by Ken Dryden
After practice, he went to lunch with them. Often he bought; after all, he was the one with the big NHL contract. Sometimes he took them to dinner. He told them again and again what he knew and what they could only hope—that the NHL was not that far away. That, sure, there were the Toews and Kanes and Keiths, the franchise-defining players, but there wasn’t much difference between the rest of the team and them. “Look at me,” he said to them. Sometimes in the NHL he’d been a 3–4 defenceman, usually a 5–6, sometimes a 7; always on the verge of being an 8 or 9 and out of the league. His IceHog teammates needed to know that they were amazingly, shockingly close. They had only to keep working, preparing, getting better for tomorrow by focusing only on today, because someday on the big team there would be an injury, a trade, a cap problem, and they would get their chance. But they had to be ready, because if they weren’t, that chance would pass to somebody else who wasn’t much different from them either, and who was ready.
Steve talked to his young teammates as if they mattered, and listened to them as if they had something to say. He had his own down moments—how could he not?—but never for long. “He knew he had a purpose,” Missy explains, “and he thought, ‘This is my purpose now. To help these kids.’” As Steve had with every team he played on, he did what needed to be done.
He was a player, not an NHL player or a veteran player, and his IceHog teammates were players, too. Less than a week after he arrived, he did an interview with the IceHogs Broadcasting Network. It was after practice in a poorly lit corridor near the ice; Steve was still wearing his jersey. The interviewer, in several different ways, asked him what it was like—to be playing again; to be back in the AHL. Steve said, “It’s a real blessing to be down here,” and that he was “definitely rusty,” and glad to have played his first two games on back-to-back nights so that he didn’t have time to worry too much about the challenges of returning to the game. On the ice, he said, he was still thinking about “where I’m supposed to be” rather than just being there. But while this community-station interview in Rockford, Illinois, was a long way from his scrum with the national media just outside Toronto the previous summer, he sounded upbeat. He looked at the interviewer the same way, listened the same way, paused before he spoke, and answered the same way.
The IceHogs had started the year slowly, improved in the second half of the season, and were still many points out of a playoff spot when Steve arrived. He played fourteen of the team’s final seventeen games, in which Rockford went 12–4–1, winning eight of their last nine games, and missed the playoffs by only two points. Steve got into one fight. The circumstances were predictable. The IceHogs were on the road, playing against their in-state rival, the Peoria Rivermen. Behind 3–2 in the second period, Steve went after Stefan Della Rovere of the Rivermen, they shoved, Della Rovere knocked off Steve’s helmet, then the two of them mostly held on to each other before the linesmen intervened. The IceHogs came back and won the game, 5–4. Steve was willing to do what players do and take the risk, even in a minor league that would take him nowhere.
When the Rockford season ended, Steve and seven of his IceHog teammates were brought up by the Blackhawks. The spares on every hockey team, those added for the hoped-for long, injury-laden slog of the playoffs, are known as the “Black Aces.” The legend goes that when “Wild Bill” Hickok was murdered playing poker he was holding two black eights and two black aces, what came to be known as the “dead man’s hand.” The Black Aces are a hockey team’s “dead.” Their unwanted. They practice in the same arena as the big team, but they have their own dressing room and practice time, lest they “infect” the regulars. And they love everything about being there. They get the taste of an NHL city during the playoffs, the feeling of excitement and importance that is everywhere, all the while dreaming that with the manager and coaches of the big team looking on, they will be spotted, rushed off the practice ice, and into the starting lineup for the series-deciding game, with only fabulously fulfilled dreams ahead.
Steve organized the golf games before the Black Aces’ practices, just as he had for Crosby and Tavares at Vail. He was the unofficial captain of the Black Aces. When the Blackhawks were in Minnesota for their opening-round series against the Wild, Steve, being back in Chicago, invited the guys over to his place, where they ordered in food and watched the games. Chicago beat the Wild, then the Red Wings, and Kings, finally winning the Cup against the Bruins. The team played twenty-three games; only one of the Black Aces, winger Ben Smith, played at all: 10:23 minutes in the third game of the final series. By that time, Steve was gone.
