Cheap beer and a suspect blocker: Before Mark Carney was Canada's prime minister, he was Harvard's No. 3 goalie
Mark Benning knew his job. The Harvard defenseman's priority was to retrieve pucks and deliver them quickly and accurately to Scott Fusco, Lane MacDonald and Tim Barakett, the Crimson's talented forwards.
To get to pucks first, Benning required timely on-ice arrivals. It was up to Harvard's No. 3 goalie to open the bench door at just the right moment to let his puck-moving defenseman pounce onto the ice at full speed.
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Mark Carney took the job seriously. He did it well.
It was one of many things the future politician mastered during his time at Harvard.
Hockey wasn't his professional destiny, but the Canadian prime minister has deep connections to it, from his college playing days to his Oilers fandom to a close friendship with longtime NHL executive Peter Chiarelli.
On Monday, Carney's Liberal Party narrowly won the Canadian election, defeating the opposition Conservative Party, meaning Carney will remain prime minister. He has held the post since succeeding Justin Trudeau in March.
Carney, 60, incorporated hockey into his campaign. In a promotional video shot at a hockey rink with Mike Myers, Carney goes back and forth with the comedian to confirm his Canadian roots. Both are wearing red Team Canada hockey jerseys.
'You're a defenseman defending a two-on-one. What do you do?' Canada's 24th prime minister asks Myers.
'Take away the pass, obviously,' Myers answers.
On March 20, Carney, wearing the No. 24 jersey of his hometown Edmonton Oilers, participated in the morning skate at Rogers Place. That night, with Benning as one of his guests, Carney watched the Oilers lose to the Winnipeg Jets in overtime, 4-3.
Carney, who spent his childhood in Edmonton, where he attended St. Francis Xavier High, has reiterated his Oilers fandom many times publicly, including a month later before the Oilers began their playoff run and days before the Canadian election.
The quest for the Cup begins tonight in LA.
To the best team in hockey: you know what to do.#LetsGoOilers https://t.co/nFN32NqMmj
— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) April 21, 2025
'He loves hockey,' says Benning, who also grew up in Edmonton. 'The two things — besides his family and his wife, obviously — that he loves are Canada and hockey.'
Carney was good enough at the latter to earn a college scholarship.
In the fall of 1983, Chiarelli moved into Straus Hall, his freshman dorm at Harvard. He met Greg Dayton, his new roommate.
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Two doors down, Chris Sweeney, Dayton's best friend and fellow Belmont Hill grad, was settling in with an 18-year-old from Edmonton. Dayton went to visit Sweeney. Chiarelli tagged along and was introduced to Carney. The teenager that Chiarelli met in his first hour at Harvard would become his best man.
'We would have connected even if we weren't living that close together with each other,' says Chiarelli, who is from Nepean, Ontario. 'Because we would be at the hockey rink.'
Chiarelli was a forward. In 1983-84, the freshman played in 27 games. It was 27 more than Carney.
That season, Carney was behind two goalies: Grant Blair, a sixth-round pick of the Calgary Flames, and Dickie McEvoy. Blair and McEvoy were very good NCAA goalies.
Carney, meanwhile, was listed at 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds, undersized for the position. Regardless of his competitiveness and puck-handling touch, he had weaknesses his teammates could exploit.
'I was going high blocker,' recalls Fusco when asked where he liked to shoot on Carney.
'Low stick,' counters ex-teammate Randy Taylor.
Carney's situation did not change in seasons to come. John Devin entered the rotation, pushing Carney to practice part-time with the Harvard JV.
But on March 9, 1985, Carney got his chance. In Game 2 of the Eastern College Athletic Conference quarterfinals, Harvard was beating up on Colgate. Crimson coach Bill Cleary pulled Blair and replaced him with Devin.
Then in the third period, Devin got hurt. Carney came in. The sophomore stopped all five shots he saw. Harvard won 10-2.
It was Carney's first and final NCAA appearance.
'His goals-against average is zero and his save percentage is 1.000,' Taylor says. 'Let's focus on that and not how many games he got in. For the chance that he got, he couldn't have done any better.'
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In retrospect, Chiarelli, former general manager of the Boston Bruins and the Oilers and current vice president of hockey operations for the St. Louis Blues, believes Carney would have been good enough to be a No. 2 goalie elsewhere in the ECAC.
'He was realistic,' Chiarelli says. 'He was good at the sport and he loved it, but he wasn't going to change schools.'
Carney did not go to Harvard to be a hockey player.
After freshman year, Chiarelli, Carney and Dayton moved out of Straus. They lived together in Winthrop House. Their room became a second home for Benning.
The defenseman had started his college career at Notre Dame. Benning transferred to Harvard after the Fighting Irish shifted to club status in 1983. In 1984-85, his first year at Harvard, Benning lived off campus in Inman Square, a residential and commercial neighborhood in Cambridge. Instead of walking back to his apartment after practice, Benning became what he termed Carney's adopted roommate.
On Saturday nights, after home games at the Bright Center, Carney and his teammates were regulars at the Piccadilly Filly. Funds were tight. Beverage quality was not the priority.
'All of us were pretty cheap,' says Benning, now the founder of a venture capital firm called Excelsior. 'The cheapest beer we could find.'
Carney graduated magna cum laude in 1987. He went to Oxford for his master's degree in economics, followed by his PhD.
Carney continued playing hockey at Oxford. On one tour of Russia, Carney stared down a barrage of shots against a professional Soviet team.
In March, Chiarelli attended Carney's 60th birthday party. Several of Carney's Oxford friends were there. They showed Chiarelli a picture of a hockey stick they had signed with goofy nicknames when they were students.
Next to his signature, Carney had written his gag nickname: 'PM.' Chiarelli had a good laugh. As Harvard undergrads, Chiarelli regularly cracked to Carney he would become prime minister.
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Taylor, a partner at LaBarge Weinstein, loves to fish. The former defenseman grew up in Cornwall, Ontario, going after walleye in the St. Lawrence River. Carney enjoys fishing too.
One year, Taylor, Chiarelli and Carney had their lines in a lake in Quebec. Carney's phone was ringing so often that he had to get off their boat and head back to town. It was during Brexit. Carney was the governor of the Bank of England. The fish would have to wait.
Carney started his career at Goldman Sachs. But service was a keener calling. Carney once joked to Taylor that in investment banking, the only difference his income made in his life was that he could wear a nicer suit to work.
'This guy could have spent his whole career in the private sector and made millions and millions and millions of dollars,' Chiarelli says. 'He was on partnership track. He chose to go into public service.'
Fusco, the founder of Edge Sports Center in Bedford, Mass., is Harvard's all-time leading scorer with 240 points. He won the Hobey Baker Award as college hockey's top player in 1986. He had help getting there.
Fusco, 62, remembers wind-lashed walks from the Harvard quad across the Anderson Memorial Bridge to practice at the Bright Center like they happened yesterday. He liked getting to the rink early to work on his shot.
As Fusco crossed the Charles River, Carney was usually at his side. The goalie with no shot at playing was happy to stand in net while Fusco ripped off pucks for 45 minutes before practice.
Carney was there to serve.
(Top photos: Andrej Ivanov / Getty Images and courtesy of Harvard)
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