by Ken Dryden
And for parents, if Crosby was at risk, their own kids were at risk. A hockey life is a full family life. It takes a family’s time, spends a family’s money, monopolizes a family’s priorities and emotional energy. It offers the kids an experience with other kids, with a team, with goals and dreams, ups and downs, that is never forgotten. For parents of earlier generations, the decision for their kids to play sports was easy. The rewards were not as great, the commitment required was much less—and besides, there wasn’t much else for their kids to do. Now there were a lot of other things to do. There was a choice—other activities, that involved less team-time and more family-time, that were less dangerous. Give parents something to worry about and they will worry. They know their kids might get hurt doing whatever they are doing, and might get hurt more often in sports. But this was different. Head injuries carry such unknowns. A leg that limps is one thing; a brain that limps is another.
So why not play soccer, many parents thought. It’s so healthy. The kids just run around, and all you need are shorts and a ball. Or basketball? Or skiing, as Paul Montador had hoped for his kids—something they could do as a family; spend their weekends doing together. Concussions gave parents looking for a way out, a way out. And beyond the tens of thousands of individual families suddenly presented with a choice—what did it all mean for the game itself? Who was going to play, and who wasn’t? Hockey’s first game was played eight years after Canada was born. It has been part of the way Canadians live since then. What happens if Canada’s collective experience is no longer so collective?
As Canadians wrestled with this awkward reality, Gary Bettman was wrestling with his own: what to do with all these concussions, all this attention, all this distraction from all the great things that were happening in the game. He turned defensive. He retreated into his lawyerly instincts—where is the evidence; I don’t accept the premise; prove it—his hockey guys retreated into their lifelong instincts—this is a tough game; this is how it’s played; this is hockey. They looked at the video evidence of each on-ice “event” rigorously. Each was the result of an individual incident—the guy ducked down here, elevated himself there, intended this, targeted that. Each involved an individual player with his own individual history—a repeat offender (or not). Each had its own individual explanation. Each was a one-off. The punishment for each was decided with careful consistency. Every decision followed the logic of every decision before—this one-off was a little more (or less), better (or worse) than that one-off. Each focused on the trees and missed the forest.
It was like two different worlds. In one world, crushing hits nit-picked to death by the game’s decision-makers and commentators—was his head down? a little, or not; a two-game suspension, maybe three. In the other, stories were written chronicling the deterioration or death of players from the recent past. The two worlds weren’t connected. They couldn’t be connected from Gary Bettman’s perspective, because connection would mean liability, and liability would mean money and industry uncertainty. Besides, who said they were connected? What science, as determined by what court of law?
The head injury story in hockey is long and winding. Once, head injuries were rare, the result of accident or outrageous actions by players; now they are more frequent. Once, their consequences seemed immediate and certain; now they are both immediate and long-term, certain and uncertain. Once, decision-makers were unaware of the science of head injuries, then they paid little attention to it, then disputed it, and then accepted its role as paramount, pointing out that they will follow that science—when science knows. It is the same strategy employed in every industry under siege—tobacco, lead, asbestos, coal, oil—whether the issue is lungs, heart, nervous system, brain, or climate change. There is no need for those in charge to prove anything. They need only create doubt. Besides, smokers, coal miners, hockey players—they know the risks. For decision-makers, it is an issue to be managed, not a problem to be solved.
“Not only must justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.” Yes. But not only must justice be seen to be done; it must also be done.
The historic compromise in hockey between performance and safety has gone out of whack.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Steve missed the first eight games of the Panthers’ 2007–08 season after having arthroscopic surgery on his knee during training camp. The team got off to another uninspiring start, and didn’t reach .500 until mid December, stayed there for two weeks, then didn’t reach the same level again until March. The team allowed thirty-one fewer goals than they did the season before, but also scored thirty-one fewer and never contended for a playoff spot.
