by Ken Dryden
By Saturday night, of course, Steve would be four-days broke. “I loved him so much, I paid his way through junior,” says Vally with a laugh. He has a story about visiting Steve the following summer in Lakefield: “I’m driving down his street, and I know it’s his street because I’ve got his address. But all I see are these mansions right on the lake. Mansions! Then the street ends; it’s a dead end. So I turn around and go back to town. This is before cellphones, so I call him from a pay phone. ‘Hey Vally, what are you doing?’ he says. ‘I saw you drive right by.’ Well, I get to his house and I lay into him. ‘Monty, you’ve got to be kidding me. You’re rich. You never had five bucks in your pocket and your dad’s got a Porsche Boxster.’ It was the most beautiful house I’d ever seen, with this beautiful dock and a beautiful boat, and I’m just laughing and crying at the same time.
“Money never mattered to Monty,” Vally explains, “so he never thought it mattered to me. He wasn’t cheap. He’d give you his money—if he had it. He just never had any.”
Sunday morning, the team went to breakfast at Perkins—sometimes directly from the Magic Lantern, sometimes directly from a “date”—and told stories about the night before. A win on Saturday meant they deserved that Saturday night, and deserved that Sunday morning, too—and having that Saturday night and Sunday morning meant that they couldn’t wait for another tough week of practice ahead, in order to win on Friday and Saturday and have that Saturday night and Sunday morning again. “It seemed we could do this forever,” says Vally.
Conditioning skates at the end of practice, extra circuits in the gym: when you lose, you need to do more; when you win, you can’t do enough. If the energy dropped a bit, there were ephedrine pills—they weren’t illegal at the time—and vials of ginkgo biloba. “We got the ginkgo from one of our teammates, who got it from his dad, who got it from some Japanese importer. It was our secret stuff, our super pill, and before a game we’d all stand around the garbage can in the middle of the dressing room, yell ‘cheers,’ and throw it back.”
When you win you can do stupid stuff, and nothing seems stupid, and nobody cares. “During warm-up,” Vally recalls, “we’d all have our helmets off, our hair would be flying as we went around the ice. We’re sweating. We’re looking at ourselves in the glass. We’re cool. And we all had visions of playing pro hockey.”
The Otters couldn’t stop winning. They went 18–0–2 in their final twenty games and made the playoffs. In the first round, they played the London Knights, one of the league’s best teams. On their roster were future NHLers Tom Kostopoulos, Rico Fata, Krys Barch, Chris Kelly, Alex Henry, and John Erskine; Jay Legault, Steve’s friend from Peterborough, was the team’s top scorer. The Knights won the first three games in the best-of-seven series; the last two crushingly in overtime. But then the Otters won, and won again. “The Knights thought we were done,” says Vally, “and we just weren’t.” Erie won the sixth game at home in overtime, then lost the seventh in London.
Even though they had lost the series, Steve had never won like this before. He had never felt like he mattered so much.
—
The 1998 NHL draft was held on June 27 in Buffalo. With his December birthday, 1998 was Steve’s first year of eligibility. The year before, Jay had been drafted by Anaheim in the third round, and Ryan Ready by Calgary in the fourth; a year before that, Colin Beardsmore was picked in the seventh round by Detroit, Chad Cavanagh in the ninth by Washington. Nick wasn’t drafted. Vincent Lecavalier was the 1998 draft’s first overall pick. Other prominent first-round selections that year were David Legwand, Brad Stuart, Manny Malhotra, Alex Tanguay, Robyn Regehr, Simon Gagné, and Scott Gomez. In later rounds, Mike Fisher, Mike Ribeiro, Brad Richards, and Brian Gionta were also chosen, and in the sixth round, Andrei Markov, Pavel Datsyuk, and Steve’s North Bay teammate, Chris Neil. In total, 258 players were selected. Of them, only 29 would play more than 571 NHL games, the number of games that Steve played in his career. Steve went undrafted.
