Terry Ryan retired from professional hockey at age 47.Then the call came

Ryan was selected as the first star and his adrenaline was pumping, causing him to almost trip over the sound of the explosion. He returned to the bench and took a “Truman Show”-style bow before leaving the ice for the last time.

And then the emotions flooded inside him. why? What did he bring to this unexpected final match?

“There were some tough times,” Ryan said. “I’m overwhelmed with emotion, but a lot of the reason is that when I was playing in Montreal and playing professionally and doing everything else, I didn’t actually even have a job. Because I didn’t. I worked hard as a player, and I don’t think anyone can deny that.

“But I didn’t know how hard life could be. I didn’t know that. And today, I feel like my outlook on life has changed.”

Terry Ryan may be better known as an actor as well as a hockey player, and rightly so. He was drafted eighth overall in 1995.but played only eight games and accumulated 36 NHL penalty minutes. hubs: Injuries and some bad decisions had him out of hockey by 2003. He is currently appearing in the TV show ‘Shoresy’ as an actor. He has a podcast and does live shows regularly. The situation is good.

However, living the rest of my life was not easy. Not nearby.

“I felt like I let the whole state down,” Ryan says from his home in Mount Pearl, New York. “It was always a little embarrassing[going back to Montreal]. Even if you accept that, there’s still a certain level of embarrassment when you’re[at home].”

It became a burden to him. At age 19, Ryan suffered a severe concussion that forced him to leave his third NHL game against Montreal in Phoenix. Pat LaFontaine called him to compare notes. Ryan paid his own expenses to get to the Mayo Clinic, and the Hub family later reimbursed him.

“I don’t talk about it a lot, but I basically spent a year in the dark,” he says. “I’m lost.”

Then, a clash with Michel Therrien in training camp sent Ryan to the minor leagues, and a sprained ankle kept him injected with cortisone into his joints for the last three years of his career.

“In 2004, 2005, I’ve been stacking shelves of Red Bull,” Ryan says. “Hmm, looking back, what a great time we had running around the delivery van.”

His weight ballooned to 6 feet 1 inch and 260 pounds. He drank a lot. One night, he was at Green Sleeves, a pub in downtown St. John’s, when his friend Mike O’Neill, a retired multi-sport man who owned the place, snapped. Ryan always respected Mike.

“It was 4 o’clock in the morning, I had mustard on my shirt, and he threw me against the wall and said, ‘Well, tomorrow the sun is going to rise, and no one will do you any wrong.’ You’ll never think, “I have to stop now,” Ryan says.

The national ball hockey team was called up for an opportunity to play. Ryan appeared on a local weight loss reality show called “Define Yourself.” And then the borderline obsessive-compulsive disorder that drove him to hockey began, and in the finale, at the old convention center, his friends and family were there. The contestants were about to stand in front of a cardboard cutout of their old body weight. Ryan looked up at the TV.

In early 2005, Ryan received a call from an old friend. Red Deer Rebels teammate and friend BJ Young, a troubled kid from Alaska who played in one game with the Red Wings but gave up on hockey. Let’s go visit Switzerland, Young said.

“He was like, ‘I’m feeling better, so let’s give it a try,'” Ryan said. “I can go over there and get some of my career back, dude. And I thought, ‘Yeah.’

And as Ryan was about to appear on the reality show’s finale at the convention center, the TV caption read, “Former Red Wing’s B.J. Young dies in car crash at age 27.” Ryan was ejected and yelled that he won the reality show, and people thought that Ryan was happy that he won the reality show.

With nothing else to do, Ryan went to Red Deer to help BJ’s widow Daniel and her son Tyson. He helped raise children and played for the Bentley Generals in the senior league. He and Daniel dated, but decided it wasn’t going to work out, and in 2009, at the World Ball Hockey Championships in the Czech Republic, he found out she was pregnant.

They had a daughter, Penny Lane, in 2010. They still co-parent and are very close.

But Ryan had no future. With the money left over from his Canadian contract, he went back to school and earned a degree in folklore and English literature. He has been keeping a diary since he was 14 years old, and at 15 he was sent to the Quesnel millionairess. In 2014 he wrote an honest memoir, Tales Of A First-Round Nothing.

