For two Icedogs, friendship is more than a decade old

Every superhero has his sidekicks.

They’re the committed cohorts who are always around. They see human and they see hero. They see success and they see susceptibility. They laugh when it’s funny and lift when it’s not.

And apparently top-five NHL draft picks have them, too.

From the cul-de-sacs by the coast to the white ice of Walter Brown Arena, brothers Steve and Jack Greeley have long been the dynamic duo alongside Ryan Whitney, the Boston University defenseman taken fifth overall in June’s pro draft.

But before the international tournaments, the NCAA playoffs or the NHL drafts, there was Steve, Jack and Ryan. Held together by hockey since they were all nearly 10 years old, the trio has forged a friendship built on respect and bolstered by the decade’s worth of hilarious narratives that defines their friendship growing up about a mile apart in Scituate.

Now Steve and Ryan are at BU, living their dream together as Terriers, while Jack is a few hours west, skating as a first-year winger for the Lord Jeffs of Amherst College. Still, the song remains the same, with each innumerable verse telling tales of competition, camaraderie and, always, high comedy.

Their story begins in Scituate, when Ryan was the big kid in the distinguishably yellow helmet, and Jack was playing for his dad’s South Shore Kings team that featured some of the best pre-high school players in the region, including current Terrier Brian McConnell.

At the time, Whitney was a slow-skating, goal-greedy centerman, hungry for the net but without the polish and poise to fill his already oversized frame. What he lacked in offensive skill, though, he more than made up for with his huge reach and exceptional vision, so it didn’t take long for coach Steve Greeley, Sr., to realize Whitney’s calling wasn’t in goal scoring.

‘I distinctly remember Ryan’s first day as a defenseman,’ the coach said. ‘He was playing center and had seven or eight real good chances down low. I don’t think he got one good shot off. So after the game, I spoke with him and asked him if he wanted to try playing defense.’

It worked, and Whitney hasn’t left the blue line since. That’s where he was in 1997 when the Kings traveled to Quebec City, playing on the pond of the old Nordiques, and taking home a world championship.

It’s also where he was when people started to take notice of him as more than just a big kid.

‘When he was younger, he had that tall, goofy look,’ Steve said with the authority of being two years Ryan’s elder and remembering the days when he would go to his brothers’ Kings practices to get in some extra skating.

‘You could tell if he grew into his body he would have a lot of potential. I remember when I was 15 years old telling my father and when he was 13, Ryan wasn’t the best defenseman I remember telling my father that Whit was going to be a pretty good player, and he was going to be better than all of those kids that were once better than him.’

Apparently Steve would make a good talent scout. Or agent. Or maybe just a good big-brother figure.

‘I looked up to him,’ Ryan said. ‘When I was 13, he was already playing high school hockey at the high level I hoped to play at. I watched him then and looked up to him a lot.’

Today, the image of Ryan Whitney looking up to Steve Greeley is a difficult one to grasp, leadership and character aside. ‘He was already about three inches taller than me [when we met], so I’ve always been looking up to him in that fashion,’ said Steve, whose five-foot-seven-inch frame gives about nine inches to Ryan’s tower-like six-feet-four-inches.

The size was there before the skill, but by the time Ryan arrived at Thayer Academy for his high school days, the two were beginning to converge in much the same way as his friendship with the Greeley brothers was beginning to tighten. Ryan was the first to Thayer, winning an Independent School League title in 1998 before Jack came of age and Steve came over from Milton Academy the following season.

Each put up impressive numbers in their time together Steve’s 20-27-47 junior season was the best of the bunch but if you ask the trio, their time together at Thayer wasn’t about points, penalties or ice time. Sure, hockey was the thing they all loved to do, and it was the thing that held them together, but in the years before Ryan left for Minnesota and the U.S. National Team Development Program, there was one overriding, off-ice factor:

Fun.

‘Steve and Jack’s family belongs to a nice golf club down [in Scituate], and the boys are very competitive. So they would just go out and kind of walk out onto the golf course and start playing,’ remembered Ryan’s mother, Susan Whitney. ‘Obviously, Ryan’s not a member so they weren’t there legally.’

‘We try to sneak him on, even to this day,’ added Jack. ‘He’s a huge kid. Doesn’t exactly blend in, and he wears these black Reebok golf spikes; they look like basketball shoes or something. So we go up on the first tee, and I’m there hoping no one notices us teeing off and we can just get out there and play.

‘He’s actually a pretty good golfer, but as he’s getting ready to hit the ball, the pro walks behind us. I got a little nervous about it, and Ryan tops the ball for about 15 yards. I almost died.’

