He started with a 1980 Pontiac that cost $75, but now that he's in the money there's still no red sports car in his garage. “Everybody thinks I drive fairly crazy,” Tim Thomas says of his driving style.



Tim Thomas, the all-star goaltender for the Boston Bruins who are currently battling the Vancouver Canucks for the Stanley Cup, grew up in Flint, Mich., which — in its heyday — was one of the largest auto manufacturing cities in the United States.

That’s where, at 16, he bought his first car — a 10-year-old 1980 Pontiac Phoenix for $75.

With over 100,000 miles on it, he says it was all he could afford.

“The driver’s side door didn’t open and the passenger side door didn’t close,” he said. “So one of the first things I did was go to the junkyard and get new door handles and put them on.”

“It was a four-speed — you know, four-on-the-floor — and everything that was wrong with it was something I could work on and so that’s why I chose it.”

It was also a sound investment. Thomas says he drove the Phoenix for six months and sold it for $150, doubling his money.

Entrepreneurial even then, Thomas and his father — a car salesman — bought and sold close to 20 cars while he was between the ages of 16 and 18.

He says his dad took him to auto auctions where he bought most of his cars, noting that over the years his father had developed a very good read on an engine just by listening to it run.

“I bought ’em, fixed ’em up and sold them. No engine work, or anything like that, but I’d fix the door handles and clean out the interior. By the time I went to college, I’d worked my way up: the last car I sold went for $3,700 bucks.”

Thomas says that being from Flint (both grandfathers worked in the industry; one as a mechanic for GM), he had lots of help and over the years became more mechanically inclined.

“I learned as I went. I changed a couple of (valve) cover gaskets. I changed the transmission with my grandfather, although he was the one who knew what he was doing. I was more the muscle than anything.”

When it came to choosing a first car, practical considerations were foremost: as an aspiring pro goalie, there were teammates and a lot of hockey equipment.

“I wanted enough room in the car to put friends in,” he said. “At the same time, I was checking out this little Toyota truck but it just had a small bench seat and you could hardly squeeze in two people. I needed to take my high school teammates to practice — so I needed something big enough to put hockey equipment and people in.”

Laughing he adds, “At the time, it seemed a lot bigger. You know, when you’re young . . . ”

It’s hard to believe that Thomas, 37, only completed his first full season in the NHL five years ago after stints in the minors and in Europe.

Having won the Vezina Trophy, he’s now in the elite class of great goaltenders (he also just ended the regular season with the best save-percentage since the early Eighties, when the NHL started keeping track of that particular statistic).

But it’s been a long and mostly uphill road from Flint, Mich., to Boston, Mass.

As a teen, he says he was shooting for the Olympics (he ultimately won silver at the 2010 Games) and “still had the dream to play pro hockey.” But his immediate goal was to get a college scholarship. Attending college would be a family first.

With the auto industry in decline, well-paying jobs with GM were scarce (made famous in Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger and Me, which illustrated the impact of GM’s plant closures and subsequent job losses on Flint).

“Unless you had somebody who was in the union leadership, you weren’t getting in so that was never a goal of mine. And I didn’t know if I was going to end up a car salesman, because my dad was in it and my uncles were in it,” Thomas says.

“Actually, I wanted to go to college so bad because I didn’t want to be a car salesman and that was really the only option that you could see from Flint, Mich.”

And a scholarship was the only way Thomas said he could afford to go to college: money was tight. In addition to buying and reselling cars, he also pitched products door-to-door; exhibiting a lot of initiative for a teenage boy.

“It was fun — I mean, for me anyway. We didn’t have a lot of money but it never felt like it. It was — we were; I hate to say we were poor, but it’s true. So we were poor but we were standing on our own two feet so we didn’t depend on anybody.”

Thomas says he’s always believed his goals were attainable through hard work. (His four-year, $20-million deal signed in 2009 would seem to prove his point.)

Down to earth, Thomas comes across as practical, even when discussing “cool cars” he admired as a teen.

His favourite from his “buying-and-selling” days was a 1976 Cutlass Supreme Brougham.

“It was like dual exhaust and that thing was pretty fast. But it cost me five dollars in gas to get to work and five dollars to get home — and that’s back when gas was 76 cents a gallon — so I turned that one over fairly quick because of that.”

His sensible reputation takes a bit of a hit when it comes to his driving, however.

Goaltenders are known for their amazing reflexes and almost-psychic ability to read the play up ice — skills you might think translate easily behind the wheel.

Thomas, laughing, says his friends have a contrary opinion of his driving skills: “Everybody thinks I drive fairly crazy.”

So what is he driving these days, now that money is no object?

Despite his millions, he says he has a four-door Ford F-150 and his wife drives a Ford as well. Their Jeep stays at their home in Colorado.

No bright-red Italian sports car (yet), although when it comes to foreign cars he acknowledges driving a humble three-cylinder Nissan during his stint overseas.

Proving, resoundingly, that the car doesn’t make the man. The goalie pads do.