Life After Hockey: Greg Andrusak fishing for compromises

(Photo courtesy of Greg Andrusak)

Fittingly, a river was the boundary between the co-hosts of Greg Andrusak’s most momentous week in hockey.

Incidentally, it was none of the forward-liners comprising the Golden Triangle of the city he represented. Nor was it any of the streams he now oversees in the career his puck pursuits postponed.

It was one of North America’s household-name waterways, shadowed by the continent’s most massive metropolis. And, at the time, populated by two men with lasting cases for the GOAT crown in their respective on-ice positions.

Given its place in the world, the Hudson River cannot help connoting greatness. But uttering the word river on its own can evoke simplicity. A vision of running water and its natural inhabitants does not seem to have much to it.

Then again, untrained eyes have a similar way of deceiving hockey spectators. No matter how effortless a pack of pucksters may appear in their element, no matter how superhuman and resistant to outside disturbances they seem, they are subject to untold and often invisible variables.

Yes, team builders put each player in a given position because they see a natural fit. With that said, each individual signs up for the short end of a symbiotic relationship. With selective exceptions, everyone takes far less from the game than they give.

Furthering their modicum of control, they can never predict the twists in an environment and situation that fluctuates the way people claim their local weather does. A twist can influence a whole team’s course, or just that of an individual.

So at least Andrusak, 15 years after his final season, has less chaos going for him in one sense. He has settled in a permanent home market, back where he began in British Columbia. There he does and experiences a lot less moving than in his former vocation.

His last transaction came in the spring of 2016. He had followed his father’s footsteps to fisheries, and the two Andrusak generations headed a consulting firm in Nelson, B.C.

With Redfish Consulting Ltd., Harvey Andrusak, a three-decade veteran fisheries biologist, and Greg’s most noted collaborations included studies of Kootenay Lake, the province’s fifth-largest, and the spawning and exploitation therein.

In 2017, Harvey became the president of the BC Wildlife Federation. One year prior, Greg had shuffled from the inland town of Nelson to the coastal capital of Victoria and the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (MFLNRORD).

At his prior employer, he had logged a dozen years in his self-described “niche” as a consultant and risen to Redfish’s vice presidency. Ultimately, he told Pucks and Recreation, “I was starting to realize that I’m not getting any younger.”

At 46, he took his chance to make a bigger stride, and assumed the B.C. government’s provincial rivers biologist’s office. On some days, the lifelong defenseman follows a more goalie-like regimen, staying in one physical space at his desk. But like a puckster in some youth ranks, he will also venture to a more outer position, surveying his jurisdiction firsthand.

Regardless, he is a crucial figure in his other lifelong passion’s “Show.” He has his head on a swivel, ready to answer shots from any party and any direction.

All federal, regional, private, nonprofit or simply concerned groups with a stake in B.C.’s waters are in his web. The seven organizations he mentions by name in his LinkedIn summary hardly cover it all.

“The most important part about success in hockey is the same in government,” he said via phone from his office. “Collaboration is how we mainly do our business.”

That principle, combined with geography, lends favorable familiarity to Andrusak’s post-puck profession. He is back where a love of fishing inspired him to build on his biology bachelor’s toward a long-term career in inland freshwater management.

And where, as he said, he “grew up idolizing” Wayne Gretzky. That detail was the X-factor of the front end of his peerless week on ice.
 

A graze of greatness

One mid-April Sunday in 1999, the year Redfish was founded, Andrusak was a month removed from rejoining the Pittsburgh Penguins. The organization had drafted him out of the University of Minnesota-Duluth in 1988, only to summon him for 12 sporadic games between 1993-94 and 1995-96.

But they signaled they wanted the third-year European-leaguer back for a guarantee-free playoff push. Andrusak inked a new Pittsburgh pact on March 18, 1999, and worked his way to a regular roster spot beginning April 3. Paired with Bobby Dollas on the third tier, he saw action in each of the final seven regular-season games.

As it happened, the Penguins went a toe-curling 2-5-0 in that stretch. They could not keep the comparatively streaking Buffalo Sabres from leap-frogging them for seventh place in the Eastern Conference.

But by April 18, the eighth and final playoff seed was safely Pittsburgh’s. In addition, a 2-1 overtime triumph in Manhattan secured a high note to take cross-Hudson for the first-round series against top-dog New Jersey.

Despite playing a stay-at-home role where stats rarely sparkle, Andrusak had something of a career day. He sustained a plus-two rating by being on the ice for both Pittsburgh strikes, including captain and regular-season MVP Jaromir Jagr’s walk-off tally.

That meant Andrusak was one of a dozen players in action when Gretzky’s career abruptly ended.

The Rangers, like the other teams below the playoff line, had not caught nearly enough fire to catch up. And with Gretzky having announced his retirement, effective at season’s end, the April 18 card would be Andrusak’s only chance to play against his old idol.

Mixed emotions ensued for every soul in Madison Square Garden. The Penguins promptly offered the man of the hour a personalized handshake line.

From there, they took their place along the bench and watched The Great One’s second round of swan-song ceremonies. (Before the game, the hockey world stood still as players and spectators in other arenas watched the ceremonies remotely.)

The ice-level personnel, to say nothing of the press, all wanted a moment at that moment with No. 99. But being one man, the owner of 61 NHL records could only oblige so much. The majority, if not the entirety, of his postgame attention went to home allies or non-padded guests.

“I wish I would have been able to approach him at the time,” Andrusak admits, “just to say thank you. That would have been a capper in my mind.”

Instead, he accepted his lack of an open shooting lane and moved on to his Stanley Cup playoff debut. His week as a growing fish in a vast, crowded, spotlight-laden aquarium was only starting.

At the time, the then-29-year-old’s postseason experience featured two Turner Cup contests along Lake Erie with the IHL’s Cleveland Lumberjacks. Now he was fostering a career hot streak of Penguins lineup inclusion and preparing to meet the other half of the Hudson River rivalry.

The Devils, backstopped by future NHL career wins and shutouts leader Martin Brodeur, were looking to restore their contender’s persona. The 1995 champions had attained the conference’s top seed in 1998, only to fall to a scrappy eighth-place Ottawa team.

If proverbial lightning was to strike twice, Pittsburgh would make it happen. After dropping Game 1, the Penguins regrouped to issue their first threat.

On Saturday, April 24, 1999, they put four of 21 shots behind Brodeur for a 4-1 victory, knotting the series and usurping the illusion of home-ice advantage. By polishing Pittsburgh’s second strike, Andrusak earned credit for the clincher.

