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John Scott thankful to be alive after falling through ice on lake
Former NHL All-Star John Scott was able to fill an entire book with the wisdom he was able to absorb throughout his improbable 10-year run in professional hockey. But it wasn’t until a few years into post-retirement did he learn maybe his most important lesson of all:
Don’t complete the first shovel on a frozen lake by yourself, man.
Scott detailed a harrowing incident in The Athletic earlier this week, revealing in a conversation with Chris Kuc that he stepped off his dock on in his property in Cedar Lake, MI, expecting to clear the snow for a skate for his family and instead plunged into the freezing cold waters.
With no one around to help, he said it was struggle to pull his 6-foot-8, 260-pound frame out of the water. He estimated he was submerged for about a minute.
From Kuc:
I couldn’t get up on my dock the first three or four attempts because I was soaking wet — I was just drenched. 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.
After returning to his house to towel off and thermoregulate, Scott went back to the dock to show his family — and his 78.5 thousand-person following on Instagram — what had happened.
Scary day at the lake #coldtub #dodgedabullet #happytobealive #gaurdianangel
A post shared by John Scott (@jhs_32) on Jan 13, 2019 at 6:06pm PST
Scott said the incident shook him up enough to decide on forgoing skating on the lake until next winter.
“We’ll go to the local rink for our open skates. That was enough to scare me away for this winter.”
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