Many Winnipeggers have warm memories of Dale Hawerchuk. I did not have the privilege of knowing the man. But the one brief exchange I did have with him stuck with me ...

It was 2005. The Juno Awards were in Winnipeg and if I recall correctly, Hawerchuk was playing at an alumni game in Selkirk, featuring musicians and formed pro athletes.

I was the music critic at the Free Press at the time. As a kid who grew up watching the Jets in the 1980s, I jumped at the chance to interview Hawerchuk for a preview story.

This was nine years after the NHL left Winnipeg - and six years before it returned.

Anyway, Hawerchuk was as polite and generous as you would expect him to be.

At the end of the brief telephone interview, I took off my reporter hat and told him how much it meant to watch him in the ‘80s.

His reaction surprised me...

”Oh, come on,” he said.

I was confused. I repeated my appreciation.

He said he thought I was putting him on.

I assured him I was not.

I was stunned. Here was this larger-than-life figure from my youth, expressing genuine surprise that ... he was precisely that.

So here’s the deal: I don’t like it when reporters act like fanboys. People in my job interview well-known people all the time. The vast majority are no more interesting than anyone else.

Quite a few are far *less* interesting than people who are not public figures.

But almost all of them carry themselves with some degree of awareness of how much space they occupy, even when they feign humility or are genuinely nice.

Hawerchuk was not putting on some sort of humble retired athlete act.

I got the sense at that moment in time - before the NHL returned, before he coached in Barrie and mentored a young Mark Scheifele - that he legitimately was not aware of the place he held in Winnipeg.

There were a lot kids like me in Winnipeg in the 1980s. Thousands of them have expressed thoughts similar to my own today.

We all wanted that guy to succeed. Winnipeg didn’t have many wins in that decade, and I’m not talking about the hockey team.

I guess the biggest win of all is to be remembered fondly.

-30-

Gah. Typos in two tweets.