I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (18 page)

The following summer, a smallish tough guy named Rick Rypien killed himself. Rypien had hoped to earn his keep in the National Hockey League by going after opponents well above his weight class. But he lost often, and never quite secured a place in the bigs. They say he’d been suffering from clinical depression for a decade when he decided to end it.

About two weeks after Rypien’s death, a hay-haired colossus of an enforcer named Wade Belak hanged himself in his Toronto condominium. He’d only just walked away from a modestly lucrative NHL career. He had a job in broadcasting awaiting him.

Two months before these suicides, Derek “the Boogeyman” Boogaard overdosed on a combination of alcohol and painkillers. Boogaard was a mantispid six-foot-seven. He caved in faces with his fists. Everyone agreed he was Probert’s heir apparent. The booze and pills had been his way of self-medicating another in a long string of fight-related concussions.

Like Probert’s before him, Boogaard’s family donated his brain to neurological researchers at Boston University. And, like Probert’s before him, Boogaard’s brain showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, a degenerative disease common to boxers, hockey and football players, and combat veterans.

CTE can be diagnosed only posthumously. While alive,
though, the afflicted exhibit symptoms like memory loss, depression, anxiety, and rage. They live in a bruised fugue that used to be called dementia pugilistica, punch-drunkenness. Lately, ex-enforcers like Dave Semenko, “Missing” Link Gaetz, “Chief” Gino Odjick, Darren McCarty, Brian McGrattan, and Chris “Knuckles” Nilan have come forward with corroborating stories of post-hockey lives ruined by addiction and psychological anguish.

Concussions appear to be CTE’s leading cause, but no one knows how much head trauma is needed for it to develop. One researcher said hockey enforcers “tell me that about one out of every four or five times that they fight they suffer what sounds to me like a concussion.”

Hockey is, essentially, entropic. Its central drama revolves around men attempting to create, maintain, and subvert order where there is none. To begin with, the foundation of the game is
skating,
on
ice,
something that comes naturally to zero humans. On top of this balancing act, hockey asks that you: control a rubber disc; pass that rubber disc to your teammate as he, too, skates on ice; retrieve the rubber disc by jarring it loose from another man, also ice skating; all while moving at Olympic-sprinter speeds (via knives attached to your feet) throughout a circumscribed field of play where contact is not only encouraged but guaranteed, as the only things scarcer than respites are exits. Also, everybody’s got bludgeons.

We’re talking here about a frontier pastime, first played by sanguinary ruffians on the ice of the northern waste. Referees, when present, chose what to call and, like lawmen in the sticks, were pained to do even that. A hook might be a hook in the first period but not necessarily in the third. In overtime, or the playoffs—forget about it.

You get viciously bodied down; the game continues. Your
temper flares as infractions pile up; still, the game continues. Something begins to seep into the play, something bad and communicable. Your frustration leads you to start taking advantage of hockey’s unique amnesty vis-à-vis the legal system. You slash the backs of knees with your stick, cross-check vertebrae, butt-end ribs. You, and everyone around you, commit assault.

All involved believe in the personality of the law. A foul is as much an offense against the victim as it is a violation of the rules. The cry in hockey is, “Let ’em play,” which rings about the same as “Boys will be boys” and actually means “An eye for an eye.”

Reprisal has always been at least one-half of the game. (One Canadian poet called it a “mix of ballet and murder.”) It’s the unforgiving element hockey’s fugitive grace floats on: original violence tolerated, then accepted, then in time turned into custom, into spectacle, into tactic, and finally into theory.

Thusly does the game continue until, at last, your baser nature has flooded and colored your soul. You’re ready to crack open an opponent’s coconut—
slavering
to, like a castaway—when two men decide it’s time to fucking
go.
They drop gloves. The game stops. They throw hands for retribution, or intimidation, deterrence, protection, or momentum—really, what they fight for is catharsis. The way things were going, someone might’ve gotten
hurt.
They do single combat, and then the game can start up afresh, purged for now like a drained wound.

That’s
why there’s fistfights in hockey.

