That’s really the gospel according to J.R.
My buddies Chris Chelios, Keith Tkachuk and Mike Modano all either called in or checked in with video greetings. Amazingly, Chelios, who is eight years older than me, was still a year away from his own retirement. “I always thought you’d retire with me,” Chelios said. “Actually, I might be retired. I just don’t know it yet.”
Chelios brought up the fact that my mouth had gotten him in trouble on more than one occasion—like the spring before, when I went on the radio in Chicago and said Red Wings coach Mike Babcock, a proud Canadian, wasn’t playing Chelios because he was anti-American. Although he said that radio interview was “entertaining,” Chelios added: “You put me through hell with the press for a couple days. It’s nothing that I’m not used to . . . always answering for you.”
There were many moments when I had to fight back the tears, such as when Chelios said no one had been a greater ambassador for USA Hockey or the NHL than I had been for years. That meant a lot coming from the man I call Captain America.
Tkachuk received the biggest laugh of the press conference. When reporters asked me what I was planning to do in retirement, Tkachuk interrupted and said I should go on the television show Dancing with the Stars. What he didn’t know is that I had already been approached about that possibility.
I’ve done a couple of rounds of interviews with the producers, and I was offered a chance to participate in the winter of 2011 when David Arquette, Chaz Bono, Nancy Grace and Hope Solo were among the contestants. I had to decline the invitation because I had just signed a five-year contract with NBC, a rival network, as a hockey analyst.
Too bad I never got my chance, because I would have won that competition. I am an excellent dancer. Just ask Justin Timberlake.
21. When the Cheering Stops
When you play for a National Hockey League team, you always have an identity, a schedule and a purpose. You know who you are and what you are about. You wear your allegiance on the front of your jersey, and you have teammates who will be as close to you as brothers and a fan base that usually treats you like royalty.
Your mission is always to win the Stanley Cup. Always, there are workouts to be completed, games to be played, passes to be made, bodychecks to be delivered, goals to be scored, road trips to be taken, team dinners to be eaten, beer to be consumed, autographs to be signed, applause to be heard, people to be met and bows to be taken. It’s like living in an adventure movie. Every day, your job is invigorating, exciting and emotional. On some days, it’s exhilarating. Then one day you wake up and your career is over. The dream is no more.
Your body is too battered. Your stride is too slow. Your instincts aren’t as sharp as they once were. Your sparkle has lost its lustre. A press release is issued announcing your retirement, and then, for the first time since you were five or six years old, you have no team to call your own.
On a Wednesday, you are a million-dollar athlete, and then on Thursday you are fucking unemployed.
I tell you this not to suggest that anyone should feel sorry for a retiring National Hockey League player. In today’s game, most athletes who have been wise with their money don’t face financial hardship. It’s not like the situation of the loyal workers who log 20 years on the job with one company and then unexpectedly find themselves pink-slipped with kids still in college and a mortgage to pay. Those are the folks who deserve our empathy, not an athlete who has made millions of dollars in his career. I tell you this simply to show that no matter how you try to fool yourself into believing you will be ready when retirement comes, it’s still an overwhelming psychological event when it happens. Many athletes will tell you that the hardest aspect of retiring from the game is not knowing what to do next. You may have money, but you don’t know how you will occupy your time. You have this nagging sense that you don’t belong anywhere. Teammates, who seemed like family to you the day before, are moving forward without you; you are being left behind, a casualty of growing older.
Even if you know it’s the right decision, you feel adrift, not knowing whether you will drown in sadness or find yourself in paradise. “I’m nervous only because I don’t know what I’m going to do in the future,” I admitted to Sharks general manager Doug Wilson after we had decided it was time for me to retire. When I first came to the Chicago Blackhawks, my roommate Wilson taught me how to navigate the NHL rink. Now, two decades later, Wilson was telling me how to sail away from my sport. “I’ve been through it,” Wilson told me. “I know how it goes. And with your personality and resumé, you will have plenty of opportunities. You will get to pick and choose.” We talked for about 30 minutes, and he advised me to be patient. He told me to go home, let my body heal, and not decide to do anything for five or six months.
