P.J. Stock reveals how he handled discrimination from French Canadian players.

Former National Hockey League player turned NHL analyst P.J. Stock was a recent guest of the Spittin Chiclets podcast and during his time on the show he revealed some very interesting details about some of the hurdles he had to overcome early on in his hockey career.

Stock, who himself is from Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Quebec, revealed on that show that during his formative years in junior he faced some discrimination due to the fact that he was not fluent in French, at least not in the context of the game of hockey. Stock, who had learned French in school, had grown up in an English speaking hockey environment and it made the transition to the game in French quite difficult for him.

"I'm 19, I'm a rookie though, and I'm running the powerplay," said Stock with a smile. " So he draws everything up and he says everything in French and I go out and I breakout and I step one way and make a pass... [the coach] blows it down and he throws the puck back in and I go back and do it again."

Stock was of course running the wrong play. He had misunderstood his coach, with the actual instructions being lost in translation, but unfortunately he did not learn from his first mistake.

"I breakout again and I do another pass... so he's like 'what are you doing?' He comes up and whispers to me 'what are you doing?' So he brings the entire team back over to the board, but now he explains it in English. I'm the only guy with my brother."

"It didn't go over so well with some of the teammates at that time.... back then they did not like the fact that that happened. It was crazy."

Unfortunately for some of his young teammates at the time, PJ Stock had not earned the reputation that he has today. For those unfamiliar with Stock, here is a classic clip from his clash with Stephen Peat, still considered by some to be the greatest fight in NHL history.

Unsurprisingly given what we know today, Stock had a rather straightforward way of tackling the problem. Stock revealed that he was threatened by some of those teammates following the incident, and he made sure to single those players out the next time they hit the ice.

"So practice ends with a couple guys almost threatening me... A couple of guys point at me and say 'don't ever make him do that again' after practice they cornered me. I called my brother that day and I said 'Dean don't come to practice tomorrow, I'm going after everyone one of those guys that said something to me.'"

"You know when you go over to do 3 on 2s and you're dumping the puck in? I'm taking a slapshot right at that guy. We're doing 1 on 1 drills, it wasn't over until the guy was on the bench. It was like I'm gonna get destroyed or they are gonna understand me."

So what happened to the guys that had the misfortune of crossing a young P.J. Stock? According to him they didn't stick around for very long.

"We traded a few of them away, and they understood me." 

Today Stock still lives in Montreal and unsurprisingly he has enrolled his kids in the highest levels of French at school, perhaps so they don't run into any of the same problems their dad did. In fact Stock himself can even be seen at times as a guest on French language hockey show L'antichambre, a sign that he has likely sharpened his skills since this incident many years ago.

"I took French in school, my kids take the highest level of French possible."