"Roy made Tremblay tremble in anger"
Nov 7, 1997 - Mario Tremblay had just been named Montreal's coach after four games of the
1995-96 season, and he was addressing the Canadiens for the first time. The way Patrick Roy
remembers it, he was sitting with his head down, and he glanced over at his red-headed buddy,
Mike Keane. The strangeness of it all struck Roy. Tremblay, his first Canadiens roommate,
was now his coach. Tremblay, who had teased Roy as a rookie goalie because Roy could
speak only a few words of English, was talking to his team . . . in heavily accented English. So
Roy grinned and laughed softly. And Tremblay angrily confronted him. "What's so funny?", In
other words, the Roy-Tremblay relationship, which ultimately imploded and led to Roy's
trade to the Avalanche, was rocky from the start when Tremblay
took over for the fired Jacques
Demers, a Roy favorite. And, actually, the relationship had been volatile even before that,
Tremblay often had been critical of the goaltender as a broadcaster. This is coming up again
because a new French-language biography of Tremblay by Montreal newspaperman Mathias
Brunet sheds some light on the feud that was so crucial in Colorado's first major-league
championship. "I haven't seen the book, but I've heard about it," Roy said after the Avalanche,
practice Thursday morning. Roy said the book didn't quite have the details of that first team
meeting of the Tremblay tenure correct, but he confirmed Brunet's account of an incident before
the Canadiens' fateful game with the Red Wings Dec. 2, 1995.
The book, "Mario Tremblay,
Le Bagarreur" (the fighter), says that Roy told Tremblay during that first meeting: "It's nothing
against you, Mario, it's just the way you talk." Thursday, Roy said that was oversimplification.
"I had my head down and I was smiling. It was not a big laugh, like, "Ha, ha, ha." I was looking
at Keaner, and his hair was so red, and I kind of grinned and Mario went right at me. But I
went to him the next day and everything seemed OK." If it was, it didn't stay that way. The book
says that before that Canadiens-Red Wings game, Roy was angry when high-scoring winger
Vincent Damphousse showed up only 10 minutes before the warm-up and Tremblay let it slide.
Roy's version jibes with the book. He confirmed that he brought up a marginal rookie winger
as an example to ask Tremblay if there was a double standard for team discipline. (This is an
intriguing twist, given the timing of Marc Crawford's Wednesday night scratching of Roy's close
friend, Claude Lemieux, for being late to practice earlier in the week.) "I said, "Hey, listen,
we're playing Detroit, and what would you do if (Damphousse's) name was Yves Sarault?'�" Roy
said. "He looked back at me and said, "Same thing.' I went back in the room and I didn't do
anything." Could that have had anything to do with what happened later that night? "I think he was
mad at me, yeah,'' Roy said. Tremblay later left Roy in for Detroit's first nine goals, and - well,
you know the rest of the story. The twists: Sarault now also is with the Avalanche organization as
part ofthe Hershey-Colorado shuttle. Tremblay's nephew, Pascal Trepanier, is an Avs utility
winger. Tremblay quit under pressure after last season and the
Canadiens are off to a surprising
start under Alain Vigneault. "It seems that their new coach is doing very well,'' Roy said dryly.
And come to think of it, the smile on his face as he said this probably would have driven Mario
Tremblay nuts.
By Terry Frei
Denver Post Sports Writer
Return to the Patrick Roy Page