The next two paragraphs aren't any better, describing in full detail the timeline that took the family to places like Michigan and California as U.S. marshals hunted down Bob Stevenson, finally arresting him in 2000.
It's a story the kid from Cherry Hill has never run from, disclosing it on the day he was drafted, retelling it countless times since, including now.
But still . . . in your official Olympic bio?
That's cold.
"Stunned?" he was asked?
"No," he said. "It's news once everywhere you go. I've kind of, for the most part, put it in the past. No one really asks me about it anymore unless it comes up in one of those sheets. I tell the story once in every new city. It gets old pretty quick."
Here's what doesn't. His candor. His success against all odds. For a kid who grew up living a lie, Ryan seems incapable of telling one. For someone who lost a big piece of his innocence through this ordeal that dominated his adolescence, he seems incredibly normal.
Say it happened to you. Say your dad had beaten your mom into a hospital bed while you slept upstairs, been arrested, fled the state, summoned you and your forgiving mother to join him, changed the name you spent your first 11 years with, and trained you to answer to it and only it.
Say you had to leave all your friends in one place, then again in another place, then finally once more to play junior hockey in Canada.
"I think through it all I became a lot more independent," he said. "I had to spend a lot more time on my own. My mom worked a lot. I came through it in the best possible way. If there's anybody who's going through the same situation, maybe with a kid who plays hockey? Channel everything through sports. That's what I did."
