Zach Parises journey to 1,000 games, through the eyes of his wife and mother

EDINA, Minn. — Alisha Woods met Zach Parise when they were both 19 at the University of North Dakota.

She grew up in the tiny town of Hoople, N.D. — population … 300.

So, she admits, she knew little to nothing about hockey and had absolutely no understanding of how big a deal her future husband really was.

She was in a dining hall eating lunch when Zach’s brother, Fighting Sioux goalie Jordan Parise, and his friend, Brady, invited Alisha over to sit with them. At the table was this strapping, brown-haired guy named Zach.

Was it love at first sight?

“Ummmmmm, no,” Alisha said, drawing laughter from everybody in the kitchen of the couple’s home, especially Zach’s mother, Donna, and even a very talkative Theodore Jean-Paul Parise, the couple’s third child who will turn 2 this week and was busy playing on the floor in an adjacent room.

“Yeah, she made me work for her love,” Parise said, triggering a second round of laughter.

“We were friends for awhile before we actually started dating,” Alisha confirmed.

Alisha just didn’t get what the big deal was about … Zach Parise.

Yeah, she knew Zach was some jock from the Twin Cities, somebody who grew up as former NHLer J.P. Parise’s son and somebody she heard broke all these Bloomington youth hockey and eventually Shattuck-St. Mary’s bantam and high school records. Yeah, she knew he played college hockey at her very own school with Jordan and for some strange reason was prepping to fly to Finland to represent the United States in some tournament she understood was kind of a big deal.

“But I didn’t know hockey that well,” Alisha said. “I always knew girls knew who he was, but I figured it was because all the girls thought he was, well, good-looking. I honestly didn’t know much.”

Zach, one year after a great showing in Halifax in the world junior championships, flew to Finland and helped lead the Americans to a gold medal in his encore world junior tourney. He scored five goals and 11 points in six games and was named the tournament’s MVP and tournament’s Best Forward.

“We were talking when he was in Helsinki, and he would say, ‘Oh, you know, we’re playing in the …,’ whatever it was, for the medal, ‘and the game is at this time, you should watch,’” Alisha said. “And I was like, ‘Why would I? Where are you again? You want me to log onto a computer in order to watch?’ I mean, I think I had dial-up. I didn’t understand it.

“And then, when they won, I remember walking by and seeing his picture on the front of the (Grand Forks) Herald, and I was just like, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ But then, I just kept walking. You know, it didn’t register to me.”

Zach, Alisha, Donna, Theo, Jaxson and Emmy Parise (Courtesy Donna Parise)

This was in January 2004. The previous June, Parise was drafted 17th overall by the New Jersey Devils.

Three months after seeing his stardom take off following his world junior performance, Parise was prepping to leave North Dakota after his sophomore season to sign with the Devils, the franchise he would spend eight years with, would one day captain and would one day represent in the 2012 Stanley Cup Final.

“Just to show you how I still had no clue, when he left, he told me he was leaving for New Jersey,” Alisha said. “I asked, ‘Oh, for how long?’”

“I said, ‘Forever,’” Parise said, laughing.

“I was like, ‘OK, nice knowing you,’” Alisha said.

Of course, that would not be the end. They’d ultimately marry, and today they have three children — six-year-old twins Jaxson and Emmy and their youngest, Theo, whose first name means, “Gift from God,” and middle name is to honor what would have been a very proud grandfather.

This feature is intended to tell you a little bit about Zach from the eyes of the women in his life, Alisha and Donna Parise.

Because while the charismatic, hilarious, very popular J.P. Parise was always the most quoted when speaking on his son’s behalf, Alisha and Donna have been there through every step of Zach’s long, successful journey through the NHL, including the past eight seasons with his hometown Wild.

They supported him when it felt like every team in the league pursued him during 2012 free agency. They helped him through the agony of losing his dad five years ago. And when he thought his career was potentially over or at a minimum adversely affected due to a serious back injury from 2016-18, they were by his side.

Thursday night when the Wild host the Vancouver Canucks, he will play in his 999th NHL game.

Friday night in the second of a back-to-back in Dallas, provided all goes right against the Canucks, Zach Parise will become the eighth Minnesota-born player to play his 1,000th game and 347th NHLer in history.

“How does that happen?” Parise said, laughing. “With all the home games we’ve just had and all the home games coming up, my 1,000th will be on the road.”

Donna Parise recognized quite early that her youngest son, Zach, idolized his dad, J.P., who played in the NHL from 1965-79, including nine years over two stints with the North Stars before getting into coaching and ultimately serving as hockey director at the hockey factory that is Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Faribault, Minn.

