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

by Jeremy Roenick

  I was somewhat worried about my weight, a worry shared by my agent. When I attended my first sports festival through USA Hockey, NHL officials came in to weigh us. I tucked a 10-pound weight under my towel just to pad my numbers a bit. I was 16 then, and I barely weighed 140 pounds.

  Although I certainly didn’t play a rough game in high school, I believed I did demonstrate a determination to score goals. In describing me as a young player, Duberman said, “You were like the dog that you have to shoot to get away from you.”

  Considering my brother, Trevor, and I were four years apart, I believe I can say we had a great relationship, as long as you can give me a pass on the fact that I terrorized him when I was nine and he was five. Isn’t that what older brothers are supposed to do with younger brothers? I was always trying to scare him, and I was successful to the point that he slept about two years on the floor of my parents’ bedroom because he didn’t want to be alone in the dark.

  Fuck, I was mean to him.

  One time, I was teasing him mercilessly and he become infuriated to the point that he snapped. My five-year-old brother made a fist and landed a roundhouse right to my face that would have made Muhammad Ali proud. In all of the years I played hockey, I never suffered a black eye more hideous than the one Trevor gave me in 1979.

  I can still see him laughing his ass off every time he looked at my black eye.

  Undoubtedly, I deserved the shot because I regularly took pleasure in Trevor’s discomfort. At the Roenick dinner table, vegetables were always served. And my mother made us eat all of our vegetables before we could be excused from the table to continue our day.

  One day, my mom’s vegetable of choice was lima beans, which Trevor detested with unwavering commitment. But my mother wouldn’t compromise on her house rules. Trevor had to finish those beans, and I took special delight in sitting at the table, watching him trying to force down lima beans. He would put one bean in his mouth, and then his gag reflex would kick in. His eyes would water and he would sound like he was going to throw up. I would be howling with laughter. I sat there for 90 minutes, watching him being tortured by lima beans. By the end, he was hitting me, throwing kitchen utensils at me and crying uncontrollably. I thought it was the funniest scene I had ever seen, and I still feel that today.

  Trevor and I were vastly different as hockey players and people. He was slightly overweight as a child, and he wasn’t a great skater. But he competed like a son of a bitch. He started to blossom in high school. Our personalities were different as well. He was earthy, retro, almost flower child–like. He owned a 1969 yellow Volkswagen beetle automobile he named Otis. Twice, he drove that beastly car across the country with no money and no place to stay. He just slept in his car. I don’t even like driving across the state, and I sure as hell wouldn’t sleep in my car.

  My parents were tough on Trevor and me. When I say that, I don’t mean they abused us. What I mean is that they believed in tough love. Always, we had to say please and thank you. If we didn’t use those words, there were consequences. Look someone in the eye when you talk to them. Treat people the way you would want to be treated. I heard those phrases many times.

  One of my most vivid early childhood memories involves a trip to the bank with my mother and a lollipop given to me by a teller.

  “What do you say?” my mom asked as I took the lollipop in my hand.

  Don’t know why, but I didn’t say anything

  “What do you say?” she repeated.

  Again, I said nothing.

  She ripped that lollipop from my grasp and handed it back to the teller.

  “He will not be having a lollipop today,” my mother said.

  I was bawling as she dragged me out of the bank. My parents insisted upon strict adherence to their rules under their roof, from the time I was a toddler through my days as a teenager. My parents’ take was that if I was going to commit to being a hockey player, then I was going to fully commit. They made sure I had my proper rest. I didn’t skip practices. I didn’t go to parties. My parents made sure I was fully invested in hockey.

  My dad pushed me all of the time to be the best I could be.

  Overbearing? Maybe. But as a parent myself, I can now look back and see that my parents were fully supportive. We were constantly on the road. Today, as a parent, I enjoy the moments I have when I have no commitments. My parents didn’t have any of those times. They didn’t go to dinner by themselves. They didn’t travel unless it was for hockey. My parents didn’t have free time. They were committed to placing us in the best possible environment to succeed as athletes and people. Yes, they were strict. But they were trying to do what they believed was in their children’s best interest.

