‘A special feeling’: With Tyler Johnson’s No. 9 Chiefs jersey headed to the Spokane Arena rafters, local legends reflect on the honor’s significance

The same season the Spokane Chiefs retired Ray Whitney’s number, the team also ran a bobblehead promotion with his likeness.

Among some of Whitney’s friends, he hasn’t been able to live it down.

“It’s a pretty good-sized one, too,” the former Chiefs forward said. “My friends say it’s life-sized.”

Whitney played at a listed height of 5-foot-10, but he also played perhaps the most storied career among anyone to wear the Chiefs’ jersey. During the Chiefs’ 1990-91 season that culminated in their first Memorial Cup title, Whitney scored a franchise single-season record 185 points, including 67 goals. He was the Western Hockey League Player of the Year that season.

What followed was a 1,330-game NHL career during which Whitney scored 385 goals and assisted on 679 others for 1,064 career regular-season points. He won a Stanley Cup title in 2006 with the Carolina Hurricanes.

Ten years later, the Chiefs honored him by retiring his number, 14, and hanging it in the rafters.

It is the only number there – but that changes Friday.

Before the Chiefs play the Kelowna Rockets on Friday night, they will raise another, No. 9, to honor Tyler Johnson, the Spokane native who also won a Memorial Cup – in 2008 – and then won back-to-back Stanley Cups with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2020 and 2021.

The ceremony is set to take place before puck drop.

While Whitney won’t be there, he said he’s excited that it’s happening.

“I think it’s great,” Whitney said. “It’s been pretty lonely up there.”

While there are no official requirements for a number to be retired, Whitney said he likes what seems to be those of Chiefs managing partner Bobby Brett: win a Memorial Cup, win a Stanley Cup – and, he joked, not be all that tall.

“If you look at the history of the Chiefs, there’ve been some great players, some big players,” Whitney said, “and the two up there are 5-foot-10 or under. So maybe there’s a height requirement.”

Johnson – who is listed by his current team, the Chicago Blackhawks, at 5-8 – is about to join an elite fraternity among athletes in Eastern Washington and North Idaho. Johnson is a Spokane-area native and lives during the off-season in Coeur d’Alene, which has made him a particular favorite locally.

Other local athletes who have experienced the retirement of their number highlighted the honor that it is to first have their name and number displayed in an arena and also pointed out what a privilege it continues to be.

It is not a one-and-done experience, they said. It is something they think about frequently.

It is a recognition of their personal achievement but also that of the teammates who played with them, and it deepens the bond that they already felt so strongly with the organization or university that they played for.

“I try to approach it with a level of respect and gratitude,” said Jack Thompson, the WSU quarterback whose No. 14 remains just one of two retired by the school. “I fully understand this stuff doesn’t happen all the time. And so, I need to treat it accordingly.”

A reminder and a validation

Washington State didn’t wait long to retire Jack Thompson’s number, a process Thompson said was pushed forward by Keith Lincoln.

Lincoln played running back for Washington State from 1958 to 1960 and then, after a professional football career, returned to Pullman and worked in the alumni association.

Thompson – who set a number of career and conference records during his four-year career at Washington State, from 1975 to 1978 – said some people at the time wanted a five-year wait time, but Lincoln lobbied against that, and Thompson’s number was retired right after his last season in Pullman.

“If anyone knew Keith Lincoln, you’d know he was a pretty convincing figure to deal with,” said Thompson, the third overall pick in the 1979 NFL draft, who now lives in Seattle. “He just felt like the circumstances were so unusual.”

In that context, too, Thompson said he also represented those football teams that “weathered the storm together” with four coaches in four years.

At that time, Mel Hein’s No. 7 was the only number retired by the WSU football program, and no one else’s has been retired since Thompson’s was.

Just a few miles away, in Moscow, Idaho, John Yarno played football for the Vandals at the same time Thompson was playing for the Cougars. The Vandals have retired five football numbers; Yarno’s is among them.

Ed Troxel was the Vandals’ head coach then.

Yarno remembers Troxel asking him after his freshman year what kind of legacy the young lineman wanted to leave.

“I said I wanted to be in the same class as Jerry Kramer,” Yarno said, referring to the Pro Football Hall of Famer whose No. 64 is retired at Idaho.

