by Ken Dryden
Everything in his life “felt very, very delayed,” Primeau says, like when a DJ slows down a record on his turntable and the sound commmes ouuuttt liiikke thiiss. All the while, he says, “I was trying as best I could to do other things, because that allowed me to be outside of my own mind, so I wasn’t thinking about how bad I felt.”
“I can remember times when I played concussed,” Primeau continues. “I’d be hit, and come off after a shift and be thinking, ‘When can I go back out there?’ Because when I was focused on the game, it didn’t allow me to be where I didn’t want to be.” When he was playing, he didn’t have the chance to think about how bad he felt. When the game was over, Primeau would find he didn’t feel better, but he didn’t feel worse. Not playing was harder. “On the exterior, you don’t look as if anything is wrong with you,” he says. “That was the most difficult part, walking into a locker room with a bunch of guys, and you look perfectly fine. You’re speaking perfectly fine. But you’re not fine.” And they were playing, and he was not.
Primeau’s second documented concussion occurred in May 2000. “I was taken off the ice on a stretcher in Pittsburgh,” he recalls. “That was probably the most severe concussion I suffered, and it was probably the beginning for me of what I call ‘the demise,’ because I didn’t manage it the right way. I was back playing two nights later when I was clearly suffering post-concussion symptoms.”
The concussion happened in the second round of the playoffs against the Penguins, their in-state rivals. “I won the faceoff in the neutral zone,” Primeau recalls, “and our defenceman threw a howitzer [pass] at me.” It was behind him. “As I turned to look for the puck, their defenceman stepped up and blindsided me.” It was Bob Boughner; he caught Primeau with a shoulder and elbow to the head. “In today’s game, it would probably be a twenty-game suspension,” Primeau thinks. “You could say that I had my head down, but my head wasn’t down.” Primeau didn’t have the puck.
“My first instinct was to get up,” he recalls, “but they wouldn’t let me. They didn’t know if I had any cervical [neck] damage. That’s why they took me off on a stretcher. But I felt fine. I didn’t have a headache. Maybe I felt slowed down, but I had none of what you consider to be concussion symptoms—you know, headache, head pressure, nausea, blurred vision, any of that stuff.” They took him to the Flyers’ dressing room, and then to the hospital, where he was kept overnight for observation. The team flew back to Philadelphia. When Primeau woke up the next day he still felt fine. The Flyers’ owner, Ed Snider, sent his plane to Pittsburgh to fly Primeau back to Philadelphia. There, he was given a baseline test. “We had done baselines so many times before that I knew what the tests were going to be. So I went in there very focused and prepared, and I passed it.” Afterwards, the neurologist that the Flyers had on their staff told him that it was her responsibility to give him the test, that she had done that, and the test said he was fine. “Then she looked at me and said, ‘Keith, just be very careful. Make sure you know what you’re doing.’ I kind of giggled,” Primeau recalls, “and I said, ‘I know. I’m fine. I know what I’m doing.’ And then I walked out of her office and I had the worst headache I’ve ever had in my life. It was this searing pain, because I’d focused and concentrated so hard just to pass my baseline, to get permission to play.” The next game was two days away.
Primeau was a player. He knew that he could have a headache one day, and the next day, and even the day after, and right up until game time—and none of that mattered. “The mentality is: ‘This headache will pass,’” he says. It had always done so in the past, so surely it would in the future. He was certain he “wasn’t doing irreparable damage to my brain by trying to persevere. It wasn’t that big of a deal at that point.”
Primeau didn’t go on the ice that day, but he did go on the next, the day before the game. “I wasn’t a hundred per cent,” he recalls, “but I felt well enough to say, ‘I’m good to go.’” The worst of the headache was gone, and it was still thirty hours until the puck dropped. Thirty hours later, he felt no better. But anybody can play healthy. Primeau was a competitor; this was another test. Besides, the team needed him. “I thought that by playing I was motivating my teammates,” he explains. The Flyers won the game 4–3 and the series in six games.
