Former Boston Bruins left winger P.J. Stock had an honor most hockey players would probably dream of.
He got to play with Wayne Gretzky.
“That was pretty surreal,” Stock said. “I remember the first time I got called up in Carolina and I walked into the locker room at training camp and getting to meet him because you don’t really get to meet or get to know anybody unless you are one of the 20 players in the locker room, so that was pretty surreal.”
Initially, Stock never had a career as a professional hockey player on his mind.
“Pretty funny when I think back to it, growing up everybody wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer and I was just watching a lot of college football growing up in Montreal,” Stock said. “The goal or dream was to get a scholarship to go to a school in the States. There wasn’t anything past that.”
Through that journey came the passion to get on the ice. Stock hung out with his younger brother, where they’d go to outdoor rinks
“The hockey thing just kind of happened,” Stock said. “We played street hockey and go down to the rink to keep ourselves busy. Everything freezes from the ponds [to the] rivers, so there was skating ability for half the year pretty much. In the summer, you played ‘ball’ hockey and in the winter there was ice everywhere not much else to do in the winter.”
Stock ended up taking a different path than college. He played two years of Junior Hockey with the Victoriaville Tigres. Because he played Juniors, Stock lost his eligibility to play hockey for a school in the United States.
This led to him going to Nova Scotia to attend St. Francis Xavier University in 1996.
Before he went, he got his first National Hockey League tryout with the New York Rangers. However, Stock did not get his hopes up.
“Prior to going to school there, I had a tryout with the Rangers that went okay,” Stock said. “But I knew I would never play a day pro-NHL-wise because in my head I just wasn’t good enough.”
A year into attending St. Francis Xavier, he got a surprising phone call. It was from the Rangers.
“It was really shocking because I was just thinking about how crappy I was,” Stock said with a laugh.
He spent 17 games with the Rangers’ minor league affiliate: The Hartford Wolfpack. On the Wolfpack, he scored the first-ever home-ice goal at the then Hartford Civic Center, which housed the team starting in 1997. After those 17 outings, Stock got his chance in the big leagues.
However, Stock often saw himself moving up and down in the system from NHL o to the minors –– thus testing his patience.
“As your career goes on, the going up and down in your career sucks,” Stock said.
The St. Francis Xavier alum was signed by Montreal, traded to the Philadelphia Flyers before ending up where he would have his most success: As a Boston Bruin.
The adjustment was huge. In regards to what teams you had to root for from New York to Boston.
“I had to cheer for the [Boston] Red Sox instead of the [New York] Yankees and that was the first thing I learned,” Stock said with a laugh. “I don’t want to say I was a good luck charm but when I was in New York, the Yankees won the World Series. I sign with Boston and Boston wins the World Series.”
From playing with Wayne Gretzky in New York, playing briefly at home in Montreal, Stock considered every stop as a building block.
“Funny enough I already played a few years but I didn’t really get [in the groove] until I was in Philadelphia,” Stock said. “Boston was just everything put together and the cherry on top.”
His career came to a grinding halt after he sustained an eye injury while playing in the American Hockey League as a member of the Philadelphia Phantom.
Today, Stock has traded the hockey stick for a microphone entering the media. In times when he was off the ice in his playing days, Stock found himself already analyzing as if foreshadowing his current career.
A career that came suddenly one evening.
“I’m in a bar one night and guy comes up to me and says, ‘Hey why don’t you come do a pregame show with me on radio’ I said, ‘Sure if you pay for my tab’ and he said, ‘Ok,'” Stock said. “He paid for my drinks and, next thing I knew, the next morning I was doing a pregame show with him and that went to radio and then to T.V.”
He works for Réseau des sports (RDS) in Canada as a broadcaster and now makes appearances on L’antichambre.
Though he has to speak a different language, he says it is all the same as what sports fans see on American television.
“I speak fast, use my hands and smile a lot which is the secret to T.V.,” Stock said with a laugh. “I wish I paid more attention to the game when I played it, the game is so much easier then and I wish I would have learned the game more when I was playing then after.”
Recently, Stock was invited back to Massachusetts to sign memorabilia and pucks which made the former Bruin love his stay here even more.
“I love this town,” Stock said. “It was a brief stint but it was a great time, the people and everything about this town. It wasn’t a long time but it was a good time. It was definitely a great time in my life.”
