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

  For Tracy

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Please Come to Boston

  2. Weighing My Odds

  3. Knowing My Creator

  4. Finding My Bluster in the Windy City

  5. Showing Me the Door

  6. Selling Ice in the Desert

  7. Guts

  8. Payback Was a Bitch

  9. Not All Rainbows and Butterflies

  10. Exit Strategy

  11. Hitch in My Giddy-Up

  12. The Gambler

  13. Born in the USA

  14. Death in the Family

  15. The Bomb

  16. All in My Head

  17. Dancing with Probert

  18. To Live and Die in L.A.

  19. Wayne’s World

  20. Reprieve

  21. When the Cheering Stops

  22. Friends and Enemies

  23. Who I Am

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Gallery 1

  Photo Gallery 2

  Photo Gallery 3

  Introduction

  In 2007, I was watching Pittsburgh Penguins star Sidney Crosby being interviewed live by NBC analyst Pierre McGuire before an NHL playoff game, and I wanted to reach through the television and grab Crosby by the fucking throat.

  McGuire asked Crosby what the Penguins needed to do to beat Ottawa, and Crosby was prattling on about how the Penguins needed “consistency” and to have every Pittsburgh player step up.

  It was the wrong fucking answer. It was a bullshit answer. When McGuire asked Crosby that question, Crosby should have stared into the eye of the camera and said, “We are going to win this game because I’m going to be the best motherfucking player on the ice.”

  If you want to inspire your teammates, those are the words that get the job done.

  That’s what I would have said. Maybe I would have sanitized my language for television, or maybe not. It would not have been the first—or last—time I said something I should not have said on live television.

  Crosby should have taken that moment in 2007 to announce to himself and his teammates that failure was not an option. Don’t give us that “We are going to try our best” line. Mark Messier isn’t remembered for saying his team needed to be consistent against the New Jersey Devils in the 1995 playoffs. He’s remembered for guaranteeing a victory against New Jersey. Patrick Roy didn’t stand up in the Montreal dressing room and tell his teammates he was going to play “consistently.” Roy told his teammates that if they scored two goals, they were going to be Stanley Cup champions because he wouldn’t give up more than one goal.

  In 1996, I pissed off Team USA general manager Lou Lamoriello because I predicted the Americans were going to win the fucking World Cup of Hockey. I hadn’t even been named to the team yet, and I ended up not playing because I didn’t have an NHL contract. But I wanted to fire up my teammates, and maybe rile up the Canadians, with my words.

  When I was playing for the Chicago Blackhawks in 1992, captain Dirk Graham told us, “You will see me play the best game I’ve ever played tonight.” Then he went out and scored a hat trick.

  We were in awe of him after that effort.

  When you are an athlete and someone asks you what you intend to do to win a game, you need to challenge yourself. You need to announce to the world that you intend to do whatever it takes to win. You need to show some balls. That’s the way I played. That’s the way I think.

  The modern athlete has become too worried about saying anything that is going to rile up the other team. Modern stars worry too much about being diplomatic.

  Fuck diplomacy. Leave polite competition for church-league softball players, or athletes who let fear be an obstacle to realizing their full potential.

  Fear of failure can paralyze your inner drive. Fear can become the roadblock to your success. Fear can prevent you from achieving your objective. Fear can overwhelm you to the point of smothering your dreams and ambition.

  But you can look at fear another way. Fear can also be the world’s greatest motivator. Former NHL coach Mike Keenan taught me to use fear to fuel my energy. When I became terrified by the consequences of failure, that’s when I played my best hockey. The thought that Keenan could bury me on the bench, or kill my career, scared the shit out of me. It also motivated me to play the game as if my career depended upon my next shift. If I wasn’t an NHL player, who was I? Was I going to be a garbageman? Was I going to be a fireman? I didn’t know. I just knew that the idea of not playing hockey was fucking frightful.

  I wasn’t a physical player before I played for Keenan. Fear of Keenan motivated me to become a top NHL player. That fear drove me for two decades in the NHL. No one influenced my career more than Keenan, but there were two other events prior to my meeting Keenan that had an impact.

  When I was seven years old, I went to a Hartford Whalers game, and Gordie Howe was playing for them. A bunch of us would lean over the glass to get a better look as players skated in the pre-game warmup. During one of his laps around his zone, Mr. Hockey scooped up some ice shavings and dumped them on my head as he skated by. I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen—until a couple of seconds later, when Howe looked back and winked at me.

  For three seconds, it was just me and Gordie Howe connecting. That moment changed my life. I felt like Gordie had given me a gift, and I wanted to pay it back. When I arrived in the NHL, I made sure I connected with fans the way Gordie had taught me to do.

  The other event that changed me was watching the U.S. team defeat the Soviets on television in 1980. It was that moment that I knew I wanted to be an elite-level hockey player. It was not Mike Eruzione’s goal that excited me as much as the celebration that followed the victory. I wanted to know what it would be like to celebrate with teammates the way the Americans did at Lake Placid. Like many other American players, I carried some of that confidence with me as I continued along my path toward an NHL career.

