by Bobby Orr
And third, one thing I always thought many people got wrong about me was the idea that things were a little easier for me than for other players, or that I was somehow different from everyone else. If that were the case, my story probably wouldn’t be worth telling. But I am no different from anyone else. What was easy for me was not what I wanted to write about. I decided that if I was going to do this, I would have to write about what was difficult.
If this book were just about nostalgia, or highlights from my career, it would just reinforce a version of the story I never found particularly interesting. The trophies, the scoring titles, the Stanley Cups—that’s all in the history books now. But like that famous photo, or the statue outside the TD Garden, they don’t tell you much. They don’t speak to values or to motivation. They don’t explain inspiration, or add asterisks for the people who helped me (or pushed me). They record, in the simplest way, what happened on the ice, not how I got there, or who I met along the way and what I learned from them.
In any case, there’s no question I have been lucky beyond belief with respect to the people I’m fortunate enough to have met. I feel it is finally time for me to reflect on and share with you some of those people. Eventually, I came to realize that this book would allow me to share many thoughts and opinions about the game I love so dearly, and that it wouldn’t have to center on me alone.
Of course, those were different times. So much that seemed permanent is gone now. The old Garden has disappeared. The Boston Record-American, where the photo of “The Goal” first appeared, is no longer in print. Some very close friends from those days are still with me, but others, some of the closest, are now estranged. I could never have anticipated how the world of 1970, the world that was captured in that statue, would change so much.
Childhood itself is different. Looking at that statue, and working on this book, it seems to me that things really were much simpler back then. I know it’s a cliché—the older you get, the more it seems things were better in the past. But the fact that it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true. Things are different. Things do change. Rules were different back then. The priorities of Twitter and Facebook are different from the values of team sports, or parental authority, or even gangs of neighborhood kids playing shinny on a frozen river. There is no way around it: the world that statue has immortalized is gone.
But some things don’t change. The interesting thing about that goal all this time later is not where it was scored or who took the picture. The important thing is not even who scored it. I think that when anyone who is close to the game of hockey looks at that statue, what they see is not a guy who was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, or even a particular goal in a particular game. To be honest, I don’t think you even have to be a hockey fan to understand what that statute stands for. I’m thrilled to be the guy cast in bronze, but you don’t have to know my name to know that the guy flying through the air doesn’t really immortalize a single deed or a bygone era. That statue stands for what is consistent, and really, that is what this book is about.
Sitting at that ceremony outside the TD Garden in Boston, I was reminded that back in 1970, May 10 fell on Mother’s Day. And I wished that my mother could have been beside me to see that statue. There is no way a kid in his twenties can understand everything his parents have done for him—not the way he will later in life when he’s had children of his own. I would have loved to give her another Mother’s Day gift to thank her.
I did have someone else to thank, though—my wife, Peggy. I met her not long after that goal was scored, and she has been as solid as that statue ever since. I have always wanted to keep my private life private—that just seems the most decent thing for everyone concerned. Our wedding in the summer of 1973 was about as quiet as a small-town wedding can be. And now that I am writing things down, I realize there is no way to include her in this book in any way that will do her justice. She is not one story among others. She is not just a chapter. Her role in my life can be found on every page. She met me when I felt I was on top of the world, and she was there for me when so much I had counted on in life was taken away from me. When I give thanks for what is constant in life, Peggy is never far from my mind.
I only committed to sitting down to write this book when I was sure I had something worth sharing. Not because I scored a famous goal, or because I won this or that trophy, or because I hold this or that record. Parents have things worth sharing, as do coaches and other mentors. I am a parent, and a grandparent, and it is in that spirit that I think I have a story worth recording and lessons worth passing along.
Being at that statue-unveiling ceremony allowed me to reconnect with many people. Sometimes it was with a handshake and a chat, other times it was only with a glance and a smile. The time went by so quickly, yet some moments forced me to slow down and pause. As I sat on the podium, I caught sight of Kathy Bailey and immediately thought about her late husband and my former teammate, Ace. I remembered the times we played together for the Bruins on this very site. Ace was a passenger on United Airlines Flight 175 on September 11, 2001. Not all of the memories that day at the unveiling were happy ones.
Sometimes we are reminded that there are things far more important than hockey. But there is probably not much that is more important than the things a life in hockey can teach you. My wish is that this book will hit a chord with you about some of the important things in your own life as you continue along the journey.
That’s the reason for this book.
One
PARRY SOUND
It would have been around 7:30 A.M., maybe 7:45 if Mom had let me sleep in. I’d hear her say, “Bobby, it’s time to get up,” and then the morning would begin. Most days started off the same at the Orr house back then. Dad would be up and at it early, and off to work at the CIL plant. Mom would usually have some breakfast waiting for us, but other times we’d make our own. Then it would be out the door and off to school.
We walked to Victory Elementary, because there was no one to give you a ride, and there wasn’t a school bus to pick you up. It was a decent hike whether we went straight up Bowes Street or took a shortcut through the woods. But in wintertime, the snow got pretty deep, so we usually stayed on the sidewalk. I walked that route so many times, I could probably make my way to my old school blindfolded even today. I might as well have been blindfolded then, for all I stopped to look around. I suppose I was like any other kid, never content to be just in one place. I was always on my way to somewhere else.
