Former Pro Hockey Player

OK, we're talking to former NHL Player, Garry Monahan. He played mostly during the '70's and early '80's. Thanks for spending some time with us today.

My pleasure.

Garry, in my research I read that you were the first draft choice of all time. I know some of the listeners don't know exactly what that means. But maybe you can elaborate on that and tell us, maybe, what happened, obviously, before this draft system was in place.

Well, prior to 1963 there was only a six team league in the NHL and those six teams used to just wander around the countryside and have scouts and bird dogs, all over Canada especially, and if they saw a player they liked, they would just sign him to what was called a "See" form and then bring him to a school or a hockey team that was, say a Junior Team, or even a Midget Team, for that matter, and at that point they were "in the system", if you will, and worked their way up, hopefully, to the NHL. I guess in 1963 or 1962 they realized they were going to expand to 12 teams, which happened in 1967, and so I suppose they decided they had to have a more equitable system in place and so they went to a draft system, and the first draft happened to be in 1963 and Montreal, as you would expect, had the first choice and, for one reason or another, they chose me. I was playing at St. Mike's at the time, which is a school with an arena right on campus and so I suppose I had more exposure and so on. Anyway, Montreal drafted me in 1963 and then sent me to Peterborough to play hockey.

So you were a young man, obviously, you were shipped out to Montreal to start your NHL career. Tell us what it was like, probably being about 18 or so, and going to, as some of our listeners may or may not know, obviously Quebec is a French-speaking province and I imagine that must have been fairly difficult.

Well, it was difficult. I mean, first of all, you were "scared shitless"! You know, you went to Montreal, and as you say, not too many on the team spoke English, and you were playing with superstars like Jean Beliveau and Henri Richard and J.C.Tremblay and Toe Blake was the coach, so these guys were my idols, I suppose. And as I say, they did speak English, except that their first language was French, and so they chose to speak French for the most part, and you can't blame them for that. But, as you say, there I was, an English-speaking only rookie of 19 years old and afraid to make a move. I'd been away from home in a sense, I suppose, but never to a ? well, I'm from Toronto, but still, getting to Montreal and trying to learn the ways of the NHL was intimidating, to say the least, so? And I was, at that time, a fairly shy guy, which is hard to believe, but anyway, I had a lot of trouble adjusting to that system, and I found that the people at that time weren't used to a lot of rookies coming in, I suppose, because they had players there that had played for years and years and years, unlike today, where there's more change on teams, and so I think I was unusual, to have an English-speaking only rookie come in, and I didn't find a real warm reception. I was kind of left on my own to "sink or swim". Obviously the purpose of gathering some of these interviews is for learning language. Did you find that you picked up any French, or did you make ? I know you weren't there for a long time, but did you make, sort of, any progress in learning French? Well, I had taken French in school for five or six years, in high school, and so I did have a foundation of French when I went there, and I suppose ? I was there for, I'm not sure how long, let's say six or seven or eight months, over a two year period. And with the background that I had, I did pick up French, just by osmosis. I didn't work at it any more when I was in Montreal, but I thought by the end of my stint there I was chattering away in French, but ? Were you able to understand the coach yelling at you?

Well? not so much. They spoke too quickly. I must admit, I couldn't quite follow it. But I could certainly make my way around restaurants and bars and the bus system and the subway system and that sort of thing.

I see that you, like many hockey players, are missing a few teeth up front. I wonder if you could maybe tell us if there's a story behind that? Well, I suppose there is always a story. It was my first year of "pro" in the Montreal system and they had sent me down to Houston, Texas, which is one of their "farm teams" and I was only, I guess, 20 years old at the time, maybe 19 and I was always told by my colleagues not to "back check". The coaches always wanted you to back check, but .

Can you just, maybe, elaborate on that? I know many of our listeners probably have no idea what "back checking" would be, but . There's two parts to the game. One's the defensive part, one's the offensive part, and most players want to take part mostly in the offensive part, where you're up there scoring all the goals. I did some of that, but I also had a tendency to want to come back and help out my own goaltender and play the defensive part of the game, and this particular night, as I was coming back, back checking, coming back trying to defend my own goaltender, my own defenseman took a run at one of their players, trying to hit him, missed him, and brought his stick up, in an effort to probably hit the opponent in the face, missed him, hit me in behind, and knocked out five of my teeth, so my own player did it by accident, but I blame myself in a way, because I should not have been playing the defensive part of the game. I should have been up trying to score goals.

