CANONSBURG, Pa. — No kid grows up dreaming of becoming a team historian, but there were early signs that Bob Grove’s life was trending in that direction.
Let’s start with the bulging black duffle bag. In the pre-Internet era, before a treasure chest of hockey information was just a few keystrokes away, sports writers brought reference books with them to the arena. Grove, who covered the Penguins for the Washington Observer-Reporter from 1981-97, arrived at the rink with the only bag requiring its own Dewey Decimal System.
There were team-issued media guides for the regular season and playoffs. Corresponding material for that night’s opponent. He also lugged around the annual NHL Guide & Record Book that was as thick as Kevin Stevens’ Boston accent. Then, there were binders filled with pages of statistical data Grove tracked on his own — written meticulously by hand in pencil on graph paper — including a separate one containing only Mario Lemieux content.
Decades later, they sit tucked away in Grove’s basement, the Dead Sea Scrolls of Penguins hockey.
“Grover did not travel lightly,” said WDVE sports director Mike Prisuta, a former newspaper writer and frequent Grove travel companion. “If laptops and information at the click of a button were ever invented for anyone, it was for Grover. He was researching that stuff when mere mortals gave up and said, ‘I’ll try looking it up again later.’ ”
Forty years after covering his first NHL game, Grove remains the keeper of the hockey flame in Pittsburgh. He hasn’t been a beat writer in ages. His decade’s long work as a Penguins’ Radio Network host ended in 2015. But Grove continues to ply the public with unique insight and obscure stats across multiple platforms, including his Twitter feed that has 27,400 followers.
We’re talking about a 62-year-old man who’s charted every faceoff Sidney Crosby has taken in his career, breaking them down by individual opponents. That’s suddenly relevant information seeing as the Penguins’ captain has taken his second-most, regular-season draws (465) against Travis Zajac, who he figures to face a few times in the opening-round series versus the Islanders. For those wondering, Crosby has won 238 of those duels for a 51.2 percent success rate against Zajac.
Grove’s encyclopedic knowledge and perspective makes him a frequent guest on sports talk shows in Pittsburgh and around the state. He’s not an official team historian, but is often introduced as one. Phil Bourque, the Penguins’ radio analyst and two-time Stanley Cup winner, has Grove on speed dial.
“There have been times when I’ve had something crazy go through my head,” Bourque said. “I don’t have time to look it up, and so I’ll call him and he’ll say, ‘Give me 20 minutes.’ Sure enough, in 10 minutes, I have it ... He has stuff you can’t find anywhere else.”
74 of the 185 regular season shutouts by the Pens (40.0%) have been recorded by Quebec natives. MAF had 44 of those.
— Bob Grove (@bobgrove91) May 8, 2021
As Internet databases grow and the hockey world shrinks, the need for team historians might die out in coming years.
Until then, Grove will continue to spend 90 minutes the day after Penguins’ games plugging data into a laptop that contains 92 files, plus 51 other folders that hold other valuable “nuggets,” as Bourque calls them. Grove will continue to spend two hours on nights before games writing his preview notes that begin to appear on his Twitter feed about an hour before faceoff.
“It’s something I enjoy, and it’s a way to stay close to the team,” said Grove, who serves as a regional Comcast vice president of communications. “I figured, ‘Why shouldn’t I keep doing it?’ I’m glad I have because I get a lot of joy in sharing information with people. I’m happy there’s some interest.”
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TOM REED / DKPS
A page from Bob Grove's binder dedicated to Mario Lemieux's in-depth statistics. He kept all the Penguins' stats by hand from 1988-98.
Grove sits in the tidy second-floor office of his suburban home explaining how his statistical pursuits and historical interests took flight. The walls are not filled with sports memorabilia or pictures of him in the Mellon Arena press box typing away on deadline. A Penguins wastecan and a teddy bear clad in a black-and-gold hockey jersey are the only clues of a lifelong bond with the team.
But as Grove swivels in his office chair, the tales flow in rich detail like Ralphie Parker supplying narration to “A Christmas Story.” He’s 11 years old again, and walking into the old arena for the first time on Dec. 26, 1970. The ticket is a present from his parents.
Grove mentions the brightness of the rink, the sellout crowd, the speed and toughness of the players, the “underlying beauty of the game.”
“It’s my first game, and it’s against Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito and the defending Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins,” he said. “Wally Boyer had a couple of goals for the Penguins and they beat Boston, 4-2. You know what it’s like to watch hockey on television and then you see it live for the first time? It opened up a whole other world to me. I had been a huge baseball fan. Roberto Clemente. The Pirates at Forbes Field. After I saw my first hockey game, that was it. I was hooked.”
