The Crazy Game

by Clint Malarchuk

  My second wife and I weren’t divorced yet. She was pregnant, but the marriage was doomed. She saw me at my craziest. She actually suggested that I see an exorcist—she wasn’t kidding. She even tried to arrange a meeting with a priest. My mom told her she needed a lobotomy.

  The suicidal thoughts wouldn’t stop. I didn’t care whether I was dead or alive. If I was hit by a car and killed, I’d be cool with that. That’s where my mind was at the time. I probably hadn’t slept in God knows how long.

  I’d call my mom mostly and she’d just say, “Hang in there, Clint. Hang in there.” It was like every day was Sunday night before returning to Elmwood Elementary. She was dragging me back to life.

  One desperate afternoon, I dropped to my knees in the bedroom and prayed: God, either fix me or take me.

  The Sabres called me back up to the NHL in late November. Hasek had pulled his groin, and I was flown across the country to back up Puppa. There were rumours that Buffalo was trying to trade me to the Ottawa Senators. At the time, I had a 2.35 goals-against average, with six wins and no losses with the Gulls. On the ice, life was good. Off the ice, life was hell.

  It was weird being back after being dismissed. The team’s strength coach, Chris Reichart—a good friend—picked me up at the airport. I basically sat on the bench, and then the Sabres sent me back to San Diego. I stayed at Chris’s house that night. I broke down there. We went for a long walk until about three in the morning. “I can’t do this anymore,” I told him. “I can’t do this.”

  The next day, Chris drove me back to the airport, and I cried the whole way. I knew I was going back down to the minors—but I wasn’t crying because of that. The tears just came and I couldn’t hold them back. I was so depressed.

  Chris was such a good man. He didn’t know what to say or what to do, but he tried. What do you say to a full-blown lunatic?

  Let me tell you, I’d rather have a broken femur or a broken back, any physical pain, than that depression. Clinical depression is just—I mean, I asked God to take me. Kill me. I didn’t have the balls to do it myself. But feeling the way I did, I didn’t even want to live.

  When I got back to San Diego, my wife was gone. She just packed up and left—she wouldn’t answer my calls or anything. Shortly after that, we had a game against Salt Lake and I allowed four goals on the first five shots of the game. Duds yanked me just over a minute into the second period. I sat on the bench with my head going a hundred miles an hour. I remember thinking, I can’t do this. I just can’t do this. I don’t think I’m any better. I may be worse. Everything was caving in on me. It felt like I was having a nervous breakdown.

  I went into Dudley’s office after the game. I was crying—sobbing, really. I was a mess. “Duds, I’m done,” I said. “I quit. I know you brought me here to give me a chance, but I’m just getting worse.”

  “Okay, Clint,” he said, “I understand. I don’t care about hockey. We’re going to get you some help.”

  He could have said, “We’ll just get somebody else. You’re thirty-one years old—away you go.” Instead, he called in the team doctor and promised that the organization would be with me while I got the help I needed.

  Dudley saved my life that day.

  We met with Don Waddell, our general manager, who was also very supportive. I took an indefinite leave from the Gulls. They had the team physician arrange for me to meet with a specialist at the University of San Diego who turned out to be one of the nation’s leading experts on obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  I met Dr. Stephen Stahl at his office in La Jolla. By this time, I was so sick of doctors, and it felt like he was the hundredth expert I’d seen about this shit.

  We sat across from each other. He asked me about the prescription my doctor in Rochester had given me. I was staring at him, thinking, You’re full of horseshit. You know nothing.

  “Prozac, first. Then he switched me to Haldol. Then Orap.”

  “Haldol?” he repeated. “When was this?”

  “I was in Buffalo.”

  “And you were playing hockey?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re a goalie?”

  “Yes.”

  “That stuff will make you …,” he paused. “I can’t believe they had you on Haldol.”

  Basically, I was having pucks shot at me at a hundred miles an hour while I was a zombie. I was trying to play NHL hockey on a schizophrenic downer. Dr. Stahl didn’t say much more, but I could tell he was thinking, Holy shit.

