This Job Leads McNab to the Ends of the Earth : Hockey: Whether flying or driving, the Mighty Ducks’ player personnel director finds talent.

When the wind chill plunges toward 100 below zero, you leave your motor running in the parking lot.

David McNab learned that.

Half the town’s population will be inside the rink, watching a hockey game. Outside, half the town’s cars idle through three periods, sometimes even overtime. Turn off an engine in such frigid temperatures without a place to plug in your engine-block heater, and you will not be driving home to the Best Western.

“It isn’t like you’re worried about people walking down the street stealing a car when it’s 100 below,” said McNab, the Mighty Ducks’ player personnel director and chief scout in charge of the team’s choices at the NHL entry draft next Saturday.

Another thing a hockey scout learns is that the warmest seat in the house is sometimes on top of the ice resurfacing machine, right over the motor. Years before anyone imagined an NHL team would play in Anaheim, McNab and fellow scout Jack Ferreira stood by the glass at a rink in Aurora Hoyt Lakes, Minn., waiting for the makeshift Zamboni to come off so they could sit over the engine and draw its heat for the few minutes the warmth survived the bitter cold.

Looking for NHL players is not like looking for the next NBA or NFL star. The temperatures are extreme. The territory is vast. Players still come from remote Canadian prairie towns and some of the coldest corners of the United States, but now they also come from Sweden, Finland, Russia, Latvia, the Czech Republic. . . .

It is a job of extreme demands, and there are few scouts who can match McNab.

“He’s a man of extremes,” said Ferreira, now the Ducks’ general manager.

McNab has flown 1.5 million miles on Northwest Airlines alone, once put 275,000 miles on a 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais and has turned in a rental car after a $100 weekend rental with 3,000 fresh miles on it.

“They look at the computer like they’ve made a mistake on the mileage and then they ask, ‘Did you fill it up at all?’ ” McNab said.

At 39, he already is something of a legend in hockey circles. The son of former NHL General Manager Max McNab (alive and well although his obituary has been reported twice, but that’s another story) and the brother of former NHL player Peter McNab, David is 6 feet 6--a towering, friendly presence known as “Too Tall.”

But it is the size of his passions about which stories are told.

A Diet Coke fiend, McNab often swigs straight from a two-liter bottle. In a hard day of driving, he will drain four of them.

“He drinks a lot of it, and you don’t know what a lot is until you see him,” said Pierre Gauthier, the Ducks’ assistant general manager. “That stuff kills rats--and he’s a big rat.”

At the draft one year, there was no Diet Coke at the team’s table.

“You should have seen the glazed look in his eyes,” said Angela Gorgone, the team’s scouting coordinator.

“I don’t know how they expect somebody to make their first pick drinking water ,” McNab said.

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McNab’s marathon driving is the stuff of scouting lore.

He has done 800 miles in a day, scouting a Canadian junior game on the way. “I did 360 miles to the game and 440 after,” he said. “From Prince Albert to Brandon and back to Saskatoon.”

Once, he drove from Minneapolis to Boston in 26 hours.

“This one kid was going to play at a certain time, and as David was driving, he realized he had misjudged how long it would take to get there,” Ferreira said. “He figured out he’d have to average 55 miles an hour for 26 hours. He got there 15 minutes before the game started--but he probably fell asleep during the game.”

For sheer mileage, nothing compares to the three-week international odyssey when he drove from Minneapolis to Calgary, from Calgary to Denver, Denver to Las Vegas and Las Vegas back to Minneapolis.

“Trust me, when I think about it now, I don’t know why I wouldn’t fly either,” said McNab, who drives less now that he is married and the father of two young girls. “When I was single, it was almost easier just to jump in the car and away I’d go. When you think about it, when you get as far as Calgary, to imagine how far that is to Denver, it’s obscene.”

There are dangers too. McNab’s Calais never stranded him, never failed to start. But once he and Ferreira were in Ferreira’s car, driving from Warroad, Minn., to Grand Forks, N.D. (“You hang a left at Black Duck,” Ferreira said). Ten miles out of the next town, Ferreira’s car overheated and blew a hose.

“It’s three in the morning, it’s 30 below and I looked at David and he looked at me and I said, ‘We’re [in big trouble],” Ferreira said.

A Good Samaritan saved them, and they will not forget it.

Driving was a way for McNab to pad his income with what some scouts call “fool’s gold” when he was just starting out. Teams are usually happy to pay mileage instead of air fare, and McNab, driving his paid-off car, made up for his low wages.

Now, by driving alone instead of flying, McNab can move on late at night after seeing a game, or stick around to interview a player without any other scouts knowing.

And, he can ruminate, going over and over the players he has seen and talked to.

“David is an extremely focused person and though he seems somewhat laid-back in one aspect, before he comes to a conclusion or decision he really likes to look at all the angles,” said his wife, Kari.

“In doing so, he has a tendency to like to spend a lot of time alone. I think that’s where a lot of the driving comes in. He can be undisturbed while he’s thinking about different aspects of a player or a situation.”

He stops mostly for bathroom breaks and McDonald’s drive-through.

“If you see his expenses, there are a lot of $1.49s,” Ferreira said.

He does not stop to read the newspaper anymore. “One time we were driving through Minnesota and he was driving and reading the newspaper at the same time,” Ferreira said. “I saw a Highway Patrol car coming in the other direction and sure enough, it did a 180 and came back and gave David a ticket.”