—
Mike Keating remembers the day. He had left Peterborough earlier in the week and was driving to Chicago. “Hey, I’m coming to see you,” he said to Steve. The Blackhawks were playing the Red Wings and were down three games to one in their series. “And Monty says, ‘Hope you brought a suit.’” Keats was too excited to ask him why. “So I get there, we’re at the arena and he’s got me walking in with all the players, going through the back corridors and up into the stands. He treated me like I was one of the guys. I ended up sitting with him on one side and [retired Hall of Fame defenceman] Chris Chelios on the other. That night he found out he was being sent home.”
The Blackhawks were in the midst of a tough series against Detroit. They hoped to have two more rounds of playoffs ahead. Steve had come back late in the year, played when he felt like crap, fought, almost helped the IceHogs into the playoffs, and was a Black Ace for the first time in his career. The day Keats arrived, a few of the other Black Aces had been told to join the big team, to practice with them and travel on the road. The rest were told they weren’t needed. Steve was one of them.
“When that happened,” Keats recalls, “it broke him a little bit.”
The next day, Steve did his exit examination with Dr. Terry, who reported “no complaints, symptoms or issues re: concussion.” He listed Steve as “Not disabled” on his Fitness to Play Determination Form.
Later in the day, Steve went out with Keats and some of the other now-former Black Aces. Keats ordered a glass of wine, Steve reached over and drank half of it. Keats was stunned. “Hey, c’mon man,” he said, “I don’t agree with this.” A short time later, Steve sent a text to Missy. “I’m drinking,” it said.
“That was the day that changed everything,” she says. His drink with Keats and the guys turned into a ten-day binge.
The Blackhawks won the Cup; Steve had a four-year contract with the team, but Steve didn’t win the Cup. A team goes through things together; it loses and wins together. The players know who is a member of the team and who isn’t, and that season Steve was a member of the Rockford IceHogs. Daniel Carcillo had played four games for the Blackhawks in the playoffs; he was a Stanley Cup winner. Steve tried to be angry about how he felt. He tried to feel sorry for himself. He just felt one more sadness.
A few days after his binge, he checked back into rehab. For the next twenty-one months, he would have some good days—and many more bad ones.
On June 27, three days after Chicago had won the Stanley Cup, general manager Stan Bowman announced that the team would be using one of its two compliance buyouts on Steve. With the Cup win, many of the Blackhawks players had earned bigger contracts, and the league’s salary cap would not be rising sufficiently to meet these new demands. By unloading Steve’s contract, the team would save $2.75 million in cap space in each of the next two seasons. Compliance buyouts had been agreed to during the last CBA negotiations—the ones in which Steve had played a part during his dark days at The Canyon Center. He would get his money, but at his age and in his state of health, he needed a contract to protect him, and that was gone. What he had helped to negotiate had ensured the end of his NHL career.
His days in rehab over, Steve felt well enough to become hopeful again. He went to see Dr. Kutcher in Ann Arbor, and Dr. Carrick in Atlanta. When he got back he was all excited. “I’m good,” he told his friends. “My head is clear.” He was p
roud of himself. He was working out again; he was going to AA meetings; he was sober. He had a plan. Kurt Overhardt, his agent, started calling around to NHL teams. There were no takers. But Steve was undiscouraged. He hadn’t really played for a year and a half, he said to himself. He’d have to prove himself again. But he was feeling better, and he got his buyout; if he had to play in Eastern Europe in the KHL, then that was the next best league, and it didn’t have to be forever. He would get in a full year of play, and then he would only be thirty-four, still lots of time for a 5–6 defenceman. He might get another shot. Then he’d know, he’d know for sure, if he could still play. He didn’t want to go out this way. He had come into the league as an undrafted free agent; he would go out on his own terms. Besides, playing in the KHL would be an adventure.
On August 11, 2013, he signed with Medvescak Zagreb. “Steve is a defender who played 10 years in the NHL and [in] four seasons he had more than 20 points per season,” Aaron Fox, Zagreb’s “athletic director,” said on the team’s website. “[He] has fully recovered from a concussion, is completely healthy…[and] will bring added stability to our blue line.”
