The annual Hockey Inside/Out Fan Summit will be held this weekend, bringing together Canadiens fans from across North America and beyond who follow the Canadiens on The Gazette’s website.
This year, the HI/O Fan Summit will include two games at the Bell Centre, with the Canadiens playing the Ottawa Senators on Saturday (7 p.m., SNE, Citytv, TVA Sports) and the Pittsburgh Penguins on Monday (7:30 p.m., Amazon Prime Video, RDS).
There will be a meet-and-greet on Friday, starting around 7 p.m., at Hurley’s Irish Pub (1225 Crescent St.), and a charity prize raffle will also be held at Hurley’s starting at 2 p.m. Saturday with money raised going to the Montreal Canadiens Children’s Foundation. Gazette sports columnist Stu Cowan will hold a question-and-answer session with fans at Hurley’s ahead of Saturday’s game and former Canadiens player and GM Réjean Houle, who is now head of the team’s alumni, is also expected to make an appearance.
All Canadiens fans are invited to attend both events at Hurley’s.
Ian Cobb, an 80-year-old retired businessman who grew up in Montreal and lives in Belleville, Ont., organized the first HI/O Summit in 2007.
Cobb is a lifelong Canadiens fan. He didn’t let the fact he’s dyslexic — leading to illiteracy — stop him from becoming successful in business and, with help from a friend, says he learned how to read and write in the comments section of the HI/O website after it was launched in 2006. Cobb only revealed his illiteracy after former Canadiens head coach Jacques Demers announced he had battled illiteracy in a 2005 biography titled Jacques Demers: En Toutes Lettres. Cobb has since published his own book, titled My Headwinds to Freedom: A Memoir.
For health reasons, Cobb handed over much of the organizing for this year’s HI/O Fan Summit to Mary McGill, another huge Canadiens fan who grew up in Montreal and now lives in Ottawa. She was helped by Paul Kinnmonth, who lives in Montreal, and Rob Hing and his wife, Alayne, who live in Calgary. Cobb will still attend this year’s summit.
In 2015, fans who attend the HI/O Fan Summit donated money so that Alex Smidt and his father, John, who live in Regina, could attend the event. The previous year, Alex almost died from meningitis. Alex’s father put up a post in 2014 in the comments section of the HI/O website asking fellow Canadiens fans to pray for his son. Cobb and other fans decided to do more than that and they were able to raise enough money to bring Alex and his father to the 2015 HI/O Fan Summit after the boy had recovered from meningitis.
“What Ian Cobb and that group at HI/O did was absolutely outstanding and unbelievable,” Alex’s father said about being able to attend the HI/O Fan Summit and having his son meet his favourite player, P.K. Subban, after the game that year.