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

by Jeremy Roenick

  “If you had a bad warmup, Mike might pull you,” Pang once said.

  When Ed Belfour was in the net, Keenan was just as willing to pull him. He would grab Belfour by the mask sometimes when he was yelling at him.

  Belfour, the pride of Carman, Manitoba, and I were rookies at the same time, and he was the person who showed me that goalies could be temperamental, eccentric personalities. It was common for him to stay after a game until one in the morning, trying to sharpen his skates the way he liked them. Not wanting to stay that long, the Chicago equipment guy would leave the road skate sharpener out for Eddie so he could stay as late as he wanted. Eddie was crazy about many aspects of his game preparation. If he came off the ice and his chewing gum, water or tape wasn’t where it was supposed to be, he would start throwing items and yelling at the trainers.

  The two most volatile players on the team were Belfour and Manson, and they often clashed verbally and even physically. Eddie didn’t like his tower buzzed with high shots in practice. One time, Manson fired a shot off Eddie’s head in practice, and we all knew Eddie wasn’t going to let that go.

  A few minutes later, Keenan had us doing a drill where the player swings across the centre of the ice and takes a pass before heading into the offensive zone and shooting. As soon as Manson took off to receive his pass, Belfour charged out of his crease. When Manson made his turn and looked back for his pass, Eddie was there to crush him with a booming hit. They were both travelling at high speed. It was like a car wreck. Then, Belfour whipped off his mask and the two men fought toe to toe in one of the most intense fights you will ever see.

  Eddie was an exceptional goaltender, but he was a little bit off his rocker at times. His emotions could blow up. Russian great Vladislav Tretiak was Chicago’s goaltending coach when Keenan was there. Our goalies one season were Belfour and Dominik Hasek, and Keenan said that Tretiak, who would put the pads on in practice, was more technically sound.

  One day, Keenan watched Tretiak and then turned to Eddie and said: “You have just lost your job. I’m playing Tretiak tonight.”

  When it came to Keenan, it was difficult to know whether he was kidding or not.

  * * *

  In that first season with Keenan, even the Chicago veterans felt like rookies as they tried to figure out how to cope with the psychological games Keenan was playing with them. Most coaches coach from behind the bench, but Keenan wanted to coach from inside your head. When he arrived from Philadelphia, he brought along his team psychologist, Cal Botterill. Keenan was always looking for a motivational edge. He even put a jukebox in the weight room, believing the music would fire up his players during circuit training. He removed the ashtrays, which was another message.

  Playing in Chicago Stadium, we already had a built-in advantage because the crowd noise was intimidating to the opposing team. Keenan believed devoutly in the power of intimidation. Our practice jerseys were black, because Keenan believed we looked meaner in black. The Oakland Raiders of the National Football League had turned black into an intimidating sports colour.

  Today, we are debating whether equipment should be downsized because bigger, harder shoulder pads are now hurting as many players as they are protecting. Shoulder pads have become weaponized. You can point to Keenan as one of those who helped increase the size of the equipment. One day in my rookie season, players arrived in the dressing room to find oversized shoulder pads made by Donzi in their stalls. Keenan had thrown everyone’s regular pads in the trash. Keenan liked bigger players, and if you weren’t big, he wanted you to play big and look big.

  “We are getting too many shoulder injuries, and I want everyone to wear these pads,” Keenan said. Not everyone would wear the enlarged pads. By then, Chris Chelios was playing for us. His shoulder pads looked like rags held together with tape and paper clips. But he looked at the Robocop-style pads and said, “I’m not wearing this shit.”

  I did try them because I felt like I had no choice. If Keenan had asked me to play in a dress and a blond wig, I would have done it.

  After we all tried them once, most of us went over to the trash can and reclaimed our old pads.

  * * *

  The coach’s office was on the other side of our changing room in the Blackhawks’ dressing room, and you could hear the fireworks when Keenan was ripping into a player.