Though he would miss the next night’s tilt due to a bout of food poisoning, the momentum continued. Back home, the Penguins seized the upper hand in the first of the set’s maximum possibility of three lead changes.

When that back-and-forth was over, the underdogs were celebrating again, Game 7 victors at a silenced Continental Airlines Arena.

“It was just sort of a whirlwind tour,” Andrusak reflected. “Going from Gretzky’s last game to (the upset). I look back at it now like it just happened yesterday.”

His illness-induced absence from Game 3 was his only benching that spring. After suiting up for six first-round games, Andrusak added another half-dozen in Pittsburgh’s conference-semifinal loss to Toronto.

But his personal playoff thrill ride was not over. He rejoined the Houston Aeros early in the IHL’s Western Conference final, and dressed for six games en route to the Turner Cup championship.

“I guess that would be the most productive and memorable time of my hockey career,” he offered.

Not that Y2K yielded too much of a letdown. Andrusak credits the Maple Leafs professional scouts who witnessed the Pittsburgh-Toronto series for offering him a contract the next season.

With the Leafs, he mustered nine regular-season and three playoff games, which ultimately finalized his NHL transcript. In between, he played for the IHL’s Chicago Wolves, with whom he won another ring in the spring of 2000.

That split campaign along two of the Great Lakes (Ontario and Michigan) added to a surplus in Andrusak’s log. When he met Turner again, he had no way of knowing his big-league basin had evaporated. But when it came to a career on climate-controlled ponds, he had long bargained with caution.
 

Vocational water cycle

Andrusak was born 350 miles inland from British Columbia’s coast in Cranbrook. That made him a virtual contemporary of future Stanley Cup-winning captains Steve Yzerman (three-and-a-half years his senior) and Scott Niedermayer (four years his junior). Other NHLers from his birthplace of roughly 20,000 included Jon Klemm (773 career games) and Jason Marshall (526).

Another 1970s Cranbrookian child, Corey Spring, mustered 16 twirls in The Show after four years at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Along with Andrusak, he was an exception to the norm of B.C.’s top-tier talent taking the major-junior route.

Through his father’s vocation, Andrusak capitalized on a wealth of opportunities to explore his province’s fisheries. Still, he was raised in what he described as a “middle-income family,” and wanted to “utilize hockey as an opportunity to get an education.”

“That had always been a focus because you never sort of felt like the NHL was achievable,” he elaborated. “Going to university was key.”

After rounding out his youth in B.C.’s Junior A ranks, he accepted coach Mike Sertich’s invitation to UMD. In the neighborhood of Lake Superior, he majored in general biology while bolstering his on-ice prospects.

The Penguins gave him his first boost after his freshman year, choosing him 88th overall in 1988. He later postponed his senior season, spending 1990-91 with Canada’s national team, opposite Stu Barnes, Craig Billington and Joe Juneau.

After he graduated, his studies would not see professional action in earnest for 12 years. Although, as one testament to delayed gratification, the University of Minnesota would become one of Redfish’s affiliates.

Come what may, Andrusak honed a critical chameleon-like habit of adaptability in the interim. During his first stint in Pittsburgh’s pipeline, he played for minor-league teams in Muskegon, Detroit, Cleveland and Minnesota. Over the four nonconsecutive years that he did see action with the Penguins, he never wore the same jersey number twice.

He also formed a juxtaposing pair of memories with the same batterymate. On Oct. 27, 1995, while representing the IHL’s Detroit Vipers, he took a bare-knuckle punch to his visor-shielded face from prolific Indianapolis Ice forward Kip Miller. Moments after the skirmish, Andrusak confronted Miller in the bowels of the arena before being restrained by ushers.

Fast-forward three-and-a-half years, and the two journeymen were sharing a common purpose with the Penguins, with whom Miller had just spent his first NHL-only season.

On April 24, 1999, the depth forward fed Andrusak for the latter’s only NHL goal, regular-season or postseason. The new allies combined for two strikes and six points in Pittsburgh’s seven-game upset of the Devils.

In between, Andrusak played all of 1996-97 and 1997-98 in Berlin, and also spent a portion of 1998-99 in Switzerland. By 2003-04, which he finished as an assistant coach for the Swiss-B league’s EHC Chur after conceding to persistent knee injuries, he had represented 14 cities in four countries over his career.

As fulfilling as it turned out, 1998-99 was arguably his most turbulent campaign. In nine months, he went from Berlin to Geneva to Pittsburgh to Houston.

Back in B.C., where he and his wife settled to raise their four daughters, Andrusak still makes good on his intangible takeaways from that wheel of change.

“Being adapatable and being able to weather the storm, as we call it,” he said, is a key carry-over from his first field to his second.

Working in government, he also recognizes the long-term benefit of his exposure to the Maple Leafs media masses. His final three NHL games closed out Toronto’s second-round loss to the eventual 2000 champion Devils. Not exactly the follow-up the Buds buffs and brass wanted after a journey to the 1999 Eastern Conference final.

The scrutiny and the subsequent summer rebuild that sent him back to free agency gave Andrusak a firsthand feel for the accountability Anglophone Canada’s Original Six franchise upholds. He senses the similarities in how the B.C. press covers his new team’s larger-scale resource-management mission.

In the NHL, it is all about establishing a balance conducive to a winning formula and an entertaining product. In the MFLNRORD, it is all about squaring conservation with the needs, wants and rights of diverse demographics.

Harvey’s precedent sets a sound example. A longtime collaborator with BC Hydro, the province’s premier energy provider, he was also instrumental in establishing the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area.

Since the area took root in 1998, resource exploration and extraction have met various and respected degrees of restrictions and permissions. Four cut-and-dry categories — protected areas, special wildland resource management zones, special resource management zones and enhanced resource management zones — physically divide a land as vast as Ireland. But the boundaries have also kept the peace between all parties concerned.

“In most cases,” the younger Andrusak said, “negotiations are best served when common ground and compromises can be found.”
 

(Photo courtesy of Greg Andrusak)

 



Messaging mogul

Recent initiatives concerning the First Nations tribes and other stakeholders have impelled Andrusak to evolve from more than a master of natural science. He must now also approach his job as an up-and-coming scholar of sociology.

“There’s a lot of outreach to the public, coming from an industry that is so media-driven,” he said. “Being able to communiciate with people is one of the biggest assets we have.”

In terms of social media, Andrusak sticks primarily to a passing game. On Twitter, his hockey content is mostly his 1998-99 Penguins action-shot profile picture and retweets revolving around his daughter, Devan’s, team at the Delta Hockey Academy.

