It was Steve’s memory loss that most disturbed Paul. He had seen glimpses of it, and heard some stories, but even he didn’t know how bad things were. The service manager at Steve’s car dealership in Toronto later told him that Steve used to call him every week or two from California. “He was always forgetting where his car was, he said, or he’d lose his keys. He was on Steve’s speed dial, so Steve would call and they would locate the vehicle through GPS.” Paul was also aware of Steve’s charters to Hartford and Ibiza, and his trips to Colombia and to Las Vegas, where in recent months at Caesars Palace he had lost more than $200,000 at blackjack. Steve had never been a big gambler.
Paul and Steve had a complicated relationship. They were alike in many ways: curious, highly independent, full of energy. Both wanted to know everything; both learned fast and wanted to move on. But Paul was more of a manager. He liked to see the big picture, all the problems and possibilities, then encourage those around him to see things the same way as he did, as if they had reached the same conclusions themselves. By contrast, Steve was a doer. He saw what he saw, then jumped into the action. He saw answers first; Paul saw problems. When other hockey parents had imagined their kids as future NHL stars, Paul hadn’t. When he had encouraged Steve to pursue other parts of himself, particularly at school, Steve had often taken this as disapproval—as Paul, a baseball guy, not caring about hockey, and what Paul thought mattered to Steve.
A few years before, when Steve was with the Ducks, he and Paul had had one of their talks. Steve asked his dad, “Are you proud of me for making the NHL?” Paul thought for a moment; he knew right away how important the question was to Steve, and how important his answer would be. “And I said, ‘You know Steve, I am so proud of you for all the great friends you have chosen. I am proud of you for the people you help and the things that you do. I’m proud that you take good sportsmanship seriously, and I’m happy for you that you made the NHL. I’m proud of you, and I’m incredibly proud of you, for all the hard work you put in because you were never the star of any team, but you made a commitment, and set a goal. And you worked.’
“And I said to him, ‘I’m happy, I’m incredibly happy, that you achieved your dream, and I’m proud of you for the man that you’ve become.’ And Steve had this quizzical look on his face, and I said, ‘You know, I would be just as proud of you if your talent had only taken you to the AHL, or the ECHL, or if you had worked just as hard at something else and were just the man you are. Those are the things that make me proud as a father.’” Paul pauses as he remembers that day. “I think that satisfied him, although, you know, I think he wanted me to say I was proud of him for being an NHL player.”
—
Steve made several phone calls during the few days after his conversation with Nick and his lunch with Paul. To the usual people: Paul and Donna, Chris, Lindsay, Missy. He drove to Buffalo to see Chantelle and to put the crib together; the baby was due in less than two weeks.
“I noticed that he was talking fast,” Missy says, “but when he’s excited about something that’s his normal.” Steve called Daniel Carcillo, too. Carcillo had heard about Ibiza and Colombia and knew that wasn’t good, but they talked about other things. Steve told him that he had been to Buffalo to put together the crib.
Steve also spoke to Marty Gélinas. “I had heard some rumblings that he was struggling a little,” Gélinas says, so he called him. “Monty said, ‘I’m doing great,’ and he told me what he was doing and what he was going to do. It sounded like he had it all figured out.” Steve called Craig Button, who had been his general manager in Saint John and Calgary. It was Button who had seen something in Steve that no one else had, and signed him as a free agent. He and Steve had bumped into each other a few times in the years since, and in January, Steve called him. A month later, Steve called him again. A ten-minute talk turned into an hour, as was often the case with Steve. Steve told him about being back in Mississauga and about the baby, and about putting down roots. They talked about broadcasting, coaching, and Steve’s work with the NHLPA, especially during the CBA negotiations. “It was as if Monty had come to this very busy intersection,” Button says, “with all these things going in all these different directions, and he didn’t know which one to take.” [I said to him,] ‘You have a lot to offer,’ and yet I was vague.” Button seems upset at himself now. “I didn’t give him enough of ‘You should try this, or that.’ But he sounded good, no different from any other time that we talked.”
