Mike Bossy’s biography will be published on Monday. Her younger daughter Tanya had been waiting for this moment for a long time. An English version written by a New York journalist was published in 1988. It was the year after Bossy’s forced retirement from hockey, at the age of 30. But Tanya wanted a work about her famous father’s career and life to be written in French in Quebec, where it all began.
She would have liked to have done it while she was still alive, but Bossy was hesitant.
“I waited for him for a long time,” she says.
“Every time I talked to him about it, he replied, ‘I don’t like it.’” When he became ill, people approached him without knowing that his health was serious. I wanted him to agree, but he still wasn’t keen on the idea. I respected that. It was his life, after all.
“He told me that if I took on this project, I wouldn’t have time for anything else. It stayed that way.”
Mike Bossy celebrates the fourth of his four consecutive Stanley Cups with his youngest Tanya, whom he holds in his arms, and his eldest Josiane. PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE BOSSY FAMILY
On the same wavelength
On April 15, 2022, a week before Guy Lafleur’s death, Mike Bossy died of devastating lung cancer. He was 65 years old.
When Tanya read the tributes to her father in the newspapers, she was touched by an article by Mikaël Lalancette, journalist from the daily Le Soleil, who worked with Bossy at TVA Sports.
“I think he talked to my father about the plan to write a book about him,” she says.
“We met and things really worked out between us. I was impressed by the biography that Mikaël wrote about Georges Vézina. He’s all about history and facts, he has a really rigorous approach.
“And like me, he didn’t want my father to be forgotten.”
Tanya is right.
Without having played for the Canadian, Bossy was one of Quebec’s greatest hockey players. He scored 573 goals in ten seasons for the New York Islanders. Here too, his career was interrupted by health problems.
Despite his back pain, Bossy managed to score 38 goals in 63 games in his final season. He was only 30 years old.
He had previously scored 50 goals for nine straight seasons when he told his daughter to make sure she didn’t forget this important detail.
Discovery of his career
Tanya knew her father had a remarkable career, but she only knew the surface of it. She was only 5 years old when he hung up his skates.
When she went to Nassau Coliseum with her mother, Lucie, and sister, Josiane, she was more interested in their games in the box where the family sat than in her father’s exploits at the rink.
Normal at that age.
By reading her father’s biography, aptly titled “50 Days in the Life of Mike Bossy” in reference to his numerous 50-goal seasons, Tanya was able to revisit the great moments of his career.
But why was he hesitant to write about it in a book?
“My father was a very reserved man,” Tanya replies.
“He kept his trophies, his jerseys and his kneecap replacements in boxes. We had never seen this before water damage forced us to pull everything out of the basement.
“He had given up this life. He didn’t like talking about himself; it embarrassed him. It may sound esoteric to think this, but perhaps he knew he was running out of time. He didn’t want to miss a second for the things that really mattered to him.”
The five women in his life
The most important things to him were the five women in his life, his wife Lucie, whom he knew when they were only 14 or 15 years old, his daughters Josiane and Tanya, and his granddaughters Alexe and Gabrielle.
We can say that there were even six, since his mother Dorothy lived with him in Rosemère until she went to live with her husband Borden, who also died of lung cancer at the age of 60.
Tanya believes her father felt guilty about being away from his family while playing with the Islanders.
“When he was preparing for a trip, he bought us a lot of things,” she remembers.
“He was so obsessed with his game, the games, the training, that maybe he blamed himself.”
Bossy made up for lost time with his family when he returned to Quebec after scoring the last of his 85 goals in the 1987 Stanley Cup playoffs. In 2010 he built a house for Tanya and her two children. girl next to his.
“He was very committed to my children,” Tanya continues.
“He took advantage of every moment he had to do activities with them. He could take her to soccer practice at eight o’clock on Saturday morning, 50 kilometers from our house.
“He was an intense man in everything he did. He was there for us as best he could.”
. 50 days in the life of Mike Bossy. Edition of Man, 316 pages. Written by Mikaël Lalancette in collaboration with Tanya Bossy.