Sometimes his two worlds overlap, as they did this past Thursday when he retweeted a post on current NHLer, fellow conservationist and fellow B.C.-bred fishing enthusiast Andrew Ladd. He has previously retweeted an argumentative salmon-preservation message by Willie Mitchell.

Otherwise, he focuses on sharing articles and retweeting posts on the status of B.C.’s endangered fish stocks. His own commentary, if and when he offers any, is short, crisp and to the point.

One such report, published in the Vancouver Sun on March 8, detailed the dire findings of the Wild Salmon Advisory Council. The group noted that the local salmon and steelhead stocks are vanishing despite a decades-long slew of conservation initiatives.

From his Victoria office, Andrusak is working with regional counterparts to get the species on the emergency list. Meanwhile, as he shared the Sun story, he tweeted, “Still need to address better management of fisheries.”

As it happens, Andrusak’s former line of work has a history of accentuating fish’s importance to his province. From 2004-05 to 2010-11, the Victoria Salmon Kings played in the ECHL.

Neither that team nor the locale was alone. Since 1997, the Idaho Steelheads have competed at the same professional Double-A level the Salmon Kings did. In the Ontario League, Mississauga’s major-junior team has also used the Steelheads moniker since 2012.

Being in Idaho’s bordering province, Andrusak keeps his eye on similar population preservation efforts there. (Idaho Fish & Game was listed among Redfish’s partners and clients during the firm’s Andrusak era.) While he hesitates to draw conclusions on the team nickname’s awareness effect, he welcomes any potential help.

“If we can rise the profile of a species through sport,” he said, “I don’t see that they should be disconnected.”

He should know. His sport bridged him to his studies and beyond.

Dogged defense still key to Luongo’s job

Photo © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The popular Old Western attitude toward scarce territory rarely applies around the Olde Towne of New England. Even when it does, it is not liable to spark much conflict.

 

Certainly not in any of the parts of Boston where you can find Nicki Luongo. As compact as the city is at 48.3 square miles, it is plenty big for sports and culture.

Luongo’s workplace is the Museum of Fine Arts, housed in a 109-year-old building on Huntington Avenue. Within a five-mile radius are the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Harvard Art Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art.

Together, those could field a broomball Beanpot of company teams, if enough employees were so inclined.

There was a time when, travel-wise, Luongo’s institute was more along the lines of the out-of-town Peabody Essex museum, some 25 miles away. She used to join her University of New Hampshire hockey team in visiting one of three Boston-area rinks in the ECAC women’s league.

It could have been Northeastern’s Matthews Arena, a 108-year-old barn on Huntington. Or it could have technically been outside city limits, but in the same 617 area code. That would have either been Boston College’s Conte Forum or Harvard’s Bright-Landry Hockey Center.

 

Matthews, home to NU’s Huskies and an easy Green Line E subway ride from the MFA, is affectionately dubbed the Dog House. That is not to be confused with the Dog Pound, home of Boston University’s Terriers on another Green Line branch.

Besides the Division I men and women, these venues host their share of lower-level college, high-school, junior and youth action. There is no shortage of opportunity for blast-from-the-past diversions.

The thing is, though, Luongo’s personal planner is as booked as the busiest rink’s.

“Sometimes,” she told Pucks and Recreation when asked if she frequents her old haunts and watches her intercollegiate descendants. “But right now, I’m coaching my son’s youth hockey team from Nashoba Valley (roughly an hour west). That takes up most of my free time.”

Throughout this calendar year, Luongo has been coaching another family member at the MFA. In January, the museum unveiled what is believed to be a never-before-tried dog-sniffing campaign against pests that prey on paintings.

As director of protective services, Luongo has been tasked with training the new sleuth. It helps that she has prior experience fostering K-9 police servicemembers, and that she enlisted her own family’s year-old Weimaraner, Riley, for this innovative initiative.

At the program’s inception, MFA deputy director Katie Getchell told the New York Times, “It’s really a trial, pilot project. We don’t know if he’s going to be good at it. But it seems like a great idea to try.”

Given its stature within Boston’s bountiful arts scene, the MFA is an appropriate testing ground. Compared to neighboring equivalents, it boasts the most quantitative (more than half a million works and artifacts) and varied collection.

And if cumulative visitors are the measuring pole, then it is what the Terrier men were when their Beanpot was waggishly nicknamed the BU Invitational. Between 1986 and 2010, they would go no more than two consecutive years without taking the trophy. In all, BU has won 30 of the first 66 men’s Beanpots.

Art Newspaper reports that the MFA ranked No. 60 among the world’s most visited art museums in 2017. With 1,226,431 guests, it attracted more than all but eight other American institutes. Those that surpassed it were based in the larger cities of New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles.

Yet no internal employees are keeping score. To that point, Luongo does not declare her Gardner, Harvard, Contemporary Art or Peabody counterparts competitors, but “colleagues.”

“In our minds, more art is a good thing,” she said. “In the protective-services industry, we support one another and consult all the time. It takes a village.”

 

Photo courtesy of UNH Athletics

‘Night and day’ times

Luongo grew up 30 miles northwest of the Hub in Tyngsboro, brushing the New Hampshire border. Her rise as a person coincided with that of women’s hockey as a program at the pioneering universities on each side of the state line.

UNH had inaugurated its program in 1977, followed by Harvard a year later. Northeastern joined in 1980, when the Wildcats were defending their sport’s first conference tournament championship. New Hampshire would not lose a single game in its entire chronicle until Dec. 8, 1981.

By 1994, the Cats owned four titles from the ECAC playoffs plus another four from its precursor, the EAIAW. As the college and international game swam to the mainstream, Luongo was ready to contribute to the era’s definitive program.

She was primarily a defender, but also had decent, if not extravagant, point-producing prowess. Down the road, that was enough to make the newfangled Olympics more than a pipe dream. The Nagano Games would feature the first women’s tournament during Luongo’s senior year.

But a combination of health and academic setbacks tripped her up, for a time anyway.

“I was out for a semester and had some learning challenges and adjustments to make after tearing my ACL,” she said. “I can’t say enough about the support UNH provided during that time. They were great in helping me understand that my education was the priority and hockey was a privilege. They spent a lot of time helping me determine where I fit in, both academically and athletically.”

By the end, she fit into the record book at fifth among UNH’s leading career scorers from the blue line. With 84 points, she tied Shawna Davidson for that slot, and the two rank No. 10 today.

One of those above that mark was Heather Reinke, who graduated with 103 points in 1997. The timing of Luongo’s turnaround was most opportune, as she effectively filled Reinke’s skates as the team’s defensive anchor.