Steve texted his former Saint John coach, Jim Playfair. Playfair hadn’t heard from Steve in some time. “It wasn’t many words,” Playfair recalls, “it was something like, ‘The world is awesome. I’m going to be a dad. How is your wife? How are the boys?’ Honest to God, there could not have been a more uplifting, encouraging sign.”
Andy O’Brien last saw Steve five days before he died. Steve dropped by O’Brien’s gym and came to the office to talk with him, but he was busy with another client, so Steve hung around a bit and spoke with some of the CFL players who were training there. Other years Steve would be there every day, always at the same time, and O’Brien could plan his schedule to fit in one of the deep, nourishing talks they liked to have. But now it was over a year since Steve had played his last game (in the KHL). He still came to the gym, but only a few days a week, at different times, for a few minutes or a few hours depending on how he felt and what else he had going on. He and O’Brien didn’t talk much that day, but he knew that Steve would be back in a day or two and they would talk then.
Yet it was clear to them that things were not the same. Once, their relationship had been underpinned by mutual expectation, and a little bit of hope. Now the relationship had hope, but only a little bit of expectation. That didn’t feel right to either of them, but neither of them knew what to do about it.
“Probably the biggest thing I noticed about Monty during all those good years was the peacefulness he conveyed,” O’Brien recalls. “He seemed very grounded. When I first got to know him, he wasn’t.” That was after Steve had been traded to Florida from Calgary, and before he went into rehab for the first time. “He looked like a guy who was struggling. I used to notice that he would go off on his own at times, into a room, to reaffirm some things through some positive self-talk. And it was really clear that, while he was struggling, he was winning the struggle. He had turned himself into somebody who was very, very much at peace with himself. He was very comfortable in his own skin. He was a very, very zen, calm, confident, secure person.”
But “there was this very unsettled feeling about him when he wasn’t in a good place.” Now, when he came to the gym, “It was like seeing a different person,” O’Brien recalls. “It was his demeanour. His ability to maintain eye contact. His ability to just sit still and breathe and not feel the urgency to talk or the urgency to move around.” He couldn’t do those things. “The quality that had made Monty so distinctively himself was changing. He seemed always rushed. He was on his phone a lot. He just didn’t seem present when he was there. He would say, ‘Let’s go grab lunch,’ then not show up, and then show up randomly later on. We would get into a conversation, and midway through it would end because he had something else he had to do. A couple of times he lost his keys; a couple of times in the same week. He lost his passport.” O’Brien thinks back. “There were very, very few circumstances in that last year or two where I saw him getting better. He just seemed to get a little worse every time.”
For Steve, everything was moving faster. And the faster things moved, the faster he talked, and the more persuasive he tried to be about how well he was doing, the less persuasive he was. He was Monty trying to sound like Monty, and yet he didn’t sound like Monty at all. But the spirit was there, they all saw it—Keats, Nick, Button, Playfair—and if the spirit was there, the body would follow. It didn’t matter that nobody around him—not his family, not his friends—had grabbed him by the shoulders and shaken him, and stared into his eyes until he couldn’t do anything but st
are back; for him to see their fear; for him to see the need to do something. Because they didn’t feel they had to. He was Monty.
The thing is, though, that Steve would never let anyone get close enough to grab him by the shoulders and pin him down. Especially not his family and friends. He found ways to keep them away. It wasn’t hard, just a few out-of-the-blue texts would make them feel close enough that no one would wonder enough to get close enough to see what he didn’t want them to see. He was up against it, but he didn’t know, and his family and friends didn’t know, just how up against it he really was. All of the conditions he was dealing with: the depression, the anxiety, the loss of control, the inability to sleep, the memory loss, the inability to focus, to think rationally, to work things through; the residual pain in his neck, his shoulders, his back and knees, from thousands of little abuses. And all of the drugs he was taking to deal with all of these conditions.
