When Blackhawks great Jeremy Roenick walked into a random Starbucks on a random morning this past June, he had no idea how differently he would feel by the time he got his cup of coffee.
After years of built-up bitterness over not being selected for the Hockey Hall of Fame, the 54-year-old felt that emotion instantly disappear — to be replaced by pure gratitude — when his phone finally buzzed with the news.
“When I got the call, I couldn’t speak,” Roenick said. “I was taken by surprise. I’m never at a loss for words, but I was. And I can say that I was very, very happy with the way that the call hit me and how I felt about it.
“When you wait for a long time, you don’t know how it’s going to hit you. I thought maybe before that it wouldn’t be as big of a deal as it was, but it hit me like a train. I was really, really happy with my emotions and the fact that I couldn’t speak. I was crying in front of a barista.”
Within two hours after receiving the call, his phone was flooded by 2,500 congratulatory messages. He said that reminded him just how many coaches, teammates, friends and more helped him along the way.
He explained at a news conference Monday — following the fourth day of Hawks training camp at Fifth Third Arena — that the main reason for his bitterness over his long wait was that his father Wally, who died in 2021, missed the announcement.
“My dad was the one who was literally engulfed and embedded the most in my career, so…it wasn’t so much for me — I would’ve liked my dad to see it,” he said. “[But] it was amazing how 12 years had been literally erased with one phone call.”
Roenick, who played for the Hawks from 1988 to 1996 and retired in 2009, ranks sixth all-time among American-born NHL players in games played (1,363), fifth in points (1,216) and fourth in goals (513).
After his official induction into the Hall of Fame on Nov. 11 — alongside Pavel Datsyuk, Shea Weber and four others in the 2024 class — a handful of pieces of memorabilia from his career will go on display at the Hall of Fame museum in Toronto.
Those donated items include the Hawks sweaters in which he scored his 50th goals of both the 1991-92 and 1992-93 seasons, as well as his Team USA jacket from the 2002 Winter Olympics. He decided to keep the puck with which he scored his 500th career goal in 2007-08 for the Sharks — largely because his son, Brett, told him he would like to have it.
“When I came to the Hawks in 1988, I was 158 pounds,” Roenick said. “I didn’t know whether I’d be able to make it. Hard work, determination and an absolute denial of failure helped me do what I did.”