I just didn’t believe that a salary cap would hurt us the way Goodenow said it would. I just believed that, even with a salary cap, players would still be paid well. To be honest, I thought the league actually needed a system that would allow more teams to be competitive. I believe that I’ve been proven correct in my assessment.
When Commissioner Gary Bettman cancelled the season on February 16, we all shared in the blame for letting that happen. The anger consumed me after that, and it probably didn’t help that I was still recovering from a severe concussion. It bothered me that players were being looked at as the bad guys in the lost season.
In June 2005, I was golfing in Mario Lemieux’s charity golf tournament when I was asked about what had happened in the lost season. My eruption became the news of the day.
“[The NHLPA] could have listened to [its] players,” I said. “They could have listened to the players who had an idea of where this thing was going. They could have listened to me; they could have listened to Robert Esche, to Jarome Iginla, to Chris Pronger, and to sign a deal close to what we had in February. . . . Now that we’re at this point, I realize I was right. That deal we could have signed in February beats the fuck out of the deal we’re going to sign in July.”
I wasn’t done talking, not by a long shot. “If people are going to sit and chastise professional athletes for being spoiled and being cocky, they need to look at one thing, and that’s the deal that we are probably going to end up signing here in the next three weeks,” I said. “They’d better understand that pro athletes are not cocky. Pro athletes care about the game. Everybody out there who calls us spoiled because we play ‘a game,’ they can all kiss my [ass]. They can all kiss my ass because we have tried so hard to get this game back on the ice.”
That sent shock waves around the hockey world. I ended up being interviewed by ESPN’s Dan Patrick on SportsCenter about what I had said. He came out verbally swinging at me, and we ended up in a heated, emotional sparring match.
It wasn’t just good television. It was great television.
After my joust with Patrick, we didn’t speak to each other for a long period of time. He didn’t invite me on his show, probably because he assumed I wanted to pulverize him for lashing out at me on national television. When we worked on the Stanley Cup final together in 2010, he said, “J.R., I thought you hated me.”
I told him I didn’t hate him. In fact, I respect his show a great deal. “But I thought you were a dick for coming after me,” I said, laughing. “But you thought I was a dick for saying what I did.”
Since the clearing of the air, Dan and I have had a great relationship. And it all came out of our heated exchange on television.
In retrospect, my words at Mario’s golf tournament probably were among the more stupid comments I’ve ever made. But I wouldn’t take them back. I’m an emotional guy, and I say what I feel at the time. Good or bad, that’s who I am.
17. Dancing with Probert
When I squared off with Marty McSorley in my first National Hockey League fight, it was a decision born out of ignorance rather than bravery. I had no idea who McSorley was, or what danger I was in, when I knocked him on his rump with a hit during the 1989–90 season. The 220-pound Los Angeles Kings defenceman inexplicably had his head down as he carried the puck near our bench, and I steamrolled him with a solid hit. McSorley was flat on his back, and I stood over him like a triumphant warrior. That was my mistake.
When our eyes met, I sensed that I had just awakened a fire-breathing dragon. Having turned 20 only two weeks before, I honestly didn’t appreciate that it was against NHL etiquette to celebrate a heavy check. But after viewing the demonic look on McSorley’s face, I instantly understood that I had done something horribly wrong. McSorley quickly was up on his skates, and I felt his long arm of the law grab the back of my neck. Now believing that I had to protect myself, I dropped my gloves. As soon as the first glove came off, I could hear everyone on our bench yell in unison: “Noooooooooooooooooooo.”
Our scrap was akin to a PT boat taking on a destroyer. I was in my first professional fight, and McSorley had already logged more than a hundred fighting majors. He outweighed me by more than 60 pounds. The guys on my bench were screaming for me to get out of there, but it wasn’t as if I had a choice. The two-minute instigator penalty McSorley received was well deserved. Within seconds, I became McSorley’s personal punching bag. I was in survival mode the instant he jackhammered me with his initial punch. I was flinging my arms as wildly as I could to make it look like I was putting up a good fight, but this was no contest. One of McSorley’s punches struck me between the eyes, and I remember my screen went blank. I lost my eyesight for a second or two. It was as if a light switch had been turned off. I could hear everything around me, and I knew what was happening, but there was total blackness.
