KIRKKONUMMI, Finland — It is a splendid summer day in Finland and Teemu Selanne, wearing olive green shorts and a polo shirt with a Mighty Ducks logo, is talking about his cars. And so, it seems, is everyone else.
Selanne opens a Finnish tabloid-style newspaper and shows a picture of a Toyota Corolla with a smashed front end.
It is Selanne's car, the one he crashed four days earlier while practicing his second favorite sport, rally car racing.
Selanne, a native of Finland and star forward for the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, is one of the best hockey players in the world.
The crash is huge news here in Finland, a country of 5 million people and 70,000 lakes but very few superstars.
Selanne is superstar No. 1 right now, having recently received the inaugural Maurice "The Rocket" Richard Trophy, awarded to the NHL's leading goal scorer.
Selanne's drive for speed off the ice as well as on, and the inherent danger in that pursuit, is underscored by the crash--one in which he was not injured, but the driver of the other car was. That Selanne is a daredevil both on and off the ice is a fact Ducks management has learned to live with.
"I'm just happy he didn't get hurt," said Ducks General Manager Pierre Gauthier by telephone. "People do all kinds of things. . . . You just hope everyone comes back OK at training camp."
'He Loves Speed. He Loves to Drive'
Hockey is the sporting passion of Finns, more popular than soccer or cross-country skiing or even auto racing.
But racers do come in a close second, Selanne says, and indeed there do seem to be a lot of pictures of Formula 1 racing's leading driver, Mika Haakinen, around town.
So when Selanne was taking his brand new race car off for a test, to get a feel for its speed and turning radius and general quirks, word filtered out.
"There is a news organization that pays people $200 any time they call up with a tip," Selanne says. "This sometimes causes some problems. People are looking for things." Some of those people also brought cameras along when they came to watch Teemu drive. Some good money was made.
"It was a silly accident, my fault, I just wasn't concentrating," Selanne says as his 3-year-old, Eemil, spills a Pepsi on himself and 20-month-old Eegu sleeps soundly. Teemu is eating a salad and laughing at Eemil. His wife, Sirpa, produces a change of clothes for Eemil and also a slice of pizza, ham and pineapple.
