ETCHED IN HIS MEMORY
Hawks enforcer-turned-podcaster Scott recalls his tenure with the team fondly
For a man who played in 73 games with the Blackhawks and didn’t score a single goal, enforcer John Scott is as beloved as they come. The love is mutual, too.
‘‘It was there and San Jose where I had the most fun as a player, on and off the ice,’’ Scott said recently. ‘‘I really do savor those times when I was with the Hawks in Chicago.’’
It has been four years since Scott retired from hockey, his strange and generally overlooked career catapulted into the limelight at the last second, thanks to serving as the captain of the Pacific Division in the 2016 NHL All-Star Game.
And it has been eight years since Scott left the Hawks, with whom he had two assists and 142 penalty minutes during the 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons.
But the friendly 6-8 giant finally had a chance to reflect on that portion of his career this summer.
Scott, now 37, reconnected with former Hawks teammates Patrick Kane, Brian Campbell, Dave Bolland and Bryan Bickell — plus former coach Joel Quenneville and reporter Jesse Rogers — for a podcast series breaking down the Hawks’ 2010 Stanley Cup run.
The first of five episodes, with Bickell analyzing the first-round victory against the Predators, dropped Monday on Scott’s ‘‘Dropping the Gloves’’ podcast.
‘‘It’s great to be able to still reach out to those guys and have a conversation,’’ Scott said. ‘‘I consider them all friends . . . and it was really neat to take a walk down memory lane because we did have some good times in Chicago.’’
The podcasts take a behind-thescenes focus, with Quenneville and each player talking extensively about how the Hawks scouted and prepared for the intricacies of each opponent.
‘‘I found it fascinating the indepth analysis Coach Q did for every single team and every single player,’’ Scott said. ‘‘On typical teams, you just sit down and listen to a coach go on about a team, and you kind of glaze over after the first hour. But Q had some really interesting way to go about preparing for teams in each series, and it was neat to hear how effective it was.’’
It’s the biggest project yet for Scott’s podcast, which ‘‘started out with me and my buddy in a room’’ in July 2018 and since has grown popular on the Blue Wire network, with 114 episodes and counting.
Scott describes ‘‘Dropping the Gloves’’ as a G-rated alternative to more raunchy hockey podcasts, such as Paul Bissonnette and Ryan Whitney’s Barstool Sports mainstay, ‘‘Spittin Chiclets.’’ That makes it so even his six kids can listen.
‘‘I got into podcasting for that reason: I wanted to stay home [in Michigan], I didn’t want to travel and I just figured podcasting was the best way, rather than moving to
Toronto or New York or wherever I needed to be a broadcaster,’’ Scott said. ‘‘It’s worked out well. It’s fun to just do a couple of episodes whenever I want.’’
Through the process of recording the episodes — Scott said it was especially fun to talk with Quenneville, considering how that relationship has changed from coach/player to friend/friend — he often found himself thinking back to his own time with the Hawks.
He wasn’t there for the Cup run in 2010, although he now knows plenty about it. But the years afterward were just as rewarding.
‘‘I walked into such a good situation where the people loved us, and all the other sports teams in town were terrible,’’ he said with a chuckle. ‘‘We’d go to a restaurant, and there’d be people lining up after our meal. And my first daughter was born there, so that was special. We just really loved it.’’