When the Boston Bruins hosted the Carolina Hurricanes on May 12, 2019, for Game 2 of the National Hockey League’s Eastern Conference final, The Providence Journal deployed Assistant Sports Editor Mark Divver to write a notebook and Kevin McNamara to write a column, while I wrote the game account for the Gatehouse New England newspapers’ coverage.
The Bruins beat the Canes, 6-2, on their way to a convincing, four-game sweep before the NHL made them wait 11 days to play the Stanley Cup Final against the St. Louis Blues.
The reason the Projo threw the kitchen sink at this hockey game was more than the gravity of the series and more than an otherwise slow Sunday afternoon (sportswriters crave an off day, trust me). The occasion, it so happened, was the only Boston Bruins game or practice that Patriot Ledger reporter Mike Loftus would miss in 31 years on the beat. His son Ben graduated that day from Emerson College.
There was no room for less than our best that day because we were pinch-hitting for the best.
Never has there been a more uncompromisingly professional, hard-working reporter than Mike Loftus, and having inherited his mother’s passion for hockey and the Boston Bruins, the team was the beneficiary of his unrelenting standards for three, once-interrupted decades.
It was with a thud that Sunday’s news set in that Mike Loftus has passed away after battling cancer when he had barely reached retirement age.
Of course, it was too soon for his family but even for his friends and colleagues to lose Mike, with whom former NHL.com reporter Matt Kalman and I were privileged to share Level 9 workstations overlooking the Zamboni gate in the northwest corner of TD Garden ice.
In his brief retirement, the three of us virtually met up any night the Bruins were playing, just our three phones texting thoughts, reactions, opinions, and jokes. It would have made a great podcast, but even uncensored Mike packaged a rare sense of humor (that has spawned two comedians – his children Jamie and Ben) with class.
Like the rink rat he was as the son of a Zamboni-driving dad and a Bruins-fanatic mom, Mike wore different hats, sometimes playing, coaching, or officiating hockey as well as writing about it. He once joked that, in Brockton youth hockey, he was a “puck-losing defenseman.”
Mike’s formative years included two seasons in the mid-1980s as media liaison for the New England Patriots before the opportunity to cover the Bruins knocked on his door.
It was around the same time (midway through the 1988-89 season) that Bruins General Manager Don Sweeney was summoned from the AHL to shore up Boston’s defense that Loftus was assigned his spot high above the ice on the North Station side of the old Garden, looking down over the Bruins’ shoulders.
The Bourque-Neely era was approaching its heights of two Stanley Cup finals (1988 and ’90) and two other Eastern Conference Final appearances (1991 and ’92). It was a grand time to be around the Boston Bruins, and it took almost 20 years before a Bruins season once again felt like it might last an extra seven or eight weeks.
In between those eras, Loftus exhibited consistency, commitment, and dedication, his effort and quality of work unaffected by a 14-year stretch from 1995 to 2008 in which the Bruins won only one playoff series.
When president/GM Harry Sinden and apprentice Mike O’Connell reinvented the roster after bottoming out in 1996-97 and drafted Joe Thornton and Sergei Samsonov first and eighth overall, the 1997-98 Bruins roster sported 11 new players and an accomplished coach named Pat Burns.
The Boston Bruins were enjoying their first sense of traction in the new-arena era, and it was approximately a month before the 1998 playoffs that Loftus was unceremoniously notified that the Ledger had cut its travel budget, and he would no longer be accompanying the Boston Globe and Boston Herald on the road.
Up until that point, those newspapers were the big three media outlets covering the Boston Bruins home and away.
It probably didn’t help Loftus’ cause that he went to bat for his Ledger teammates as a union representative in collective bargaining sessions, but neither the New England Patriots nor the Boston Red Sox were yet all that and a bag of chips. It wasn’t about priorities as much as the business itself. Glory was still a few years off for the Patriots and for the Henry-Lucchino-Werner era at Fenway Park.
The Ledger’s decision stunned Mike and, as writing on the wall, was received by his colleagues with great disappointment. Loftus would continue to absorb all things hockey at the Ledger, and he lit up at any mention of “The Mighty” Quinn Waters, the Weymouth child whose young life was threatened by a brain tumor. Loftus wrote about how Charlie Coyle supported Quinn’s cause.
For several years, Mike maintained his due diligence as chapter president of the Professional Hockey Writers Association, and as members, we all enjoyed the one day of the season when he ditched his trademark jeans and sneakers for a jacket and tie to present the annual Elizabeth C. Dufresne Award to the best Bruin in home games.
COVID canceled a lot of things, including a better chance in 2019-20 for a more experienced Boston Bruins team to win the Stanley Cup, but the pandemic did not cancel Mike Loftus. That can be blamed on a declining newspaper business and the acceptance of a retirement package he’d never justly enjoy. His last game was remotely covered as the Bruins lost in the 2020 bubble tournament to Tampa Bay.
Fittingly, Loftus’ retirement marked the end of any regular beat coverage of the Boston Bruins by Gatehouse newspapers.
The media keeps on changing, just like the army of ushers that patrols TD Garden’s sections, rows, and seats. What for a long time were the Big 3 of Boston Bruins beat coverage are now like ancient landmarks in a rapidly changing city. They’re easy to miss without a tour guide.
If you’ve never read Russ Conway, get a copy of “Game Misconduct,” the book that emerged from the former Eagle-Tribune great’s relentless reporting on corruption during the Alan Eagleson era. If you missed Mike Loftus, make sure while you enjoy the emerging, next-generation core of excellent beat writers covering the Boston Bruins to read the Globe’s Kevin Paul Dupont and the Herald’s Steve Conroy.
For young, old, and in between, win or lose, north or south of the border, the passion around the Boston Bruins media contingent is second to none.
Sunday we all lost. RIP Mike.
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