Gino Odjick and Chris Simon, both gone too soon at 52
The two native enforcers had a lot in common, including autobiographies in the works that may or may not make it to print one day.
The hockey world was shaken again last week with the news of Chris Simon’s death at his own hands.
The former Ottawa 67’s who won a Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche becomes another in a too long line of former NHL enforcers who passed away premeturely, joining the likes of Bob Probert, Derek Boogard, Wade Belak, Rick Rypien and Steve Montador. Like them, his passing is being linked to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive and fatal disease linked to repeated brain injuries, such as those suffered during a bare knuckles fight.
Because he was a native hockey player, from the Ojibwe tribe in Wawa, Ontario, Simon was also linked to Gino Odjick, who died in January 2023 after a long battle with a degenerative heart disease called amyloidosis. It’s hard to say if CTE had anything to do with that condition, but he said after being admitted to a mental health hospital in Gatineau in 2013 that the multiple concussions he had affected his quality of life.
The former Vancouver Canuck, an Algonquin, was 52 when he passed, the same age as Simon. According to Hockeyfights.com, the “Maniwaki Mauler” fought 156 times in the NHL, while Simon dropped the gloves 111 times, but they never faced each other on the ice, which is probably a testament to the respect they had for each other.
My colleague
from How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying) revealed in an RIP post to Simon on Facebook last week that they had been talking about him ghostwriting Chris’s autobiography, which led to this exchange:Before he left for the “spirit world”, as his sister Dina wrote when she announced Gino’s passing, I was far advanced in a project to do the same with him. In his latter years, we talked a few times about his health struggles, he even gave me a scoop — not the best kind to get, but still — about the amyloidosis returning after he had been in remission for seven years. It is the rare story that I managed to get into my then paper, Le Droit, before it ran online, something that doesn’t happen anymore these days.
Gino Odjick lutte à nouveau pour sa vie
An avid reader, Gino wanted a copy of my book, Gorgée, on another tough guy, Roberto/Bob Bissonnette, who became a popular folk singer in Quebec after his hockey career, before a tragic helicopter accident ended his life way too soon. After reading it, he told me that I was a “great writer”, and when I suggested that he had an inspiring story to tell, he added this:
Once he gave me the go ahead, I had an editor in Quebec interested in doing the book, and I also did a sample chapter after interviewing him and Bob Hartley, his coach with the junior A Hawkesbury Hawks. The following chapters would have seen him go from Hawkesbury to Laval, Laval to Vancouver, and Vancouver to Montreal in his hockey career, ending with his post-career health issues. I was hoping his best friend on the Canucks, Pavel Bure, would write the foreword. And the first chapter would have been about his dad Joe going from the residential school in Spanish (he was called by the number 29 instead of his name, which explains why Gino wore that number) to Kitigan Zibi, the Algonquin reserve near Maniwaki, Quebec.
With his family’s permission, here is that chapter that I was hoping to submit to an editor (possibly in Vancouver, where Gino lived in retirement and was very popular). Who knows, maybe it will be possible to revive the project. Chris Simon’s story also deserves to be told.
Keep in mind this is written as him talking, I was going to be the “ghostwriter” telling the story in his own words.
FROM KITIGAN ZIBI TO HAWKESBURY
It is Saturday, May 30th, 1987, and the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League is holding its annual draft at the Verdun Auditorium. The host team, the Junior Canadiens, uses the first overall pick to select a high scoring forward, Martin St-Amour, while Martin Gélinas, who years later was going to be traded for Wayne Gretzky, is selected second by the Hull Olympiques.
The stands of this old arena are filled with other players aged 15 and 16, among the best in Quebec, most of whom skated in midget AAA leagues.
Don't ask me where I was that day, it's been too long. One thing is for sure however, I was far away from this suburb of Montreal!
As a defenceman who played for the Maniwaki Midget B Forestiers the previous season, I had no hope of hearing my name on the loudspeakers on this memorable day for many players. For the others it was the biggest day of their hockey lives, but for me it was just another day. My biggest day was a year away, a postponement, even though I had no idea at the time, no way of knowing how it would play out.
