When he was close enough to see me, he recognized me and said, “Sorry, Jeremy, didn’t know it was you.”
He immediately backed off. We both retreated to our cars. I was grateful that I hadn’t gotten myself into trouble. My would-be sparring partner apparently had other feelings. Just before he sped off, he yelled: “Fuck you, Roenick, I never did like you.”
We still laugh about that.
It seems as if I’ve had several memorable moments in Toronto, like the time in 2004 when I received a flower delivery at the Royal York hotel at five o’clock in the morning.
When I heard the knock at the door and looked at the clock, I suspected something was up. Toronto radio stations were well known for pulling pranks on opposing players when they came to town. Usually, these involved wake-up calls in the wee hours of the morning or a prank designed to prevent a player from getting a good night’s sleep.
As I walked to the door, I could actually hear the man through the door, talking to the radio hosts back at the studio.
“Who’s there?” I asked, deciding to play along.
“Delivery for Mr. Roenick,” he said in his best professional voice.
“At five o’clock in the morning?” I asked.
He mumbled some explanation, but I didn’t hear it because I was already headed to the bathroom. I grabbed the wastepaper basket and filled it with water. I walked back to the door, opened it, and threw the bucket of water at the guy.
“Looked like the flowers needed water,” I said, before slamming the door.
Fifteen minutes later, there was another knock. When I opened the door, the drenched man was standing there. “This is really pushing it, I know,” he said, “but the guys at the studio want to talk to you.”
Much to his surprise, I took the phone and talked for 10 minutes with the guys, who were laughing nonstop about their buddy getting soaked. They thought I was the coolest guy for adding my own touch to their gag. To me, it was always fun during the playoffs to also be sparring with the other team’s media and fans.
To say I’m spontaneous is an understatement. If I get myself into trouble, it’s usually because I do something crazy just for laughs.
I’ve had my share of wild-ass moments, like the time in the summer of 2010 when I removed all of my clothes on the 13th hole of the Atlantic City Country Club. Playing with my former teammate Rick Tocchet, I badly hooked my second shot and the ball plunked in the middle of a water hazard.
Irate over my horseshit shot, I attempted to fling my Nike 3-wood down the course as if I were competing in a track-and-field hammer throw. The problem was that I held onto it just a second too long. I hooked my throw, and my club followed my ball into the water.
Tocchet thought the entire scene was hilarious, particularly when I started to remove my clothes.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m going in the water to get my club,” I said.
“Buy a new fucking club,” he said.
“I like the club and I have five holes to go,” I said. “I’m getting that club out of the fucking water.”
Picture me standing bare-assed on the fairway, arguing with Tocchet, and imagine what people were thinking as they arrived at the tee box behind us.
Tocchet’s laughter was out of control as I tiptoed into the water to find my club.
My club landed in water that was seven or eight feet deep, and it was the murkiest, foulest water you can imagine. I almost threw up when I came up from my first dive attempt. If I had opened my eyes in that water, I think I would have gone blind. Luckily, I knew where the club had entered the water and I found it on my second dive. Tocchet has a photo of me standing buck naked in the water, holding up my club.
I may be 42 years old, but I can still act like a teenager from time to time.
* * *
Although it sounds silly saying it, I thought I could make another living by being me. What I didn’t know, exactly, was how to do it. I had dabbled in acting, appearing on the television shows Heist, Hack, Arli$$, Leverage, Ghost Whisperer and Being Frank. I had talked about trying to land my own talk show, figuring my expansive knowledge of useless shit could serve me well if I were trying to conduct an interview or carry on a conversation with a celebrity from Hollywood or the sports world.
But the most logical career path for me was to go into television as a hockey analyst.
Wilson was right when he said offers would come. I had some phone calls from teams, and there were several opportunities in Canada. One of the calls came from the producers of the CBC television show Battle of the Blades, which featured former hockey players serving as partners for elite figure skaters in a competition similar in approach to Dancing with the Stars.
