Thrown Off the Ice

by Taylor Fitzpatrick

  Bad choice of words, considering.

  *

  I thought we’d have more time. I didn’t know how much, and I didn’t know about the quality of it — Mike’s biggest fear, bigger than dying, was that if he didn’t die early, dementia would kill him in its own way, kill everything that was him. This wasn’t an unrealistic fear: that’s the bitch of degenerative diseases — there’s no cure. Treatment will, at best, slow things down, but eventually time catches up to you.

  It didn’t have a chance to in Mike’s case. I don’t know if I’m grateful for that, but I know Mike would have been, so I guess I am. I guess I have to be.

  The thing a lot of people don’t realise is that generally the worst concussions aren’t from the fight itself, they’re from losing your balance, going down, more often than not with two hundred plus pounds of player and equipment on top of you. You hit the ice without a helmet, at that height, with that kind of force, that’s when the most severe concussions happen. The TKO, as it were. You see a player lose consciousness on the ice, it’s usually because of that.

  Mike had five severe concussions before he retired. He joked that it wasn’t worth counting the mild and moderate, and honestly he couldn’t even remember them all anyway: must be all the concussions talking. I never found that joke all that funny. Mike also told me, not joking but far too casually, that one of the reasons he decided to retire was because his doctors told him that even one more concussion could kill him.

  The doctors weren’t wrong.

  The last thing Mike said to me was that he was going to wring my fucking neck if I forgot to pick up dog food one more time. I promised I wouldn’t.

  I did forget, in the nightmare of a day that followed, because later that day Mike got a concussion. It was on ice, irony of ironies. He wasn’t skating. He hung his skates up when he hung his jersey up. All it took was a patch of black ice on the sidewalk, and he was gone. Knocked himself out. Intracerebral hemorrhage. He died in the hospital that night without ever regaining consciousness. He never had a chance to wring my neck, and I never had a chance to say goodbye.

  He was forty-seven years old.

  *

  Roman Novak, my former teammate on the North Stars, a friend to us both, and someone who once lost a fight and three teeth to Mike, came to the funeral. “He was the biggest son of a bitch I’ve ever met,” he said, and the affection in the way he said it was enough to make me smile when I no longer thought that was something I was capable of.

  "I'm the bitch," Mike's mother said. She was standing beside me, and her hand, occasionally squeezing mine, was the only thing rooting me to the ground. "Nice to meet you."

  Roman looked embarrassed for a moment, then said, "You raised a hell of a son, ma'am."

  “Thank you,” she said. “I know.”

  Michael James Brouwer, the biggest son of a bitch I’ve ever met, was born in 1985 to Lori Patricia Muller and a father that doesn’t deserve naming, since he left when Mike was twelve and his brother Tom was ten. Lori worked two jobs to support them, and she was rarely around, certainly not enough to ferry Mike to all his games and practices. She couldn’t afford them either, and the only reason Mike could keep playing was because her parents helped cover hockey expenses and took Mike to his games.

  Lori didn’t ask for many things, didn’t like to ask for anything, but she asked them for that. Mike was a hockey prodigy, his coaches kept telling her, and she couldn’t bring herself to take that from him, even when it meant that bills piled up and she wanted to cry every time Mike put on another inch, grew another shoe size. They always bought skates two sizes too large, but still he outgrew them at an astonishing rate.

  Mike had never been a small kid, but by the time he was fifteen he was head and shoulders above most of his opponents — literally — and close to two hundred pounds. He wasn’t a prodigy anymore — he was still great, still amazing, even, but every time he grew he had to adjust to his size, and some of the other kids were starting to catch up.

  Was he the best player in Duluth? Probably, but when he was playing in tournaments that drew the best of Minnesota, or Wisconsin, or both, he wasn’t the standout. What he was the best at was throwing hits, taking them without budging, and, even though it wasn’t technically allowed at that level, putting his fists up when the cause was worth a suspension. When he was drafted in the fifth round by the Nashville Predators, he was aware that they didn’t expect him to ever play on their first line, or even second. He had been picked with a very specific role to play.