The only other Lagace to play in the NHL was D Jean-Guy, who played 106 GP for Pens from 1968 to 1975 in 2 stints. He also played for Buffalo and debuted for Sabres here in Pgh on Oct. 10, 1970 -- Buffalo's first NHL game.
— Bob Grove (@bobgrove91) May 8, 2021
Grove followed the Penguins on his Zenith portable radio in the days before the local team was regularly on television. His heroes, Jean Pronovost and Dave Burrows, moving left to right on his radio dial with Jim Forney on the call.
He remembers that magical night in the spring of 1972 when the Penguins won their final regular-season game and qualified for the playoffs thanks to the Flyers' stunning loss to the Sabres.
“Gerry Meehan scores a goal for Buffalo on a long-distance shot against Doug Favell with just seconds left,” Grove said. “I was listening to the Flyers’ broadcast when it happened. I ran out of my bedroom telling my dad, ‘The Penguins made the playoffs! The Penguins made the playoffs!’ ”
Grove developed an interest in writing, attended Penn State and landed a job with the Observer-Reporter covering the Penguins. He traded loyalty to the club for objectivity to his readers. Besides, there were no positive spins for teams like the 1983-84 Penguins other than their abject failure earning them the right to draft Lemieux.
The budding superstar offered the franchise hope, but beat writers from small-town papers couldn’t chronicle the day-to-day news. Grove would go from covering a Game 7 one night to designing Page 1 the next night and spending the weekend reporting on high school spring sports. Road assignments were infrequent and rarely glamorous.
“The night of Frank Pietrangelo’s ‘save,’ me and Grover drove to Jersey on the day of the game to save a few bucks,” Prisuta said in reference to Game 6 of the 1991 series against the Devils. “We blew a fan belt or something. Something went wrong with the car and we were stuck in a garage in Jersey and I’m MF-ing the world. ... The whole time, Grover is like, ‘We’re gonna get there. We’re gonna get there.’ We ended up getting the car fixed and pulled into the team hotel just as the team buses were leaving. We ran inside, threw our stuff in the room and got to the game and saw one of biggest saves in Penguins history.”
By then, Grove had realized the multi-tasking responsibilities of a suburban sports writer put him at a disadvantage. He couldn’t be around the team every day. That’s how the deep dive into statistical analysis began in 1988. It enabled him to write informed columns and notebooks without access to players and coaches.
Grove combed wire services and city papers for the kind of complete accounts fans today take for granted. He charted every stat available, breaking them down by periods, arenas, weekends or weekdays and what opposing goalies were in net. He sent fax requests to the NHL to get composite boxscores. There was no “delete” button in his operation, only a pencil eraser. He kept everything by hand until 1998.
After starting a separate binder for Lemieux, he did the same for Jaromir Jagr. Nowadays, he has digital folders for Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Jake Guentzel that he keeps on his laptop. His old handwritten files also have been scanned into his computer.
“I can’t even imagine the hours and hours and hours he spends to have the most abstract and bizarre stats that you can ever imagine,” Bourque said. “It’s not an arduous thing in his mind. It’s not something he has to do, but it’s something he loves.”
With one keystroke, Grove pulls up a file that shows the Penguins are 89-9-3 when both Crosby and Malkin score goals in the same regular-season games.
Grove refuses to download programs that allow stats to auto-populate into his files. Typing them manually lets him spot trends he might otherwise miss.
One of his favorite stats naturally involves the brilliance of Lemieux. From his rookie season (1984-85) to the time of his first retirement in 1997, the Hall of Fame center only once went more than two regular-season games without logging a point. It happened March 20-24 in 1997, a span of three games.
“What he puts out on Twitter is so valuable,” Bourque said. “I use it all the time. I know our TV guys use it, too. We’re all lucky to have a guy like Grover around, and we acknowledge his work on the air. He makes our jobs a lot easier.”
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BOB GROVE
Bob Grove presents a baby-faced Jaromir Jagr with a plaque for being named the Penguins' rookie of the year in 1991.
Claire Grove is a patient woman. Fortunately for her husband, she also has plenty of hobbies to occupy her free time, including oil painting and gardening.
Married in 1986, Claire has two grown children — three if you count Bob, who disappears for hours each night to turn raw data into Penguins historical content. Grove has written a book on the franchise, and would love to author another on the city’s hockey origins dating to 1895.