  What links together the Howe, Keenan and Eruzione moments is that they each made me emotional and fuelled my passion. Flying around the ice with my jersey flapping behind was the key to my success. Certainly, talent is crucial, but you won’t be respected at the NHL level unless you play with overflowing desire. Aren’t passion and emotion what life is about? I really don’t want to do anything that doesn’t stir my passion. Life is short. Why bother with anything that doesn’t excite you?

  When I started this book project, my stated objective was to produce an honest, raw, emotional book that gives the reader a peek at what happens to players when the curtains are drawn. I’m hoping this work elicits a strong emotional response from you. When you read this book, I hope it makes you angry. I hope it makes you curious. I hope it makes you laugh. I hope it makes you think. Mostly, I hope it makes you wonder, “What the fuck was Roenick thinking?”

  If I get that response from you, then you and I are on the same page.

  1. Please Come to Boston

  When I was an 11-year-old playing peewee hockey in the Washington, D.C., area, I remember backing down from an encounter with an opponent and hearing a voice from the crowd yell, “Get off the ice, you pussy.”

  Looking into the stands, I realized it was my mother.

  In the 1980s, the Roenicks were not like the model American families depicted on a television situation comedy. We were not like Leave It to Beaver, The Cosby Show or Family Ties. There was nothing typical about our American family. The Roenicks would have been a better fit for one of today�
�s reality shows. We could have produced the level of swearing, screaming, angst, drama and unusual storylines necessary to bring viewers back every week. They would have tuned in just to see how many miles we were driving, or how many mountains the Roenicks would be willing to move, to make sure I could play in a good hockey game.

  If we were on reality television, directors could have built an entire episode around the time my father, Wally, booted me out of the car and made me walk three miles home in winter conditions because my effort wasn’t as strong as it should have been in a hockey game. My family’s overzealous pursuit of hockey success for their oldest son probably would have had viewers shaking their heads about the nutty lifestyle we lived to support my ability to play elite-level hockey. We were such a hockey family that my dad tells the story of driving away from our house in Connecticut after it was sold and realizing that one side of the house was black from pucks striking it over and over and over again.

  Certainly, there were people around us who considered it bizarre, or maybe even insane, that my mom and dad built their lives around my sports activities. At age 13, I was living in Fairfax, Virginia, and commuting 250 miles each way on weekends to play for a hockey team in Totowa, New Jersey. Every Friday during the hockey season, I had a 3 p.m. reservation on People Express Airlines to fly from Dulles Airport in Virginia to Newark for the weekend. Even with People Express’s special fares of $79 or $99 one way, my dad estimated that it cost about $25,000 in total for me to play for the New Jersey Rockets that season. He always joked that my NHL travel schedule was like a walk in the park compared to the miles we logged in my youth hockey days.

  “Tough travel is when you are 14 and you get home from a road trip at five in the morning,” my dad said. But, as he points out, at least I was able to fly to New Jersey. “The idiots had to drive,” he said.

  He was referring, of course, to himself and my mother, Jo, who would drive from Virginia to New Jersey. At the time, my dad was an executive for Mobil Oil and he travelled around the country for his work. It was standard procedure for him to land in Virginia after a lengthy work trip and then jump into a car for a drive to New Jersey. Sometimes he would take a red-eye flight directly from the west coast to Newark. As busy as my dad was, he usually found a way to attend my games.

  To get an invitation to play for the New Jersey Rockets was an honour for a bantam-age hockey player in that era. The Rockets organization has been around since the 1970s. Joey Mullen, the first American player to reach 500 goals at the NHL level, played for the Rockets. They prided themselves on bringing together the best players from Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut and the Washington, D.C., area. They recruited me after I had scored 203 goals and produced 485 points for the Washington Metros in my final season of peewee hockey. If it is possible for an 11-year-old to have a hockey reputation, I had one. The NHL is full of players whose first international notice came from the Quebec peewee tournament. I was one of those guys. In one tournament game, I netted eight goals. The tournament record was nine goals, set by some kid named Wayne Gretzky.

  The Rockets also recruited my Metros linemate Matt Mallgrave. When my family moved us to Northern Virginia when I was 10, all I heard was that Mallgrave was the best player in the area. I don’t know who I was expecting to meet, but I sure didn’t expect to meet a player sporting a Mohawk haircut. I remember thinking, “This freak is the best player in the area?” Meanwhile, he told me later that he kept hearing I was going to come into Washington and be the new best player. He was unimpressed when he saw me in street clothes and realized that I weighed 15 pounds less than everyone else. He told me later he was thinking, “This little shit is the guy everyone is talking about?”

  Despite our first impressions, we ended up becoming lifelong buddies. Although I didn’t recall this, Matt remembers that he was matched up against me in our first scrimmage and I scored six goals against him. He said he knew then that the hockey in Washington, D.C., wasn’t quite as strong as the hockey we were playing on the east coast. But Matt was unquestionably a quality player, netting more than 100 goals for the Metros one season. He was also one of the top players for the Rockets.

