The Crazy Game

by Clint Malarchuk

  The season after the accident, it got worse than it had ever been. It’s that feeling you get when you have to wake up for something really important early in the morning and you’re depending on the alarm to get you up. But what if something happens to the alarm? Or what if you just sleep right through it? What if … What if … What if … And you lie there in this crazy haze, your mind spinning in circles. You stare at the ceiling, you toss and turn, you get up and make sure the front door is locked and that the back door is locked and then you check the front door again and then the back door … and then, Oh shit, what about the stove? The smallest things invade your mind and keep it ticking before the big things return. I’ll probably play shitty tomorrow. If I play shitty, I might never start again. And soon you’re staring at the red numbers on your alarm clock and it’s 3:43 A.M. Shit. When I’d finally close my eyes and drift into a peaceful place, I’d feel a blade against my throat and see gushing blood—wake up sweating, check my neck, catch my breath and start all over again.

  It’s weird how the mental affects the physical and the physical affects the mental, isn’t it? That never crossed my mind at the time. I didn’t understand the relationship. On game days, I’d try to get in a two-hour nap because I’d slept so badly the night before. I was always one of the first guys to the rink. I was nervous once I got there, but it eased a bit. When I was at home and obsessing, I’d let it out. But when I was around people, I’d try to hide it. I’d kind of settle down as I went through my routine in the locker room, just trying to stick with the same system that helped to manage the anxiety. I’d go through the same stretching, check my equipment to make sure it was perfect, stare at the floor in silence and then throw my racquetball against the wall, fine-tuning my reflexes to make sure I was ready to go. Warmups would pass by in a blur. I’d be in my zone unless some dipshit on my team raised the puck and hit me in the head or caught me in the collarbone. Then, right before the opening faceoff, my mental chaos would go sky high. But when the puck was dropped, everything was fine. My mind was obsessed with one thing: the puck. Nothing else crept in.

  For an hour or two after the game, I’d still be in that kind of euphoria—and then it would start all over again. It was chronic anxiety. It’s difficult to make sense of it. As miserable and debilitating as it was, it was normal for me. That seems so morbid. But it’s true.

  The season went fine. I wanted to play more, but I was a team guy. Buffalo relied heavily on me as a backup, and I was proud of how I played. In twenty-nine games, I had a 3.35 goals-against average and a .903 save percentage, both of which were pretty good by the standards of that freewheeling, high-scoring era. But I hated every minute I spent on that goddamn bench. I desperately wanted to prove that I had overcome the injury and that all the naysayers were full of shit. More than that, though, I needed to prove it to myself. The accident haunted me, but I wasn’t about to admit it. I certainly wasn’t going to accept it. I didn’t tell anyone about the nightmares or insomnia. I wanted to deny it all.

  The best way to do that was to keep my act going on the surface—always instant smiles, instant humour. I tried to keep things light while riding the pine. There used to be a phone beside the bench at the Aud that the trainers would use to call for an ambulance if something bad ever happened on the ice. (What could possibly be that bad?) Sometimes, during the games, I’d call my mother back in Calgary—just chatting away with her as she watched on satellite TV and I sat on the bench. I’d wave to her. Jim Pizzutelli always got a kick out of that.

  Even though we were competing for playing time, Daren Puppa and I got along great. Here’s the thing about goalie partners: you sit beside them, you work with them, you practise with them and everything. We’re all overly competitive, proud men. If you don’t want to be the league’s best, you have no business playing the game. But at the same time, you’re part of a team. And all clichés aside, you care about that team and you take your role within it seriously. Goalies are in a unique situation: if one plays, the other doesn’t. Ideally, though, they have the sense to support each other. Of all the goalies I shared the net with, Daren was one of my favourites, even though we were complete opposites. He was really quiet, really reserved, while I was the team clown.

  For a while, I didn’t think he liked me very much. When everyone else was laughing with me, he just sat there quietly. Then one day, his fiancée, Meg, told me that Daren thought I was the funniest guy he’d ever met. She asked me to be the MC at their wedding at the end of the season. I was really pumped because I liked him, but until then I didn’t know what he thought of me.