  He scribbled in his notebook and handed me a prescription for a drug called Zoloft and told me to come back in a week.

  “Aren’t you going to talk to me about my childhood?”

  “No,” he said. “Why?”

  The psychiatrists and psychologists I’d seen in the past had all followed the same pattern. They’d all wanted to interrogate me. Yeah, I had a bad childhood. Who didn’t? I got tired of it—Yeah, my dad did this, my dad did that … You know, who really cares?

  I just wanted someone to fix me once and for all.

  “Clint, your problem is a chemical imbalance,” he said. We’re going to get you on the right medication to fix that.”

  Nothing changed that first week. I stayed inside the whole time—I was in one of the sunniest cities in America, and I just wanted to sit in darkness. I was consumed with my marriage. I know it’s not good. She doesn’t understand; I don’t understand. It seemed there was no way to fix it. I was away from the team the whole time. I didn’t skate or train at all.

  “I’ve struggled with the problem ever since I was diagnosed last January,” I told reporters. “We’re using this week to try to get things stabilized, then we’ll take it from there. This disease has affected my career, my life and my marriage. I’ve tried to make a go of it while being sick, but the problem is that when you’re on the medication—most of them—you can’t play hockey. At least, you can’t be a goalie.”

  It was the same week after week. No change, but Dr. Stahl kept telling me to stick with the Zoloft. It would take some time to kick in, he said. I’d see him once a week, week after week. I figured the outcome would be the same as it always had been. I wasn’t skeptical; I was desperate, and hope was fading.

  And then, after six weeks, I woke up and—swear to God—walked outside and wanted to be there. I mean, it was San Diego! I wanted to be outdoors. I wanted to go to the rink. I drove to Dr. Stahl’s office for our meeting.

  “The depression’s lifted,” I said. “I’ve never felt this good.”

  He said, “Great, let’s give it three more weeks,” and upped my prescription. I was starting to see a little light. Dr. Stahl said if the drug was working, the depression would ease up. Then we’d see what it’d do for the OCD. I returned to the team around then. It felt great to be back on the ice. The game meant something to me again.

  It took nine weeks to finally understand—maybe for the first time ever—what normal feels like. I wasn’t depressed. I wasn’t obsessive. Stahl told me I was a special, special case. I was dealing with such extreme OCD, and the drug usually only gets you about 60 per cent better. I thought, I’ll take it! I could have kissed him.

  “Good, good,” Dr. Stahl said. “We’ve just got to keep you on it.”

  I did a feature interview with the Los Angeles Times that revealed the reality of my ongoing struggle more candidly than I had allowed myself to do in the past. I explained my obsessions and anxieties. About watching a TV show with an unfaithful spouse in it and becoming convinced that my own wife was doing the same. Or hitting a bump while driving my car and becoming so convinced that I’d hit someone that I’d circle back to look for the body.

  “Ultimately, I want to keep playing,” I told Rachel Blount of the Times. “But I want to be happy, too. I would love to be able to resurrect my career and get back to the NHL. I dream of beating the odds and coming back and having another year or two in the NHL. But I can’t lose my life doing it. It’s been a struggle all my life. It’s been
so much pressure that I just want it to stop. Sometimes, I wish God would come down and take it all away.”

  After those nine weeks, I really enjoyed life for the first time in I don’t know how many years. It was as though God had come down and touched me on the forehead and said, “Have fun now, son.” For the first time, it seemed, he’d actually answered my prayers.

  I played exceptional hockey when I returned to San Diego. The game felt natural again. I did an interview with CNN about my battle with mental illness. I did an interview with Prime Ticket. Mental illness in pro sports was rarely discussed back then, but I felt like I needed to share my story.

  I was haunted by thoughts of all the things that could have been. There was no question that my play had been affected by my mental state or that my successful return to Buffalo after the breakdown had been limited by the prescription drugs I was taking at that time.

  My goal now was to make it back to the NHL and prove that I belonged there.

