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

by Jeremy Roenick

  It wasn’t as if I wanted to leave Philadelphia. But the Flyers wanted to pursue unrestricted free agent Peter Forsberg, and they needed to clear space to fit him under a $39 million salary cap. I was the logical choice to move out because my salary was $4.94 million. The problem for the Flyers was that my contract had a no-trade clause.

  Bob Clarke, the Flyers general manager at the time, had to call and ask me to waive it. I made it easier for Clarke by telling him that I completely understood why the Flyers wanted Forsberg. I told Clarke I thought it was a great move to bring in Forsberg. He was still one of the world’s best players, and he was three and a half years younger than me. I was coming off a concussion. There was no reason for me to stand in the way of the Flyers landing Forsberg.

  Throughout my career, even if I didn’t agree with decisions that some of my teams have made, I respected their right to run their businesses as they saw fit. The only request I made of Clarke was that he try to trade me to a Western Conference team that was closer to my home in Arizona. He said he would do that.

  When he called to say that he had completed a deal with Los Angeles, I was ecstatic. The deal was announced August 4, with the Flyers also giving up a draft pick for what was called “future considerations.” In essence, the Flyers were paying a third-round pick to the Kings for taking my $4.94 million salary off their books. The Flyers were paying Forsberg $11.5 million over two seasons.

  In my mind, a move to L.A. was the best possible situation for my life and my career. I thought the Kings had potential as a team. They had a skilful, puck-moving defenceman in Lubomir Visnovsky and a tough, hard-nosed defenceman in Mattias Norstrom, plus some talented forward prospects in Michael Cammalleri and Dustin Brown. The team had also signed Pavol Demitra, who was among the league’s most productive offensive players for a period in the 1990s.

  Demitra and I ended up as roommates, and I loved the guy. Of course, you won’t find anyone who didn’t like Pavol. He was full of life, and he loved the game. He would do anything for you. He could also be quite funny. When Keith Tkachuk played with Demitra in St. Louis, they were linemates, and I was told they sometimes bickered like an old married couple. Knowing them the way I did, I can imagine that their bickering played like a comedy routine in the St. Louis dressing room.

  The truth is that Tkachuk considered Demitra a close friend and often had him over to his house. When you get inside Keith’s inner circle, you are a quality person as far as I’m concerned.

  Each of us have events in our lives that are overwhelming to the point that we will always remember where we were when we heard the news. One of those events in my life was the 2011 Russian plane crash that killed members of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team, including two of my former NHL roommates, Pavol Demitra and Brad McCrimmon.

  I had been McCrimmon’s roommate when we played together in Phoenix. McCrimmon was nicknamed “Beast” and “Sarge” because of his commanding presence. He wanted to be an NHL coach, and he was in Russia chasing his dream. He figured coaching in the Kontinental Hockey League would be a stepping stone toward being a head coach in the NHL.

  The news of the crash came while I was at the clubhouse of the Trump National Golf Club, and I almost dropped my coffee. I started to cry as I heard that Demitra and McCrimmon were among the dead. It’s still difficult to accept that they are gone.

  * * *

  I thought my trade to the Kings would be one of the highlights of my career. As it turned out, it was probably the low point of my career. I never would have guessed that I wouldn’t be able to deliver offensively.

  Off the ice, I delivered immediately for the Kings. They wanted a colourful entertainer, and I gave them one. I arrived in Tinseltown with tinted hair and a silver Porsche. The day after the trade, I threw out the first pitch at a major-league baseball game in Anaheim. I said I liked what our rivals the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim were doing with their team, and then added, “But I still think we will kick their ass.”

  When Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke gave me a chance to modify that quote, I did by saying, “We’re going to kick their ass up and down.”

  The Kings’ public relations vice-president, Mike Altieri, was amazed when I booked my own appearances on Last Call with Carson Daly and The Best Damn Sports Show Period.

