Worcester Railers give Marlborough's Bobby Butler a great sendoff for wonderful hockey career
WORCESTER — Bobby Butler has done so much, and seen so much, in hockey that he can be hard to stump.
Tuesday night, though, he had a hard time coming up with an answer to the question — What would you have done with your life if you weren’t a hockey player?
“Really, I never thought about it,” the Marlborough native said. “I’m not that much of a sports guy. I grew up hanging out in my driveway, shooting pucks, asking my parents am I going to baseball, am I going to hockey? And it was mostly play hockey, play hockey.”
Butler was honored at the Worcester Ice Center by his final pro team, the Worcester Railers, who sponsored a retirement party that drew a capacity crowd. The audience included dozens of family, friends and fans as well as Worcester Mayor Joe Petty, who gave Butler a ceremonial key to the city.
Hockey may not be a disease, but it can be incurable.
Butler’s career had seemingly ended in 2019. He spent a full season with the Hartford Wolf Pack, playing closer to home than he ever had before. At 32, he was the oldest player on a team that was not very good. Butler then stayed in the game coaching youth hockey, running the Junior Railers program and eventually serving as a volunteer coach at Holy Cross.
With the Railers trying to work through a roster crunch, Butler came back for a one-time appearance on Jan. 2, 2022. In that game, Worcester beat Reading, 5-3, with Butler contributing a goal and two assists. He returned for a second game on Jan. 21 and wound up playing in 17 games before the season ended.
“The first one when I came back,” he remember of his return, “I thought of it as a great opportunity to get back on the ice. Then, after I played that one game and had a fun time, it kind of sucked me back in.”
He was a full-time forward last season. About halfway through the winter, he decided that being a player, a husband, the father of three and a youth hockey coach and administrator was a tough thing to make work.
“It was definitely one of the hardest, one of the busiest years of my life,” Butler said.
The sheer numbers on Butler’s résumé are a bit overwhelming.
He played four seasons of Division 1 college hockey at New Hampshire and went 61-60-121 in 153 games. There were 130 games in the National Hockey League with four teams — Ottawa, New Jersey, Nashville and Florida. Butler went 20-29-49 with those teams.
He was an AHL standout, also with four teams — Binghamton, San Antonio, Milwaukee and Hartford. In 357 American Hockey League games, Butler scored 157 goals and added 112 assists for 269 points. During the 2010-11 season, as a pro rookie, Butler scored 13 goals in 23 playoff games to help the Senators to a Calder Cup championship.
He played 89 games in Europe and scored 17 goals, then came out of retirement to play parts of two seasons with the Railers, for whom he totaled 23 goals.
That all adds up to 659 pro games, 217 goals and 195 assists.
Oddly enough, even though Butler was the oldest player on the Railers last season, he had the highest penalty minute total of his career with 50.
“I actually got a little feisty this year,” he said, “I had to go into the locker room with my (youth) team, had to let my kids know — do as I say, not as I do.”
Butler won championships before he turned pro and played for the 2018 United States Olympic team. After Binghamton captured the Calder Cup in the spring of 2011, he got to take the trophy home to Marlborough.
“We had a great group,” Butler said of those Senators. “Being my first year, I had some ups and downs, but being able to hoist that — and find it floating at the bottom of my parents' pool — was definitely special.”
Butler was impressed by the caliber of hockey he found at the ECHL level
“It is really good hockey,” he said. “It’s fast with guys trying to move their way up.”
While Butler had to occasionally remind his players this season to do what he said, not what he did, they would be well advised to see the bigger picture of a hockey professional who was once where they are now and went on to make the game his life’s work.
—Contact Bill Ballou at sports@telegram.com. Follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @BillBallouTG.
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Worcester Railers honor Marlborough's Bobby Butler after stellar career