Any other injuries that you sustained? I know hockey's a rough sport. Well, just really a lot of minor ones, but the only major one, which a lot of people still remember here in Vancouver is in about 1976 I was back checking again, and for some reason I slipped. Whether I stepped on a piece of debris on the ice or what, I don't know, but I was right in front of my own net, and I fell and slid into my own net. Now, it's a bit complicated to explain on tape, but the middle of the net had been broken, if you will, and there was a sharp, jagged part sticking up, which shouldn't have been there, and I slid backwards into that, and so my hamstring was impaled by this part of the net, and I bet you there was ? well certainly there was blood all over the place, and I think there was 200 stitches to close the wound, but at one point I could tell that they were nervous on the ice, with so much blood spewing out of my leg, that they thought I might die right there on the ice. I could tell there was panic around me, and the trainer finally got his belt off and put a tourniquet on the top of my leg to stop some of the bleeding, but I know it was a scary moment for a lot of people, but I recovered from that, and I guess my thought, in terms of injuries, was that if I never went near heavy traffic, if I skated on the periphery of the play, and never went near the puck or into the traffic zones, you wouldn't get injured. Ah, not so much any more, but certainly I know, during the seventy's hockey, there was a lot of fighting, and if you will, I know that you sure didn't tell your children that you were a big fighter back in the day, but I'm sure you had a few tousles and maybe you can tell us about one of your more memorable ones. Well, I don't know if I had that many memorable ones. I did get into a lot of fights. Mostly, and I don't mean this in a funny way, mostly by self-defence. It seemed like I was probably an irritating kind of player, who went into the corners and maybe had my elbows up and seemed to annoy the opposition, where they would want to fight with me. But I suppose one time, John Ferguson, who was a big fighter with Montreal, and whom I'd played with in the Montreal organization, a couple of years later now I'm playing against John Ferguson, and I'm with Toronto, he's still with Montreal, and for some reason he had recognized that I had been in a couple of fights the previous game, and I suppose he thought, well, I'll show this young guy that he's the kingpin in terms of fighting, so the puck went into the corner, I went in and touched it first, and he already had a two-minute delayed penalty, if this isn't too confusing on tape, so I knew that as soon as I touched the puck, the whistle was going to go, and I thought that would be the end of the play. Well, I touched the puck, the whistle went, but John jumped on my back and started to pummel me, and Mike Pelyk, my old buddy from the Leafs, jumped on his back and basically saved my life, but in the quick flourish and a number of punches that were thrown, I had blood coming out of my ear, I had lost a filling in my molar, and went to the penalty box and pretended like I was OK, but I'm not sure if that's memorable or not, but anyway, he was a heavyweight and he wanted to sort of teach me a lesson, and he did. Sounds like he did. I read as well, that you went to Japan, I believe, right around 1980 or so. Tell us a bit about that. Obviously, I don't think many guys at the time were doing moves like that. And, ah, tell us a little ? you know, different culture, different language.

Well, a lot of the players, when they finished an NHL career, would go to Europe, I suppose, would have been their first choice, and it might even have been my first choice at the time, but at any rate, an opportunity came up in Japan and I thought, why not. Shogun, the book Shogun, and the movie Shogun was in vogue at the time, and I was reading Shogun. In fact, some of the guys on the team, I'm a slow reader, and Shogun, if you remember that book, is quite thick, so it took me the whole season to read it. So some of the guys on the team were starting to call me Shogun, when I was still with Vancouver. At any rate, I went to Japan, and you're quite right, it was a bit of a culture shock, but we were well looked after by the management of the team, in terms of schools for the kids, and for automobiles and how to get around, and visas, and accommodation. We were well looked after, so we felt comfortable that way. But yes, in terms of the language ? at that point I decided to take it seriously and try to learn some Japanese and we had a housekeeper come to live with us, a young lady who wanted to learn English, and I would spend time with her teaching her English, and she would spend time with me teaching me Japanese. The guys on the team were sent by kohai system, where the young guys have to do whatever the older players want, and so I would take a younger player, just about, not every day, or maybe three times a week after lunch, and say "You have to talk to me for half an hour or 45 minutes". So I would force them to talk to me. I bought a book and somehow got my hands on about 60 hours worth of tapes, disks if you will, and they were in conjunction with a book. And so I would read the book, listen to the tapes and study Japanese as much as I could that way. And of course I played on a team with say 30 Japanese players and only one or two other people who spoke English. So you were forced to speak Japanese to a certain extent. So anyway, I thought I made great progress after a three year period and I felt pretty comfortable with Japanese.

Just maybe to wrap up, obviously you've gone on to probably bigger, not necessarily bigger and better things, but certainly I can see looking around the office here, quite a success. Ah, what's life after hockey been like? Is it ? I imagine, ah, it would have been quite a sort of a high point in your life playing in the NHL. What's it sort of been like afterwards? Well, a lot of people seem to have difficulty making that adjustment. Even today, being a member of a couple of alumni's, you keep reading the material, whereby the players of today are still having difficulty making that transition, which surprised me, because first of all, the money is so much better now, so you think of players retiring with, I don't know, five or ten million dollars in their bank account. You think they'd be having an easy time making that transition. But I keep hearing "no". A lot of them end up getting divorced because they can't handle the new life. The wife, I guess, takes half of what they've got, and the rest of it disappears pretty quickly. So they end up with no money, I hear, and not being very fulfilled. I didn't seem to have that problem for some reason. I don't know why that is. But I did do some radio and television broadcasting with regards to hockey, and of course, the Japanese experience, so perhaps those two things that happened to me after the NHL career, perhaps eased me into retirement and I think the fact that I've been fairly successful in my other endeavours, whether it be real estate, or the brokerage business, certainly helped. So it's nice to feel that you're somewhat successful, and still making money, and that eases the transition, I guess. So I haven't found it all that difficult. Do you still keep in touch with any of the hockey players, or are you involved with? I know you're in Vancouver, obviously, I know, and the Canucks have various golf events and alumni events. Are you still involved in that at all?

To a certain extent I am. I am obviously a member of the Canuck Alumni, the Vancouver Canuck Alumni, and the Toronto Maple Leaf's Alumni, but I do live here in Vancouver, and so I don't really play hockey with the Alumni. They have a team and they travel around the province for sure, playing games and trying to raise money. I don't do that, but I do play in as many of the golf tournaments and go to any of the other fundraising events as I can, so there are luncheons, and different elimination draws, all geared to making money for charity, and to help some of the players who haven't been successful after hockey. So I do what I can in that regard, and plus we do get tickets given to us for the hockey games. We have an Alumni suite, which holds about 14 or 15 players, so I go there as often as I can and fraternize with my old colleagues.

Well, thanks for spending some time with us this morning - I know you've got a busy day! Thank you very much!