I’ve always regretted what I said to Barry that day. Although I didn’t believe I was being treated respectfully, there was no justification for my taking out my anger on him. I liked Barry, and I certainly respected the work he did as an assistant coach. He had been one of Scotty Bowman’s assistants in Detroit, and Bowman is the greatest coach in NHL history. Barry deserved better than I gave him at that moment in my life. Whenever I became angry that season, it seemed I immediately escalated to Defcon 1.
My relationship with Gretzky boiled over when the Coyotes were playing in Vancouver on December 12. I had suffered back spasms in the previous game, but I told Gretzky I was healthy enough to play. At 5 p.m., Gretzky told me I wasn’t playing. I was miffed, to say the least. Ed Jovanovski was coming back to Vancouver. It felt like a big game. I wanted to play. Gretzky said he was scratching me because of my injury, but I was definitely a healthy scratch as far as I was concerned.
No question I was mad. After Gretzky told me I wasn’t playing, I rode the stationary bike for a while. Then I wished the boys luck, and then I left General Motors Place. I decided to go to the Keg Steakhouse for dinner. I ended up meeting my old Chicago teammate and roommate Mike Hudson. We ate and watched the game on television. I certainly didn’t want to be in the press box, where the media could ask me about Gretzky’s decision to leave me out of the game.
As mad as I was, I didn’t leave the building out of anger. This wasn’t a premeditated protest against Gretzky or the team. If I wasn’t going to play, then I was going to eat. I was hungry. I intended to watch the game at the restaurant. It became an issue only because someone saw me at the restaurant and called a local radio station. The guys on the air began talking about me being in the restaurant while my team was playing. The radio guys made it seem as if I had committed a crime against humanity. It was blown way out of proportion.
After the game, I rejoined my teammates. We stayed over that night, and I hung out with them right after the game. There was certainly no attempt on my part to abandon my team.
To say I was stunned by the media attention my dinner at the Keg received would be an understatement. It’s not as if I punched anyone, or cussed anyone out, or said I didn’t want to wear the Coyotes sweater ever again. I ate a steak and watched my team play on television. That was my despicable act.
Gretzky called me into his office the next day and said he didn’t think it was a big deal that I left, but it was an unwritten rule that players should be in the press box if they are scratched.
Unwritten rule? I can’t recall exactly what I said to Gretzky, but it was something like “Fuck unwritten rules.”
I wasn’t always inclined to follow all of the rules that were down on paper. I certainly wasn’t going to be good at following rules I didn’t know existed. At that point, I had been in the NHL for 18 years, and I certainly didn’t know there was a rule against leaving the building if you were a healthy scratch. My impression was that coaches didn’t like having veterans hanging around if they were scratched. They didn’t want them poisoning the well with their anger.
“What, do you give your support from the press box? Give support with pom-poms from the press box?” I said to the media after the incident. “There’s nothing that a player who isn’t playing can do. If anything, [coaches] want players that are not playing away because it’s a distraction.”
Even when the media treated my dinner as if it were a federal crime, I didn’t regret my action.
“I don’t think there is anything wrong with going and having a nice dinner, having a beer and watching the hockey game,” I said.
I don’t believe Gretzky wanted to do anything beyond giving me a stern talk, but the media made such a major deal of it that I think he felt obligated to suspend/sit me for one more game. He even told me that Vancouver was simply the “wrong place” for me to be out in public while my team was playing. The implication was that, had I done it in a place like Tampa, Carolina or Nashville, it would not have been an issue. But Vancouver is a hockey town. Gretzky also said he didn’t appreciate that it put him in an awkward position.
The entire incident bothered me then, and it bothers me today. I have made remarks, or committed acts, that deservedly caused me trouble. But c’mon, going out to dinner?
“I treat players like men and they should act like men,” Gretzky told reporters the day after it happened. “J.R., all in all, has been pretty positive. But the reality is, last night he made a mistake.”