  I was dating a new girl I had met in Calgary during the off-season. She was from a big-time rodeo family. Following my usual pattern, I fell in love with her right away, she moved in with me in Buffalo, and pretty soon we were married. It was better to cover up all the holes in my life than deal with the broken foundation.

  My good buddies Grant Ledyard and Dean Kennedy were still on the team. Both of them saw that I wasn’t exactly myself but figured I’d be fine. We weren’t much for spotting warning signs back then.

  The Sabres finished the season with the third-best record in the NHL with a record of 45–27–8, just three points behind Boston, who led the Adams Division—and the league. Mike Foligno was our captain and Phil Housley and Mike Ramsey wore the As. Puppa earned a spot on the second all-star team and was fifth in the league with a 2.89 goals-against average. Dave Andreychuk and Pierre Turgeon led the team in scoring with forty goals each, and Turgeon led us in points with 106. But even as a rookie, you could tell that Mogilny was the rising star of the franchise. The kid was dripping with natural talent. He was also the laziest guy on the team. He had a kind of screw you attitude. If it wasn’t laziness, maybe it was just defiance. This kid had a wrist shot that just blew you away—it was so fast. But in practice, he’d just skate over the blue line and flick it at the net. He just wanted to get done with practice. He just didn’t care.

  Mogilny told the team he hated flying, which I thought was bullshit at the time. Later in life, I would come to understood fear a lot more than I did then. I’m sure his phobia was legitimate. But at the time, it just made him seem precious. Because he didn’t like to fly, the Sabres got a limo to take him from city to city. Which was luxurious for games up and down the eastern seaboard. But then we’d play in St. Louis or Chicago, and all of a sudden it’s a twelve-hour ride in the back of the limo. Limo or not, a half-day drive is a long haul to make between practices and games. He got cured of his flying issue pretty soon after that.

  When I first came back after the accident, I’d read in one of the papers that Steve Tuttle was having a hard time, that he was having nightmares and shit. I got Steve’s number and tried to call him, but he wasn’t around. I told his roommate and teammate Sergio Momesso to tell Steve that I didn’t blame him for what happened. I had never really considered the trauma that the accident might have caused the other players involved. Sure, I was the one who had been injured, but being involved in an accident like that has to mess you up. So when the Blues came to town in early December, I wanted to make sure Tuttle knew it was okay. I passed by him at centre ice during the warmups and shouted, “Jesus, you’re a cutthroat bastard, aren’t you?”

  I did my best to carry on my sense of humour, despite the shit going on in my head. At the time, I got along really well with Jim Kelley, a writer for the Buffalo News. As he got older, Jim had this white beard going—it made him look like Kenny Rogers. When we were in L.A. on a road trip, I went into the record store and picked up a Kenny Rogers album. I had it all set up. As people were lining up to get on the plane at the terminal, I walked up to Jim.

  “Kenny! Kenny Rogers! Oh my goodness, Kenny Rogers!” I pulled the album out of my bag. “Would you sign this for me?”

  Shit, he signed autographs for the whole flight. I reconnected with Jim years later. He said, “I’ll never forget that, you son of a bitch!”

  Jim died much too young in 20
10 after suffering from pancreatic cancer. He was one of the good ones.

  Dudley used Puppa and me in tandem, with no clear starter really emerging. I didn’t mind this because Puppa was supposed to be the go-to guy, but I was making a strong case that I deserved to play. Then, during the 1990–91 season, I suffered a serious back injury that sidelined me for most of January and part of February. I felt a terrible pain in my upper back and neck during one of the games. I managed to play through it, but I knew it was bad. It hurt to skate. It hurt to move. I couldn’t even check my blind spot when I drove home. Throughout my career, I was always paranoid about missing games because of an injury. It took a lot to keep me out. I often played hurt. Look at the picture of me clutching my neck when my jugular got cut, and you’ll see I had a cast on my hand. I was playing with a broken thumb.

