Looking Back on the Life and Career of Former Ottawa Senators Goalie Ray Emery

Just a month before the fiery Ray Emery backstopped the Senators' run to their only Cup Final, The Hockey News profiled Emery's extremely interesting life and career to that point.

On Saturdays, we like to take a stroll through the Hockey News Archives to remember some of the cool personalties and storylines in Ottawa Senators' history. This week, we look back on the career of the late Ray Emery, the one goalie who was able to backstop the Senators to a Stanley Cup final.

Tragically, six summers ago, the hockey world was shocked and saddened to learn that Emery had drowned in a swimming accident in Lake Ontario. Emery had just retired from the NHL a couple of years earlier and was only 35 years old.

Emery had a solid NHL career, going to two Stanley Cup finals, one with Ottawa as the starter in 2007, and the other with Chicago as a backup in 2013 when the 'Hawks won it all. 

While his off-ice shenanigans would sometimes make headlines, he's probably most remembered for being, arguably, the toughest goalie the league has ever seen, even fighting twice on the same shift in a brawl against Buffalo, and smiling through all of it.

In this feature story from an issue in The Hockey News’ in March 2007, a month before the Sens went on the longest run in their playoff history, writer Ken Campbell profiled "The Eye of the Tiger."

For exclusive access to The Hockey News Archive, go to THN.com/Free and subscribe to the magazine.

The year was 2004 and Ray Emery was gaining a reputation as something of an on-ice lunatic. 

The Ottawa Senators were growing deeply concerned about their prospect’s violent outbursts, concerns that became full-blown fears after Emery two-handed Michel Ouellet of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins with his stick, then punched him in the face in an American League game.

The AHL gave Emery a choice – a 10-game suspension that would be reduced to five if he agreed to attend anger-management therapy.

So off Emery trudged to a psychologist to tame the beast within.

“I went for a half-hour to this shrink, pretty much,” Emery said. “And after 10 minutes, he says, ‘Well, you don’t really need to be here. You seem pretty well put together. You play a contact sport and you let your emotions kind of ride out there sometimes.’ But I had to go to two more sessions, so I went and just kind of shot the (bull) with the guy.”

Watching Emery tuck into a couple of spring rolls at a downtown Toronto hotel, he certainly doesn’t portray the angry young man image very well. After Emery earned a three-game suspension this season for whacking Maxim Lapierre in the face with his stick, one Montreal columnist compared Emery to Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist whose image for a brief time adorned Emery’s goaltending mask. Among the seven tattoos Emery has on his body, one of them reads, ‘Anger is a gift.’

But it turns out Emery has about as much reason to be angry as Alanis Morrissette did. He grew up in a quiet little Ontario town called Cayuga, near Hamilton, living a simple, rural lifestyle in a family filled with unconditional love and support. He was a terrific athlete and an outstanding student, taking, as he says, “all that enriched stuff in school. Not that I particularly liked it, but I guess I was pretty good at it.”

Race has never been a significant issue for him, unless you include the time in the AHL when he attacked Denis Hamel for uttering a racial slur at him. At 24, he makes $925,000 a year, dresses impeccably and drives a limited edition white Hummer.

But there he was on Feb. 22, after dusting Buffalo goalie Martin Biron in his first career NHL fight, trading punches with enforcer Andrew Peters. The fists were flying and through it all, Emery had a maniacal grin on his face. It’s difficult not to think Emery is wired a little differently, but it turns out that’s an easy answer to a more complicated question. There are goalies in the NHL (see Belfour, Ed), who are truly surly, walking around with emotions bubbling at the surface and no real indication when things will spill over.

‘A HAPPY-GO-LUCKY GUY’

“I don’t see that with Ray at all,” said coach Bryan Murray. “In fact, I see a happy-go-lucky guy who usually has a smile on his face.”

Let us, then, chalk it up to a hyper-competitive nature that sometimes gets the better of him. Emery’s mother, Sharlene, claims that much of it is for public consumption. After all, Emery has displayed a penchant for wanting to be the center of attention. She and her husband, Paul, were at the game in Buffalo and while her son was trading blows with Sabres players, she was watching the reaction of the people in the stands.

We can safely assume Emery didn’t get this penchant for snapping from Mom.

“I was the only person who wasn’t standing up,” she said. “I said to myself, ‘Are these people lacking something in their lives? My goodness, there are grown men out there beating each other up.’ I just don’t get it.”

It’s quite easy to figure out, really. The NHL has always been happy to associate itself with violence, even in the new NHL. Just recently, in fact, the league aligned itself with the movie 300, which is based on the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. The movie is so graphically violent – severed heads, impaled torsos all done in slow motion – one reviewer wrote, “If you wince at the sight of skewered bodies and decapitated skulls, then your money is better spent on a repeat screening of An Inconvenient Truth.”

That is probably what intrigues the hockey world most about Emery. He’s a goalie who really, really likes to fight and wields his stick with the same amount of recklessness as Billy Smith or Ron Hextall.

Jason Spezza is one of Emery’s closest friends on the team and he, too, claims Emery doesn’t exactly fit the dangerous offender profile. Spezza, Emery and Senators enforcer Brian McGrattan lived in a rundown house with faded pink curtains and a huge flat-screen TV when they were all playing in Binghamton (AHL) during the lockout. Spezza claims McGrattan would beat Emery in a fight if it were on the ice, but Emery would win off the ice.

“Living with those guys was great,” Spezza said. “I had 24-hour protection.”

All of the notoriety, most of it brought upon by Emery himself, has overshadowed the fact he has become an elite NHL goaltender. In a recent issue of THN, Emery was ranked the seventh-best goalie in the NHL, two behind former Senators battery mate Dominik Hasek and one behind Ryan Miller, who bettered him in last year’s playoffs.

