DEEP INTO OUR INTERVIEW, I say to Nilan, “I’d like to go through a list of your injuries.”
I start at the bottom, with his toes. But after a few seconds, he cuts me off. This is because Nilan’s history of playing in pain is so extensive that it would take for- ever to go through all his injuries. Instead, he just reads them off as if he’s dic- tating from his own autopsy report.
“I’ve had thirty surgeries,” Nilan begins in a clinical tone.
“Legs: I’ve had eleven surgeries on my right knee, eight scopes and three big ones. One scope on my left knee.
“Stomach: I’ve had a sports hernia.
“Shoulders: I’ve had both shoulders done twice. Rotator cuffs on both shoulders twice.
“Elbows: I have chips in them.
Arms: I broke the ulna bone [the forearm bone that runs from the elbow to the pinkie side of the wrist] twice. I played the rest of the game with it. The first time I broke it I was at the Forum with the Rangers and I hit the goalpost. There was about seven minutes left in the game, and I sat on the bench. I just thought I had hit my funny bone, and then when I started turning green I realized it was broken.
“Hands: I had teeth in my hands. Two surgeries. I had a finger bitten off in a street fight, came halfway off. Actually, two fingers were nearly bitten off. I had an infection.
“Face: My nose is like rubber. Believe me. I’ve gotten hit plenty of times in the nose.
“Stitches: I’ve got stitches around my eye area. Say about twenty. Three here, two there. Nothing really bad, though. I did get a puck in the head once, my fore- head, from Guy Lafleur. He hit me with a slap shot in practice and I got about twenty-five stitches. But it was a plastic surgeon, and they did a pretty good job.”
After he retired, the pain actually grew. The aches in his muscles and joints from all the injuries he had sustained over the years had built up layer by layer. And be- neath all that, Nilan had been playing with bone-on-bone contact in his right knee since high school. It was after a shoulder surgery when he was done playing that Nilan first turned to Percocet to ease the pain. The pain medication made him feel all right, made him function and able to get through the day. He wasn’t taking the pills to get high. He was taking them to try to be able to live a normal life, to go golfing, to slow the crippling arthritic pain that had started creeping through his body and soaking into his joints.
“I had arthritis issues in my knee, my hand, shoulders, back, ankle, everything,” says Nilan. “The Percocet worked for me, and the progression, the disease is such that you’ve got to take more to get the same effect.”
Percocet led to Vicodin, and when he couldn’t afford that, he turned to the cheapest opiate on the market: heroin. His marriage fell apart, and his relation- ships with his children and family were sucked into his maelstrom of pain.
“I was just trying to get through the day without hurting another person,” Nilan said in the film The Last Gladiators, a documentary by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney about the role of the enforcer in the NHL. It stars Nilan and his fights both on and off the ice.
The blow that put the mighty Chris Nilan down—a man who hardly ever went down—was when he woke up in a hotel bathroom with blood all over his body and a needle stuck in his arm. When he stood up, his legs gave out and he hit his head on the way down.
Soon after, he asked for help and entered rehab. After slipping back into addic- tion on a few occasions, Nilan is now sober and fights his addiction with meetings and his trademark no-nonsense work ethic and never-stay-down attitude. The phys- ical pain is still there, though; he feels it every day when he wakes up. “I’m stiff in the mornings,” Nilan says. “Issues with arthritis in my right knee, hands, and left ankle. But I deal with it. I go to the gym every day. Work out.”
His hands took the brunt of his occupation and continue to give him problems. He works out with a trainer now to specifically help strengthen them, which re- duces the pain some. His left ankle is not only ravaged with arthritis but once developed a staph infection so severe they almost had to amputate the foot. He had three surgeries on the ankle alone, and that chewed up all the cartilage.
But he no longer numbs himself with narcotics and booze. No matter how many times he’s been hit, bitten, or speared, or seen his life dangle at the end of a But he no longer numbs himself with narcotics and booze. No matter how many times he’s been hit, bitten, or speared, or seen his life dangle at the end of a
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