An enforcer’s loving heart

Gino: The Fighting Spirit of Gino Odjick
by Patrick Johnston and Peter Leech

Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2025
$44.95 / 9781778402708

Reviewed by Daniel Gawthrop

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As one of the National Hockey League’s most feared tough guys in his day, Gino Odjick remains one of the most popular Vancouver Canucks ever and a favourite role model for Indigenous youth across Canada. Now, two years after his death from a heart attack nearly a decade after surviving a terminal diagnosis of AL Amyloidosis, he’s the subject of a new biography.

Gino presents a nuanced, heartwarming, and unsettling portrait of a man who was inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame two years before his death and honoured in 2015 with an Indspire Award for his work educating Indigenous youth. Odjick comes off as a complex individual, a cultural bridge builder whose positive influence was far reaching despite his many challenges.

The co-authorship is complimentary. Johnston, a hockey reporter for The Province, was only nine years old when Odjick entered the NHL. But he has applied both his journalistic cred and a hockey nerd’s enthusiasm to capture all of Gino’s career highlights and lowlights. Leech, a close friend and collaborator in Odjick’s final twenty-five years, is a former hockey pro and an educator from the St’at’imc Tribal Nation in B.C.’s Southern Coast mountains and Fraser Canyon. A specialist working with First Nations communities and organizations both public and private, he brings first-person knowledge of Indigenous culture that provides critical context for our understanding of Gino’s “fighting spirit.”

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The book’s first four chapters cover the arc of Odjick’s colourful hockey career. Born in the Algonquin reserve of Kitigan Zibi just outside the town of Maniwaki, Quebec, Gino presented himself as a guy who “just came off the rez” and figured out the larger world on his own. Tall and lumbering with sad eyes and a big smile on his long jaw, he was used to being underestimated as just another dopey goon. But he defied stereotype in many ways, not least by speaking three languages and claiming to read 150 books a year when on the road.

Odjick’s arrival with the Canucks is seen as a transitional moment for a team that had gotten used to being pushed around. Taken with the 86^th pick in the 1990 draft, the “Algonquin Assassin” was chosen for his tough guy rep with the Quebec junior league’s Laval Titan. During his first NHL game against the Chicago Black Hawks, he dropped the gloves twice, holding his own against legendary enforcers Dave Manson and Stu Grimson.

His presence made the Canucks harder to play against, their improvement continuing right up to their ill-fated run to the 1994 Stanley Cup final. That achievement would have been impossible without the superstar heroics of Pavel Bure—a hockey artist who, like Gretzky and Lemieux before him, needed protection. Of course, Bure never had to worry about opponents taking liberties with him: Gino always had his back.

Off the ice the two became fast friends, an odd couple bromance the authors explore in Chapter Seven. As different as they were (Bure the artist and Odjick the ruffian, Bure the beauty and Odjick the beast, Bure standoffish with fans and media while Odjick was an open book), the authors note that the two shared a deep bond as outsiders—Bure to Western culture, Odjick to mainstream Canadian society. Odjick named one of his sons Bure; Pavel became his godfather.

Gino also reveals Odjick’s role as an intermediary between Bure and the Aquillini family as a critical factor in the Canucks’ successful bid to convince the Russian Rocket, fourteen years after his acrimonious departure, to return to Vancouver for his jersey retirement ceremony.

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Apart from his on-ice personality, it was Odjick’s unfiltered honesty, self-deprecating humour, and loyalty to friends that people remember. Province columnist Tony Gallagher recalls Gino being so candid in interviews that he chose not to quote some of his best lines, for fear of exploiting him. Early in his second season, when he scored on a penalty shot against the Calgary Flames, Odjick received a roaring ovation from hometown fans worthy of a playoff overtime goal. “I think he could run for election right now in B.C.,” mused Hockey Night in Canada’s Chris Cuthbert. (Odjick, we learn, told Pat Quinn on the bench that he could not return to the ice right away, despite his coach’s order, because he was still aroused by a woman’s celebratory act of flashing her breasts at him from the stands after he scored.)

