It was during a training camp for some of the best teenaged hockey players in the United States that Tyler Biggs made a rare inquiry.

Biggs, now a Maple Leafs prospect, had grown tired of watching the on-ice conduct of a countryman named J.T. Miller.

“(Miller) was running around and taking liberties on other guys,” remembers Biggs.

But what could be done? As Don Biggs, Tyler’s Mississauga-bred father, points out, the folks in charge of the U.S. national developmental program “discouraged the whole fighting thing.” Still, Tyler felt a show of force was his only option. So he approached one of the presiding coaches and asked a favour; he wanted special permission to drop the gloves with Miller, a first-round pick of the New York Rangers. Only after authorization was granted — and after Biggs and Miller performed the ceremonial removal of their helmets and full cages — did an old-fashioned fight ensue.

“(The coaches) didn’t want us to have a big slugfest out there, so I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to get in trouble for it,” Biggs says now. “But it had to be done.”

The more you know about Tyler Biggs, the more it becomes obvious why Leafs GM Brian Burke selected him with the 22nd overall pick in the 2011 draft. Burke, as he nears the four-year anniversary of his fruitless Toronto tenure, has repeatedly bemoaned his club’s lack of sizeable forwards. Biggs, at six-foot-three and 224 pounds, is an imposing right winger with a talent for truculence.

Certainly the non-sporting sensibilities of the GM and the player seem aligned. Burke has long claimed he’d be willing to serve in the U.S. military if his country ever came calling. Biggs, 19, says that if he wasn’t currently pursuing an athletic career, he’d likely be enlisted in an arm of the U.S. forces. And just as Burke harbours a passion for military history, Biggs’s recent reading list includes the autobiography of a Navy Seal who is purported to be the most lethal marksman in the history of U.S. warmaking.

The book is called American Sniper. Playing this season for the OHL’s Oshawa Generals, Biggs is hoping to develop into an ice-bound version of such.

“Once he refines his skills, he’ll be a prototypical power forward,” says D.J. Smith, head coach of the Generals. “He’s hard to knock off the puck. Down low he grinds it out. He just has to have a little bit better touch around the net and he’ll really start to score, I think . . . I’m sure he’d love to have more points at this point. But he’s coming along nicely, and it’ll go in for him soon enough.”

His OHL run has barely begun, of course. After managing one assist in his first two regular-season games last weekend, Biggs scored in Friday night’s home opener, a 5-1 win over Peterborough. In a sport in which parental influence is often a factor in success or failure, the Biggs bloodline certainly suggests a predisposition to soft hands. Don Biggs, a Mississauga native who played for the Generals in the early 1980s, was a prolific scorer in both the OHL and various minor pro leagues. His 138 points for the Binghamton Rangers in 1992-93 still stands as the most productive single season in the history of the American Hockey League.

Don Biggs, for all his minor-league exploits, played all of 12 career NHL games and scored two goals for the Philadelphia Flyers during a brief call-up in the 1989-90 season. Why didn’t he catch on in the NHL? The short answer is that he topped out at five-foot-eight.

“Probably size was an issue, and his skating wasn’t quite enough to overcome that,” says Ron Smith, who coached Don with the International Hockey League’s Cincinnati Cyclones. “But he was an incredible competitor. And surprisingly, for a guy who scored as big as he did, he was a mucker, too. He had no fear.”

Says Dave Poulin, the Leafs executive who was a Flyers regular during Biggs’s brief stay in the NHL: “He was a terrific American league player but just never found himself in the right place at the right time with the right team. And that happens.”

Certainly Don Biggs remembers the NHL clutch-and-grab era down to the details.

“My first game (with the Flyers) I think I played with Tim Kerr and Brian Propp. We go into New Jersey and Tim Kerr had 12 shots on net and didn’t score. You look back at that, as an offensive guy — if Tim Kerr scores a hat trick and we get on a bit of a roll, that could have changed a lot of things,” he says. “I made the best of my opportunity at the time. I have no regrets about what I did or how I played or the career that I had.”