  When I wasn’t scheduled to play a preseason game, I volunteered to walk the concourse to meet fans. After getting over the initial shock of an athlete wanting to hang out with the masses, the Kings’ public relations people had me out there shaking hands, signing autographs and posing for pictures. They viewed me as going above and beyond the call of duty, and I viewed it as me doing what I should be doing to promote my sport.

  The running joke that season was that if you couldn’t find me, I was in the trainer’s room, “icing my tongue” to get ready for my next interview.

  If you look back at the stories written about me when I came to Los Angeles, I gave every writer a different perspective, a fresh angle, a unique glimpse of who I really was. Kings general manager Dave Taylor said publicly that he was acquiring me solely for my hockey-playing ability. But to me, that was like saying you buy Playboy just to read the articles. If a team acquired me, it would seem logical they wanted the flash and the substance.

  In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, I admitted that I dabbled in poetry. I have been writing poetry since I was at Thayer Academy. One of my first days as a King was spent at the beach writing poetry. “Hey, I’m a metrosexual guy,” I told Times sportswriter Chris Foster. “I have my hard side and my soft side.” Foster wrote that there were more sides to me than on “a Rubik’s Cube.” That seemed like a fair description.

  One of my first purchases in L.A. was a T-shirt that read, “Everyone is an actor.” In those first couple of months in Southern California, I did a masterful job of playing myself. It was the role I always wanted. It was the first time in my career that I was totally allowed to explore the entertainment side of being an athlete. I appeared on actress Jenny McCarthy’s television show and dressed ballet-dancer style, in a unitard and puffy shirt, for a figure-skating skit. Would Wayne Gretzky have done that for the Kings?

  When Sports Illustrated writer Michael Farber came out to do a story about me, I took him to the Ivy, a happening restaurant where you constantly run into celebrities.

  “They get it here [in Los Angeles],” I told Farber. “They understand the entertainment factor.”

  On September 24, 2005, I created Internet buzz by dancing on the ice in front of 15,000 fans during the Kings’ outdoor preseason game against the Colorado Avalanche in Las Vegas. When a sheet of Plexiglas broke during the game, it was taking forever to fix. The fans and players were becoming restless and bored, and when the Bee Gees’ song “You Should Be Dancing” started playing, I began to dance in place by the side boards. When the crowd responded, that was all the encouragement I needed. The spotlight found me and I started ice dancing, disco style, toward centre ice.

  It was Las Vegas. It was an exhibition game. It was a game designed to promote the sport of hockey. It just seemed like the thing to do at the time. My teammates were howling, and Colorado centre Joe Sakic told me it was the funniest hockey scene he had ever witnessed.

  If you looked at my first five regular-season minutes in a Kings jersey, you would have guessed that my career in Los Angeles was going to be an epic success. On October 6, I scored on my first two shots, helping Los Angeles build a 4–0 first-period lead in Dallas. But this was the “new NHL,” with no hooking, holding or obstruction, and teams could no longer go into a defensive shell to preserve a lead. The Stars kept coming, and they beat us 5–4.

  I also got cut in the game, and the wound needed five stitches to close. Between the goals and the cut, I felt like I was playing the aggressive way I needed to play to be successful in the NHL. You don’t get cut unless you are playing in traffic. After my first game, I thought I was going to thrive in a Los Angeles Kings sweater. I could not hav
e been more wrong.

  As it turned out, I was blind to the obstacles that prevented me from succeeding in Los Angeles. When the 2003–04 season ended, I was dealing with a concussion, and I didn’t work out at all. As my health started to improve, I still didn’t train the way you need to train to properly prepare for a season. Honestly, I was angry over the lockout. I was angry with the league, angry with my union and angry with fans who viewed players as being spoiled. To me, it seemed as if everyone had ruined my game. As the lockout progressed, I found myself not giving a shit.