He said he wasn’t disappointed, because he viewed me as “a very emotional young man and a good person.” But he added, “But what he did wasn’t right.”
Totally frustrated by what had happened in Vancouver, I told the East Valley Tribune that I would probably retire at the end of the season.
“The way it seems to be going right now,” I said. “I don’t think anybody would want to give me another chance, to tell you the truth.”
Controversy has never bothered me. Thick skin is a requirement if you are going to say what you feel, like I always have. I have rhino skin. But Gretzky has always tried to avoid controversy and criticism. It bothered him to have to deal with this. He kept insisting that he had benched me because I was hurt, and I kept saying I was healthy enough to play against the Canucks.
“He was legitimately hurt,” Gretzky told the Tribune. “He could hardly get through the game in San Jose. If he were 21 years old and had 25 goals, then yeah, you throw him in the lineup. Reality is—and nobody likes to face it—he’s not 21 years old and he doesn’t have 30 goals right now, so I was giving him a break and a night off to rest his back, to regroup and come back.”
That’s not how I saw it. But Gretzky was certainly not the first, or the last, coach I ever disagreed with on the interpretation of how I was playing, or how I should be playing.
There was no question that I struggled over the first two months of that season. I only had one goal in 28 games. But I thought I had worked my tail off, and that’s what I told the media when this situation developed. I admitted that I was frustrated by my diminishing role on the team. This is hardly a new player–coach disagreement. The coach tells a player that he will get more playing time if he plays better, and the player insists that, if given more playing time, he will play better and be more productive.
ESPN.com had a story headlined “Roenick benched, future uncertain.” The lead sentence of the story was “Jeremy Roenick wants to retire at the end of the year, but he may not have to wait that long.” The clear implication was that the Coyotes might dump me. Gretzky killed that speculation.
“I’m never going to tell him to do anything [regarding his career],” Gretzky said. “I have too much respect for what he’s done for the game and how much he loves the game. He was the face of this team when it came here, and I want him to enjoy this year. And I want him to love playing here again and living in this city again. As I said to him, down the road here we’d like to have him [as] part of our organization.”
Gretzky and I made our peace on the Vancouver issue, but my situation in Phoenix deteriorated, even as I was getting more productive. At the time that Gretzky scratched me in Vancouver, I had played 28 of the team’s 29 games, averaging 15:24. After missing the Vancouver game and the next one, against Columbus, I appeared in 42 of 51 games, averaging just under 13 minutes of ice time but scoring 10 more goals. So, my second half of the season actually wasn’t all that bad, given the reduced ice time.
Another reason why playing time became less of an issue for me was that my daughter, Brandi, became ill with a serious kidney ailment called IgA nephropathy around the Christmas holiday. She was 12 at the time, and she was one of the country’s best equestrian riders. She was hospitalized for seven days, and she only had about 30 percent kidney function. It was an extremely scary time in my life, and it certainly put my complaints about Gretzky into perspective. Not surprisingly, Gretzky was as helpful as he could be during my family crisis. He told me to take a home game off to go t
o the hospital, and he cleared me to miss a road trip. “The most important thing is the health of J.R.’s child,” Gretzky told the media. “That’s more important than what we’ve got going on right now.”
Later in the month, Gretzky scratched me. But I was far less hostile than I would have been a month before. As I explained to writer David Vest, “I’m in such a good place right now mentally, especially with everything that I’ve gone through the last week and a half with my daughter, that I’m just not going to let things bother me. I’m just going to try to enjoy myself and help the young guys develop, be a good role model and a good teacher and a good cheerleader. That’s what I do best, use my mouth. I might as well use it.”
After Brandi became sick, I was a kinder, gentler J.R. To this day, we have to worry that if she contracts an infection, it could attack her kidneys. Certainly, anyone who has ever dealt with a child’s serious illness understands that it changes you.
