J.R.: My Life as the Most Outspoken, Fearless, and Hard-Hitting Man in Hockey

by Jeremy Roenick

  The previous June, I had watched Teemu Selanne, who had been selected right after me in the 1988 NHL draft, finally win his Stanley Cup while playing for Anaheim. In 2006, Rod Brind’Amour, drafted before me in 1988, won his Stanley Cup with the Carolina Hurricanes. Maybe it was my turn to win a Stanley Cup. It felt as if Wilson was going to help fulfill my destiny.

  Ron Wilson, no relation to Doug, was the team’s coach, and I knew him well. We had mixed well when he was Team USA’s 1998 Olympic coach. Wilson is tough, but he’s a funny man. As long as you are working hard, you can joke around with him.

  With only a month to get in shape before training camp, I went home to Arizona and lived in the gym. I lost 15 pounds in three weeks. A couple of weeks later, I called Wilson and told him I wanted to wear number 27, the number I wore in Chicago. To me, 27 was symbolic of my commitment to be a hockey player and not a sports personality. When I wore number 97, as I did in Phoenix, Philadelphia and L.A., I felt like I needed to be more than just a player.

  “That’s funny,” Wilson said, “because I was thinking yesterday that I was going to ask you to change your number back to 27.”

  The deal was announced on September 5, and no one was writing that Wilson was a genius for signing me. There were probably snickers around the NHL. The general perception seemed to be that I didn’t have anything left in the tank. But I knew Doug Wilson believed I could help the team, and I was determined to reward his faith in me. I didn’t consume any alcohol the entire season. My weight dropped to 187, and I felt better than I had in years. I scored 15 goals playing on the third and fourth line. I kept my promise to Wilson. I kept my mouth shut. I had fun with the fans. I didn’t create any controversy.

  I was on my best behaviour all season. I tried to be the league’s best third-line centre. Doug didn’t want me to be the centre of attention, and I respected his wishes. I tried to be a leader without stepping on the toes of the team’s established leaders, such as captain Patrick Marleau and veteran Joe Thornton.

  My respect for Thornton was instantaneous. He is an incredible playmaker, and I discovered immediately that he was a good man. He wanted to win. It was clear to me that he was part of the solution in San Jose, not part of the problem. I didn’t have the same good vibe about Marleau. I thought he was one of the most talented players I ever had on my team, but he didn’t seem to have the level of emotion that I believe you need to be a great player. What was more frustrating, he didn’t seem to want to acquire that emotion. He disappointed me with his unwillingness to accept the idea that he needed to make changes in his approach. As someone who understood what it takes to be a great captain because I played alongside Keith Tkachuk and Chris Chelios, I can tell you Marleau didn’t have those qualities. Disappointed with Marleau’s leadership, I tried to do what I could to be a leader behind the scenes in 2007–08.

  One of the more enjoyable aspects of being an older player was having younger players look up to you. Tracy and I pretty much adopted Devin Setoguchi and Torrey Mitchell. They were always at our home. Setoguchi lived with us for a while, and after he moved out he still brought his laundry over to our house. I had serious discussions with those two about what it takes to have a successful NHL career. And I also had some hilarious moments with the players who were almost half my age.

  One night, my cell phone rang at three o’clock in the morning. It was Setoguchi and Mitchell. They told me to go to my front door. No one was there. I left the door ajar and started toward the kitchen for some water. Suddenly, the door burst open and it’s Setoguchi and Mitchell, out of breath, wearing nothing but running shoes. They were giggling like elementary-school girls. Obviously, many bottles of beer had been killed in the making of this story. Setoguchi and Mitchell had run naked from their apartment to my house. It was more than a mile. Tracy, sound asleep, heard the noise of their arrival. She came downstairs to discover my two teammates standing naked in our living room. Having been a hockey wife for almost two decades, nothing surprises Tracy. So she said simply, “Why don’t you have any clothes on?”

  “Because we are having naked races,” Mitchell said matter-of-factly.

  “Well, put some clothes on, because my daughter is sleeping upstairs,” Tracy said. “If she wakes up and sees you guys, she could be traumatized for life.”