Originally, the producers wanted me to be a competitor in season two. My answer was a quick, “No, thank you.” I had no interest in wearing skates again. As soon as I announced my retirement, it was like I had an instant hatred of skating. The idea of putting on my skates again, for any reason, is revolting. I don’t want to lace ’em up to skate on a pond. I’m not going to play in a beer league for fun. If I’m not playing at the highest level, I’m not wearing skates.
But my reaction was different when producers offered me the opportunity to be a judge on season two of Battle of the Blades. They wanted me to replace the famed U.S. figure skater, Olympic gold medallist Dick Button, who left after the first season. What they were asking me to do was to appear on television and offer commentary and opinion about pairs figure skating, a sport I know nothing about. As my former coach Ken Hitchcock always said, I have an opinion about everything. It seemed like a perfect role for me. Producers wanted me to be me, and I play that role reasonably well. I accepted their three-year contract offer.
My role was to assess how the skating pairs were progressing while flirting with the female competitors and poking fun at the ex-NHL players. I did both with equal enthusiasm. The first time former NHL tough guy Georges Laraque appeared on the show, I said he owned the biggest ass I’ve ever seen on a figure skater. When former first-overall NHL draft pick Bryan Berard showed up with his tattoos, long hair and generally scruffy appearance, I said, “It’s nice of the Hell’s Angels to let Bryan come and do the show with us.”
Mostly, I was in awe of how hard the players and professional figure skaters worked on this show. Former St. Louis Blues player Kelly Chase lost 45 pounds while competing on the show. They have competed through injuries. They have treated the show like an important competition.
The most awkward figure skater was probably Laraque, who happens to be one of my friends. He was such an extra-large athlete that there was concern that the blades were going to break off his skates. As an NHL player, he was all-muscle, all-powerful, all-fuck-you. That doesn’t work in figure skating, but Georges gave it all he had.
Berard shocked me the most because he almost won the event. He was always an exceptional skater in the NHL, and he worked at the figure skating more than I expected he would.
The difficult aspect of the job was actually voting people off the show. I know all of the players, and it was hard to cut someone. As competitors, these guys aren’t happy when they are told they are gone. Todd Simpson was particularly mad at me when he was eliminated.
The best NHL player in the competition was Valeri Bure. He is such a graceful skater and athlete. He and partner Katia Gordeeva looked like a professional team when they were done.
One of my favourite moments on the show was the night figure-skating legend Katarina Witt was a guest judge on our Halloween show. Katarina is simply gorgeous, and I felt it was my job to remind everyone how sexy she is. We were all wearing devil costumes, complete with horns on our heads. As the show started, I offered that “I’m feeling horny tonight.” It was my job to come up with bawdy lines like that. I wasn’t on the show for my figure-skating expertise.
Early in the summer, after I retired in 2009, I received a call from an agent named Mark Lepselter who
said he wanted to talk to me about my potential in the broadcasting world. He had an idea of what I should be doing with my life after hockey. We agreed to meet in Chicago in July.
This was not a suit-and-tie type of meeting. I wore a T-shirt and flip-flops. He dressed casually. It was 10:30 in the morning when we met in the lobby.
He looked at me, and I looked at him. “Want to get a drink?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said.
A minute later, we were standing at the hotel bar. “What’ll you have?” I asked.
“Tequila,” he said.
I looked at him, laughed and said, “Fuck it—make it two.”
Lepselter describes our first meeting as “love at first sight.”
After an hour of shots, I suggested we move the meeting to Carmine’s, where they always take care of me. For the next six-and-a-half hours, we drank and talked. I don’t think there was a five-minute interval when we didn’t have a drink in our hand. He’s my kind of guy. I’m his kind of guy. No forced conversation. No awkward pauses. We talked about everything and anything. It was a business meeting, but we weren’t talking about business. It was a gorgeous day, and people were stopping by to say hello. I may be retired, but I still have fans in Chicago. Time slipped away, and suddenly it was 6:30. I had a car picking me up to take me to the airport to meet Tracy and my son, Brett.