In 1998, Luongo’s belated junior year, the Wildcats won the first formal national championship in women’s college hockey, ousting Brown University at Boston’s FleetCenter. Meanwhile, senior teammate Brandy Fisher claimed the inaugural Patty Kazmaier Award, the long-time-coming women’s equivalent of the Hobey Baker.

“I’ve always said that you have to learn how to lose before you can learn to win,” Luongo said. “That championship season was a great example of that. After facing adversity, things sort of fell into place. We had a close team that stood together no matter what. Winning in the end was a brief moment in time when your childhood dreams really did come true.”

As a senior, Luongo rose to UNH’s captaincy, and flexed an unprecedented two-way prowess. Amidst a 13-0 thrashing of border rival Maine in mid-November, she had a hand in seven of the scoring plays.

But then the short shelf life of the ultimate glory kicked in. After the Wildcats and their representatives spent that calendar year breaking championship ice and setting records, their Crimson colleagues from the Commonwealth south of the border took their turn.

UNH was one sudden-death strike away from a repeat national crown in 1999. But eight minutes into overtime, and spilling over into a ninth, a Harvard team coached by another one-time two-way UNH defensive standout in Katey Stone saw all of its stars align.

U.S. Olympic gold medalist A.J. Mlezcko and Canadian standout Jennifer Botterill were leading a swarm on Wildcat property. Blueliner Angela Ruggiero, another American Nagano veteran, was in the mix as well.

The Harvard Crimson newspaper went on to describe the game’s deciding sequence as follows: “At 8:01 of the extra period, co-captain A.J. Mleczko won the puck in the left corner and raced past UNH’s best defenseman, senior Nicki Luongo, along the goal line. Mleczko slid the puck under the diving glove of Wildcat junior goaltender Alicia Roberts, who set a school record with 48 saves. On the receiving end was freshman winger Jen Botterill, who slammed home the championship-winning goal.”

Two days later, Mlezcko was awarded the Kazmaier. Luongo, a repeat All-American, finished third in the final vote. Botterill would later win it in 2001 and 2003, to say nothing of four Olympic gold medals. Ruggiero earned it in 2004, a decade before enshrinement in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

For Luongo, that would be the end of the extramural showdowns. Two decades later, she insists she does not “remember the play or much of the game at all.”

She does, however, treasure her later opportunity to skate with Mleczko and room with Northeastern standout Hilary Witt on the U.S. national team.

“Our experiences as rivals and teammates were positive,” Luongo said. “More importantly, back then, we had to support one another and stick by each other through good times and bad.”

While Mleczko went on to play one more Olympic tournament in 2002, Luongo was in the running for a roster spot until the preceding August. Injuries had caught up with her. In addition, the opportunity to sustain and sharpen her skills in the two years between graduation and the official tryout was scant.

Although she attained a degree in English teaching at UNH, Luongo offers a simple summation of today’s women’s hockey landscape versus the one she beheld through her window.

“Night and day,” she said. “Women in the game today are lucky to have so many options for college and to play professionally. The competition is much better than when I played the game, and I think they’ve earned a lot of respect, which is a great thing.

“I wish it was like that when I played. But I hope that my generation helped lay some of the groundwork for women in the sport today.”

Incidentally, the women were not the only Wildcat pucksters to lose a national championship in 1999. The UNH men dropped their own overtime decision to Maine that year. But of the 25 players on that season’s roster, 17 had a chance to play beyond school. Three of them made the NHL, and three were active as late as 2016.

If she had as many avenues as the men and more consistent health, Luongo might have been wrapping up her career in this decade. Or she might have taken her teaching talents behind a college bench. And she may not have had to go far from home to do it.

For three seasons this decade, with the CWHL’s Blades and NWHL’s Pride, two professional women’s teams used the Boston dateline. That only changed this year when the Blades moved west to Worcester. One alumna of both teams, three-time Olympian Kacey Bellamy, leap-frogged Luongo on the UNH defenders’ all-time scoring list in 2009.

The four Beanpot schools remain, jockeying for recruits year-round, PairWise positioning for five months and civic bragging rights on two Tuesdays every February. But in an age where #growthegame pervades Twitter in a women’s hockey (among other sports) context, kinship still transcends competition.

Imagine, then, what it was like in Luongo’s playing days. Two decades ago, her sport was still an Olympic neophyte. Bona fide professional leagues were an afterthought. The collegiate ranks ran not under an NCAA banner, but as the American Women’s College Hockey Alliance. The latter finally changed in the fall of 2000.

The familiar Hockey East conference would not get a women’s equivalent until UNH, NU and four others seceded from the ECAC in 2002, mimicking their male counterparts’ move from 18 years prior. Boston University would not start fielding its modern varsity program until 2005.

What-ifs might find some space in the back of Luongo’s mind. The thing is, they are not invited. It is nothing personal. She would just as soon accentuate the positive, keeping the memory bank pure.

“In the end,” she said, “the experience was amazing, and taught me a lot about myself and my ability to push myself harder in whatever direction the world sends me.”

 

Photo courtesy of UNH Athletics

 

Switching places

Six years separated Luongo’s graduation from UNH and her first inside look at the MFA. Her 2005 arrival culminated the journeywoman phase in a career built around a lifelong affinity for non-profit institutions.

“My parents worked hard to instill values that focused on giving back to the community and others that needed help,” she said. “They taught us to be kind and caring of everyone. As I grew up and learned about the different types of businesses and organizations, I always felt that the non-profit world was where I belonged.”

For her last breath of high-level hockey, Luongo briefly joined old bench boss Karen Kay’s staff at UNH after being cut from the national team. Among her achievements there, per LinkedIn, she “Created computer based evaluations, academic tracking, and recruiting systems with various software programs.” But Kay was fired after the 2001-02 season, and the coaching crew dispersed.

As it happens, while Luongo now works in the neighborhood of Witt’s alma mater, Witt holds the Wildcat reins. A Northeastern Athletic and Massachusetts Hockey Hall of Famer, Witt also fell short of the 2002 Olympic team. She promptly joined the Yale coaching staff, then ascended to the head position a year later.

After briefly shifting to an assistant slot at NU, Witt filled UNH’s next vacancy in the spring of 2014. That move made it easier for her to attend Luongo and Stone’s UNH Athletics Hall of Fame induction that June.

“She has done great things for the game,” Luongo said, “and remains dedicated to continuing to improve the experiences and opportunities for young women playing hockey. I’m happy for her, and think she does a great job at UNH.”