  When Mallgrave decided to play for the Rockets, his father secured a townhouse in New Jersey. The Mallgraves would pick me up at the airport when I landed there on Friday afternoons. My dad would join us later when he drove in from home, or flew in from his latest business trip.

  In my youth hockey days, my dad was heavily invested in my career. My playing style in those days came from the many talks I had with him about how the game should be played. He believed in teamwork, and if he thought I was selfish on the ice, he would holler at me on the car ride home.

  The impression that everyone had in those days was that my dad was more intense than I was. Most of my teammates considered me laid-back. What everyone also remembers about my dad was that he was a chain smoker. When he coached my peewee team, the kids thought it was hilarious when smoke would come out of his mouth when he was barking instructions at us.

  In looking back at our weekends in New Jersey, Mallgrave always recalls my dad with a cigarette in his hand. “Over a weekend, I swear he must have smoked 170 cigarettes,” Mallgrave recalls.

  The Rockets won back-to-back U.S. national bantam championships when Matt and I played for them in 1983 and 1984. In my first season with the Rockets, the only team we couldn’t beat consistently was the Chicago Young Americans, a team that boasted Justin Duberman, who ended up playing college hockey at North Dakota, plus a few games for the Pittsburgh Penguins; Joe Suk, who would become a quality scorer in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League; and Rick Olczyk, who is an assistant general manager of the Edmonton Oilers. He is also the brother of former NHL standout Eddie Olczyk, who is also an NBC analyst. The Rockets always ended up playing against Chicago in the finals of tournaments, and I believe we only beat them twice all season. But one of our wins came in a 3–2 quadruple-overtime national championship game in Buffalo. I played in that game with a separated shoulder, courtesy of a check by Duberman in our preliminary loss to the Young Americans. In the title contest, I exacted my revenge with two goals and an assist.

  Mike Ross, who went on to be a top college player at Brown University, scored the game-winner after a giveaway by Olczyk. In 1996–97, Ross scored 50 goals for the East Coast Hockey League’s South Carolina Stingrays. He was a smooth, smart fucking player in the style of Craig Janney. He was probably faster than Janney.

  Interesting, Duberman ended up playing with the Rockets the following year. We went all the way to the finals again—this time in Madison, Wisconsin, where we downed Detroit Compuware 3–2. Future NHL player Denny Felsner played on that team, as did Mike Boback. At that time, some people argued that Boback was the top American player in our age group.

  At the peewee and bantam age, it’s impossible to project who has NHL potential and who has not. But even when I was a peewee, everyone in the hockey world knew who the best players in the country were. Mike Modano was in Detroit’s Little Caesars organization, and my rivalry with him started when we were 10 or 11 years old. At every tournament over the next few years, I measured myself against what Modano was accomplishing. That didn’t stop when we reached the NHL.

  The funny thing is that many in the hockey world thought Boback—who, like Modano, was from Michigan—was Modano’s equal. Boback seemed to be more physically mature than Modano. Both of them seemed like they were extra large.

  Boback was a quality college player at Providence and a solid minor-league player. But he never made the NHL. In my era, Michigan had another top player in Neil Carnes, who ended up playing in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League when I was there. But he was killed in a motorcycle accident. Rick Olczyk played for Brown University but never played professional hockey. If there was one story that has defined the Roenick family during my childhood, it is my father’s decision to take a significant demotion—and a dramatic cut in pay—from Mobil Oil to move the family from
Virginia to Massachusetts when I was ready to enter high school. My dad has said the move was about “quality of life” as well as hockey. “But hockey was a big part of it,” he says.

  My dad worked 40 years for Mobil and says his career chart looks like “the point of an arrow.” He had a steep rise to the top and then a quick fall after he moved to Massachusetts. He was a marketing projects manager when we lived in Northern Virginia; he was an entry-level territory manager after going to Massachusetts. My dad won’t say how much money he lost in the change of venue, but it has been my impression that his pay was cut in half.

  The backstory behind our move to Massachusetts was my parents’ weariness and concern about all of the moving the family had endured until that point. Because of my dad’s position, we had moved 10 times in 15 years. If my dad had continued on his career path as a projects manager, he knew he would continue to move every couple of years. He noted that other executives moving that often had children who were in trouble. He didn’t want that to happen to his two sons. Based on where my dad knew his career was heading, he expected that his next move could be to Florida, or Los Angeles, Dallas or Louisiana. This was the mid-1980s and those areas didn’t have the hockey presence they have today. Because hockey was a big part of our life, he didn’t want to risk going someplace where we couldn’t find quality competition. My parents wanted to put down roots in Massachusetts and stay there.

  We were a dedicated hockey family. Thanksgiving tradition for us meant having a turkey dinner at four o’clock on Wednesday and then my mom and younger brother, Trevor, climbing into the car for a drive to Buffalo for a tournament. When they arrived there, they would call my dad to make sure he knew they’d arrived safely. And then my father and I would board a plane for Detroit, where I had a tournament. The family would be reunited at nine o’clock Sunday night to resume our lives. When I was a peewee, we would have Christmas dinner and then we would pick up Mallgrave and his father and drive all night from Maryland to Ottawa, Ontario, for a tournament.