He started feeling better again.
On November 19, Savard got the go-ahead to begin practising with the team. After his first workout, he reported that he felt “great.” Four days later, he went to Pittsburgh to be tested by Dr. Micky Collins, a well-known clinical psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The session lasted six hours. “I went through tests that I’d never gone through in my life,” Savard says. The clinic’s staff pushed him almost to the point of exhaustion, then at his weakest, they tested him some more. He was also given the baseline tests that he had done every year at training camp. “In some areas I passed with flying colours, and in others, I wasn’t any worse than I had been before. They said I was ready to go if I felt ready to go.”
Savard was now cleared to participate in contact drills.
His press conference in September about his depression and recovery had touched a nerve in big, tough Bruins fans. In an interview in late November, Savard spoke of how important the support of those fans had been to his recovery. “[Y]ou find out that so many people have struggled with this thing. All those letters from fans. I got at least [ten] thousand….I was going through a tough time, then to read those stories….It’s pretty incredible, huh?”
Since that game in Pittsburgh almost nine months before, Savard had had one wish: “I wanted to feel normal again. I wanted to do normal stuff.” So he did all kinds of treatments and took all manner of tests so the dizziness and depression would go away, and mostly they did. Then he realized that the absence of symptoms didn’t make him feel normal; only playing did. If his symptoms wouldn’t go away, that didn’t mean he couldn’t play. That meant he had to play. This wasn’t about feeling normal to play hockey. This was about playing hockey to feel normal. Normal was playing hockey.
There was nothing in the tests that said he shouldn’t try. It was up to him, and how he felt. “I was on the ice a lot more, and skating and working with the workout coach,” Savard recalls, “just getting ready for that day to come again where I could play.”
It didn’t take long. “I don’t remember the date. I just remember the crowd and the standing ovation. It was a really great night for me. I was a little emotional. I missed playing so much. And after that I started to feel pretty good.” He was “with the guys again, doing the everyday stuff that I’d done for the last fourteen years. I’m good. I’m good.” Three weeks and ten games later, a story in the Boston Herald describes him as “a shadow of his former self.”
“I wasn’t as effective, that’s for sure,” he says about his play after he returned. “I’m a guy that saw the ice really well, and was always a step ahead.” Now it was as if everything was just there as it happened. He wasn’t foreseeing anything. A big player can power his way to open ice; everyone else has to get there first. If Savard couldn’t do that, his whole game wouldn’t work. He’d always have to play in a scrum of bigger, stronger players, with no space or time to see the ice, to make his magic.
To quiet his doubts, he told himself that he hadn’t played for the better part of a year. It had only been one bad game, after all, or two, or only one bad week, or two. He just needed to get his feel for the game back, and then he’d be able to see everything better and faster again. He just had to stick with it.
Things did come back in time, Savard remembers, at least here and there. “I definitely had some moments where I felt real good. I had a couple of games that I felt like my old self. Making play after play some nights, then I’d go about three games not doing anything. But then having another good night.” He looks back on that time and on himself, and says, “I never thought about this until I stopped playing, but I don’t think I had it anymore.”
On January 15, 2011, the Bruins were trailing Pittsburgh, 3–2, in the third period in Boston. Savard skated the puck up the right boards across the Penguins’ blue line and, with time, turned to face across the ice, waiting for his teammates to get into scoring position. Pittsburgh defenceman Deryk Engelland closed in on him. Engelland is a few inches taller and was skating in a mostly upright position. Savard, bent slightly, made the pass as Engelland, with his hands and arms extended, pushed Savard’s head into the glass. Savard went down on his knees, holding his head. The Bruins trainer rushed out. Quickly, Savard was up and skated to the bench, and was back playing on his next shift.
After the game, he said he was “a little woozy.” The next day, his neck was sore, but he had no concussion symptoms. He had received a blow to the head, but except for a few short-term side effects, he was fine, he thought. This was a good test. He must be healing.