  Probably the first player to yell back at Keenan in one of those sessions was Yawney. That seemed to quiet Keenan a bit and gave teammates licence to also return fire on Keenan. Insubordination was part of your routine when you were coached by Keenan. Soon, we realized that Keenan seemed to respect you if you stood up to him. Troy Murray was a quiet man and didn’t say much, and Keenan made him pay a price for his quiet nature. He was often a Keenan target.

  Before Keenan promoted me from the Quebec Major Junior League, the Blackhawks were playing in Boston Garden and were losing by a couple of goals when Keenan ordered Murray and Steve Larmer to remove their equipment after the first period because they weren’t playing anymore. As they were undressing, I was told, defenceman Keith Brown stood up and said, “Coach, if they aren’t playing, then none of us are playing. We are either all in it together, or we are all going to the showers.”

  Keenan turned around and said, “That’s what I wanted to see here: someone to step up and pull this fucking team together.”

  Was that Keenan’s plan all along? Or is that what Keenan said just to avoid a showdown with players? You can be the judge, because we will never know.

  Once, I asked Keenan why he was always so confrontational with his players, and he said, “Because negative energy is better than no energy at all.”

  If Keenan felt he needed to embarrass you, or demean you, or anger you to inspire you to perform, he had no qualms about doing that. When he arrived from Philadelphia, he had decided that the Blackhawks didn’t have a winning attitude, and he was determined to change that by any means necessary. Knowing he couldn’t change every player immediately, Keenan’s mission seemed to be to topple the team’s entrenched leaders. He didn’t seem to appreciate my first roommate, Doug Wilson. But Savard, one of the most popular players in Chicago history, seemed to be Keenan’s primary target. Keenan and Savard were constantly bickering or yelling at each other on the bench during games.

  Once, during a game, Keenan was giving Savard an earful, and Savard subtly drove his elbow into Keenan’s groin—as he explained later, “just to shut him up.”

  Keenan and Savard didn’t like each other, and that relationship was a constant source of tension. One time, Keenan was skating the Blackhawks hard as punishment, and Savard tried to leave the ice. He had had enough. Savard was popular with his teammates, and Wilson and Brown convinced him to stay. Watching the Savard-vs.-Keenan sideshow was part of being a Blackhawk.

  Keenan liked to chew on ice during the game, and before every period, Savard would skate to the bench and knock over Keenan’s cup of ice just to irritate him. During the 1990 playoffs, Keenan kicked Savard out of the dressing room and said he would only return if the players wanted him back. When we came into the dressing room one morning, we had to vote yes or no on a piece of paper on the question of whether Savard should return. Savard won that vote by a landslide. I think Keenan believed we would throw Savard overboard. He underestimated Savard’s popularity. Personally, Savvy was one of my favourite people. He treated me well from the moment I walked into the dressing room. We played cards together.

  Savard’s vote of confidence from the players was only a temporary reprieve. Keenan didn’t believe in democracy in NHL dressing rooms, and the following summer he dealt Savard to Montreal for Chris Chelios. As much as he didn’t like Savard, I think Keenan also wanted to make the deal to show his players he was fully in charge of our lives.

  To Keenan’s credit, he could take abuse in addition to giving it out. Every season, he would come into the dressing room in full gear and say, “All right, you motherfuckers; this is your chance to take a shot at me.” Keen
an would play 30 minutes for each team, and he would take a beating.

  Manson couldn’t wait to get his shot at Keenan. Once, he hit Keenan so hard it looked like he almost fucking decapitated him.

  Once, we were on a western road trip, and Keenan decided to scrimmage with us at the Kings’ old practice facility in Culver City. Mike Eagles and Bob Bassen went after him with vengeance.

  Keenan wasn’t the prettiest of players, but he had played college hockey at St. Lawrence University. He could skate, and when he took to the ice against us in practice, he went to war. Everyone knew this was our time to go after Keenan, but we also knew that there would be no free shots. Keenan was a fucking stick hack, and when you got near him he would chop you up.

  It wasn’t always serious drama on the Chicago bench. We had some ridiculously funny moments, such as the time I had to explain to Keenan that I needed to leave a game in Vancouver, in the third period, because I had soiled my drawers. Maybe I didn’t need to tell him, because everyone on the bench could smell the problem.

