexpected change in representation. Gunnar parted ways with his long-time agent and joined forces with Johnny Hamilton, who is well-known for also representing Seattle’s Cassius Darrow. Darrow is a three-time Challenge Cup champion and winner of multiple awards in this league as well as internationally, so the agency pedigree is strong, and I ask if that played a part in making the decision to sign.

“I mean, kind of. I want to make sure everybody knows there’s like…zero drama there,” Gunnar tells me. “My agent was wanting to retire for like five years already, and Johnny’s a good friend. He’s good at his job and I trust him, so it all worked out pretty easily. I wasn’t unhappy, it was just a good fit and probably the best thing for everybody. Nothing more than that, really.”

If Gunnar and his prior agent’s retirement timelines weren’t aligned as he seems to be indicating, I assume that means he has no immediate plans for retirement himself, which he confirms.

“Not yet,” he says, “no way. I mean…I don’t mind being open about this, but there was a minute there this summer when rehab got really hard where I was like…Gunnar, do you really still have this in you? This is so fucking hard. But by the time I got through, I was just so absolutely determined to prove that I could keep going, that I wasn’t going to let this be the end of everything I’ve been working for my whole life. When I go out, I want to go out on my own terms. I know that’s what we all hope for, but I want to retire when I’m ready to retire, not because my knee doesn’t feel like cooperating. I’m really lucky because I have the best support system, and I have so many good people in my life who held me up when I was at my lowest last summer.”

That sounds like an invitation to the usual shoutouts Gunnar likes to do in our interview, so I ask him if there’s anybody specific he’d like to thank in that context.

“Sure, yeah, a few people,” he nods. “The usual suspects by now, I think. Corey [Kennedy] has been great, he came by and walked my dogs and helped me out with stuff when I couldn’t get around very well at the beginning. He’s a great teammate, but he’s an even better friend. Mat [Smith] has also been just really good about making me feel better about my own game when it wasn’t going so great early on. And Jean-Uhtred, obviously.”

The “obviously” at the end of that sentence leads us naturally into something that I’ve been waiting to bring up until after we’re done with the hockey discussion, because it’s of a more personal nature. By now, most people are probably aware of Gunnar’s relationship with Jean-Uhtred Ragnarsson-Tremblay, who played three seasons in Chicago before being traded to Seattle prior to the start of S60. It’s something Gunnar has been fairly open about by now, but the details are a little scattered, between tweets that might have already made some things obvious to the more observant among fans, tabloid speculation, and blog entries written by Gunnar himself, but when we spoke leading up to this interview, he was more than willing to set the record straight.

He is adamant that his relationship with JURT (as he is known to most) was purely platonic until this season, and his one request when we were discussing potential topics today was that he be given the chance to say so.

“I just want to make sure that’s out there, because I don’t want people to think this was something like…shady that we were doing behind everybody’s backs. I’ve always had a personal rule that I don’t cross that line with people on my own team, regardless of gender, it’s just not worth risking whatever that would do to the dynamic of the whole team.”

I ask him what caused the shift in that relationship recently, whether there was some specific moment he realized things had done past “just friends,” and he shrugs.

“I kind of mentioned some of this in my blog, but it’s not like…I mean, I have fully functioning eyes, look at him, I knew I was attracted to him, it just wasn’t until he was gone that I kind of had to face up to the fact that it was a lot more than that for me.”

So when, exactly, did the whole picture come together for both of them?

“You know, I haven’t asked him when he figured it out,” Gunnar admits. “We’ve only seen each other five times this season, at our games and then we met up at All-Star so I think we’ll probably have more time to rehash the details this summer. But it was that first game out in Seattle that, uh…” He trails off there, and I’m not sure he’s trying to decide which details to share, or just trying to remember. “I went to his place for our D&D game the night after we played them, and I was just…all kinds of a mess, because by that point I was just in so deep and I was convinced there was no way that went both ways, so I was just making myself miserable over it. I probably never would have gotten up the guts to say anything.”

It was Jean-Uhtred, then, who made the first move, I assume, and he nods.