  I was so disenchanted with what was transpiring that I had convinced myself that we might lose another season. The proof of my disillusionment was the fact that I planned a vacation in Italy for late August and early September of 2005. When I should have been skating and working out in preparation for the 2005–06 season, I was feasting on carb-filled pasta and drinking wine in one of the world’s most beautiful countries. I bet I gained seven or eight pounds in those 12 days in Italy. I weighed around 220 when I showed up for training camp in Los Angeles. I had to lose about 18 pounds, which took me about a month and a half.

  That trip to Italy was probably one of the worst decisions I made in my NHL career. It was a boneheaded move.

  Injuries played a role as well. I received my 12th concussion in the preseason when I was decked on a hit by Phoenix Coyotes defenceman Denis Gauthier. I was angry about the hit because I believe every player in the game should understand that big hits shouldn’t be delivered in an exhibition game. That’s where the respect among players comes into play. When we play in the regular season or playoffs, we all realize that players will be trying to run you through the boards. We don’t expect that in an exhibition game. I told Gauthier that in a phone call we had on the subject, and he said he had never looked at a preseason game as being different from a regular-season game. He said I also had to take into account that he was battling to hold his job. Fair enough.

  That injury was one of the nagging injuries that slowed me throughout the season. Just before Christmas, I broke my index finger blocking a shot on a penalty kill. That injury occurred in a 4–3 shootout win against Vancouver and sidelined me until early February. I had a goal and an assist in the game, and I helped the Kings come from behind to win it. Coach Andy Murray called it my best game of the season. I was just starting to feel good about my play. The timing could not have been worse.

  Maybe I was pressing a bit, too, because I knew some fans looked at me differently after my comments during the summer.

  The other issue I had that season was with my skates. This is the issue that I’ve been criticized over, because fans don’t seem to appreciate how fussy I am over my skates. I’m a mental case when it comes to how my skates get sharpened.

  Throughout my career, I’ve had two different radiuses on my skates. I don’t know how to do it myself, and I have a hard time explaining the way I like them. But if you ask all my equipment guys through the years, they will verify that I need my skates sharpened to unique specifications.

  All of my previous equipment guys figured out how to make them perfect. But Kings assistant equipment manager Rick Garcia couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t from a lack of effort. He was a great guy. He called my previous equipment guys in an effort to figure out what I needed. I know the Phoenix Coyotes’ head equipment guy, Stan Wilson, spent time on the phone with Rick, trying to explain what I needed. I tried to talk him through how I skated. But nothing worked. He couldn’t seem to find the right radius or the correct cut.

  Throughout that season, I was never comfortable on my blades. Skating was my game, and when a skater doesn’t trust the equipment, then he doesn’t play with confidence. I didn’t trust my feet to do what I wanted them to do. When you are constantly thinking about your skates, you suddenly discover you have no hands or head for the game. I felt like if I made a quick cut, my skates were not going to hold. My confidence is tied to my skating.

  I suffered a groin injury early in the season. Was that tied to my skates? I just don’t know.

  I’m not telling this story to suggest that my skates were the only reason why I had a miserable season. I’m telling the story to explain that everything that could go wrong did in 2005–06.

  One day at practice, we ended up in a striptease shootout contest. If you didn’t score, you had to take off one item of clothing. I couldn’t buy a goal. When it was over, I was skating around in only my jock strap. It was like the ending of the hockey movie Slap Shot, when Michael Ontkean skates around in his jock strap. No one else came close to shedding as many items of clothing as I did in that game.

  It was simply a weird season. One night, later in the season, when we were fighting for our playoff lives against either Dallas or Anaheim, I had a meltdown in the dressing room between periods because we were playing so poorly. I stormed into the dressing room swinging my stick, destroying an electrical fan and a couple of items that happened to be in the path of my rage. I was a ball of fury, and when I was done swinging my stick like an axe to vent my anger, the blade was shredded. The stick now looked like a dangerous spear with spikes coming out of the end. I went to whip the last remaining piece of my broken stick into the chalkboard, and it struck the rubber part and catapulted right at our goalie, Mathieu Garon. It nearly decapitated him.