Sadly, J.P. died Jan. 7, 2015, after a battle with lung cancer.

Zach took after his pops, especially when it came to their similar gutsy, gritty, hard-working style on the ice. J.P.’s big thing was if you fall down, unless you’re seriously hurt, you should pop right back up.

That has long been Zach’s M.O. He plays like the Energizer Bunny — he’s always going, his feet always moving.

And, let’s put it this way: Donna never had any misconceptions that Zach would want to become a doctor or lawyer.

“I mean, of course, we always thought he would do something huge in life,” Donna said. “But (Jordan and Zach) were always just really into hockey. I mean, they played other sports. J.P. introduced them to everything so that they could make the decision on what they wanted to do. Baseball was pretty big in Zach’s life, too, but he was obsessed with hockey.

“It’s kind of like now with Theo and Jaxson. They’re obsessed with it.”

Donna began to recognize early that Zach had the “It” factor. He’d always rack up points and was starting to get notoriety from the outside, even as a young kid.

His first television interview came during a tournament in Fargo when he was just 9 years old.

“We taped it, but I don’t know how to use a VHS anymore,” Zach said.

“We always thought he was good, and J.P. used to always tell me there’s something about him, but what is it, something like 3 percent of how many hockey players make it?” Donna said.

“I don’t know if it’s even that,” Zach interrupted. “It’s got to be less, like point something.”

“But when I knew there must be really something special about Zach is when he made the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated,” Donna said, laughing, as Zach, now holding Theo, blushed by the stove.

Wait, what?

“Yeah, I saw that issue on your wall and thought, ‘That’s weird,’” Alisha told her mother-in-law.

“I wasn’t in a swimsuit!” Parise yelled. “I was just in the same issue.”

Parise was still a teenager and was in the midst of a 77-goal, 178-point season at Shattuck when he received a call from a Sports Illustrated reporter that wanted to include him in the magazine’s “Faces in the Crowd” feature.

“That’s when I knew he made it,” Donna said, laughing.

“(When) he told me he was leaving for New Jersey,” Alisha recalls, “I asked, ‘Oh, for how long?’” Zach told her “Forever.” It ended up being eight years — and one run to the Stanley Cup Final. (Julio Cortez / AP)

Zach never even wanted to go to Shattuck-St. Mary’s.

In 1996, J.P. got a call from former Shattuck hockey director Craig Norwich asking him to coach Shattuck’s bantam team. J.P. said he’d do so if Zach and Jordan could go to school for free, but that turned out to be a part of the deal anyway. J.P. agreed, then a week later got another call from Norwich informing him he was moving to Vail to coach their AAA program and leaving his post.

He asked if J.P. wanted to take over as hockey director, something J.P. agreed to.

“But Zach said, ‘I’m not going,’” Donna said.

Zach was 11 years old and entering sixth grade and wanted to continue to go to school in Bloomington and play hockey with his friends.

“School started at Shattuck a week before it did in Bloomington and Zach decided that he would go down and stay down there with his dad for a week,” Donna said. “I don’t know what possessed him, but maybe because all the other kids were starting school, he decided that he wanted to go to school just that week that he was down there.

“The headmistress down there said that would be fine, but he had to do the work.”

Zach: “My sixth-grade class had four kids and we ended with three. I ended up staying the year.”

Donna (to Zach): “I never asked you this question, but I always in my mind thought the reason that you wanted to go down there that week was because you wanted to skate and see if you felt you could make that bantam team.”

Zach: “I think that was a big part of it is because I was a peewee, a young peewee at that.”

Donna: “You were small.”

Zach: “The thing is there was no peewee team down there and I didn’t want to be over my head and then everybody says, ‘He’s only on the team because he’s the coach’s son.’ I just wanted to feel it out to see if I could play at that level. I don’t know if I could or couldn’t, but I ended up staying and loved it.”

That, he did.

Zach stayed from ages 11 to 18. His dad got an apartment that first year, then the family sold their Bloomington home and bought an off-campus house in Faribault his second year. Donna got a job at the school as the executive assistant for the president of the board, then the headmaster.

That home became the Parise Hotel.

Visiting parents of hockey players had an open invitation to stay at the house, and that became the hangout for several of the players, from Sidney Crosby and Jonathan Toews to Drew Stafford, Kyle Okposo and Jack Johnson.

“Yeah, it was awesome,” Zach said. “Mom was making me and all my buddies pregame meals or whatever. It was pretty unique, it was great. And Shattuck set my path toward college hockey and the NHL.”