Even though I wasn’t sure whether I shared Doug’s optimistic assessment of my future employment possibilities, I trusted his instincts. He’s an honest man, and he would not have said what he did unless he believed it.
While I had no specific “retirement plan,” I did have a vague idea that I wanted to find a job where my personality could be viewed as the most important qualification on my resumé. In essence, I wanted to be paid to be Jeremy Roenick. I wanted a job that could spotlight my ability to keep a party going. For years, I had been saying that my objective after hockey was “to try to figure out how to stay in front of the camera.”
My former youth hockey teammate Justin Duberman, now an NHL player agent, once said about me: “Jeremy Roenick is an expert on the most meaningless things in life. He can’t tell you what our president’s foreign policy is, but he knows the words to every song. He knows every magic trick, every dice game, and the rules to every drinking game. Anything in life that is insignificant, Roenick is great at.”
Duberman calls me “a vacation from reality.” “If you need a break from the reality of real life, Jeremy is the perfect guy to be with,” Duberman said.
He forgot to mention that I know more than my fair share of lines from movies, and I’m willing to fully expose myself in the name of giving everyone a good laugh, such as the time I lip-synced Enrique Iglesias’s song “Hero” on Michael Landsberg’s show on TSN, Off the Record.
When I retired, Yahoo.com listed my top 10 pop-culture moments, and the Hockey News’s website listed my top 10 quotes. How many NHL players have had enough colourful moments, or spouted enough interesting words, to spawn those kinds of lists when they retire?
No one can say I didn’t try to make it interesting when I played. One night, I had NHL referee Kerry Fraser busting out with laughter after I tongue-lashed him for missing what seemed to be an obvious penalty against an opponent for pulling me to the ice.
“How can you not fucking call that?” I said.
“Because you fell down,” Fraser said.
“Do you think I would just fall down?” I screamed at him. “I’m the best skater in the league.”
Fraser just laughed at me. From that point on, any time I ended up on the ice, Kerry would yell in my direction: “J.R., you can’t fall down because you are the best skater in the world.” It was a tough loss for the league when Fraser had to retire, because he was an exceptional referee and a quality guy.
Another time, at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, the Kiss Cam scanned the Flyers’ bench and settled on me. Seizing the comedic moment, I leaned over and kissed teammate Mark Recchi on the cheek.
Probably the most famous verbal sparring match of my career involved my 1996 Western Conference semifinals encounter with Colorado goalie Patrick Roy. In game three, I had a breakaway and beat Roy on a slick fucking move that tied the game 3–3. We ended up winning the game in overtime. In game four, I ended up on another breakaway in overtime. On this play, I was hauled down from behind just as I was about to shoot. No penalty was called on the play. If you look at the replay, it was clearly a penalty. But in that era, nothing less than assault and battery was called in overtime.
Roy told the media that it wouldn�
�t have mattered because “I don’t think [Roenick] would have beaten me.”
When the media came back to me for my reply, I said: “It should have been a penalty shot, there’s no doubt about it. I like Patrick’s quote that he would’ve stopped me. I’d just want to know where he was in game three—probably getting his jock out of the rafters in the United Center maybe.”
Roy was allowed to have the last word, and he uttered the words that probably defined him as a personality: “I can’t really hear what Jeremy says, because I’ve got my two Stanley Cup rings plugging my ears.”
As we got to know each other through the years, I told Roy that was the funniest line I had heard in my career.
My exchange with Roy was really playful, but there was more anger involved when I locked horns verbally with goalie Garth Snow while he was playing for the New York Islanders and I was with the Flyers in 2002.
Snow and I were always giving it to each other during games. We are both ultra-competitive. I felt as if there was respect between us. But the trash talk between us was always R-rated and constant.