This willingness to drop the gloves—win or lose, for oneself or a teammate—is called “showing up.” Traditionalists would have you believe that, time was, every man on the ice showed up, even immortals like “Rocket” Richard and Bobby Orr. This changed when hockey leagues expanded nationwide in the late
’60s. Suddenly, the talent pool was diluted; all these new teams in the south and west were filling up their rosters with muckers and hatchet men. (Their seats and coffers were filling up, too.) It was no longer viable for a hockey player to be some combination of skill and grit, a willing draftee in any fight. These new guys were thugs,
animals
—laboring skaters who kept getting bigger and stronger, punching harder and harder, even as their quarry’s skulls changed not one bit.

The game became specialized, stratified. Now you had #1) your scorers; #2) your less-skilled players who tried to stop the scorers by any means necessary; and #3) your guy at the end of the bench who beat the bejesus out of the #2s when they got overzealous. This guy belonged to the new lowest class of player, the grunt whose sole job it was to look out for #1s: the enforcer.

“When I think of Dave Semenko now—and I often do,” Wayne Gretzky wrote of his enforcer, “I don’t picture the piercing glare that caused other heavyweights to look down or up or anywhere but back at David. I remember instead the little smile, the quick wink, and the words, ‘Don’t worry, Gretz.’ And you know what? I never did.”

The former head of the NHL players union once said that Gretzky would’ve played “several hundred” fewer games had it not been for Semenko’s absorbing and meting out punishment on his behalf. It was this seeming indifference to pain that earned Semenko the nickname “Cement Head.” He did things like box Muhammad Ali to a draw. He was a thoroughly terrifying enforcer—though nowhere near as terrifying as Dave Schultz, the dread warlord of the most fearsome team of all time: the late-’70s goon squad known as “the Broad Street Bullies.”

Schultz today is still mentioned in hushed tones. Saying his name is unsettling, spooky; no one wants to chance it, like with “Bloody Mary.” Instead, he’s called “the Hammer.” He threw
his right fist like a man releasing a bowling ball. His single-season penalty record will never be eclipsed. But ask Schultz who
he
thought the scariest was, and he says, “John Brophy was the toughest and wildest I ever fought.”

When Schultz got his clock cleaned by Brophy, he was barely out of his teens, playing in his first professional season. Brophy was at the end of his minor league rope, having spent the years between 1952 and 1973 bouncing around the now-defunct Eastern League, skating in snakepit arenas in decaying industrial cities. The violence there was so thick that Brophy went gray before he was old enough to drink. The closest he’d get to the National Hockey League was breaking an NHLer’s leg during an exhibition.

Schultz wrote in his autobiography that Brophy “employed his hockey stick the way a samurai uses a sword. If he had any scruples, he must have buried them the first time he put on a pair of skates.” By the time he ended his twenty-year playing career, Brophy had racked up 4,057 minutes of penalties, which comes out to three fights fewer than Rick Rypien, Wade Belak, and Derek Boogaard
combined.

Props to Bob Probert and Theogenes—but John Brophy was the baddest. Yet the last anyone heard from him was 2007, when he quit his equally storied coaching career. (Only one head coach, the Hall-of-Famer Scotty Bowman, has won more professional hockey games.) Then he just … disappeared.

Did he eat a gun? Shove off and put fire to his own Viking funeral?

I had to know. Such is how I found myself one spring morning in a diner in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Brophy’s hometown, feeling stiff and brittle, having not slept well. I ordered two eggs, scrambled, and took a seat at one of the truck stop tables
bolted into the linoleum. The space had the dimensions of a shoebox or budget coffin—low, rectangular. In one corner, an ancient empty Coke fridge chanted Gregorian.

Fat men in khakis tinkled the door’s bell and sighed while walking past rows of empty place settings. A few elderly couples were drinking tea and scanning the paper. I went ahead and leaned across and called to one huncher gumming toast: “John Brophy, yeah?”

“Brophy?”

“John, yeah.”

“Brophy’s a Maritimer, sure.”

“What’re you saying?” asked another gent around the way.

“Brophy.”

“Brophy went and he played in the States where they got down on hands and knees and marveled at the indoor ice.”

“Team bus’d need a police escort to the county line,” the first agreed. “Yessir.”