Zach Parise, born in Edina before growing up in Bloomington and Faribault, has scored more goals than any Minnesota-born player in NHL history (380). He ranks third with 778 points, first with 72 game-winning goals and second with 117 power-play goals (12 behind South St. Paul’s Phil Housley).

In Wild history, he ranks third with 186 goals (33 behind Marian Gaborik), third with 368 points, first with 66 power-play goals, second with 35 game-winning goals, third with 1,580 shots and second with three hat tricks.

But it was only a few years ago that Parise wondered if he’d ever get to this point, approaching his 1,000th career game.

In Jan. 2016, Parise’s back started to ache often. It got worse and worse with pain shooting down his legs. He couldn’t get out of bed without help, could barely walk, would sometimes have to go to dinner by sitting in the trunk of his SUV.

He received cortisone shots, but after being low-bridged late in the season, he missed the Wild’s playoff round and eventual loss to Dallas.

He rehabbed naturally and played the entire 2016-17 season, but he aggravated the injury in the summer of 2017, couldn’t take part in training camp and ultimately underwent a microdiscectomy to repair a herniated disc pinching on a nerve. He’d miss half the season.

A back injury in 2016 nearly stopped Zach Parise well short of 1,000 games. But now he’s returned to his usual form among the Wild’s leaders in scoring. (Ben Ludeman / USA Today)

“I couldn’t do anything at home, so that ruled me out of helping,” Zach said. “Couldn’t pick up the kids, couldn’t do anything. I would lay right in (the den) with my feet up on that ottoman the whole day.”

Said Alisha, “There was a point I was cutting his food up for him. I would put it on the floor and he literally would lay on the floor and eat. It was hard because the twins were four, I was pregnant with Theo. Quality of life, he couldn’t go on like that. He had to have the surgery.”

Parise returned in Jan. 2018 and struggled for the first couple months until taking off with 12 goals from March 1-April 2.

“My worry when I came back, I felt fine, but I just felt like I’d lost a step and, in my mind, it was like, ‘Is this what I’m going to be from now on? Because, this is going to suck,’” Zach said, laughing. “My body was messed up. I thought for awhile, ‘This is going to be a long seven or eight years. They’re going to boo me out of Minnesota in a hurry.’

“So that part was tough. It was just wondering if you’re ever going to be the same again. It took about 20-some games and some pretty intense rehab to start to finally feel it was slowly coming back. The jump started to come back that I was used to having. From then on, it was no looking back after that.”

Alisha and Donna ooze with pride when they talk about Zach’s 1,000-game accomplishment, let alone that he stands atop all Minnesota goal scorers in NHL history.

But they’re mostly proud about the father and husband that Zach has become.

“We met when we were both broke college kids,” Alisha said. “And what I love most about him is he’s the same. He’s just humble. And that’s what I appreciate so much, when you’re introduced to this new life and he still is the same. He treats his friends and family, I feel, the same. And our kids, I couldn’t ask for a better dad and husband. Watching him from when we were basically teenagers until now, it’s been a blessing to watch.”

One of Zach’s biggest prides is going to watch Jaxson play hockey. It had to be what J.P. felt like as a kid when he got to watch Jordan and Zach.

“I never saw J.P. skate, but I always say that I have horrible eyes when I’m at the games,” Alisha said. “I should wear glasses, but I don’t. I can just tell where Zach is just by the way he skates, just from watching him so much. It’s the exact same watching Jax. He could have no name, no number, and it’s like you know which one is Jax because he looks exactly like Zach out there. It’s crazy to me.

“Jax is always in front of the net, too, always waiting for the puck like his dad.”

Said Zach, “It’s amazing what he picks up watching hockey. If I don’t score for a while, he gives it to me. This summer he was mad he didn’t score in a game. I said, ‘It’s OK, you’re not going to score every game.’ Alisha laughed and said, ‘You need to remind yourself that.’”

“Yeah,” Alisha said, “I said, ‘I should record you saying this to your son and play it for you during the Wild’s season.’”

Back in October, Jaxson said to his dad one day before a game, “Wouldn’t it be great if I got a hat trick today and you got one, too, tonight?”

During Jaxson’s game, Donna received a text from Zach, saying, “It’s the first period, and Jax already has three goals. I’m in trouble.” Later in the game, Zach texted his mom, “Now, he’s got five. I’m really in trouble.”

Zach didn’t get a hat trick that night against the Montreal Canadiens, but he did score the tie-breaking, eventual winner late in the third period off a tremendous pass from Jason Zucker and one-touch shot.

