"Cheryl Byfuglien and her son lived in a trailer behind the tidy home of her parents in Roseau, a hockey town of 2,700 in northwest Minnesota hard by the Manitoba border. Byfuglien rented his skates-not uncommon among growing kids--but paying off a stick shaft in three installments at the local hardware store was out of the ordinary.
When Byfuglien went off to play junior hockey, his mother borrowed $80 from her parents to buy him an all-purpose black suit. "And we never found a winter coat that fit because he had such long arms and big shoulders," she says. "I don't know how he [lived in Canada] without a winter coat ... but we couldn't afford it at the time."