“Sometimes, I do reach a point where I’m sick of hockey,” Claire said. “It’s hockey, hockey, hockey all the time and forever. But I know how much he enjoys what he does and how much it means to him.”
As the Penguins make a push for a sixth Stanley Cup, Grove thinks most fans appreciate the remarkable age in which they are living. Since Lemieux’s arrival, no city has witnessed such an extended period of hockey success.
There have been low moments, often at the hands of the Islanders in the postseason. While Grove expects the Penguins to advance to the second round this year, the historian in him can’t shake the memories of 1975, 1982 and 1993, when David Volek’s overtime goal in Game 7 of the Patrick Division final denied Pittsburgh a chance at a Cup three-peat.
“They are the Penguins’ playoff kryptonite, there’s no question about it,” Grove said of the division rival that owns a 4-1 postseason series advantage. “I know history has nothing to do with it, but when you have been around as long as I have and it’s the Penguins and the Islanders, you get nervous.”
Malkin missing his 217th regular season GP tonight. Of course it's crazy to think up hypotheticals where a player never misses a GP, but just for fun. . . Geno now 63rd all-time in NHL scoring. At 1.18 pts/game, he could have had another 256 points. Would put him 26th.
— Bob Grove (@bobgrove91) May 1, 2021
His favorite moment in Penguins history is an easy one — May 25, 1991, sitting in the press box in Bloomington, Minn., watching Lemieux raise the franchise’s first Cup.
“It was a 6-0 game after two periods,” Grove recalled. “There was a point in the second intermission when I thought, 'The Penguins better hope the North Stars don’t score a couple of quick ones or it could get interesting.’ You look back on it now and realize, ‘That’s an absurd statement.’ It’s like you are right there, but it’s the longtime fan in you that’s like, ‘Something could still go wrong.’ ”
His second-most memorable moment perhaps best illustrates his depth as an historian. It’s April 9, 1993, a date that might not leap to the minds of Penguins’ fans. It was the night Pittsburgh thrashed the Rangers, 10-4, at Madison Square Garden near the end of the historic 17-game, regular-season win streak. Lemieux, who had been compiling “almost fictional numbers” in his return from cancer, scored five goals and added three assists. The remarkable performance led New York fans to give Lemieux a standing ovation.
“They are the two-time defending Stanley Cup champions who are riding this amazing win streak,” Grove said. “Mario goes off for five goals and eight points and is in the process of blowing past Pat LaFontaine for the scoring title. The Hockey News writes a headline before the playoffs something like, ‘Who Can Beat These Guys?’ To me, that game in the Garden was really the height of the Penguins."
The franchise twice has moved Grove to tears. There was the night in 1997 when Lemieux scored what many thought at the time was his final home goal against the Flyers’ Garth Snow in Game 5 of a first-round playoff defeat. The other occasion came six years earlier as the franchise honored the passing of “Badger” Bob Johnson on Nov. 24, 1991.
“They held a ceremony before the game against the Devils and they gave everyone (battery-operated) candles in the crowd,” Grove said, his voice cracking at the memory of the moment. “I mean, the tears were flowing.”
Claire wishes her husband was still more involved with the team. She knows the value of his life’s work, the joy of being around the players and in the press box. Grove believes the Penguins receive tremendous coverage in the region and hopes "my little contributions" add to it.
He pulls out a framed picture of himself as the Pittsburgh chapter president of the Professional Hockey Writers Association in 1990, presenting an award to Jagr as the team’s rookie of the year.
“Look at how young Jags looks there,” Grove said, admiring the photo.
Time waits for no man, and nobody knows it better than a hockey historian — even one who has aged more gracefully than Jagr.
Grove still can hear the echoes of Forney calling those five Penguins’ goals in a 2:07 span of the third period in a 1972 game against the Blues. He still can hear Pierre Larouche’s shots clanging off the pipes in Game 7 of the 1975 playoff series against the Islanders before Ed Westfall broke Pittsburgh hearts in a 1-0 loss. He still can hear his 13-year-old self deliriously shouting the good news coming out of Philadelphia.
“The Penguins made the playoffs! The Penguins made the playoffs!”
The ice will be bright again for Game 1 of the upcoming series against the Islanders at PPG Paints Arena, the “underlying beauty” ready to reveal itself amid the chaos. And 20 miles southwest of Downtown, Grove will sit in his living room, armed with 40 years of institutional knowledge, providing statistical analysis for fans on social media.
The black duffle bag is long retired, all of its content transferred to a laptop that helps connect the hockey world one keystroke at a time.