A week later, the Bruins were playing the Avalanche in Denver. Savard chased down a loose puck in the Colorado zone, almost into the left corner. Avalanche defenceman Matt Hunwick went with him, and as Savard made his pass behind the net, Hunwick—with a short, sharp motion—drove into him, Savard’s body hitting the boards, his head hitting the glass. “It wasn’t anything massive,” Savard recalls. “But I remember falling to my knees and seeing black again. And I’m in a bit of a panic, and I stay there, and when my eyes come back, I could see dots. I remember seeing the trainer coming out and I told him, ‘I think I’m done. I just can’t do this.’”
What disturbed Savard so much was the sheer routineness of the play, the kind of hit that can happen a few times in any game. To Savard, it now didn’t matter what he felt like the next day, whether his symptoms were better or worse than before. It wouldn’t matter what doctor he saw, or what tests he passed. “I had battled through it all. I tried three times to play again, and it just wasn’t going to happen. It was the last game I played.”
It is now several years later. “I feel pretty good,” Savard says. “I still have my issues. When I say ‘pretty good,’ my wife will tell you that I’m not good. I have some anxiety, some panic situations that I get medication for. But I don’t get too many headaches anymore. I have some memory issues, especially the short-term. But other than that I’m pretty happy. I help out with hockey, and try to keep myself occupied, and that’s a big thing for me.”
He had never had panic attacks before. “I ended up going to the emergency twice a few years ago. I thought I was having a heart attack. They tested me and told me my heart was fine.” He skates occasionally, but takes that pretty easy. He plays golf all summer and is still good enough to play in some Canadian Tour events. He has started working out again with a trainer. “But it’s just thirty minutes a day,” he says. “Nothing strenuous. Just to keep me active.” As for any kind of nine-to-five job, “That would be impossible, I think.”
He and his wife saw the movie Concussion shortly after it came out. “It was quite moving for us to watch. She was really disturbed,” he says. “It kind of scared me seeing what happened to some of these guys later on in life, and their anger issues, and what they were doing. I was basically telling myself that they had taken way more blows to the head than I ever did. It was the only way I could say to myself that it’s not going to happen to me, right?
“I just try to keep everything normal and to live a normal life. So that’s kind of what I’ve been doing.” Hockey was always at the centre of normal. Now he has a new normal: “Going to the kids’ hockey, raising a little girl, playing golf, spending time with my wife, and just trying to be happy.”
“It was sure a difficult time in my life,” he says, thinking back. “It’s not something that I’ve ever really talked about. I try to stay out of the spotlight. But I guess stuff needs to be said at some point.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Before Chicago’s 2011 training camp opened, and before Steve and Vally’s annual “head” session with Gisele, Steve had his yearly “spirit” week in Vail, Colorado. The idea had started from a conversation between Marty Gélinas and Andy O’Brien. NHL players were training harder than ever in the off-season, but they were finding that after they arrived back in their NHL cities and before camp began, the energy of their workouts dropped. It was the last gasp of
their summer, so it seemed they had a right to take it easier. There were also so many players of so many different skill levels in the on-ice sessions that it was impossible to get much done. The players, Gélinas and O’Brien realized, were losing fitness at the moment that they needed it most. Gélinas wondered, “What if we were to go away for a few days and have high-intensity workouts to get us ready for the season?” So he and O’Brien approached Ed Belfour, who was with Florida at the time; Belfour was all for it, and suggested Vail as the site. He had been there with the Dallas Stars; Vail was beautiful, and wasn’t busy at that time of year.
There were about eight or nine players in their initial group, Hayley Wickenheiser and Steve among them. As word spread, in subsequent years the numbers grew to twenty-four. It was by invitation only, and it was an invitation highly prized because of O’Brien and his work with Sidney Crosby—and because Crosby was there, too. How often, even as an NHL player, do you have a chance to spend five days with the world’s best player? To share the same locker room, the same ice surface, the same gym and breakfast table? To see what makes him tick? And because Crosby was there, John Tavares was there, and Tyler Seguin, and Jason Spezza, and other guys that they themselves wanted to be there—good players, hard workers, great guys. It was hockey’s Davos.
