Mike Scott would not let anything stop him from being a hockey goalie.
Mr. Scott drove a school bus for Chicago Public Schools, and after he dropped students off he’d head to Johnny’s Ice House — a rink on the Near West Side.
He parked on the street — until the bus got towed. So he took to parking near Whitney Young Magnet High School, a few blocks from the rink.
“Who’d tow a bus by a school?” he figured. And he figured right.
His daily quest was for rat hockey — hockey’s version of pickup basketball — where anyone can show up, pay a few bucks and play.
Goalies, a priceless commodity, play for free.
On weekends, sans bus, Mr. Scott, an Army veteran who served in Operation Desert Storm, piled his equipment into a shopping cart, pushed it from his South Side home to a CTA train station, locked the cart to a pole, rode the train to the Near West Side, unlocked another shopping cart he kept there, and pushed his gear to the rink.
With no promise of ever getting on the ice, Mr. Scott regularly went to the rink and sat, or sometimes napped, in the stands, in case a goalie didn’t show up for a men’s league game and he could step in.
He allowed many teams to avoid a forfeit, which comes with a fine.
“As soon as he got on the ice he was happy as a lark, he had a purpose,” said pal and former Johnny’s Ice House employee Steven Osuzik. “Everybody relied on him as an EBUG,” or emergency backup goalie.
Staff at Johnny’s Ice House adopted him as family.
“Every morning I’d get him a sausage and egg sandwich or whatever he wanted from the Palace Grill across the street,” Osuzik said. ”I always took care of him. He was a good guy. We got along real well. I think everybody kind of knew that. I didn’t let anyone mess with him. He was a little older, a little slower and guys gave him crap every once in a while, and I had to pull them aside and let them know that wasn’t the way we were going to do things around here.”
Mr. Scott was also capable of handling things himself.
“He didn’t take s---,” recalled William Anderson, a Johnny’s employee and pal. “I’ve seen him drop [his gloves] and beat up lawyers and whoever on the ice. He loved it.”
Mr. Scott happened to be at the rink one day when former Blackhawk Patrick Kane and his dad showed up for a shoot around and needed a goalie.
Mr. Scott attended staff parties, and the folks at Johnny’s also picked up the tab so he could attend a goalie camp run by former NHL goalie Craig Anderson.
Johnny’s Ice House has two rinks along Madison Avenue — known as East and West — and employees would shuttle him between the two if he needed a lift.
Once, his gear was stolen and the hockey community collected new and used gear to get Mr. Scott back on the ice.
“He was one in a million ... and one of the kindest souls you ever want to meet,” said Ken Rzepecki, a youth hockey coach.
Mr. Scott, who had recent complications caused by diabetes, died June 30. He was 63.
Mr. Scott grew up on the South Side playing street hockey, strapping the foam stuffing from abandoned furniture to his shins for protection.
He joined the Army after graduating from Dunbar Vocational High School and served for 15 years.
It’s not clear when he first put on skates, but Mr. Scott started coming to Johnny’s Ice House in the late ’90s.
“That was his passion,” said his younger sister, Michelle Scott, who lives in Waukegan.
Mr. Scott most recently had been living at the Ashland Hotel near 47th and Justine Streets, his sister said.
“I was always trying to convince him to come stay with me, but Mike was a very, very independent man who stood on his own two feet,” she said.
A couple of years ago Mr. Scott got on his first team at Johnny’s in a beginner three-on-three league.
“He made it, he was happy, in heaven,” said former Johnny’s employee Eddie Perez-Chavez.
He ended up losing in the championship to a team called the Mighty Nerds.
He’d lament with a smile: “I lost to the Nerds!”
“To me, heaven got a new goalie,” Perez-Chavez said.
Mr. Scott was known for his stretching routine, which left an impression where his skates dug into the rink’s soft flooring in one particular spot that reminds everyone of him.
“I always joked it was like in Hollywood where actors put their hands in the cement,” said Pete Johnson, general manager at Johnny’s. “I’m thinking about memorializing that piece of rubber.”
Mr. Scott walked on the ice last year at a Chicago Wolves game in a brief ceremony in which the team honored him for his service to the country and the city’s hockey community.
Services are pending.
