“I don’t want to get in trouble again,” I told the Chicago Tribune. “So [the record] will be in the back of my mind. The team is always first.”
Not daring to take any risks in the final few weeks of the season, I finished with 53 goals.
The Blackhawks were only the NHL’s seventh-best team that season with a record of 36–29–15, but everyone in the hockey world understood that we would be a bigger force in the playoffs because of our grittiness.
Although Chicago fans were initially miffed at the decision to trade away Savard, it took only a few games for everyone to realize that Chelios’s presence completely changed the culture of our team. He was the most ruthless competitor I’ve ever known. He was skilled, and he was mean. Nobody liked playing against Chelios, and that’s why Keenan wanted him.
When Chelios got tangled up with opponents, he would put them into headlocks. He would squeeze them so tightly they would start kicking the ice and screaming that they couldn’t breathe. I don’t remember who the opponent was, but I can vividly recall him yelling, “I’m going to die, I’m going to die! You’re squeezing too hard.”
Back then, the Blackhawks tested the strength of our grip with a device that measured it on a scale of one to a hundred. You would squeeze a lever, and the needle would rise like a tachometer. Most of the players could push the needle to the mid-70s. The strong players pushed it to 78 or 79. Chelios grabbed it and gave a quick squeeze, and the needle rocketed to 100. Chelios has vice-grip hands. In the 1990s, Chelios went through what I called his “arm-wrestling phase.” He was always challenging the biggest guy in the bar to an arm-wrestling contest. Sometimes, he would entice opponents by offering to put up a hundred dollars against anyone who would be willing to bet twenty that he could beat Chelios. The five-to-one odds usually drew some takers. My guess is that Chelios won over a hundred of those arm-wrestling matches.
Pity the fool who didn’t know all of Cheli’s tricks; if you tried to hit Chelios, you often found yourself chewing on his stick. The closer you got to Chelios, the higher his stick would come up. And Chelios was also the king of chop. If an opponent violated his personal space, Chelios would fucking chop him across the ankles.
Although Chelios and I often partied together, we had a business relationship when it came to what happened on the ice. Chelios was among the few teammates I had who was comfortable critiquing my performance or my conduct. Even though Chelios and I were close, he had no problem pulling rank on me if he believed it was necessary. If he felt I was out of line, he told me.
One year, I was injured in the postseason when we were playing against Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens. While the guys were preparing for the game, I felt like I was getting in their way. The visitors’ dressing room was cramped in that vintage arena, and they didn’t need an extra body in there. I decided to leave the rink to have dinner. The food was not a problem; the cocktails were a problem. By game time, I was amped up. I decided to watch the game from ice level. I stationed myself at the Zamboni entrance along the glass. I was banging on the glass and yelling to Eddie Belfour and Chelios all night long.
After the game, Chelios said he needed to talk to me. He brought me into one of the small rooms at the Gardens and started to yell.
“You were acting like an idiot out there,” Chelios said. “It was embarrassing.”
He told me never to behave like that again. If anyone else would have said that to me like that, I might have been livid. As soon as Chelios was finished with his tongue-lashing, I apologized and thanked him for setting me straight. I never acted that way again.
The Blackhawks had every type of player we needed to be successful. Marchment was a madman when he played. He would slash guys, make game-changing hits and fight anyone. Smith certainly didn’t accumulate all of those penalty minutes for delay of game. He was a very confident player and an intimidating presence. He had an aura that rubbed off on all of us.
It’s not a coincidence that my best goal-scoring numbers came when I was playing alongside Hall of Famer Michel Goulet and Steve Larmer, should-be Hall of Famer. Those two players taught me more about playing offensively than anyone else. They also drove me fucking crazy with their teaching methods. But the lessons stuck with me. Keenan always says I was a “sponge” back then because I soaked up information. But I can say that it wasn’t easy processing all of the “tips” they were providing me when I was a 20-year-old playing between two established stars. We would be sitting on the bench after a shift, and Goulet would be chirping in my right ear about what he needed me to do while Larmer would be yelling into my left ear about what he thought I should be doing. Fucking “J.R., do this.” Fucking “J.R., do that.” Fucking “J.R., be here.” Fucking “J.R., be there.” Essentially, I learned to be a top offensive player by doing everything in my power to serve two masters. I knew if I didn’t give them the puck when they wanted it, they would bitch-slap me.