Comedian Jerry Dee called me and invited me to Toronto to write a hockey show. Ryan rented a room in a rough part of Parkdale for $900 a month, and every morning for $3.99 he drank breakfast sandwiches, coffee and ate Kraft in the old Cadillac Lounge. Dinner at night. There was only one futon and no friends. Although he had never smoked, he would walk around downtown Toronto to do things and pick up cigarette butts and smoke them. He lost again.

“I said [to Dee], it takes a little bit of work,” Ryan says. “And he said, ‘Okay, you’ll be opening tomorrow night in Oshawa.'”

“I look at myself in the mirror. I slap myself in the face. I’m like, I have to do this. I can’t say no. And I used to do stand-up comedy. , I was depressed and had no money, so it was really difficult.

“So I came home. I still didn’t have anything.”

He and Daniel made bad investments and were on the verge of bankruptcy. He worked nights at a factory packing lottery tickets for minimum wage, earning $370 a week. Ryan received some work on movie sets, including the TV show “Frontier,” but then took a break. Ryan was cast in the role of a British soldier begging for his life.

“I couldn’t afford to get my teeth fixed, but they gave me the role because I had no teeth and I needed to hit this British soldier,” Ryan says. .

The show’s headliner and future superstar Jason Momoa took a liking to Ryan and helped him join the Screen Actors Guild and earn two more on-screen stunt credits. Momoa then took Ryan to Europe as his personal assistant, and true to Ryan’s word, he brought Ryan back to his senses. He began to be assigned bit parts such as boxer and crackhead.

Hockey commentator Paul Bissonnette heard Ryan was a wild guy with a great story and had him appear on his popular podcast, Spittin’ Chiclets. Bissonnette visited Newfoundland and loved Ryan, but understood that his hockey career was still a burden.

“I could tell it was crushing him,” Bissonnette says.

After the podcast aired, Jared Keeso of the TV show Letterkenny called Ryan and asked him to play the Newfoundlander for one time. He invited Ryan to lunch and told him he was planning another show called “Shoresy.”

“He said, “I love Newfoundland, and I have a show I’m thinking of writing, and it would be foolish not to have Newfoundlanders in it, and if I do it, It would be stupid not to have a Newfoundlander in it,” Ryan says.

“It changed everything.”

Terry Ryan has been looking for a path forward.He lives in a 650-square-foot home once owned by a Pearl Mountain legend Tony Farrowa Zamboni driver and a dedicated figure in the hockey community, Tony is the inspiration for Ryan’s character in “Shoresea,” and he’s very much a Newfoundlander.

However, the pain still remained. Then, on Sunday night, I got the call that the Growlers needed a player.

And his mother and father, his uncle and aunt, two cousins ​​and their children were in the arena. Daniel too. People he knew on the set of movies, in youth soccer at Pearl Mountain, in college, on the ball hockey team, in kindergarten.

And Penny Lane was in the crowd with some friends, and lo and behold, he was worried about embarrassing himself in front of her. She had to take a bow instead.

“Have you ever seen the movie ‘Big Fish?'” Ryan asked, referring to the 2003 film that follows a father’s fantasy life that culminates in his funeral. “At the end, all the people who were involved in his life come together?

“I feel like I’m taking a deep breath and I’m like, wow. I totally love it, but I’m going to completely reset my hockey legacy here. And with the legacy, I’m going to be some kind of hero. It sounds like I’m trying to be, whatever the word is, my hockey resume, whatever I use.

“You have to understand that people were looking down on me, but it was because they were so proud of me. Everyone here really wanted me to succeed. I don’t think they would have hated me if I hadn’t done that. It was like, “What the hell were you doing?” You know? And I didn’t have an answer to that. .

“And I’m okay with that. Having a good day with one of my friends is never far away, but difficult times are difficult. And last night I didn’t need it, at least consciously, I didn’t want it. I wasn’t there.

“But now that it’s happened, I’ll tell you right now, it just put a bow on so many things. I don’t really use the word beautiful when it comes to hockey. But it was beautiful.”

he exhaled. Whether they become actors or not, not many athletes go through a scripted breakup. Terry Ryan did.