Last season as Hasek’s understudy, Emery garnered more attention for eating cockroaches, dying his hair blond, putting Mike Tyson on his mask and getting tattoos than he did for anything he accomplished in the crease. But now that Murray and the Senators have made him their No. 1 goalie and play with confidence when he is in goal, that has all changed.

“This year, he’s getting attention for being a good goaltender,” Murray said, “so he’s not crying out for it anymore.”

Some observers thought Emery had lost a bit of his edge and gained some rust following the three-game suspension he served for whacking Lapierre. Martin Gerber, who struggled mightily at the start of the season and lost the No. 1 job to Emery, came in and played well, leading some to speculate whether Emery could hold on to the starter’s job. Emery said much of his struggles were due to the fact that he got sick while he was serving his suspension.

“Even that night in Buffalo when I fought, I went in between periods and told the trainers I was dying…I was dehydrated,” Emery said. “Normally if I fight, I’m pumped up and bouncing around, but that time I was in a daze because I was so tired.”

There has been a maturation process for Emery to be sure. He likely wouldn’t eat a cockroach for $500 this season, although it’s probably best not to tempt fate. But between the eyes and between the goalposts, there has been a marked improvement. Emery has always been a workout maniac, but last summer he trained less and worked on the ice more and the result is a game that relies less on pure athleticism and more on technical play. For his part, Murray has noticed Emery is much more square to the puck this season and he shows a lot more patience before making a move.

“Even now, it’s way more simple for me than it was two years ago,” Emery said. “There are still things that are kind of awkward to me that, with practice, will become routine. If I make a save and the puck goes to my right side, now I’ll get up on my outside leg and push across. When I was 19, I had no idea you were supposed to do that because nobody had ever told me. The way I learned, if the puck is over there, you get up as fast as you can and get into the play.”

Part of the reason for that is Emery wasn’t exposed to a high level of hockey until recent years. After playing youth hockey, Emery tried out for and was cut from eight junior A and B teams in southern Ontario as a 16-year-old in 1998-99.

“I wasn’t an elite goalie by any standard, but still I remember going to a couple of teams and playing four or five scrimmages and I didn’t let a goal in,” Emery said. “I went into the coach’s office and he would say, ‘I think you can tell there’s some talent out here that’s above your level.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, I didn’t let a goal in.’”

Emery was so frustrated he was about to quit until a junior-C team in Dunnville, just down the road from Cayuga, had an opening for a backup goalie. Emery and another goalie who had played junior-B the previous season were battling for the position, so the owner of the team decided to have them play in a beer league tournament one weekend to see who would get signed.

“It was no contest,” said Dunnville Terriers owner Jim Russ. “He just shone that weekend. He gave us no choice.”

It’s rare that a goalie who posts three wins and has a goals-against average of 6.37 wins rookie-of-the-year honors, but that’s what Emery did in junior-C. He routinely faced between 60 and 70 shots a game and caught the eye of the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds, who drafted him in the fifth round. After starting 1999-00 with the Welland Cougars in junior-B, the Greyhounds called him up, telling his junior-B team he would be back the following weekend. The GM of the Cougars drove to the airport in Toronto to pick Emery up, but he wasn’t on the flight and he never returned.

The fans in the Soo loved Emery, largely because of his combativeness and intense nature. It was there that he really began to fight and prove to the hockey world he was an NHL prospect. But one night, he and McGrattan were caught breaking curfew when they were in an establishment on the other side of the U.S.-Canada border. Greyhounds coach Craig Hartsburg was incensed and called a team meeting where he gave the players an ultimatum.

Because of Emery and McGrattan, Hartsburg made the team vote to either enforce an 8 p.m. curfew for the rest of the season or to send the two rule-breakers home. The Greyhounds opted for the early curfew and kept their valuable teammates.

If it sounds as though Emery has a wild side, nobody is certain how he came to get it. He’s basically a farm boy, one who admittedly spent much of the summer with his grandparents in Hamilton because farm life, “just really wasn’t my scene.”

A LITTLE DIFFERENT

“We live in the bush and we love it,” Sharlene said. “I can’t even imagine the kind of pressure Ray faces in his life. I think too often people complicate things too much and we’ve tried to keep it simple. We’ve always focused on relationships. We love our kids unconditionally and I pray for them every day.”

But Emery can’t help but feel a little bit different. First of all, he’s the only black man in his family. For the first two years of his life, Ray Emery was actually Ray Nichols, son of Sharlene Nichols. Emery’s mother had a brief relationship with a man from Jamaica, Ray’s biological father, but the two never married and he returned to Jamaica shortly after Ray was born. Emery has never met his birth father and has no desire to do so.

Sharlene met Paul Emery when the two were crane operators for Dofasco, a steel plant in Hamilton. “One day we bumped cranes and fell in love,” Sharlene said.

After the two were married, Paul adopted Ray and the couple had two more children. His adopted father came into his life at such a young age that the relationship was natural for him. Emery said the situation rarely created any problems for him in hockey or school.

“Not half as much as you’d think,” he noted.

Emery, meanwhile, continues his upward trajectory as an NHL goalie. Had the Senators thought he would be able to do what he’s doing this season, they certainly wouldn’t have felt the need to spend $11.1 million on a three-year deal for Gerber. Goaltending problems have long haunted the Sens during the playoffs, including last season when Emery was less than stellar in a second round loss to the Buffalo Sabres. Emery knows he can improve and has the confidence to believe that’s exactly what will happen.

“I know I can get a lot better,” he said.

“Every time I challenge myself, I surprise myself.”