No. 195: BOBBY RYAN II / He's getting trashed on X & he lost his gig on a pod, but seriously, take a breath.
You might disagree with an opinion he voiced, but you have to respect him from weathering a stormy youth & surviving family dysfunction. He worked on it. He's still at work on it.
Bobby Ryan on the Ottawa cul de sac where he lived.
ON Monday I wrote about the kerfuffle around former NHLer Bobby Ryan airing out his low opinion of women’s sports on social media and his subsequent dropping from his regular spot on a podcast panel in Ottawa.
Check out No. 194: BOBBY RYAN 1 / Many would wilt after social-media abuse, but he's endured worse. That SubStack entry features the ESPN The Magazine story that I wrote in 2005, the first reporting of Bobby having to live under an assumed name while his father was on the run from the law. For those tuning in late, Ryan isn’t the name on Bobby’s birth certificate— Stevenson is. Bobby decided to stick with Ryan, his mother’s maiden name, after his father was sent to prison.
Okay, back to the present: What Bobby thinks about Caitlyn Clark or the NCAA women’s tournament isn’t a big deal. It would be a lousy message to send to a daughter, I suppose, but that’s about it. If Bobby wasn’t watching South Carolina beat Iowa, he wasn’t missed by the millions who were tuned in. It doesn’t rise to the category of controversy unless you’re really shopping for stuff to beef about. I guess that’s why people go on social media to start with.
What alarmed me, though, was the fallout on X. It’s a case of social media begetting anti-social media. The opinion police kicked down Bobby’s door and held him up for ridicule. That by itself would be find, but of course it had to turn abusive, just the way things go on Elon Musk’s open sewer. Some dredged up circumstances Bobby had no control of, namely the dysfunction and violence in his home growing up. Others suggested that he had “fallen off the wagon” and was “back on the bottle,” alluding to time that he spent in the NHL players-assistance program. And a toxic few even brought up the death of his mother, who had drug issues as a young woman.
I don’t know why anyone would want to punish a person for his or her home life as a kid or struggles as an adult, but again, these are the times we live in. Bobby Ryan’s crime, I guess, is a lack of interest in women’s sports … oh, and the gall to point out that some advocates to women’s sports are recent converts and might not be entirely sincere. Certainly he didn’t mean to hurt anyone the way the badgers on X intended to wound him. If you’re trying to make an argument for the excellence and entertainment value of women’s sports, I don’t know that you’re making much of a case trying to re-traumatize someone who has been through an emotional wringer like Bobby Ryan has.
A lot of people would have wound up broken under the tumult of the Stevenson/Ryan household. Bobby somehow endured. When he was traded from Anaheim to Ottawa in 2013, I tracked him down before the start of the season for a story in Sportsnet Magazine. I could have simply rewritten and updated the ESPN The Magazine piece, but I thought I had to try to make it stand as a separate and distinct profile.
The lasting image that you take away from the 2005 piece is a kid sleeping on a couch and waking up when US Marshals kick down a door and haul his father away in handcuffs. The image that I tried for in 2013 is a young man trying to process his past and not let it snag his hopes and ambitions. The former focuses the trauma, the latter the recovery and damage control. The former is what happened, the latter what’s ongoing.
Melody died a few years back and I don’t know what type of relationship Bobby has with his father—even in this Sportsnet piece you get a sense that Bob Stevenson wasn’t happy with the person his son had become. The hecklers on X can go on all they want and it won’t matter, because Bobby Ryan has heard worse and from up close.
Personal sidenote: I’m not much on eavesdropping for a story but I did back in Ottawa on draft day in 2005. I knew that Brian Burke, the Anaheim GM at the time, had set up a meeting with Bobby and his parents at breakfast at our hotel, the Westin. Down in the restaurant I tipped a waiter to seat me at the table closest to Burke and I listened in, Bob and Melody doing their best to present in a favourable way. The biggest takeaway was nothing said that morning but what occurred to me later: Bob Stevenson had crossed the border and was in the company of his wife, both violations of the conditions of his parole. U.S. authorities picked up on this and Bob would later be re-incarcerated. I feared that he might blame me for reporting on his presence at that breakfast with Melody in Ottawa, which I worked into the ESPN The Magazine story—a guy you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of. In fact, he was fully prepared to be snagged by parole officers—even the threat of going back to jail wasn’t going back to jail wasn’t going to keep him from seeing Bobby drafted.
THE SECRET LIFE OF BOBBY RYAN
The Sens’ star opens up about his lost childhood on the run from the FBI, and how he survived it all.
THE TEAM gave Bobby Ryan Mondays off. He didn't even come to the arena. It wasn't rest he needed. And it wasn't star treatment, even though he was the second pick in the NHL draft that June. His teammates didn't resent what looked like a free pass, because they knew it wasn't. They knew he would have liked to have stayed in Owen Sound and skate with the team and work out in the gym and drink in the fan worship, just like the other guys. Instead, every Monday at 6 a.m., Bobby Ryan, age 18, set out on a two- or maybe three-hour drive down winding roads covered with black ice to Toronto, then sat in a waiting room until it was his turn. When his name was finally called, he would walk into an office and sit, though he never got comfortable. For the next two hours, he would be asked to bare his soul, dig out shallowly buried memories and spill out a story that was hard to believe, and harder to survive.
He didn't hate Mondays. He knew he needed them.
And on the long drive back to Owen Sound, he had nothing but time to think about what he had said in the office. What had happened one awful night back in New Jersey. What happened back in L.A. over the stretch of years. What he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
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