“Yeah. Johnny was like, giving us a hard time about Twitter earlier in the evening because we get kind of carried away on there sometimes, so I was trying not to be weird or anything. But after we were done with the game and the guys had all signed off, he just went for it.”

The takeaway here, regardless of the details (which Gunnar does not seem eager to share, and I don’t pry into), is that by the time the world found out about it, Gunnar and Jean-Uhtred had already been together for the better part of a month.

“Yep. I guess everybody kind of found out at the same time, but you know that story already, I’m sure I don’t need to do a recap there.” He’s referring to the incident that occurred when the Argonauts came to Chicago in late December, which has indeed been written and speculated about at length by publications less reputable than this one. Gunnar himself seemed a little displeased with the media response to that situation, and I ask him if things have settled down on that front.

“I guess so. Haven’t seen anything weird on the magazines in the grocery store lately, anyway.”

And how have things been with him and Jean-Uhtred in the time since?

“Good,” he says immediately, smiling. “Really good. It’s just…really easy. Even though the long distance thing is hard. We didn’t get to see each other for ten weeks after that game here in Chicago, but it’s still…I don’t know, there’s something really different and special about being in love with somebody who’s already one of your best friends, like…we already know so much about each other, we communicate really well, it just feels really natural and easy. For me, anyway. I hope he’d say the same thing.”

Based on the timeline we’ve constructed here, I feel it’s fair to ask if it’s purely coincidental that Gunnar’s point production took a distinct upwards trajectory around the same time as that first game in Seattle.

“That’s kinda what I thought you were going to ask,” he laughs. “Look, I don’t really know. I don’t think I magically got better at hockey because I wasn’t single anymore or whatever, but it was absolutely something I was in my own head about for a while, so I think once we sorted it all out, I was able to not…I don’t know, dwell on it as much in a negative way.”

Gunnar was fairly public about taking that trade pretty hard, but I wonder if he feels differently about it now, given what he’s told me about his own self-imposed rule about dating teammates.

“Kind of a catch-22, isn’t it? Sucks that he’s far away, but if he were still here, I guess that’d be a whole other thing still standing in our way.” I ask him if he thinks there’s any chance Jean-Uhtred was thinking of any of this when he (reportedly) requested to be traded, and the expression on Gunnar’s face makes it immediately clear that this is the first time he’s considered that question.

“I don’t…wow, I don’t think so. I mean, that would be crazy. You don’t think…Nah, look, he has all his own career stuff he’s hoping for. He was with us for Chicago’s first Cup and played a huge part in that his rookie year, and I know he wants to be able to do that somewhere else, too. He wrote a whole letter about it, so if you want to know more you can just go read it in his words instead of me trying to explain it all. I told him he’s not allowed to beat us, though, so he has to wait until I retire until he gets his Seattle championship.”

It’s the second time in this interview Gunnar has addressed the issue of retirement, and even though he assured me earlier he had no immediate plans to do so, I have to ask if he has any idea how long he wants or plans to keep playing if he has his choice in the matter. At the time of this interview, he’s just shy of his thirty-second birthday, and while that’s certainly not old by any means, it’s around the age a lot of other players have started tapping out.

“I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head. “I feel like I’ll know when it’s time, but right now I just know that I’ve still got plenty of hockey left in me. I feel good, really good. I’m happy, I’m healthy, I’m playing well, and I’m not going anywhere yet.”

I ask whether that means just retirement in general, or if he’s hinting at his plans after the one-year deal he signed with Chicago this season is up.

“Both, I guess,” he smiles. “As long as there’s a place for me here, as long as I’m not taking up space that somebody else has earned who’d be better for the team, this is where I want to be. When the time comes, I want to retire here. I try not to worry about the numbers in the meantime. It’s not really about the money for me at this point. Johnny’s gonna kill me for saying that, but it’s the truth. I love this team, I love the city, I’m probably going to keep my house here even after I’m done playing hockey, so I just trust that management and Johnny do their jobs and I just worry about doing mine.”

Does that mean he’s fully prepared for the playoffs next week?

“Hell yeah,” he grins. “I’m ready, let’s go get it.”