For Steve, it was another Peterborough summer teaching at the hockey school, runs at the Lift Lock, workouts in the gym, field parties at the Shack, and deep, deep conversations about who-knows-what with Keats and the rest of the guys; then it was back to Erie. Several of the Otters’ veterans had “aged out” of junior hockey, including Vally and the team’s captain, Colin Pepperall. The new veterans—among them Shane Nash, who was the new captain, and Steve—would need to fill their roles on the ice and off. The team also had a new coach, Paul Theriault. Theriault had won two OHL championships with the Oshawa Generals, and had gone to the Memorial Cup final each time. Sherry Bassin, the Otters’ manager, had also been Theriault’s boss in Oshawa. Now Theriault was behind the bench in Erie, having not coached junior hockey for ten years.
The Otters never got on track the whole 1998–99 season. The new veterans weren’t leaders in the way the old ones had been; Steve wasn’t a good enough player to be “the guy” that the team needed; and Theriault seemed not entirely happy to be there. The team scored about the same number of goals as they had the year before, but allowed many more against. They missed Vally. As for the bus rides, Steve, now a veteran, sat at the back in the Pit, chewing tobacco, playing euchre, laughing his laugh.
Erie made the playoffs and lost in five games to Guelph in the first round. Steve had improved during the year, but he was getting older. His junior eligibility was up, and he was beginning to seem like just another player. But he still wanted to play. He wasn’t ready to move on to a Canadian college. That would mean playing without the dream; nobody made it from there.
The 1999 NHL draft was held on June 26 in Boston. The first overall pick was Patrik Štefan, and then came the Sedins, Daniel and Henrik. Tim Connolly, who had played in the Quebec tournament, was selected later in the first round, as was Martin Havlát. Ryan Miller was chosen in the fifth round, as was Steve’s opponent with the Marlies and the Otters, Tom Kostopoulos; Henrik Zetterberg was the 210th overall pick. The 1999 draft class has been described as one of the NHL’s worst ever: 272 players were selected; only 112 of them played even one game in the NHL; only 19 played more than Steve’s 571 games. Again, Steve went undrafted.
Yet Steve would still get his chance. The Peterborough Petes had a spot on their roster for an overage player, so the following season, Steve returned home, this time to play.
—
In December, the Petes held their annual skate with the fans. For local kids, Peterborough’s Memorial Centre is like Montreal’s Bell Centre; the Petes are their Canadiens. The kids come to the arena that day, put on their skates, step out onto the ice, and then their pain begins. “I was so nervous,” Adam Babcock recalls. A kid at the time, he stood, looked around the ice, looked around the building, and with nothing else to do, began to skate.
The moment was not much more comfortable for the Petes players. They were teenagers, and beneath the bravado most of them were shy and awkward, except around girls. A few minutes into his solo skate, Adam felt someone come up beside him, bend forward, and ask him how he was. It was Steve. They started to skate, Steve doing most of the talking, Adam nodding, then Adam talking a little bit himself. When it was time for Steve to skate with other kids, he stayed with Adam. “I went from feeling small to feeling like the biggest guy out there,” Adam remembers. He was seven.
A few days later, somebody in the Petes office called the Babcocks and asked if they were interested in billeting a player. They had done it before but their kids, Adam and his sister Amanda, who was five, were now at an age where they saw everything and took in who-knows-what—and every billeted player, whether he was on the Petes or not, was a stranger. The Petes office had been inquiring about a place for Steve. Mary and Terry Babcock said yes.
The Montadors’ house on the lake was only thirty minutes away, but with Steve’s schedule, and with Peterborough’s unpredictable and often sudden winter storms, the Petes thought it better that he live in town. Steve was also nineteen and had lived on his own
for most of the past three years. He had become independent. It was easier this way.
If there wasn’t a game, Steve ate supper with the Babcocks; or if practice kept him late, there were leftovers in the refrigerator for him to warm up when he got home. When he was around, which was much of the time, he did what the family did. He watched TV with Amanda, who was about a quarter his age. Amanda liked cartoons; Steve didn’t. Steve learned to get to the TV first to control the remote. Amanda learned to get to the TV even earlier, turn on her cartoons, and hide the remote in the freezer. She knew he would never get up to change the channel.
