Travis Roy dedicated to changing lives

The smells and sights of hockey are not always easy for Travis Roy. Pucks dropping to the ice, the camaraderie in the dressing room and the sizzle of the skate sharpener were all once part of his life.
But all these years later, he's still connected to the game through his tireless work of raising money, helping people, and changing lives.

Roy, the former Boston University hockey player who suffered a serious spinal cord injury 11 seconds into his college hockey career in 1995, is the longtime face of the Travis Roy Foundation, which is dedicated to improving the lives of those with spinal cord injuries. It has grown tremendously over the past two decades, and now is able to provide 15 to 18 grants per month to those in need, approximately $500,000 per year, in addition to raising money for research.
"Twenty years later, why am I still doing this?" Roy said recently. "I think it's partly because I need hope to get up every morning, selfishly, and for me that hope is supported and becomes a little bit more tangible through the funding of research."
To that end, the Travis Roy Foundation is having three upcoming events, beginning with the NYC Charity Hockey Challenge at Madison Square Garden on Thursday, Feb. 1, the Foundation's first event in New York, and one that is already sold out. Players, who raise a minimum of $3,000, will get the chance to play on the Garden ice at 1 p.m. that day, and take in the New York Rangers-Toronto Maple Leafs game that night.
The New York event will be followed by the 10th annual Men's Charity Beanpot Challenge at Boston University on Feb. 12, which last year raised $250,000, and the inaugural Women's Charity Beanpot Challenge at Harvard University on Feb. 13. There are still openings for both of those events.
Twenty-two years after his accident, Roy remains a tireless fund-raiser and advocate for his community, bringing hope to those with spinal cord injuries. It's a community that he has seen grow in recent years, with Denna Laing and Jack Jablonski and others suffering spinal cord injuries as a result of playing hockey.
Roy, 42, and his Foundation provide things as simple as a computer for someone who has no ability to contact the outside world, or a doorway that's wide enough for a wheelchair. A little bit of freedom, a little bit of normalcy, said former BU teammate and Foundation board member Dan Ronan.
"I think for him it was a very, very fulfilling life, and he has dealt with the cards he was given head-on, and decided to make the most he could out of it," Ronan said.

It started small, with one golf tournament. Roy and NHL great Bobby Orr would sit on a golf course, and raise $50,000 while Roy was still in college. He didn't exactly know what he was doing. But he gradually figured out how to support himself through a speaking career, determined that he could do more and more.
"It doesn't solve everybody's problems, all their problems," Roy said. "But it definitely makes their lives a little bit easier, a little more independent, a little bit less stressful or less burdensome on the parents or family."
When Les Foster dove into a pool and suffered a spinal cord injury in 2016, Roy and the Foundation were there. His then-fiancée, Amy, found the web site and applied for a grant to get their family a Prism Medical lift that would allow her to help Les in and out of bed, which they then received.
It meant everything to them.
"There is life after this type of injury," Foster said, becoming emotional. "When you take that, it's inspiring. … When you're able to get in touch with somebody who can change the way [you live] and take some of the stress off of your family, I think is amazing."
Foster says he is indebted to Roy, who was 20 years old when he struck the boards and was paralyzed from the neck down.
"It's not so much about the money, I think," Foster said. "It's more about what he does for people to be inspired with what he's done with his life. And then you add in the Foundation."
That doesn't mean any of this is necessarily easy for Roy. It often isn't.
"The hockey piece is really the most difficult one for me," Roy said. "I was on ice at 20 months old. For literally the next 18 and a half years, I loved the game of hockey. I loved it with all my heart, my emotion and it was a big piece of who I was, and I have been broken-hearted ever since the night of my injury.
"But I still love watching the game being played. I can watch on TV, I can go to a game. I love watching the skill, the speed, it's incredible the caliber and the quality of hockey that's available to us these days. The harder part for me is being down at ice level, being in the locker room, just hearing somebody dump a bucket of pucks out on the ice. There's the smells, there's the sounds, there's the sensation of the game."
It makes him remember. It reminds him how much passion he had for the game. It makes him wonder what it would have been like to have kept playing after those 11 seconds, in college, perhaps in the NHL. Then, he says, he boxes that up.
He doesn't go to games often these days. But he is looking forward to going to Madison Square Garden on Thursday, to watching the Rangers and the Maple Leafs, to raising more money for his Foundation and helping more people.
"We'll be seeing the road show of the Maple Leafs locker room right next door to us and the guys coming and going and taping up their sticks and seeing their skates sharpened," Roy said. "That'll sting a little bit to be that close to it, but at the same time we're going to hopefully raise 200, 250, 300 thousand dollars, and I look at it as my life has purpose, and I'm willing to put myself in that position down by the ice to know that something good is going to come of it and we're going to help change some lives."