That meant one of two places. If it wasn’t school, it was the water. I was the kind of kid who was always on the move. In a town like Parry Sound, there was always something to keep us busy. In the warm weather, whether it was after school or on the weekend, I never missed a chance to grab my fishing rod and head across the road directly in front of our house, the road that followed the river. There, I could slip down an embankment and in seconds have my line in the water, imagining that some monster fish would be waiting to take the bait. It might have been only for a few minutes, but it always made my day.
While I never hated school, I loved to fish. It’s funny what you remember. I don’t recall much from my geography classes, but I clearly remember what it was like to be sitting on the shore of the Seguin River, waiting to see what I could pull from the water. I loved it, and that enjoyment has lasted my entire life.
During the long winter months, I would sit at my school desk and that big clock on the classroom wall would take more and more of my attention as the afternoon started to wind down. I couldn’t wait to be dismissed so I could get through the front door of that school once all my books had been put away. I understood that soon enough I would have on a pair of skates and all would be well—as long as there was enough daylight to see the puck. The routine of my daily life as a kid was pretty simple. One way or another, it always seemed to lead me in the direction of a body of water, regardless of the tim
e of year. The only question was whether the water would be frozen solid for hockey or open and flowing for fish.
• • •
If you want to answer questions about where you have ended up in this world, it is important to understand first where you came from and where you have been. It’s kind of like framing a cherished photograph. Where someone is born and raised serves as the border for many of the events and incidents that will play out in any particular picture. The place where it all begins for any of us puts everything else into context.
For me, home was Parry Sound, Ontario, a small town nestled along the shores of Georgian Bay. I suppose Parry Sound was the same kind of small town you would have found all across Canada at that time. By that I mean it was a safe place, generally very quiet, and a great place to be a kid.
Parry Sound is a few hours north of Toronto, far enough north that there is still a lot of bush and water for kids to explore and enjoy, and a lot of space. It had a small-town flavor. When I was growing up, the permanent population might have been around five thousand people during fall, winter, and spring. But come July and August, I’d guess that those numbers swelled maybe ten times over with cottagers and tourists. The nearby lakes and waterways, and the thirty thousand islands that dot the coast of Georgian Bay, have always been irresistible during the summer months.
Still, despite the annual migration of vacationers, it was a tight-knit community where people knew everybody else’s children and kept an eye on them. If someone got into trouble, the word spread quickly, and sooner or later a brother or sister, mother or father would know all the details of your problem. As a result, most of us realized early in life that it was best not to get in trouble unless you wanted it to be a topic of conversation around town.
It is no surprise to me that my grandfather Robert Orr chose a place like Parry Sound when he immigrated from Ballymena, Ireland. The community he came to was quaint and small and had many of the characteristics you might find in a tiny Irish town. It was here that he met and married my grandmother Elsie. My father, Doug, was their third child. In 1943, he married my mother, whose maiden name was Arva Steele, and they decided to continue the family tradition by settling down in Parry Sound. My parents would have five children: Patricia, Ronnie, myself (the middle child), Penny, and Doug Jr.
I can vaguely remember living in a house on Tower Hill, and my most vivid memory of that location was the black-and-white television set in the living room. That would have been in the 1950s, so our programming selections were pretty limited. I can still picture all of us sitting on the floor eagerly watching the test pattern until it was time to go to bed. I suppose you could assume from that description that it didn’t take a whole lot to entertain the Orr kids.
But my clearest memories of home and family begin with the old house at 24 Great North Road. It was always filled with family and friends, and years later, when I set up my own company, I called it Great North Road in homage to that long-ago place where my life took shape. As you drive into Parry Sound coming down the big hill on Bowes Street, you will find Great North Road on your left, just before the bridge that leads into the center of town. The road twists and turns to follow the Seguin River. Our home was across the street from the water, just a few houses down from the bridge.
The old homestead was no palace, by any means. The floors, for example, weren’t quite level. In fact, anything left on the floor would eventually end up on the other side of the room. On one occasion, my older sister, Pat, had to stay home because she was ill, and when I went up to check on her, she had a unique problem. Our mother, deciding to play it safe, had placed an empty pail at the side of Pat’s bed, just in case it was needed in a hurry. Because of the pitch of the floor, the pail would slowly slide away from the bed. It meant that poor Pat had to keep dragging herself out from under the covers to go bring it back. (My contribution to her care was to put a heavy book behind the pail to keep it from moving.)
I remember that during the long Northern Ontario winters, the house could get terribly cold. If you wanted to watch anything on the television set for any length of time, you would have to dress as if you were heading outside. (By the time we moved to Great North Road, we had viewing options far more interesting than the test pattern, so keeping warm while we watched was more of a priority.) We had a big living room in that house, yet the only day of the year all of us actually sat down in it was Christmas Day. We just didn’t have the money to heat it the rest of the time.
And when I say parts of the house went unheated, I don’t mean it was merely cool. I mean it was literally freezing. On the coldest days, frost would accumulate on the light switches. We used to have to flick off little pieces of ice before we could turn on the lights.