Parise finishes off a rush with a beauty of a shot to give the #mnwild the lead. pic.twitter.com/NA2oYL7VZK

— Giles Ferrell (@gilesferrell) October 20, 2019

“He was excited I scored that night,” Zach said of Jaxson. “He just thought it was so cool that I went to watch his game, and then he went to go watch mine that night. It’s the best, watching him. Jax always looks at us after he scores. He loves a celebration.”

“Yeah, just like his dad,” said Donna.

Recently, Parise’s former Devils teammate Jamie Langenbrunner, now a Boston Bruins scout, attended one of Jaxson’s games and then sent a scouting report to Parise like he would write up if he was entering it into the Bruins’ database.

Parise busted out laughing as he read it:

GAME REPORT
19: Light Green
—Assets: Offensively tilted player that has a nose for the net. Seems to get oxygen with the puck. Good balance and strong on his skates. Willing to go to hard areas to score goals. Plus shot with a natural goal scoring ability.
—Marks or room for improvement: Seems to have a bit of an allergy for his defensive end at times.
—High Interest in the player as weaknesses are correctable.

Despite that largely positive report, Alisha says Emmy actually might be the more athletic of the twins. Though she likes to skate, Emmy doesn’t play hockey, instead opting for swimming, tennis, gymnastics, soccer and basketball. Theo may only be turning 2, but he wants to get on skates too.

“When we put the rink in the backyard and the kids were getting ready, he kept saying, ‘Theo skates, Theo skates,’ pointing to his feet,’” said Alisha.

“I was looking through a bag and I just dug out the twins’ old skates from when they were his age. I think those will be good for him,” said Zach.

Jaxson, Emmy and Theo Parise (Jordan Below)

As big an influence as J.P. was on Zach’s hockey career, so too did he shape Zach as a father.

“(Zach) had a very good role model because J.P. was an amazing husband and father,” Donna said. “He did get his legs from me though.”

Laughter erupts.

“She’s always complained that every time I was in an article growing up, it would say, ‘Son of J.P. Parise.’ It was never, ‘Son of Donna Parise,’ so I’m glad she’s finally getting her due,” Zach said.

“We didn’t even know if he had a mother there for a while,” Donna joked.

“Actually, someone just told me that 80 percent of athleticism comes from the mom, so …,” Alisha said.

“I could see that,” said Donna, who was a great tennis player and now has gotten into pickleball.

Donna met J.P. in 1972 after she attended her first-ever hockey game and somehow was chosen as the two millionth North Star fan to walk through the Met Center turnstiles.

The grand prize was a road trip with the team to Montreal and Boston.

Donna grew up in Albert Lea, Minn. Her father, Leslie, died when she was five, so she and her sister, Mona, were raised alone by their mom, Ruth Peterson, with humble means.

“We grew up very poor and didn’t have anything,” Donna said. “So, when I got this opportunity to go on this trip, I thought, ‘Oh this would be perfect. Mona’s got to go with me.’”

They first went to Montreal, then to Boston.

“We flew to Boston for an afternoon game and then we were supposed to go home with the media,” Donna said. “Mona and I said, ‘We are so close to New York, we can’t just go home and not go to New York,’ so we decided to go to New York. We booked a train to New York the next day, so that night in Boston, we had asked the concierge where we should go for dinner. And he had suggested (Anthony’s) Pier 4.”

While they were waiting to get into the popular restaurant, North Stars forward Charlie Burns walked in and recognized Donna and Mona from the hotel in Montreal. Burns asked if they wanted to join him for dinner.

“About 20 minutes later, in walked J.P. with about six of the other guys and they had all been out partying after the game,” Donna said. “J.P. just ended up sitting down and having dinner with us.”

It was a chance encounter after the incredible luck of becoming the North Stars’ two-millionth fan.

“It was meant to be. Just fate,” Donna said.

J.P., Alisha, Zach and Donna Parise (Courtesy Donna Parise)

J.P. and Donna were married in 1976 and had Jordan in 1982 and Zach in 1984.

“I see a lot of J.P. in Zach, and not just how he looks,” said Donna, her eyes welling. “He’s such a great help. J.P. did everything. He would be the one that would clean the house, clean the toilets, vacuum and everything like that because that’s what his dad did for his mother.

“The biggest thing I see in Zach that J.P. had was his humbleness.”

The room was quiet and needed an ice-breaker, one Alisha provided.

“A little bit of stubbornness, too,” she said as everybody wiped their eyes.

“Yes, I forgot about that,” Donna said, laughing.

