Michael Russo's Sunday Insider: Grateful remembrance

Maybe it's the holiday season, maybe it's the uncertain future of the newspaper biz. But lately, I've thought a lot about how I couldn't envision doing anything else.

Since I was 16, I've covered every sport at every level, but only one with a true passion.

A few weeks ago, a father and his son introduced themselves to me. We talked hockey and they asked the question I get often: How did you become a hockey guy growing up in Florida?

Subconsciously, I said, "Bill Nyrop."

From 1993 to '95, when I was stringing for the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, I covered the Sunshine Hockey League's West Palm Beach Blaze.

It was as minor league as minor league can get. It was a four-team league, so you can imagine, fights were plentiful. So were goals.

Fans packed the West Palm Beach Auditorium because games were fun as players worked their tails off.

Nyrop, a former Edina High School football and hockey star who was a defenseman at Notre Dame and won three Stanley Cups with the Montreal Canadiens, owned, managed and coached the Blaze.

The Blaze won three consecutive Sunshine Cups under Nyrop, the tradition being to jump in the moat that bordered the old Auditorium with the Cup.

In October 1995, Nyrop, who had sold the Blaze that summer, sent his players a letter. He had been diagnosed with colon cancer. It was caught late, and spread throughout his body.

I called Nyrop at his father's home in Edina on Oct. 25, 1995.

"The doctors say it's very, very serious and that it's not curable," Nyrop said. "You realize now that you don't really have control over your life any more."

That was tough to hear. Nyrop was a fitness freak. I used to always see him running up and down the stands or around that moat.

"Billy was a health nut," said Wild GM Doug Risebrough, who was roommates with Nyrop and Doug Jarvis in Montreal. "Going on shopping sprees with these two guys was comedy. Billy'd be putting all this health food stuff that's costing him a fortune in the cart and Jarvy would be taking it out, dropping it on the shelves and putting in ice cream. And, vice versa.

"We'd get to the counter, and it'd always be, 'What happened to my organic nuts? Well, what happened to my potato chips?'"

My conversation with Nyrop was difficult. I had spent many an afternoon sitting in Nyrop's office listening to stories or watching him diagram systems for me on his chalkboard.

It was Hockey 101 for a wannabe hockey writer, and Nyrop was my professor.

This was a bright guy, somebody who stepped away prematurely from the NHL to eventually become a lawyer.

"We're in training camp [in 1978] and I didn't have a car, so I was going to catch a ride with him," recalled Risebrough. "He said, 'No, I have to go somewhere first. I'll meet you there.' We waved goodbye, I get to the rink and I'm told he called Scotty [Bowman] and said he was retiring."

Lou Nanne talked Nyrop out of retirement to play for the North Stars, but he left again after a year.

"I don't know if he had one goal in life," Nanne said. "He was always constantly searching. It was like he was forever chasing after something different."

Wednesday -- New Year's Eve -- will be 13 years since Nyrop died.

I figured now would be a fitting time to express my gratitude. In a lot of ways, I'm a hockey writer today because Bill Nyrop took me under his wing.

A few years ago, I showed Risebrough the letter Nyrop wrote to his team, and his jaw dropped.

I keep a wrinkled copy of that note in my desk drawer at home, and to this day, I pull it out and read.

"I am not bitter," Nyrop wrote, "because if there is a more grizzly, mentally and physically tough old bull than me to fight this thing, I don't know who it would be."