by Ken Dryden
They were signed to be mentors to a group of promising young players—Jay Bouwmeester, Nathan Horton, Stephen Weiss, Gregory Campbell—all of them twenty-two years of age or under. Nieuwendyk and Roberts were to show them how winners—true pros—practised, trained, played in big games, worked with teammates, treated fans, took care of themselves, and lived. “Both Gary and I found it difficult,” Nieuwendyk recalls. The two of them were used to playing on teams that won most of the time, and always contended. They had played in hockey cities, or on playoff-bound teams that had made non-hockey cities, for a time at least, feel like they were hockey cities. They had played where hockey mattered and they mattered. They were also used to being better players, and weren’t used to being old. At this stage in their careers, they needed energy, hope, and possibility; they needed more than their own professionalism and pride to drive them. It turned out Nieuwendyk and Roberts needed more from the younger players than what they were able to give.
“Monty was really a breath of fresh air,” Nieuwendyk remembers. “He was fun and energetic.” Older than the young guys, younger than Nieuwendyk and Roberts, Steve could relate to all of them and they could relate to him. He helped Nieuwendyk and Roberts connect to the rest of the team, so they could have the impact that the team needed them to have.
Steve was still a 5–6 defenceman getting 5–6 ice time—between fifteen and eighteen minutes a game, rarely on power plays or the penalty kill; he even played on the wing at times (it was this adaptability, as he told his Saint John coach Jim Playfair, that made him a million dollars). But now Steve was a regular; he arrived at the rink for every game knowing—not wondering if—he was playing. He liked his teammates. He liked the flip-flops and shorts informality of Florida. He liked living in the caring environment of the Gélinas family. He knew he needed to change his life, and now he was ready to do it.
In February 2006, the NHL schedule shut down for more than two weeks, for the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. During the much shorter All-Star breaks in other years, Steve might charter a plane with a few teammates and their wives or girlfriends, and go somewhere hot, or fly off by himself to some place he thought might be interesting. But this time it was different.
The Panthers played their final game before the Olympic break on February 11 in Buffalo, and wouldn’t play again until the 28th. Steve didn’t tell his teammates; he didn’t tell Keats, Jay, Nick, or Vally; he didn’t tell Gisele Bourgeois or Marty Gélinas. His coach, Jacques Martin, and his general manager, Mike Keenan, didn’t know. He didn’t even tell Paul, Donna, Chris, or Lindsay until the day he left. He just got on a plane, flew to California, and checked himself into rehab. It was at Milestones Ranch in Malibu. He was there two weeks, as much time as he could risk in order for his rehab to go unnoticed. Then he flew back to Florida, resumed training when the team’s practices began again, and continued with the season.
The Panthers’ strength and conditioning coach, Andy O’Brien, didn’t know about Steve’s rehab stay, either. This was O’Brien’s first NHL job, and he had known little about Steve before the trade from Calgary two months earlier. At first, Steve was just another guy who worked hard in the gym—and the guy who kept knocking over the hurdle. O’Brien had a runner’s hurdle in a small area just outside his office. It was for the players to do stretches each morning, to open up their hips before going onto the ice to skate. The hurdle was made of metal, pieced together, and “if you hit it at all with your foot it would fall apart and make a pretty loud noise when it hit the floor,” O’Brien recalls. “And every morning I knew when Monty was there because every morning I’d hear the hurdle hit the floor. Some days I literally counted the number of times he kicked it over. But every time he did, he’d put it back together and try it again. He had this clumsy, bit of a train wreck, element to him. It was very endearing, very sincere.”
After the Olympic break, Steve and O’Brien grew closer. It began with Steve’s workouts, then as he began to hang around, he and O’Brien began to talk. Their conversations grew long and intense. “I didn’t really understand the significance of all this for him at the time,” O’Brien says, “why Monty had this extra compulsion to drive himself as hard as he did.” It was several more months before Steve told him about his rehab—and by then, Steve was starting to put some of his own pieces together in his mind. “He was beginning to make training a big element in the journey he was embarking on to change his life.”