  “We’ll do that,” Setoguchi said. “But can you answer one question first?” Setoguchi put his arm around Mitchell, and they turned around together. “Can you tell us which one of us has the nicest ass?” Setoguchi said.

  Tracy rolled her eyes and went off to bed, comforted in the knowledge that her two “Sharks kids” were simply under the influence of a very high blood alcohol content.

  One of my favourite practical jokes occurred during my two years in San Jose. It involved my efforts to achieve payback against Ryane Clowe for a joke he pulled on me.

  We were on the road, and I decided to pull the time-honoured hockey prank of removing all of the furniture from his hotel room. That joke became harder to pull off as the years went by because hotel security has improved considerably. These days, if your ID doesn’t say you are in the room, you don’t get a key. To get around that issue, I dressed in a bathing suit and went down to the front desk and put all of my acting ability on display. I explained that I had gone down for a swim and I had forgotten my key. I didn’t have any ID to show them. This was an elaborate fucking ruse to say the least. They balked at first, but I turned on the charm. Before long, I had secured Clowe’s key. Minutes later, I had put together a crew to remove every item from his room. We reassembled it in the area by the elevator. It was exactly the same; we even remade Clowe’s bed.

  What makes this story funnier was Clowe’s reaction. When Clowe found his room empty and his bed in the hallway, he decided he was too tired to put it all back the way it was. So he said, “Fuck it,” climbed into his bed and slept in the hallway all night.

  Honestly, I believe that I was playing at a higher level in my last two seasons than I was playing in my last two seasons in Philadelphia. Whether you want to believe it was fate or coincidence, my second game in a San Jose jersey was in Vancouver, where, the previous season, I had triggered a controversy by going out to dinner at the Keg when I was a healthy scratch.

  Do you think I was pumped up to play that game? In my new role as a checking-line centre with linemates Milan Michalek and Torrey Mitchell, I played 13 minutes and scored two first-period goals on three shots in a 3–2 win against the Canucks. When the game was over, Wilson came into the dressing room and shouted that “J.R. needs to take everyone to the Keg for a steak dinner . . . or at least the coaches.”

  The local media wanted to turn my production into an atonement story, and I obliged. They asked me which was more satisfying: my night at the Keg or the two goals.

  “I don’t know,” I said, playing along with the storyline. “That steak at the Keg was really good. They serve a really good steak. There’s no question about that. But I will take two goals instead.”

  The Vancouver Sun story read: “Why couldn’t Jeremy Roenick have done the honourable thing and just spent Friday night at Keg Caesars? The Canucks certainly would have been happy to pick up the bar tab.” Given all the publicity I provided the Keg over a two-year period, I probably should eat there free for life.

  I met some special people and had some special moments in San Jose, such as scoring my 500th career NHL goal on November 10. At the time, that put me in the company of Mike Modano and Joe Mullen as the only American-born 500-goal scorers. Since then, Tkachuk has joined the club. I mentioned to people that I didn’t want to score my 500th into an empty net. I probably should have said I didn’t want to score my 500th because of a strange bounce, because that’s what happened.

  In a game against the Phoenix Coyotes, I fired the puck into the offensive zone and Coyotes goalie Alex Auld basically deflected it into his own net. The puck hit the glass, the net and then Auld’s stick before it slid into the net from a strange angle. A
t least I was playing well when I scored that goal. The goal came in the midst of a five-game point-scoring streak and a run during which I had at least one point in nine out of 10 games.

  It seemed fitting that I would score the 500th against Phoenix, where I had played for five seasons. My 50th goal had come in my hometown Boston Garden, and my 100th in Chicago Stadium.

  After the game, I carried my son, Brett, on my back as I skated around for a victory lap. I also told the media that I was thrilled to score the goal in San Jose because “a lot of people threw me to the dogs after last year, and this team gave me a chance.”

  After the game, I presented the 500th-goal puck to Doug Wilson as a token of my appreciation for the opportunity he had given me. Had he not called me, I probably would have been forever stuck at 495.

