So, how did Hodson wind up in the Sault?
by Peter Ruicci (Independent Media)
What if Kevin Hodson wasn’t watching TSN that day?
Arguably, Soo Greyhounds history would be markedly different.
It was May 13, 1990, a Sunday afternoon, and Kitchener was playing Oshawa for the Memorial Cup championship in Hamilton.
“That was the day, that was the moment right there,” said Hodson, explaining what swayed him to walk away from scholarship offers in the United States and cast his lot, as a free agent, with the Greyhounds.
The star netminder wound up helping carry the Soo to back-to-back Ontario Hockey League championships, followed, in 1992-93, by the only Memorial Cup title in franchise history.
“I was watching Mike Torchia (Kitchener’s goalie) and Fred Brathwaite (Oshawa’s goalie) play in the final,” added the now 49-year-old former NHLer. “And I said to myself that I want to play on that stage and at that level. I pictured myself on the ice, in goal, at that moment.”
As Torchia and Brathwaite waged a torrid goaltending battle, the Generals wound up defeating the Rangers 4-3 in double overtime.
A Winnipeg native, Hodson had offers to play in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) for his favourite team, the North Dakota Fighting Sioux, now known as the Fighting Hawks, and the University of Maine Black Bears.
“I loved the fighting Sioux. I had dreamed about playing for North Dakota,” said Hodson, who grew up cheering for the team and had verbally accepted a scholarship offer to play in Grand Forks, N.D.
However, a number of circumstances changed for Hodson, who would go on to win two Stanley Cups in the late 1990s as a member of the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings.
First, he suffered a broken leg playing Jr. B hockey. He spoke of how serious the injury was, calling it a “possible career-ender.”
Because of the uncertainty surrounding the player’s health, UND’s offer was changed to a partial scholarship.
Hodson’s best friend, Wade Whitten, is a former Greyhound.
He spoke to the young goalie about the Greyhounds need for a goalie to pair with Mike Lenarduzzi. Hounds’ director of hockey operations Sherwood Bassin visited Hodson and his family and talked about the opportunities for the netminder in the Sault.
Shortly after Maine offered a scholarship, Bassin called saying he needed to know Hodson’s plans in the next couple of days. The Greyhounds boss was planning to bring in another goalie if Hodson had elected to play elsewhere.
“My favourite goalie was (former North Dakota standout) Ed Belfour. I idolized him,” Hodson said. “I had wanted to play for the Fighting Sioux my whole life and that’s why I turned down a lot of offers to play in the Western Hockey League. I had two days to decide.”
But the lure of the Memorial Cup stage won out and Hodson, at age 18, began his Hounds career in the fall of 1990. He has no regrets.
“My time in the Sault meant a lot to me. I remember the crowds, the fans, the electricity in the city was amazing,” he said. “You don’t really appreciate that until you’re older. You look back and realize it was just awesome. Playing in the Sault was just a great experience for me.”
While winning a Stanley Cup, both in 1996-97 and 1997-98, was the culmination of a boyhood dream, but there was something unique about winning the Memorial Cup as a junior-aged player.
The Hounds achieved that goal on May 23, 1993, at old Memorial Gardens.
Ralph Intranuovo scored twice, Jeff Toms had three assists and Hodson was a standout in goal as the Soo defeated the Peterborough Petes 4-2. Led by head coach Ted Nolan and assistant Dan Flynn, the Greyhounds posted a 38-23-5 (wins, losses, ties) regular season record.
They won the Super Series to earn the right to play host to the Cup by sweeping the Petes in four straight.
However, Peterborough returned the favor, beating the Soo in five games to win the OHL championship. Still, the Hounds were very confident with the Cup to be played in their backyard.
“When you win a Memorial Cup, you know a lot of the people in the stands. You have your barber, your teachers, your land parents, your girlfriend, you know the media guys well,” Hodson explained. “It’s a very intimate, connected feel when you win a Memorial Cup.”
And while winning a Stanley Cup is an achievement anyone who laces up skates aspires to, “you don’t feel the people in the stands,” Hodson added. “You’re not connected to them as much because you don’t know them personally. As a hockey player, it’s a lot more personal to win a Memorial Cup.”
One year earlier, on the Greyhounds way to the franchise’s second straight OHL championship, Hodson’s brilliant goaltending was front and centre in a critical Game 6.
Facing the North Bay Centennials in the league final, the Hounds trailed 3-2 after the Cents won Game 5 by a 7-6 score in the Sault. The visitors were facing elimination as the series shifted back to North Bay’s Memorial Gardens.
“That building was electric that day,” Hodson recalled. “It was packed. Their fans came there thinking they were going to the Memorial Cup.”
However, Hodson was brilliant, stopping three breakaways and a penalty shot, while also facing an estimated 15 quality chances from in front of the goal.
Despite missing some key players, the Soo pulled out a long-remembered 2-1 victory, before winning Game 7 – and the J. Ross Robertson Cup – two days later with a 4-2 victory at home.
“Sometimes as a goalie you play in games where you become the game,” Hodson explained. “Your senses are heightened, your movement is heightened. You’re crisper, you track pucks quicker, you can smell things in the stands, you can hear everything more clearly.”
In short, you get into a zone, he added.
“And in that game, I was in a zone,” Hodson said. “I knew that for them to score on me would take an act of God.”
One of the other times he felt that way, Hodson added, was in his NHL debut.
With their OHL crown in tow, the ’91-’92 Greyhounds advanced to the Memorial Cup in Seattle, where they lost the final 5-4 to the Kamloops Blazers. In a moment that lives in infamy for Soo fans, Zac Boyer scored on a breakaway with 14.6 seconds to play in the championship game.
Hodson blames himself for the loss, saying he believes the Greyhounds “should have won. I did not perform to the level of my capabilities needed to win a Memorial Cup – yet my teammates did.”
The former netminder went on to explain how he thinks he “put a little too much pressure on myself because we had lost at the Memorial Cup a year earlier.”
The 1990-91 Hounds lost all three of their round-robin games at the 1991 Memorial Cup in Quebec City.
Today, Hodson works as an investment advisor, running his own advisory group for RBC Dominion Securities. He and wife Maarika, a Sault native, were living here before moving to Vaughan, Ont., in 2014.
They have two children, both exceptional soccer players on scholarship south of the border. Eighteen-year-old Noah attends Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y., while daughter Maija, who is 18, is a student at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