When her own crack at college coaching ended, Luongo had three years of experience as a service technician in Chelmsford, Mass., bordering her native town. She stayed there through 2004. The next year witnessed three job switches, with a stint at Liberty Mutual Insurance as a security manager in between.

But by October 2005, the MFA had opened its door to her inner linguist, learner and leader.

“I feel like I use my teaching background consistently in my current career, and I’m grateful to have had the experience,” said Luongo. “The protective-services team is a large group, and these kinds of skills are important when I’m training them on everything from conflict resolution, medical response, managing high-stress situations and other everyday protection strategies to keep people and our collection safe.”

As the assistant director of security technology for seven years and one month, Luongo made the MFA eclipse her combined tenure at every preceding professional stop. Then she got a helping of the institute’s actively progressive principles.

Balancing work with caring for her young son, Luongo was also expecting triplets in 2012. That was when her dedication and familiarity yielded her elevation to director of protective services. Assuming office in November of that year, she became the first woman to hold the title.

“Without a doubt, my biggest accomplishment is my children,” she said. Professionally, though, her ascent up her division’s ladder “has certainly meant more than I can put into words.”

In the coming month, she will have rounded out six full years in her current post.

 

Photo © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Treasurable talents and promising prodigies

Storm in the Mountains, an oil painting by the German-born, Massachusetts-raised 19th-century artist Albert Bierstadt, hangs in Luongo’s house. It is one of Bierstadt’s many realistic renderings of a given landscape, roughly 20 of which the MFA boasts.

With the color, Luongo’s favorite work captures the lavishness of a verdant setting, even as dark clouds creep in. But when Bierstadt opted for grey and grainy portraits, one could swear he was wielding a camera.

“I’ve taught myself how to draw, and I’m awestruck by the artwork on our walls,” Luongo said. “It’s one thing to have talent as an athlete, it’s completely another to be able to draw or paint. I’m fascinated by artistic genius, especially when you look at a painting and think it’s a photograph. To have that kind of talent is incredible.”

To justify Boston’s self-proclamation as the Hub of the Universe, the least the MFA can do is hold a comprehensive swath of that top-notch talent within the same set of walls. Indeed, examples of virtually every medium of visual art from each continent and era is represented there.

“What I love about the museum is that there’s really something for everyone,” Luongo said. “Ancient mummies, Impressionist paintings, Chinese scrolls and American silver are just a few examples.

“We never discuss the value of the collection. In a word, it is priceless.”

The behind-the-scenes exploits of Luongo’s division are equally sensitive. She did, however, allow that ever-evolving technology equals extra encouragement.

While pro hockey has “moneypuck,” emulating baseball’s sabermetrics revolution, analytics keep the MFA’s guards a step ahead in their task. The staff crunches patterns, Luongo said, “to predict human behavior and find new ways to display and protect the art.”

The main difference is all findings are fair game for other museums, regardless of area code or even zip code.

“It’s been great to be able to share our research and findings with colleagues from all over the world.”

Long before Luongo’s time in the field, the neighborhood had its most sobering example of the advancements’ importance. In 1990, 13 works were lifted from the Isabella Gardner, a seven-minute walk from the MFA.

A page on the victimized museum’s website reminds visitors that the case is still “active and ongoing.” It offers a $10 million reward for successful leads on the perpetrators and paintings.

Odds are that, if any memorabilia symbolizing UNH’s 1998 AWCHA championship went missing, the lengths for recovery would exist. But they would pale next to the Gardner’s drive to bring back its treasures.

The woman who could not outwit Mlezcko on her last intercollegiate shift understands the difference better than anyone. Any effort to relate the challenge or strategy or defending of a net or a title to that of safeguarding revered cultural remnants crumbles when you consider the disproportionate magnitude.

 

“There really is no comparison,” Luongo said. “Playing a sport is one thing, but protecting people and artwork is on a completely different level. They are irreplaceable. The consequences are far more significant than losing a game.”

 

If anything can be quantified here, it is the volume of artifacts needing attention. Per its annual report for 2017, the museum procured 5,399 new works, the most in any year since Luongo’s promotion.

But that unprecedented uptick coincides with the team’s new four-legged offensive defenseman. With Riley, Luongo has yet another apprentice eager to tap her teaching instincts.

In January, local and regional media of all forms descended on the MFA for a word on the acquisition. One message was palpable: Boston’s biggest art aggregator is too big for the smallest of visible organisms.

With Riley, the MFA is rephrasing that statement, one that anybody could freely Xerox for their own sake. Of course, the copycat rate will hinge on the hopeful revolutionary canine’s success.

On that note, how has this new breed of Huntington Hound come along since his draft day? How has the scouting report changed in the last 10 months?

 

“Riley has made incredible progress,” Luongo said, “and we’re really pleased with how he’s advanced through his training. He’s completed basic puppy training and is now in the midst of scent training.

 

“We’re using moth pheromones to help him track and identify these insects, which are particularly damaging to textiles. He’s well on his way!”

Life After Hockey: Muskegon Fury dynasty lives on at the dealership

The Muskegon Fury employed one or more of Rob Melanson, Robin Bouchard and Todd Robinson for 15 of their 16 seasons. The three contributed to one or more of the brand’s championships, combining for eight rings between them. Now they service Muskegonites as teammates – and as bona fide townspeople themselves – once again.

2002 United League playoff MVP Todd Robinson on Fury Night with the Muskegon Lumberjacks. (Photo by Derek Wong)

Muskegon’s L.C. Walker Arena is barely a five-minute stroll from Lake Michigan. Its artificial pond is practically an inlet of the lake’s basin.

The Betten Baker Chevrolet-Cadillac-GMC dealership is a mere five-minute drive straight north to the Port City Princess Cruises docks. Another 10-minute drive, tops, will take you to the town’s Lake Express terminal, where Milwaukee-bound ferries arrive and depart.

Given what is on the other side, the lake is not quite, to quote a tourism campaign, pure Michigan. After all, Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois all have a piece of the slender waterway’s borders.

But perhaps you can call it pure America. After all, it is the only one of the five Great Lakes not touching Canada.

Yet from this side, at least, it is the backdrop to a fountain of fondness for various voluntary imports from the northern neighbor. Ditto a few from overseas. They came and made things happen on the indoor pond, then decided there were more reasons to stay than their laurels.

“I’ve got my wife here, my kids,” Todd Robinson, a veteran of nine glorious seasons playing, three coaching and now eight satisfying months of auto sales in Muskegon, told Pucks and Recreation. “If hockey didn’t bring me here, none of these things would be around. I enjoy being a part of a community here.”

