Our Favorite Players of All Time — Mike Foligno: Jump!

Mike Foligno scored 370 goals in the National Hockey League, regular season and playoffs, and by his recollection, he jumped after about 369 of them.

Foligno would do this thing after he scored where he'd jump up in the air, doubling over and tucking his knees into his abdomen. One time, though, the Buffalo Sabres, his team of nine years, were leading the lowly New Jersey Devils 7-1 or 8-1 late in the game, when Foligno added another tally. Foligno did the sporting thing, and didn't jump.

"I got mail," he chuckles.

What's the deal? Why didn't he jump? He always jumps -- these days, this decade, when the Sabres are in the middle of ten straight years without winning a playoff series, it's what we want to see! Someone having fun, someone celebrating when good things do happen.

Besides the jump, the first thing you noticed about Foligno was that he wore this bulbous, retro helmet, the same one throughout his entire career. "I tried those lightweight Jofas, but I felt like I had nothing on my head," he says. "I felt really confident with it. I think a lot of guys went for looks instead of safety." Foligno says he only suffered one concussion during his playing days, on a shift when he'd lost his trusty helmet and hit his head on the ice.

Sabres fans in the 80s saw better players -- Gilbert Perreault; maybe, depending on how thigs were going, Tom Barrasso and Pierre Turgeon -- saw more skilled goal scorers -- Dave Andreychuk, for example -- saw more savvy, accomplished checkers -- Craig Ramsay, Don Luce, Ric Seiling -- saw better fighters -- Larry Playfair comes immediately to mind -- than they saw in Foligno. But they never saw a player quite like Mike Foligno -- from the lid, to the caution: curves ahead nose, to the patented goal celebration, to the mile-a-minute answers to even the most routine questions from the media. And no one took the hockey fans of Buffalo by the collar and shook 'em up like Mike.

Foligno arrived in Buffalo under strange circumstances. The Sabres were 12-5-7 to start the 1981-82 season. In December, Scotty Bowman traded Jim Schoenfeld, Danny Gare -- both current or former team captains -- Derrick Smith and Bob Sauve to Detroit for three players picked in the first round and another first-rounder in the 1983 draft. A poignant moment in Sabres history: Schoenfeld, who bled blue and gold, broke down crying during a TV interview at the airport on his way to Detroit after the deal.

The Sabres got Dale McCourt, a flop, Brent Pederson, who had a long career as a faceoff specialist with the club, and Foligno. Schoenfeld remains extremely popular in Buffalo to this day, never mind when Bowman set about purging the team of any non-Bowman influence, and it was going to take an extraordinary player and personality to win fans over to this deal.

Turned out to be Foligno, who would win the Booster Club's Frank Eddolls Memorial Trophy, honoring the team's most popular player, five years in a row starting in 1984-85. Foligno's engaging personality helped. "He was a very likeable guy off the ice," says Budd Bailey, who covers the Sabres for the Buffalo News and who wrote a fantastic almost day-by-day history of the team's first 20 years called Celebrate the Tradition. "He was as talkative a professional athlete as I've ever seen... the joke always was that you could ask him a question, set the microphone down, go out for dinner, come back and he'd still be answering the same question."

His genuine love for the game won fans over, as well. "Mike gave the impression that he liked playing," says Bailey. After Foligno's signature moment with the Sabres, his assist on childhood hero Perreault's 500th goal, Foligno was giddier and more excited than Perreault was, joking that it was a great accomplishment for a fine Italian boy like Bert. And of course, there was the jump.

"It was all in fun, and it was taken as a fun thing," Foligno says, and he's right: no one thought he was showing them up. His greatest risk of injury was in landing funny, not getting beaten on for excessive celebration. Not that taking Foligno on would have been an attractive proposition for a disgruntled opponent: his 2,049 career penalty minutes included eight seasons of 149 or more.

Foligno was the complete package. In addition to his reckless abandon, reflected in his PIM totals, he scored 41 goals in 1985-86, and 20 or more in nine different years. Naturally, though, there were traits you simply couldn't measure with statistics. Foligno played hockey as though he couldn't possibly have cared less whether there was something -- or someone -- between him and his goal, be that a loose puck, the net, his check, whatever.

"In the 80s for a while Mike was not only the best player on the team, but its emotional center," says Bailey. Fiery and temperamental, on a team of Paul Cyrs and John Tuckers and Phil Housleys, he was the team's conscience, and its captain, for a time. From Buffalo, Foligno was traded -- hours before the team Christmas party -- to Toronto, where he scored what he considers his biggest NHL goal, an overtime winner in the playoffs against the Red Wings in 1993, helping the Leafs to the conference final. He never jumped higher. He played out the string in Florida, and turned to coaching.