  More than 30 years later, they still have my back. I bought a golf course, the Pembroke Country Club, in Massachusetts. They saved my ass by agreeing to manage it for me. The golf course was in a shambles when I first bought it, and now I’m proud to own it.

  * * *

  In retrospect, I didn’t have a childhood as much as I had a career from about the age of 10 or 11. My life was a fucking road trip. Hockey was all-consuming. In high school, Amonte or Tracy would often try to convince me to come to a party, but I would stay home because it was the night before a game. While other kids were busy growing up, I was busy worrying about whether my shot was hard enough for the NHL. Unquestionably, my parents sheltered me at a time when my peers were learning about life through trial and error. When I signed my first NHL contract and was earning more than a hundred grand per season, I didn’t even know how to use a chequebook.

  My hockey-dominated childhood hurt me once I reached the NHL. As I now understand, I missed the trial-and-error period of adolescence when you learn who should be trusted and who shouldn’t. Too busy playing hockey, I skipped the stage when you learn those lessons. When I arrived in the NHL, I had the skills necessary to play the sport but not the social maturity needed to make proper decisions away from the arena. My initial impulse was to trust everyone, a trait that didn’t serve me well away from the rink.

  I realize now that I resented my parents for sheltering me when I was in high school. When they were no longer watching over me, I raged, making up for all of the parties I didn’t attend when I was at Thayer. Never did I find myself in any major trouble. But I made bad choices, particularly with regard to friends and hobbies. I could have been, should have been, a better husband for Tracy. It was tough on her when I was busy exploring the perks of being an NHL superstar. In the early years of my NHL career, Tracy tried to warn me that I was losing perspective on what was important and what was not. I didn’t listen for the longest time.

  What should have been done to better prepare me for adulthood? I don’t have an answer for that. We were too harried, moving from rink to rink, to analyze whether I was socially prepared for the road ahead. Truthfully, what I see when I look back is a family that made major sacrifices to accommodate my career. Trevor probably was shortchanged because sacrifices were routinely made to support my career. He has the right to complain. However, he carved out his own path, earning a scholarship to play at the University of Maine. He also played some pro hockey, although he didn’t make it to the NHL.

  In hindsight, I wish somehow I could have been better prepared for the fame I would know before my 21st birthday. I wish I would have owned the wisdom to understand that new friends don’t always have your best interests at heart. I wish I would have realized that Tracy had a far better understanding of what was happening to me than I did.

  But it would be a lie for me to say that I would want a fucking do-over of my childhood. I played almost two decades in the NHL, earning almost $60 million. I scored more than 500 goals. I own a golf course. In those early years, the Roenicks must have done something right.

  2. Weighing My Odds

  When my agent, Neil Abbott, prepared me for my team interviews before the 1988 NHL draft, it was as if he was providing me my Miranda rights. He told me that everything I say can
and will be used against me. It was like receiving your attorney’s instructions on how to testify in a trial. Neil predicted what questions would be asked, offered sample answers and gave me specific instructions on what I should avoid discussing.

  To Neil, the taboo subject was my weight—or lack thereof. He told me to plead the Fifth Amendment about it because he was reasonably sure that revealing how much I weighed would scare off some potential suitors. In June of 1988, I weighed 155 pounds. But no one knew that because Neil made sure my weight was the biggest mystery of that year’s draft.

  Under no circumstance, Neil told me on several occasions, should I accept any team’s request to step on a scale.

  “The scale,” Neil told me, “is not your friend.”

  This was an era in NHL history when teams wanted forwards to be as big as lumberjacks. The two highest-rated centres in the 1988 draft pool were American Mike Modano, who was six foot three and 212 pounds, and Canadian Trevor Linden, who was six foot four, 210 pounds. It seemed as if all of the top prospects outweighed me by more than 50 pounds.