  He was the best at that role too, and unlike during his childhood, he stayed the best at it until the very end. No one wanted to fight Mike Brouwer. You fight Mike Brouwer, you’re probably going to lose, and even if you don’t, he’ll take out a piece of you on his way down. Guys ten years younger than him flinched when they saw who it was they were squaring off against, and if they somehow miraculously won they wouldn’t shut up about it for days afterward. Fighting Mike had practically become a rite of passage among the league’s enforcers and agitators by the time he retired.

  These aren’t things Mike told me. I know about his reputation from the number of guys who contacted me after he died, telling me about their fear of ‘Big Bad Brouwer’, their memories, the fights he won and the fights he lost, the way he never, ever refused to put his mitts up. Mike never talked about his childhood at all, didn’t like talking about anything that might be deemed ‘personal’. Lori’s the one who told me about it, and it’s Lori who has generously allowed me to share his history, because it’s important.

  The first time Lori remembers Mike fighting was in defence of his little brother Tom. Tom was small for his age, a little awkward. Easy pickings, basically, and on the playground Mike saw his brother get shoved into the dirt. Lori had to leave work when she was called to the school, arrived to find both her sons injured, and when she got angry, she was informed that the kids Mike fought were hurt worse, that Mike took on three boys and he was the least injured of any of them.

  She likes to tell that story. I like to hear it.

  Mike was a protector. I’m sure he’d have argued, said that was some romantic bullshit to make fighting sound noble, but he protected his brother, and he protected his team. Mike liked to pretend he didn’t care, but his fists would be up the moment someone had the gall to threaten anyone he deemed to be under his protection.

  That didn’t just extend to violence. Mike tried to protect me from the reality of his declining health, often in ways I didn’t appreciate. He kept the true impact of the concussion that ended his career from me, drove me off so that by the time he retired, I had already signed with another team. He knew I would have stayed if I knew, so he didn’t tell me. He knew I would have stayed even if I didn’t know, even if it was only to stay with him, so he pushed me away.

  It was infuriating then, and just as infuriating in the years following, this tug of war where Mike tried to get me a safe distance from him, like somehow I could avoid getting hurt that way. Like I hadn’t already made my choice.

  I can’t count how many times Mike asked me to leave him. How many times he tried to push me away. Turns out he left me instead. That’s the reason he asked, I know. He didn’t want me to get left behind.

  You’d think, after preparing for years, knowing the way things would end for over a decade, the big picture if not the details, that it would hurt a little less when it happened, that it might even be a relief.

  It doesn’t, and it wasn’t. Sometimes it feels like it hurts more every single day.

  *

  I wanted to write this to shed a light on the repercussions a hockey career can have on enforcers. On the dozens, if not hundreds of guys who are living with the long-term effects of their hockey careers, the ticking time bombs their brains have become. That’s what I wanted to do. I had a cause, and I wanted to write about it, and I was generously allowed to.

  But it’s impossible to talk about the cause without talking about the man
who made me passionate about it. It’s impossible to talk about the hits and the fights and the symptoms and the result without talking about the man I’ve loved for half my life, the man I love now, for all the good that does us both. Mike wouldn’t like me making it personal, making it about him, but he’s dead, so as he said himself, what the fuck right does he have to tell me what to do?

  Mike Brouwer would laugh in your face if you called him a nice man. He’d scoff at good man, though I think he was one. But he was a man, not a cause. He had a temper, and he hated having a serious conversation about anything, and he swore more than anyone I ever met, which is saying a lot as a former hockey player. He was impatient, and stubborn, and brusque, and sometimes cruel. And he made the best breakfast I’ve ever had, listened to my games on the radio because watching them made him dizzy, let our dog sleep on our bed when I was on road trips because he couldn’t say no to her face, and he loved me, even though he never said it. He was smart, and funny, and determined, and loyal. He was a man.

  “That’s just the way it goes,” Mike said once. Probably everyone has said something similar, but he said it after his fourth consultation in a week, having spent the entire morning puking as a side-effect from the newest drug adjustment, weak and dizzy, his eyebrows pinching with an incoming migraine that would completely incapacitate him for the next 48 hours.

  “That’s just the way it goes,” he said.

  But it shouldn’t be.

  - Liam Fitzgerald, August 2033

  Copyright © 2018 Taylor Fitzpatrick

  Cover design © 2018 by Kit Leveret (@gomidog)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.