“I’m glad I’m still alive.”
That’s what retired NHL enforcer and 2016 all-star hero John Scott had to say several days after falling through the Cedar Lake ice near his home in Traverse City, Mich., this past weekend.
Scott posted to his Instagram page a video his wife filmed of him on his dock going over what happened with his family. He has since gone into more detail about the harrowing experience.
“It was a nice day, the sun was out so I thought I’d go and shovel it off and skate maybe that night or the next day,” Scott told Chris Kuc of The Athletic (subscription required). “So I went down there with a couple of shovels, put the headphones on, stepped onto the ice and boom, right through.”
The 6-foot-8 Scott, who tipped the scales at 260 pounds during his playing days, saw there was an ice fisherman out on the lake so he figured the ice was thick enough for him to walk on and for his family to skate on.
In this type of setting, it doesn’t take long for a simple error in judgement to quickly become a life or death situation.
“I couldn’t get up on my dock the first three or four attempts because I was soaking wet — I was just drenched,” Scott explained. “I was like, ‘OK, do I scream for the ice fisherman but how is he going to get me?’ My kids were playing up at the house and they weren’t going to hear me screaming with the noise up there.
“I tried to hoist myself up but I couldn’t do it and there was no way I could get to a part where I could walk up because at the end of my dock it’s probably 20 feet deep and I couldn’t get around to where the beach starts, so I was like, ‘either I get up on the dock or I don’t get up at all.’ I managed to find a somewhat solid piece of ice to put my foot up on and kind of hoist myself up luckily.”
Scott said the experience scared him enough to where he and his family will be heading to the local rink for theirs skates for the remainder of the winter.
“It’s funny, you’re not scared right away, you’re just like panicked, but then once you get out you realize like, wow, that could have gone a lot worse than it actually did,” Scott added. “I was lucky enough to be close to my dock and I could kind of grab onto it after I came up and work my way up on the edge and climb up. It was pretty sketchy.”
Scott officially retired from professional hockey late in 2016.
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