Muskegon is a modest mammoth of a town along Michigan’s “west coast.” Despite boasting fewer than 40,000 residents, its size eclipses the eponymous state’s other municipalities brushing the lake.

It is thus little surprise to remember that, for exactly a half-century, this was a stable minor-league hockey market. Here the original IHL’s Muskegon Zephyrs/Mohawks/Lumberjacks won four Turner Cups over a 32-year run. Afterwards, the Muskegon Fury of the Colonial/United/International League nabbed four Colonial Cups.

The pros have since given way to juniors, as they have in most medium Michigan cities. But the affectionately dubbed Skeetown’s small side lends it a magnetic grip that transcends the transition from athletic to “normal” careers.

Three maple-leaf men became mighty Muskegon men upon making Walker Arena their workplace in the 1990s and 2000s. As of the 2017-18 hockey season, they were teammates again at Betten Baker.

One former blueliner is now monitoring the bottom line as a finance manger for the dealership. Meanwhile two one-time prolific forwards are still on offense, scoring sales in the used-auto lot.

And it is safe to ascertain that neither they nor the time-laden townspeople would have it any other way. Case in point: Fury Night at the USHL’s Muskegon Lumberjacks game this past November.

The Lumberjacks averaged a respectable 2,168 fans per home game in 2017-18. But two nights after Thanksgiving, they swelled that average by nearly 50 percent to 2,917 spectators.

Surely the presence of Fury threads on the home skaters had something to do with that. Even without that element, the ceremonious presence of former Fury fan favorites had to have been the main thrust, right?

Not if you ask Robinson. Having served as a USHL Lumberjacks assistant coach the previous three seasons, he has the distinction of having participated in Muskegon hockey at both levels. So naturally and forgivably, that residual, habitual hockey humility will affect his assessment.

“It’s not fair to compare,” he cautioned in a recent phone interview.

Indeed, there are limits inherent to the junior ranks that are not enforced in the pros. As a team, and with an age-based revolving door in play, the current Lumberjacks can theoretically strive to match their forebears’ precedent. But the individuals who played the game here in the past have their own legacies.

(Photo by Derek Wong)

 

Transition made easy

Rearguard Rob Melanson began his association with Muskegon in 1991-92. One year removed from going to Pittsburgh’s pipeline in the fifth round of the NHL Draft, he was promoted from the ECHL to the Penguins’ then-IHL affiliate, the original Muskegon Lumberjacks.

After the Triple-A Lumberjacks gave way to the Double-A Fury, Melanson stuck and rode through the expansion club’s lean years to Colonial Cup contention. He left the game with one ring in 2001.

Within another 15 years, after career stops at two other dealerships, he was teammates with Robin Bouchard again. Melanson transferred from crosstown rival Great Lakes Ford in June 2016.

At 44, Bouchard is practically a player-assistant coach on a new team of 20. That is, the 20 men and women listed and pictured under the used-sales heading on the Betten Baker website. An eight-year dealership veteran, he has risen to one of his division’s two management slots.

This is the same Bouchard who logged four years as a player-assistant coach for the Muskegon Fury, including back-to-back championship runs in 2004 and 2005. Who gave all or part of 13 seasons to the Fury/Lumberjacks franchise, saturating the scoresheets in the goal, assist and penalty columns alike. Who in the twilight of his skating days reached a minor-league record career count of 683 goals, then added five more.

And who, after spending his first 20 years of existence in Quebec, has since logged more time in Muskegon. At the dusk of the previous millennium, he had spent his mid-20s forging a new relationship for the next century.

By the dawn of that century, Melanson had already cemented that adulthood adoptions and moved on to his new field. Ditto veteran Russian striker Sergei Kharin, who started working at Great Lakes Ford in 2001 and has been employed at other regional dealerships since.

Meanwhile, in 2000, the British Columbian Robinson began his own conversion from Canadian to Muskegonite. As of his first non-hockey season, he has consummated that conversion.

Make no mistake, Robinson’s arrival at Betten Baker was not in the camp of Johnny Upton’s lament, “(Expletive) Chrysler plant, here I come.” He had exhausted his energy for formal involvement in his lifelong pastime. But he knew when and where he wanted to start tapping into new pursuits.

“I was transitioning,” he said. “Trying to find something else to do so I could spend more time with my kids.”

He added, “I never had a weekend off during the winter my whole life.”

Such was the price of success and stability. Robinson’s otherworldly scoring output in major junior’s Western League never translated to staying power in the high-end professional ranks. But that production rate did translate smoothly to Double-A for 15 seasons, nine of which he spent fully or primarily in Muskegon.

Of those nine seasons, three culminated in a Colonial Cup championship. With Robinson, Bouchard and other Muskegon mainstays constantly brushing their ceiling, the Fury forged a rare modern-day minor-league dynasty.

In his crack at coaching, Robinson almost recaptured that glory. His first USHL season saw the Lumberjacks reach the Clark Cup Final. But they were swept by Sioux Falls, and have not been back since.

Today he is happy to limit his athletic involvement to volunteer coaching his daughter’s youth basketball team. Even so, his competitive streak idled no longer than the summer, just as it had for three-plus decades running. He joined the veteran Bouchard in Betten Baker’s used-sales sector this past September.

Here he had built enough familiarity with the town, the personnel and the expectations to quell any qualms about entering an uncharted line of work.

“I never really had many normal jobs,” Robinson said. “I was in the hockey world my whole life…I didn’t know a whole bunch about cars when I started.”

But Bouchard, five years Robinson’s senior in life and seven years in auto sales, “taught me the ropes.” Ditto other ex-players who preceded him in the department.

When they worked for rival dealerships, Melanson and Bouchard alike dangled a reunion with Robinson as an eventual option. It was simply the thing to do for Muskegon’s pucksters when they needed an occupation for the offseason or their next professional life. And so, in Betten Baker’s case, Robinson joined Bouchard and Melanson to complete what he calls “the trifecta.”

“There’s some similarities (to hockey),” he said. “It’s competitive. They keep a scoreboard every day.

“I’m a competitive guy. I like to win at things, and the more you put in, the more you get out.”

Determining Betten Baker’s equivalent of the Fury’s treasure trove may be just as hard as reaching it, though. The brand lasted 16 seasons, yet secured a spot on this site’s top-10 list of the greatest defunct minor-league identities.

 

Swirling state of affairs

When one rehashes minor-league hockey tales, Slap Shot references can constitute a trap of triteness. But it works too well when assessing Muskegon’s timeline.