  Now, what you should know was that Garon was our best player that night. We were down 2–1, and he was the only reason we were still in the game. And my flying stick caused a cut in his forehead that needed 15 stitches to close. I can’t imagine what would have happened if my stick had struck Garon in an eye, or in the throat. That was one of my rants gone very badly. I apologized while he was getting stitches. But nothing I could say summed up the regret I had over that incident.

  Despite all of my struggles that season, I still believed I would be named to the 2006 U.S. Olympic team. I had helped the USA win the silver medal at the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City. I was one of the leading goal scorers in American hockey history. In my mind, that was enough to earn me a place on the team. But I was wrong about that. General manager Don Waddell didn’t select me, and I’m still upset about that to this day. Shane Doan was struggling that season, and Canada found a spot for him out of respect for his previous performances. USA Hockey officials showed me no such respect.

  At this point in my career, I could have used some love from USA Hockey, and what I got was the cold shoulder from Waddell. I felt like I was disrespected.

  My bad luck continued the entire season. In late March, I fractured my ankle in a game against the Nashville Predators. When the 2005–06 season mercifully ended, I had 9 goals and 13 assists in 58 games. Los Angeles fans have never forgiven me for that season. My numbers were horrendous, but no one can say I didn’t work hard or care greatly about the Kings that season. Even when I wasn’t scoring, I tried to be a quality teammate and a cheerleader. As a 600-game NHL player, I qualified for a single hotel room on the road, but I offered to room with young forward Mike Cammalleri. I told then-rookie George Parros that he could move in with me at my apartment in Manhattan Beach.

  In the Sports Illustrated article, Kings captain Mattias Norstrom paid me one of the best compliments I ever received. “Every player you play against, you have an assumption,” he was quoted as saying. “My picture of J.R. was of a self-centered guy. What a pleasant surprise. When he gets to the rink, it’s business. It’s about being a team, and he always puts that above his own opinions.”

  Although the L.A. experience wasn’t what I wanted it to be on the ice, I certainly had some memorable moments in my one season of playing hockey in Southern California.

  Playing on a team with Luc Robitaille is one of the highlights of my career. He might be the best scoring left wing ever to play the game. Never a strong skater, Robitaille still found a way to be successful. He played smarter than everyone else, and the guy always has a smile on his face. It’s a pleasure to be around him because he has such an upbeat personality.

&n
bsp; I had many fun moments away from the rink. When I went to L.A., I viewed it as the opportunity to expand my acting career. That happened when producers from the CBS television series Ghost Whisperer asked me to play an assistant baseball coach on an episode entitled “Giving Up the Ghost.”

  My excitement mostly centred on the chance to meet Jennifer Love Hewitt. Although I’m a gentleman who prefers blondes, I’ve always found Love Hewitt to be irresistible. That attitude didn’t change after I was able to work with her. She’s a very warm, high-spirited person who likes to joke around and keep her co-workers loose.

  In my scene, the pitcher collapses on the mound, and my character and others race to the mound to help. Jennifer is supposed to come out, revive him, and say something serious and moving. At least, that’s what the script called for her to do.

  Instead, Jennifer decided to have some fun. She ran out and yelled, “Let me revive you. Look at my breasts. Look at my breasts.” Everyone on the set cracked up, and it was challenging to do the scene straight after her playful ad-libbing.

  In my year in Los Angeles, I also became better acquainted with actor Cuba Gooding Jr., best known for his uttering of the line “Show me the money” from the movie Jerry Maguire. A regular on the celebrity hockey circuit, Gooding has turned himself into a decent player. He knows his share of NHL players, and he is known for his sense of humour and his willingness to zing a guy whenever possible. He did it one night at the Ritz-Carlton, when he was on stage and sang a love ballad to me. I believe it was “You Light Up My Life.” It was as hilarious as it sounds. He strolled over to my table and stood beside me as he crooned away and batted his eyes at me. It was delightfully embarrassing for a man who doesn’t embarrass easily.