  It was my coach, Ron Wilson, who had the nicest comment after the game: “It was an emotional moment,” he said. “J.R. plays with a lot of passion. To see that joy is inspirational. Our team sees that it’s okay to be passionate in the way you play the game.”

  Although I liked playing for Ron, it wasn’t always a smooth ride for the two of us. During the 2008 playoffs, we played the Calgary Flames in the first round and we weren’t at the top of our game. We were all on edge, and Ron screamed at me during game five because he believed I had taken a long shift. I screamed back, using my full arsenal of expletives, because he was fucking wrong in his assessment. I had only been out there 25 seconds or so because the centre before was late coming off.

  Between periods, I went into his office and told him I didn’t fucking appreciate the way he screamed at me on the bench when I was innocent of the fucking charge. Then I unleashed a string of foul language that would have made a prison guard blush. Ron didn’t budge an inch and told me profanely that I had no right to speak to him like that. He climbed into the gutter with me, and we pounded each other with foul language and insults. What happened next probably is what earned me a benching. Ron is a memorabilia collector, and his office contained several historically significant artifacts he had picked up during his career. Among them was a game-used stick he had been given by New Jersey Devils goalie Martin Brodeur. I grabbed the stick and flung it against the wall. At that point, I believe Ron may have momentarily lost his mind when he saw the Brodeur stick airborne.

  It’s never easy to explain how I could lose control of my emotions in those situations. Unquestionably, I was frustrated because I hadn’t been playing poorly in that series. But you also have to take into account that, even after 19 years, I still played hockey with molten passion. I was still flying around the ice, breathing fire and looking for prey. It’s not easy to turn off the passion between periods. When I’m in my battle mode, I’m not going to take kindly to a coach wrongly second-guessing something I did, or didn’t, do.

  When I’m fired up, it’s not in me to say, “Geez, Ronny, you may have a point there about the shift length. I will try to work on that.” It’s not going to happen that way. When I’m in my competitive mode, my mouth is a flamethrower and I fire at will.

  Luckily, the Brodeur stick wasn’t broken, but I felt terrible after it happened. Ron loved his items, and I had shown disrespect to a coach I liked and admired.

  Considering that I didn’t have a single point in the first five games of the series, Ron might have already been thinking he was going to scratch me for game six in Calgary. But I certainly gave him another reason to take me out of the lineup. Like the professional he is, Ron brought me in to tell me I was sitting out the game. He said he didn’t have to give me a reason. “But I think you know why you are sitting out,” he said.

  Leaving his office, I remember thinking I was either getting benched because he was pissed off that I threw his Brodeur stick or because I was brutal. Probably, I was scratched for both reasons.

  If Wilson hoped to motivate me with the benching, it definitely worked. When we lost game six in Calgary, I made up my mind that I would be a difference-maker in game seven if given the chance. On the morning of that game, in San Jose, Ron sent me a text predicting I was going to have a big game. At the morning skate, Ron gathered everyone around and said none of us should worry because we were going to be carried that night by a player who had netted more game-seven goals than most players in NHL history.

  He was talking about me. At that time, I had scored four goals in game sevens. As it turned out, Ron was accurate in his forecast, because I had one of the best playoff performances of my career, netting two goals and two assists in San Jose’s 5–3 win.

  With San Jose trailing 2–1, I fired a low shot through Setoguchi’s screen to beat Calgary goalie Miikka Kiprusoff to tie the game. We’d been struggling on the power play (4-for-27) through the first six games of the series, and Wilson rewarded my goal by putting me on the power-play unit. Three minutes after my first goal, I found some open ice and blistered a high shot past Kiprusoff to give us a 3–2 lead.

  At the time, only Glenn Anderson (with seven) had scored more goals in seventh games of playoff series than my six. Although I played only 12 minutes in the game, my four points tied the Sharks’ team record for points in a playoff game.

  I thought our response to that game-seven challenge against the Flames would launch us on a successful playoff run. It did not. Inexplicably, we lost the first three games of the second-round series against Dallas. We showed some mental toughness by winning games four and five, but we were unlucky in game six, losing in the fourth overtime on Brenden Morrow’s goal.