From the sport’s pre-helmet era through the country’s Reagan/Bush years, this town was a fixture in a league one stride from The Show. The largely independent development circuit had the Zephyrs/Mohawks/Lumberjacks partaking in scores of feisty regional rivalries. At least four fellow Michigan markets — Flint, Kalamazoo, Port Huron and Saginaw — were regular dance partners most years.

With a nominal downgrade to Double-A came a similar brand of bus-league spiritedness. Many of the same cities had undergone the same change, sustaining or reviving classic feuds. And for anyone who went to a CoHL/UHL game in the ’90s or ’00s and has bothered to watch the first game scene of 2002’s Slap Shot 2, one experience likely reminds you of the other.

Then the Slap Shot franchise produced a third movie in 2008, with a new Charlestown Chiefs team playing in the junior ranks. It turned out to vaguely and inadvertently foreshadow what was to come in Muskegon.

In its 58th year of usage, Walker Arena has aged well. It began with the arrival of the Zephyrs, and has housed the city’s whole hockey story since.

Once pro gave way to junior in 2010, the building finished immersing itself in the 21st century. That summer the facility refurbished its locker and training rooms and installed a center-ice video screen to replace the old scoreboard’s rectangular LED message ticker.

The building got younger in accordance with the VIPs it puts on its pond. But with four Turner Cup and four Colonial Cup banners, its hallowed history is indispensable. As long as a given entity is synonymous with winning, it suits the snug, seasoned sports house.

Besides its revolving door of Zephyrs, Mohawks, Lumberjacks and Fury players, Muskegon can claim a few prominent hockey residents pre- and post-fame.

Native son Justin Abdelkader (born 1987) was around for the better part of the Fury dynasty. He was still attending and starring on the ice at nearby Mona Shores High School the year of the team’s third Colonial Cup victory. After one year out of state with the USHL’s Cedar Rapids Roughriders, he gradually moved eastward to Michigan State, then Detroit, where he is coming off his 11th NHL season.

Jeff Carlson — Jeff Hanson from Slap Shot — finished his playing days after the movie with parts of four seasons as a Mohawk. He subsequently settled in Skeetown for a second career as an electrician.

And with the current Lumberjacks refining aspirant collegians and NHL prospects, there can always be more to come. But no one has directly represented the city during his peak quite like Bouchard. Nor have many filled the same comparable chronicles as Melanson or Robinson.

Bouchard’s 823 games for the city trail only the 888 outings Brian McLay aggregated as a Zephyr and Mohawk. He was the lone constant through the Fury’s four championships, making him the most ring-laden puckster in Muskegon history.

Like the NHL team across the state, Muskegon’s Double-A franchise made six appearances in their league playoff final between 1995 and 2009. Uncannily enough, it too sandwiched its four championships with two runner-up statuses at the bookends.

The Fury arrived in 1992 as a replacement for the first version of the Lumberjacks, who had caught their league’s big-city bug and moved to Cleveland.

Joining the upstart Colonial League, the Fury felt their share of growing pains on the ice in the mid-’90s. They failed to advance beyond the first round of the playoffs in four out of five seasons, minus a run to the 1995 final.

Apart from one full AHL season that year and portions of three others at the next level, Melanson was a Muskegon mainstay through that time. A stay-at-home specialist, he translated his aggression to 552 penalty minutes in 117 games his first three Fury seasons. His 260 PIM fell three notches shy of the team lead in 1995-96.

Meanwhile, as a second-year pro, Bouchard led Flint with 107 points en route to the 1996 Colonial Cup. Over the subsequent Thanksgiving weekend, the Generals dealt him to the Fury. It would be one of several midseason Muskegon imports that paid maximum dividends at decade’s end.

Crowd-pleasers, though, made for one measure of instant gratification. Jeff Carlson’s onscreen and real-life brother, Steve, cited in a Slap Shot 2 featurette the two developments in a hockey team guaranteed to arouse applause. Namely, “When a goal is scored or a fight breaks out.”

Bouchard promptly brought the whole package in peerless quantities. Despite only being available for 52 of Muskegon’s 74 games in 1996-97, he placed second on the goal chart (34), fourth in points (52) and first in the penalty-minute leaderboard (220). He would start being voted most popular player in the club’s annual season-end awards regularly.

For Bouchard’s first full campaign in his new home, the league and the team transformed. The Colonial League had rebranded as the United League. The Fury added purple, then gold to their simple San Jose Sharks-like teal-and-black scheme, giving them one of the loudest looks in the league. Meanwhile, their straightforward tornado-and-puck logo morphed into a snarling stick-wielding twister.

With the mutated identity came one of the most extravagant pregame presentations in the low-level minors. Atop a house-shaped tunnel, an inflatable rendering of the new logo looked like Gumby just swigged the serum in Dr. Jekyll’s lab. A crew set up the display at the Zamboni entrance as the building darkened and pulled strings on each end, as if to simulate wind gusts.

The arena sound crew complemented the visual by playing Stevie Ray Vaughn’s “The House Is Rockin.” Then they cued up the era’s all-the-rage Michael Buffer/2 Unlimited mashup. And the Fury mascot (a Tasmanian devil named Furious Fred) and players entered to the distinctive techno tune while four red lights and a disco ball supplemented the spotlights from the scoreboard.

That was about as much as the small-to-medium building could do in its pre-videoboard era to rev up the audience. With that said, it wasted no assets to that end.

The franchise’s fortunes elevated hand-in-hand with the energy. For the second time in six years of operation, the Fury made it past the first round of the playoffs. Along the way, Bouchard was one of four forwards to break triple-digit points. Although he placed three spots behind Kharin, a Russian league, NHL and IHL veteran obtained from Port Huron the previous winter.

Among other transactions, the hiring of a new coach and director of hockey operations proved the last prerequisite boost. Rich Kromm came to Muskegon for 1998-99 with five years of Triple-A tutelage experience to his credit. As an assistant on John Anderson’s staff, he had just helped the Chicago Wolves to the IHL’s Turner Cup.

Under Kromm, the Fury were slightly less ravenous on offense, but more efficient on defense. For his part, Bouchard finished third on the team with 82 regular-season points. Melanson ran away with a leading 251 PIM.

As a team, Muskegon finished first in the UHL standings, then followed up with a Colonial Cup victory. The road included a seven-game semifinal triumph over Bouchard’s old friends in Flint and a six-game vanquishing of the two-time defending champion Quad City Mallards.

After the Fury failed to repeat, Kromm enlisted a fellow Portland Winterhawks alum as one of the drops of new blood for 2000-01. Robinson came to Muskegon after spending his professional rookie season in the West Coast League.

