Hitchcock humbled by doors opening to Hall of Fame

TORONTO -- Ken Hitchcock’s Size 12-plus Hockey Hall of Fame ring was sparkling on his finger Friday afternoon in the shrine’s Great Hall. As the Class of 2023 Builders-category inductee spoke, he fidgeted absently with the small box from which it was presented, a little of his coaching philosophy popping out each time he opened it.

Hitchcock hadn’t set foot in the Hall of Fame in nearly 30 years, since his days an assistant coach with the Philadelphia Flyers.

“It looks big,” he said as he gazed around the shrine’s centerpiece space, plaques of honored members -- himself now included -- framing the room. “I was fascinated (during his last visit) by some of the memorabilia from the 1972 Summit Series. It’s become massive -- the Hall of Fame, the production, the ceremony ... everything.

“I’ve stayed out of the limelight for a little while now. I’m telling people that this is the third day I’ve put on long pants in three years. I’ve lived in shorts for three years. It feels good to be among friends again, people I know from the media, guys I coached against and coached with. I was around when Caroline (Ouellette, the women’s hockey icon who enters the Hall on Monday as a player) was an elite player, when I was trying to help the [Canada national] women’s team a bit. It feels good to be around this again.”

To speak with Hitchcock is to hear a wonderful stream of consciousness, a flow of ideas and concepts and principles that have guided him since his days behind the bench of the Sherwood Park Midget AAA juggernaut from the 1970s into the early 1980s, in the outskirts of his Edmonton hometown.

He has produced champions at every level -- Junior B, Midget AAA in Edmonton, Kamloops in the major-junior Western League, and in the NHL with the Dallas Stars, who he guided to the 1999 Stanley Cup.

The 71-year-old won 849 games, ranked fourth all-time in the NHL, winning the 2011-12 Jack Adams Award with the St. Louis Blues as the best coach in the League.

In 14 of his 22 seasons, he took his teams to the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Hitchcock has also been either head or associate coach internationally for Canada at the IIHF World Championship, World Juniors, World Cup of Hockey and four Olympic Games, winning three gold medals (2002, 2010, 2014).

Throughout Hitchcock’s entire career, he has believed it was his responsibility to give back to the game. In June, announced as a member of the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2023, he spoke of having absorbed in every pore the teachings of Canada’s great collegiate coaches -- Tom Watt, Clare Drake, George Kingston, Dave King and Dr. Robert Hindmarch among them.

“They put clinics on every summer so they could teach us how to properly run practices, build teams, everything …” Hitchcock said. “I was left with a profound knowledge. When they finished the meetings, they said, ‘Now go out and share.’ The NHL isn’t a league about sharing (coaching) information, but I felt like I owed it to the people who allowed me to get the information. It was kind of my life’s work.”

On Friday, standing in the Esso Great Hall, he was letting the shrine wash over him, more than a little awed by the history in the room, the legends he now joins.

On Monday, he will try to distill many different emotions into an induction speech that will thank many of those who have formally placed him among hockey’s elite.

That will come 24 or so hours after he’ll be celebrated at a private Sunday dinner in downtown Toronto, attended by his family, friends and members of the Stars, Flyers and Blues.

“That’s the highlight of the weekend,” he said. “To be able to share this with those people who mean the world to me is No. 1, by a mile.”

Now, Hitchcock says, it is his duty to celebrate the vocation of hockey coaching, “a noble profession,” he calls it, and to let one and all know how important coaching is to himself and to those he calls his colleagues.

“My feeling is that the coach is responsible of the culture,” he said, considering his life’s journey. “The culture and the commitment to culture is created by the coach. That’s a very important part of having success as a team.

“As a coach, I was very driven and demanding and I held the players to a high standard. The reason I did that -- and I don’t care what the media said or what they thought -- is that every team I coached was capable of doing special things. I felt that it wasn’t based on my record, it wasn’t based on wins and losses. It was based on the commitment to each other.”

Hitchcock’s speech will touch upon sacrifice his players made at every level to achieve those special things, in victory and defeat.

“I really felt it was my job to convince the players that the level of sacrifice that they made was worth it,” he said “If I could find a way for them to embrace that level of sacrifice, regardless of our record, we would all find success. I thought that my job as a coach was to build that commitment, culture and accountability within the group.

“People might find this surprising, but I was very proud of the fact that I was a demanding coach. I wasn’t afraid of the players, I wasn’t afraid of the criticism, and I wasn’t afraid of going on the island. I felt that way because of the support I had from my (general) manager. I was lucky.

“I’ve had a lot of really great, supportive managers and that allowed me to do what I do best. But in saying that, I did it because I really believed in my players. I really believed that every year, we were capable of something special and that we could make it happen together if I could facilitate the buy-in that was necessary to have success.”

Hitchcock will right what might have been a mild wrong when he speaks to the profound relationship he had with his players in minor hockey through major-junior, the minor pros, the NHL and in international arenas.

“What never gets said is how much I appreciated what the players sacrificed and what they gave, and how much I loved the players,” Hitchcock said. “I had a healthy respect and admiration for them that is as high as anybody in the National Hockey League. That was what I felt in my heart. I wish that I would have said it more, but I really do love the players and their commitment. It didn’t go unnoticed or unappreciated.”

This weekend, and every time he will choose to visit the shrine’s Great Hall, he’ll see the greatest legends of hockey displayed on the plaques. That he is now among them hasn’t quite sunk in yet.