He still has a style all his own, but Roenick plays key team role on club longing for Cup reward.
Jeremy Roenick lays a smack on Bill Barber’s backside that sounds like a whip cracking. Then he disappears with an elfish twinkle into the closed-door nether regions of the Air Canada Centre visitors’ dressing room. The corners of Barber’s mouth curl upwards into a grin. He keeps talking.
Roenick re-emerges wearing a thin black leather jacket with furlined collar. It completes the J.R. middle-aged hockey hipster look - the blond highlights, the platinum watch and wedding ring, the 27-stitch swollen lip from two games ago and the 12-year-old’s idea of a good time. He hides behind Barber and peeks out at the cameras from behind one shoulder, then the other and back again, like the pop-up mole in the midway hammer game.
Roenick gets his guffaws among the assembled pre-game skate media throng in Toronto, but the television crews among them surely aren’t impressed: unless they want to run the coach’s comments with the distracting back-drop of a $7.5-million-a-year human jack-in-the box, their footage is ruined.
“Get out of here, you…”
Barber’s swipe misses. Roenick cackles and heads toward the exit. Moments later a small ball of white tape flies across the room and lands ignored at Barber’s feet.
Twenty feet away from the microphones and bright lights, Roenick lingers. Like a firefly attracted to the lamppost, it’s just so hard to pull himself away.
For Barber, being away from the action has not proven easy of late, either. The 49-year-old has been in the Philadelphia Flyers’ organization for the past 30 years as a Hall of Fame player, assistant coach, scout, minor league coach and NHL head coach. Long enough to see lots of wins and far too many losses. Barry Ashbee in 1977 was just the beginning.
He is a two-time Stanley Cup winner in 1974 and ’75, but right now, and tomorrow and the day after that, Bill Barber needs hockey as much as he ever has, maybe more. How long will it last? He doesn’t know. His father died in 1985 and things have never been the same. During the Olympic break, two months after his wife Jenny passed away due to lung cancer, it was the worst kind of empty space.
“I got to Florida for a few days, but I had my (moments),” he says. He ended up changing his ticket to return to Philadelphia a day earlier than planned.
Barber dealt stoically with his wife’s nine-month illness. The players knew what he was going through, but he refused to make it an issue within the team or in the media, so as not to bring anyone down. Since her passing, only when asked, he has been open and honest about the hurt. There are times you can hear the quiver and the sincerity in his voice.
And J.R? J.R. is stoic like Bart Simpson is stoic. He’d find a way to make Charlie Chaplin a good quote. Over the years since breaking in with the Blackhawks in 1988-89, Roenick has earned a reputation as one of the game’s shameless self-promoters. He is perhaps the a only player to have his own self-monogrammed style, “J.R. Hockey.”
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