That weekend, odds are pretty good that I was in the woods around Lac Barrière, hunting and fishing in the Parc de la Vérendrye. The Algonquins have a reserve up there, that of Lac-Rapide and Kitiganik. It is about a hundred kilometers northwest of where I grew up, Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, near Maniwaki.
Since I had no future in hockey, I pretty much spent the whole summer in the deep bush. There was no off-season training. I did come back to civilization in September to take a welding class at Highland Park High School in Ottawa. The idea was that one day, I could go to New York like my dad Joe and work on “high steel,” building the skyscrapers of the Big Apple. Natives like us had the reputation of not being afraid of heights.
My dad later worked on the maintenance of the Rideau Canal Skateway in the winter, getting off his plow to come see me practice at the Ottawa Civic Center when I was playing for the Canucks and we were preparing to face the Senators when they returned to the NHL, but that's a story for later.
Like my father, I had to find a way to earn a living since my first daughter, Ashley Ann, had just arrived in my family. The first of my eight children.
My mother Giselle worried that I would find trouble while I was away at school, since I lived on my own in a small apartment near Lansdowne Park in the Glebe neighbourhood of Ottawa. She shared her worries with the father of one of my former teammates, Michel Branchaud, to see if he could find me a hockey team to play with, to fill my free time.
Louis Branchaud, who had taught me in high school, told her that Michel had made the Hawkesbury Hawks, of the Central Junior A League, out of training camp. That team was off to a terrible start with eight straight losses, which got the coach, Barry Rice, fired. Ironically, he apparently had aspirations of getting to the NHL as a coach, and his replacement was the goalie coach, a guy by the name of Bob Hartley. You might have heard of him, he would later win the Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche, during a long pro career that also saw him win titles in the American Hockey League (AHL) and the KHL in Russia.
“The team president was my softball coach in the summer and he thought I could do the job as head coach even though I had no experience,” Hartley recalls. “I told him first that I couldn't accept his offer, that I didn't have time with my job (at a windshield plant) and two young children. He finally asked me to take charge of the club for two weeks while he waited for the intended replacement to arrive. But it wasn't even true, there was no one else, he just wanted me to be his coach."
When I played in Maniwaki, we almost never practiced, we just played games. When I showed up to tryout with the Hawks, who were looking to add some toughness, I didn’t understand any of the drills during practice. I had never done two on ones or three on twos. Forechecking, back-checking, I had no clue about any of that!
However, I quickly realized that I had to find a role for myself on the team, and I decided that the tough-guy role would be perfect for me, since I was taller and bigger than most players in the league.
I started as a defenseman, but I also skated on the fourth line with Michel. I can't remember the first time I dropped the gloves, but it was during one of my first games, and it went pretty well. I had never fought on the ice before, it wasn’t allowed in minor hockey, even less at the B level than the leagues higher up. But I did have some instincts for the role, some experience. As a teenager, I had several friends with whom we would “wrast”, what we called wrestling. My first season in Junior A, that's pretty much all I needed to do, grab my opponent and pin him down. It was later that I took boxing lessons and developed my pretty open style, which started giving spectacular fights once I started playing with the Laval Titan.
Even though I was pretty shy and quiet, the players in the locker room appreciated right away that I was ready to go to war with them, and that I would not accept an opponent taking any liberties with any of my teammates.
Bob saw that I was ready to do anything to help the team, and he didn't hesitate to help me in any way also. At first, I went to games in jeans and a white t-shirt, but since the club had a dress code and the other players wondered why I didn't adhere to it, he approached a clothing shop in Hawkesbury to get me cleaner pants and a dress shirt, since I couldn't really afford that.