In late March, when Gretzky scratched me one night against Chicago, I went upstairs and went suite by suite, thanking our season-ticket holders for supporting us. I made up my mind that I was going to contribute, even if I wasn’t going to be on the ice.
Looking back now at that season, it’s not as if I didn’t admire, or like, Wayne, because I liked him then and I still like him today. It wasn’t that I didn’t respect Wayne, because how can you not respect Gretzky for what he accomplished and how he conducted himself over the years? We just didn’t get along as player and coach. I believed he never really provided me the opportunity to be an effective player. That season, I averaged under 14 minutes of ice time per game and totalled 11 goals and 18 assists.
I’m clearly not the only hockey guy who didn’t believe Gretzky had the same magic as a coach he had possessed as a player, but I may be among the few who believe it truly wasn’t his fault. My observation is that Gretzky already had a full-time job being Wayne Gretzky, and he didn’t have the time it required to become a successful coach. He’s a great guy, a phenomenal ambassador for Canada and the sport of hockey. He didn’t have any time left to learn to be a first-rate coach.
He was a once-in-a-century player, and that doesn’t mean he could be a great coach without putting in the time. Just because someone is a master carpenter doesn’t mean he knows how to build a house. You can’t teach a player to be Wayne Gretzky, even if you are Wayne Gretzky.
Coaching in today’s NHL is time-intensive. Gretzky had so much going on in his life that he had to leave too much of the work to his assistants. He had endorsement deals, business obligations, and he couldn’t walk down the street in any Canadian city without being hounded for an autograph. You have to be hands-on to be a great coach. As a general rule, icons don’t make great coaches because their days are full just being icons.
Also, it’s really difficult to know how good Gretzky was as a bench coach because, let’s face it, the Coyotes were a low-budget, below-average team when he was their coach.
As I’ve stated many times, you can’t ever evaluate how I feel personally about a coach by whether or not we had issues when I played for him. Mike Keenan and I argued ferociously all of the time, and today he and I are the best of friends. When you watch us working together as NBC analysts, I think that’s quite clear. Jim Schoenfeld and I almost came to blows when I played for him, but I like him as a person. Ken Hitchcock and I didn’t always mesh as coach and player, but I think he’s a tremendous hockey guy.
The same is true for Wayne Gretzky. I have nothing but respect for the Great One, especially for the person he is. I’ve said publicly that he was the smartest player I played against. He thought about the game differently than the rest of us. If I were to see him now, I would greet him as a friend, not a coach that once ticked me off.
* * *
Over the last couple of months of that 2006–07 season, I repeated my intention to retire, even though I believed I could still play.
For the final five games of the season, I played on a line with Owen Nolan and Shane Doan. We clicked, and I generated three goals and three assists in those five games. My ice time was over 17 minutes for each of the last three games. I hadn’t played that much over a three-game span since November. In my final game in a Phoenix uniform, I scored into an empty net to preserve a 3–1 victory. It was my 495th NHL goal. I needed five more to join the 500-goal club, and I told members of the media after the game that I might have to accept the fact that I might not get there, although privately I was hoping there was a chance I might play again.
On July 1, the first official day of free agency, my phone did not ring. It didn’t ring the next day, either. Over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, I was in a resort in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, hanging out in Bruce Willis’s bar. The actor was actually there, performing with one of his bands. I was drinking and having a great time with my friends and Tracy when I decided to catch up with Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Tim Panaccio. My text to him was: “I’m retiring; is that still news?”
Panaccio called my father to get confirmation, and his response was that if I had texted it, then it was probably true. The Inquirer dutifully reported my retirement, and it was picked up by various news organizations. My agent and the Coyotes couldn’t confirm my decision, and I didn’t return any phone calls. I didn’t really want to talk to anyone.
Mostly, my text to Panaccio was meant to be funny, but I really did believe my career was over. I didn’t believe anyone still had faith in my ability. But I was wrong in that assessment.