If Tyler is destined to crack an NHL roster in the coming years — Poulin calls this season in the OHL “just another stage” in the unpredictable process of grooming would-be NHLers — he’ll arrive at the game’s pinnacle by way of a childhood career that resembled one long road trip. Since hometown Cincinnati is hardly a minor-hockey hotbed, the youth teams he anchored needed to venture far afield in search of suitable competition. Their closest rival was a team in Columbus, an hour and a half away. They’d often make the seven-hour drive to Nashville to play a couple of weekend games. They’d drive eight hours to Toronto for a tournament.

By age 14, he’d moved to the GTA with his mother, Leigh, who also has local roots, to play for the Toronto Junior Canadiens of the Greater Toronto Hockey League. If that change of address cut down on the travel, it also offered a dizzying tour through the sometimes perilous terrain of Canada’s favourite kids’ game.

“We went through a few different coaches that year,” he says. “There was a little adversity. I was away from home at a young age. Maybe things weren’t going the way I wanted them to. That happens at every guy’s career, and that was something I wasn’t used to. I was used to my dad being the coach the whole year.”

Tyler, who spent a couple of years playing for the U.S. developmental team before enrolling last year at Ohio’s Miami University, where he scored nine goals in 37 games, continues to follow in his father’s footsteps. He is wearing No. 16 for the Generals, the same number Don Biggs wore during his three seasons in Oshawa. And certainly there’s symmetry in the stories of their OHL debuts. Playing in last weekend’s season opener against the arch-rival Peterborough Petes, Tyler Biggs announced his presence by instigating (and winning) a fight with Petes defenceman Clark Seymour, this after the six-foot-three Seymour unleashed a near-miss of an open-ice hit on 16-year-old Generals rookie Michael Dal Colle.

“Biggsy stuck up for me, which I really appreciate,” says Dal Colle.

It was 30 years ago that Don Biggs, in his first OHL game, also found occasion to drop his gloves against a member of the Petes, albeit for the purposes of protecting himself, not a teammate.

“I had never played in Peterborough before. I didn’t know what to expect. They drop the puck and, Jesus Christ, here comes (six-foot-two) Bruce Shoebottom. I just happened to be in his way and he dropped the gloves and wanted to go,” says Don Biggs, speaking over the phone from Ohio. “I’d played with Shoebottom growing up in Mississauga, and I’m going, ‘Hey, Shoe — we used to sleep over at each other’s house.’ Next thing you know, I threw as many punches as I could before I hyperextended my elbow. I wasn’t going to stop throwing them. You just do it out of fear.”

It was a different era, to be sure. Jeff Twohey, now the Oshawa general manager, previously spent about 30 years with the Petes, working his way up from trainer to scout to GM, among other roles. He said the bad feelings between the two clubs were real.

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“Donny Biggs was a guy we hated. He would stick you. He would yap at the bench. He would fight if he had to. He had no fear. You couldn’t intimidate him,” said Twohey. “I mean, I loved him as a player; we would have had him on our team in a second. But I hated him. When Tyler was in the (OHL) draft a few years ago, I had to call Donny. I said, ‘Jesus, I can’t even believe I’m talking to you.’ Back then, we didn’t talk. Kids now, they all know each other. They’re all on Facebook. Back then, if you were with Peterborough, you didn’t talk to the Generals. It’s so far removed from how it is now. It still pained me a little bit to talk to Donny Biggs . . . But as I get to know him, it’s neat to share some memories with a guy that went through it.”

Hearing mention of those long-ago exploits, Tyler Biggs smiles. The American son of a Canadian sniper is a student of battles won and lost, perhaps because he knows his most important ones lie ahead.

“I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am today without my dad,” he says. “For me, if I could take anything away from my dad’s career, it’s that you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. You can’t look at the picture five years down the road, signing a big deal or whatever it may be. You’ve got to take it a game at a time. You’ve got to fight for everything.”

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