  18

  Sin City

  AFTER THE SEASON ENDED, MY CONTRACT EXPIRED. THE YEAR IN San Diego had been a success—the Gulls had led the IHL with sixty-two wins and 132 points and reached the Turner Cup final—but staying on was not an option. The team had become affiliated with the expansion Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, and they needed my roster spot to develop talent for the parent club. Besides, Rick Dudley had taken a new job coaching the Phoenix Roadrunners. It was time to move on.

  The Canadian national team was still interested in me, but it wasn’t an Olympic year. Meantime, the IHL had placed a new franchise in Las Vegas, and the team’s general manager, Bob Strumm, asked me to come and be one of the team’s marquee players. I was in the middle of my second divorce. I had a little girl and a little boy in my life. My son, Jed, went with my wife when she left me. He was still just a baby, and I didn’t get to see him very often. Kelli had recently moved to Australia with her mother. She came to visit when she was out of school. She was about nine at the time. We drove together from San Diego to Vegas to meet with Bob to discuss the possibility of my future with the Thunder, and then continued on to Alberta, where I always spent the off-season. After everything I’d been through in the past few years, it was nice to have my little girl by my side again. On the last leg of our trip together, I asked Kelli where she thought I should start the next chapter in my career.

  “Las Vegas,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I like it there,” she said.

  I thought about it for a moment. “You know what? I like it there, too.”

  Kelli went back to Australia shortly after our trip across the western part of North America. She would have been five or six when she and her mother moved there. It was a tough void to overcome. My baby girl was a world away.

  For an obsessive-compulsive person, Vegas probably seemed like one of the worst places to wind up—booze and cards, 24/7. I was never much of a gambler, though. But Vegas is a city built for insomniacs—at least if I couldn’t sleep, I’d have company. And the ranch life appealed to me. It reminded me of the life I loved back in Grand Prairie when I was a kid. There was something peaceful about the vastness beyond the bright lights.

  I wanted to enjoy going to the rink again. It was something I’d started to get back near the end of my time in San Diego, when Dr. Stahl had me all figured out and the pressure of playing was no longer amplified the way it had been by OCD. I was so happy to feel normal, and I didn’t want to mess it up. But then, that would have been too easy.

  I drank a lot in the summer of 1993 and never really stopped. It got out of hand. I was distraught about leaving my two-year-old son, Jed, behind in Calgary. I was still going through an ugly divorce, and Wife Number Two was keeping me from seeing him. I struggled that summer. I was crying hard as I was driving out of Calgary. The city was my security blanket, and here I was, leaving, not knowing what the hell I was doing with my life. When I crossed the border into Montana, I stopped at a liquor store and picked up a bottle of vodka. I was feeling crappy. The next thing I remember is waking up at a rest stop just outside of Vegas. It was dark, and I could see the bright lights reaching up into the sky. I can’t remember much about that drive.

  It was the week before training camp, and we had some ice time the next morning. The problem was, there’s no last call in Vegas. So I drove to the strip and found a bar in one of the casinos. I just sat there as the gamblers filtered around me, and I drank and had a good time. Suddenly, I was feeling tired. I went out and started my truck at maybe four or five in the morning. Then I remembered we had ice at ten. At this point in my drinking career, I didn’t even notice the hangovers. I was out all night and looking for happy hour at lunch the next day.

  After about three or four days of that, I knew I couldn’t live in this goddamn town and drink to drown my sorrows and still play hockey.

  The Thunder flew to Regina for training camp that year. I sat in the hotel, craving a drink. I can’t keep doing this. I need help. There was a phone book in one of the drawers. I flipped through it and found a number for a local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. A kind voice answered.

  “I don’t know how this works,” I said. “I’m from out of town.”

  “Stay there. We’ll have somebody pick you up,” the man said. “In fact, we have somebody who just called from your hotel. We’ll pick you both up, if that’s okay.”

  A few minutes later, there was a knock at my door. It was one of the other players. He’d been sober for less than a year. We went down to the lobby together, a van picked us up and I went to my first AA meeting.

  They went around the room with the typical introduction: “Hi, I’m Fred and I’m an alcoholic.” My turn came. I took a breath and said, “Hi, I’m Clint. This is my first meeting. And the jury is still out. I’m not sure.”

