I asked current NHL players, NHL alumni, and all manner of hockey personnel. I asked them over the phone, in locker rooms, in the press box, and in coffee shops. With the exception of Jack Carlson, every single player I talked to for Hockey Strong had a hard time answering what appeared to be a rather straightforward question.
It wasn’t like I was asking the players about global warming and the effects of rising sea levels or their thoughts on the Dickensian narrative of The Wire. I was asking them about something they were intimately familiar with, both physically and mentally. But in interview after interview, it was almost as if they had never re- ally considered why hockey players like themselves continuously played in so much pain. Perhaps it is something so commonplace, something that has always been there, like the moon or the presence of oxygen, that they had never given it an ounce of thought. Hockey players play in pain. So has it always been, and so shall it always be. What’s there to talk about?
Former Minnesota North Star Steve Payne: “Why do hockey players play in pain? I’ve never given it any thought.”
Former New Jersey Devil Randy McKay: “Ugh, it’s just something you do. Wow, that’s a tough question. It’s hard to explain.”
Dave Brown: “I think . . . it’s the way it’s always been . . . ?”
As each interview moved forward, though, the players would inevitably circle back to that first question in an attempt to answer it. They seemed suddenly just as curious as I was. When each player began to tell his own tales of playing through pain, or when he told stories about a teammate’s feats of courage, it was as if he, too, were hearing it and believing it for the first time. The injuries that they sustained in their careers, the ones that they thought were mundane, moments that were completely taken for granted, were discovered to be riveting parts of their narrative. It took some coaxing, sure. All the players interviewed truly believed that their own particular scars or injuries were nothing special, because every hockey player has stories just like them. But they eventually peeled back their layers of stoic pride, the shield that tells hockey players never to draw attention to their own injuries because, in the end, it’s all about the team, and winning the Cup as a team. Finally, though, with their willingness to share, my
book began to take shape.
As they talked, the stories behind their injuries were unwrapped, revealing years and memories, which led to more stories, more memories, like Russian nesting dolls. After a few moments of flitting around my first question, Payne came around and disclosed to me, “I actually played for seven years with what I would call minor injuries. That’s stuff like broken ribs, broken thumbs, broken fingers, and a broken nose.” That small observation led directly to him later confessing in our interview that he played three-quarters of his rookie year when he was eighteen years old with a severely broken thumb, which had swelled up to the size of a pickle.
My interview with Randy McKay was also typical. One small story about a minor scar on his chin was a portal to much more.
“Devils coach Jacques Lemaire was the best coach I had in my career by far,” said McKay. “When he would get pissed off about someone on the other team, he’d say, ‘Give him a fucking whack.’ And he said it a lot. ‘Give that guy a fucking whack’ if someone was out there embarrassing us.”
“The Crash Line was something unique, and at the time we were the best fourth line in the NHL. [We’d go into the game] to either keep momentum going or to just get some momentum built,” McKay said. “Well, it was a New Year’s Eve game in Chicago. My linemate Mike Peluso on the Crash Line, one of the most emotional players that I’ve ever played with, was forechecking on this one defenseman. At the last second, the defenseman saw Peluso coming and ducked. Peluso went right over the top of him and ended up hitting me instead, right on the side of my face with his skate. I dropped to the ice like a frickin’ bag of rocks. Peluso hit me so hard with his skate I got cut on the chin and a concussion, too.”
All of the hockey players interviewed for this book gave some version of these general reasons for playing in pain:
- It was their history and culture. Almost every player mentioned that the hockey players who played before them all played in pain, and they set the example.
So that’s what they would do, too. Who were they to break the chain? Who were they to not learn the lessons of their forebears? The thread through time, the one that tied the original players from the 1800s to today’s players to- gether, was real, and it was alive.
-It was a team thing. Every player I talked to mentioned that they gutted it out because they didn’t want to disappoint their teammates. Each one of them knew that in order to be a hockey player, they had to accept the fact that they’d never feel 100 percent, and the injuries were simply going to be a part of their career. The end of the season would feel like hell for all of them, but the team that could win it all was the team that could endure. Again, you can’t truly com- pare sports to real warfare. But inside the confines of the hockey locker room, the loyalty the players had for each other was akin to a military band of broth- ers.
• It was simply part of their job. Cody Franson of the Buffalo Sabres said it best: “There’s no way to play a season without playing in some pain. When you start to consider this game as a profession, you know you’re going to have to play in pain. It’s a physical game; you play a lot of games in a short amount of time. I think if you’re going to consider hockey as a career, you have to accept that and have a high pain tolerance.”
• The players felt pressure to play in pain. Most of the NHL alumni that I spoke with told me that they felt like they’d lose their spot in the lineup if they didn’t play in pain. They learned quickly that hockey was very much a business just like any other, and if they didn’t show up for work, if they couldn’t play, they didn’t have a job. So they played with an injured foot or hand or shoulder to remain employed. But this pressure to play in pain was also why so many NHL players felt compelled to continue playing despite the lingering effects of concussions. As we’ve seen in the NFL, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive, degenerative brain disease found in athletes with a his- tory of repetitive brain trauma, was lurking in their brains and their very liveli- hood. For vast numbers of NHL alumni, the research and information on con- cussions wasn’t yet available or completely understood, and the locker room culture was far less forgiving than it is today. So they played through the headaches, the dizzy spells, the depression, the fits of anger, and the metallic buzz ricocheting between their ears, because it was their job to do so, and their teammates were counting on them. The players simply had little idea how corrosive the effect of “having their bell rung” would be for their brains and their futures. Understandably, most of the players that I interviewed didn’t want to broach the subject of concussions, either, because it was too personal or because they were involved in lawsuits.
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