One night, after a 3–1 loss to the Islanders, I was upset with referee Don Van Massenhoven because he waved off two of our goals. One of the penalties was a goalie-interference call that came about because Snow was guilty of embellishment. It wasn’t even a quality acting job. It was obvious he was trying to sell the call.
“He should be worried about playing the game, not innovating it,” Snow told the media. “He thinks he’s Brett Hull or something. You should remind him that he didn’t go to college. He’s a junior guy. So he’s not that bright.”
Snow graduated from the University of Maine before signing his first NHL contract. He was 23 when he played his first NHL game. I barely made it through high school, played some junior games, but was in the NHL at 18.
When I read what Snow said, I was angry enough to summon Panaccio to offer my rebuttal argument.
“We have to analyze the situation here,” I said. “It’s not my fault [Snow] didn’t have any other options coming out of high school. Second of all, if going to college gets you a career backup-goaltender job, and my route gets you a thousand points and a thousand games, and when you compare the two contracts, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out whose decision was better.”
Ten years later, I hear Snow has a master’s of business administration (MBA). I still don’t have a single college credit. He also is general manager of the New York Islanders. I’m an NBC analyst. If you go to a website called HockeyZonePlus.com, it analyzes career earnings of NHL players, and it says Snow earned about eight-and-a-half million dollars in his NHL career. My career take was roughly $60 million.
Maybe now that Snow has an MBA, he can see that I made the smart fucking decision not to go to college. I don’t need an economics degree to know that $60 million is greater than $8 million.
We can still have some fun with this—can’t we, Garth?
* * *
As a seven-year-old, I watched Gordie Howe play to the crowd in the warmup, and I never forgot that lesson. Hockey is part of the entertainment business, and I believe players have never paid enough homage to that reality.
Every time I was in the All-Star Game, I had to be talked out of playing without my helmet. I always had to give in because of safety issues.
At least I was able to throw a hit in an All-Star Game—a rare occurrence. I hit Alexei Zhitnik twice.
“Why do you always fucking hit me?” he said.
“Because you are fucking easy to hit,” I said.
Always, I tried to be glib in interviews with reporters. My words are usually unfiltered. When I was playing in San Jose, I was asked once why the team was playing better on the road than at home.
“Because our wives and girlfriends are not with us on the road,” I replied.
Political correctness isn’t always in me.
Fortunately, I’ve always been a people person, and the entertainment side came naturally to me. I liked having some fun with the crowd during the pre-game warmups. Just as Mr. Hockey made my day by dumping ice on my head, I’ve tried to play with the children in the crowd. I’ve reached through the photographer’s hole in the Plexiglas and grabbed a kid’s fries and eaten them. I’ve snatched baseball caps, worn them in warmups, and then returned them.
When people brought signs mentioning me, I’ve told them that I liked them. When they made signs I didn’t like, I’ve told them that as well.
One fat lady in Phoenix would always show me a sign that read, “You suck.” My response was to create my own sign that read, “Go eat another hot dog.”
Like I said, no one will ever accuse me of being fucking politically correct.
In Columbus, there was an older gentleman who always brought signs to the rink riding me about being in the twilight of my career. When I was playing with San Jose, he would tell me, through the clever use of signage, that I was old and over-the-hill to the point that I should be playing in the senior league.
One time, I prepared for my game in Columbus by making my own sign that read, “Congratulations on still being alive.” I pinned it to my chest and went out for the warmup. I skated over to the older Blue Jackets fan and pushed my chest against the glass so he could read the sign.
He started laughing so hard that I thought he might have a cardiac arrest. As it turned out, he knew my then-Sharks teammate Jody Shelley, and he sent word through Shelley that he appreciated my willingness to engage him. He said he wanted to make a contribution to my charitable foundation. Not long after, I received a cheque from him.
