Glen Wesley: A recollection

You could set your calendar by it: Every summer, usually about the middle of June, I'd start leaving messages on Glen Wesley's cell phone every week or so. He was almost always at the beach, and he'd get back to me that night, and let me know whether there was any contract news.

At first, the questions were about contract negotiations. Later, they were about retirement. But they were part of the offseason furniture, part of both of our lives. In my eight summers on the Hurricanes beat, Wesley's contract was up in the final six of them.

One year, he re-signed while I was on vacation. I pulled over to the side of an Interstate in Indiana to take his call. Another year, I scribbled notes on a napkin while at lunch.

I remember these things, because Wesley was such a fixture during my time on the beat. He was there when I got there. When I left, he had just left. Three trips to the playoffs, a last-place season and a lockout: Wesley was around for all of them. (Only Niclas Wallin and Rod Brind'Amour could say the same.)

Watching Wesley's No. 2 retired Tuesday night brought back a lot of memories — those summer calls, so many long conversations at his locker in the morning and short conversations after games, the horror of watching him go head-first into the open penalty box in Chicago in 2001, the joy on his face in the hallway outside the Carolina locker room in the moments after the Game 7 win in 2006.

Like John Forslund, I made it a point to stop by Wesley's locker on a daily basis just to chat. I'd often eat breakfast in the stands at the beginning of practice and Wesley would often ask what I was eating when he came on the ice; occasionally, I'd bring him a bagel of his own and drop it off at his locker.

In a way, I'm kind of glad I left the beat at the same time Wesley retired. For so many of us who spent time around the team, he was a constant: as steady and reliable with the media as he was on the ice.

He was the go-to guy on a trend story, the guy who could sum up a month of hockey in two sentences. After games, good or bad, you could count on Wesley to be at his locker — sometimes, he was the only one in the locker room when the doors were opened after a particularly bad loss. When he had something to say, you could count on it being insightful. When he didn't, he'd make himself available anyway, to discuss the obvious when no one else would.

(After an 8-4 loss in Phoenix in December 2005, he was there waiting at his locker: "We can't continue to play that way, digging ourselves a hole at the start of games, continuing to fall in holes and expecting to come back," Wesley said. "It's catching up to us right now. It's biting us and we can't dig out of it." He was right: That was the low point of Carolina's season.)

In 2001, when the Carolina chapter of the Professional Hockey Writers Association decided to give out a "Good Guy Award" for media cooperation, Wesley was the inaugural winner.

You always knew Wesley would get his jersey retired, for the same reasons he was always offered a contract every summer: Because you couldn't imagine the Hurricanes without him. Obviously, that's the bottom line.