Another old-timer, this one fox-faced, lifted his head from his breakfast and added, “I’ll tell ya right fuckin’ now—sorry, Ma—I saw a fan spit one on Brophy, right? He spits one on Brophy, and then later Brophy makes like he’s digging the puck away from the boards in front of the guy—they didn’t have glass separating you from the ice back then—and Brophy butt-ends the guy right in the teeth. Right in the kisser. And then how does he go? He goes, ‘
Now
spit, motherfucker!’ ”

“I seen him fight Don Perry. I thought it was like those Japanese monsters. The world was ending.”

“When he coached, the fans would throw batteries, and the security guards had to keep him from going up after them.”

“Brophy. Whatever it took to get things done, he didn’t mind doing.”

“Once, he got to stick-siwinging with Bobby Taylor, the football player. Like somebody was gonna die. The sticks were
shattered all over the place, and they were trying to spear each other with the splinters.”

“I don’t even know how many times he came out of the dressing room with the needle and thread still in his face, the brawl still going.”

“Haw, you miss three
shifts
back then and you were out.”

“Different back then.”

A leathery waitress in a nurse’s uniform brought a patron his milk on ice and then told me where Brophy was: an old folks’ home outside of town.

I got directions and found a farmhouse awash in green pastureland. Behind it, a flock of dingy sheep grazed in a Fibonacci spiral. The wind was tossing fistfuls of slitty rain every couple of beats, like wedding rice. I walked in—the door wasn’t locked—and tried the first bedroom. A big guy, not big like tall but big like a mascot, was sliding a cable-knit sweater over his head. I waited, and then we shook hands across the threshold.

“I didn’t think anybody’d come,” Brophy said.

“It’s an honor,” I said.

Our handshake stalled. He looked at me obliquely, beginning to grin, as if, fine, I’d mangled the pronunciation, but he’d accept the shibboleth.

“I’m going walking today,” he said. He stared until I’d retraced my steps to the front door. “Come back tomorrow.” Outside there was one heckler, a crow.

The traditionalist would have you believe that enforcers took accountability out of the game. (Do
not
get the traditionalist started on what would happen if all fighting was taken out of the game.) To them, the unprecedented level of technical ability in
today’s hockey is a kind of decadent virtuosity. A different sport altogether; an exhibition that ought to be scored by judges. One does not simply
get to be
an engine of consequenceless will and expression in this game, according to the traditionalists. Fuck around, and you should have to answer for it. But, no, guys now are able to have their picnic and eat it, too, because enforcers are smoldering blackly at the periphery, keeping out bloodsuckers.

The way the traditionalist sees it, time was, each new crop of players had to venture into hockey’s brutal element and test themselves against it, like sailors. And, like sailors, the old would tell the green how poorly they were measuring up. The toughest were dead or retired; the way they played—perfectly irretrievable. Old-time hockey, it’s called. It could never exist in the present, any present, because present hockey is always too slick, sleek, knowing, and indulgent. “If some of the longhairs I see on the ice these days met Sprague Cleghorn,” coach Red Dutton once remarked, “he’d shave them to the skull. Jesus, he was mean.” Dutton said this a
lifetime
ago.

Old-time hockey is in perpetual retreat, never further away than at the present moment—but still it
keeps hanging around,
like a sun slow to set on the horizon. This is just how generations work, I guess. The ideal of old-time hockey lingers in rinks because so do the graybeards who lived it. Or think they did. If it’s not how they played, then it’s how they
wish
they played. And, with time, it has become how they
remember
themselves playing, their fuzzy past and obscure present cohering like bad binocular vision.

It is no less true now than it ever was: old-time hockey is disappearing. There are many reasons for this, most of them cultural and economic. The short of it is: in the last fifty-plus years, as hockey grew exponentially around the world, peaceable goalchiks began arriving from the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, western Europe—places where the game’s revanchist grammar
didn’t translate. This globalized workforce sped up the pace and quality of the play to the point where tough guys have had a hard time keeping up. They still enforce, but their pressure-release methods have come to seem more and more atavistic to our otherwise sports-and-violence-saturated public.

This is why today’s hockey leagues—ever after broad appeal and the casual fan’s pocketbook—impose stiff penalties on the instigators of fights. They suspend players for on-ice offenses that used to be settled mano a mano. They dock their pay for overt retaliation. They are legislating violence out of the game.