Inside the Mind of an NHL Emergency Goalie: Resilience, Sobriety, and Second Chances | Max Duganne

There are guests who sit down and immediately make you reconsider something you thought you already understood.

Max Duganne was one of them.

I knew Max before this conversation. Our boys play baseball together, and we have a habit of independently finding the same mom-and-pop coffee shop at away tournaments, settling in, and talking. I knew he was the emergency backup goalie for the San Jose Sharks. I knew he had built Amble Clothing into something real, with partners like Pebble Beach and Bandon Dunes and PGA pros wearing his gear on tour. I knew he had lost his dad and gotten sober in the same brutal year.

What I didn't fully appreciate until we sat down together was how all of those things connect, and what it actually looks like to rebuild an athlete's identity from scratch in your forties, with clearer eyes and a steadier foundation than you had the first time around.

Max is a father of three, a youth coach, a CEO, and currently the best regular guy in a city with an NHL team. This is his story.

The Gretzky Generation

Max grew up in Santa Monica in the late eighties, the son of a teacher and an artist, raised largely by the beach. Summers meant being dropped off at the water in the morning and picked up when it got dark. Money was tight. Vacations didn't happen. What did happen, in 1988, was Wayne Gretzky getting traded to the Kings, and an entire generation of Southern California kids suddenly wanting to play hockey.

Max was five years old. He started skating at six, playing by seven or eight, and was a forward for exactly one season before something about the goalie position caught him. He suspects it had something to do with control. He pitches in baseball too, so the pattern holds. By ten or eleven he was winning state championships with the Junior Kings, traveling to Edmonton and Calgary and Chicago, seeing parts of the country and Canada he never would have seen otherwise. Hockey was his vacation. It took him to places his family couldn't have afforded, showed him landscapes he still carries with him, and gave him his first real sense that a kid from Santa Monica could belong somewhere unexpected.

The path toward a serious career ran through the East Coast junior leagues, as it does for most players. At seventeen he tried out, made a team in Boston, and found himself in New England chasing a future that was still coming into focus. He had gotten into Boston College academically, his dream school, but the program had just won a Division One national championship and had no room for a California goalie, however talented. His junior league coach, a mentor he still speaks about with real warmth, sat him down and said something that took courage: no one here is going to the NHL, and you have a door open that every other kid in this room would stop playing in a second to walk through. He got Max a preferred walk-on spot with the Eagles. Max took it. He met his wife Laura the first day of freshman orientation. September 11th happened a week later. He held tight to both things and let them shape the rest of his college years.

The Goalie Injury Is Up Here

Max tapped his temple when he said it, and it deserves to land properly. He was not being glib. He was describing something he has lived, something he has watched take down players he knows personally, and something he believes is structurally baked into the position itself.

A goalie spends an entire game alone. There is no one to share the weight with, no one to talk to between whistles. Every goal is yours. Every save is yours. The position demands a kind of sustained internal pressure that the rest of the sport simply does not, and what Max described is what happens when that pressure has nowhere to go. You get comfortable in the solitude. It starts to feel like your natural state. And then you go dark inside it, and by the time you notice, the habit of isolation is already set. He watched it happen to himself over years, and he is open about the fact that alcohol became part of how he managed that weight. Not in a way that destroyed anything visible from the outside. More like what he described as hitting fast forward at five o'clock every day, checking out just enough to stay just below his own ceiling.

His advice to parents of young goalies was specific and quietly urgent: make sure they are talking to people when they are not on the ice. The solitude of the position can follow you off it if you let it, and the habit of going inward, of processing everything alone, is one that forms early and takes real effort to undo. The NHL Assistance Program exists largely because that pattern, left unchecked, tends to find its way to darker places. He has seen it happen to enough people he respects that he does not gloss over it.

What finally shifted things for Max was his father. His dad had been thirty-eight years sober when he died, and had quietly modeled what stability looked like for Max's entire childhood. AA meetings at the house every Wednesday night. The same person every single day, never hungover or unpredictable or unavailable. Max filed that away for decades. When his own kids got old enough to start paying attention, he decided he wanted to give them the same gift. He got sober in 2020, the same year his father was dying of cancer, and they spent some of that time together in it. He counts that as one of the more meaningful things he has been given.

Driving the Coast

The year 2020 asked a lot of Max at once. He got sober. His father was dying. The world shut down. He bought an old Toyota and started driving up and down the California coast every week because flying wasn't an option with a cancer patient in the middle of a pandemic, and being present was the only thing that mattered. His father passed three weeks after coming out of the house to watch Max finish the LA Marathon, one of the last times he left. Max crossed the line on March 18, 2020, days before everything closed.

He had been running the local Boys and Girls Club for five years by then, having joined the board shortly after he and Laura moved north following a loss that reshaped them both. They had been building a life in LA, bought their first house, and lost a baby at twenty-three weeks. It was traumatic enough that they were ready for a completely fresh start, and Laura wanted to come home. They moved within six months. Emma was born six months after that. The Boys and Girls Club work gave him roots in a new place, and he grew the organization in ways he is still proud of. But somewhere in the grief of losing his father, he realized he had spent years doing meaningful work for other people and hadn't yet built something purely his own.

Amble Clothing started as fabric prototypes between three friends who knew almost nothing about the apparel industry. It raised two million dollars. It landed at Pebble Beach and Bandon Dunes and Kapalua before most people had heard of it. A partner group that owns established brands came in to accelerate what they had built, and the morning we sat down together Max was tracking three PGA Tour players wearing Amble gear in competition, checking their scores the way you check on friends. Because that is what they are.

The Best Hockey of His Life at Forty

The path back to the ice was quieter than the path away from it. Through golf Max had gotten to know Joe Thornton and Erik Karlsson during the covid years, and eventually someone needed a goalie for a skate. He bought gear again for the first time in a decade, showed up rusty and marathon-fit, and gradually worked his way into the Sharks' orbit. For the past four seasons he has been the team's emergency backup goalie, the best regular guy in San Jose, suited up twice for actual NHL games and on call for practices that he describes as the hardest workout you have ever done in your life.

He has to be ready for a call that might come tomorrow or might never come. He trains with that uncertainty as his baseline, staying sharp in the top men's league, keeping his body prepared for a standard that would humble most people half his age. His son Gavin was at the rink at six in the morning on the day we recorded this, working with a skating coach on a weakness the ten-year-old had diagnosed himself. Max does not push it on him. He doesn't have to.

What he keeps circling back to is the gap between what he knew then and what he knows now. The recovery tools, the training methods, the understanding of his own body that took sobriety and years of running and an entirely different relationship with himself to develop. He plays the best hockey of his life at forty, and that is genuinely thrilling and a little bittersweet at the same time. He knows exactly what he would have done with this version of himself when it still might have mattered competitively, and he cannot get that back. So he puts it into Gavin, every explosive drill and early morning skate, all the what-ifs converted into something useful.

The emergency backup goalie position is being eliminated by the NHL after this season. The role will go to a salaried player who travels with the team full time. Max knows the math. He also played the best hockey of his life in this chapter, clear-headed and well-trained and fully present for every moment of it. That is its own kind of complete.

Connect

You can find Max and Amble Clothing at ambleclothing.com and follow the brand on Instagram. For more conversations like this one, subscribe to The Resilience Factor wherever you get your podcasts, and find me @dr.pamelamehta on social media.