with Sonny Sachdeva of Sportsnet,

Allan Walsh has never been one to go quietly.

It’s in fact his inclination to do the opposite that’s made his name in the game. While others boast client lists with brighter stars and higher dollars, Walsh has risen to become one of hockey’s best-known agents through his unabashed loyalty to his players — and his willingness to wear that loyalty on his sleeve publicly when he feels injustice is afoot, at times becoming a newsmaker in his own right.

But back before he first went to the negotiating table for NHLers, back before he was making waves on Twitter as the sport’s loudest voice on labour issues, Walsh was a young prosecutor in L.A., thrown into the fire navigating murder cases and wondering how his dream of working in hockey had taken such a sharp left turn.

This is how the most outspoken player agent in the game found his way back to the sport he’s long worshipped, in his own words.

Let’s go back to the beginning, before you became an agent — what was your relationship with hockey growing up?

I was born and raised in Montreal and started playing hockey when I was five [or] six years old. I was a goalie. I played throughout minor hockey, played for Dawson College, and played for a little while when I went to McGill University. After McGill, I went to law school in Los Angeles, so I moved from Montreal to L.A.

I went to law school with the idea that I would work somehow in hockey. When I was a kid, I didn’t just play hockey — I wasn’t just a goalie — I was hockey-obsessed. At eight, nine, 10 years old, I was a hockey encyclopedia. My dad had a great influence on me growing up. He would go on business trips, and on every trip he would go into a bookstore and buy a hockey book, and every time he came back, he’d always have one for me. I would literally race to the door, grab the book, go into my room and I wouldn’t come out until I had read the entire thing.

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