Zagreb is Croatia’s capital and biggest city, with a population of almost one million. Medvescak had previously been in the Austrian League, and was one of only three clubs in the twenty-eight-team KHL located outside the old Soviet Republics. The other two were in two traditional hockey countries: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The KHL season began in early September. Medvescak, as a new team, would need to be put together quickly; Steve had to get there for training almost right away. Among his new teammates were Jonathan Cheechoo, who in 2005–06 with San Jose, had led the NHL in goals with 56, and Matt Murley, who Steve had played against in the Quebec peewee tournament twenty years earlier.
Zagreb would finish sixth out of the fourteen teams in the league’s Western Conference—ahead of CSKA, the legendary Red Army team of Moscow—and make the playoffs. But the road trips were long and punishing, drinking came easy for Steve and the others, and Steve’s concussion symptoms wouldn’t go away. After eleven games, he came home.
He had been bought out by the Blackhawks, received no offers from other NHL teams, and had left the KHL behind. He had no place left to go. His phone still might ring, and he would keep on training in case it did, but this time Steve knew he was done. Until this moment, everything had been about his career. Now it was about his life.
He still had his place in Chicago, or he could go back to Toronto, but now without a team he had no real home. George Parros, his former Anaheim Ducks teammate, was playing in Montreal but had kept his condo in Hermosa Beach, and Steve rented it from him. One of a string of beach communities south of Santa Monica, Hermosa Beach was affluent, mostly young, with lots of cafés, bars, and beach-shack restaurants. Its biggest employer was 24 Hour Fitness. It was also a place for serious surfers, paddle-boarders, and beach volleyball players. It was a place for Steve to get some distance, thousands of miles away from his friends and family, from his old life, from too many people who would ask him too many questions. He had some thinking to do. He had to get himself back together and sort out what he would do next. With its sun and sea, Hermosa Beach was a place for him to get healthy.
He had no practices to get up for or games to play. He didn’t have teammates with needs he had to meet, or coaches he had to please. He didn’t have fresh injuries to heal. He could hang out at Starbucks with his laptop and live a summer life all year round. Nobody knew him here; he had no expectations to live up to. He had never liked to tell people he met that he was a hockey player. He certainly didn’t need to tell anyone now. He was single. He had money. He could put together the pieces of his life however he wanted them to fit.
He could also be alone. Nobody could just drop in. He could text or call his family or friends when he wanted, whenever he had something to say and was ready to say it, and everybody would be thrilled to hear from him. He could do it on “good brain days,” as Missy describes them, when he was sharp, and up, and able to sound just like Monty, and whoever he texted or called, he knew, would text or call others, and they all would say, “Monty sounds great. He’s surfing and paddleboarding. He’s in his flip-flops and doing a million things,” and they would all laugh and know he was all right because this was the Monty they knew. All of which would give him even greater freedom to do what he wanted to do, and to hide.
But the dark clouds wouldn’t go away.
Just before Christmas 2013, Nick Robinson, one of his Peterborough buddies, visited him. “Monty picked me up at the airport,” Nick recalls. “He was coming from this hypnotherapist and he had lost his wallet. So we spent the next hour and a half retracing his steps, going to all the places he had been that morning and afternoon. Then he gets this call, and the wallet’s at the hypnotherapist’s. That was my first experience with his memory problems.”
Nick wasn’t entirely surprised to find out that Steve had been drinking again. He hadn’t heard from him much in the previous few months, which was unusual. Nick had had a problem with drinking himself when he was younger, and had used Steve as his inspiration and changed his life. Now he feared Steve was turning away from those he needed most, right at the time when he most needed them—because he was embarrassed, because he didn’t want anybody to see this Steve.
But in the few days he was with him, Nick also realized Steve’s problem wasn’t just alcohol. “He was taking medication for depression and anxiety. He was having convulsions from all his concussions. I was also concerned about the decisions he was making, and the way he was talking and thinking. Monty was always a very deep thinker,” Nick says. “He would speak logically. He would speak effectively. He would speak articulately. And he was a very good listener. That’s why the dialogue between us was always so great. He would talk; I would talk; it was always fifty-fifty. Now he talked and talked and wouldn’t listen.” After a few days, Nick had to return to New York to go back to work.
