Owen Nolan spent part of his career in the same dressing room as Tony Twist, which meant he saw things most opponents only experienced once and then tried to forget.
Twist stood 6-foot-1 and weighed 245 pounds, and he built his method around that frame. He would grab his opponent’s right shoulder pad, lock him in place so there was nowhere to go, and start throwing with the other hand. It worked often enough that Jim McKenzie, Patrick Cote and Bob Probert all became regular dance partners, and teammates spent years watching it happen from a few feet away.
One of those occasions stayed with Nolan longer than the rest.
“He throws hammers, he throws to kill. I’ve seen him crack a helmet with a punch,” Nolan said, per HockeyFights. “If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
How many fights did Tony Twist have?
The ledger reads 100 NHL fights and more than 1,000 penalty minutes across 570 games, which gives some sense of how frequently the Sherwood Park native was asked to do this. He was drafted by St. Louis in the ninth round, spent a spell in Quebec in between, and returned to finish his career with the Blues.
READ MORE: Tony Twist knocked a guy out at a stop sign — in full hockey gear
Twist was also unusually candid about what the job did to a person. Asked to describe it, he reached for an analogy that has stuck with plenty of people who have read it since.
“Imagine going to high school every day, you’re trying to get As and Bs because you want to make the honor roll and make your parents happy,” Twist said. “But at the end of every day, you’re going to have to fight the biggest kid at your school or the biggest kid at another school. That’s got to be on your mind the whole time. The same thing goes for an enforcer.”
The career ended without warning. A motorcycle accident in 1999 left Twist with a broken pelvis and forced him into retirement, and the years immediately afterwards were difficult for him and his family.
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