  My dad taught me to fight, but my mom made me tough. Be tough, be tough. The first time I remember getting hurt in a hockey game was when I was eight, on the outdoor rink near our house. I was playing forward and went into the boards stick first. It speared me right in the gut and I fell down, unable to breathe. My mom was right there, standing on the snowbank above me. I writhed around on the ice, gasping for air. “Clint get up, skate to the box.” That was exactly what she said to me. “You want to lie there and get attention? Or do you want to be a man and skate to the box?” So I got my ass up and went to the bench. She instilled character and toughness in me.

  I carried that with me throughout my career. If I went down, I didn’t stay down. I tried to play through every injury, and if I couldn’t, I came back as fast as humanly possible. I took pride in that for a long time. But most of that was rooted in fear. Any honest player will tell you that. A fear of losing your job, of being traded or going unsigned. Or of some damn rookie coming in and taking your job. So you bite the bullet and play hurt.

  But this injury was like nothing I had felt before. I was out for much of January, and the team hit the skids, going 1–8–4 with me away. Rick called me up one night and said, “Clint, do you think you can play? I think I’m going to lose my job here.” I hadn’t played in I don’t know how many weeks. I was doing physical therapy, trying everything possible to fix my neck just enough to allow me to function in net. I’ve always felt this need to please people. It’s hard to tell where that came from, but I never wanted to let anyone down. Rick Dudley had earned my respect as a teammate in Fredericton and he had it as the bench boss in Buffalo.

  “Rick,” I said, “I’ll do my best.”

  I took these shots before I played to completely freeze out the pain. It worked. I played again. I got hot and we started winning. I went 3–0–3 in my first six games back. It ended up saving his job—for the time being, at least. We had a decent year, but the success they had when I was playing didn’t get us far. Montreal knocked us out of the first round of the playoffs.

  After the season, I went to see a back and neck specialist in Toronto. He said, “You’ve got a broken vertebra here, buddy. You could have been paralyzed at any minute. And you took freezing? You could have been paralyzed. That’s stupid.” Oh well. Be tough, be tough. Rick thought a lot of that. It was a key moment in one of the most important friendships of my life.

  After the season, everyone from the team went to Puppa’s wedding. As the MC, I spent a lot of time roasting Duds. All players have stories about their coaches that they probably won’t share unless they’re in a situation like that. I wasn’t too mean—just enough to get the boys roaring. Duds loved every minute of it. He thought I was the most well-adjusted person he knew. He thought I had the perfect timing for jokes and that I had charisma and confidence. Years later, he’d tell me that the night of the wedding, as he sat there getting roasted, he looked at me and thought, This kid has it all.

  16

  Whiskey and Pills

  I DIDN’T DRINK A LOT THAT FIRST YEAR AFTER THE ACCIDENT. I relaxed over a few beers with teammates here and there—nothing much. But the next summer, the second after the accident, I really started to spiral. I was going to a lot of rodeos and partying hard, doing everything I could to avoid the shit going on in my head.

  When I returned to camp for the 1991–92 season, I was in a bad place mentally. My obsessions boiled inside me. It was just getting worse. I knew I was struggling, but I was too stubborn—maybe too afraid—to ask for help. I was trained to cowboy up. If you get bucked off the horse, you get back on. Get your jugular vein cut, you get back in the game. That’s what I did. There was no way of processing the actual depth of the accident. There was no way to get educated, no resources. Back then, we didn’t have team psychologists. No one ever asked me anything about my neck injury. And counselling didn’t occur to me, either. I thought, It’s just an injury. I thought the accident was completely irrelevant to how I played the game or functioned in my personal life.

  I was doing all of the typical OCD stuff—checking stoves, turning them on and off, water faucets on and off, constantly. Germs were a huge concern, like they were when I was a kid in school who couldn’t function unless the desks were cleaned with Lysol. If I opened a door, I’d open it with my pinky. If I shook someone’s hand, I’d wash it as soon as possible. I washed my hands a lot.

