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Violence in Hockey: Do Enforcers Pay the Price?

He’s known as “Grapes.” He’s known by most Canadians as the flamboyant multi-coloured-suited co-host of Hockey Night In Canada every Saturday night. He’s perhaps best known, however, for the often controversial things he often says on the show’s Coach’s Corner segment.

Don Cherry’s C.V. of shenanigans is an impressive one. It includes the hoopla that resulted from his famous “Only Europeans and French Canadians wear visors” comment, as well as from him purposely mispronouncing Jaroslav Halak’s name during the Montreal Canadiens Cinderella playoff run two years ago, a playoff where Halak was by far the team’s best player.

His most recent comments, though, about violence in hockey, have probably caused the biggest stir across the country. Cherry seemed to question the manhood of enforcers for “complaining” about the symptoms they suffer in retirement as a result of having been in so many fights.

“The ones I am really disgusted with — a bunch of pukes that fought before — [are] Stu Grimson, Chris Nilan and Jim Thomson,” Cherry said. “[They say], ‘Oh, the reason that they’re drinking drugs and alcoholics is because they fight. You turncoats. You hypocrites. There’s one thing I’m not is a hypocrite. You guys, you were fighters. And now you don’t want guys to make the same living you did.”

His choice words almost landed him a lawsuit from Nilan, one of the most respected men to ever wear the jersey of one of the most historic teams in professional sports.

Nilan was a fan-favorite in his 10-year tenure in a Montreal Canadien uniform. He may not have lit up the score sheet, but you could always depend on him to defend the players who did. His 3043 penalty minutes rank him ninth in the NHL, and everyone on and off the ice envied him for his courage to continually drop the gloves.

The 54-year-old’s toughest test wasn’t protecting the likes of Guy Lafleur and company on the ice, however. His real test came after his career was over, 14 years ago, in the form of two things: alcohol and drugs.

Nilan’s life began spiraling out of control when he became addicted to the painkillers he had to take after his multiple surgeries because of his style of play as a player throughout his career. He seemed to be paying the price for being good a throwing a punch. But luckily, he was able to overcome his addiction, and is now able to lead a normal life and finally enjoy his retirement.

The news for Nilan’s off-ice problems with drugs and alcohol came at a time where the NHL was mourning the loss of three of its enforcers, the same title Nilan held for his entire professional career, only in these three cases, the men weren’t as lucky as Nilan.  Part of Cherry’s accusation was that Nilan and his fellow tough guys were using the death of these enforcers to try to reduce violence in hockey. But was there a cost to these enforcers because of the role they played in the game?

Nicknamed “The Boogeyman” for his fearlessness to come to the defense of his teammates, Boogaard was found dead at the age of 28 in his apartment in Minnesota, after he accidentally mixed alcohol and unprescribed painkillers on May 13, 2011. He had been released from the NHL’s drug and alcohol rehab program the day before, and he was spending a night on the town with his brother Aaron, who gave him the pills that caused his death.

Newly signed free agent Winnipeg Jet Rick Rypien, 27, was returning to the place where he started his professional career with the AHL’s Manitoba Moose, when he died of an apparent suicide attempt on August 15. When he was a member of the Vancouver Canucks, he took two leaves of absence in three years for “personal reasons.” He was said to be suffering from depression. Still, he was a fan favorite in both Vancouver and Winnipeg, and he was one of the most respected enforcers in the NHL during his career.

In the locker room, at practice or at home, 35-year-old Wade Belak was the happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Though he was one of the scariest players on the ice, he was always cracking jokes, putting a smile on someone’s face, and having fun with the media during post-game interviews. That’s why his death was the most shocking of the three to everyone outside the Belak family. Not that the others were any less devastating, but it wasn’t a secret to players around the League that Boogaard and Rypien were having personal issues and were both put into the rehab program by the NHL. On the other hand, when news broke out the Belak had committed suicide in his hotel room in Toronto on August 31st, everyone was bewildered. He, too, had suffered from depression. How could a guy who seemed to have had the most perfect life be so confused and unhappy?