Steve’s contract with Florida was up at the end of the season, and he was now a free agent. The Panthers had missed the playoffs for the seventh straight year. The team had changed coaches, made trades, signed veterans, waited for young players to improve, but the Panthers simply weren’t good enough. They needed some players that would make them better. Steve could play with better players. There were players like him even on Stanley Cup–contending teams, but he couldn’t make the Panthers better in the way they needed to improve. He also wanted to play on a contending team himself—he had had the taste of that in Calgary. The Anaheim Ducks offered him that chance, signing him to a one-year contract for $800,000, the same amount he had received in Florida. And California was California—flip-flops, shorts, and cafés on the beach.
The Ducks had won the Stanley Cup in 2006–07, and lost in the first round of the playoffs a year later. They had two young stars, Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry; three ageless wonders in Teemu Selänne, Scott Niedermayer, and Chris Pronger; and a big, tough supporting cast, led by George Parros, that had topped the league in total penalty minutes and fights the previous two seasons. “We were a rough and tumble team with no shortage of guys who could play and also drop their gloves,” Parros says. Steve was signed to help make the Ducks even more of what they already were and wanted to be. He dressed every game, played regular 5–6 defenceman time (over sixteen minutes a game), was second on the team in plus-minus, third in blocked shots, eighth in hits, and second in fights, with eleven (his last two with the Bruins) behind Parros—the highest total of his career.
The Ducks drifted back into the middle of the pack that season, yet they always seemed contenders. Their big names were still there. But their checking line—Sammy Påhlsson, Rob Niedermayer, and Travis Moen—so important to their Cup victory, was gone. In a salary-cap league, lesser players on a winning team can always find bigger contracts elsewhere. As well, the Ducks didn’t need to win as much as they had in 2007. The Kings had been L.A.’s team; they were in the first wave of NHL expansion in 1967; they had had Gretzky. But in 2007, the Ducks were the first California team to win the Cup—their Stanley Cup rings even said so. But having won so recently, they could lose and the sky wouldn’t fall. At the trade deadline and going nowhere, the Ducks sent Steve to Boston.
Steve reacted as he always did: he was disappointed, then he was excited. The Bruins were an Original Six team. They played a tough, lunch-bucket style, and had the best record in the Eastern Conference. At the deadline, the Bruins also added veteran scorer Mark Recchi; they were gearing up for a Cup run. Two weeks after the trade, in a game in Toronto, Luke Schenn of the Leafs hit Stéphane Yelle into the glass from behind; Steve took on Schenn. The next night, in Philadelphia, the Flyers scored early in the game; a short time later, right from a faceoff, Steve dropped his gloves and fought Daniel Carcillo. He lost both fights, but in doing so reinforced his reputation with his new teammates. If the team needed something, even if it was a tough, dangerous, and potentially humiliating task, Steve was willing.
He fought against Schenn and Carcillo in the way he’d always fought. He had good balance on his skates; he knew what he was doing. He gripped his opponents close and tight, and ducked his head and angled it away from the worst blows. And if the linesmen had stepped in to end each fight a few seconds earlier, the result would have b
een mostly even. But Steve was not a finisher. If the linesmen didn’t step in, the tide would, and eventually did, turn towards the better fighter and against Steve. He lost most of his fights, often clearly, but almost never badly, and almost never with a knockdown blow. His opponents, frequently the other teams’ heavyweights, knew that Steve wasn’t a risk to them. Nor did he represent any proud new notch on their guns. Steve’s job wasn’t to embarrass them or even to beat them, but to remind them that what they or their team had done wasn’t acceptable and couldn’t be left to stand. In turn, these heavyweights seemed intent only on winning the fight, not on humiliating Steve. To them, what he was doing was honourable, and they would treat honour with honour. When his fights with Schenn and Carcillo ended, the players on the Leafs and Flyers benches slammed their sticks against the boards in triumph. The Bruins players slammed their sticks against the boards in respect.
Boston finished the regular season second in the league in points, second in goals for, first in goals against. But in the first round of the playoffs, they had to play the Montreal Canadiens. Montreal and Boston had played each other in thirty-one series in their playoff history, the Canadiens winning twenty-four times—eighteen straight between 1946 and 1987, three straight since 2000. But as it turned out, the series wasn’t even close. The Bruins won four straight, outscoring the Canadiens 17 to 6. Steve was plus-2 and averaged over eighteen minutes of ice time a game, the fourth highest among the Bruins defencemen.