  Having felt ill all day, I went into the corner and got checked hard. At impact, my bowels did an unexpected evacuation. When I returned to the bench to sit down, my odor caught everyone’s attention.

  “Who shit themselves?” Blackhawks trainer Mike Gapski asked.

  He was undoubtedly joking, not knowing that I had done exactly that. I was so uncomfortable that I had to inform Keenan I was leaving the bench with 15 minutes left in the third period. I missed five or six minutes of the game because I had to change my underwear. It was the most embarrassing moment I ever had in the game. Pardon the pun, but you can imagine the shit I took over that episode.

  Keenan always tried to stay one step ahead of his players, particularly with regard to controlling our lives through curfews and practices and so forth. It’s said that Keenan learned all of his tricks to control players from the great Scotty Bowman when Keenan was an American Hockey League coach in Rochester. At the time, Bowman was in charge of Rochester’s parent club in Buffalo.

  When we were on the road, Keenan would give the bellman a hat and tell him to ask every player who came in after curfew to sign it. Keenan could then inspect the hat the next day and know who had violated curfew. Other times, he would sit in the lobby reading a book and catch his drunken players stumbling in at three in the morning.

  Some of us had our ways to beat the curfew setup, most of which involved making sure we didn’t return to our rooms through the lobby. At the Los Angeles Airport Marriott, for example, we would use rocks to make sure that the side doors remained ajar so we could sneak back into the hotel.

  Early in my career, we had back-to-back games in Calgary and Vancouver. We flew from Calgary to Vancouver after the game, and with the time change, it was still after midnight when we got to the Westin Bayshore hotel. With a game against the Canucks the next night, we were supposed to go directly to our rooms. But players always liked going out in Vancouver because the Roxy was a favourite player hangout. We were only going to Vancouver twice a season, so you couldn’t waste a trip. Several of the guys, me included, took the elevator to our rooms and then took the stairs back down to the ground floor and fled out the side door.

  Several beers later, it was past three in the morning, and I returned to the team hotel by myself. I was standing in front, wondering whether I was walking into a well-executed Keenan trap. Had he paid the night manager to keep a list of players coming in late? Would there be an autograph seeker waiting for me by the elevator to essentially ask me to sign my own death warrant? Would Keenan himself be standing watch? Anything was possible with Iron Mike.

  Wanting to avoid any possibility of a Keenan ambush, I went around the side of the building to find the loading dock. That was locked down tight, as was the entrance to the hotel kitchen, which was on the same side of the building. But as I inspected the area, I noticed a ventilation grate; and peering through it, I could see into the hotel’s kitchen. Back then, hotels were still issuing metal keys, not key cards, and I used my key to unscrew the grate. Within a couple of minutes, I had the grate removed and was scooting through the air duct, attired in a suit. I ended up breathing in plenty of soot and dust, but it was a small price to pay to pull one over on Keenan.

  Once in the kitchen, I grabbed a ham sandwich and a Bud Light and took the service elevator up to my floor. I remember sitting in my room at four in the morning, munching on my sandwich and sipping my beer, feeling like I had just pulled off the crime of the century.

  Truthfully, NHL coaches had to play babysitter and night watchman in that era because I believe my generation had more of a frat-house attitude than today’s players. Modern players are far more concerned about rest, eating properly and following a training regimen that doesn’t include consuming mass quantities of Molson Canadian. When I played, it was expected that you would go out on the road and drink with your teammates until it was nearly dawn. Today, players seem to live in the weight room. We lived primarily in taverns and bars. I didn’t start spotting abs on players until I was about 26 years old.

  Keenan tried to keep track of us on the road mostly because he was trying to discourage us from finding trouble. When I was a young player, it did often seem as though I was only two or three steps ahead of finding myself in hot water.

  One night, during a trip to Calgary, a bunch of the Blackhawks met people at the bar who invited us to a party at a house outside of town. The invitation came at about 1:30 in the morning, but stupidly I decided to go. One other Blackhawk decided to go, but we ended up in separate cars. We were driving well outside of town when the situation turned bad. In wintry conditions, we ended up in an accident. The car completely flipped over. Even though I was a passenger and not the driver, I could see the headlines in the morning paper: Drunken young Blackhawks star Roenick detained after late-night traffic accident.