Next, the New Jersey Devils. Primeau was feeling no better, but no worse. In the middle of the second period of the second game, the Flyers behind 2–1, Primeau got into a fight with the Devils’ Randy McKay—“not a guy I thought could seriously hurt me,” he says, “but a tough kid and a smart fighter.” Primeau wanted to show his teammates that he was so committed and so “okay” that he was willing to fight. In Game 7, the Flyers’ Eric Lindros rushed the puck up the ice as if he were still playing peewee—too big, too strong, too good to be hit; but lurking in the shadows was the Devils’ defenceman, Scott Stevens. When Lindros was completely defenceless, Stevens obliterated him with a shoulder to the head, ending Lindros’s career as a superstar. The Devils won the series.
It was May 26. Primeau had three and a half months of warmth and sunshine ahead of him before training camp began, a time for his bumps and bruises to heal. That’s how it had been in other years, for his knee and his back; why not for his head? With no big surgeries to rehab, this would be a normal summer for Primeau.
And it was. When the next season began, Primeau played the way he had before his injuries. His reactions, his hands were just as quick; he felt entirely himself. “I was fine,” he said, “until I suffered my third documented concussion.” It came almost four years later, in February 2004.
Again, Primeau was in the neutral zone, and like a wide receiver cutting across the middle of the field, his eyes were on the puck; the defenders’ eyes were on him. “I got hit on the left side of my head with a forearm and elbow,” he recalls. It was from the Rangers’ Bobby Holik. “I didn’t think it was that hard,” he said, but this time, he immediately didn’t feel right. “They took me to the locker room and told me I probably had a concussion. And I said, ‘No, I’m fine. I feel fine.’ But there was something about my eyes, I guess. Even my wife when I got home said the same thing.” This was a Thursday night at Madison Square Garden; the Flyers’ next game was Saturday afternoon at home.
The next day, Friday, Primeau was driving to practice and was only a mile away from his house. “All of a sudden my stomach was nauseous,” he said. “I pulled into a parking lot and called the trainer. He told me to go home and get into bed and come back to the rink the next day. It was delayed onset.” The playoffs were due to begin in eight weeks.
For the first time, the problem for Primeau was more than just headaches and not feeling right. “It was motion sickness,” he recalls, “bright lights, and I started to struggle with my speech.” Not so much that others noticed, but he had to work harder just to get his words out, and felt no real improvement day to day. But week to week, slowly, would be fast enough, he knew. He needed to get back for the playoffs. He set in his mind the last weekend of the regular season for his return. In those final games, he would be able to get in a little conditioning, get back some of his feel for the game, and be ready when he needed to be. In the last week or two, “I started to feel well enough to convince myself and others that I was okay to play. My eyes, my vision, were still off. But this wasn’t about feeling perfect, this was about those three-hour windows of a game, when everything goes away but the game; to have that outlet, just to feel well enough to play. That’s what I was fighting for.”
Primeau hit his target, and in eighteen playoff games that year, scored nine goals. This was the year the Flyers went to the semifinals and lost to Tampa Bay; when, because of his play in this series, Esposito called him the most dominating player he’d ever seen.
“I had a good playoff run,” Primeau says. “And I think it was partly due to how hard I had to concentrate and focus.” By the time the playoffs were done, “I thought I was healed.”
Two nights after their series loss to
the Lightning, the players went to the Borgata casino in Atlantic City. “It was an end-of-the-year party, it was all the guys out drinking and blowing off steam. I had a fair bit to drink, but nothing more than I’d had before.” The next morning, he recalls, “I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t get my head off the pillow. It felt like the whole weight of my body was in my head.”
For five days, nothing changed. Then he started to feel better. His symptoms receded. “I got back into my routine, got the kids off to school. We were into the summer, and I was going to take a few weeks off anyway. And we were going into the lockout year. Everything would be fine when it needed to be fine. There was plenty of time to rest and recover.” Instead, his symptoms were slow to clear, and if training camp had begun in September, he wouldn’t have been ready to play. But as it turned out with the lockout, Primeau had an extra year to heal; an extra year to seek out every treatment imaginable.