  The problem the Sharks have is that they are judged solely on how they perform in the playoffs. It’s almost as if anything less than the franchise’s first Stanley Cup championship is considered a failure. A second-round playoff exit cost Ron Wilson his job. People always want to know why the Sharks can’t get over the hump, and there seems to be no real answer for that except that we weren’t on a roll at the right time.

  The disappointing finish didn’t reduce my enthusiasm for continuing my career in Northern California. I still believed this team could win the Stanley Cup, and I still believed I could contribute to that cause. Doug Wilson offered me another one-year contract, this time for a million dollars. Wilson’s willingness to double my salary felt like a true compliment. Frankly, I would have come back for the same salary.

  My second season in San Jose didn’t go as well as my first, simply because of injuries.

  In mid-December, we were playing the Anaheim Ducks, and defenceman Brett Festerling cross-checked me from behind. I tried to stop myself, and my elbow hit the boards. I felt my shoulder pop out. I played the next two periods, even though I suspected I would be out the next couple of weeks.

  But I was shocked when the MRI showed that I needed my shoulder rebuilt. I missed 28 games and wasn’t able to return until February.

  When I returned to the lineup, I was playing on the fourth line with Claude Lemieux and Jody Shelley. We combined for 115 years on the planet. At age 33, Shelley was the baby of the unit.

  As a team, we seemed even more ready than we were the previous season. We won the President’s Trophy with 53 wins. We only lost five times in regulation at home. First-year head coach Todd McLellan had brought a fresh sense of urgency. But in the playoffs, we lost our first two games at home against Anaheim, and we never recovered. We were knocked out in six games. It was certainly among the most disappointing playoff exits of my career. I believed the Sharks had enough quality players to win the Stanley Cup.

  Again, we just didn’t seem to be the gritty team that could get on a roll. I’m not sure that there is anyone in the organization who is more at fault than any other. Doug Wilson is a quality general manager, and Todd McLellan knows what he is doing. You can’t say the players weren’t good enough. We just couldn’t peak at the right time.

  I would probably be a mess today if Wilson had not provided me with the opportunity to end my career with a positive experience. After two seasons in San Jose, I did consider playing another season.

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nbsp; It’s said that athletes are the last to know when it’s time to retire. But really it’s the friends, fans and family members of an athlete who may be the last to know that it is time for him to retire. In the spirit of supporting an athlete, they sometimes are enablers when it comes to athletes playing beyond their expiration date. Everyone I knew, including teammates, was telling me to play another season. What I needed was a friend who could set aside emotion before giving me advice. Again, it was Doug Wilson who filled that role.

  When I went to meet with Doug for the season-ending meeting, I told him I was considering playing another season.

  “As a friend, not as a general manager, I’m telling you it’s time to hang them up,” Doug told me.

  He told me I had enjoyed a great career, scored more than 500 goals and proved in San Jose that I could still play. In my two seasons in San Jose, my number 27 jersey was the hottest-selling Sharks jersey. I had done what he asked me to do, and now it was time to walk away. He told me he was worried that the next concussion I suffered might be the one that caused permanent damage.

  When Wilson said he believed it was time for me to retire, it felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. My next breath was the easiest one I ever took. I needed someone to tell me it was time to quit playing, and Doug Wilson was the friend who gave it to me straight. That was more than appropriate. When I first entered the NHL, I was in a room with Doug Wilson as my teammate. When I realized my NHL career was over, I was in a room with Doug Wilson.

  Being the class act that he is, Wilson implied that there was a job in the organization if I wanted it. The Chicago Blackhawks also seemed interested in bringing me on as an ambassador.

  At a very emotional retirement press conference, I almost broke down several times. Asked what advice I would give a younger player, I said: “Be yourself, enjoy what you’re doing. Don’t be afraid to open your mouth. Don’t be afraid to say what you feel. Be different. Don’t be afraid to rock the boat every once in a while. But do it with respect. Enjoy what you do, work hard and love your teammates.”