Really sad news... we had all braced ourselves for this some years ago, and then the next thing you know he makes a recovery with his famed fighting spirit and hangs on for a number of years...
Gino's rookie year is also the same year I started actively following the Canucks... his first game would have been one of the earliest ones I listened to on the radio. Even though I dislike fighting in hockey, it was impossible not to have as soft spot for Gino. Like
@Uhmkay, I was in attendance at the famous penalty shot game, and the crowd went wild for him.
I remember the
Vancouver Sun doing a feature on him early in his career, talking about what a hero he'd become on his reserve back in the Maniwaki region. The article (which also explored hockey/Indigenous relations generally) mentioned all the kids on the reserve being decked out in Odjick Canuck jerseys, despite being in western Quebec, and I thought that was the coolest, particularly in Hab territory. (Although Maniwaki is closer to Ottawa than Montreal, and unfortunately in these parts you also sometimes see missing children posters displaying kids named Odjick).
His contrasting friendship with Pavel Bure was always one of those adorable stories around the team that was always special. I even remember
Sports Illustrated commenting on it, and an amusing excerpt that I remembered even before realizing this article was now online:
When asked by a reporter if he was drawn to Bure because he empathized with the Russian's plight as a stranger striving for acceptance in a strange land, Odjick thinks for a moment and then says, "What?"
One other moment worth remembering – one of Gino's last with the Canucks, I'm quite sure after he had already played his last game. In the throes of the Keenan reign, Gino was called into Keenan's office and stood up to him, basically speaking for us all at that point. (I had heard the story as him saying "Don't you dare pick up that phone" when it rang, although I see iMac has reported it as him actually hanging it up when Keenan began speaking badly of Pat Quinn). Whatever it was, that was a "yeah!" moment when it first got reported.