20. Reprieve
When I was a young player, Doug Wilson was the Chicago veteran who showed me the ropes. When I was an older player, it was Wilson who threw me a lifeline to help rescue my career.
Mentally, I was not ready to retire in the summer of 2007. But I did nothing to help myself. I didn’t spend the summer with T.R. Goodman to send a message to teams that I was serious about returning. I wasn’t working out at all. That’s why I was surprised when Wilson, my first NHL roommate, now the general manager of the San Jose Sharks, called me on August 10 and asked me to fly to San Jose to meet him.
As soon as Wilson picked me up at the airport, he was probably thinking he had made a mistake, because I was grossly overweight, probably weighing as much as, or more than, I did when I went to Los Angeles. At that point, I had to weigh at least 220 pounds.
Wilson took me golfing, and before we left I stocked the cart with a couple of beers for each of us. Once we were alone in the golf cart, it was clear that Doug didn’t bring me to San Jose to drink with him. We had one of the most serious talks I ever had in my career. He didn’t pull his punches.
“J.R., what are you doing?” he said. “Your career has been too good to go out the way you are going out now.”
I explained the messiness of the Los Angeles and Phoenix situations, but none of my words offered insight into why I hadn’t readied myself over the summer to play again.
“What if I give you another shot?” Wilson said.
“You would do that for me?” I asked.
Wilson said he would if I would accept a contract on his terms. He would pay me the league minimum of $500,000. He wanted my head, my heart and my wheels. He didn’t want my mouth. “No media,” he said. “I want you to come in and only be a hockey player. You are going to keep your mouth shut and just play hockey.”
Wilson said he would tell the PR department to keep my interviews to the bare minimum.
“And you can’t have one drop of alcohol the entire season,” Wilson said. “Not one beer.”
When he made that demand of me, I was starting to sip a Bud Light. I stopped the can at my lips and quickly poured the beverage onto the fairway.
“You just saw me have my last drink,” I said.
“Do you think you can do this?” he asked.
“I don’t think I can do it,” I said. “I know I can do it. You give me this opportunity and I won’t waste it.”
At this point in my life, I was ready to make this level of com
mitment. The month before, Tracy’s father, Richard, had died suddenly. I was devastated. I don’t think I realized how much I relied on him for support. His death changed me. It made me realize how precious life is, and how important it is to make your life count for those around you.
Tracy called her father’s death “the biggest bitch-slap” I ever received. She was right.
After the funeral, I told Tracy that my goal was to be the best husband I could ever be to her. I wanted to take care of her like her dad would have wanted me to take care of me.
Tracy says that she saw instant change. I started to confront my issues head on, instead of ignoring them as I had done in the past. I didn’t want to hide from my problems anymore. I let go of friendships that weren’t good for me. I finally turned gambling into a non-issue. I embraced what was good in my life, like being a good husband and father. And I threw out the rest of the baggage.
It was easy for me to tell Wilson that I wouldn’t drink because I was a man in the midst of major change in my life. And although I’ve admitted that I had a gambling problem during my NHL career, I don’t believe I had a drinking problem. I can see why people could think otherwise, because I have what seems to be a long list of drinking stories. But don’t forget that I played two decades in the NHL.
It wasn’t as if I was drinking every night I was on the road. There were periods during my career when I didn’t drink much alcohol at all. To me, Wilson’s demand that I quit drinking was a way of gauging the level of commitment I had to being the best player I could be. I was an older player, and Wilson wanted to make sure that I wasn’t accepting a contract just to be one of the guys. He wanted to be sure I wanted to play because I was still hungry to compete.
The Sharks had won 51 games the previous season and then lost to Detroit in the Western Conference semifinals. Doug Wilson was looking for a gritty third-line centre, and he believed I could fill that role. He was trying to push his team to the next level.
J.R.: My Life as the Most Outspoken, Fearless, and Hard-Hitting Man in Hockey Page 20