One of the Penguins’ team bonding activities this weekend in Halifax is playing some golf on a course Nova Scotia native Ryan Graves had heard about from a few of his friends, the Links at Brunello, which hosted the Canadian Men’s Amateur Championship in 2019.
“A bunch of them went down there, and these guys are like, good players. They came back and none of them were happy with their day, it was so hard,” Graves said with a laugh. “So, the course is really tough, but it's beautiful.”
Graves probably fared pretty well, as he’s an excellent golfer himself, at a +3 handicap. When he was growing up in Yarmouth – which is a few hours away from Halifax, the closest big city to Cole Harbour, where Sidney Crosby is from – Graves would get dropped off at the local golf course and play “like, 40 holes a day” during the summers.
“We would just hang out there all day,” he said. “I was old enough that you could golf by yourself. I was probably like 13 or 14. Not super young, but enough that I could be trusted on my own.”
Graves doesn’t play as much now, only about once or twice a week when he’s at his offseason home in Prince Edward Island, which is where he played junior hockey. These days, he’s more content just sitting at home, on his deck, or at the beach.
“I’m pretty chill, in the summertime I like just having quiet downtime,” he said. “I'm not someone that wants a full schedule all the time.”
Get to know more about the 28-year-old defenseman, who signed a six-year deal with the Penguins on the first day of free agency.
He’s childhood friends with Nathan MacKinnon.
Graves and the Avalanche superstar are the same age, and even though they’re not from the same part of Nova Scotia, they would see each other at tournaments over the years. The two of them were then teammates in Colorado from 2018-21, and now train together a bit in the summers, which is how Graves met Crosby for the first time.
“I go back and forth once a week or every couple of weeks, in July and August, to skate with Nate and Sid’s group,” Graves said. “There's a bunch of other guys over there, it's a really good group.”
Ryan and his girlfriend Clare have two dogs.
The older puppy is named Minnie, who actually joined Ryan on the golf course for Father’s Day last year, with that adorable photo currently serving as the background on his iPad. They recently got her a sibling, a Portuguese water dog called Elwood (pictured above). They drew inspiration for the name from a clothing brand Ryan and Clare both like that features casual, comfy clothes.
“I feel like they entertain each other,” Ryan said. “The plan was always to get two. We just had to wait long enough to kind of get the older one enough time to mature a little bit. You don't want litter mate syndrome. So, as soon as she was out of the puppy phase, we got another puppy.”
Clare is the mastermind behind their epic Halloween costumes.
Ryan has posted some photos of the couple’s getups on his Instagram account (@ryangraves27), with the two of them dressing as the Incredible Hulk a couple years back, and going with an Alice in Wonderland theme before that.
“I think it's cool. It’s fun,” he said. “I’m game to do whatever. She is creative and loves that stuff, so she takes pride in it, so we’ll see what she comes up with. Let me know if you have any ideas.”
When he’s not skating or golfing, Graves likes to take out his Cyclocross road bike.
He purchased it during the pandemic, as a way to stay active and get out of the house, as Graves doesn’t have a home gym. “During COVID, I was riding it every day,” he said. “For us, it’s like a different form of exercise. We skate all the time, we practice, we go to the gym and we do the same lift and track workout or whatever. So, it’s kind of a different way to stay fit with kind of a little bit more excitement.”
But ultimately, he loves marinating at the beach in the summertime.
“We’re like, old people,” Ryan said with a laugh. “We bring chairs down. We have the nice ones that are backpacks. We walk down, we bring a cooler, a couple snacks and a book and just go down there and chill.”
A couple tomes Graves has read recently are ‘American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road’, and ‘Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice.’
Finally, Graves hosts a hockey school in his hometown every summer to make hockey more accessible for kids in his Maritimes community.
Until Ryan moved away to play Midget hockey, their closest game would be 90-120 minutes away from Yarmouth. Which was fun for the kids, who had a blast carpooling with teammates. But as Graves got older, he realized what a time commitment that was for the parents – not just time-wise, but financially as well.
“So when we kind of threw around the idea of doing the hockey school, there was two motivations,” he said. “Obviously, the first was to bring a camp to Yarmouth that was quality and parents didn’t have to travel for, and kids could sleep in their own bed at night.
“The second was financial. I know that it’s a big burden to travel. Hotels, and I think the price of hockey camps and things like that, are crazy now. So, we keep our camp honestly pretty cheaply-priced just to make it accessible for anybody that wants to come. We put a good product together. I’ve been very fortunate to do this for a living and I’ve had a lot of good people in my life that have, hockey-wise and just in life in general, that I’m able to pass on to the kids and create a hockey school that something that would honestly be what I would want to do. We play a ton of games on the ice, off the ice. It’s just a lot of fun for the five days that they’re there.”
