The father was a skilled tennis and volleyball player back in Iran, but his life came apart when the revolution erupted.
Talking with the Ottawa Citizen last week, he chose his words carefully. “I don’t want to say too much. The reason I moved was the revolution. They closed all the universities and high schools. We had nothing.”
At 23, he scoured the world looking for a safe spot to further his education. He thought about going to Germany, before settling on Sweden, where he studied to become a computer engineer.
“Sweden was the first choice for me. Some people I knew gave me information about the social life in Sweden.”
In Sweden, he met his future wife, Ritva, a native of Finland who had left there after a divorce.
They then became the parents of Mika Zibanejad, now 18, who was drafted last week by the NHL’s Ottawa Senators.
Dad first pushed Mika towards tennis. But Mika wasn’t attracted to the courts as much as he was the ice outside Stockholm.
“It’s important to start in some sport,” Mehrdad told the Ottawa Citizen. “It doesn’t matter which. Once he was five or six years old, he was at the [hockey] arena every day.”
It didn’t take long for Mika to establish himself as a star youth player in Sweden. But his father has always made sure that learning was the focus. “Education is very important, but education is not just going to school, there are other things, too,” Mehrdad said.
Accordingly, Mika speaks Swedish, Finnish, English, Farsi and is learning French, which will appeal to some Senators fans across the river in the province of Quebec.
Before Mehrdad Zibanejad joined the celebration of his son signing up with the Canadian team, he said he is thinking of moving to North America. “This does not happen everyday,” he said of his son’s career move. “It’s nice. It’s not normal, but not too crazy.”
