Chris Nilan’s path to this place of peace, this place of nonviolent resolve, was born out of the hockey strength he nurtured on the hard road he’s traveled. It’s been a journey that has seen his body torn apart by injuries and addiction and put back together one day at a time. Ironically, Nilan’s present life as an antibullying advocate was shaped by his own brutal past, his own personal history of violence and destruction. All of his scars and injuries and memories from his life as an NHL enforcer live inside him, and they have marked his life like the rings of a tree.
DESPITE NILAN’S REPUTATION AS one of the meanest players in the history of the NHL, he was, in fact, never a bully, never used a power imbalance to prey on the weak or fragile. He was the opposite.
“I’ve always been for the underdog,” Nilan says sharply. “I’ve always stuck up for people.”
This was a mantra that Nilan’s dad drilled into him from an early age: to stand up for anyone smaller or weaker. Whether it was on the street corner or at school or on the ice, and whether it involved a family member or a friend or a teammate, it wasn’t negotiable: when someone was being taken advantage of, he was expected to get involved. It was in the gritty streets of Boston that Nilan’s hockey strength was born. In many ways, it was a perfect Irish existence. Nilan has always had one fist ready to fight if needed and to protect those who require protecting, to rise up against the oppressive nature of those in power, and the other hand extended to help the fallen get back up, to lift up those in need. This dichotomy that exists in Nilan, and most certainly in most Irishmen, the one where we find both the fighter and the peacemaker, the sinner and the saint, the poet and the plow, was formed in his surly upbringing in Boston, where loyalty to one’s family, to one’s neigh- borhood, and to one’s crew was ingrained in him from an early age.
Nilan grew up in Boston’s crime-riddled West Roxbury section, an Irish- American enclave that was practically governed by clan rule. He first learned to skate on a frozen puddle in a parking lot and learned to play the game in outdoor ice rinks that sprouted up in neighborhoods all over the city of Boston amid the black-and-gold fever created by rushing defenseman Bobby Orr. His upbringing had all the makings of a Martin Scorsese film: truculent kid, street fights, and a stern dad with a military background (Mr. Nilan was a former Green Beret) who used a hands-on form of discipline with his kids. There is no doubt that growing up in the city of Boston toughened Nilan.
“Just growing up with the kids I did in West Roxbury, I learned not to take shit from anybody,” Nilan says proudly. “Someone was always looking to get some- thing over on you.”
The streets of Boston were filled with hard men, and some of them were mon- sters. At times there was no avoiding them. Nilan couldn’t even go out on a simple date with a pretty girl without feeling the direct threat of violence.
As a young man he drove over to pick up a woman named Karen Stanley. Stan- ley’s mom, Teresa, was dating James “Whitey” Bulger, a man with a very dangerous reputation.
“Bulger gave me the typical, you know, the way a father would talk to any guy that was taking his daughter out,” Nilan told Toucher and Rich on CBS Radio. “He had a gun on his lap. He reached over the table, grabbed the gun, and just talked to me. He wanted to see how I would react. I just answered his questions. What’s he going to do? Shoot me before the first date?”
Years later, Nilan would marry Karen Stanley and they would have three children together, and the world would eventually discover that Whitey Bulger was the crime lord of Boston, a cold-blooded Irish mob boss who would eventually become num- ber one on the FBI’s Most Wanted List after he escaped prosecution for murder and other crimes and went on the lam for decades.
Nilan grew up in this hard place, in city rinks, in streets full of gangsters and goons, of Southies and Townies and Dorsets, all of them looking to protect their turf. To survive his childhood, Nilan became a hard man, too, but lived by a code to protect those who needed help.
After playing hockey for four years at Northeastern University, Nilan was se- lected by the Montreal Canadiens as the 231st pick out of 234 players selected in the 1978 NHL draft. He was shipped to Halifax to play for the Nova Scotia Voyageurs in the American Hockey League, a young American college kid battling the stereotype that college players were wimps and couldn’t play the sort of ill- tempered hockey called for in those days. He proved them wrong straightaway. Northeastern had gotten him out of West Roxbury, but the streets of Boston never left his heart. Nilan found his way into hockey fights by never taking any shit from anyone on the ice, just as he wouldn’t take any shit on the streets in his own neigh- borhood.
