Tampa Bay Lightning’s co-founder and former player Phil Esposito talks about his tough journey
Phil Esposito, a former professional ice hockey player from Canada and currently the co-founder of the Tampa Bay Lightning in the National Hockey League (NHL), has talked about everything he went through en route to his team becoming an NHL success.
Former NHLer and a Hall of famer, did a lot of hard work when he had to make people that there could be an ice hockey team in Florida and got the team playing in the world’s most famous and biggest ice hockey league.
The 70-year-old talked about the hard times he had to go through and it even cost him his marriage when he was working for them. He tells that it was very tiring and exhausting and it all paid off at the end, as he said while talking to NHL.com,
"I had to convince a lot of people ... it was grueling. It cost me a marriage, it cost me every penny I ever had. But it was all worth it. That's the way I look at it”.
The former centre thinks that founding an NHL team was the greatest thing he ever done in his life as he started out something which was very new and a lot of people thought he could not do it but he proved all of them wrong an got his dream come true
by not only making the team, but making it successful as well. Esposito added,
"It was my idea right from the get-go. It was probably the greatest thing I ever did in the game of hockey. I was out of my element, and I started a brand-new franchise in a state that everybody thought I was nuts to try and start it in. And we got
it accomplished."
There were also a lot of people who were against the move of his team being in the Southeast Division of the Eastern Conference and people from New York, Boston, Canada were very much against his idea and thought he would fail but they proved everybody
wrong with their performance and made in to the playoffs in the fourth season.
Just after a decade, Tampa Bay Lightning went on to win the Stanley Cup, which is the most prestigious trophy in the ice hockey world.
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