On weekends, he would go bowling with the family, or push the kids on the swings. He played ball hockey with Adam on the family’s driveway, and sometimes his teammates would come by and join him and Adam in a game they called “rebound hockey.” Steve would stand in front of the net, a tennis ball on his stick, his teammates next to either post. They would put Adam in goal. Steve would shoot, and if there was a rebound, his teammates would pounce on it. “If they scored,” Adam recalls, “it was a point for them. If I covered it up, a point for me. It was torture really, but Monty always kept a watch out for me.” If he could see that Adam was getting frustrated, he would catch the eyes of his teammates and they would back off a little. “And if I stopped one,” Adam recalls, Steve would shout like an NHL announcer: “Oh, and Babcock makes the save!”
Steve continued to visit the Babcocks every summer, even after the Montadors had relocated to Toronto and Steve had made it to the NHL. During his last season in Chicago, Steve invited Terry to go on a dads’ trip (later these became moms’ and special parent and friends’ trips as well) with the Blackhawks. He had taken Paul on a similar trip a few years earlier. To a hockey parent (or friend), the only future more impossible to imagine than having a son make the NHL is the chance to share that future with him on the road; to live the life themselves. Terry travelled with Steve to Florida for games against the Panthers and the Lightning, then back to Chicago for a game at the United Center. Terry had known Steve for more than a decade by this time, but almost entirely in the environment of Peterborough, and within his own household. Now he’d be seeing Steve as a member of a big-time team that had won the Stanley Cup the previous year with a roster of big-time stars. How would Steve be?
“It was like he wanted to take me by the hand and show me his world,” Terry says. “He wanted me to be a part of everything he was doing.”
“He had this amazing gift for making you feel that you mattered to him,” Mary recalls. “He would come back in the summer, he had all this money, it wasn’t like he couldn’t do whatever he wanted. But he hung out with us. He did it because he wanted to.”
Adam is now twenty-three. His games of rebound hockey with Steve on the driveway turned him into a goalie. Recently, he got a new mask. On the top of it he has written “Monty”; on the bottom, “1979–2015.”
—
The Petes were a mediocre team. But again, Steve was getting better. And again, he was getting older. When the 1999–2000 season ended, his junior career was over. He was twenty years old, and facing the same choice he had the year before. He could take the scholarship credits he had earned from his junior teams and go to a Canadian university, play a few years, keep improving, and hope. He had taken some courses at Mercyhurst University the second year he played in Erie. But he didn’t want to go to college. He still had his hockey dream. Besides, going back to school would prove that he was wrong and Paul was right.
Calgary’s general manager, Craig Button, had seen Steve play as he had scouted the OHL’s stars the previous years. Button knew that there wasn’t much difference between a fifth-round pick and someone like Steve. Neither is good enough at twenty to play in the NHL, and both need time to develop. They would both have to work harder than they had ever worked before in order to make it, and not everyone is willing to do that. Button liked Steve’s spirit, and offered him a contract. Steve signed.
—
In February 2000, in a Petes game, at a moment that didn’t seem to matter at the time and in a way he later wouldn’t remember, Steve got his second concussion.
CHAPTER NINE
Dr. Karen Johnston realized early in her neurosurgical studies that, as she puts it, “you begin to understand better how the brain works by knowing how it doesn’t work when it’s broken.” She began her career at the Montreal Neurological Institute (part of McGill University) around the time Steve suffered his second documented concussion, in 2000. Her focus was the “traumatized brain.”
Brain trauma wasn’t about concussion at the time. Concussion was a small, peripheral field dominated by observation and anecdote, not by science; it was driven by team doctors in all sports, most of whom were orthopedists because most sports injuries involved joints or bones. The doctors were beginning to see more clearly the effects that concussions had on their players, but because brain X-rays didn’t disclose anything broken or torn, these athletes kept on playing—partly because, as players, why wouldn’t they, and partly because, if there was no visible damage, their coaches assumed they would.
