A Masshole in Full

If you grew up here, you know a Robbie Concannon: Tough. Funny. Big-hearted. Hard-partying. Frequently flirting with danger, or incarceration, or worse. But Robbie Concannon dodged the fate most guys like him meet. The unlikely tale of how the craziest kid from the neighborhood turned himself into a bona fide folk hero.

Robbie washed up in Charleston in 1995. He’d finished college at Salem State and played 20 pro games in the American Hockey League, the rung right below the NHL, before getting sent down to the South Carolina Stingrays of the East Coast Hockey League. The ECHL used to be where hockey careers went to die, a league where long bus rides and empty rinks inspire a sinking feeling that your best years are behind you. Robbie knew this, and he was ready to hang it up. But then he talked to an old buddy, Mark Bavis, a former BU standout from Roslindale who was playing for the then-three-year-old Stingrays. Bavis told him, “If you come down here, you’ll never leave.”

At the time, hockey was a novelty in town, and the games regularly drew over 10,000 fans. Simply by being himself, Robbie instantly became a huge star. He wasn’t the best player, or the toughest, or even the first from Boston (Bavis and his twin brother, Mike, were already there). But Robbie was an entertainer, and the fans couldn’t get enough of the Irish kid from Beantown. He made funny faces at them. He scored big goals and did big dances in front of the other team’s bench. He tried to bite a guy’s finger off during a fight. “He’d tease his curly hair up into an afro,” says teammate Jared Bednar, who now coaches the Stingrays. “Once, he smoked a cigarette during warmups.” Robbie cost the team a fortune in pucks—he would stand at the end of the rink before games and flip them over the glass to the kids.

His second year, the team won the Kelly Cup championship. Robbie was everywhere. He was on billboards; he was on the cover of the program; he did a milk mustache ad. The southern fans didn’t understand much about the game (the team tutored them on icing and offsides), but they liked the fights and they loved Robbie. “We’ve had two huge blows of wind since I’ve been in Charleston,” says Jack Hinkle, a fan who became a friend. “One was Hurricane Hugo. The other was Robbie Concannon.” The fans started calling him “Coo Coo Concannon,” or just “Coocs.” When the souvenir stand, spotting an opportunity, began stocking “Coo Coo” T-shirts, it sold out the entire run in one night.

The local newspaper covered all his antics, and reported that he was bombarded with invitations from fans who wanted to take him out for his birthday. Robbie would instruct the rink announcer to introduce him as hailing from “North Charleston,” and the arena would go wild. After games, he’d have the announcer tell the fans to meet him at the Wild Wing Café down by the old slave market, and they’d come out in droves and watch him put on a show.

The huge personality, the classic Masshole behavior—they might have led Robbie toward nothing good if he’d stayed in the neighborhood. But in Charleston he found a kind of salvation. That’s because Robbie did it all, all of it, completely sober. The wake-up call came 15 years ago, after a late-night brush with the law. “We were waiting in line to buy food at the yuck truck after the bars had closed,” says David Cunniff, an old Southie friend who is now assistant coach of the Worcester Sharks. “Robbie thought it would be funny to cut the line and steal some guy’s sandwich and play keep-away.” Naturally, a fight broke out and Robbie was arrested. “I was in jail handcuffed to some guy,” Robbie explained to me, “and he asked what I was in for. I told him I tried to beat up a guy with a turkey, bacon, and mayonnaise sandwich. He told me he’d tried to kill his wife.”

Robbie realized some things had to change. The court informed him that with his next arrest he could expect a nice, long sentence. So he stopped drinking, cold turkey. “If I hadn’t quit,” Robbie told me several times, repeating the old maxim, “I’d be dead or in jail.”

Even without the booze, he was still Robbie Concannon, and Robbie Concannon stories still always end the same way. “I think it’s safe to say,” says Brendan Clark, lead anchor for the local NBC affiliate, “that he has the most seen penis in Charleston history.”

 

Charleston is a city where the men dress as if they might have to go golfing or drinking at a moment’s notice: polo shirts, pastel shorts, Croakies, flip-flops, with a nice seersucker suit in the closet for weddings. The city has an insular, fraternal feel; a place of old money and old southern history, of secret gardens behind secret gates.

Robbie dresses as if he might have to come off the bench for the Celtics. He wears a T-shirt and track pants every day, specifically the tear-away kind, in case he needs to strip down quickly (though it’s frequently been noted that he always keeps his sneakers and socks on). He’s 38 now, and after all those years in the minor leagues, where trouble-makers operated without the protection of face masks, his face is full of interesting furrows from countless stitches. His hairline is higher, and his curly hair is now cropped close to his head, but he’s still lean and ripped. A lot of people say he looks like Lance Armstrong. After nearly 14 years in Charleston, though, his attitude and accent are still the same, still very Robbie.

“The other day I was in the park with my dogs and I told this kid to pick up his dog shit,” he explained shortly after I arrived in town. “He flashed me the peace sign twice. So I smacked him twice. The cops came to my house. I don’t know how they knew where I lived. We had a little talk.”

I can tell you how they knew where he lived: Everyone in Charleston, from the debutantes to the homeless guys in the park (Robbie has learned all their names and gives them money and clothes), knows Robbie. “He’s a natural, larger-than-life entertainer,” says Andrew Savage, a bigtime Charleston attorney known for representing accused Al Qaeda operative Ali al-Marri (and occasionally Robbie, “for stuff that I usually deal with for clients between the ages of 15 and 20,” Savage says). Savage’s staid, wood-paneled law office looks like the setting for a John Grisham novel. It’s also the setting for a popular Robbie Concannon story: Once, in the middle of the day, he hopped onto a table to show a secretary “the difference between a man and a woman.” The display sent another employee, who is now an FBI agent, diving under a desk.

When I asked Robbie to help me understand why he’s always getting naked, he said, “It’s an impulse.” Then, impulsively, he got up and vanished. “If you spend an hour with Robbie, you only see him for 10 minutes,” says Brett Marietti, who was Robbie’s teammate and roommate during Robbie’s five years with the Stingrays. “Don’t ask me where he goes. We’d go to the mall and he would disappear, and then we’d walk by Old Navy and he’d be in the window wearing the mannequin’s clothes, or no clothes.” When I ask his family about the nudity, they have no explanation. “As far back as I can remember, he’s been naked,” says his brother, Brendan. “I’ve seen him naked more than I’ve seen myself naked.”