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The phone calls started coming in right after the news had broken.
Bobby Orr called.
“I didn’t expect that,” Jeff Twohey said.
Chris Pronger called. A whole lot of hockey people, some players, some famous, some not, calling, texting and leaving messages offering well-wishes to Twohey, who was stunningly fired after 29 years with the Peterborough Petes.
“It’s almost been like a sudden death in the family,” Twohey, the junior hockey lifer, said. “That team was very important to me. I put my heart and soul into it. And then you go through all the emotions: Pain, shock, frustration, anger. It takes a while to recover. It’s been three weeks. I guess that’s what I’m doing, recovering.”
If you don’t know who Jeff Twohey is, you probably should. He’s a lifeblood of hockey kind of guy. He loved being the general manager of the most famous junior hockey franchise in the country. But it wasn’t being in charge that he adored: It was the game, the kids, the parents, the people, the relationships and the richness that can come when all is done right.
But more than anything else, the game was the attraction. As a high school kid, he wrote letters to every junior B and tier II team in the province asking for a job. He wound up scouting for the Aurora Tigers. While in university in Sudbury, he scouted part-time for the Petes. When he graduated from Laurentian, he wrote to every team in the OHL.
“The Peterborough trainer quit in the middle of the summer,” said Twohey. “Dick Todd asked me if I wanted to be the trainer. So I started at the same time Jacques Martin started as an assistant coach. In fact, we lived together at Roger Neilson’s cottage. I always joke he moved up a lot faster and farther than I did.”
Twohey didn’t just wrap ankles and tape sticks in Peterborough.
“They didn’t have a marketing department, so I started doing some marketing,” he said. “After a while, I wrote the press notes, I sold advertising, I scouted.”
He did anything and everything. From trainer, he was promoted to assistant GM and, when Todd went to work for the New York Rangers in 1993, Twohey became the GM of the team he had already tattooed on his shoulder.
It was the culmination for a kid who grew up idolizing the Maloney brothers — Dave and Don — from his hometown of Lindsay and working for Bill Watters as a teenager at the Orr-Walton Hockey Camp.
The promotion to GM was 17 years ago: The firing came in late March. Twohey was in Michigan, scouting the U.S. top 40 camp, when he got an e-mail, asking to meet some board members the next day. He told them he couldn’t meet until the camp was over. He had no idea he was about to be dismissed.
“I was shocked,” Twohey said of the brief meeting. He went to the office, cleared out some things and then quietly went back at night to accumulate 29 years of photos and papers and all that he had accumulated.
You don’t get rich running a junior hockey team. And you don’t get severance pay either. When Twohey’s contract expires in June, so does his income. He wants to keep working, preferably in junior hockey.
“In my heart, I’ve done this for the right reasons,” said Twohey. “I’ve treasured the relationships, whether it be with the kids, their parents, everybody around the game. I really enjoy watching the kids develop, whether it’s a Chris Pronger, who I’ve always been close to, or a lesser-known player. The guy who is the vice-principal of the high school our players went and is about to become principal, played for us. I’m as proud of him as I am of Pronger.
“I hope I can keep doing this. And if I can’t stay in junior, I’m hoping maybe I can be an NHL scout. That’s what I do here. I scout. I get to know kids. I think I do it well.”
steve.simmons@sunmedia.ca
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