One time, I remember we came back to the bench and Larmer climbed all over my ass for not serving the puck to him at the optimum moment.
“You should have given me the puck as soon as I started to cut in,” he said.
“I tried, but—” I said, before he cut me off.
“Don’t try,” he said curtly. “Just do it.”
Their constant harassment helped transform me into a star, but don’t believe for a minute I didn’t grow weary of constant bitching about how I was playing. We are like family in an NHL dressing room, but sometimes family members get mad at one another. Once, Larmer was yelling at me on the bench while I was trying to get a drink of water. I became so pissed off at him that I spit water all over him. That was truly spitting on the hand that fed me, because Larmer taught me much about positioning and seeing passing options before they are visible to others.
Keenan always loved Larmer. When Keenan coached Team Canada, he always told us it wasn’t easy to find guys who could play with Wayne Gretzky because Gretzky just saw the game differently. It was like we were all playing chess, and Gretzky was playing three-dimensional chess. Keenan said Mario Lemieux was the best at playing with Gretzky, but the other winger who could do it was Larmer.
Larmer passed along one trick that I used for most of my career.
“If you don’t see me,” Larmer would say, “I’m going to the spot that you just vacated.”
When two linemates think like that, they will score on plenty of give-and-go plays. And our line scored often on that play.
All of our changes had been made with the idea that we needed to be tough to play against in a seven-game series. We proved that in 1992, when we lost two of the first three against St. Louis and then rattled off 11 consecutive wins to put Chicago in the Stanley Cup final for the first time since 1972. We were trying to win Chicago’s first Stanley Cup since 1961.
Going into the final, the media asked me how the Chicago Blackhawks were going to beat the Pittsburgh Penguins; I thought they should have been asking the Penguins how they were going to beat us. Even though the Penguins were the defending Stanley Cup champions and boasted a roster that included Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr, Ron Francis, Bryan Trottier, Kevin Stevens and Rick Tocchet, the players in our dressing room believed we were the favourites.
It seemed like we were correct in that assessment when we claimed a 4–1 lead halfway through game one. Even when Tocchet and Lemieux scored late in the second period to pull the Penguins within a goal, we still believed we could hold the lead. We thought we were mentally tougher. We thought we could outwork the Penguins. We thought wrong.
The Penguins were relentless, and Lemieux and a 20-year-old Jaromir Jagr took over the game. With just under five minutes left, Jagr claimed a loose puck and wove through five Blackhawks, including Brent Sutter and Dirk Graham, skated through the slot and beat Belfour with a low backhander. My recollection is that Jagr turned Sutter inside out twice. In the newspapers the next day, Lemieux called Jagr’s goal “the greatest goal I ever saw.”
Lemieux had his
own heroics, scoring the game-winner, on the power play, with 13 seconds remaining in regulation. Five seconds before, referee Andy Van Hellemond had whistled Smith for hooking Lemieux. Smith had to do it to prevent Lemieux from breaking in on Belfour.
The Penguins were the first team since 1944 to come back from a three-goal deficit to win a game in the Stanley Cup final. We actually led twice by three goals because we had scored the first three goals of the game.
One news account of the game prophesized that Lemieux and Jagr “may some day be remembered as hockey’s equivalent of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.”
Keenan was livid over our performance in general, and he was particularly incensed over Jagr’s goal. “Both defenders played the puck, not the man,” he said, referring to Sutter and Graham. “And our goaltender never made a save, and it wasn’t a very hard shot. He beat three players on a solo effort.”