Handing out pucks during warmups was a regular part of my routine. When I played with the Coyotes, I would give away 10 or 15 before every game, home or away. To this day, I have people who come up and tell me how it meant the world to them a decade ago when I tossed them a puck or handed their child a puck.
The great Bobby Hull was always known as an athlete who signed every autograph, and I always tried to follow his example. The Phoenix Coyotes hosted a carnival when I was there, and the line for my autograph was out the door. Everyone seemed surprised that I stayed the extra hour or two to make sure everyone received their autograph. To me, that wasn’t extra effort. That’s the effort we should be putting into taking care of hockey’s fans. We are selling the sport as entertainment. We should be treating all fans like they are our best customers.
Much to my teammates’ chagrin, I even signed multiple items for the adults who flock outside the team hotel, knowing full well these fellows would resell them. I was respectful of my teammates who don’t appreciate their autograph being peddled for profit. But my attitude was that if someone can make some money off my signature, good for him. I don’t pretend to know anything about the autograph economy, but if I can help someone make a living by signing a trading card, I’m happy to do it as long as the person is reasonable in his request and I’m not pressed for time.
One of my favourite autograph stories involves my random meeting of a Toronto fan named Darcy Walsh who has become a lifelong friend.
In my second NHL season in 1989–90, I showed up at Maple Leaf Gardens for a morning skate, and there was a mob of autograph hounds waiting for us. If you signed everyone’s autograph, you could be there half an hour or longer. That’s how many fans were waiting for you. I was moving through the line that morning, signing as many as I could, when I came upon a young man who asked me to sign five hockey cards.
I signed three of them and asked him if they were all for him. He didn’t say a word. I knew the answer anyway. Dealers pay kids to get the autographs because players were more likely to sign for kids than adults. But the kid was very polite, so I signed all five.
After the morning skate, I knew there would be another mob outside wanting more autographs, and I wanted to get something to eat before my game-day nap. I didn’t have time for a lengthy signing session. I found a side door and walked out. But the autograph hounds are highly organized, and they had
a lookout on the corner who yelled, “Roenick is on the side of the building.”
When I looked up, I saw everyone running toward me. Then I saw the polite kid I had talked to two hours before, getting into a car parked several feet in front of me.
I jumped into the back seat of the car and yelled, “Go. Go. Go.” As we pulled away, I told the driver and the kid, “Sorry I jumped in, but I just didn’t have time to sign everyone’s autograph.”
The kid told me his name, and it turned out that it was his friend who had picked him up. They offered to drive me back to the Westin Harbour Castle. When I got out of the car at the hotel, I told young Darcy: “Don’t go down and hang out with those autograph hounds anymore. The next time I come to town, just call me at the Westin Harbour Castle. You and I will go to breakfast and then I will take you to the rink.”
The next time I came to Toronto, there was a message on my phone. “Mr. Roenick, this is Darcy.”
I called him, took him to breakfast and brought him with me to the rink. You can imagine what those autograph hounds thought when they watched Darcy climb out of the cab with me. I brought him into the dressing room, got him tickets. I met with him almost every time I played in Toronto, and we remain friends to this day.
Darcy has seen some nutty shit hanging out with me through the years. He was with me one cold fucking day outside the Air Canada Centre, when a crowd of about 75 people broke into spontaneous applause because I stayed 30 minutes and signed autographs for everyone there. I think it was minus-20 that day.
Another time in Toronto, Darcy and I were driving on Lawrence Avenue, trying to merge onto the Allen Expressway, when we were held up by a driver who stopped to shout at someone in another car. I started yelling at the guy. He yelled back. Expletives escalated, and I decided to get out of the car. Not sure what the fuck I was intending to do. He exited his car and started coming toward me, and he was a big fucking man, probably weighing 220 pounds. He looked like he was ready to fight me. Can’t say for sure what I would have done had he started swinging at me.
J.R.: My Life as the Most Outspoken, Fearless, and Hard-Hitting Man in Hockey Page 22
