Pit Martin

Many of us have had our encounters with celebrities doing things you don’t normally think celebrities do. Defining what constitutes a celebrity is, of course, largely subjective — but the encounter itself can be an extraordinarily powerful memory.

The moment might come in an airport coffee shop or perhaps at a magazine stand. For me, the celebrity was Pit Martin, and the extraordinarily powerful moment was in that most ordinary of settings: my house.

Pit Martin was gifted hockey player who recorded 800 points in 1,100 games during an 18-year career in the NHL. I first saw him in the flesh when I was still a kid. At the time, he played for the Boston Bruins, and came to my minor hockey banquet with Paul Henderson, who then played for the Detroit Red Wings. From that point on, I followed his career from Boston to Chicago — he went to the Black Hawks in exchange for the legendary Phil Esposito — and then to Vancouver.

When his playing days were over, Pit retired to Windsor, Ont., where he had lived when he first broke into the NHL with Detroit. He operated a prominent restaurant there for many years, but it was through one of his other business ventures that I came to meet him.

It was in the 1980s, and my then wife and I lived in Stoney Point, a small village on Lake St. Clair just east of Windsor. Like many people in that part of the country, we had a backyard pool to help cope with the extremely humid southwestern Ontario summers. Pit was in the swimming pool business then, along with a partner who also lived in Stoney Point.

One day, the pump for my pool up and died. It was not the first time this sort of thing happened, so I called Pit’s partner — I’m sorry, his name escapes me — to ask if he’d come have a look. The person who answered the phone said he wasn’t available, but they’d send somebody else out to have a look.

The next day, there was a knock on the door. I opened it, and found Pit Martin standing on my porch.

“Oh my God,” I thought, my jaw no doubt dropping. “Pit Martin is standing on my porch!”

That was nothing. Within a few minutes, he and I were in the pool shed, taking apart the offending pump, trying to figure out exactly just what the problem could be. I was absolutely giddy, an unusual reaction given that service calls — even from professional hockey players — don’t come cheaply.

“Oh my God,” I thought, “Pit Martin is on his hands and knees in my pool shed, fixing my pump! How cool is this?”

What was particularly memorable was how comfortable he was in his own skin as he went about his work. He may have played hockey with Bobby Orr and Bobby Hull, but on that day, he was focused on doing a job for me. Just me.

I would never hose down that pump again.

The problem fixed and the bill submitted, Pit took his leave from my yard and from my life. Since then, I have met many celebrities in the course of my work — people whose names carry far greater cachet than does Pit Martin’s. But it is the memory of my afternoon with Pit, working on our hands and knees, that has stayed strongest with me. Few people who gain a measure of notoriety retain the humility and decency he so easily showed.

Pit Martin died on Nov. 30, 2008, when his snowmobile crashed through the ice on Lake Kanasuta, near Rouyn-Noranda, Que. He was 64.

To a select few people, he was a cherished friend or family member. To most, he was simply a hockey player they remember from the Saturday nights of their youth. For me, however, Pit Martin was more than that. He was my introduction to the fact celebrity can come with a common touch. I won’t forget that, or him.