McNab’s ideal motel is one where you can pull your car right up to the front door. His life in the fast lane of pro sports is not often glamorous. “In some of those places, you’ve got no choice,” Ferreira said. “What’s that one . . . I think it’s the Prairie Oasis Motel in Moose Jaw.”

Even the trips to Europe aren’t what you’d envision.

“When you tell people you’re going to Europe, people say, ‘Well, have a good time,’ ” McNab said. “But I’m going two hours north of Moscow or three hours north of Prague. That’s not Paris.”

Still, all those years on the road, the Calais endured.

“It was just a legend in the industry,” Ferreira said.

“Nobody would ride with him the last 75,000 miles,” said Al Godfrey, another Duck scout.

In 1991, when the first of the couple’s two daughters was born, Kari put her foot down.

“Absolutely. I said, ‘That’s gone, I need something decent for my kids,’ ” she said. “He wanted to keep the steering wheel, but I said no. Someone actually bought it, with 275,000 miles on it. I think we basically gave it away.”

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McNab came early to scouting, in no small part because his playing career ended so soon.

He likes to say he chose the one position in all of sports that penalizes height: Goalie.

“I’ve seen team pictures,” Gauthier said. “He was way too big to play goalie.”

The crossbar, by the way, is four feet off the ice.

“When you’re 6-6,” McNab said, “most of your size is above the net.”

McNab is a rare California-bred scout. He played his youth hockey in San Diego, when his father was general manager and coach of the San Diego Gulls of the old Western Hockey League. He later played at Wisconsin under the late Bob Johnson, and was a backup goalie on the 1977 NCAA championship team.

By 22, he was scouting for the Washington Capitals. Since his father was GM of the team, he did it for free.

“I didn’t want anybody to think I got the job because of him, that’s why I worked for nothing,” McNab said. “Obviously, I got a chance because of who he was, but very few people, I felt, would still work for nothing and work full time. I worked for just expenses, and if anybody ever said I got the job because of my dad, I could say, ‘I work for nothing, if you want the same job, you can have it.’ The next year I worked for $6,000, so my first two years out of college I made a total of $6,000. Whether I actually proved myself or not, I felt I earned the right to work as a scout.”

In 1981, Max McNab was fired. His son still considers he was too. He left the Capitals immediately but was hired by Larry Pleau to scout for the New York Rangers, finally erasing any question of nepotism. When Pleau was fired, the Rangers kept McNab and he stayed there until the Ducks made him their player personnel director in 1993.

When McNab goes to the draft in Edmonton next week, he will fly his father in to join him. After 48 years in hockey, Max McNab retired last year--just before his last employer, the New Jersey Devils, made their Stanley Cup championship run. David’s gesture is small compared to the time he bought his father a Stanley Cup ring because he somehow didn’t have one after playing with the 1950 Detroit Red Wings.

“He worked so hard, and I think everybody in sports works hard, but this probably helped me after I got married and had kids; he never brought the sport home,” David said.

“His humility and work ethic and the way he got along with everybody, I don’t expect to have the reputation he had. His is just exemplary. I’ve never heard anybody ever say a negative thing about him. He was always honest and worked hard and humble about what he did.”

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People tell stories about David McNab because of his height and the Diet Coke and the driving. But the thing about his work that sets him apart it is his near obsession with talking to the players he scouts.

“He is so thorough and so conscientious,” Ferreira said. “He doesn’t just go and evaluate talent. He takes it a step further. He knows coaches, teachers.”

Over the last 15 or so years, McNab probably has taken more future NHL players to dinner than anyone, convinced that he can gauge their potential on the ice better by getting to know them off it, if only for an hour over dinner. So many of the big names in hockey took a ride in that Calais.

Jeremy Roenick, Chris Chelios, Wendel Clark, Tony Granato, Mike Richter, Pat LaFontaine, Craig Simpson, Joe Murphy, Adam Graves, Brendan Shanahan, Mike Modano, Joe Sakic, Rod Brind’Amour. It’s almost easier to ask what NHL star wasn’t in that car.

“I always say, if I’d just had an autograph book and just asked them to sign in . . .” McNab said.

Some days he will arrange to meet one player in the morning, another before the game, another after. Over the years, he has interviewed perhaps 1,000 youngsters.

“[My father] was the one that really told me to talk to the players and get more out of that,” McNab said. “I didn’t get that idea on my own. He felt it was not enough just to see them play. It’s amazing to me other people don’t do it more. You talk to coaches and they say, ‘Give me guys who work hard.’ That’s who they end up playing, so you might as well draft them.

“In our sport, where you’re dealing with guys at this age [around 18], with their physical development still going on, it helps to look at their character. You’re not looking for the perfect human being, a guy who doesn’t go out at night. You look for a guy who will be a great teammate, guys who get along with everybody and understand the team concept.”

As he does with just about everything, McNab sometimes takes the interviewing thing to extremes. A few years ago, when Kari was planning to return to work as a surgical nurse after their children were born, her husband naturally wanted to interview the woman who would be taking care of his children.

He also interviewed the woman’s husband, her teen-aged children. . . .

“I said, ‘David, I don’t think that’s necessary,’ Kari said. “He said, ‘Well, you never know what kind of kids teen-agers might bring home.’ ”