The first night, the players picked the teams, then went at each other the rest of the week. Golf, basketball, mountain climbing, bowling, three-on-three hockey; Team Crosby against Team Tavares, the players pushing themselves and each other the way no coach can; no standings in the newspaper, no money on the table, but stakes that couldn’t be higher—respect and bragging rights. It was the ultimate street hockey game. And if any of them thought of some other game to play, they competed at that, too.
“It’s at more than eight thousand feet of altitude,” O’Brien explains, “so it’s really difficult. But it’s this incredible environment removed from all the distractions of your life, where you’re just able to focus on what you are doing, whether it’s fishing, or golfing, or climbing a mountain to see a lake that’s very pristine and hard to get to. And Monty was at the centre of it. He planned the dinners. He planned the golf and put the foursomes together. He kept score of every contest, because at the end of the week a trophy was presented to the winner.
A few years later, after the camp began, Monty approached Vally, who had just retired. “‘Hey chum,’ he says to me,” Vally recalls, “‘you could be the goalie coach for our camp.’ And I’m thinking, I’m five minutes retired and I completely don’t belong. Then Monty goes to Andy [O’Brien], ‘Andy, we’ve got to bring in my boy, Vally. We need him at this camp. He’s a character. He’s going to be a guy that can glue everybody together.’ And Andy says, ‘We don’t really need a goalie coach, but okay Monty.’ And they bring me on.” Vally was amazed by what he saw. “These players have a different relationship than anything I ever experienced in the NHL,” he said. “They are stars for a reason. Crosby versus Tavares in a faceoff circle; it was just awesome.”
Awesome, too, was Steve. “I just loved seeing him chirp Sidney Crosby. I loved seeing him chirp, absolutely chirp, John Tavares. These are the stars of our league, that we all look up to, and they love him! Sidney Crosby loved Monty. They were workout partners. Monty was texting him. How did Steve Montador, my buddy, and just a regular NHL dude…?” Vally answers his own question: “Because he treated the stars like they were just regular fourth-liners. You know, like any guy is walking into the locker room and there’s Monty, ‘Nice pants, chum. You gonna change before we go out?’ Next guy, ‘Not a bad shirt. I wouldn’t wear it to a shit fight.’ You can’t say that to Sidney Crosby. And Crosby’s loving it! It was priceless.”
“It was like Monty was the superstar,” O’Brien says. “It was really funny to see Sidney Crosby taking a liking to him, following him. Monty had this ability to walk into a room and be the guy.”
O’Brien remembers a moment the first year they were there. “Eddie Belfour had a friend who had made some money in the oil industry and had this beautiful home in one of the most expensive areas in all of the Rocky Mountains. We went up there just for a little meet-and-greet and to enjoy some time together as a group. And Monty starts talking economics and investments and real estate with this guy.” O’Brien shakes his head as he tells the story. “Monty just morphed into being whatever he needed to be in any situation. He took control of the room. Not because he wanted to. That’s just who he was.”
O’Brien also remembers a hike they all went on. “It was a jog-hike, up the mountain, a little above ten thousand feet, and then around a lake, so the guys could walk for a bit, then run again. It was probably an hour long. We had already trained an hour that morning; Monty about ninety minutes. And we’re on this trail and Monty has his bag with him with a camera in it and every kind of power gel and supplement you can imagine. Everyone else is scared about a hike at this altitude, and here’s Monty carrying a backpack that weighs twenty pounds. And he’s at the front of the group. Then he sees a bear.” O’Brien laughs at the memory, and talks even faster. “So he cuts off the path, away from the group to take pictures of this bear! He’s gone. Then about ten minutes later, we see him, and now he’s at the back of the group, but then he catches everybody and ends up way ahead again. These are some of the fitter guys in the league.” O’Brien pauses a moment. “It was actually one of the few times in my career where I took a step back and said, ‘Wow, that was very impressive.’ He was a cardiovascular machine.”
“Monty was just such a unique human being,” says Vally. “It’s hard to even explain. Actually, it’s not hard to explain, but it’s hard to believe. I just loved watching him at Vail, seeing him absolutely mature from being captain of the rookies to captain of the stars.”