One year later, in September 2005, he was at training camp. He felt “good and recovered,” Primeau recalls. “[Then] we were seven games into the season and everything is going fine. We were in Montreal, I’m out killing a penalty, our goalie kicks the puck out, I go to clear it away and [Alexander] Perezhogin comes flying in for the rebound and catches me in the side of the head. I go down and stay down, just waiting to see how I feel. And I felt fine. There were only about seven minutes left in the game, so they didn’t play me anymore. After the game I got on the bus and called my wife and my parents, and I was excited. I said, ‘I’m fine. I took a hit. I feel good. I think we’re good to go.’”
The team returned to Philadelphia. Primeau practised the next day, played against Florida, then flew to Carolina and was in the lineup against the Hurricanes, but he didn’t feel right. “I was sluggish, lethargic, my legs were heavy, I just didn’t have any jump. But I thought, ‘It’s early in the year.’ I still wasn’t associating how I felt with the hit in Montreal.” The team flew to Ottawa after the game and practised the next day. The morning after that, on game day, “I get up and go to the rink. I still don’t feel great during our skate, and go back to the hotel but I can’t sleep. Then I go and see the trainer, and they keep me out of the game.” Primeau had felt tired and listless in the first days after being hit in Montreal; but then, as he put it, “things deteriorated: the sensitivity to light, double vision, headaches, head pressure, exercise-induced light-headedness, clearly the worst symptoms I’d had to this point.”
When the team got back to Philadelphia, Primeau went home and took a couple of days off and waited for the symptoms to subside; but they didn’t. He started into his recovery routine. “I would go to the rink every day, ride the bike, get light-headed, go home and sit in front of my computer in a dark room, and not feel great. Then I would go to the rink the next day, and feel the same.” Weeks passed. “I started seeing a bunch of different doctors, and tried different therapies: massage, acupuncture, reiki, rolfing. I was doing vestibular therapy. I was going to downtown Philly for visual therapy at least twice a week, and would come out of there completely exhausted because of how hard I stressed my eyes. I was willing to give anything a shot. That was my cycle for the better part of twelve months. I had some days that were slightly better than others, but no good days. None were symptom-free.”
He skated with the team a few times near the end of the 2005–06 season, but then people began to think he might be back for the playoffs, and, rather than becoming a distraction for the team, he stopped. He went home for the summer. “The team figured we had done everything we could here, and so why not rest and try and get better.” Instead, Primeau recalls, “I had a terrible summer. The double vision had gone away, and most of the exercise-induced light-headedness, but I wasn’t getting better.” In late August, he returned to Philadelphia and started skating with his teammates. One day when their workout session ended, Primeau went into the trainer’s room and said to Jim McCrossin, the team’s head athletic trainer, “I’m right there. I’m feeling good. In another couple of weeks when camp opens, I’ll be fine.” Primeau said this to McCrossin knowing he was not. At this point, McCrossin stopped him. “Keith,” he said, “we appreciate your effort and the work you’ve put into getting back. But in good conscience, I’ll never be able to give you permission to play again.”
“At that point,” Primeau recalls, “my career was over.” Was he angry? Lost? Devastated by what McCrossin had said? “I felt this sense of relief, because I would have just kept pushing.” But the hard part was only beginning. “Just because you retire,” Primeau says, “doesn’t mean you’re healed. My symptoms lasted for another seven years.”
Nothing really changed, month after month, year after year. “I was always just tired, and not really able to do anything for any extended period of time. The headaches and the head pressure; I couldn’t exercise.” He had skated, worked out, done something physical almost every day, all his life. Now—nothing, not even with his kids. “Even getting down on the ground and playing mini-hockey with them, I couldn’t do it. The movement of my head would set me off.”