For Steve, it was hockey that had always made life work. But now, on this non-playoff team in this non-hockey market, surrounded by successful on-ice and off-ice people, he was beginning to realize that life made hockey work as well. He went to Alcoholics Anonymous every morning he was at home (that’s where he was before the Gélinas family got up, something Gélinas came to know only later), and most days on the road. Going into rehab and to AA helped him give up one life; taking on the family habits of Gélinas, the playing habits of Nieuwendyk and Roberts, the wellness habits of O’Brien, and the life habits of all of them, would help give him another.
“For Monty, this wasn’t just about changing one or two behaviours. It was about embracing a new way of living,” O’Brien says. “He was giving up an old obsession and gaining a new one. The way he exercised, and respected his sleep. The way he respected his nutrition. He could see an element of purity in the way he was living. He started to realize that what he put into his body and what he did the night before might overcome anything he did in his next day’s workout. So he didn’t want to put anything toxic in his body at all. This wasn’t about dealing with addiction. For him it was about adopting healthy living.”
And as always, once Steve was in, he was all in. He wanted to know everything. “If he heard about something, he’d ask me my thoughts, we’d debate it, and he’d want to try it. And he also wanted to explore things on his own, have his own experiences, know for himself.” He talked to everybody and tried to learn from everybody. He wanted to be better, and he wanted to discover and uncover and maximize everything that was in him as a hockey player and as a person. For Steve, this wasn’t overcoming; this was pursuit. This wasn’t grimness or desperation; this was joy. Possibility. He couldn’t wait to get to practice, to get to the gym, to do every rep he was supposed to do, and ten more. He couldn’t wait to get to the health-food store and the grocery store. He couldn’t wait to meet the next person; he couldn’t wait until he could be off by himself to read or think. He couldn’t wait until the next day. Some of his Peterborough friends were worried about him, about this “fanatical pursuit of health,” as O’Brien puts it. It felt manic. It had a hint of instability about it. O’Brien disagrees: “I can say with certainty that at the times I knew him, from Florida to late in his life, he was a very, very healthy person.”
And in finding this new life, Steve appeared little haunted by his old one. He didn’t seem to have days where, so in need of a drink he hid himself away to avoid the temptation. He went with his old friends to bars and restaurants where they drank, and he didn’t. He didn’t go as often as he did before, nor did he spend as much time in Peterborough during the summers. Still, his friends were his friends, and his old friends were still as funny and likeable even when he was sober, and he was still as funny and likeable to them. He liked his new self. He liked it at least as much as he’d liked his old one, and his friends did too. Steve’s new life “seemed all very comfortable and natural to him,” says O’Brien.
Steve was also finding a new life in reading. The book that had the greatest impact on him was The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. Steve read it and reread it; he highlighted sections of it; he kept it with him on the road. First published in 1997, The Four Agreements was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than seven years. In it, Ruiz relates his own story. Born in Mexico, he almost died in a car accident while he was attending medical school. Yet, as damaged as his body was, his mind remained fully alive. At that moment, Ruiz writes, he understood what for him became a simple tru
th: “I am not my body.” Later, as a doctor treating patients with all manner of illnesses and injuries, this truth took on greater meaning for him. To help them heal their bodies, he realized, he had to help them heal their minds.
The “Four Agreements” he details in this book, Ruiz says (though others have disputed this), come from the spiritual traditions of the Toltecs, a people who inhabited parts of south-central Mexico more than 3,000 years ago. Ruiz believes that every child is born as a blank page, free, and with every human possibility in front of them. But the world that they are born into—of parents, families, schools, cultures, societies—has already determined countless understandings about what they are and how things work, which every child learns, both by reward and by punishment. By this process of “the domestication of humans,” as Ruiz calls it, the child comes to live everyone else’s life, not his or her own. The book is about how we can live a life that is centred in ourselves—that is our own. It is, as it describes itself, “a practical guide to personal freedom,” detailing four “agreements” to live by.