Next was Carolina. Boston had finished nineteen points ahead of the Hurricanes during the regular season. The series went to seven games and was decided in overtime, with Carolina winning. Steve played even more against the Hurricanes than he had against the Canadiens, averaging over twenty minutes a game, third most among the Bruins defencemen. He was a plus-3, the third best on the team. But for the Bruins, who had felt they could win it all, the defeat was hard. Less than two months later, on July 1, 2009, Steve became a free agent again.
He would soon be thirty years old. For a good team, when a season is over and before free agency begins, a player like Steve seems a replaceable piece. Somebody is ready to come up from the minors, or might be; by next October, somebody else will be one year more prepared, or could be. Steve was the kind of player that teams add at the end of a season, when the somebodies they have counted on haven’t panned out, and playoff possibilities and fears are in their headlights.
The Buffalo Sabres were looking for something that Steve was, not what he wasn’t, and signed him to a two-year contract for $3.1 million, which per season worked out at almost twice what he had received under his previous contract. The Sabres had made the playoffs regularly in the 1990s, during the Dominik Hašek years, then missed for three seasons, then made it to the Conference Finals in 2006 and 2007, riding the goaltending of Ryan Miller. But the glow around the team was beginning to fade: ownership was unsettled, Daniel Brière had gone to the Flyers, Chris Drury to the Rangers, and Miller’s future in Buffalo seemed unclear. Moreover, the economy of western New York was depressed. Even the NFL’s Bills seemed in jeopardy. Hope for the Sabres’ future had resided in a very small cohort of potential new owners, big-moneyed western New Yorkers who had made their fortunes elsewhere but who believed in western New York, and who could buy their way into the NHL and have big local impact at low-end Buffalo prices. First had been early cable-entrepreneur John Rigas, then Paychex founder Tom Golisano. At this moment, the Golisano years were winding down and natural gas billionaire (and now also Bills owner) Terry Pegula was not yet on the horizon. The Sabres seemed a franchise with its best days behind it.
“[Steve’s] got incredible competitiveness, toughness; he’s gritty,” Sabres general manager Darcy Regier said at a media briefing when Steve’s signing was announced, “and there’s still upside in his game.” Regier then talked about how the Sabres had sixteen young defencemen in their development camp, all of whom had been drafted by the team—and how with three veterans with their contracts expiring a year from now, Steve could be a good transition player.
—
Before Sabres training camp began, Steve made his annual pilgrimage to Gisele. He went with Steve Valiquette, as he usually did now; Gisele was Vally’s life coach as well. She had helped him to have a ten-year pro career, Vally believed, one that had been far from inevitable after he had graduated out of junior in Erie—six-foot-six goalies being seen as far more awkward than ideal at the time. Vally had played in the ECHL in Dayton, Hampton Roads, and Trenton, then was a regular in the AHL in Bridgeport and in Hartford, and in the NHL with the New York Rangers. He had also played in the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) during the lockout, on the Lokamotiv team from Yaroslavl, Russia, that five years later would be wiped out in a plane crash. Vally was the goalie equivalent of a 5–6 defenceman: an NHL backup, or sometimes the third guy in a team’s system. With the Rangers, Henrik Lundqvist, one of the league’s best and most durable goalies, played almost every game.
Their visits to Gisele also gave Steve and Vally some time together. The hour-and-a-half drive from Vally’s place to Gisele’s in Lenox, Massachusetts; the nights at the hotel at the end of each day’s session; their ride back and any extra time they could steal. It was a chance to catch up, to get news of each other’s family, to hear about former teammates, to go “deep and serious” sometimes, as Vally puts it, but mostly to recall old stories and tell outrageous new ones. One of them only had to say something and they were off, laughing, spilling out their souls, and confirming what they most were looking for: that Monty was still Monty, and Vally still Vally.
One year, anxious to start on their drive, they found themselves in Northampton, Massachusetts, ahead of schedule. They decided to stop for lunch, but when lunch was done they were still too early. Walking back to Vally’s car, Steve saw a sign on a storefront: “Psychic,” it read.
