When he was younger, Steve Bégin was not a star student. Learning difficulties, attention deficits, he was, in his own words, a “little monster”. It wasn’t until he was an adult and a father that he realized he was dyslexic.
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“The teacher used to tell me, ‘You’re just less intelligent.’ I was the least sharp pencil in the box,” the former Canadiens player says in an interview with the Journal as he drove to the North Shore to play in a indigenous community to hold a conference.
“That wasn’t known at the time. The teachers just thought that you didn’t want to work, that you didn’t want to improve, that you were a coward. If we had known what I had in the 1980s and if we could have used the tools we have today, like Lexibar, I would have had a better chance of success,” Bégin is convinced.
More trust
Knowing that his 16-year-old daughter Maylia has the same problems, it’s no surprise that he agreed to become a spokesperson for the “I love my dys” awareness campaign alongside actress and content creator Olivia Leclerc.
The initiative comes from Quebec company Haylem Technologies, which is behind Lexibar software, which helps young people with literacy difficulties in 87% of the province’s schools.
“The difference is incredible, not just academically but also in confidence. It was difficult for my daughter to go to school, she found it difficult. We had to fight in the mornings, it was difficult,” says Bégin, who remembers how afraid he was as a child to go to the blackboard, at the front of the class.
“I was upset, I wasn’t feeling well. I wanted to die,” he says.
Thanks to her daughter
During meetings with specialists when Maylia was in primary school – she is now in the fifth secondary school – the former CH striker from 2003 to 2009 had two revelations: his daughter was dyslexic and so was he.
“I listened and thought, ‘That’s me, that’s me!'” My wife told me we weren’t there for me! But I had just discovered something important. For me, reading was so difficult and I didn’t understand why. “After reading a paragraph, you don’t remember anything,” explains the 45-year-old, who is being treated for attention deficit disorder.
Steve Bégin meets Martin St-Louis of the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2003. Portal archive photo
Work more than others
Bégin has always been a hard and persistent worker, which made him a crowd favorite in Val-d’Or, Saint John, Calgary, Montreal, Hamilton, Dallas, Boston, Milwaukee and Nashville. A character trait that was shaped by his father.
“I told my daughter that if you want to be successful you have to work two, three or even ten times harder than others. “My daughter is so proud every time she passes, when she gets 75, 80 or even 90%,” stresses Bégin.
This type of language development disorder does not go away when you leave school. But that didn’t stop Bégin from starting a great hockey career.
“I had a lot of trouble learning English. If I had to fill out a questionnaire, I wouldn’t understand the meaning of the sentences. I feel better today than I did when I was in an English-speaking environment every day. I couldn’t remember the words I was taught. “It wasn’t easy,” says Bégin, who expects Cole Caufield to score between 35 and 40 goals and CH to be in the playoffs in just two seasons.
Driven by challenges, the Trois-Rivières native obtained his high school diploma in 2018 and completed the exam on his 40th birthday.
“It’s been 22 years since I went to school! I hardly sweated. I studied every day and even weeks before the exams, from morning to evening, from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. and sometimes longer. My wife was so happy that I was finished!” says the man who recently discovered the joy of reading.
“It used to take me six months to read a 300-page book.”
Like glasses
When Steve Bégin became the spokesperson for “J’aime mon dys” on this International Day of Developmental Language Disorders (DLD) and at the beginning of TDL Week in Quebec, it is to make known the reality of people affected by dyslexia or other afflictions.
“There are parents who ask why a child has a right to a computer and why he or she has more time than others. I tell them that we will take their child’s glasses off for the exam! They tell me, “No, he won’t see it.” That’s the same. Why can your child have a tool and not mine?”
The different “dys”
dyslexia: Difficulty understanding written messages and expressing thoughts in writing
Dyspraxia: Difficulty planning and reproducing a movement
Dyscalculia: Mathematics learning disability
Dysgraphia: Difficulty learning to write
Dysorthography : Difficulty recognizing words as a whole and reading irregular words such as “sir,” “son,” “madam,” etc.
Source: I Love My Dys Awareness Campaign