—
During Steve’s first few days in Chicago, he ran into Daniel Carcillo, a tough, feisty left winger, who was also in his first season with the Blackhawks. They had met twice before, the first time years earlier when they were taping segments for the TSN show Off the Record, with Michael Landsberg. “I was twenty-two years old then,” Carcillo recalls. “I remember I’d had two or three beers downstairs because I was really nervous and wanted to loosen up a bit, and when I went upstairs there was this guy getting his makeup done. He had cool hair and tattoos everywhere, and I wondered who he was. He looked me right in the eye all the time he was talking to me. I will never forget meeting Monty for the first time. He had something I wanted. I knew that right away. He was happy and he seemed so comfortable with himself, so sure of himself.” The second time they met was when Carcillo was in Philadelphia and Steve in Boston, when they fought. That was in 2009.
Carcillo had modest size and skills, but he played with the ferocity of someone who had a grudge against the world and whose survival was at stake. “Car Bomb,” he was called. He had made a name for himself leading the NHL in penalty minutes with the Coyotes in 2007–08, but made his breakthrough with the Flyers in 2009–10, when the team went to the Stanley Cup Final and lost to Chicago. The next season was worse for both the Flyers and for Carcillo, and when it was over, his contract up, the team didn’t extend him a qualifying offer. At age twenty-six, Carcillo was without a job, and with a reputation on and off the ice. There is good “out of control,” when a player unnerves and unsettles an opponent, and bad “out of control”—on the ice and off—when he unnerves and unsettles his own team as well. Car Bomb had become a time bomb.
On July 1, 2011, he signed a free agent contract with Chicago. The Blackhawks, after winning the Stanley Cup in 2010, had been pushed around in an opening-round loss to Vancouver the next season. A headline in USA Today announcing Carcillo’s signing read: “Daniel Carcillo is ready to stir it up in Chicago.”
Off the ice, Carcillo was less sure of himself. “I was going through a really rough time in my life. I was lonely and not in the right frame of mind.” When the Flyers let him go, he had made a decision to get sober and turn his life around. H
e decided he would do it by himself, the way he liked to do everything.
Early in his career with the Coyotes, Carcillo had been charged with DUI, which got him the attention of the league and the NHLPA, and he was put into their substance abuse program. “I fought them for about five or six years,” he says, “asking them to leave me alone, telling them that none of this stuff applies to me, blah blah blah. And the doctors were really good. They just let me come to my own realization, because if you push a guy like me into a corner, I’m going to fight back.” But there was something else Carcillo knew, that the doctors didn’t know. “They had no idea what I was doing as far as taking pills, and how deep into that I was. When I blew my knee out and had a few surgeries in Philly, I got hooked on painkillers, and that’s what brought me down pretty quickly the last year I was there. When I didn’t get signed, that was a wakeup call.”
With his new contract in Chicago, he decided to get help. “I went to see Dr. [Brian] Shaw and told him what I’d been doing.” Shaw, a clinical psychologist in Toronto, was co-director of the NHL/NHLPA Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health Program. “I started going to AA meetings that day,” Carcillo says. “Dr. Shaw asked me if I wanted to go to rehab, and I said no because I only had a month to train [before camp] and I wanted to be around my family. So I sat on my couch for a week just shivering, detoxed on my own, then started working out. That’s how I got sober.” Then he drove to the Chicago camp. “I wanted to try to do it on my own,” he explains, “because I wanted to feel what it’s like to come off it so I wouldn’t do it again.” He also wanted to feel proud of himself for something.
That’s when he ran into Steve. For Carcillo, it was three times lucky. “When I got to Chicago,” he recalls, “it just so happened there was a guy who had been doing what I wanted to do, and he was seven years sober. But he was just so normal. He wasn’t awkward. He was always happy. Confident of himself. Comfortable in his own skin. Well dressed. He just had something different about him. Other people try so fucking hard to be cool; it was as if he wasn’t trying. He seemed like he had it all figured out.