06/15/2026
When Joey Moss was born in Edmonton in 1963, the doctors gave his mother a simple instruction.
Place him in an institution. Grieve. Move on.
Sophie Moss did not move on. She brought Joey home, raised him exactly like every other child in their family of thirteen, and watched him take his place in the family band — the Alaska Highway Birth-Quakes — as the ukulele player. He was five years old. He always received the biggest applause.
Some people are just built that way.
When Joey's father died in 1977, his mother raised all thirteen children alone. Joey kept showing up. He got a job at a local bottle depot in Edmonton — sorting returns, doing the work reliably, with the kind of commitment that makes the people around you quietly pay attention.
One of the people who paid attention was Wayne Gretzky.
In the mid-1980s, Gretzky was the most celebrated athlete on the planet — rewriting the NHL record books with the Edmonton Oilers, winning Stanley Cups, becoming something beyond famous. He was also dating Joey's sister Vikki. And on cold Edmonton mornings — sometimes forty below — he kept seeing Joey at the bus stop, patient and steady and fully present, waiting for his ride to work.
Gretzky had grown up with an aunt who had Down syndrome. He understood something about Joey that the doctors of 1963 had missed entirely.
He went to Oilers general manager Glen Sather with an idea: give Joey a tryout in the locker room. Let him come to the rink. See what happens.
Sather said yes.
Joey Moss walked into the Edmonton Oilers dressing room in the 1984-85 season, and something happened that no one had planned for.
He changed the room.
His duties were exactly what you'd expect from a locker room attendant — clean, do laundry, manage towels and water bottles, run errands for equipment manager Lyle "Sparky" Kulchisky. Support work. The invisible kind. The kind almost no one outside the building ever notices.
Joey brought everything he had to every single piece of it.
He arrived before practice with more genuine enthusiasm for the day than players earning millions of dollars. He learned every name, every preference, every routine. He remembered every result from the night before and every stat from the season. When the team won, Joey celebrated with a physical joy that filled the entire corridor. When they lost, Joey was still there — warm, steady, exactly the same.
Wayne Gretzky said it simply: "Whether it was a coffee before practice or a big hug after a great win or a tough loss, he would put life in perspective."
He didn't do it by saying anything wise. He did it by being completely, uncalculatingly himself — every single day, in a world that runs almost entirely on calculation and performance.
The Oilers won the Stanley Cup in 1985. Then 1987. Then 1988. Then 1990.
Joey Moss was in that dressing room for every single one.
In 2006, when the Oilers made an unexpected playoff run, Joey was told he needed hernia surgery. He told the doctors he'd do it after the playoffs. He delayed his own medical care so he wouldn't miss a single game.
He also sang. At Oilers home games, Joey belted out O Canada with everything he had — loudly, joyfully, completely unconcerned with whether his voice was technically perfect. The arena responded the way arenas respond when they encounter something genuinely real.
They loved it. They loved him.
In 2015, he sang the Canadian anthem in front of 40,000 fans at Commonwealth Stadium. The crowd went wild. That same year, he was inducted into the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame — not as a footnote, not as a feel-good gesture, but as a legitimate honoree recognized for genuine contributions to sport.
For thirty-six years — through dynasty and rebuilding, through Gretzky's departure and new stars arriving, through victories and long losses — Joey Moss showed up. The same Joey, every morning, with the same warmth and the same commitment and the same complete inability to be anything other than exactly who he was.
Joey Moss died on October 26, 2020. He was fifty-seven years old.
The Oilers, the Eskimos, and the city of Edmonton stopped what they were doing.
And then something happened that had never been written into any plan.
The Oilers started playing "La Bamba" — Joey's favorite song — as their victory anthem after every home win. Every celebration in Rogers Place now carries his name in it, even when no one says it out loud.
Outside the arena, thousands of fans gather before playoff games in the plaza that the whole city calls the same thing.
The Moss Pit.
The doctors in 1963 said he had nothing to offer.
He offered a city thirty-six years of joy. He delayed surgery for his team. He sang the anthem with everything he had and made 40,000 people go wild. He showed up, the same way, every single day, for thirty-six years — and taught a dressing room full of the world's most competitive athletes something about what it actually means to care.
His family said it plainest: "Joey was a remarkable person who taught us to love, laugh, and enjoy life always."
The people who change a room are not always the ones with the biggest role in it.
Sometimes they're just the ones who show up — completely, joyfully, irreplaceably — and never once stop.