In retrospect, I wonder whether I sustained a concussion on that McSorley punch. Because it happened more than 20 years ago, I can’t remember whether I experienced headaches or any other symptoms that we would associate today with a concussion. Back then, we weren’t as aware of concussion symptoms, and I know I stayed in the lineup even when I wasn’t feeling quite right.
During my battle with McSorley, I remember thinking I just had to hang on until my teammates could rescue me.
It didn’t take me long to realize that if I was going to play the Tasmanian Devil style that Keenan wanted me to play, I was going to have to fight from time to time. I’m proud that I have 40 fighting majors to go with my 513 NHL goals. I also fought Ulf Samuelsson, Garth Butcher, Darcy Tucker and Robyn Regehr, among others.
According to hockeyfights.com, I even had a fight against current Penguins coach Dan Bylsma when he was playing for Los Angeles, on the day after Christmas in 1999. I don’t have any memory of that fight, which didn’t last long, according to the Internet. But if I had to theorize as to why I fought Bylsma, I would say it was because I had a general dislike for defensive-style forwards. When I faced a forward whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to prevent me from scoring, my strategy was often to skate toward one of his teammates and chop him on the ankles. The result would be that I would have two opponents trying to deal with me, which usually meant that one of my linemates then had open ice.
The problem with that strategy is that it often meant I had two angered opponents looking to fight me. I don’t know for sure if that happened with Bylsma, but it is a reasonable theory. Usually, the people who wanted to fight me believed they had a just provocation.
I wasn’t one of those guys who sized up who my opponent was before I decided whether to fight or not. Sometimes it felt like I was a flyweight competing in the heavyweight division. My second fight was against tough guy Craig Berube, and I scrapped twice against the late Bob Probert, who might have been the baddest fighter in NHL history. Whenever I fought someone that Keenan believed was out of my weight class, he would say, “Jeremy, I admire your courage and question your intellect.”
It’s not as if I enjoyed fighting, because I clearly didn’t. But I believed that if I was going to buzz about the ice running into people, then I was going to have to pay a price. Most of my fights came about because I was just an irritating presence. In the 1990s, it was still the tough guys keeping the law and order. When I hit a Detroit Red Wings player, I knew policeman Probert would be looking for me.
The first time I fought Probert, he had come after me because I had caught him with some solid hits. As I recall, he was also mad at me for flattening Shawn Burr. Probert decided he had put up with me long enough, and he began to chase me down. I could hear him calling me out, and inexplicably, I just turned around and dropped the gloves. The whole scene is available on YouTube.
After the game, the big question my teammates had for me was, “What were you thinking?”
What I was thinking is that pain is temporary, while pride is forever. That was my motto in those situations. I would rather be the player who got his ass kicked once in a while
than the guy who skated away because he was afraid. My attitude is that as long as I’m going to wake up the next morning, I can accept black eyes, bruises and scars as the cost of doing business in the NHL.
The worst beating I took in an NHL fight probably came from Darcy Tucker when I was playing for Philadelphia. Tucker tattooed me with a couple of hard punches. One of his uppercuts nailed me square on the chin. I think I rose up an inch off the ice.
I had a wild fight against Scott Walker, who is a scrappy, tough customer. The fight, which happened in the first period, started in my zone, and when we finished we were in his zone. It seemed like the fight lasted a minute and a half. When the battle was over, I remember that I was spent. I was totally worthless as a player the rest of the night. I was totally gassed. I couldn’t move my fingers or arms very well.
Fights in the NHL often occur because one player is standing up for his teammate or making an opponent pay for unacceptable behaviour on the ice. But even if they occur for those reasons, the primary reason for the fight could be that the players dislike each other. You are always more willing to defend a teammate if the guy you have to fight is someone you can’t stand.