He remembered how he had been when he was healthy, and that haunted him, and it drove him. “I knew what normalcy was,” Primeau says, “and I had too much to live for not to fight to get back to it. So I dealt with the headaches every day.” He had all these years of life ahead of him, and he wasn’t going to accept the way he felt as his new normal. He would do everything he could, see every doctor, take every treatment, to get himself back to his old normal—but in the meantime, he had his life to live. He had a wife and kids. It had to seem to them, headaches and soul-weariness notwithstanding, that he was never anything other than the old normal.
“And this is where it gets very delicate,” Primeau says. He mentions Dave Duerson, Andre Waters, and Junior Seau, among others—football players who, after suffering head injuries and their dehumanizing effects, had killed themselves. “We all have a breaking point,” he says. “I wasn’t at it, and I don’t know what mine is. But there had to be a point where I’d stop caring about getting back to normalcy and would spiral out of control. Because there were days where I sat in my office with the lights off, breaking out in tears, because I’m six, seven years into this and I don’t feel well.
“I lived on hope. I hoped to return to my normalcy, and I was going to fight every day to get there.”
Primeau had to adjust; think about things differently. He had to focus on what he was capable of doing, not what he wanted to do. “It meant that if I got tired and had to take an afternoon nap, I took an afternoon nap. If I wasn’t able to work out, I didn’t work out. I laid down a lot,” he says, “because that’s when I got the most relief.” It might mean a couple of hours in the afternoon, or half an hour at other times of the day—just little compromises that gave him some respite. “Basically, I let my brain dictate what I was going to do,” Primeau says. “If I needed to take a nap, it was because my brain was telling me I was tired.”
About two years ago, his symptoms receded. They had been diminishing gradually, so much so that he hadn’t really noticed, until one day he thought, “Wow, I feel great. I feel incredible.” Running still bothered him, but “I was working out and lifting again,” he says. “I was training with my daughter. I lost a bunch of weight. I was still suffering from some fatigue, but it wasn’t as excessive as it had been.”
Then, a few months after that, he was at a rink for one of his kids’ practices. He was in the dressing room and walking to the ice, but at six-foot-five and wearing skates, he forgot to duck, and hit his head on the top of the doorframe. His symptoms returned.
They lasted about a year: headaches, dizziness, a shortening of his attention span. Then, beginning around September 2015, he could feel them go away again. He still isn’t able to run any distance. The moments of creeping tiredness that he feels may always be with him. “I’d love to be at a hundred per cent again,” he says. “But I’m okay with where I am.”
His old symptoms may be only
a random bump away, yet Primeau knows now that those symptoms can also go away again—because they did. His old normal is still in him. “I don’t think I was close to my breaking point,” he says, “but I certainly can appreciate when somebody is. I think it is important when we lose hope that we’re ever going to get better, that we just keep fighting.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Gary Bettman emerged after the 2004–05 lockout in complete command. He got his salary cap and, in the process, got the NHLPA to destroy itself.
The NHL now had seven years of labour peace ahead, seven years of wage certainty, seven years to construct a solid base on which shaky franchises could stabilize—and strong ones, as well as the league itself, take off. Only one team moved in the decade that followed: the Atlanta Thrashers became the Winnipeg Jets. When the Jets had left for Arizona in 1996, there were few things more certain than that Winnipeg would never have an NHL team again. The city’s population was less than one million. Its corporate base was too small; its traditional industries were in agriculture. Once the “Gateway to the West,” Winnipeg was losing its importance in a country that was losing its importance in the NHL. Of more significance to the league, the city offered little upside to an NHL that was selling upside. For U.S. franchises needing to convey “bigness” to their arena- and TV-publics, no city name on a marquee said “small” more than Winnipeg. But in 2011, seemingly impossibly, the Jets came back. It was as if the Dodgers had returned to Brooklyn. A city that had once seemed bigger than it was because it had an NHL team—then came to seem smaller because it didn’t—began to feel bigger again. And if this could happen to Winnipeg, why not to Quebec and the Nordiques?
