April 22, 2023

By Patrick Kennedy

Kingston Whig-Standard

Depending on who you ask, Bob Senior was either the toughest fair coach or the fairest tough coach in Kingston’s storied history in the puck game. Most people who knew him would tell you he was both.

“He was definitely tough, but he was also fair,” recalled John Sheridan, who played for Senior-guided Elks teams in the midget and juvenile divisions of the old top-shelf Rotary Kiwanis hockey league, a long-defunct loop from yesteryear that launched many the pro career.

Senior, the former pro goalie who never donned facial protection against flying pucks and errant stick blades, died last week at age 86. Left behind is the legacy of a splendid multi-sport athlete and a molder of young men. Among those he influenced were ex-Vancouver defence man Dennis Kearns and former Boston Bruins rear guard Rick Smith, who once hailed Senior as “the reason I made it to the NHL.”

John Sheridan never made the NHL. But back in the early ‘70s he played one season for Senior on the Kingston Frontenacs Junior B squad before the latter cut him prior to the start of what would’ve been the forward’s second campaign. For some players, that axing might have permanently soured their taste for the coach. Not Sheridan. Like many players who came both before and after him, he was thankful for simply having had the chance to play for the man known fondly as “Ox.”

“I was still young and had a rough time with being cut,” the retired firefighter said decades later, “but Bob was very supportive and explained the situation in a plain, positive way.

“Years later when my sons were playing hockey, I’d often sit with Bob and watch the games.”

Watching a hockey game with Ox Senior was not unlike sitting with Pavarotti at an opera, standing next to DiMaggio in a batting cage, sitting ringside with George Chuvalo at a prizefight – experts whose opinions and observations were often enlightening, especially if the listener realized the fellow rendering them, as the saying goes, “knew his apples.”

It wasn’t just players who climbed to great shinny heights as pros who benefitted from Ox’s tutelage. Others who never made a dollar in the game were as thankful for his mentorship. Take Clyde “Camel” Harris, for instance. Today the retired Orillia school teacher, a spry 73, still tends the twine in pick-up hockey games, doing as Ox taught him more than a half-century ago at the Memorial Centre.

“Sad day for the goaltender’s union,” Harris noted on his old coach’s passing. Harris played goal for coach Senior on the Junior B Frontenacs before putting in five years as the last line of defence for the Queen’s Golden Gaels. During summers he was an integral member of Kingston senior baseball clubs. Harris hinted that his university career, perhaps even university itself, would not have happened if he hadn’t taken Senior’s advice “back when” - advice that was more technical than scholarly.

“When I got called up to play for the Jr. Bs, I thought I was Glenn Hall,” Harris recalled over the phone, referring to the NHL hall-of-fame goalkeeper. “I was flopping and flipping around, rarely in position, all of which worked great for Glenn Hall but no one else. Bob took me aside and said: ‘That style is fine if you want to play in the industrial league. If you want to get better, have less movement, stay on your feet, cut down the angle. And if the shooter rings one in off the post, it’s not like you got beat with your ass halfway in the net. Fish the puck out and tip your hat to him, because that guy’s been shooting pucks as long as you’ve been stopping them.’

“Bob had a unique way of explaining things,” Camel remembered. “He made his point, which always made a ton of sense to me. Better yet, his way worked, pucks started hitting me. After that I became a sponge. I listened to everything he said, it was like plugging into a computer.

“What Oxie didn’t know about goaltending wasn’t worth knowing.”

Like John Sheridan, Camel Harris felt the disillusion and disappointment that came with being the odd-man-out on a team’s final roster. Senior cut him at the following year’s Junior B tryouts. “There were two better goalies ahead of me in camp,” Harris recalled. “I knew it and Bob certainly knew it. He pulled me aside and said: ‘Can you see the writing on the wall? It’s 10-feet high.’

“But you know what? If I hadn’t taken his advice, I would’ve been exactly what he said - a decent industrial league goalie but no better. Instead, I have hockey to thank for my education and teaching career. And I have Ox Senior to thank for my hockey.”

As a coach, Senior let it be known at the outset that it was his way or no way. That included any pushy parent who wanted to expound on the right way to play or coach hockey. “In the 13 years I coached,” he noted in a 2021 interview, “I never had a parent come close to me. I didn’t like having my time wasted.”

Before he entered the local coaching ranks, Senior had played junior hockey in Toronto, Galt, Kitchener and Barrie, and then briefly as a professional. His last whistle stop as a pro was with the American Hockey League’s Springfield Indians, a step below the old six-team NHL. His teammate that year was bus-league veteran Don “Grapes” Cherry.

“I remember the one time we went into Rochester,” Cherry recalled the other day from his Mississauga home. “Rochester had a first-place club, and their barn was just rocking, but Ox shut ‘em down. The (Montreal) Canadiens couldn’t have beat him that night. He should’ve been in the NHL,” added Grapes.

Senior – a teammate dubbed him “Ox” after the 200-pound goalie stepped on his toe in the dressing room and broke it – abandoned pro hockey and returned home to Kingston at age 23. He soon started a family with wife Marion and began what turned into a 30-year career as a tradesman with Correctional Service Canada. He also became a stalwart on area fastball teams and later distinguished himself as a curler. In 2001, he was elected to the Kingston & District Sports Hall of Fame.

His most cherished sporting moments, however, according to sons John and Doug, occurred at the harness-racing track. That was a venue that Ox, the hulking horseman, knew well from his years training and driving his horses, Lucky May Jay and her colt Early Lead.

Senior played all sports with a competitive fire. Talk about tough? In hockey, like Buffalo Bisons’ fearless netminder and 2023 Kingston & District Sports Hall of Fame inductee “Bashful Bill” Taugher, Ox played bare-faced, and he suffered the consequences. His face saw more thread than a home-made quilt. As a sturdy, slugging catcher in the city’s best fastball circuit, he wisely wore a mask but never a belly pad. And like big-league hall-of-fame pitcher Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, Senior only had eight digits at his disposal, having sacrificed the forefinger and middle finger on his right hand to a wringer-washing machine in a childhood accident.

A highlight for any player who played on Senior’s Jr. B clubs was the early morning post-practice “shootout.” Ox, who would head straight to work afterwards, turned back the clock and faced breakaway after breakaway wearing only skates and his official prison-issued work uniform.

“All he’d have is a trapper, a blocker and a goal stick,” recalled Sheridan. “He’d say, ‘Shoot it wherever, boys, just don’t go for my shins.’ We couldn’t beat him. He was so quick with the trapper, and if you deked him, he’d use the Johnny Bower poke-check.”

Patrick Kennedy is a retired Whig-Standard reporter. He can be reached at pjckennedy35@gmail.com