  Everybody told a story. I didn’t share mine. They all had pretty devastating tales, but it was nothing compared to what I’d been doing to myself.

  Back in my hotel room that night, I lay there awake, thinking about whether I wanted to admit to yet another failure in my life. Then I thought of my dad. There was really no choice. I went back the next night. “Hi, I’m Clint and I’m an alcoholic.”

  I didn’t have another drink for eight years. From that meeting in Regina, eight straight years. It’s hard, but I don’t think I suffered from the same kind of addiction that other alcoholics have. It was a self-medicating thing. I think I overindulge more than most people do, and my problem was rooted more in that than in dependency.

  I was just ready to change my life. I was going through my second divorce, I felt that I had really been helped with my OCD in San Diego and I was getting a new lease on life. The medication was giving me relief, and things were going well in hockey. I wasn’t obsessing as much as I had been—I was functional. I looked inside and said, You know what? You’re just giving yourself one more problem to deal with here. You have to deal with this divorce and your kids and all that. But you can do it. I realized I couldn’t afford to screw things up by drinking myself to death, just to deal with being lonely and getting a divorce. Eight goddamn years without a drink. Incredible, until they were gone.

  Hockey in Vegas was an anomaly back in 1993 when the Thunder opened their first season in the IHL. For the future and fading stars who had come to the desert to play a winter sport, it was an unfamiliar, glitzy world. Bringing the game to Vegas was a unique and exciting challenge. The team’s owners—the father-and-son duo of Hank and Ken Stickney—knew how to sell an experience to the fans. They both owned baseball teams in the California League, even though Ken was only thirty, and co-owned the Triple-A Las Vegas Stars of the Pacific Coast League. At the time, few who called the City of Sin home could tell a hockey puck from a urinal puck, so we weren’t selling just the league to fans—we were selling the entire package.

  Bob Strumm strung as many blinking lights on his new franchise as he could. My photo went up on a billboard in town. It was so cool—to be
on a billboard in Vegas, where you’d find celebrities like Wayne Newton and people like that. We played out of the Thomas and Mack Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where the Runnin’ Rebels were consistently one of the top teams in men’s NCAA basketball under controversial coach Jerry Tarkanian.

  The lights went dark before every game and our team skated out under spotlights. Songs like “Bad to the Bone” and “The Boys Are Back in Town” pumped through the PA system. After every home goal, fireworks exploded at centre ice. The Zamboni was sponsored by Caesar’s Palace. The advertisements along the boards advertised venues like the Girls of Glitter Gulch, a nearby topless bar. After each period, one of the girls from Glitter Gulch carried a ring card around the ice announcing the next frame.

  Strumm had been the general manager of the Canadian team that won the world junior championship in 1982. He brought in NHL veteran Butch Goring to be our coach. Our best player was a seventeen-year-old Czech named Radek Bonk who was considered one of the top NHL prospects in the game. Bonk had played a season of professional hockey in Czechoslovakia before coming to North America to get more experience and raise his stock in advance of the NHL draft. He did all right: 87 points, 42 goals and 208 penalty minutes in 76 games. In the 1994 NHL draft, he went third overall to the Ottawa Senators.

  We also employed one of the craziest hockey players I’ve ever met. Kerry Toporowski came to us from Indianapolis partway through the season. I once asked Bob Strumm to name the toughest player he’d ever had play for or against his team. We’re talking guys like Stu Grimson and “the Missing” Link Gaetz. Strumm said, without question, it was Toporowski. He was one of those guys for whom the adrenaline just took over—their eyes roll back in their head and they don’t feel pain. I’d like to nominate myself for that category, too. I know what it means to go to Mars or Pluto.

  When I met Kerry, I knew I wasn’t that screwed up, because this guy could tear a planet apart. No disrespect to him—or to Rick Dudley, who was a member of the same club—but it’s very comforting to know you’re not the only kook. Of all the guys I played with, Kerry was the craziest. A lot of tough guys are predictable, but Kerry went to a different place. He was a good guy to have on your side.