Steve had no continuity in his life. No co-workers who saw him every day. He had nobody to return home to, no wife, no partner, no roommate who might notice something. Steve was on his own, just the way he wanted it.
A few weeks after his visit, Nick got a call from Steve. “I’ll never forget it. Monty says, ‘I’m going to follow your lead, chum. I am going back into the program.’ It was a pretty fantastic moment,” says Nick, “because I felt there was hope.”
Steve still saw Daniel Carcillo occasionally. Carcillo had been traded to the Kings that summer, and the two of them spent Christmas together. “I could tell that something was up with his head,” Carcillo recalls. “He was always forgetting his phone or his keys, and he didn’t really look you in the eye when he was speaking to you, or hold your gaze like he used to. It just looked like he was hurting.” Carcillo also knew what Steve was doing in all the hours he wasn’t biking or training or dreaming of what he might do next; what he was doing at Starbucks with his laptop. “He was researching concussions,” Carcillo says, “and what the fuck was going to happen to him because of them. And the more knowledge he gained, it seemed the worse he got, realizing maybe that he wasn’t going to reverse the symptoms and the memory loss and the headaches.” Carcillo had sustained several concussions himself. He knew that Steve was now doing a million different things because he loved to do a million different things, but also because he needed to keep his mind racing so he didn’t feel his headaches or his anxiety or his depression or anything about anybody, especially himself. But a million things weren’t always enough.
And when they weren’t enough, Steve drank; and when he drank two, he drank ten. For more than seven years he had fought those battles and won. Now he was losing. He no longer had a life-structure around him; the incentives of his career and of money were gone and not coming back, and he knew that, and he hated that. But he had so many other lives to live, and a whole big world to discover and learn about, and new people, and all the time and money he needed to do that. But what he di
dn’t have, what was gone and not coming back—and what he hated even more and couldn’t live without—was himself. He could still trot out the old Monty (or what he thought others thought the old Monty was, the one they loved), but not very often. And that Monty wasn’t Steve now. That Monty was gone.
“He knew what was going on with him,” Carcillo says. “He had all those extra sets of keys made. You don’t do that if you don’t know something.”
Steve tried to focus on what he might do next. He was good looking, he spoke well, he was smart and funny, he could be outrageous; players liked him and would talk to him. He could do something in broadcasting with one of the NHL teams or with the NHL Network. Or something with the NHLPA. He was a player through and through, and had a player’s mentality. He had been involved in two CBA negotiations; he was active and committed; he worked hard and did his homework. In the midst of his suicidal thoughts in the rehab centre in California, he had helped to get the CBA deal done. The NHLPA could be his new team, and he could help all those players in the league who were going through what he was.
Or he could help players from the team side of things. He hadn’t been drafted; he’d had to work his way into the league. He’d always had to improve, and to prove himself. He was a good teammate, and he had been through so much. Teams were getting younger. He had always worked well with young guys: he related to them, and they related to him. He could get involved in a team’s player development, for example. Craig Button, his old GM in Calgary, even imagined something bigger for him. Steve knew everything about a team and how it operated—not only about players and coaches, but about managers, owners, scouts, trainers, fitness people, and the guys who cleaned the arena—because he talked to everyone, and listened to everyone. Button thought Steve might run an NHL team someday.
There was also the possibility of doing something outside of hockey. He was a part-owner of Andy O’Brien’s gym in Etobicoke. The two of them had talked about what they might do together: O’Brien, the fitness guru; Steve, the spirit of a gym. Or they might do something different and new. A few years earlier, when he was living in Calgary, O’Brien had turned a house he rented into what he called a “Bed & Barbell,” with a gym in the basement, a yoga area, and an office suite where he did presentations on training and nutrition. “It was designed so that the athletes could stay with us for a couple of days and experience what it’s like to eat and train a certain way.” Steve had visited him and loved what he saw. “We even had organic bedsheets,” O’Brien recalls, “which Monty thought was the coolest thing.” Someday, the two of them might do something like this together, only bigger.
