Ice Guardians Page #11

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That had nothin' to do with it.

I was drinking and drugging because

I was an alcoholic and a drug addict

and I had a problem with it

When I took drugs and alcohol,

they hit me completely different

than it hit somebody else

and it had nothing to do with fighting.

When I cleaned up in Phoenix,

I went and lived in a

sober living home for 2 months.

And I decided I wanted to play again.

It's... closin' in on seven years now.

There's not a day goes by where I...

I never let myself forget where I was

and where drugs and alcohol can take me.

You have all these

contradictory thoughts...

And it... it exists in a spectrum.

It isn't ever that black and white...

media portrayals of enforcers.

You'll run the gamut

and you'll try to look for

this thread of, like...

"What is an enforcer?"

And like any other label,

it never tells the whole story.

Every single person is different.

It isn't a case of saying whether

fighting is good or fighting is bad

or whether enforcers are goons

or whether enforcers are

thoughtful gentlemen.

It's such a massive issue to understand.

And what the media likes to do

is to sort of, put a spin on it

and make it this very simple thing

that - if we outlaw fighting,

then there'll be no problem

with the sport at all.

And the reality is that

there are other issues

that need to be resolved

that are perhaps bigger than enforcers

and bigger than the problem

of fighting in hockey.

You have now, more so than ever...

A real idea of how dangerous

this game can be...

and what the long-term effects are.

Every sport right now...

Is looking at concussions

differently than they used to.

Whether it's baseball

or football or soccer.

Soccer has tons and tons of concussions.

What that means is

they're finally being reported.

Being a player,

particularly an enforcer,

over those last ten years

has been um... a pretty strange ride

with all of the evidence, um,

that's coming out

about the dangers...

and then obviously how...

slanted all these views get

in dealing with sports.

And then particularly enforcing

and fighting in the NHL.

Everybody loves these combative stances

and there's always this

kind of, "butting of heads"

and these black and white issues

and there's obviously much,

much more to the story.

A concussion is a brain injury.

When I went to medical school,

it wasn't really considered

a brain injury,

it was considered

something rather trivial.

The biomechanical injury

that causes concussion

is rotational acceleration.

If my left hand is the skull,

and my right hand is the brain...

The jiggle of the brain within the skull

is what we think of as

rotational acceleration.

And it's that jiggle that

causes the brain damage.

Concussions can lead

to permanent brain degeneration.

When that happens,

we call it "C.T.E."

Which stands for...

There's where we see...

Dementia.

Significant memory decline,

Real major personality change.

If you just were a casual

observer of, y'know, "sports"

and just would pick up

on different things

that were being discussed

in the media about hockey,

you would probably think 95%

of concussions came from fights.

The statistics on

fighting as a cause of

concussion in hockey

show that it's one of the

smaller causes.

Probably about 5%...

The reality is that

the vast majority of concussions

come from, y'know, hits.

It's... almost creating

a situation where

you're blinded to the reality

by focussing in on such

a small percentage.

With fighting, it's something we

certainly have to address

and be cognizant of

but you're possibly doing a disservice

to the other, y'know, huge

percentage of concussions

that are happening in hockey.

It's easy to isolate

when a guy gets hurt in a fight

because, look, there's a punch,

it hit him in the head and he went down.

But if you talk to doctors -

I was talking to one a while ago

and she said,

"You hockey guys have it all backwards."

I said, "What are you talking about?"

She said, "I treat more people

that have concussions

from getting hit in the stomach

than they do getting hit in the head."

Because all that has to

happen is your body has to jar

and your brain has to hit your skull.

Let's say my knuckles are their chests

knock together and their heads,

which are my thumbs,

don't receive any direct blow at all

and yet both of them may

fall down concussed.

And that is because

of the "whiplash effect" on the brain.

You go back to 2005

when the game opened up

and it was the fly-zone NHL.

Blue line to blue line.

Guys are movin' faster, uh, than ever.

Defensemen can't hold up

forecheckers anymore.

Defensemen are getting

their faces plastered

up against the glass.

And we all say, "This is great! -

"Look how fast they're going!"

We seem to have equated fast to good.

And that's fine, if that's

your thing, that's cool.

Because it got that much faster,

the body checks turned into collisions.

They weren't guys rubbing each other,

they were billiard balls,

smashing into one another.

And I always ask people this...

If you want the game

to be this fast, right?

30-35 miles an hour.

And you want guys going this quick

and you wanna make it

relatively... "safe,"

or as safe as you can possibly make it,

ask yourself how many concussions

you're comfortable with.

The force that you're

getting slammed into the boards... is...

Is like...

It's unimaginable for

a person that doesn't play

how hard you can actually

get hit by another human.

It's weird,

I don't know the number of fights I had

but the only three concussions I had

had nothing to do with fighting.

Kids, when you're playin' hockey

it's called "heads up."

Y' you never put your head -

Ohhhh...

That's painful to watch.

This is a game that's not gettin' slower

It goes faster and faster.

I had, probably 200-plus fights,

never with a concussion symptom ever.

I went in, in for a battle

in the corner,

and me n' another guy hit head on.

My head snapped back.

It was the first time I ever

had a concussion symptom.

It was from an innocent hit.

One of my last blows

I took, was an elbow.

It wasn't a huge bodycheck

It was just an elbow that

came around that caught me

and tweaked my TMJ and cracked my jaw

and now, there's a

concussion right there.

I remember talkin' to Brad May once.

I said, "Brad, what's the, what's

the hardest you've ever been hit?"

I was expecting something like,

Oh, I got in, y'know so-and-so

fight with this guy -

whether it was in junior or the,

or the NHL.

But he said, "The hardest I ever got hit

was when I mistakenly turned

into Mats Sundin's shoulder,

and Mats wasn't trying to hit me

but I just turned

and my jaw hit his shoulder."

And he was out.

He can't even remember

getting to the hospital.

He said, "I've been

in hundreds of fights,

...nothing hit me harder

than just bumping into

Mats Sundin's shoulder."

But - hockey fight's

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