“We’ll kick it back at about nine o’clock,” I said before I departed.
A few hours later, we were back at a rooftop bar, joined by my wife and another couple. We gabbed until closing time. As we were walking out, Lepselter remembered he was a businessman and I was a potential client. He asked how much time I would need to make a decision about his proposal to represent me.
“Dude, are we cool?” he says
“Send me the contract,” I said. “It’s done.”
That’s the way business should be transacted. Get to know the man. Figure out who he is. Make sure your wife is there to offer a second opinion. If it feels right, go with your instincts.
Lepselter says it was one of the best days he ever had in his business. “At our first meeting, it was like we had known each other for 20 years,” he says.
That fall, Lepselter began to pitch my availability to national entities such as NBC and ESPN, and NBC producer Sam Flood was interested. He liked my name, my personality, and that I was a Boston guy. “I will keep Roenick in mind,” he told Lepselter.
Oddly, my break at NBC came about because John Stevens was fired as coach of the Philadelphia Flyers on December 4, 2009. That started dominos falling, to my benefit. To replace him, the Flyers hired Peter Laviolette. NBC had hired Laviolette to be an analyst for their coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Now, with an unexpected hole in his broadcast team two months before the Olympics, Flood called Lepselter. Suddenly, I had a career that seems perfect for me. I think being an analyst is about trying to connect with fans and help them understand and enjoy the game.
* * *
For me, the most difficult aspect of retirement was losing the dressing room. I miss hanging out with the guys. I miss the horseplay. I miss the cutting humour. I miss the practical jokes.
When you enter an NHL dressing room, it’s like living in Peter Pan’s Never Never Land. Outside of that room, you have to be a mature adult. But inside that room, you never have to grow up. You are free to talk about anything, including the size of a man’s dick.
At one of my NHL stops, penis talk was a frequent occurrence because one of our teammates was shockingly well-endowed. He contributed significantly to our on-ice performance, but if you ask any of his teammates what made this player stand out, they would all say he had the largest cock they had ever seen.
In the dressing room, you would catch yourself staring at it and have to remind yourself not to look. Guys would refer to it as the “Louisville Slugger.” Somebody said it looked like a baby’s arm, and we laughed at that comment for two weeks.
If this story bothers you, I apologize, but athletes in an NHL dressing room aren’t talking about global warming or the size of the national debt. Talk in an NHL dressing room is usually about sex, or cars, or sports. If you listened to 10 minutes of conversation in an NHL locker room, you might think you were back in high school. And if a player is endowed with a rocket-size penis, we are going to talk and joke about it.
It was such an amazing spectacle that I told my wife about it. That’s only important because of what happened one year at the team party I held at my home. The guys were all gathered with me downstairs, drinking much more than we should. In an alcohol-induced moment of hilarity, I convinced my well-endowed teammate to haul out the Louisville Slugger and hang it out of his pants as my wife, Tracy, was descending down the stairs on the way to the wine cellar. Tracy had to walk past us to reach her destination. Considering she was talking to us as she came down, I wondered if she would even notice. But I should have known that you can’t miss the Louisville Slugger. She took a step away from the stairs, shrieked “Oh my God” and headed back up the stairs. Meanwhile, we were all laughing our tails off.
I’m not sure she has forgiven me for that humorous moment, and mentioning it in this book probably won’t help. I don’t believe Tracy has ever recovered.
In the dressing room, there is always something going on that keeps the boys loose. On one of the teams I played on, there was a contest held to see which player could jerk off the most times on a road trip. True story. But I’m not going to reveal the team or the players. The contest was called “The Knuckle Cup.” The plan was hatched as we boarded a flight to begin a trip. The rules were laid out as our plane was hitting cruising altitude. Obviously, it would be the honour system of counting. Everyone had a good laugh. The contest was forgotten for a couple of minutes, until one of the most popular veterans exited the airplane bathroom and yelled, “One.”
