By CHAT News Today

“It was an amazing journey,” Tigers alumni Kelly Hrudey reflects on playing days in Medicine Hat

Nov 28, 2017 | 2:28 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB — Medicine Hat still holds a special place in Kelly Hrudey’s heart.

“It’s a great city,” said the former Tigers netminder and longtime NHL veteran during a phone interview with CHAT TV. “I think of Medicine Hat as a place that has changed my life in a positive manner.

“I moved away from home at 17 years old, like most of the kids off to play junior hockey. For me, it was an amazing journey, it was an amazing experience.”

Hrudey, who started his junior hockey career with the Medicine Hat Tigers and played 15 years in the NHL, is back in town on Wednesday. The Hockey Night in Canada analyst will be signing his new memoir, Calling the Shots, at Costco in the afternoon.

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From there, he’ll head over to the Canalta Centre to take part in a ceremonial puck drop prior to the Tigers’ home game against the Portland Winterhawks.

Hrudey’s career with the Tigers lasted from 1978-1981, and he has a lot of great memories of the team, especially in his first two seasons.

“We were an extremely young team,” he said. “We weren’t very good, but we sure stuck together. I believe we finished with 37 points, so that tells you that we weren’t a very good team, but we were young, and because of all the strides we made that year – for the most part, we were the same team going into the next season – we made it to the Eastern Conference finals.

“Those two years in combination, we didn’t know who we were, we were young kids trying to forge our way through hockey and life, and we were able to find some team camaraderie, some spirit, and we were not a bad team that second year.”

Hrudey also has positive memories of playing at the Medicine Hat Arena, which closed in 2015.

“Virtually every single time I go back to Medicine Hat to visit family, I try to sneak off if I can for 10 or 15 minutes to go to the old Arena, and look around, look at the trophy case in the main foyer and go back into the bowl and look at all the colourful seats and think back to my days there,” he said. 

“Trust me, I am nostalgic in that way, that I do like to go back.”

Hrudey’s NHL career from 1983-1998 saw him play for the New York Islanders, the Los Angeles Kings and the San Jose Sharks. Since his retirement in 1998, he’s ventured into a career in sportscasting.

He says when he began sitting down with Kirstie McLellan Day to write Calling the Shots, the two of them released the primary theme of the story would be about relationships.

“Whenever I was sharing stories about my career, whether it was in Medicine Hat, or Indianapolis in the minors, or in the NHL, it always happened to be about how my relationships with everybody in the game affected me, and in most cases, usually positively,” he said.

Hrudey will be signing copies of Calling the Shots at Costco beginning at 4 p.m. The Tigers’ game begins at 7 p.m. at the Canalta Centre.

The full phone interview with CHAT TV’s Mitch Bach can be heard below.