“In my first game for Montreal’s farm club, I played against the Philadelphia Fly- ers’ American Hockey League farm team,” Nilan says. “I fought Glen Cochrane, a huge guy at six foot four. Well, I cut him bad. Then all of a sudden everyone in the American Hockey League wanted to fight me, and it took off.”
Admittedly, he had to work on his hockey skills to become a full-time profes- sional player. His fighting skills, on the other hand, came quite naturally. After all,he’d been fighting his whole life in Boston.
“He was good at fighting because I think he learned a lot in the streets,” says Dave Brown, the legendary Philadelphia Flyers heavyweight and Nilan’s frequent combatant in the NHL. “He was a real tough guy, and undersized for the job he did. But he would fight anybody. Nilan knew what his job was, and he did his job every night.”
No coach had to ask Chris Nilan to fight. No one had to remind him that his job was to take on the nastiest men in the NHL for his teammates. After growing up in a city carved up by neighborhoods and borders, Nilan’s hockey strength was al- ready bursting with a fierce sense of clannish loyalty. Now the next step for Nilan was to protect his NHL teammates, most of whom couldn’t fight their way out of a wet bag. During the 1979–80 season in the American Hockey League with Nova Scotia, Nilan played 49 games and recorded a staggering 304 penalty minutes.
The following season, Nilan made the Montreal Canadiens’ roster. His NHL ca- reer started with a literal bang in the first period in his first game versus the big bad Boston Bruins, the team he grew up watching and idolizing. Along with the Phila- delphia Flyers, the Boston Bruins of the 1960s through the early 1980s had a noto- rious reputation as the biggest bullies in the league. The Bruins would terrorize their opponents into submission.
On one of his first shifts in the NHL, Nilan hit Bruins agitator Brad McCrimmon hard into the side boards to let him know that Montreal would no longer be pushed around. Within seconds, Stan Jonathan, the Bruins’ tough guy and resident policeman, was all over him. The gloves came flying off and Jonathan hit Nilan with both hands, tuning him up with rights and then lefts. Nilan got in there and swung wildly, landing a few and taking a few, before they fell to the ice in a heap.
In the second period, Nilan was taking the face-off draw against renowned Bru- ins tough guy Terry O’Reilly, nicknamed “Taz” for his Tasmanian Devil–like behav- ior. O’Reilly tried to intimidate Nilan, and by extension the entire Montreal team, and slashed his stick at Nilan right there at the face-off for everyone to see. But Nilan was no patsy, and he gave it right back. Both players got thrown out of the face-off circle, but instead of complying with the referee’s order to move to the wing and take positions on either side of the circle, they simply skated in a parallel line until, finding an open stretch of ice, they dropped the gloves.
“Terry O’Reilly was a tough customer,” Nilan says. “In my first game, I hit him with two good rights. He hit me with two lefts, and I couldn’t see. He hit me right on the button. Blood coming out of my eye, and I couldn’t even see where I was.”
After the fight was broken up, blood poured out of Nilan’s nose and eyes and blotted his crisp, white Montreal jersey. Montreal’s Larry Robinson, sporting an epic Afro, stood amusedly next to Nilan the whole time, chewing gum, mentoring the young scrapper as Nilan talked smack to O’Reilly en route to the penalty box.
The announcer once again made an official announcement for Nilan’s arrival into the league: “From West Roxbury, quite a story, he made it here to the Cana- diens. Nilan is making a name here. It was no contest [for O’Reilly] after Nilan caught him with the first punch.”
It was an ass-kicking clinic by O’Reilly, a complete schooling on how things are done in the NHL, and one that set Nilan straight. After that fight in his first game, Nilan made a private promise to himself that it would never happen again, that he would never again fight that wide open and allow himself to get that beaten. For it wasn’t just him losing a physical battle; when a team’s resident tough guy gets his ass kicked, the whole team suffers. From that point on Nilan improved his tech- nique so he could more effectively stand up for his teammates. Soon his reputation built as one of the toughest guys in the league pound for pound.
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