Sometimes you have to go visiting . . .I was expecting something else. I was told the man had been a hockey player. Yet here he was, barely 5 feet 5 inches tall. He might have weighed 140 pounds, if I had thrown a bucket of water on him.
I had read stories about John Paris Jr., the lightning-quick junior hockey league winger who would become the first black general manager and head coach in professional hockey history.
He escorted me into the living room of his Westminster townhouse, hung my jacket and we chatted awhile.
He goes back to the beginning, how his father, a good hockey player in his own right, taught him to skate at age 2. It is what everyone did in Windsor, Nova Scotia.
He grew up on the ice in leagues he can’t remember now, always the lone black face. That fact only dawned on him, he insists, when at age 8 he was playing in a small town outside of Windsor and someone threw a banana at him and called him a name.
“I realized then there was a whole other world outside of Windsor,” Paris said. “It was ignorance, but it was my choice to be there. I wanted to play hockey.”
He played professionally for nearly a decade, Hall of Fame coach Scotty Bowman recruiting him to the Montreal Canadiens’ junior chain, until 1967 when he nearly made the National Hockey League with the Philadelphia Flyers.
“Never got there,” he said. “I knew in ’67. When you’re 5-5, a buck-40, and you go into a corner with a 6-2, 220-pound defenseman hanging on you, and you can’t get out, you know.”
He would earn a master of science degree in sports psychology, but he never left the sport. Hockey executives who had watched him play told him he was a natural coach.
“As a player, I saw the game differently than others,” he said. “I’d watch what was happening, what coaches did, and I could anticipate the action. It was normal to me because I learned that from my dad.”
He started coaching junior hockey in Quebec, working his way up to head coach of the Atlanta Knights of the International Hockey League, winning the Turner Cup championship in 1994.
He is 63 years old. By his count, he has coached more than 240 Division I college and NHL players, including 11 first-round NHL draft picks.
He arrived in Westminster from the Miami area with his wife, Stephanie, and their 3-year-old daughter, Jocya, last June. He would finally retire, he told himself.
The family had not fully moved in when a call came. Would he consider coaching a Team Rocky Mountain squad of teenage boys? He was back on the ice that week.
He will be on the bench tonight for the first annual U15 AAA World Hockey Summit, a championship tournament between teams from the U.S., Slovakia and Canada. The preliminary rounds begin at the NoCo Ice Center in Windsor, with the semifinals and finals Monday at Budweiser Events Center in Loveland.
He came up with the idea for the tournament in January as a way to reward his players for their hard work over the past season.
He has signed on to coach Team Rocky Mountain’s U16 squad for the next three years. So much for retirement.
“Some men retire and play golf, fish,” he said. “Hockey is my passion. It has been and will be until the day I die.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