These days, after a stint as an assistant with the Colorado Avalanche, my favorite player of all time is the head coach of the AHL's Hershey Bears, top minor league affiliate for the Avalanche. He's got a good team, when it's healthy, but last week he had nine regulars out of the lineup, and after a great start, the team's struggled. Injuries to his players have been a big problem, but so have injuries to Avalanche players like Adam Foote, Sergei Gusarov and Aaron Miller, not to mention big-ticket items like Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg. Key Bears like Christian Matte, the team's leading scorer, Dan Hinote and Dan Smith, to name just a few, have been unavailable due to the personnel demands of the big club.

What are you gonna do, Mike Foligno?

"We're going to work as hard as we can through this thing," Foligno says. He's spent a long time during his season-plus as Bears coach cultivating in his younger players the necessity of a "commitment to be the best player you can be that night," planting the seed in their heads that injuries, promotions, slumps, and tough times in general aren't the end of the world. "Youth gets opportunity from change," Coach says.

Born in Sudbury, Mike's family moved to Italy, where Mike spent five or so years, playing goalie on a soccer team. Back in Sudbury at age seven and a half, his father took him to a Sudbury Wolves game. Foligno remembers it well. "A packed house, the hits, the fights, the blood... I said, 'this is the game for me!'" And naturally, he couldn't stand still long enough to be a goalie. "They told me you start off with a bag of marbles, and once they were all gone, then you could be a goalie," he says. "I hadn't lost all my marbles yet."

Instead, he would develop into a junior star for the Wolves, notching 150 points in 1978-79. Foligno was named to the MasterCard OHL All-Time Sudbury Wolves team. He was drafted third overall in the NHL entry draft by Detroit in 1979.

He gets to see a lot of kids the age he was in 1979 these days as the Bears' coach. Players in the NHL today are, we think it's fair to say, a little more concerned with salaries and contracts and all that than players were 20 years ago. What about the youngsters in the AHL, Coach?

"At a time when, yes, the money is very good, the dreams that they have are the same," Foligno says. "These are just kids. When that [dressing room] door closes, you forget about salaries. They want to be the one to score that winning goal, or make the big save.

"A lot of that other stuff clouds the picture."

The picture, to Foligno and his fans, is of a game that's fun to play and to watch when it's played with energy, joy and abandon. Does he continue on in the game, along with so many of his former teammates -- Jay Wells is his assistant in Hershey, Lindy Ruff, Mike Ramsey and Don Lever are behind the Sabres bench, Schoenfeld, Ramsay, Rick Vaive, Seiling, John VanBoxmeer, all have been coaches -- because of any specific influence from their time with the Sabres?

"I wouldn't know, I had my own reasons to go on to coaching, I'm sure everyone else did, too," Foligno says, but he thinks some of it may have to do with their "joy for the game... the love of the game we had in Buffalo." You had to love those teams, to commit yourself to them, whether as a player or fan, because of that ten-year playoff drought. (Foligno bristled when I asked him about his and the team's approach during those ten years, saying, "I don't think it was quite ten years," but, unfortunately, it was.) For a man who did and does pride himself on and attributes his success to his "commitment to compete," it was a difficult time.

"Every time you're in the playoffs, you want to win," he says. "But if you come out of it thinking you've done your best, that's all you can ask.

"We were frustrated... we felt bad for the people in Buffalo, who wanted to see a winner."

They did. He wore number 17.

"Showing up every night is not as common as people think it is," says Bailey. "And not only do you have to show up every night, you have to want to show up." This, more than the jump and the helmet, were what stayed with you after you watched Foligno play. He threw everything he had at the game of hockey, and loved every minute of it. This was true in game 12 in November or game seven in April.

Foligno's name isn't on the Stanley Cup, he's not in the NHL record books, except -- and this shouldn't be taken for granted -- as one of the relatively few players to play 1,000 games, he won't be in the Hockey Hall of Fame. His goal to beat the Red Wings for the Leafs was unforgettable, as was his assist on Perreault's 500th, but he isn't synonymous with any historical hockey event. But while "there weren't many big goals [for the Sabres] in the 80s," Bailey says, "when you score 40, it means you got a lot of little ones."

Are there any players playing in the NHL today that remind Foligno of himself? "That's hard to say," he says. "I don't think I've ever been asked that one before.

"Obviously, it would be one of the best players in the league, the fastest, the most skilled, the toughest..."

Not to disagree, but it takes more than all that dime-a-dozen stuff to make someone my favorite player of all time. "I enjoyed my time in the NHL," Foligno says. So did we.