Blood on the Ice

By SEAN GREGORY Monday, Dec. 12, 2011

In Hockey circles, they're known as tough guys, goons, enforcers. They're sluggers on skates. The job description is simple: You touch one of our talented players, our goal scorers, I pummel your face. Underneath the cocky, growling exterior of some hockey fighters, however, is something surprising: fear. Crippling fear. The kind that can keep you up all night before a game, stomach churning, half-wishing that when you do fall asleep, you don't wake up the next day.

Jim Thomson knew the feeling. A former enforcer, he played for six National Hockey League teams from 1986 to '94 and protected, among others, Wayne Gretzky. For Thomson, a steady diet of booze and painkillers helped untangle the late-night knots in his gut. He'd never let on, but whenever Thomson knew he'd have to fight the next day, he was terrified of getting his ass kicked in front of 15,000 fans howling for blood--his blood.

The NHL's enforcers, many of them marginally skilled at best, often become rent-a-fighters who drift from team to team until their usefulness runs out. Thomson says he sustained six documented concussions in his pro career and failed to report dozens of others. He's convinced that these blows to the head, received in dozens of fights, contributed to his anxiety, depression and addiction. Recent scientific research suggests such a connection. After Thomson's playing days ended, his addiction intensified and his depression worsened. At his low point, he curled up in bed, strung out on drugs and alcohol, thinking about taking his own life. "I know what being an enforcer did to me, how it destroyed me," Thomson says.

Thanks to stints in rehab, Thomson was able to bounce back. He now trains hockey players and does some motivational speaking. Others haven't been so lucky. The recent deaths of three enforcers highlighted the potential link between head trauma and mental illness and ignited a debate about whether fighting should have a place in the NHL. In May, the New York Rangers' Derek Boogaard, whose 2010--11 season was cut short by a concussion, died of an accidental overdose of a painkiller and alcohol. Boogaard had a history of substance-abuse problems. On Aug. 15, Rick Rypien, a former Vancouver Canucks player who had just signed with the Winnipeg Jets, killed himself after a decadelong struggle with depression. Two weeks later, Wade Belak, a recently retired defenseman for the Nashville Predators, hanged himself. (Belak's parents have described his death as an accident.)

While of the three, only Rypien's issues with depression were well known, we are aware that mental illness carries a stigma in pro sports and can go hidden. And while only Boogaard had a documented history of concussions, we know that pro athletes often refuse to report concussions, afraid that time off the ice will cost them a job. Belak, Boogaard and Rypien got into over 400 pro-hockey fights combined; accumulated subconcussive blows to the head may lead to addictive behavior and depression.

You can't draw definite conclusions about the root cause of this year's tragedies, but some scientific hints are disturbing. A Boston University research center has diagnosed two former enforcers with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease found in people who have sustained repeated blows to the head. The enforcers were Bob Probert, one of the toughest players of all time, who died in 2010 of heart failure, and Reggie Fleming, who played in the prehelmet days and passed away in 2009 at 73. Fleming, a fierce and fearless player, had suffered from dementia and other CTE symptoms for 30 years. (CTE symptoms include substance abuse and depression and can be diagnosed only postmortem; the Boston University lab is conducting a study on Boogaard's brain.)

After several NFL players were diagnosed with CTE, football took steps to make that game safer. Hockey is trying to do the same. In January, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman noted that concussions are on the rise. If the league wants to reduce head trauma and the risk of its players going through hell, why not scrap a tradition that involves multiple bare-knuckle punches to the head? "The role of the enforcer must go," says Thomson. "What are we waiting for?"

Hockey fighting has passionate defenders, though, even among the ex-enforcer ranks. "The beauty of our game is the diversity," says former enforcer Ryan VandenBussche, who served 70 penalty minutes for each of the 10 goals he scored in nine years in the NHL. "We give the fans what they want." In early October, one of hockey's highest-profile figures, irascible ex-coach and Hockey Night in Canada broadcaster Don Cherry, went so far as to call Thomson and two other enforcers "turncoats," "hypocrites" and "pukes" because Cherry thought they wanted to eliminate fighting. (Two of them didn't; Cherry later apologized.)

Bullies and Blood Sport

Since the dawn of hockey, fighting has been ingrained in the game. Screamed one Toronto Star headline during the NHL's first season, in 1918: "Two NHL Players Under Arrest in Charge of Fighting, Fighting Players Remanded for Sentencing." After the Philadelphia Flyers of the 1970s, known as the Broad Street Bullies, intimidated their way to back-to-back Stanley Cups, teams started an arms race (a fists race, really) to stockpile enforcers. The 1977 film Slap Shot--which starred Paul Newman as a player-coach of a minor-league team that signs a trio of bespectacled goons--glorified hockey as blood sport.

By the early '90s, the NHL began dishing out 10-game suspensions to players who left the bench during a brawl. After a lockout shut down the 2004--05 season, the NHL allowed longer passes and enforced rules against hooking and holding in order to emphasize skill and win back fans. These changes have allowed the game to flow, and with fewer stoppages and less clutch-and-grab defense, players are not as inclined to drop their gloves and square off. Today, according to the NHL, fighting is down more than 50% from its late-1980s peak, to less than a fight every two games.

Not only is fighting less prevalent; its defenders point out that it's far from the main cause of concussions. According to research from St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, fighting causes 8% of all diagnosed NHL concussions. Moreover, fighting proponents insist that throwing punches actually makes the game safer. If the NHL were to ban fighting, the argument goes, concussions could increase: without fear of retribution from enforcers, players might feel freer to take cheap shots. "It's not a gratuitous 'We like fighting,'" says ex-player Brendan Shanahan, now the NHL's chief disciplinarian. Players may be more likely to use their sticks as weapons, for example.

But the NHL is already handing out stiffer penalties for egregious hits to the head while the puck is in play. So why, if fighting were banned, would stick-waving maniacs suddenly emerge? Dr. Robert Cantu, a co-director of the Boston University concussion lab, labels as "horsebleep" the assertion that fighting causes just 8% of hockey concussions, since the research measures only diagnosed concussions. Judging by the enforcers he has examined, he says hockey fighters suffer concussion symptoms "about once every four fights."

And even if we suppose that fighting causes only 8% of concussions, aren't these worth eliminating? Football refs immediately break up brawls. If you fight in a soccer match, your team plays a man short for the rest of the game. Hockey in the Olympics and at the collegiate level in the U.S. survives without fisticuffs. Why can't the NHL? "We evolve with the times," says Thomson. "We once smoked on airplanes, but we stopped doing that when we found out it was killing us. Where do you see more head shots than in a hockey fight? Why don't we start at the top?"