“That is very true,” Zach added.

But, said longtime family friend Lou Nanne, who was one of J.P.’s best friends, his former teammate and former boss when J.P. coached the North Stars, “We always talk about how Zach works and J.P. was like that, but I’ve got to tell you, his mother is a determined, strong lady. I really think his mindset is more like Donna’s than J.P. She’s a determined, bright lady.”

There’s no doubt, when it came to hockey advice, Zach always went to his father — “That was his area,” Zach said, laughing. “He was always, ‘Donna, leave him alone. Donna, leave … him … alone.’” — but Donna made it all work.

“I can honestly remember playing as a small child in Bloomington, we’d have a hockey game in the morning, and then she’d rush me over to a baseball game and then back to an afternoon hockey tournament,” Zach said. “It was insane, but I took it for granted. And my parents worked, too, (at insurance companies). It’s not as if they were stay-at-home, they were working on top of that.

“So I don’t know how they made it work getting me to all these places. I feel like, at times, we were playing three different hockey teams at the same time, and then, baseball, and we never missed anything, somehow. You know, somehow, we never missed anything. It’s crazy.”

In 2012, Zach and buddy Ryan Suter were highly-sought in free agency by several teams.

But Zach flew to Mississauga, Ont., with Alisha to spend the free-agent frenzy with his Newport Sports Management agents. Zach would spend the days fielding calls, while Alisha, who is a dietician, stayed in the hotel studying for her second degree.

“I was right in the middle of my finals,” Alisha said. “I was just, literally, studying. And then, he would call or text and say, ‘OK, this is what’s happening.’ And sometimes, there was a long pause on the other end of the phone, like, ‘OK, maybe we’ll move on from that one.’ But we had talked a lot before going there. And we both had ideas of what would be a good place to start a family and what places that we didn’t necessarily want to be in.’”

Donna, though, was less in the loop than J.P.

“I’d send texts to Dad, like, ‘These guys offered this and these guys offered that,’” Zach said, smiling at his mom.

“Yeah, nobody kept me in the loop,” Donna said.

“She wasn’t on the group messages,” Zach said.

“Every time I’d ask a question, they’d call me, ‘Pierre McGuire,’” Donna said, laughing. “He and his brother would go, ‘Oh, Pierre’s asking questions again.’ So I learned not to ask any questions.”

The Parise family at home: Emmy, Zach, Theo, Alisha and Jaxson (Courtesy the Parises)

While there have been tough times during his Wild career and the team certainly feels as far away as it has ever been from being a true Stanley Cup contender, the blessing of signing with the Wild was he got to be in Minnesota during the year in which his dad got sick.

After the side effects of treatment, J.P. made the excruciating decision to stop undergoing chemotherapy.

“It was devastating,” Donna said.

There were some touching times during that year.

Former general manager Chuck Fletcher, after learning of J.P.’s diagnosis, gave him the gift of his very own personal father-son trip because he never got to go on one with the Devils. On that trip in Arizona late in the 2013-14 season, Zach scored two goals to pass his father’s career goal total of 238.

In September of 2014, Parise and J.P. sat down with me for a very touching story in which J.P., who was not a smoker, revealed publicly his diagnosis of lung cancer.

On Jan. 3, 2015, after a loss in Dallas, Zach broke down during an interview with me by the team bus that his father was in hospice care.

He gave me permission to write this gripping story, which appeared in the Star Tribune the day before J.P. passed on Jan. 7 at the age of 73.

So, Zach said, perhaps it’s fitting that his 1,000th game will come in Dallas against the re-located team that J.P. played so many years for.

On Feb. 15, before a 4 p.m. game against the San Jose Sharks, Zach will be honored for playing his 1,000th game.

They decided to wait so long for the ceremony so his kids can attend the game because of the early start.

On the green carpet will be Zach’s wife, three children and, of course, his beloved mom. There will be a video montage, and Zach will be showered with gifts.

Zach’s family will be beaming with pride.

“I get emotional at all of them, there’s something about it,” Alisha said. “Every single player that I’ve been at their celebration, it’s like you find yourself just getting teary-eyed. I don’t know what it’ll be like at his. It’s a lot of games. And he’s gone through so much.

“But we are so proud of Zach, and it will be a special celebration for all of us. J.P. will be on all of our minds, you can be sure.”

Oh, how J.P. would have loved to have been a part of this night to honor his son. His pride, his smile, would have been ear to ear.

(Top photo of Zach and Donna Parise, in Zach’s days with Shattuck-St. Mary’s: Courtesy Donna Parise)

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