Sal Barry runs Puck Junk, a site about hockey cards and collectibles. On the evening of February 3, 2010, he was on his way out the door when his cell phone rang with a number he didn’t recognize and an area code he couldn’t place.
He answered it anyway.
“Hi, is this Sal? I’m a friend of Bob Probert‘s. He’s wondering if you would email me a copy of his picture on your site,” the caller said, in Barry’s account of the conversation, which he has noted is paraphrased from memory.
Barry had no idea what to make of that. The man told him to hang on a second and passed the phone over.
“Hi, this is Bob Probert.”
“Seriously? THE Bob Probert.”
“Yeah.”
What one of the most feared men in the history of the sport wanted was a photograph of himself.
“You know that picture on your website, where I’m in a Hawks jersey and smiling? I was wondering if you could email a copy of it,” Probert said. “I’m playing in a charity game out in B.C. tonight, and I want to make copies of it to autograph for fans.”
There was a complication. Barry had taken the photo to the Blackhawks Convention the previous summer and had Probert sign it, so the version on the site already carried his autograph across it.
“Do you think you can somehow cover up the autograph?” Probert asked.
Bob Probert’s NHL career:
| Games | Goals | Points | Penalty minutes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 935 | 163 | 384 | 3,300 |
Who scored the last goal at Maple Leaf Gardens?
Barry had a man on the phone who had fought 246 times in the NHL and sat fifth on the all-time penalty minutes list, so he asked him two questions while he had the chance. The first was about his most memorable fight, which he apologized for as soon as it left his mouth.
“Oh man, I get asked that one a lot,” Probert said. “They were all pretty memorable. But I guess I’d have to say probably the one with Domi.”
The second question got a faster answer.
“What’s your favorite memory as a player?”
“Easy. Scoring the last goal ever at Maple Leaf Gardens.”
That was February 13, 1999, with Chicago, in the final game played in the building. Of everything across sixteen seasons, two 60-point years and a 398-penalty-minute season that remains one of the strangest statistical lines in league history, the thing he picked was a goal.
Probert’s friend came back on the line with the technical details, the file size and where to send it. The charity game was hours away on the west coast, which gave Barry time to work the autograph out of the image and send a clean copy.
He never spoke to Probert again. The enforcer died of heart failure on July 5, 2010, at the age of 45, while out on a boat with his family on Lake St. Clair.
Barry published the story four days later, the night before the funeral.
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