  Neil was convinced that it would hurt my draft status if anyone learned I still weighed less than 160 pounds, despite my efforts to gain weight. A few months before the draft, I was competing for Thayer Academy in a tournament when I decided to step out of our hot, cramped, smelly dressing room just to find some fresh air. The problem, as Neil saw it, was that I had ventured in public without my shirt. As soon as he saw me, Neil ran down the stairs of the bleachers as if he were fleeing a raging fire.

  “Get back in that dressing room and don’t walk out here again unless you have gear on,” he said. He didn’t want the hockey world to know that the potential first-round pick from the Boston area had skinny arms, a sunken chest and no discernible muscle mass.

  My draft year came before the Internet explosion. Today, there are a handful of websites that rank potential draft picks and many that provide an overload of information about each prospect. But in my draft year, information was based on what scouts witnessed at the rink and what they heard through the grapevine. Scouts made it clear that they liked my speed, my hands and my heart, but we also heard that NHL teams were concerned about my size. That was reinforced when the Hockey News’s draft preview issue was published in the spring. The magazine’s assessment of my potential was primarily positive, and I was ranked 11th. However, my evaluation stated there were “question marks” about my potential. Those concerns clearly centred on whether I was big enough to survive in the NHL jungle.

  “How big is he going to get?” asked one scout in the article. “He is not that tall and he’s light, too. That’s not a good mix.” Another scout called me “skinny.”

  The Hockey News also stated that I was five foot ten and a half and that I weighed 158 pounds. It didn’t help my cause that every player ranked in the magazine’s first round was heavier than me. The only other small players considered top prospects that year were fifth-ranked Martin Gélinas, who was my height but almost 40 pounds heavier, and Reggie Savage, who was an inch shorter than me but more than 20 pounds heavier.

  As soon as the Hockey News article brought more attention to my weight, Neil got his propaganda machine running effectively. We never said how much I weighed, but we did say that The Hockey News’s number wasn’t accurate. Most scouts seemed to assume that I had grown a bit and The Hockey News’s data was simply out of date. They assumed I weighed more, and we just let everyone believe that. We even had our own “expert witness,” a chiropractor who had examined me and projected that I would grow to six foot one and 195 pounds.

  The other worry we had was that I was an American playing prep school hockey. Scouts celebrated Modano because he had gone to the Western Hockey League to prove himself, and they questioned me because I had stayed in prep school. Even though I had produced 34 goals and 50 assists in 24 games in my junior year, scouts wanted to discount my statistics on the basis that they had been achieved against what they considered inferior competition.

  Although NHL general managers had become far more open-minded about drafting Americans, they still preferred players trained in the Canadian Hockey League. The year before, at the 1987 draft, all 21 picks in the first round were Canadians. The success of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Team coached by Herb Brooks in Lake Placid had opened doors for Americans in the NHL, but eight years after that event, only 19 Americans had ever been taken in the first round of the NHL draft.

  Some Americans were performing at a high level in the NHL. But Brian Lawton had been a first-overall pick in 1983 out of Mount Charles High School in Rhode Island. In my draft year, Lawton, then 23 years old, registered 17 goals and 41 points for the Minnesota North Stars. It didn’t seem as if he was going to develop into the superstar the North Stars had hoped he would be. That didn’t work in my favour. It also didn’t help my case that I was a junior in high school. Scouts had worries about what I planned to do the following season. The possibility that I might play another season of prep school hockey didn’t appeal to the scouting community.

  Against that backdrop, Abbott was steadfast in his belief that I needed to exercise my right to remain silent when it came to my weight. But I was nervous about that plan, because I didn’t know if I would have the courage to say no if a team asked me to get on a scale. Wouldn’t a refusal signal that there was a problem with my weight? That’s what I was thinking.

  “What if they hold that against me?” I asked.