The sentiment around the hockey world seemed to be that Keenan gave up on us after the first game. I didn’t feel that way. I thought his quotes after the game were typical Keenan mind games, designed to spur us to a higher performance level in the second game. But in hindsight, anyone can see that we never recovered from game one. In game two, we started slowly, and I found myself at the end of the bench with my linemates, Steve Larmer and Michel Goulet. Keenan wouldn’t even look at us. Stu Grimson and Mike Peluso, two of our tough guys, received increased ice time while we sat. Grimson was six foot five and weighed 220, and Peluso was six foot four. Keenan said he was trying to “wear down” the Penguins with some size. We lost the game 3–1.
The buzz after the game was about Keenan benching his top line.
“I can’t decipher what his reasons are,” I told the Tribune. “It was very frustrating. I knew the position we were in. I feel I was working hard. I was getting good hits. And he sat me on the bench. It was tough to take. He sat me out three or four shifts, the last eight minutes of the game. But I can’t worry about what he’s going to do. I have to worry about what I’m going to do.”
The media questioned Keenan’s in-game tactics for benching his three best offensive players. The theme of the criticism was that the Stanley Cup final is not the time to make statements to your players. It wasn’t the time to take the switch to your players. It wasn’t the time to teach lessons.
Keenan wasn’t done with his theatrics. Before I was benched in game two, Stevens slashed me. Fortunately, it resulted in a bruise and not a break. But that didn’t stop Keenan from telling the doctors to put a cast on my injury. He told me I was going to the press conference that morning, and he told me that I shouldn’t say a word. When we got there, Keenan held up my cast as Exhibit A of his case that the officials had missed the Penguins taking liberties with his players. My cast was Keenan’s prop. My “injury” was also his explanation for why his 50-goal scorer had been on the bench for such a long time.
There were far more reporters snickering than believing in Keenan’s theatrics between games two and three. When I was able to play game three, famed Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Verdi, who knew by now the way it works for the Blackhawks, wrote: “Let the healing begin! Jeremy Roenick lives! At 7:44 Saturday evening, in a miracle of modern science, the Blackhawks’ 22-year-old superstar left his death bed and skated onto the Stadium ice to take his first shift.”
Near the end of his column, Verdi even suggested that Bill Wirtz should sell copies of my X-rays for $19.99. Late in his column, he added this: “Bite your tongue if you even dare think Keenan choreographed this entire scenario. To deflect criticism of his coaching in game two? To work the officials? To get some strokes for Roenick, who plays golf with Stevens all summer back in Boston? Shame on you. Then again, if Roenick was too hurt to play Thursday night, what about Steve Larmer and Michel Goulet? Where were their one-day casts, or were they being benched in sympathy for Roenick? Just asking.”
No one should have been shocked by Keenan’s move, because he’s not the kind of man who is going to change his approach because the stakes are higher. He’s going to do it his way, because at that point his way had worked out well for him.
Down 2–0 heading back to Chicago, we knew our belief that hard work would trump skill was misguided, at least for this particular series. We were swept in four games. I was crying as I left the ice. Veteran players always tell you to savour every moment in a Stanley Cup final because you never know whether you will ever return. Those words went right over my head, because I felt as if the Blackhawks had arrived and we would have more chances to win a Stanley Cup. I could not have been more wrong.
While the Penguins were celebrating their victory in our building, the Blackhawks were in our dressing room, talking about what had gone wrong. Keenan recalls that Dirk Graham told him immediately after the series that it had been over before we realized what the requirements were for winning the Stanley Cup. The Penguins had a superstar in Lemieux, and they had won the Cup just 12 months before. They knew what they needed to do, because they had done it recently.
What I remember most about that night was sitting with Keenan in the dressing room, drinking beer until three or four o’clock in the morning. Mike told me that we had to learn from our experience, and we talked about how this loss would make us stronger. We had a tough, skilful team. I was 22. Ed Belfour was 27. Chelios, Steve Smith and Steve Larmer were still in their prime. Michel Goulet was 32. At 42, Keenan was still a young coach. In my mind, I believed Keenan would push us back to the Stanley Cup final. In my mind, I was going to be a better player in my next Stanley Cup final. I didn’t get a point in my first three games of the series, and then I scored twice in game four. My second goal pulled us within one with 8:42 remaining, but we just couldn’t get the tying goal. I believed I would get another chance to redeem myself.