Nobody knows the exact events of Steve’s last few days. Nobody really wants to know. Steve was found dead at about 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, February 15, 2015, in the house he had rented only a few hundred metres from his childhood home in Mississauga. He was found by a woman whom he knew a little and who had been with him the previous few days. His autopsy showed evidence of opioids, THC, benzodiazepine, and cocaine in his system. Opioids are used in the treatment of pain. THC is the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis. Benzodiazepine, or benzo, best-known under the brand name Valium, is used to treat anxiety and insomnia. Cocaine, among other things, can offer a quick “king of the world” rush of energy and euphoria. Opioids and benzo together, or cocaine and opioids together, can result in respiratory depression and death. Steve was thirty-five.
Four days later, Morrison Montador Robidoux was born.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It was early Sunday morning. Texts, voicemails, emails shot out in a rush, and in them a few urgent words, “It’s about Monty. Call me.” From Paul and Chris, from Keats, Vally, and Nick, to the rest of the Steve-network. Those who received them knew before they called back, and knew it couldn’t be, and knew it was. And when they did call back and were told, many of them cried, went into a deep silence, and made plans to get to Toronto, to do something, to be there.
The hockey world came to his funeral. Teammates from his Lorne Park and Mississauga teams, from the Marlies, Senators, and St. Mike’s; from North Bay, Erie, and Peterborough; from all of the NHL teams he played on. His old coaches. His former opponents. People who Paul and Donna had come to know; others they had heard about; many more they didn’t know at all. People from other parts of Steve’s life, from who knows where, who had nothing to do with hockey.
They were wrecked. Filled with whys and hows, but mostly they were just sad. At the visitations, a video of moments from his life played over and over, and people stopped and watched it, over and over. Photos of Steve as a child that the friends from later in his life had never seen; photos of Steve as the adult that his childhood friends didn’t know. But all of the images, fitting together, so recognizably Steve, culminating with a clip of that goal. That face. That dance of celebration.
At the funeral, so many people spoke so movingly, so beautifully. There were shudders and sobs, but there was laughter, too. Steve was just so funny. He was quirky and weird. His life was not to be believed, even for those who had lived it alongside him. Vally told “Monty stories.” He made cue cards for himself, a single word on each one. Then, as he told everyone there, in honour of the way Steve talked and lived his life, he shuffled the cards and spoke about Steve in the order the cards appeared. “Which is no order at all,” he said. A Monty order. Vally had people laughing until they cried; crying until they laughed. He had them reliving Steve; Steve filled the room.
It was what his family and friends needed. Steve was funny. He wouldn’t want people sitting around sad. “Hey chum, gotta dance”—that’s what everyone told themselves to feel how they needed to feel. It was all too much for Jim Donaldson. Now in his late sixties, Donaldson had been Steve’s coach in minor peewee with the Mississauga Braves. Steve was the second of “his boys” he had lost. Donaldson tried hard not to feel the way he did, but to him this was all too sad to be this funny. And he left.
Nick was Nick, serious and thoughtful. He had decided not to write anything down. He wanted, instead, to “speak from the heart.” He told one or two stories about times they’d spent together, but most of all he wanted to talk about the impact Steve had had on other people. How Steve believed that a smile, a tiny gesture—even a deep, hard look into a stranger’s eyes to remind the stranger that someone else knows they exist—might change a life.
Paul held himself together. When he spoke, trying to find comfort for himself, his words helped others find comfort. “Steve packed seventy years into his thirty-five years of living,” he said. To this day, those present at the funeral repeat Paul’s words, seeking consolation when they think of Steve.
Months later, all of them were still thinking about Steve’s passing. The loss of a son, a brother, an uncle, a teammate, a friend, a father-to-be. The loss of all that energy. His laugh. The loss of someone who made life bigger, richer; who made life feel better. The loss to them, but the loss to Steve. He’d had fifty years of his life ahead of him. Fifty years of who knows what—and that would be the best part—because he was Monty. He lived seventy years in his thirty-five years, and he would have lived a hundred more in his next fifty. That’s the lousy part.