They got out, though, and by the eighth hole, Whitney had found his game. In fact, he’d found the cup, too, with his tee shot on the 200-yard par-three at Hatherly Country Club. Barely into high school, he had his first ace, albeit one that would have to remain up his sleeve.

‘They couldn’t tell anybody,’ Susan Whitney said. ‘That was a bummer. They came home all excited, and I think they did tell maybe one or two people, and somebody bought him a hot dog or something. But he couldn’t put it in the record books or anything, which is very frustrating when you’re competitive.’

Competitive is barely the word to describe the intensity when Steve, Jack and Ryan get some free time outside of hockey season. ‘We’ve played every sport together,’ Jack said. From midnight street hockey to pool basketball to backyard Wiffle ball to what Steve Sr. describes as ‘Hockey East-style’ tennis, if a game’s got a winner, they’ve tried it.

Sometimes they played two sports in the same season, which proved to produce constant fodder, especially when the boys were about to hit the hardwood.

‘One of those hockey rides home, Ryan and I were talking so much trash about the next day’s [basketball] game,’ Jack said. ‘You know, he’s the big rebounder, I was the point guard. We’d been giving it to each other all night.

‘The next day, we were playing a pretty close game and I got a steal. I was going in all by myself for a layup and someone just trips me. I fall straight on my face and cut my lip.

‘I look back, and Ryan’s there with this big grin on his face. I was going to kill him. To this day he says he didn’t do it on purpose, but after all of the trash talking, I was ready to kill him.’

And don’t think Steve was left outside the wars over wins.

‘One time we got in a fight,’ Ryan said. ‘[Steve and I] had a game that day, and we were playing a board game in school during a free period. He ended up beating me, and we were both in bad moods so we ended up getting so mad that we played the whole [hockey] game mad at each other.’

Everyone’s got a story about the trio. Jack gets under Ryan’s skin by calling him ‘Gramps,’ because, according to Jack, ‘he looks like an old man. He’s white, he’s hairy and those sideburns just don’t work for him.’

Steve recollects laughing hysterically when a fuming Ryan rammed the car behind him while backing out of a parking space. McConnell says they still find the same things funny they did when they were 10. Steve Greeley, Sr., remembers when newcomer Frantisek Skladany came to play tennis with the boys and was ‘never hit with so many tennis balls as he was that day in a half-hour.’

The Greeleys’ younger sister tells a story of astonishment dating to when her dad’s business client saw a sleeping giant flopping over the Greeley’s couch and when he asked who it was, she was shocked he didn’t recognize her idol, ‘Whit-dogg.’

And Bob Foley, their former coach at Thayer, has the story of losing Ryan at a post-game McDonald’s stop in New Hampshire. Well over six-feet tall at the time, they found him in the children’s area, playing in the pit of balls.

‘We always had good times at Thayer,’ Ryan remembers.

The time of Steve and Jack’s lives came this summer, when they accompanied their long-time friend as he became the first American player taken in the NHL draft.

‘It was awesome. We go there, went right to Bobby Orr’s suite at the hotel. I just walked right in like I was a star,’ Jack said.

The trio traversed Toronto for a night or two of their stay, but for the rest of the time, Whitney couldn’t be bothered by being star-struck. While others wandered looking for Wayne Gretzky, Whitney sought the hotel squash court.

‘He has things in such perspective,’ Jack said. ‘We’re up there and he’s having so much fun, but he has to go to all these meetings all day. He kept telling us all he wanted to play squash with me and my brother instead of go have some press conference by himself. He’d rather be with us.’

And there he was, with the Greeley brothers and his family as the Pittsburgh Penguins called him to the podium.

‘It was a thrill for me,’ Steve said. ‘We were sitting right with his family at the draft where he was called from. It was fun to watch. Only so many kids go in the top five, top 10, so to watch him go through the whole process was a lot of fun for us.

‘It wasn’t really a surprise. Ryan had told us a year before that he wanted us to be the kids that came to the draft with him.’

Of course it was no surprise to Steve, whose choice to attend BU played a part in Ryan deciding the same thing a few months later. Since Whitney arrived, they’ve won a Beanpot together, re-established BU among college hockey’s elite and been impact players each time they play.

In addition to providing each other with support only a close friend could lend.

‘He always asks me those questions,’ Steve said specifically of the lingering discussion of when Ryan will bolt for the big time. ‘He’ll talk to me about kids that left early, or kids that didn’t leave early, and we’ll talk about the pros and cons. I know he’s happy where he is now. With any good player, there’s going to be options eventually, but when those come, I’m sure we’ll talk about it.’

That’s probably a good idea for Ryan Whitney. After all, Steve Greeley is one of the guys who sees more of Clark Kent than he does of Superman.