Orr at 70: forever young, getting old
Legendary hockey star and agent releases new book years after first memoir
TORONTO — Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Bobby Orr needs surgery. He was going to see a sister’s grandson play — his own boys were good athletes who didn’t play hockey, and Bobby seems happy with all that — and he tripped on some wires hidden under a mat and popped his bicep tendon where it attaches to the shoulder. It will be his first surgery in 14 years, since he replaced those famous knees.
Bobby Orr is 70 now, a successful player agent, forever young, getting old. He has another book, a few years after his polished, careful memoir. This one is “Bobby: My Story in Pictures,” with stories accompanying all the pictures that he or his sister could dig out of the albums or the shoeboxes in the closet, of his family or his childhood or his life. Some hockey players in this country reach a place where everything they touch becomes a holy relic. Bobby’s one of those. He writes in the book that the pictures show another time. So does he.
“If I played today? Oh, God only knows. If my family was the same as it was then financially, I wouldn’t have been playing,” says Orr, smiling that eruptive smile over a serious thought. “We didn’t have the money to do those things, and my parents weren’t going to sell a child so I could play hockey.”
Part of the very Canadian legend of Bobby Orr is how he was allowed to discover hockey on the river and on the bay of Parry Sound, and emerged as this fully formed genius, this force of nature, a walking, skating creation myth. It’s like Gordie Howe getting his skates in a bag sold by neighbours in Saskatoon during the Depression. We’ll never see another Bobby Orr, because how he was made doesn’t exist anymore. He wishes it did.
“My fear would be if I was 10 years old now, someone would be trying to convince my parents to make me move to play somewhere else, and that’s what’s happening: moving because parents think that if I don’t move my child, his development will be hindered,” says Orr, who left home for Oshawa and junior at 14. “And that’s just bulls-t. It’s not true at all. If the kid is playing, he’ll be fine. He just has to play. If he’s got it, he’ll get a chance.
“My dad never coached me. We talked, I’m sure, but my parents worked, more than one job.”
It’s like Gordie Howe, I say. Gordie came from a dirt-poor family.
“We all did,” says Bobby.
Bobby Orr is revered, of course. His career was so beautiful and so tragic, his unnatural brilliance extinguished by his knees, leaving a beautiful 30-year-old corpse. He might have been the greatest ever. He played 36 games after he turned
27.
“If it’s time, I think it’s easier,” Orr says. “For me, I was very young, and it was only because of my injuries. So, it was more difficult. As you get older, and it really is time, and you can’t do it anymore, you can’t keep up, then I think you say: ‘It’s time to go.’
“It was hard. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy. But I had a good support group. We need that.”
Now, he heads the Orr Hockey Group, and belongs to Canada’s royal line of hockey players, the true greats, the best. Howe was eventually followed by the children, who still speak of him with reverence: Orr, Gretzky, Mario. The next wave was Lindros for a moment, Sid, and now Connor McDavid, who is represented by agent Jeff Jackson under Orr’s banner. McDavid knew who Bobby was, and still values his counsel. Orr talks to McDavid as Gordie talked to him, but it’s different advice: not watch for my elbows, and maybe not even grab every penny you can make.
“You’ve got to be careful with the players, too,” Bobby says. “They’ve got three or four coaches, and with Connor, his dad, and they’ve got all the experts coaching him. He doesn’t need me, but we do talk about things. Not often, not often, but we do talk about things. Very little about his play.”
So, maybe about being a special one in Canada, where we love the game to death — how to handle the pressure, the responsibility, the everything. You talk about the rest of his life.
“That’s all the stuff we talk about, yeah,” says Orr. “I can’t coach him.”
Bobby was always a shy kid, and he still is underneath his practised good humour, his natural charm. You walk in and the first thing he does is, he asks if you want coffee and he goes and gets it. He walks stiffly, if he’s been sitting for a while. He has grown used to being Bobby Orr.
“I mean, people are really nice to me and I try to be nice to them, and it works,” Orr says. “Gordie said, ‘I treat them the way I’d want them to treat me,’ and that’s how it works. So, I try to do that. You just treat them with respect, that’s all. You talk to them, you look at them when you talk to them, you don’t look by to see what’s coming next. That’s Gordie, and Arnold Palmer. Arnie was the best.
“I think more people recognize (me) in Toronto. I played in Boston, so maybe it’s similar there. But kids don’t recognize you. I get the fathers saying ‘Go up and get his autograph’ and the kid’s like ‘Why?’ and it’s ‘Never mind why. I’ll tell you why later.’
“But the notoriety, I don’t pay much attention to it. I mean, I know it’s there.
I’m comfortable with it. I disappear a lot. Like, I’m here all week and this isn’t my favourite thing to do, not that I dislike you, but this isn’t my — talking about myself, it’s still difficult for me.”
He worries about the kids who aren’t Connor McDavids, who aren’t Bobby Orrs. He thinks those kids will find their way because they will find the game and unlock it and not even be able to tell you why afterwards, or how. Bobby never could. He watches his grandson and sometimes he touches the puck, but mostly he skates around and has a blast. He’s 8. Bobby wants hockey to remember the kids like that.
“This isn’t a sprint, this is a marathon, and if mom and dad would just realize the competition is huge, you’re eventually competing against the world,” says Orr. “Very few make it. So, what’s the purpose of playing minor hockey? Or minor baseball, or anything? It’s about learning to be a good teammate, to be responsible, to be dedicated to the sport you’re playing or the school you’re going to. Those are things you can learn anywhere. Love the game. Do you love your job? If you didn’t would you do a good job?
“But we’ve got to give every kid in the community that. Minor hockey is supposed to be fun for everybody. I’m not sure that’s happening now. It’s different today, and I understand that, but I would like to see every community give a chance to every kid.”
Hard to find a solution, though. The photographer brings out some prints of Bobby she found in the Star archive; he is delighted. Some of them are his older self; some are him blond and unscarred and still that boy who would never grow all the way up on the ice, who would stay forever young.
“Oh, there’s some nice pickerel,” Bobby says of a fishing photo. “Oh, where did you get that?” to another, of him and his grandma. “Oh God, I wish I’d had these. Oh my gosh, my sister Penny. There’s a good one of Penny. Oh, there’s mom. That’s Bobby Orr Day in Parry Sound.” He sees a dog, a golden retriever. “Scoutie!” he says.
There’s one of him and Terry Fox, too. Bobby was retired when he met Terry on the run across Canada and he rolled up his pant leg and he and Terry compared some of the most famous damaged legs in Canada. When Terry ran through Parry Sound, Bobby’s dad called and said he wanted to give the kid something, and Bobby said: anything he wants.
So, his dad gave Terry the Canada Cup jersey from ’76, which was the tournament that more or less ended Bobby’s career once and for all. It was kind of poetic, that part. After he left Parry Sound, Terry ran one more month before he had to stop.
Bobby, like almost everyone, was luckier. When it’s time to go, Bobby Orr shakes your hand, grasps it and really shakes it, looks you in the eye, says thank you. He closes the door and signs some more books with that signature you can read, a little like Jean Béliveau’s. Bobby knows if people meet Bobby Orr, if they come in contact with the holy relics, they will treasure that. He knows they’ll remember.