  Panicked by the thought of what Keenan would say, I embraced the only strategy that offered me any hope of getting out of this mess: I ran. I got the fuck out of there. I ran through the snow into a neighbourhood. The problem was that I was on foot, more than 30 miles from my hotel. I was in a residential area. No stores or pay phones were anywhere. Plus, it was now after two in the morning. My only option was to knock on someone’s door and ask to use a phone to call a taxi.

  That’s what I did, and when the man came to the door in his pajamas, he opened his storm door and his eyes bugged out.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “You’re Jeremy Roenick.”

  “I am,” I admitted, “and I need to use your phone.”

  Only in Canada or Chicago would I have been recognized. Even bleary-eyed, in the middle of the night, this man recognized an NHL player when one showed up on his doorstep.

  The funny part of the story is that the guy invited me into his kitchen and offered me a Molson Canadian. In the 45 minutes it took for the cab to find the house, the Good Samaritan and I talked hockey and finished off his case of Canadian. I imagine he had quite a story to tell his buddies at work the next day. Meanwhile, it was almost four o’clock when I returned to my hotel. But I was up in time for the morning skate, hoping I had dodged a bullet. Clearly, the people in the car that night and my friend with the beer didn’t rat me out, because no one from the Chicago organization ever brought it up to me.

  The closest I ever came to being arrested involved an incident that occurred when Keenan took the team to the resort area of Banff, Alberta. The team was scheduled to play Calgary and Edmonton in the same week.

  At about two in the morning, after spending most of the night in a bar, five or six players and four or five local women, decided to visit a nearby hot springs that was closed to the public. Since it was located halfway up a mountain, we hired cabs to transport us and then paid the drivers handsomely to come back in 45 minutes to retrieve us. Snow was falling, and we had to scale a fence to get inside. We had brought beer along, and in short order we were drinking and jumping into the springs just to keep warm. Even wit
h the steam rising, it didn’t take long for us to start feeling the cold.

  When the cabs didn’t come back on time, we decided to start walking down the zig-zaggy road. I remember I had a brown suede coat that I wrapped some of my clothes in. That meant I had no coat on, and it was freezing. I remember joking that we should just cut through the woods, because it was a shorter trip back to the hotel. Everyone laughed, because there was probably six feet of snow covering the ground. There was no way we were going to do that.

  We kept hoping the cabs were on the way, and when we heard cars coming up the mountain, we were initially relieved. But when we looked over the side, we could see it was a police car and what looked like a paddy wagon. Immediately, we figured the police had heard the taxi drivers talking on their radios about coming to get us and they planned to arrest us for trespassing before we were rescued. Quickly, we decided our only option was to leave the road and start trudging through the snow. One by one, we climbed over the ledge to start the snowy descent. Holding my clothes under my arm like a football, I must have looked like Herschel Walker high-stepping my way through the snow.

  Not knowing we had gone down the side of the mountain, the cops drove to the springs. When they arrived, they could see us scrambling down the mountain. They came after us. Some of the snow was up to my chest, but we all reached the hotel’s parking lot right before the cops arrived. They thought we had already made it into the hotel, but we hadn’t gotten that far. There was so much snow, they couldn’t see we were on the other side of the parking lot.

  When the cops left, we strolled into the hotel lobby and came across an employee cleaning the floors. We were covered in snow, our hair turned to icicles by freezing sweat as we hustled down the mountain.

  “Why did you guys have a snowball fight at three o’clock in the morning?” he asked.

  Keenan didn’t catch us that night, either.

  Another time in Banff, Michel Goulet left the ice early at practice. He went into the coach’s office and lifted one of Keenan’s credit cards out of his wallet. That night, all of the players went out together, and Goulet ordered five full trays of Jägermeister shots. The trays of liquor kept coming all night, and Goulet paid the $4,000 bill with Keenan’s credit card. Of course, this was going on without his permission.