Every fucking guy on the team was rolling in the aisle.
One of my teammates claimed to have scored a 13 on one day of the competition. His explanation: “I was a healthy scratch—what can I say?”
22. Friends and Enemies
When Norelco officials hired me to act in a humorous commercial involving NHL playoff beards in 2012, they also asked me to pick a former NHL star to appear alongside me. My first choice was Mike Modano.
People always assumed that I hated Modano because I viewed him as my biggest rival. But the truth is I liked Modano, even in the days when it was my personal mission to staple his ass to the boards.
As we were filming the commercial and telling war stories about playing in the NHL, Modano’s take was always, “J.R. was always trying to kill me.” Maybe I was. There’s no question that I was envious of his talent. He was the most effortless, graceful skater I ever saw. He was like a fucking eagle. He just flew over the ice. He had great hands, and he seemed fucking flawless when he was stickhandling pucks, receiving pucks, passing pucks or shooting pucks. He made everything look easy. The man could rip a 100-mile-an-hour slapshot and make it seem as if he was barely breaking a sweat.
As great as Wayne Gretzky was in terms of offensive production, he never looked as magnificent as Modano did when he was skating up ice.
Since Modano and I were 10 years old, I’ve measured myself against him. I wanted to outperform him. For 14 years, I believe I was able to do that. But in the end, he caught and passed me. In comparing our careers, he was the better player. He won our competition.
Can’t recall exactly when I accepted that reality. But very late in my career, when I was playing in San Jose, I had Modano lined up in the corner. I had him locked in. I was going to run him. But as I started to skate toward him, I opened my mouth and these words tumbled out: “Mike, look out behind, here I come.” Instead of drilling him, I just rode him into the boards with a bear hug.
As we both started chasing the play back up ice, Modano yelled, “Fuck, J.R., you have changed.”
Maybe I had. Somewhere along the line, my envy of Modano had simply mor
phed into respect and admiration. By the time I aborted that hit, Modano and I had played on two Olympic teams together. We had been in All-Star Games together. Although we had not really talked about it, we had become old friends.
It was like Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson in the NBA. Bird has said many times that every morning, he would look in the newspaper to see what Johnson had done the night before. He didn’t want to like Johnson. He just wanted to compete with him. That was how I was about Modano. I always knew how Modano was doing. I wanted to compete with him. Over time, Bird started to realize that he liked Johnson. Over time, I realized that I should be grateful that I had Modano in the league to be my measuring stick. My competition with him forced me to be a better player, and I’m sure our rivalry pushed him as well. If nothing else, my two-decade pursuit of Modano proved that an athlete with some fire and determination can compete with a more talented player.
I believe Modano is the greatest American-born player of all time. At worst, he’s in the top three with Chris Chelios and Pat LaFontaine.
My 10 Favourite Opponents
There’s no question that Modano is number one on my list of all-time favourite opponents. Here are the others on my Top 10 list:
2. Steve Yzerman. He represented everything I thought a captain and leader should be. He was so fucking talented that he always brought the best out of me. I always felt like I matched up well with Yzerman, even in his best scoring seasons.
3. Sergei Fedorov. He was a horse, bigger than you’d think he was. He could skate, handle the puck like a magician and check you until you hated him. You didn’t get a break when you played centre against Detroit in those days, because you would end up facing Yzerman, and then you got Fedorov the next shift. That’s like meeting the bear after you fought the fucking lion.
4. Pavel Bure. He was always just one stride away from being on a breakaway. He was jet-propelled. I loved playing against the Russian players because they tested you with their speed. I respected their speed, but I wasn’t intimidated by it.
J.R.: My Life as the Most Outspoken, Fearless, and Hard-Hitting Man in Hockey Page 23