The First Agreement: Be impeccable with your word. The word impeccability, Ruiz explains, comes from the Latin prefix im-, meaning “not,” and peccare, meaning “to sin.” Even if individuals and institutions in the world around us are not speaking and living out their own truths, we must know our truth—in order to express it and to live it. We must speak about others and about ourselves “without sin.” This First Agreement, Ruiz says, “is the most important one and also the most difficult one to honour.”
The Second Agreement: Don’t take anything personally. When others say something about you, or do something to you, it’s not about you. It’s about them living their lives and filling some need they have, which can be hurtful to you if you allow it to be.
The Third Agreement: Don’t make assumptions. We assume everyone sees the world the same way as we do. They don’t.
The Fourth Agreement: Always do your best. This is the action you take to realize the first three agreements.
And if you do live up to all four of these agreements, Ruiz says, “You are going to control your life one hundred per cent.”
The Four Agreements is a harsh message in a gentle story. Nobody and nothing in the world is what they should be. Everybody’s truth is false. The path to your own life is not about forgiving others; that makes them too important to your life. The path is about becoming, each of us individually, in control of our own life. It was Gisele Bourgeois who had given Steve the book. She wanted him to know that in a life his parents had first lived for him, then his parents and coaches, then his coaches and managers and the media and fans, that it was his life. He had to shut out the thousands of voices around him and hear only his own. He had to know that even if he was a team player, it wasn’t because others—the players, coaches, and fans—said so; it was because he said so. Because he said impeccably that this is what he was.
The Four Agreements meant so much to Steve, O’Brien believes, “because Monty was a guy who had a lot of hope. He had faith in what was coming around the corner. He understood that no matter how hard things are, you can always get through them. That drove him to find solutions, to seek out better opportunity no matter what situation he was in in his life. I know there was never a moment he didn’t believe in himself. Or that he didn’t believe he was capable of getting to the next level. That’s so important for a guy who’s in the American League, then called up, then sent down, then a healthy scratch; moving back and forth from defence to forward. He always believed he was capable of getting to that next level. In anything.”
—
In the 2005–06 season the Panthers earned ten more points than they had the season before the lockout, but missed the playoffs for the fifth straight time.
Steve went back to Calgary that summer. Hayley Wickenheiser recalls a conversation they had one day after a workout in the gym. “Monty asked me to sit in his car and he told me that he had been to rehab. He just wanted me to know that, he said, and he wanted me to know that he was an alcoholic and that he was going to change his life. I remember being taken aback, but he was attempting to do his cleanse.”
Steve did the same with Keats. “I was working in Hoboken, New Jersey, at the time,” Keats says. “I remember him calling and telling me that he was an alcoholic.” He sounded serious, but Keats knew what would follow, what had always followed with Steve: an even bigger than usual Steve-laugh, because he had sucked Keats in again, and that Keats would never hear the end of it. Keats didn’t realize that something might be different this time until Steve started talking about “making amends.” They were buddies. Buddies don’t need to make amends to buddies. Keats had been as drunk and stupid with Steve as Steve had ever been with him. “I remember saying to him, ‘You don’t have to do this [make amends] to me.’ Then we laughed a bit. I actually said I was proud of him for doing this.”
The Panthers got off to an indifferent start to the 2006–07 season, then had a bad November, winning only three out of thirteen games. They had a new goalie, Ed Belfour, who at forty-one was giving the team the same strong goaltending that Roberto Luongo had provided for the previous five seasons. Luongo had been traded to Vancouver in the off-season in a multi-player deal that included Todd Bertuzzi, who the Panthers believed would give the team the scoring and attitude they needed. Instead, after recording a goal and three assists in his first game, Bertuzzi injured his back a few games later, had surgery, and never played for the Panthers again. Joe Nieuwendyk, also with recurring back problems, played only fifteen games, went on injured reserve, and retired.
The Panthers improved during the second half of the season, but they had too much ground to make up. Their veterans were too old or too injured, or both; Gary Roberts went to the Penguins at the trade deadline. The young guys were too young or not good enough, or both. The Panthers needed more than what their players could give them, Steve included.