  “They won’t have a problem with it,” Abbott insisted.

  I wasn’t convinced, and I spent plenty of time thinking about what I would say when they asked.

  Going into the draft, we had a general idea of which general managers were thinking about taking me. We felt there was an outside chance that the Quebec Nordiques might take me with the fifth pick. If the Nordiques passed, Neil figured I could go eighth to Chicago, or 11th to Hartford or 12th to New Jersey. Although there had been some speculation about the Toronto Maple Leafs, with the sixth pick, being interested, Neil believed they wouldn’t take an American high school player over a Canadian Hockey League player.

  I thought there was a very good chance I would end up with the Devils. New Jersey general manager Lou Lamoriello knew me well because I had attended his hockey camps when I was younger. The Devils had brought me to New Jersey for an interview and had tested me there along with Michigan State player Rod Brind’Amour.

  The Nordiques owned both the third and fifth picks, the latter coming from the New York Rangers as compensation for their signing Michel Bergeron as coach in 1987. Frankly, I had no desire to play in Quebec, although I never said that to anyone. I wasn’t concerned about the prospect of playing in a French-speaking community. I was concerned that Quebec was a weak team and didn’t seem to be on a path toward success.

  We were sure Quebec wouldn’t select me with the third pick, but we weren’t positive general manager Maurice Filion wouldn’t take me at number five. With two first-round picks, the Nordiques could have decided to take a risk on the skinny American with the raw speed. And the Nordiques did interview me in Montreal.

  As it turned out, only the Blackhawks asked me to step on a scale.

  I refused.

  “Did you ever see a scale score a goal?” I asked.

  There were six or seven members of the Chicago staff in the room at the time, and most of them laughed. Maybe some of them thought I was a brat. Maybe some of them just thought I was cocky. But hopefully, they all understood that I had a personality.

  The Blackhawks’ interview group included Mike Keenan. The team had made headlines two days before when they signed Keenan to be their coach, replacing Bob Murdoch. Having led the Philadelphia Flyers to the Stanley Cup final 12 months before, Keenan was considered one of the NHL’s best young coaches. He was only 38 years old at the time. But the Flyers had fired him essentially because they thought he was too tough. Keenan was viewed as a young Scotty Bowman, and the idea of bringing in a tough guy had appealed greatly to
Chicago owner Bill Wirtz, who knew a little something about ruling with an iron fist.

  I don’t recall Keenan saying much in my interview. I’m sure the Blackhawks did other interviews, and maybe all of the young prospects started to look the same after a while, because he wasn’t sure he recognized me the next time he saw me.

  Our second encounter came the night before the draft, when I found myself standing next to him at the urinals in a restaurant in Old Montreal.

  “Hello, Mr. Keenan,” I said.

  He nodded first, and then, after a pause, said, “You’re Jeremy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes sir,” I said. “I hope you draft me tomorrow.”

  “If we draft you, will you play hard for me?” Keenan said.

  “Yes, I will,” I said.

  “Do you have big balls, kid?” he asked.

  “I do, and considering we are standing here at a urinal, I can show them to you if you like,” I joked.

  Keenan laughed, and we still laugh about that meeting to this day.

  The next morning, I had no idea whether the Blackhawks would take me, nor did I have any true idea who was thinking about drafting me. The draft unfolded as expected, with Minnesota taking Modano, and then Vancouver grabbing Trevor Linden and the Nordiques taking Curtis Leschyshyn of the Saskatoon Blades. Then the Pittsburgh Penguins took Darrin Shannon of the Windsor Spitfires, and then it was Quebec’s turn.

  We were both relieved and shocked when the Nordiques took six-foot, three-inch forward Daniel Doré with the number-five pick. Doré was much more of a tough guy than he was a player. Who takes a fighter with the number-five pick in the draft? We were told that the Nordiques felt an obligation to take a French-Canadian with their second pick in the first round. Today, that pick is considered one of the worst in NHL draft history.