The best nights, of so many very good nights, were the ones when Larry Brooks roamed the press level and the dressing room of Madison Square Garden, hands in his front pocket, notebook in his back pocket. The poker face was intact, and it was necessary, because tucked in that notebook was The Story.
He had The Story, of course. He knew it. The players and the team’s brass knew it. All of the hundreds of potential sources who could’ve filtered him The Story knew it. His competitors sure knew it. Most of all, thousands of hockey fans hungry for news knew it, and knew that if there was something to be learned about the Rangers, the Devils or the Islanders, there was one place to find out about it.
“The Post has to be not just a first-read, but the must-read,” Larry Brooks often said. “We all do what we can to make it so. And this is my small part of that.”
He was right about most things, and wrong about that last one: he was a huge, larger-than-life part of it, all across the 38 years and two separate tenures that he worked here. That reign over the hearts and minds of the Post readers he fought for and fretted over ended Thursday morning, when Brooks died after a brief battle with cancer.
He was 75. He leaves behind a son, Jordan, daughter-in-law, Joanna, and two grandchildren: 14-year-old Scott and 12-year old Reese. His wife, Janis, died in 2020.
“He was around the crease all the time,” said Dave Maloney, who broadcasts Rangers games for MSG TV and first met Brooks when he was a 19-year-old rookie defenseman for the team and Brooks was cutting his teeth at the Post. “He was a Hall of Famer at what he did and more often than not he tapped it in. On the journey to reach the crease he might get body checked and hit in the nose, maybe got his jaw broken. But he always got there.”
Most of that is metaphorical. The Hall of Fame part is real. In a career filled with capstones, one of the brightest was in 2018 when he received the Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award from the Hockey Hall of Fame.
“For the last three decades, no one covered a sports beat in this city better than Larry did on the Rangers,” Post Executive Sports Editor Chris Shaw said. “Well before the Hockey Hall of Fame enshrined him, Larry had already earned a place among the legends who have graced the pages of The Best Sports in Town.”
The men he covered recognized that, too.
“I like to think that I was a guy who could change the momentum of a game when I came on the ice,” said Sean Avery, the immensely popular left wing who played parts of six seasons for the Rangers. “Brooksie could do that with the swipe of his pen. The guys that really understood playing for the Rangers all had a good relationship with Brooksie because he loves hockey players.”
Said James Dolan, executive chairman and CEO of MSG Sports:
“Besides the stellar job that Larry did covering the New York Rangers, what few people know is that he and I would meet on occasion and he would give me his unabashed opinion on how the franchise was doing and what we needed to do to win. This never appeared in any of his columns, but I found his advice to be invaluable and will miss it dearly.”
Tellingly, one of his highest-profile feuds came with former Rangers coach John Tortorella, with whom Brooks regularly skirmished during much of Tortorella’s time as Rangers coach from 2008-2013. The two had long ago reconciled but Tortorella reached out to Brooks this week to check in, a call Jordan Brooks said meant the world to his father.
Brooks was also a happy advocate for the players and issues he cared most about. He fought in his column for years to push the Rangers to retire Brad Park’s jersey and let it hang in the Garden rafters alongside Brian Leetch, a fellow No. 2. It was Brooks who dubbed Henrik Lundqvist “King Henrik.”
Hockey was his abiding professional love, and it is what he’ll best be remembered for. But early in Brooks’ first tenure with the Post he was assigned to cover the Bronx Zoo Yankees of 1977, taking over the beat after the All-Star Game, “and in about five minutes he proved he could hang in there with the most veteran baseball writers,” Steve Jacobson, who covered that team for Newsday, said in 1996.
A few weeks earlier, moonlighting for a talk-show shift on the radio while subbing for a young broadcaster on WMCA named John Sterling, he was handed a slip of paper just before midnight which he first refused to believe but then shared with all of 570-AM’s listeners: Tom Seaver had just been traded from the Mets to the Reds.
“And for the next hour,” Brooks said in 2017, “I had to listen to one caller after another accuse me of being a liar. By the end, they just wished I was.”
In 1982, his fascination for the inner workings of hockey pulled Brooks across the Hudson River to become the Devils’ vice president of communications, a job he held for 10 years. Five years later, Lou Lamoriello arrived as general manager and thus began a 38-year friendship that was often collegial, occasionally contentious but always rooted in mutual respect.
“What never changed, from day one, was the personal part of our relationship,” said Lamoriello, who ran the Devils from 1987-2015 and the Islanders from 2018 through last April and who sat at the Brooks family table in Toronto the night Brooks was honored by the Hall of Fame. “One thing you always knew about Larry was that he’d tell it like it is.”
His colleagues knew another side of Brooks, too: one who grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side as a ferocious Rangers and Yankees fan, who devoured the New York tabloids the way most kids his age crushed cheeseburgers and milkshakes. He held in high esteem the writers who’d come before him, and was determined to make certain the ones who came after would carry the baton with similar devotion.
When the Post’s present Rangers writer, Mollie Walker, was handed the impossible task of following Brooks on the beat, her first call, smartly, was to Brooks, hoping he’d empty his brain (and perhaps his phone directory) for her. But Brooks put a surcharge on such priceless information: he told Walker to first read the NHL labor agreement, cover to cover.
“I wasn’t being a hard-ass,” he explained. “But if you’re going to cover this game, you’d better know all of the game.”
Much to his delight, a week later Walker called him back and said, “Ask me anything.” He did. She knew every answer. And thus was born a quintessential mentorship, as well as a close friendship between two writers separated by 50 years but bonded by a common commitment to doing the job right and a passion for hockey.
“He was the best hockey writer of the past 50 years,” said Mark Everson, for many years his fellow hockey writer at the newspaper, forever his friend. “He said he was lucky to get to The Post, but The Post was even luckier to have him.”
Everson recalled his friend as a fierce advocate for access for reporters — echoing the mission of one of his newspaper heroes, Dick Young — and recalled when he and Brooks were covering the 2003 Stanley Cup Finals between the Devils and the Ducks. Brooks overheard Ducks/Disney boss Michael Eisner talking about the team’s parade route to be used after they won Game 7 in New Jersey.
Brooks, one more time, had The Story, and so the next morning did the Post. The Ducks went berserk, denying it, accusing Brooks of inventing a controversy. But then a kid working at a college radio station released a tape of Eisner saying exactly what Brooks had written. Devils coach Pat Burns plastered that on the bulletin board.
“Larry wrote it,” Burns crowed, “and Larry’s always right.”
The Devils won Game 7. Eisner canceled his parade.
To the end his columns were still alive and crackling; to the end he fought the good fight calling Park one of his all-time favorites. By the end, though, he had another favorite hockey player. “I told Larry to send me Scott’s schedule,” Lamoriello said, laughing, “because I wanted to see what Hockey Grandfather Larry looked and sounded like.”
Avery has another wish:
“His grandson plays, and I hear he’s pretty good. I hope he can read this and understand his grandfather holds a lot of weight in the game.”
At the Post, too.
— Additional reporting by Dave Blezow