But, six days after the Penguins finished us off, Mr. Wirtz informed Mike that he had to choose between being general manager and being coach. Keenan was told that Darryl Sutter had become a hot coaching candidate, and the Blackhawks didn’t want to lose him to another team.
At that time, Keenan was mentally drained. He had coached Team Canada to a gold medal at the 1991 Canada Cup before guiding us to the Stanley Cup final. That meant he had been coaching 11 consecutive months. Anyone who knew Mike knew he still wanted to coach, but he chose to be general manager.
Then, on November 6, 1992, less than five months after taking us to the final, Keenan was summoned to what he thought was a meeting to negotiate a new contract. Instead, he walked into a room to find the team’s lawyer, Gene Gozdecki, and Mr. Wirtz’s son Peter, then a team vice-president. They informed him he was being fired. No reason was given. To this day, Mike tells me he still doesn’t know for sure why that decision was reached. The presumption is that Mr. Wirtz didn’t enjoy having a strong-willed executive pushing him to make moves he didn’t want to make. My guess is that Mr. Wirtz preferred a “yes man” in that position, or at least someone who wasn’t as strong-willed as Keenan.
Keenan had pushed Mr. Wirtz about trading Denis Savard, and I don’t believe Mr. Wirtz truly wanted to trade Savvy. Keenan had brokered the deal for Chelios with Montreal’s Serge Savard. Mr. Wirtz went along with the trade, but maybe Mr. Wirtz resented Keenan for pushing him to trade a popular player. My hunch is that Mr. Wirtz didn’t appreciate how much power Keenan expected to have.
The mistake the Blackhawks made in dismissing Keenan was clearly evident 19 months later. By then, the New York Rangers had hired Keenan, and he had taken them to the Stanley Cup championship in 1993–94. It was the Rangers’ first title in 54 years.
Some players were happy to have Keenan out of their lives, but I was devastated. I was angry. As I mentioned, he was a father figure to me. He always gave it to me straight. The decision to fire Keenan was probably my first true exposure to the ugly politics of sports. When you negotiate contracts with teams, you certainly understand that the NHL is a business. But when Keenan was fired, I realized for the first time that decisions weren’t always made o
n the basis of how successful a team was on the ice. If Keenan had been judged solely on how his team performed, he would have never been fired. I learned that day that talented people can be cast aside simply because someone doesn’t like them. Remember, I had stepped from a high school classroom into the NHL. These life lessons were all new to me.
My wife, Tracy, believes that losing Keenan at that time changed my life’s course. I was a young man with a lot of money and time, and I was just starting to be the party guy that I hadn’t been in high school. I started to hang out more with people who wanted to be with me because I was a star player. They didn’t even know Jeremy. They only knew J.R. Tracy tried to warn me what was happening, but I wasn’t listening. Perhaps if Keenan had been there, it might have made a difference. I was afraid of Keenan. He was the most intimidating coach I ever had. Strangely, I liked the power he had over me. But honestly, I don’t think even Keenan could have stopped me from exploring my celebrity status. It was intoxicating to be a star in Chicago in the 1990s. When you are on the top in the sports world with thousands of fans, it’s very easy to feel like you are the king of the world. You feel invincible. I’m sure Tiger Woods felt he was invincible. My situation was far different from Tiger Woods’s situation, but I do understand the feeling that nothing bad is going to happen to you. When you are a top young athlete, you are coddled and sheltered. Then you end up with money and popularity; it’s easy to get caught up in that superstar-hero mentality. When that happens, then you are fucked.
5. Showing Me the Door
During my time in Chicago, there was an impression around the NHL that I didn’t like Darryl Sutter as a coach, but that wasn’t true. I thought he was a smart hockey guy and a quality coach.
J.R.: My Life as the Most Outspoken, Fearless, and Hard-Hitting Man in Hockey Page 8