Steve was now twenty-seven years old. He had been a solid player and a good teammate all his life. At times, and to some coaches’ or managers’ eyes, he had been more or less than that—or would become more or less. But really, truly, after all these years—through youth and adolescence, substance abuse and sobriety; after all his training and learning, hope and hard work—he was what he was going to be. No less, but no more.
Nieuwendyk, for almost twenty years, had played with good teams against good opponents in the NHL and at the Olympics. He knew Steve as an opponent, a teammate, and from watching him play. “Monty was always a gamer,” he says. “He liked to be involved. He wanted to help the team. He was physical and gritty. He played hard. He wasn’t a fun guy to play against. And he wasn’t very big, but he would do anything for a teammate. Stick up for him. Drop the gloves. He was a good skater, and could carry the puck. He was a good first-pass guy. It’s just that when the walls were closing in on him he tried to make a harder play than he needed to.” If he was playing against him, Nieuwendyk says, he’d make the walls close in. Get on him quickly, cut off the passing lanes, turn Steve’s hard-trying instinct against him, get him to do something he couldn’t do. “He would have been better served at times to just play the simple game.
“I think he wanted desperately to be an everyday player. He wanted to make an impact. To be one of the core guys. Monty really searched for that kind of respect and stability. I think he chased it throughout his career. He was a great 5–6 pairing guy, but he was never going to be anything other than that.” Steve was the type of player that moves around, and goes from team to team. “He didn’t have to worry about family,” Nieuwendyk says. If he was traded, or became a free agent, “He was a guy that could say, ‘Okay, gotta close up the apartment. I’m off to the next stop.’”
On the ice or off, Steve could fit in everywhere, and not make a home anywhere.
—
Late in the season, Steve celebrated a milestone. “Monty invited me to his one-year anniversary of being sober,” Gélinas says, “where
AA gave him that medal. It was pretty special.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Steve’s first season with Florida had been Keith Primeau’s last season in the NHL.
Primeau was big—six-foot-five, 220 pounds—and he moved with the power and fluidity of a big Lab, always on the puck or always on the player with it. Detroit’s first-round pick, the third selection overall in the 1990 draft, he played for Canada in the 1996 World Cup and in the 1998 Olympics, and was captain of the Carolina Hurricanes and the Philadelphia Flyers.
In 2004, the Tampa Bay Lightning had beaten Primeau’s Flyers in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup semifinals before going on to win the final against the Flames and Steve. In a radio interview, Phil Esposito described Primeau in that series as “the most dominating player I ever saw. More than Orr, Howe, Gretzky, or anyone.” During his career, Primeau played the way a Canadian player of the time was supposed to play—tough, competitive, unrelenting, with a crasher’s spirit and a goal scorer’s touch. On October 25, 2005, his career ended after he received the last in a series of concussions.
“I had four documented concussions,” Primeau says, careful to distinguish the documented ones from all the other times he had his bell rung as a kid or in junior, or even from the time in the 1996 World Cup when he ran into his own teammate, Eric Lindros. “[Lindros] circled one way in the neutral zone, I circled the other,” Primeau explains, “and we collided.” Primeau is quite certain now that this injury in the World Cup left him vulnerable to the concussion he received in the season that followed. That, too, came in the neutral zone, and wasn’t a severe hit. But as Primeau recalls, “It was enough to put me in the hospital overnight,” and for the team to shut him down for a week. He searches for the right words to describe how he felt in those moments. Overwhelmingly, he says, “I just didn’t feel well. I didn’t feel myself. I didn’t feel normal. I wasn’t processing as quickly. I wasn’t thinking as alertly. I was more tired than usual. Physically, my eyes felt heavy. Everything seemed slowed down. I had a lethargic perspective on everything. I wasn’t stimulated as easily. I became more irritable. I had less patience. Instead of getting up in the morning feeling good about the day, about what I was going to get accomplished, I was just inside my body trying to function.”
