How a 13-year-old accidentally trolled Canucks' Cliff Ronning
Cliff Ronning is a Vancouver Canucks legend — a hometown hero who grew up in Burnaby and became one of the team’s best players during the nineties.
Ronning defied the odds as one of the smallest players in the NHL at a time when size was the rule of the day and hooking, holding, and hits to the head were just considered solid defence.
Generously listed at 5’8″, Ronning always had a chip on his shoulder about being called too small, and it helped fuel him as he played 1,137 NHL games, scoring 306 goals and 869 points in the process.
“I just found the more people told me I couldn’t do something I loved, it pushed me harder to train harder and compete,” recalled Ronning.
Still, he never loved being reminded of his stature, as Brian Burke’s son, Patrick, learned.
“It wakes me up in a cold sweat”
Patrick Burke shared the story on the 32 Thoughts podcast with Elliotte Friedman and Kyle Bukauskas ahead of his dad being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame this weekend.
“I don’t know if anyone else remembers this, but it wakes me up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night,” recalled Patrick, who is now the co-president of the NHL’s department of player safety. “Patty O’Neill, who was the longtime Canucks trainer, invited me to be a stick boy on the bench in Madison Square Garden when the Canucks came to town, and I would have been like 13 or 14.”
At the time, Brian Burke would have been the NHL’s director of hockey operations, which means the family would have been located in New York City, home of the NHL offices and the New York Rangers.
“I was looking at the stick rack, and Cliff Ronning’s stick was there, and I offhandedly just said, ‘This is the same size stick I use,'” Patrick continued. “And he glared at me.”
Ronning was probably used to being chirped by opponents on the ice, but it must have been something quite different to hear it from a 13-year-old kid.
“Cliff had always been so, so kind, one of the nicest people in the world, and he gave me a look and walked away,” said Patrick. “I immediately went, ‘That was a stupid thing to say out loud to an NHL player.’
“And that has woken me up in the middle of the night, going on 30 years now.”
“Those are just my buddies”
It was an unusual childhood for Patrick, who grew up surrounded by NHL players all the time, and thought nothing of it.
Patrick was four years old in 1987 when his dad took the job with the Canucks as director of hockey operations under general manager Pat Quinn. That’s right when the seeds of the team that went to the 1994 Stanley Cup Final were being planted.
“We were living in Vancouver, and I thought I was just hanging with my dear friends,” said Patrick. “You know, Trevor Linden, Pavel Bure, Kirk McLean, Gino Odjick — like, those are just my buddies.”
Kids are a regular sight in the bowels of Rogers Arena and sometimes in the locker room itself, though somewhat less so now that the team is getting younger, with fewer dads on the roster.
But for those kids, the arena is just another place to play, and the professional NHL players — some of the best hockey players in the world — are just their dad’s coworkers who come over for dinner sometimes and play mini-sticks with them.
“Of course, every kid hangs out with those guys and goes out and skates at the practice rink and everything,” said Patrick. “Because when you’re six or seven years old, you don’t know any better.”