  I’d go to the movies alone in an attempt to shut my head off. It was impossible. Everything was magnified. It was more anxiety than depression at the time. But if my head had ever stopped spinning, I would certainly have been depressed. I was so messed up, so wound up, I just didn’t stop long enough to feel it. It’s hard to explain to someone who has never felt this way. But some people reading this might be thinking, Yep, that’s me.

  By far, the most damaging obsession I had was my belief that my wife was messing around on me. This was my second wife, of course—another relationship that was doomed from the start. She saw me suffer as I tried to fight a war within me that I didn’t understand. And when my obsessions and paranoia peaked, I turned to her and saw nothing but betrayal. It was a constant insecurity in all the relationships I’ve been in. It was irrational. But then, obsession is the opposite of rational thought. My anxiety was on overdrive after the accident. Not realizing that I suffered from mental illness, I searched for outside causes of the stress that consumed me. Hockey was an easy one. You’re anxious in the days and hours leading up to a game. You’re nervous; it makes sense. But when I wasn’t playing, or if I was playing well, it didn’t seem like a logical cause for anxiety. I loved the game more than anything, and as a kid it was the one thing that relaxed me. So I tried to find other reasons for my stress, and they all started with her. Does she really love me? Am I the best she’s ever had? Who does she think about when we’re in bed? Before I’d leave to go to the rink for a game, sometimes I’d ask her these questions point blank. I needed to clear out my mind, to reassure myself. I had to get it out of my head.

  I hadn’t slept in almost two weeks. The insomnia consumed me. I’d go to the arena and play goal and come home in a red-eyed haze. My eyes burned from lack of sleep. When I got to the rink, no matter how tired or anxious I might have been, I put on the best show I could. On the surface, I was unflappable. No one would say anything.

  At the time, I suffered from these uncontrollable tremors where my hands would start to shake. I’d fold my arms across my chest and tuck my hands into my armpits to keep them from quivering. At night, I’d keep thinking, I have to sleep, I have to get up tomorrow, I have to function. And then I’d just try to breathe. As soon as I could almost doze off—in my bed, or on an airplane—boom. I’d just wake up. There would be about a five-second calm where I’d be kind of dazed. Then the anxiety would overwhelm me again. It was like it heated my whole body, from my waist to my head. It’d get warmer and warmer, and by the time it got to my head, my forehead was hot. By then, I’d be panting like a dog and cussing myself—Damn, geez, goddammit, I could have been asleep. You were right there, Clint. Then I’d try to close my eyes and sleep, and the whole thing would happen again. Around six in the mor
ning, I’d just say screw it and get up. I was wasting my time trying to sleep, and if I did manage it, I’d probably snore right through practice.

  I was confused and angry and desperate, but I refused to ask for help, even though I was already on pain medication for a bulging disc near my neck. I had no trouble talking to professionals when it came to physical pain. But emotional problems? Hell no.

  On January 23 of that year, I started to vomit up blood before a morning skate in Pittsburgh. I hunched over the toilet and puked and puked and puked. The team sent me to the hospital right away. They shoved a scope down my throat and looked deep into my guts and discovered some festering ulcers.

  At times, emotional turmoil takes a physical toll. I couldn’t hide anymore—my body was demanding help. My hospitalization was in all the papers. Everyone knew about the ulcers, but no one knew what was going on in my head. I remember being so anxious that I couldn’t sleep or eat. I couldn’t function. My OCD was off the charts. I felt out of my skin, and as an NHL goaltender I’m really not sure how I managed to get by on a daily basis, but people dealing with this kind of thing are incredible at covering it up. It was like I was twelve again, only this time the ulcers were real. The stress in my life was like an ongoing preoccupation that dissipated but then came back and became bigger. Eventually, it would go away again, but it always came back stronger. Soon it would destroy me.

  Three days later, one of my teammates threw a Super Bowl party for the players at his house. My wife and I went to the party and I had a few beers with the boys. We went home and I had a bad reaction to the medication I was taking for the bulging disc. I swelled up, was almost convulsing and had a hard time breathing, so I was rushed to the hospital.