FORMER FLAMES TOUGH GUY HAS BRAND NEW ACT
Mere hours before marching off to Wednesday’s Memorial Cup parade as the toast of Windsor, Ont., Rocky Thompson came clean on one of his secrets to recruiting for a national championship.
“I say to parents when I meet them, ‘Don’t YouTube Rocky Thompson, because you’re going to think something different from the reality here,’ ” the 39-year-old former Flames enforcer-turned Spitfires coach said with a chuckle.
“From time to time, the players YouTube me and come in and say, ‘Holy smokes, you were an animal.’ ”
The Internet is indeed littered with video evidence suggesting, as linesman Mike Cvik liked to joke with his colleagues, “Rocky tied his laces too tight and it cut the circulation off to his brain.
“On the ice, he was crazy, but away from the ice, we knew he was a great guy.”
Cvik was there the January 1998 night Thompson became a legend ’round these parts, marking his NHL debut as a midseason call-up through two epic bouts with the Polish Hammer, Krzysztof Oliwa, a future Flame then toiling for the New Jersey Devils.
An amateur boxing and wrestling champion whose dreams came true when the team he grew up cheering for drafted him in the third round, Thompson had tapes on every possible opponent. Except Oliwa.
Six minutes into the game, the 6-foot-2, 200-pound Thompson took on the 6-foot-5, 245-pound Oliwa in a fight that saw Thompson’s jersey and helmet removed early, allowing his long black hair to flail wildly throughout a battle that left both players bloodied.
While the crowd buzzed and the song Eye Of The Tiger was played, Thompson went off for 18 stitches between the eyes, vowing to return for a rematch. The do-over 20 minutes later had the crowd roaring from the start, building to a crescendo midway through a flurry of exchanges when Thompson switched from a steady delivery of lefts to a series of rights that buckled the giant once and dropped him with a final blow to the back of the lid.
Thompson exploded in celebration with a show of emotion rarely seen in the game, prompting the Chiclet-challenged warrior to roar up at the crowd while flexing his arms in victory.
His hair all over his freshly-stitched face, it was a scene right out of Slap Shot.
“The crowd went absolutely nuts,” recalled the Calgary native of Metis descent, who had 14 fights over his 25-game NHL career.
“It was kind of like the Rocky movie. I win this back-and-forth fight with a big punch at the end, and this incredible moment ended with the crowd chanting my name. I’m fortunate my name is Rocky and everybody grew up watching those movies and everybody wants to cheer for a Rocky. The fact that I was a small guy compared to those giants just kind of fed into that whole theme, I guess.”
His magical night didn’t end there.
“It was such a big thing, I remember walking into Cowboys (nightclub) afterward to have a drink and the crowd kind of noticed me because I was all cut up really bad,” he said.
“Slowly, this Rocky chant started happening again and the whole place gets in on it. I’m walking on Cloud Nine because 19,000 fans chanted for me and now a whole bar. I’m a 20-yearold kid from a small town, and I said to my cousin: ‘This is crazy, isn’t it?’ ”
Crazy being the operative word, as Cvik can attest, citing several examples of Thompson going “Looney Tunes.”
There were other fights against legends such as Stu Grimson, Donald Brashear and Matt Johnson, but this was the best moment of his playing career.
Fast forward 19 years, and there he was on Sunday, in front of a raucous Windsor crowd, unleashing a shockingly similar primal scream when handed the Memorial Cup as the secondyear head coach of a team he turned around radically after owner Bob Boughner handed him the reins.
“As a coach, you have to control your emotion on the bench, and I held it all in until I was able to actually lift the Memorial Cup, and when I did, I lifted it over my head and let it go — I didn’t care if it looked ridiculous,” said a laughing Thompson, whose host club beat all three league champs despite waiting 44 days for the tourney.
“The best moment in hockey I’ve ever experienced was what you saw the other day. The emotion of having the crowd chant your name is a great individual feeling, but the accomplishment my team was able to do there — nothing will ever compare.”
The son of a pulp mill worker who was born in Calgary but raised in northern Alberta, Thompson said he learned plenty from his time with the Flames, which included the work ethic of coach Brian Sutter.
The hair is short now, and the husband and father of four has carved a coaching path that belies the sadistic-looking menace he portrayed as a Flame and a Panther, and while racking up almost 2,000 penalty minutes in the AHL. It was, he insists, an act. “My whole game was based around intimidation, so I grew my hair to look kind of scary, and every now and again, I would do things that were crazy because I wanted them to think I was crazy,” he said with a laugh.
“You’ve got to understand — I don’t coach this way. That way of playing is gone. My team had the fewest fights in the OHL, and believe it or not, if you ask anybody who knows me, I’ve never been in a fight off the ice.”