The rest followed. “Vally, Vally, we gotta check this out,” Steve said. Two suckers, about to be born. “So we go in,” Vally recalls with a laugh. “It’s a tarot-reading card place and the lady’s name is Dorina.” Dorina began with Steve. They went into another room; Vally waited. Then it was Vally’s turn. When they were both done, Steve and Vally left. “Monty’s just bouncing,” Vally says. “‘Vally, Vally, oh my god, she knew about everything. She just nailed it.’ And I’m saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, but Monty, how do you think she knew? What did you tell her?’ And he says, ‘No, no, it was amazing. It was the best.’
“Dorina tells him that he’s got this great career ahead of him, that he’s gonna play in the All-Star Game. Meanwhile, she tells me I’m never going to make the NHL, I’m gonna be a construction worker.”
Dorina had seen the future: two idiots coming through her door.
When they were walking towards Vally’s car, “Monty was still carrying on, [saying] ‘I’m keeping in touch with her. She’s going to light candles for me,’ and we’re laughing. And I say to him, ‘Why am I even going to Gisele’s? I’m going to be a construction worker. What’s the point?’ And we laugh. Then Monty starts saying, ‘Dorina, you’re in. Gisele, you’re out.’ Now we’re both into it, ‘Dorina, you’re in. Gisele, you’re out.’”
After that season began, Steve and Vally were talking on the phone. “I say, ‘Monty did you ever call Dorina back?’ And he says, ‘Oh yeah, she’s been lighting candles for me.’ And I’m going, ‘Come on man,’ and he says, ‘Yeah, I just cut her a cheque for $1,200.’” Even Vally was stunned.
For the rest of Steve’s life, in a phone call or text, or when they were together, out of nowhere Vally or Steve would say, “Dorina, you’re in,” and the other would say, “Gisele, you’re out,” and they would crack up.
“Gisele helped us to believe in ourselves,” Vally says. “She gave us these little things to help us in this very busy game, when your mind can get very, very busy. We each had our mantra. Before a game, instead of everything being chaotic, everything was calm. Our mantra was the same: ‘I now command my unconscious mind
to know with absolute certainty that I have all the skills, resources, and abilities necessary to know that I am an NHL hockey player, and I belong here, and I am ready.’” By having Steve and Vally focus on their mantra, Gisele had them not focusing on all the other things that might undo them. And when Steve and Vally were done saying their mantras, wherever they were, they would do the same thing. “I would look in the mirror,” Vally says, “see my reflection, and say, ‘I am ready. I am ready. Let’s go. I am ready.’”
“I was cut from teams many times through youth hockey,” Vally continues, “and didn’t make AAA until I was fourteen. I’ve been told I’m not good enough a lot. So when I did get good enough, you still have to believe you have a right to be there. That you belong. Later, when Monty got that big contract from Chicago, he didn’t believe he deserved it. When you don’t believe you’re good enough, you never lose the feeling.”
Vally also helped Steve believe in himself, and Steve did the same for Vally. One year, when Steve was with the Panthers and Vally with the Rangers, they played against each other in Florida. “I was in the last year of my contract with the Rangers,” Vally recalls. “Henrik [Lundqvist] had played the first fifteen games of the season. I played my first game in Toronto, then he played five more. Now it’s my second game, in Florida, and I still haven’t gotten my letter from the team saying I can move out of the hotel and into my own place. But I’m going after my dream. I want to become a full-time NHL player for the first time, and I’m twenty-eight years old,” he says. “And I had a great game.” The Rangers were outshot by Florida, and lost in a shootout. “I just had one of those nights,” Vally says. When you’re a 5–6 goalie, every game is a big game. “After it was over, Monty comes up to me in the hallway, and we’re both just sweating. It was like we couldn’t wait to get out of our locker rooms to see each other. And he’s like, ‘Vally, Vally, you’re the best goalie that’s come in here all year,’ and he’s as happy for me as you could ever hope a friend or teammate could be.”
