Lou Lamoriello has gone from playing pond hockey in Johnston to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Providence Journal / GLENN OSMUNDSON

The news came last week that Lou Lamoriello has been named to the Hockey Fall of Fame.

The report said that he has the longest tenure in the NHL as a general manager with the same franchise. It said that his New Jersey Devils have won three Stanley Cups under his direction. It said that he was the general manager of the United States team in the 1998 Olympics. It had all the highlights of his glittering career.

It told us the facts.

But it didn’t tell us the story.

Lamoriello’s professional hockey life has been spent in New Jersey, but this is a Rhode Island story, a story with roots that go back to the old R.I. Auditorium on North Main Street, back when that old barn was hockey’s sacred shrine around here, back to another era when the Reds were our professional team. Back to when Lamoriello was a kid in Johnston with hockey dreams, growing up in a world of pond hockey, a world so very, very far from the big rinks of the NHL.

A Rhode Island story.

One that began in a time when the Hockey Hall of Fame might have been located on the other side of the moon for a kid from Johnston. Back when hockey was, in all the important ways, a Canadian game.

“There was a pond across the street from our house,” he says, “and I began skating with my brother. I probably was about 11.”

So it began.

It was a different era, certainly, and in the manner of the times Lamoriello played two sports, hockey in the winter, baseball in the summer. He never played summer hockey, never played on a travel team when he was a kid. He didn’t make the varsity hockey team at La Salle until he was a junior.

His father was in the fish business, but he had gotten to know some of the Reds’ players of the era. So Lou Lamoriello was around pros at an early age, people like Harvey Bennett, Johnny Bower and Fernie Flaman. In a sense, he was getting introduced to hockey culture, even if he didn’t know it at the time.

And in high school, he both practiced and played in the Auditorium, for that’s what just about everyone did back there in the late 1950s and ’60s. And so what if sometimes that was at five in the morning and the building was too cold? So what if it was winter?

That was hockey in Rhode Island.

He went on to play both hockey and baseball at Providence College, captaining both in his senior year. He played summer baseball in the Cape League. And when it was over, he became a math teacher at Johnston High School and also the PC assistant hockey coach. In 1968, he became the head coach, and what was better than that? The hometown kid who had made good. The kid from Johnston who was a college coach about a slap shot away from where he had grown up.

Then in the early ’80s, his world changed.

It began when the Rev. Peterson, the PC president, asked him to be the athletic director.

Athletic director?

He didn’t want to be an athletic director. He was a coach.

The first year he was both, then became just the athletic director, a move that was a bit of a surprise.

There was the perception then that Lamoriello might be too much the rink rat to be able to run an athletic program that genuflected to big-time basketball program. What was he going to do, buy some more pucks and tell everyone to forecheck? So much for perceptions.

Not only did he hire Rick Pitino, bringing him on the campus surreptitiously in the dead of night, he provided as much support as any basketball coach could ever want. He gave coaches the resources to win, and made sure all the athletes graduated. Who could have asked for anything more?

He ran the athletic program with his personal stamp. He arrived at work early and stayed late, watching over everything, missing nothing, as successful an athletic director as he had been as a hockey coach.

And then in May of 1987, he went off to New Jersey to become the president of the Devils.

A big decision?

No question.

“But the biggest decision had been to leave coaching to become athletic director,” he says. “We had started Hockey East. We had things going well. My whole world had been hockey.”

His whole world also had been Rhode Island.

But he took the same drive and passion that once had made him a college star in two sports, and the same work ethic that he once had learned from his father, who used to go to work at four in the morning, and took it to the NHL. So what if he had never been a professional player? So what if he really had had little to do with the NHL, whose roots were primarily Canadian?

He was an instant success.

The first thing he did was name himself the general manager.

The second thing he did was lead his Devils into the playoffs for the first time in franchise history. It was the beginning of a stretch that has seen the Devils make the playoffs ever since, save for two years.

And from the beginning he did things his way, even taking over the coaching reins twice, once for the better part of the 2005-06 season, and another time for the playoffs in 2007. Then again, he’s never been indecisive. He does things his way, and he does them very well. Has done them so well that he’s been named to the Hockey Hall of Fame, hockey’s highest honor.

And such a long, long way from the Johnston of his childhood.

“I’m a product of Rhode Island,” says Lou Lamoriello.

Yes, he is.

One of the best sports stories we have.

breynold@projo.com