“Back in our day, in that time, it wasn’t unusual to have a bench-clearing brawl,” Brown says humbly, not mentioning at all the fact that he was involved in a bench- clearing brawl that rewrote the NHL rule book.
More than anything, though, it was Brown’s job to make his teammates feel safe out on the ice. Brown was there to make sure the hard men and ogres on the other bench remained leashed and did not go after his team’s young, skilled players; in that role, his sacrifice for his teammates was limitless.
Rick Tocchet is a former teammate of Brown’s in Philadelphia and had a front- row seat.
“Dave Brown was the toughest player I ever played with,” Tocchet says to me in a phone conversation. “He made us all look bigger than we were.
“Let me tell you a story about what Dave Brown meant to us,” Tocchet con- tinues excitedly. “When I was in juniors, all I heard about was this guy named Tim Coulis. The guy was crazy. The stories always got exaggerated. As the years went by, the stories got bigger.”
As Tocchet battled his way up through the minor leagues of Canadian hockey, Tim Coulis’s name haunted him. This was because during the mid to late 1980s, Coulis was the boogeyman, a real-life hockey brawler with a reputation shrouded in menace due to his many acts of on-ice violence. Tocchet played for the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds in the Ontario Hockey League (OHL), and at every turn, in every city, in every locker room, someone had a new story about Coulis that was worse than the previous one.
“Coulis didn’t just beat up one guy, he beat up ten. Coulis didn’t just break a guy’s nose, he broke necks and jaws and ended guys’ careers,” Tocchet says. “Coulis didn’t just fight a guy; he repeatedly and viciously punched him in the balls from close range. And did you hear the one about the time Coulis swung his stick at another player and almost maimed him for life?”
While Coulis was a decent, hard-nosed player, the stories about him were often exaggerated, the Slap Shot–style antics becoming established urban legend. But all fables start with a shred of truth. A lot of the stories that surrounded Coulis were based on real events, such as the time in 1982 when he punched out a referee. At the time of that incident, Coulis was twenty-four years old and playing for the Dal- las Black Hawks in the Central League. After a penalty called on Coulis resulted in a power-play goal for the Salt Lake Golden Eagles, an enraged Coulis exited the penalty box and instantly went after referee Bob Hall, who had called the penalty on him.
Coulis menacingly skated circles around Hall in what was described as “an Indian and covered-wagon routine.” Hall informed Coulis that if he didn’t stop, he was going to receive a ten-minute misconduct. Coulis didn’t stop, and Hall went back over to the penalty box and informed the other officials that Coulis was receiv- ing the additional penalty. As Hall was informing the other players of the situation, Coulis popped Hall in the back of the head and knocked him out cold. Hall fell to the ice and had to be revived with ammonia.
At first Hall thought someone had thrown a bottle at him from the stands. (Hey, it was old-time hockey in the old Central League, a rough arena, and anything was possible.) Coulis was suspended for the rest of the season and kept away from the media for fear that he’d say something he and the team and the league would re- gret. But when Coulis stepped away from the game for a season, it only deepened the dark shadows that surrounded him.
Then, as fate would have it, Rick Tocchet and Tim Coulis crossed paths, and for the first time Tocchet came face-to-face with the specter who had haunted him for years.
“It was my first year with the Philadelphia Flyers,” Tocchet says. “I was a rookie, and it was my first exhibition game. We were playing Minnesota, and Coulis was on a tryout with the North Stars. I’m eighteen years old and stretching at the blue line during warm-ups. And there’s Tim Coulis. He’s got no teeth and he looks like Fred- dy Krueger, and I’m shitting my pants.”
As the teams warmed up, Tim Coulis had set his eyes on Tocchet, because Toc- chet had garnered a solid reputation for himself as a fighter and a young, aggres- sive upstart, a player who possessed a unique blend of bare-knuckled moxie and scoring touch. Because of this, Tocchet knew that he was potentially a target, the type of person Coulis would challenge and try to intimidate and make a statement with.
But sitting next to Tocchet on the Flyer bench was Brown, a legitimate NHL tough guy with a cracking left fist. Tocchet leaned forward on the bench in the old Met Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, and saw with wide eyes that Dave Brown was no mere mortal NHL fighter. Dave Brown was a monster slayer.
“For me, it was like when you’re a kid and there’s the boogeyman, the Freddy Krueger. Well, on that night Dave Brown killed Freddy Krueger,” Tocchet says, still in awe. “On Dave Brown’s first shift he grabbed Tim Coulis and he just beat the liv- ing crap out of him. He broke Coulis’s entire face.”
Brown broke Coulis’s orbital bone, crushing his face into pieces. In that one shift, in that one fight, Brown exemplified hockey strong, because he stepped up, set aside his own personal safety, and fought the bad guy so that his teammates didn’t have to live in fear. Because of Brown’s extinguishing of Tim Coulis, Tocchet was finally unshackled of the fear that had haunted him for years in the minor leagues. So, naturally, on Tocchet’s next shift he played like a free man.
“I went out onto the ice and ran every guy I could,” Tocchet says, his hearty guf- faw rattling the phone speaker. “I hit four Minnesota players in a row straight from behind, because when you have the guy who broke the orbital bone of the boogey- man on your side, you can get away with anything!”
Tim Coulis was soon cut from the North Stars and he never made it in the NHL.
Although Coulis’s toughness was without question, his antics and his legend last- ed slightly longer than his career of about nineteen games with the Washington Capitals. Meanwhile, Dave Brown played in 729 games over fourteen seasons in the NHL, earning 1,789 penalty minutes, and his reputation as one of the most feared and respected tough guys to ever play the game has been permanently stamped in the annals.
But physical strength and a hard chin can take a hockey fighter only so far. Brown and all the other enforcers had to possess not only an untold amount of physical strength but also mental toughness. As a team’s designated tough guy, there was always someone on the opposing team, in the next game, in the next town, preparing to destroy them, and looking to make a reputation by kicking their ass. And if they didn’t fight or got beaten too often, they could lose their job and be thrown onto the NHL scrap heap like so many disposable tough guys before them. After all, a general manager could always find someone else who was willing to step in and fight.
Courage is in all hockey players, in various forms: playing in pain is in the very fabric of the game. But the hockey strength and courage it takes to be a fighter is something else entirely. Fighters like Brown had to live with the fear of being beat- en, of being humiliated, and of being savagely injured. That fear was a living thing. No matter how far a player pushed his fears of being beaten to the corners of his mind, brushing the mental anguish and physical pain to the side and summoning the courage to stand in there and fight again, there were always crumbs of that anx- iety left behind. The fear never left them; there was another game in two days and another tough guy to potentially deal with, and that tough guy could hurt you so bad you just might not ever recover. This was what Dave Brown and countless other players like him lived through day after day, season after season. From the broken bones in their faces to the scars on their hands to the concussive waves that rippled through their brains, their sacrifice to the team was paid in full.
But, in typical Brown fashion, he downplays his sacrifice, his toughness, and the pop-culture glorification of his role.
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