MASTER BLASTER

After 18 hard-rocking season, Jeremy Roenick was finished with hockey. Now, given a chance to put some bite back into the Sharks, he's singing a different tune.

by Chris Smith

There are no do-overs to fix life's big mistakes, right? Those Christmas apparitions who show George Bailey and Ebenezer Scrooge the error of their ways? Works on the big screen, sure, but not in real life. Where's Clarence letting you go back and buy Google at $85?

Yet here's Jeremy Roenick, age 37, pulling on a Sharks sweater for the 2007-08 season. Yes, he's had a great run: 18 seasons in the NHL, a ton of goals, couple of Cup runs, millions banked, even Swingers cred as the greatest Sega hockey player ever. But nobody cheats time, and JR suffered through painfully diminished motions the past two seasons with dreadful teams in LA and Phoenix. Last spring, he looked physically washed up and emotionally uninterested, his image transformed from colorful to cancerous. So when he decided to quit this past July—texting "I'm retiring, is that still news?" to a Philly Ink reporter—no one wept. Roenick had had enough of hockey, and the feeling was mutual.

Except in San Jose, where the disappointments equaled Roenick's: piles of regular-season jollies for the Sharks; not so many in the playoffs. It helped that GM Doug Wilson was Roenick's first roomie, with the Blackhawks in 1988. So last summer, while the two played golf, Wilson offered JR the opportunity to write himself a new, happy ending. "A gift," Roenick says in wonderment. "An absolute gift."

All JR had to do was become a new man, but he was ripe for change. Like in the movies, he'd already hit the skids. It was December 2006. Before a game against the Canucks in Vancouver, coach Wayne Gretzky made Roenick a late, healthy scratch from the lineup of the last-place Coyotes. Stunned, JR breached NHL protocol by heading to a bar for a steak and a beer instead of watching the game from the press box. A day later, Gretzky suspended Roenick for a game. The nine-time All-Star had become a bitter joke. "The bottom fell out," Roenick says now.

Fast forward to December 2007. JR has already signed a one-year, $500,000 deal with the Sharks, locked up his just-finished Arizona dreamhouse and moved his wife and two kids to Cali. Tonight, on Dec. 11 in San Jose, Roenick is a scratch again, this time with a sore left knee. But instead of finishing a brewski as the first-place Sharks pound the Wild, Roenick is finishing a workout in the Shark Tank training room. He's dropped 21 pounds, and hasn't had a drink since Wilson challenged him to give it up for the season. "All in," Roenick explains.

Sure looks that way. Although he's not playing tonight, JR will be one of the last players to leave the arena. That's what gratitude does; makes you rethink who you were and who you want to be. "I'll never be boring," Roenick says. "But I want to be heard inside the locker room, not outside." So the guy known as the best quote in hockey—someone who never met a coach, player, ref, fan or NHL suit he couldn't find fault with—has spent the first part of this season dodging the media, insisting he just wants to fit in with his new team.

He's done more than that, playing like someone who's scared this new life could be snatched away at any moment. JR is tied for the NHL lead in game-winning goals (five) and is fourth on the Sharks in points (15). He plays 13 hard minutes a night, instead of the 20 he played during his prime, without complaint, and he's dropped the swooping and circling in favor of San Jose's up-and-down style. He's also keeping that promise to be heard inside the locker room. "We've got too many quiet people on this team," says coach Ron Wilson, who wants JR to teach younger Sharks, like rookie linemate Torrey Mitchell, how to match his level of intensity. At first, Roenick deferred to 2005-06 Hart Trophy-winner Joe Thornton and captain Patrick Marleau. But after consecutive, sloppy losses to Anaheim and Phoenix, JR blistered his teammates during a two-hour, players-only meeting.

"A lot of kids are 'We lose, I'm still gonna drive away in my Mercedes,'" Roenick says. "How are they gonna throw themselves in front of a slap shot, or take a punch in the mouth to get in front of the net and score a goal? When this team gets in trouble, we have no emotion. So I've gotta attack 'em."

Tears well in Roenick's blue eyes as he says this. Yes, he wants to win a Cup. But he's just as driven to shake his gifted 'mates—Thornton, Marleau, Mitchell, Jonathan Cheechoo—before they waste their youth. It's part of the reason Roenick switched to the 27 he wore as a Blackhawks rookie. "Maybe people could see me again like they did back then," he says, "before I became a spectacle."

And maybe you do get a do-over every once in a while. When JR scored his 500th goal, on Nov. 10 against the Coyotes, it wasn't on a trademark Roenick one-timer or a scrum in front of the net. The historic lamp was lit on a dump into the zone that took a screwy bounce and wound up behind goalie Alex Auld. When Roenick took his lap for being named the No. 1 star of the game, he did so with his son Brett, 10, riding piggyback on Pops.

Fluke goal? Sure. You might even call it a gift. And JR will take it.

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