His loyalty to friends was absolute. When Quinn’s replacement as Canucks coach, Mike Keenan, humiliated former team captain Trevor Linden in the dressing room, Odjick stood up for him. When Keenan was later overheard saying insulting things about the fired Quinn, Gino’s response (“Mike, you can call me stupid. You can call me a stupid Indian. But don’t ever talk like that about people I respect.”) achieved the rare feat of silencing “Iron Mike.”

Though proud of his Indigenous heritage and culture, it wasn’t until a year after the ’94 Cup run that Odjick first raised public awareness about its importance to his survival. The day after the Canucks were swept by the Blackhawks in Round Two of the 1995 playoffs, Gino was crushed: he had truly believed the Canucks were still good enough to return to the final. So he followed his team’s devastating elimination with a seven-day bender. At the end of it, he had a vision that told him his self-destructive drinking was ruining him as a role model for Indigenous kids.

Within weeks, he had organized a twenty-day trek, nearly a thousand kilometres “by foot and vehicle,” from Calgary to Musqueam. The Journey of Healing, which connected Odjick with Indigenous communities along the way, was aimed at educating native youth about the perils of substance abuse and wasted opportunity. The initiative drew much media coverage as several players (Bure, Calgary Flame tough guys Sandy McCarthy and Rocky Thompson, and even Stan Jonathan, a childhood hero of Gino’s as an Indigenous NHLer and 1970s Boston Bruins tough guy) joined Odjick at various points.

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The bulk of the book’s final seven chapters is devoted to Odjick’s personal life before and after his NHL career. One passage about his father Joe, a gifted hockey player for whom the sport provided his only release from the confinement of residential school, is reminiscent of Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse. Joe Odjick, whose own father was killed in the Second World War, became a selfless provider for his children, often leaving home to follow the work wherever he found it. His example rubbed off on young Gino, who would maintain a lifelong sense of obligation to others despite being something of a dreamer (he fancied himself a country music singer/songwriter if the hockey thing didn’t work out).

Odjick’s connection to the Musqueam people deepened the longer he lived in B.C., which became his adopted home. He invested in their golf course and managed the Musqueam Golf & Learning Academy; his friendship with Chief Wendy Grant John, regional vice president of the Assembly of First Nations, led to his support of her bid to become the AFN’s national leader. (He also supported the winner, Phil Fontaine, in much of his work—including as a member of the unsuccessful 2009 delegation to the Vatican, where the AFN sought an apology from the Roman Catholic Church for its role in Canada‘s residential school system.)

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Notwithstanding such examples of its subject’s better qualities, Gino is no hagiography. As someone who grew up with five sisters and no brothers, it’s perhaps no surprise that Odjick the adult became a ladies’ man who fathered eight children with six women. But it’s hard to keep up with all those different girlfriends, wives, and kids: the more you read, it becomes clearer that Odjick needed a high-paying NHL gig just to pay for all those mouths to feed. Given that some of his relationships overlapped—he even got the sister of one of his partners pregnant—it’s a tribute to Odjick that many of his exes still speak well of him. (All the more amazing, given that three had to use the court system to sort out payments and access rules for his kids.)

There are many disturbing references to Odjick’s struggles with alcohol and mental health issues, including incidents of sudden mood swings, paranoia, or psychotic episodes that required police intervention or hospitalization for Odjick. The player’s admission, years after retirement, that he was addicted to being hit in the head suggests that his role as a hockey enforcer had a definite long-term impact on his mental health.

Gino and Peter Leech had discussed doing a book together a decade before Odjick’s death. The fact that Leech and his wife were willing to bring him into their home and take care of him during the last years of his life, and that Leech made sure his friend’s story found a writer and a publisher to tell it, only adds poignancy to this tender and respectful biography.

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Daniel Gawthrop is the author of the novel Double Karma (Cormorant) and five non-fiction titles including The Rice Queen Diaries (Arsenal Pulp). Visit his Substack here and website here. [Editor’s note: Daniel has recently reviewed hockey books by Mike Keenan and Ed Willes, to name a few, and has also reviewed the work of Ziyad Saadi, Eddy Boudel Tan, Ervin Malakaj, and David Geselbracht, for The British Columbia Review. He is a co-founder of the Cutting Edges, Vancouver’s LGBTQ+ hockey association, where he still plays left-wing.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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