Yarno was the Big Sky Offensive Player of the Year in 1976 as a center, the only lineman to earn the distinction since it was first awarded in 1974. Yarno was taken by the Seattle Seahawks in the fourth round of the 1977 draft, and the University of Idaho retired Yarno’s No. 56 that same year.

Now Yarno, a season-ticket holder, sees his number up next to Kramer’s at every football game he attends.

“(Following Kramer) was a big deal,” Yarno said. “I was just a guy from Spokane who got passed over by both the Washington schools and wasn’t highly recruited. I went to Idaho and worked my butt off and ended up having success. … It was validating. It validates your effort.”

Eleven years after Yarno’s graduation, John Friesz became the third Idaho player to win the Big Sky Offensive Player of the Year award. He did so three times, in 1987, 1988 and 1989.

His jersey, No. 17, is also retired: Idaho did so in 2006. Wayne Walker (53) and Ken Hobart (9) are the other two Vandals football players whose numbers are no longer worn.

Friesz, who lives in Hayden, said it was a fun experience for his family but that to him it wasn’t so much the ceremony that stood out.

“I think about what it means, more than anything,” Friesz said. “It’s fun to see my name and jersey in the rafters, but it has nothing to do with what I did. It reminds me of those teams, those guys and those systems and the wins.”

Idaho went 9-3, 11-2 and 9-3 with Friesz as its starting quarterback. He won the Walter Payton Award as the best offensive player in I-AA football his senior season.

Friesz said his friends still tease him about his number being retired and that he’s “not that big of a deal.”

“I was completely a pocket passer, completely dependent on the guys blocking for me,” he said. “It was a collective effort (with) coaches and teammates.”

Whitney didn’t have blockers in the same way that Friesz did. But he had enforcers like Kerry Toporowski who gave him more space on the ice, and he had other future pros like winger Pat Falloon to share the other team’s attention.

“When my jersey went up,” he said, “I was very cognizant of how it got up there.”

‘A special feeling’

Yet an entire team doesn’t get its number retired, just individuals.

In some cases, they name entire facilities after someone, as is the case for Michael Roos at Eastern Washington. The Eagles retired his No. 71 football jersey in 2009 and a year later renamed their football field after him. Roos and Katherine, his wife, pledged $500,000 to help Eastern install its red turf in 2010. The field was renamed as a tribute.

“It’s an odd thing to have someone offer (to retire your number), because it means no one else gets to wear that number,” Roos said. “But it’s also a special feeling to know you were the last person to wear that number, and you are who it’s going to be remembered for.”

Roos played 10 years in the NFL with the Tennessee Titans and still lives in Nashville. Every year when he returns – as he already did before the jersey retirement – he sees his name and number. Roos’ No. 71 and Bob Picard’s No. 84 are the only two retired so far by Eastern.

“It’s on the stadium wall,” Roos said of his number. “To have it sit up there is special.

“You definitely have to take a short pause and relive it for a split second and understand what it means. It’s there, it happened.”

Earlier in 2009, Eastern Washington retired Rodney Stuckey’s No. 3 basketball jersey, two years after he finished a two-year career at Eastern during which he averaged 24.4 points per game. That remains the program’s career record.

Stuckey is the only player from the program to be selected in the first round of the NBA draft. Until his, Eastern hadn’t retired any men’s basketball jersey numbers. When Stuckey was playing, there were no jerseys to see on the Reese Court walls.

He said he hopes the presence of his inspires current players that “anything is possible.”

“It’s just cool,” Stuckey said. “It is something for those guys to push themselves and want to be able to have their names up in the rafters. If I was one of those kids, that’s what I’d be thinking.”

For Thompson especially, though, the honor is also a call to represent well not just the program but the whole of WSU.

That was on his mind, he said, when he chose to stick around for his senior season rather than going pro early, and at the time people close to him reminded Thompson that long after his career was over, people would remember him for staying.

“For me, (seeing the number) is a point of pride. It really is, when you think in terms of the hundreds if not thousands of players who’ve played there, great players,” Thompson said. “And I think for me, not only is it a point of pride, but it’s also a responsibility behind that.

“To the greater public, I think of representing the program. That’s always been something in the forefront (for me).”

Now the honor will be bestowed on the hockey player Johnson, whose number no Chiefs player will wear again. His will become a jersey that will serve as a reminder of what a kid from Spokane can achieve.

“I think he’s going to have a great day,” Whitney said. “It’s a great moment for him.”