These deaths left many experts wondering if the role of these players in the league had anything to do with their deaths. And this question is what started the Cherry vs. Nilan debate, with Cherry criticizing Nilan for being a “hypocriter,” claiming Nilan had said the NHL needed to remove fighting from the game after having made his living being an enforcer.

Nilan claimed he said no such thing, and rightly so, because without fighting, he along with many other players including Boogaard, Rypien and Belak, probably wouldn’t have had a job. And when hockey is all you know, all you have ever dreamed of, what happens if you don’t have a job?

These men are a lot like the soldiers we send off to war, in a sense. It might seem like an odd comparison, but it really isn’t. Enforcers, like soldiers, risk their health, if not their lives, every single day, to protect others. When you think of successful teams, like the Canadiens of the 1970’s, you think of the superstars like Guy Lafleur or Jean Beliveau or Yvon Cournoyer. But there are more people than just the superstars who have shaped the Habs organization over the last 100-plus years. And you could say the same for every team in the National Hockey League. Hockey is a team sport, and to be successful in a league as tough as the NHL, you need more than just your stars to carry a franchise to a championship. What people don’t realize is that enforces like Nilan are also an integral part of winning a Stanley Cup because they’re letting the superstars play their game without them having to worry about fighting or getting hurt.

But, just as it isn’t easy being an soldier, it isn’t easy being an enforcer. Every game, you’re running the possibility for serious injuries such as concussions, brain damage, or broken bones. Not that regular NHLers do not run that same risk, but they’re not fighting for the lives day in and day out. They’ve got guys like Chris Nilan to do that work for them.

Also, these enforcers live, breath and sleep hockey, no matter their talent level. These guys often don’t know how to do anything else but play hockey. Yet being an enforcer in the NHL means that your job is not always secure. If you can’t score, you’ll never know when you’ll be unemployed. If you live, breathe and eat hockey, and then suddenly you can’t play anymore, how do you think you would react to that? Maybe the constant worry about not being able to do something they loved, something that was their  livelihood, was so destructive that it cost three young men their lives.

This constant worry also stems from not having an education, another sacrifice many athletes, like soldiers too, make to play hockey. So if you are an enforcer whose job isn’t always safe and you have no education to fall back on, where are you supposed to go from there? If you become unemployed, how are you going to support yourself and your family? You know you can’t do anything. If you feel all the fighting, the punches to the head, are taking too much of a toll, you say to yourself, I have a family to take care of–should I step down and get my life back together? What about my family? And what if this is the only thing I know how to do? Where do I draw the line between my health and my job?

There might not be an easy answer as to where that line should be drawn. Yes, as an enforcer, your health, your life, are more important the the paycheck at the end of the week, even if it’s the only thing you’ve ever known how to do. But if the answer were that simple, then we wouldn’t have stories like Boogaard’s or Rypien’s or Belak’s. We wouldn’t have people like Cherry, thinking they could insult enforcers and then apologize when someone threatens to ruin your already bad reputation.

What we need to recognize, though, whatever side of that line we come down on, is that tough guys in sports, like soldiers, serve a role for us in society, a role we like to be able to take for granted. Yet they are human, and they have their own worries. We may  always need tough guys in the NHL, just as we will always need soldiers in war. That’s life. That being said, if some of these people come out with their stories instead of keeping them secret, it could help others. If you look at players like Belak’s former teammate Jordin Tootoo, who like Nilan battled with drug and alcohol addiction, he’s made his story public. Canadian Olympic cycler and speed skater Clara Hughes along with TSN’s Off The Record host Michael Landsberg have both battled with depression, but have collaborated with Bell Mobility in their Let’s Talk campaign, a lobby to get people to talk about what they’re going through. Maybe such initiatives wouldn’t have saved Boogaard or Rypien or Belak, but in the future maybe it could save so many more innocent people who are battling with mental illness or drug addiction and want to get better, but simply don’t know how. These people play an important role for us, and we owe them our understanding and help in return.