“So much attention has been given to the way Monty’s career finished,” O’Brien said a few months after Steve’s death. “About the injury he had, whether it was about CTE, or the concussions; the tragedy of his early death and the tragedy of his life. But to me these are all very, very insignificant stories when I think of Monty. The bigger story was the type of person he was. The way he cared for other people. The phenomenal example he was for others. The value of educating yourself, the value of giving, the value of friendships, and the value of maintaining humility in spite of all that is going on around you. The ability to embrace your teammates and to really enjoy the day-to-day grind at the rink.
“Monty had learned all this. He mastered it. So to me, in spite of everything else that happened, this is what Monty was about. He was just this really, really incredible person. Whether he died at thirty-five or ninety-five, his true story wasn’t the tragedy. It was the way he touched people. It was the type of person he was.”
At Vail that summer, the winner of the week-long competition between Team Crosby and Team Tavares was presented with the Montador Cup.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
So where do we go from here?
Hockey is a really good game. It has never been played and watched by more people in more different countries than it is now, by more boys and men, by more girls and women, by more people of more different racial and ethnic backgrounds. It has never been played better. Its players have never been so skilled and fit. The NHL has never been a better league. It is where the world’s best players play. It is what kids in Moscow and Mississauga, Minneapolis and Malmö dream of. It is the world’s league, and the Stanley Cup is the world’s hockey trophy.
It is now a game that demands more. More time, more money, more of the life of its players and their families, because when more becomes possible—more tournaments, more special clinics, more months of the year—more becomes the norm. To put it simply, it took Connor McDavid more to make it to the top than it took Sidney Crosby, and far more than it took Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, and Gordie Howe.
It is the same for kids and their families in every field—music, dance, nanotechnology, it doesn’t matter what—just as it will be for their kids and their families in the future. Sports still teach what sports have always taught—teamwork, discipline, hard work, resilience, goal-setting, and goal-achieving—but with the greater commitment now required, these lessons are more intense, and the talent unearthed is even more remarkable. The more you put in, the more you get out. And
for those few who do make it, there is recognition and money that might last a lifetime.
For some, sports have other impacts that also last a lifetime—and that is the big new question sports face. For former athletes, bad knees and bad hips might keep you from stretching a single into a double when you’re playing with your kids, or they might need to be replaced later in life, but they are no great burden. But what about a bad brain? Not even a brain like Steve’s, with CTE, but one that is depressed and anxious, that can’t remember, can’t decide, can’t sleep, can’t enjoy; with fifty years ahead of it, that can’t live a full life. That is a big burden.
Is this now the trade-off for a life in hockey or football? For many, it is. These athletes have made their choice, some will argue. They know what they are getting themselves into. Maybe not when they were kids, but their parents knew, or should have known. And later, after they have lived through the battleground of junior and signed their first pro contract, they’re adults and old enough to make their own decisions. Hockey is a tough game. Things happen. Did they think that all the masses of love and money that rain down on them from the heavens are just for donning the jersey and scoring a few goals? This is their danger pay. So some have paid the price, and it is awful and horrible, and something we all wish had never happened, but it has happened, because in a collision sport, it can happen. In life, it can happen.
Do you think Steve knew all this? He knew about the bumps and scrapes. He loved them. He knew about the cuts and lost teeth, the separations and tears. He caused as many of them in others as he ever received himself. He knew about broken zygomatic arches and concussions. He knew about the sort of pain that fills your body and mind and takes over your life. Do you think he also knew about memory loss and suicidal thoughts? Do you think he knew about the sort of pain that fills your body and mind and takes over your life and doesn’t go away? Do you think he knew about a life that might end fifty years before its time? Do you think he knew that these were part of the trade-off he was making? Do you think Keith Primeau knew about the seven years of pretending to his kids that he was just regular old dad when he was really someone else? What about Marc Savard?