Like Bouchard and Kromm, he came with a proven winning pedigree, having co-piloted Portland to the 1998 Memorial Cup. His 109 points that year led the team, eclipsing even Brenden Morrow and Marian Hossa.

For nine of the next 10 seasons, the exception being 2007-08, either Robinson or Bouchard topped Muskegon’s scoring charts. As Robinson’s first impression, his touch erupted to the tune of 100 points, 16 more than the runner-up Bouchard.

For his encore, he topped the team chart again with 92 regular-season points, 23 more than the runner-up. By that point, his importance was magnified by the aforementioned offseason retirements of Kharin and Melanson.

He then ran away with another lead in the postseason, tallying 24 points en route to the franchise’s second Colonial Cup. While the bulk of his output was always in the assist column, he helped himself to the deciding play. In overtime of Game 6 in the final round, he picked off the puck at center ice as the visiting Elmira Jackals tried to regroup after a Fury clear.

Robinson wasted no time bolting down Broadway and roofing a breakaway conversion. The sudden-death strike ended what would be Muskegon’s only home-ice championship clincher, after which he collected the MVP trophy.

By entering a more interactive field this season, Robinson has afforded himself bottomless opportunities to hear fans rehash that moment. “I get chills when I think about it,” he said. “When people bring that stuff up it brings back great memories. It’s near and dear to our heart for sure.”

Bouchard had spent most of that 2001-02 campaign with the Central League’s San Angelo Outlaws, but returned to Muskegon for the homestretch. His 17 playoff points tied Brant Blackned for second on the Fury’s 2002 playoff leaderboard.

Bouchard would lead the club in each of the next four seasons, including two more championship campaigns in 2004 and 2005. Robinson was a close second in 2003-04 with 106 points. In addition, he tied Blackned for the playoff lead with 22 points in 2005, cementing the notion that his acquisition was the key to ensuring a bona fide dynasty in Muskegon.

Robinson reclaimed the regular-season throne with a career-high 123 points (his third triple-digit season) in 2006-07, the year Bouchard played in Italy. Robinson had his own year abroad in Denmark the next season. As he abdicated his regal spot on the Fury leaderboard, the returning Bouchard tied Bill Collins for the team lead while playing in six fewer games.

Upon the tag team’s reunion, a change in management yielded a change in brand. Though the switch to a new incarnation of the Lumberjacks met mixed reviews, the Cup contention continued.

And in their final year together, Robinson and Bouchard were a runaway one-two punch with 109 and 101 points, respectively. When Bouchard broke the minor-league goal record at home, an eight-minute ceremony put the game on hold.

One year after losing on a return trip to the championship round, and with Kromm back behind the bench after leaving in 2001, the 2009-10 Lumberjacks fell one win shy of reaching the yet-again-rebranded IHL’s Turner Cup Final. None other than the Generals spoiled their swan song, winning Game 7 at Walker Arena.

Bouchard struggled to keep his eyes dry upon meeting local news cameras afterward. It is easy to ascertain why. He and Robinson are second and fifth, respectively, on the Fury’s all-time games chart with 709 and 429 appearances. (Melanson is fourth overall and second among defensemen with 439.)

Bouchard’s 919 points and Robinson’s 613 are good for the top two slots among anyone who ever wore the sneering tornado crest. The next runner-up, Brett Seguin, accrued a meager 366 points in his Muskegon career. And that was when the twister on the team’s thread was non-anthropomorphic. Before Bouchard was obtained from Flint over that Thanksgiving weekend in 1996.

In their two years as Lumberjacks, Robinson racked up 221 points, Bouchard 168 and everyone else double digits at best. Throughout its dynamic duo’s tenure, Muskegon won at least half of its games and filled more than half of the 5,400-seat Walker Arena every year. It was a straightforward system of supply and demand, and it worked.

“We won most nights at home,” Robinson noted. “And if we didn’t win, there’d be four, five or six fights. So even if we didn’t win, there was something to cheer about.”

(Photo by Derek Wong)

 

Plenty left to prove

For their eight nonconsecutive seasons as ice colleagues, Robinson watched Bouchard maximize his assets and block out bitterness.

When the Lumberjacks retired his No. 32 jersey in 2012, Bouchard confessed his mild regret over never having touched NHL ice to the Muskegon Chronicle. But he also implied that he reached a point where this was the only city he could live and work in, with or without skates on.

“People in Muskegon are a simple kind of people, hard-working people,” he told reporter Mark Opfermann at the time. “That fits me.”

Between the Betten Baker “trifecta” of Fury alumni, Bouchard had the most meager stints at the next level. He had played two games for Fort Wayne of the original IHL in 1996-97, then four with Grand Rapids of the AHL in 2004-05.

Yet he embraced his riches in a town blissfully oblivious to its gargantuan Lake Michigan brethren in Chicago and Milwaukee. To that point, when he theoretically could have continued his career when the Lumberjacks relocated to Evansville, Ind., he stayed.

On the flipside, he played five seasons strictly in North American Double-A and overseas after last Triple-A sip of Joe. When he could have theoretically conceded, he stretched his participation in pro hockey for as long as Muskegon did.

“He always wanted to do well as a player,” Robinson said. “When he got older, I think he got better. He took care of his body and prolonged his career.”

Robinson stretched his playing days by stopping in four more cities in as many years. Beyond 40 games in Grand Rapids in 2004-05, he too never got back to the AHL. But he added to his trophy case with the 2013 Central League champion Allen Americans, then led the Tulsa Oilers with (surprise) 57 assists in his final season.

That helper’s instinct has served him well in his gradual crossing from playing to post-playing to post-hockey altogether.

“I think it’s just talking to people and being honest,” he said of the secrets of successful sales reps. “There’s a stigma about them a little bit. But I try to do things the right way, be honest with people.”

Hardly any regular Walker Arena ticketholders, past or present, need convincing that hockey players are far from hulking, huffing haymaker-seekers. More broadly, it takes extra effort for a used-car hawker to contrast oneself from a Roald Dahl character. And no one in the field will be getting any help from Carvana commercials.

Some Betten Baker customers may develop into the equivalent of a Flint/Fort Wayne/Quad City fan or player. But like when the ice chips settle on an intense playoff series, one must be ready to seek and keep good relations post-sale.

That has become the rookie Robinson’s mantra. He has his head up, ready to respond constructively if and when a buyer comes back with complaints.

Anything less on his part and “I wouldn’t be able to sleep well at night,” he said.

Even if not every sale is an outright win, he will fight to set things right. That incentive to ensure everyone always leaves with something to be pleased with may never leave him.