Of course, winter would inevitably give way to spring, and in our home that always produced a minor irritation for everyone. The house was built into a ridge of granite, and as the warmer spring temperatures arrived, the melting ice and snow would run down the face of the rock and stream in through the kitchen door. Perhaps Dad just decided it wasn’t worth the time to fix the problem. But I remember that water coming through the door year after year.
No, the old place wasn’t much to look at. Years later, after I’d started to become pretty well known, I was standing in front of the house when a father dropped by with his son wanting to say hello to me. The little guy looked up at our place, leaned over toward his dad, and whispered something into his ear. But he spoke just loud enough for me to hear him ask, “Does Bobby Orr really live here?” It was no palace, to be sure, but it was home, and it was all we needed.
In fact, that house had something to do with the way I learned to play hockey. I was obsessed with the game, just like the kids around me, and I was always looking for ways to get better at it. Firing pucks at your garage door is probably something that young hockey players have always done. But we didn’t have a driveway, so I’d open the door and shoot right through. The granite rock face that channeled the spring runoff into our kitchen provided the back wall of the garage—the rock had been left exposed because nobody ever saw a need to build a wall to hide it. Young hockey players tend to leave a trail of destruction in their wake as they perfect their marksmanship, but I can safely say that, despite firing thousands of pucks, I never put a dent in that granite.
I would use weighted pucks that I created by coring out the rubber and adding melted lead. The heavier pucks were far more difficult to shoot. The idea was that if I could handle heavy pucks, the lighter ones would seem easy in comparison once I got on the ice. I had managed to scrounge up a couple of pieces of plywood, and would lean one of them up against the rock cut, and that would be my net. The other one I’d lay on the floor in the doorway of the garage so I had a smooth surface to shoot from. It was almost as good as shooting off a sheet of ice, and the plywood allowed me to really let fly with those weighted disks. The garage had a light, so even with dusk approaching I could still practice. Trust me, I shot a lot of pucks at that makeshift plywood net during those years when I was a youngster.
Our house was located next to a couple of sets of train tracks. The ones just on the other side of the road were so close that at times you’d have thought the trains were passing right through our living room. The other set of tracks was up higher, located on a trestle that ran across the river just down the street from us. With two sets of tracks in the neighborhood, there was usually some kind of train traffic regardless of the time of day. It’s funny how you get to a point when the noise of those trains doesn’t even register with you. I guess it would be like living at a busy intersection with cars and trucks coming and going all the time. It was all just a part of living at 24 Great North Road.
There was another place where I spent a considerable amount of time while growing up, and it brings back wonderful memories. That was the cottage my Grandma Orr shared with our Aunt Joyce on Five Mile Bay. All of us grandkids would spend endless hours du
ring the summer months at that cottage, fishing and boating and generally having a great time. When you live in a northern climate and have to contend with a lot of cold weather, you learn to appreciate the warm summers. We took advantage of every day we possibly could at Grandma’s cottage, and I always enjoyed her company over those many years. It turned out Grandma and I had something in common that I didn’t really think about at the time. She would often make reference to the fact that she suffered from considerable knee pain. “Look at these knees of mine,” she would say, while trying to rub away the pain. Soon enough, I would learn what that suffering was all about.
As a child growing up, I had a pretty solid group of friends, and we always seemed to travel together, like a pack of wolves. It was just the way you did things back then. Your inner circle of buddies would play sports with you, hang around town with you, and you generally did everything together. My pack consisted of boys like Neil Clairmont, Jimmy Whittaker, and Roddy Bloomfield, among others. It’s funny to look back at those days and think about where those friends of mine ended up. Neil would eventually play professional hockey with the Boston Braves in the American Hockey League, the Bruins’ farm team. To this day, I remember that his mother would always feed us and how I looked forward to those meals. Jimmy Whittaker was a player as well, and someone I’d meet up with again during my junior career. Roddy Bloomfield went on to play some pro hockey in Binghamton, New York, and eventually landed the job as Paul Newman’s double in Slap Shot. That’s got to make him one of the most-watched hockey players of all time.
We were all linked by the game in one way or another. In the winter months, we could generally be found out on the bay playing hockey, but we would play anywhere we could find some open space. It didn’t matter if we ended up on the bay, in a parking lot, on the river, or at the Victory school rink. As long as we could play hockey, we were happy. I’d leave in the morning with my hockey stick in hand and skates slung over my shoulder, and often my parents would say no more than, “Be home by dark.” And that’s what we would do. We played all day if we could. Sometimes we got so wrapped up in a game we’d forget to eat anything. Sometimes our toes got so cold we could hardly feel them. But we loved to play, and play we did, often until there was no light left at all. I can still remember how excited I used to get with the anticipation of heading out for a game of shinny. The formal game of hockey, as we all know, is played with six players on the ice for each team. But on any given day when I was a youngster, you might have twenty kids show up on the bay. It didn’t matter how many came, we always made the numbers work, one way or another. We would appoint two guys as captains, and they would have the job of choosing up teams. If the total number of players was twenty, then it became a game of ten-on-ten, with everybody participating at the same time.