Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis has warm memories of Mike Bossy

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“It’s a sad day for the hockey community.”

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With that statement after Friday’s morning skate in Brossard, Canadiens head coach Martin St. Louis said what a lot of people were thinking after news broke that Hall of Famer Mike Bossy had died at age 65 from lung cancer.

Bossy and St. Louis both grew up in Laval, but there was a 19-year age difference. St. Louis was only 11 when Bossy completed his final NHL season with the New York Islanders in 1986-87, forced to retire at age 30 because of a chronic back injury. Bossy scored more than 50 goals in his first nine NHL seasons before being limited to 38 in his 10th and final year because of his injury to him. He won four Stanley Cups with the Islanders.

St. Louis said his father used to tell him stories about Bossy and Mario Lemieux playing for the QMJHL’s Laval National team. Bossy posted 75-51-126 totals in 61 games during his final junior season in 1976-77 and was selected 15th overall by the New York Islanders at the 1977 NHL Draft. The Canadiens had the 10th overall pick that year and took Mark Napier.

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St. Louis remembers Bossy handing out trophies a few times at the end-of-season banquet for Laval youth hockey and has photos of the two of them together from those days.

“He’d give his time to encourage the kids, which was something special,” St. Louis said.

“Mike was very generous with his time. He was a great human off the ice, an unbelievable hockey player on the ice, and it’s a sad day for the whole hockey community, the NHL and his family. So I want to wish them my sincere condolences.”

Brendan Gallagher was the first player to speak with the media following the Canadiens’ morning skate and took a moment to speak about Bossy before taking any questions.

“I just found out that Mike Bossy passed away this morning,” Gallagher said. “On behalf of our group we want to offer our condolences to the family. He’s somebody that did so much for the game of hockey, so much for the community — even after he was done playing. We’re thinking about him, thinking about his family. It’s tough news to hear, for sure.”

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Bossy left his job as an analyst with TVA Sports last October after announcing he was battling lung cancer.

Dave Poulin played 13 seasons in the NHL and is an analyst with TSN. Poulin also writes a fantastic weekly column for the Toronto Star and last weekend he wrote about what it was like to play against Bossy.

“There was an explosion that came when his team touched the puck, and he was deciding where the opportunity might be,” Poulin wrote. “He was waiting, poised, cagey, like he knew something that you didn’t. And he usually did. He knew where to go to score goals, and he knew how to do that, brilliantly, when he arrived. He skated on top of the ice when many others were digging in, gliding effortlessly, changing pace when required to, and inevitably being in the right place at the right time while avoiding the chaos along the way.”

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In 2017, The Players’ Tribune published an article by Bossy under the headline: “Letter to my younger self” and it started with: “Dear 14-year-old Mike, I write to you today as a 60-year-old man, and I have some news from the future that you probably aren’t going to believe.”

Bossy wrote about his parents raising 10 kids in a 41/2-room apartment in Montreal and never having a real bedroom — instead sleeping on a cot at the end of a hallway behind a little curtain until the family would later move to a house in Laval offered to them by his new junior team.

He also wrote about his dislike for fighting, how he was always targeted as a young player and how so many teams passed him over at the NHL Draft, thinking he was too timid and not tough enough to score at the next level. Former Islanders GM Bill Torrey believed in him.

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Bossy’s back wasn’t the only part of him that took a beating. So he did his brain from all the hits he took — not all of them legal — from players trying to stop him from scoring. He wrote about being resented and targeted by opposing players for being a goal-scorer, getting jumped from behind, sucker-punched and completely knocked out by blindside hits before he knew what a concussion was — later realizing he had quite a few of them.

“My biggest piece of advice for you is to try to remember more of it,” Bossy wrote about his Hall of Fame career to his 14-year-old self. “As sad as it is to say, as I write this to you at 60 years old, I can barely remember anything about lifting those Stanley Cups. I don’t know if it’s all the hits I took, or just because of how overwhelmed I was at the time, but I really cannot remember much.”

Hockey fans will never forget Mike Bossy.

R.I.P.

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