Johnston arrived in the field just as the “brain people,” as she describes them, were becoming interested in concussion itself: in the pathology of it, and what it really means to the brain. Functional MRIs had been developed and were becoming more widely available—and these scans were able to show what had never been seen before. Neuropsychologists were getting more involved, too. Concussion had never been an invisible injury to them. They saw it every day in the symptoms and behaviours of their patients. They knew that if someone was doing weird and destructive things, something wasn’t right.
Johnston treated some of the players from the CFL’s Montreal Alouettes. She was not the team’s doctor, but she watched their games from the sidelines and saw up close the effects of concussion and how the players’ injuries occurred. She could also see the challenge of being a team doctor—on the one hand, there were the single-minded needs of the players and coaches, the passion of the crowd, and the urgency of the game as it ticked away; on the other, the doctors’ profound obligation to do what is best for the patient, and their absolute inability in almost every case to know what was best, because of the mountain of things they did not and could not know. A player’s dizziness, disorientation, headache—what did they signify? Were they of the sort we all have, ones that quickly go? Or something more? And what was especially difficult was that these team doctors had to decide instantly, as if they really did know.
Doctors who treated patients with concussions were looking for some certainty and guidance. If they weren’t able to know all they needed to know, they wanted at least to be able to apply the best of what they did know according to some accepted standard. “Everybody was trying to hang on to something,” Johnston recalls. The most obvious indicator—a player having been knocked out—wasn’t good enough (it would eventually be dismissed as an indicator entirely). Doctors were seeing too many other symptoms that seemed to matter just as much. Therefore, a grading system was needed. One of the early leaders in this effort was Dr. Robert Cantu, a neurosurgeon in Boston, later well known for his work at Boston University.
Cantu’s initial focus had been boxers. It was in boxing, many years earlier, that blows to the head in sports had first gained attention. In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1928 entitled “Punch Drunk,” Dr. Harrison Martland expressed in scientific form what boxing observers had long noticed and what fans could see with their own eyes—fighters with slurred speech, tremors, and unsteadiness in their gait and balance. These boxers, who suffered repeated blows to the head, were described at the time as being “cuckoo,” “goofy,” “cutting paper dolls,” or “slug nutty.” Their condition came to be called “dementia pugilistica.”
Around this time and for many years after, punch-drunk characters were often depicted in movies. They dressed in a funny way; they talked funny and said funny things. They were us
ually a sidekick to the star, like Sach in the Bowery Boys movies; they were the comedy relief. There was nothing sad about them. Their role was to chime in with the kind of wisdom that made everyone else, who looked and sounded smart, seem stupid—the way kids in sitcoms do. Red Skelton, a popular TV comedian of the late 1950s, played a recurring character called Cauliflower McPugg, who—with his cap on sideways, his head twitches, and his nasal, slurred speech—was hysterical. McPugg was a boxer.
In real life, most boxers were immigrants or African Americans, who were doing what immigrants and African Americans at the time had to do to get by. To many white Americans back then, they were seen as lowlifes who were just going to fight anyway—so why not in the ring to make a few bucks and maybe become a “somebody.” And because they weren’t like everyone else, when they walked around punch-drunk people would laugh at them and not feel sad.
Then along came Muhammad Ali. He was beautiful and smart, he did float like a butterfly, and he was definitely not a lowlife. It wasn’t funny to see Ali in the years before his death. It’s not funny to see football or hockey players now—local heroes who can’t remember, and whose thoughts won’t string together. It’s hard to recall the last punch-drunk character in the movies or on TV. Punch-drunk isn’t funny anymore.
But until recently, boxers seemed of another world to scientists as well. Boxers get knocked out. Football and hockey players rarely do. On an MRI, boxers’ brains often look different; football and hockey players’ brains look normal. In boxing, hits to the head are purposeful; in football and hockey, they are mostly incidental or accidental, less frequent, and are delivered with less force—except in hockey fights. That made the sports seem different, and led them to be thought of in different ways even by scientists. It took a long time for scientists to see that the issue was hits to the head, not about how they happened; and that boxing, football, and hockey were not disconnected worlds, but on the same hits-to-the-head continuum. For Johnston and medical colleagues engaged in other sports, it was this recognition that came to link their research and their work.
