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Flyers president Paul Holmgren's lifelong inspiration from his late brother

Flyers president Paul Holmgren took to the Players' tribune on Monday to pay tribute to his late brother Dave, who died many years ago but continues to serve as an inspiration.

Flyers president Paul Holmgren took to the Players' Tribune on Monday to pay tribute to his brother Dave, who died many years ago but continues to serve as an inspiration.

Dave Holmgren, the oldest of four Holmgren children, suffered from diabetes starting when he was eight years old. Two years later, complications from the disease caused him to go blind.

That meant Dave didn't get to see Paul fulfill his childhood dream of attending a hockey camp at Bemidji State, a few hours' drive from the Holmgrens' home in St. Paul, Minn.

But Dave played a big part in Paul going to that camp:

He had some money saved, he said, and he wanted to do this for me.

I would go on to play football and baseball at Harding High, but this being Minnesota, I also played hockey. Hockey was everything there. Hockey is everything. If I wasn't playing in the street in front of the house, I was at the outdoor rink at East View Playground two blocks away. On the weekends my friends and I would play from nine in the morning to eight at night - with maybe a break for lunch. And after we finished our homework, we would go back out there again.

On career day at school, I wrote hockey player on the questionnaire that everybody had to fill out.

Because of the age differences, Mark [another sibling] and I were closer to each other than we were to Dave and my older sister, Janice. We were more into sports than they were. If I talked to anybody about hockey, it was Mark. I just don't remember talking to Dave much about my interest in the sport. But thinking back, he was obviously paying attention. Why else would he have paid for me to go to hockey camp?

Holmgren concludes by writing: "Perhaps without Dave's gift, I might still have gone on to play in the NHL - but I doubt it. Everything that I went on to do in hockey (including being a coach and a general manager) I owe to Dave."

Check out the full story here.