Bryan McCabe, then with Chicago, started a fight with me on March 6, 2000, and said after the game that he did so in retaliation for my high stick against Tony Amonte five months before.
“[Roenick] had to be held accountable for what happened,” McCabe told the Chicago Tribune after the game. “No one forgot about that. We know each other, so we know it is just part of the game. I think he even knew it was coming with the score 6–2 [at the time]. He knows what he did, and I was just trying to keep him honest.”
What McCabe didn’t say was the truth: that he came after me because he didn’t like me. The feeling was mutual. McCabe came after me every time we played. He was a hard-nosed player. We were both cocky. We were always trash-talking. I would tell him how badly I thought he was playing, and he would tell me I was overrated.
The Amonte factor may have been the official reason he attacked me, but it wasn’t the only reason. Trust me on that.
I’m guessing that fight didn’t go quite the way McCabe thought it would. Remember, I was playing for Phoenix then, meaning I wasn’t the hometown boy of the Chicago Tribune. But Tribune writer K. C. Johnson said, “Roenick held his own against the slightly bigger McCabe, perhaps even squeezing out a close decision in the bout.”
My position on fighting is that it is a necessary and entertaining aspect of hockey. I like the tradition of two guys spontaneously throwing down their gloves in the heat of the moment. I respected opponents who came after me when I had wronged them. That’s the way it should be done. However, I don’t believe we still need players on the roster whose only job is to fight. I hate saying that, because I’ve known fine men who have played that role for many years.
In all of my years playing in the NHL, I’ve never had a fighter on my team that I didn’t like. Usually, the team’s fighter is the most popular guy in the dressing room, and not just because he protects his teammates. Fighters are often the nicest players in the dressing room. I’ve found fighters’ personalities to be a sharp contrast to the image they portray on the ice. When I played against Probert, he seemed like a wild-eyed, vicious thug. But when I played one season with him in Chicago, my attitude about him changed. He seemed like a gentle giant, a pleasant man with a big heart. If you met him in the dressing room, he would strike you as the guy you would want as your neighbour.
There was no one more neighbourly than longtime Chicago tough guy Stu Grimson, who also didn’t fit the profile of the typical NHL fighter. Grimson was a born-again Christian who had 234 penalty minutes when the Blackhawks reached the Stanley Cup final in 1991–92. He was a 240-pound enforcer who never flinched against Probert or any of the league’s best fighters. He fought hard. But he didn’t swear. He didn’t carouse. He is the player featured in a television spot for the Foundation for a Better Life, where he receives a call from his daughter in the dressing room and then sings “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” to her between periods. It is a fictional event, but it was certainly a plausible scenario for Grimson. I never had the impression that he loved his role as a fighter, but he cherished his role of being a teammate. And he was a quality teammate. He was a jokester, the kind of guy who tries to lift the spirits of a teammate when he was down.
In newspaper stories, he said he had reconciled his Christian lifestyle with his job as a fighter by viewing himself as a protector.
“Jesus was no wimp,” he said once in a newspaper interview, adding, “If there has to be a player in this team environment that sticks up for the smaller man, or the less physical athlete, why wouldn’t it be a Christian?”
Grimson said when a teammate was taken advantage of, he felt it was his duty to set things straight.
Religion isn’t usually a good fit in an NHL dressing room, where the language is often blue and the jokes off-colour. But it was never an issue with Stu, who never pushed his religious beliefs on anyone. It was hard to find anyone who didn’t like Grimson.
Some fighters I’ve known did fit the stereotype of the wacko guy who became a fighter because he liked being a tough guy. Greg Smyth was a Blackhawks fighter for a while, and he seemed to like the role. He was one of the most entertaining teammates I’ve ever had. Everyone loved him as well, for different reasons. We called him Bird Dog. We used to say he was crazier than a shithouse rat.
