In his new book All Roads Home: A Life On And Off The Ice, Bryan Trottier tells his life story from rural Saskatchewan to the bright lights of the NHL to his post-playing days.
In Part 1 of this two-part Q&A, Trottier talks about growing up on the ranch, his first goal as an 8-year-old as well as his first goal in the NHL, plus meeting Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull for the first time.
Sam McCaig: Welcome Bryan, thank you for doing this. And congratulations on your book coming out. What inspired you to tell your story now?
Bryan Trottier: Why now? Well, it’s probably been the No. 1 question people have asked me for quite a while, you know, ‘Are you going to write a book?’ It’s been like that for 40 years, probably, but I just wasn’t ready. I didn’t feel like doing it when I was a player or a coach. To tell my story, I’d have to give away my strategies and my approach to the game. Now I’m more of an open book. Where I’m at in life, it just seems like a good time where I can, you know, not just tell my story but my path to the NHL and share some insight on my family and where I come from, and all the people I’ve met that were responsible for helping me to reach my dream. I don’t have to be guarded anymore. People can see a different side of me, and I think this will help people understand me a little bit better.
SM: You must have a great memory, you provide an incredible level of detail in the book. It’s almost 100 pages before you get to your NHL career. There’s a lot about your family and playing music with them and growing up on the ranch, and playing hockey as a kid and your junior hockey career. How do you remember it all?
BT: Well, I don’t know. I think it was adrenaline. It was fun. (Writer) Stephen Brunt did a good job of jogging my memory and keeping everything in chronological order. But it wasn’t like it happened in a week, it took a lot of time. And just putting things down and remembering them, and calling (WHL teammate) Tiger Williams and getting his memory on certain things, and talking to buddies and family. I had a pretty vivid memory of growing up, the hockey stuff especially, because it was there that a lot of fun stuff happened through the years. Those were the formidable years, from age eight to 16, they were pretty vivid, it felt like every year I was developing fast and furious. There was a lot going on, a lot of music, working on the ranch, hockey. It was pretty fun. Looking back, it was more fun than it was angst, even the toughest times when you wanted to quit hockey.
SM: The first part of the book is sort of a dedication to your family, it was obviously important for you to tell their story as part of your own story. And the theme of homesickness comes up a few times, it’s natural when you leave home when you’re 15 or 16, but you also talk about it later on in the NHL, and when Mike Bossy first joined the Islanders, you seemed to sense it in him as well.
BT: I think there are lots of people that can relate to that. They don’t want to leave home, they’re shy. You know, there are lots of Indigenous kids especially, and I really want to strike a chord with those kids as well. I think all of us get a little homesick. And when you’re chasing the NHL dream, it seems like those things kind of resonated in my head all the time, you know, to call mom and dad, to go home. It never really went away during my whole career, like, I couldn’t wait to get home.
SM: You talk about being shy when you were younger, not wanting to be the center of attention or do public speaking. But your hockey ability thrust you into the spotlight. Was there a point when you became comfortable with it?
BT: Probably during my career and a little bit through my coaching career. No, I didn’t want to be the center of attention. It’s fun, sharing praise, talking about somebody else. And it’s fun being on a team. When you’re standing alone singing, or you’re doing that kind of stuff, that comes from years of my dad, you know, making us go be part of a band, getting up and dancing and performing a song in front of everybody. It wasn’t something that I ever really felt comfortable with. I’m not a great singer, either. But performing and talking now is a lot less anxiety.
SM: I had to laugh when I opened the book and there’s a couple pages of your awards and accomplishments, and the first one listed was your first goal in 1964 when you were eight years old. What do you remember about that goal?
BT: Well, it was one of our early games because we had just got minor hockey in my hometown (Val Marie, Sask.) and we’d taken a couple of lickings. There’s a photo of the team in the book, and you can see some kids are wearing a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey, some are wearing Montreal Canadiens, some kids have helmets and some don’t, and not many kids had hockey gloves. We’re a misfit team but we are playing hockey. Dad played defense so he said, ‘You’re gonna play defense, you’ll get more ice time and learn how to skate backwards.’ So I started on defense and in one game I just kind of snuck up on the outside, and my buddy Bernie Syrenne had thrown the puck over to Claude Jeanson in the corner. Jeanson was a really good stickhandler, but he stickhandled so much that he kind of fell down on his butt. I came to his side and yelled at him to sweep the puck over to me, and I got the puck and shot it at the net and darned if it didn’t go right into the upper part of the net over the goalie. I was so surprised that I shot it so high, it must have been the adrenaline. And then I didn’t know how to react with my hands in the air or whatever. I kind of skated away from everybody and went back to my position and all my teammates came up and patted me on the back. It ended up being the winning goal and dad made such a big deal out of it. You know, like, ‘Hey, winning goal!’ and he handed me the puck that he’d had in his pocket. Mom put some white tape around it and wrote my name on it and put it on the windowsill at home, you know, ‘Bryan’s first goal.’ And I never thought about it, but then when she passed away (in 2011), there was that darn puck, she still had it all those years later. It was a special moment. And then, years after that, I go to the Hall of Fame, and there’s that puck. I thought that was really cool.
SM: Later in the book, you talk about your first NHL goal and it’s the same thing, they put tape around the puck and wrote your name on it, just like your mom did. That’s pretty good symmetry.
BT: Well, yeah, that was fun. My teammates went crazy, and it ended up being the first goal of a hat trick. You know, (Islanders trainer) Jim Pickard handed the puck to me after the game, the whole team was going crazy for me and they put it on a plaque and the whole experience was just like what you’d dream about your scoring your first NHL goal, an amazing dream. The media made a big deal out of it, too. I was trying to get away from it all to call mom and dad but the Islanders PR guy was like, ‘No, the media guys want to come up again.’ But it was fun.
SM: That game was your first-ever home game at Nassau Coliseum and you ended up scoring a hat trick and five points. At that point, you didn’t even know if you were going to stick around for the whole season yet. That must have been a surreal game, a surreal night for you.
BT: It was beyond what you can imagine. (Islanders GM) Bill (Torrey) and (coach) Al Arbour were happy for me, they usually played things down a bit but they were really happy for me. I was like, ‘Oh my god, we’re a couple of weeks into the season, we’ve played five or six games and my name is at the top of the NHL scoring list, tied with Guy Lafleur, what the hell am I doing up here?’
SM: Before you got to the NHL, you were on a WHL all-star team that played a series against the WHA all-star team and it sounds like that was the first time you met Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull. What was it like for you at that age to meet those two legends of the game?
BT: Oh my god. Yeah, they were bigger than life. I was so excited to meet Gordie Howe because he’s from Saskatchewan, too, and his boys (Mark and Marty) were also playing on the WHA team. There were a lot of headlines about the series in The Hockey News, we used to read The Hockey News like the Bible. And just to be able to sit and talk with Bobby Hull, you know, and hear about his big slapshot. Those guys were just so polite to us, so good to us kids. I mean, here we are, we’re really here and playing against them and they’re being so polite, like, ‘Play us hard! Don’t let up! Give us some good competition!’ And I think we did, we gave them some good games. And then after the games, they’d always be praising us and come over to our bus and stop by our dressing room and it was always Bobby or Gordie. To me, that was like, ‘Wow, these guys are nice, they’re just the nicest people.’ They were bigger than life to begin with and then they were better than you could ever imagine. Yeah, I have very vivid memories of that.
