John Garrett was the most selfless person Bruce Boudreau ever knew

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Just shy of two weeks before he was fired as head coach of the Vancouver Canucks in 2023, Bruce Boudreau found himself a practice in Pittsburgh. It was his birthday.

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When he walked off the ice into the small office at the PPG Paints Arena for the coach of the visiting team, he stopped to greet me, and expressed a little surprise that I managed to come from Winnipeg in time for that morning’s practice, I told Boudreau that I didn’t need him for comments – the team had lost 7-4 just the night before and wish Winnipeg a birthday.

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“Not much luck around here,” he cried. He, and everyone else, knew his days as Canucks coach were numbered. He was on the bench for weeks, with president Jim Rutherford openly critical of the coach’s performance. It certainly wasn’t a happy time for Boudreau, in what appears to be his final NHL coaching gig.

The pro that he was, even after I said I didn’t have much to ask him, he still persisted and talked for a few minutes about everything that wasn’t working for his team.

Then John Garrett and John Shorthouse arrived. The Sportsnet play-by-play duo, along with host Dan Murphy, had a long tradition of going from their hotel to the rink and so there they were, fresh-faced.

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Garrett hugged his old friend Boudreau and the two headed to the coach’s office, presumably to chat about the state of the team, but also to make a firm plan to celebrate Boudreau’s birthday that night.

The man known as Cheech was one of Boudreau’s oldest friends in hockey. The previous season at Boudreau’s first news conference as Canucks coach, Garrett’s face when he introduced himself as “John Garrett, Minnesota Fighting Saints” before a question was full of joy. It was because he couldn’t quite believe that Boudreau, who coached in the NHL for years, had actually landed here, in Garrett’s home.

“He was always so friendly,” Boudreau said of Garrett on Tuesday morning by phone from his home in Pennsylvania, hours before the Canucks were to pay tribute to the former color commentator and goaltender, who died of a heart attack last spring at age 74. “You could talk to him anytime.”

Boudreau was a redshirt rookie when he joined the Fighting Saints during the 1975-76 WHA season. He was a first-round pick for Minnesota in the 1974 draft, then spent a year in the juniors before making the jump to the pros.

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The Fighting Saints squad he joined was a veteran group, one that faced the reality of playing for a team that was running out of money. The hazing, Boudreau said, holding back on details, was brutal.

“We had an older team. They were merciful,” he said. “But John was one of those guys who wouldn’t treat a rookie the way they were treated in 1975.”

Garrett and his backup Mike Curran did what they could for Boudreau.

“Those two guys always took me aside. ‘You’re going to be OK,’ they’d tell me,” he said.

Garrett’s humanity is something that stands out to all who knew him. Shorthouse and Garrett were first paired in 2008 and their friendship quickly blossomed, their on-air relationship becoming so cozy that it was hard to realize they weren’t just always the Canucks’ TV anchor.

“I remember being in San Jose. We wanted a Red Bull. The teams’ locker rooms are always stocked. I kind of stepped back to ask,” Shorthouse recalled. “John didn’t bat an eye. He just saw Jumbo Joe (Thornton). “Hey Joe, can you grab us some Red Bulls? And Joe just goes and brings us some.

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“There was just nothing not to like about him,” he added.

“He was always selfless,” Murphy said. “He was always offering to get you something. He would go to CVS or Walgreens. He would ask if he could get you something. Or if you had trouble with something, he would offer to look it up for you online or book something for you.

“I can’t think of a time when he was in a bad mood,” he added.

He recalls a similar time in San Jose, when the broadcast team was on its way back to the hotel from the SAP Center, a reasonably easy 15-minute walk.

“(Joe) Thornton was driving by. He stopped and said, ‘You want a ride?’

It was Murphy who was supposed to sort Garrett’s remains and personal effects back home in BC after he died in Salt Lake City last April, the morning of a playoff game the two were covering for Sportsnet along with Harnarayan Singh and producer Paul Gris.

For Murphy, it was a real pleasure to work with his old friend, who is still working national broadcasts two years after his time covering Canucks games came to an end. He was remembered that week’s work the Utah vs. Vegas series of how everyone knew Garrett and liked him: from the coach for the mammoth, some of whom returned to the franchise days in Winnipeg, to Vegas coach John Tortorella, and for a late-season cameo as head coach. Everyone knew him. Everyone was devastated when they realized what had happened.

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“Of course I’m going to stay. I don’t want his family to have to fly to Utah and try to take care of it,” Murphy said as April 29 and the days that followed went. Gris stayed and helped too. “It was cathartic in a way. Cleaning his hotel room and packing his stuff, stealing some of his beer from his fridge, you know, that kind of stuff.”

It was the selfless thing to do, the only thing Murphy and Gris would have done for their friend.

“He was the kind of person who made the world a better place, he was constantly generous, loyal, selfless,” Shorthouse said. “I’m stealing this from Murph: You know how you walk down the street and maybe avoid the gaze of the less fortunate? John would always stop and hand them five dollars. He didn’t care if he was conned. He just had his heart for everyone.”,

Shorthouse recalls a time when they had the most basic nights out in Jersey City — at the Cheesecake Factory.

“Here we are, sitting at the bar in the Cheesecake Factory. On the right is a woman who was unwell. Perhaps an illness in her family. She said she had to eat quickly and get out because life was hard now. John had picked up enough of her to know this.

“And then she gets up to leave, asks to pay… and of course you know who already paid the bill.”

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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