In the early 1990s, the Blackhawks were still flying on commercial flights. We went to the airport, checked in for our flight like everyone else, and then started trading seats with other passengers to get six seats across to facilitate our card game. Most of us would always be mindful of the reality that we were sitting among other paying customers; we tried to keep our voices low and our swearing to a minimum. Smyth didn’t care where we were or what we were doing. He was going to be who he was, regardless of the situation. If we were playing cards for money and he lost, he would cuss loudly enough for everyone on the plane to hear.
One time, a passenger in front of us heard one too many curse words from Smyth and turned around and barked at him to “watch your language!”
“No fuckin’ way,” Smyth screamed back at him.
The passenger sunk in his seat, and we were all stifling our giggles. Smyth wouldn’t back down from the league’s toughest fighters. He certainly wasn’t going to let a civilian tell him what to do.
* * *
The men who fight for a living in the NHL are some of the most interesting and likeable men I’ve ever met. It’s hard for me to say NHL tough guys don’t deserve the jobs they have today. I don’t believe the NHL has outgrown fighting, but I think it has outgrown players whose sole hockey function is to fight.
My confrontation and feud with Berube started because of a battle I was having with his goalie, Ron Hextall. I ran Hextall into the net, and Flyers coach Paul Holmgren blew a gasket. He ordered Berube to go after me. There was no invitation to dance. He just grabbed me and we started fighting. But we didn’t throw many punches before we were engulfed in a big scrum involving all of the skaters on the ice. When the linesmen interceded to break up the scuffle, I suddenly realized that Berube was being restrained by officials and I had my right arm free.
Berube was in a vulnerable position. I remember weighing whether I should hold back or launch my best right cross. I opted for the cheap shot. I cold-cocked Berube when he was totally defenceless. Berube was furious, but he couldn’t come after me because the linesman had him in a bear hug. That encounter came in 1990, and for the next few years Berube was always looking for his chance to make me pay.
Every time we played Philadelphia, Berube was always trying to get on the ice against me. It didn’t happen very often, because I was usually playing against Philadelphia’s top players and he was a fourth-liner. But when I was on the ice, I could hear him calling for the winger to cut his shift short to allow him the opportunity to jump on the ice and chase me. If he g
ot on the ice, and I got off, then he would skate quickly to the bench. If he would have caught me, I would have fought him. But I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. He chased me for years, but I was always able to elude him. As time marched on and Berube played for other teams, I wondered whether he had forgotten. Could he carry a grudge for a decade? I received my answer in 2003, when Berube was a player/coach for the Philadelphia Phantoms while I was playing for the Flyers.
He came into the Flyers’ dressing room, and I said, “Hey, what’s up, Chief?”
He responded by hammering me in the fucking mouth with a vicious punch. He knocked me right on my ass.
My teammates were so shocked that the entire room went quiet. Before anyone in the dressing room could even react, Berube had reached down, pulled me up and said, “Now we are even.”
He had waited 11 years for his revenge. There was no inclination on my part to further escalate the feud by coming back at him. I rubbed my mouth and said, “I should have known that was coming.”
18. To Live and Die in L.A.
When I joined the Los Angeles Kings, the prevailing wisdom seemed to be that I was born to play in Southern California. It was like Elvis moving into Graceland or P.T. Barnum settling into his first big top. I am an entertainer, and L.A. is the entertainment capital of the world. It seemed like the perfect market for me, particularly when you consider that I was kicking around the idea of getting into acting when my NHL career was finished. I like to be a person who knows people, and many of the interesting people to know are located in the zip code 90210.
The Associated Press story on the trade led with the sentence “Jeremy Roenick is going Hollywood.”
Since Gretzky left town, the Kings had been seeking a colourful star to help on and off the ice. They thought I was that guy, and I believed I was that guy. After the deal was completed, Kings star Luc Robitaille told the Los Angeles Times, “This guy is ‘Showtime.’ This guy is Magic Johnson.”
J.R.: My Life as the Most Outspoken, Fearless, and Hard-Hitting Man in Hockey Page 17