"I will always remember the night Gino came into my office before a game with his clean clothes on, but his shirt and pants were bloody! I thought he had killed someone, but he was all excited and asked me to follow him to the parking lot. So, I did and he showed me that there was a deer in the trunk of his father's car. They had seen it on the road between Maniwaki and Hawkesbury and they had stopped to hunt him down. Gino had done his warm-up by going to pick it up and disemboweling it.” - Bob Hartley
I don't have exactly the same memory--the way I remember it, we had shot a deer, then we cleaned it up, yes, but we left it near the road and we went back to pick it up on the way home. In any case, Bob had to ask his friend Denis Charlebois, from the Mercerie Maître Charles, to donate more dress clothes for me!
I didn't have the best equipment to start my hockey career either. The Hawks were a team with few resources, the crowds at the arena that today bears the name of Bob Hartley were quite small as the team was not very good. There was a Monday-night bingo that allowed Bob to buy half a dozen sticks -- three right-handed and three left-handed -- and some tape that all the players on the team would have to share. After a home game on Friday night, he would get some more money to repeat the same order on Saturday morning, going to the pro shop at the arena to prepare for the next game.
The club therefore had no money to buy skates for players, which has become the norm since, in major junior hockey anyway. I had reported to the club with Lange skates, an old brand known at the time because the plastic exterior of the skate had a boot inside that could be removed. Mine were about two sizes too big for me, because my foot was too wide for my size skates!
Hartley: “Our trainer at the time came to me at one point to complain that we were using tons of Kleenex tissues, since Gino was asking for dozens every intermission during games. When I asked him why he did that, Gino explained that it was to put in the toe caps of his skates that were too big for him.”
I still managed to get where I wanted to go on the ice with those skates that were too large for me. In a straight line, it was fine.
I improved over the season, scoring two goals and adding two assists to go with my 167 penalty minutes in 40 games. Our team had a record of 9 wins and 47 losses, but the lopsided scores from the beginning of the year before my arrival -- and especially that of Bob behind the bench -- were not as frequent and we won games here and there.
At one point in December, the team had to reduce its number of players under contract from 23 to 21 to meet Ottawa District Hockey Association regulations. It was between me and two other guys for the final spot and Bob asked the three of us if we were unhappy with our role in the team, which would have made his life easier to make his decision if it had been the case.
I wanted to stay, and I showed it by showing up at the arena early on a Saturday morning, well before our practice time. The arena manager phoned Bob at home to ask him what he should do, and he told him to open the room for me and turn on the arena lights. When Bob arrived, he came to see me while I was skating from board to board on the ice. “What are you doing here?”, he asked. I told him that I just really wanted to stay with the Hawks, that I didn't want him to cut me.
Bob told me later: "If you work hard for me, I'll work hard for you and you'll get drafted into the QMJHL."
I held my end of the bargain and he held his.
As the Laval Titan regularly played home games on Monday nights, Bob would occasionally go see them at the Laval Coliseum, which was nicknamed the "House of Pain". In the second half of the season, he got in touch with one of the team owners, Jean-Claude Morrissette, and told him about me. “I have a real tough guy, a native. A good kid, easy to coach. Good skater, but we don't have the money to buy him a good pair of skates," he told him.
The team sent their scout from the Outaouais region to one of our games in Kanata, but his report was apparently not very positive after we had lost 7-2.
Hartley: "The guy said Gino wouldn't score three goals in a season, including during all the practices. Quite insulting, eh! I was a rookie coach that came from working at a windshield factory, so I couldn't say much. But later, I went back to Mr. Morrissette and told him he should come see Gino play himself. When he came, I pumped Gino up for the game and he was hitting anything that moved. After the game, Mr. Morrissette came to me right away and he wanted to talk to him and draft him. That’s how my relationship with the Morrissette family started. Gino was the first player that I championed to go to a higher level.”
A few weeks later, in the 1988 Quebec Major Junior Hockey League Draft held at the Maurice-Richard Arena in Montreal, the Titan used their seventh-round pick to say on the microphone: "The Titan select, from the Hawkesbury Hawks, Gino Odjick”.
Apparently, some scouts from other teams mocked the pick, thinking Laval had wasted it. They hadn’t seen anything yet.
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