Hat tricks? Mike Bossy had 39 of them -- second all-time to Wayne
Gretzky. Goals per game? Bossy averaged .79 -- second all-time to Mario
Lemieux. Sixty-goal seasons? Tied with Gretzky for No. 1.
And Bossy threw in nine 50-goal seasons -- all consecutively, for
another NHL record.
By way of comparison, the current streak of 50-goal seasons is held
by Florida's Pavel Bure -- with one.
And Bossy became the first player since Maurice Richard to score 50
goals in 50 games, and he calls that 50th game in which he scored two
goals his most memorable in pro hockey.
The Islanders' first-round pick (15th overall) in 1977, Bossy had a
little trepidation heading into training camp. But once he became
acclimated to the NHL and his new team, he knew that the situation was
perfect for him to put up some solid numbers in his career.
"You go into a situation not knowing where you are going, if you are
going to make the team," Bossy said. "There are a whole bunch of things
you don’t know when you go into a situation like that, but once I got
there and saw the kind of guys I was playing with and saw the potential
of that team, then I didn’t really look at anything or any level as
being unattainable.
"It was sort of out there for me to go and get as much as I could."
In a 10-year career that prematurely ended because of back problems,
Bossy pretty much did it all.
The franchise leader with 573 goals, he
added 553 assists and is second on the Islanders all-time points list
with 1,126.
He also won four straight Stanley Cups along the way with the
Islanders dynasty, a team that included four Hall of Famers in Bossy,
Denis Potvin, Bryan Trottier and Billy Smith.
"It was an amazing time," Bossy said of the Islanders in the 1980s.
"Fortunately, when you win four Stanley Cups, people only remember the
Stanley Cups and that’s a great thing. I did play 10 years, and in six
of those years, we didn’t win the Cup.
"In the first two years, we actually were very disappointing in that
we had the team to go farther than we did but weren’t able to. And after
the fifth final that we got to (and lost), my last three years with the
team were sort of uneventful as far as team success is concerned. But
everyone remembers only the Stanley Cups, and that’s great. It was an
unbelievable feeling playing for as great a team as I played for."
Bossy doesn't have a lot of time for hockey these days. He's busy
running Mike Bossy's Restaurant in the old Montreal Engineering Club,
which used to be a private men’s club. Then, it was known as Mother
Tucker’s restaurant for more than 20 years.
Since February, it's Mike Bossy's. And it's not a sports bar.
Sure, he has a few pictures on the walls of the corridors leading to
the dining areas, but the top floor is a steak house specializing in
roast beef, while the bottom floor is a bistro, currently undergoing a
renovation to be completed sometime around February.
"The restaurant in itself is huge," Bossy said. "It can seat over 450
people, and it's in a historical building in Montreal, so that sort of
gives it its own atmosphere. The idea wasn’t to turn it into a sports
bar.
"It’s a (building) that was well-known, and I guess the challenge has
become to let people know that the place has changed and it has become
two different restaurants."
When not involved with the public relations aspect of the restaurant,
Bossy is also a consultant for Humpty Dumpty, a potato chip company in
Canada. That, plus other endeavors, leaves precious little time for
following the game closely.
"That takes up quite a bit of my time," Bossy said, "and I do a lot
of work for a lot of different companies with promotions. I watch the
game, but I sort of watch from afar. There’s no doubt that the game
interests me because hockey was part of my life, but I don’t have the
motivation to be involved any more than I am."
What he does see is the franchise he helped elevate to one of the
greatest dynasties of the last 40 years falling apart.
"It's tough to watch," he admitted. "It's tough when you see an
organization go through as many changes as they have, without any
success. I mean, the Islanders are probably one of the few teams around
that have put as much confidence as they have in management without
having any success in probably the history of the league.
"After a while, the change of ownership and everything like that,
you’d think that sooner or later -- it’s not a matter of winning the
Stanley Cup, it’s a matter of making the playoffs and putting a team on
the ice that people want to come see, and want to come see
consistently."
Kind of like the Islanders teams of the early 1980s, which Bossy
thinks would still win today -- if owners could find a way to manage the
salaries.
"Those Islanders teams wouldn’t exist today, because I don’t think an
organization would have enough money to pay for the guys that were on
that team," Bossy said. "If you look at today’s standards and the
salaries that the players of that caliber are making, it would have been
probably impossible for the Islanders to have that big a payroll.
"But as far as they would fare, there is no doubt in my mind that
they would be as successful today as we were back then."
"Where Have You Gone..." appears weekly. Andy Clendennen is an associate
editor for The Sporting News. Email Andy at
aclendennen@sportingnews.com.