Joanie called me. “Did you miss your flight?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing?”
“Sitting in my room.” I was terrified. She could hear it in my voice. It was the first time she really understood my demons.
She told me to walk downstairs in five minutes. She called the airline and booked me on a new flight. She called the concierge and told him I was coming down and that he needed to get me into a cab. She walked me through the process of getting to the airport. She called me every fifteen minutes to make sure I had arrived at the airport, made it through security and to my gate. She made sure I boarded the plane. Joanie got me home.
When I got back to San Antonio, Joanie took me to the hospital to get my medication adjusted. I was paranoid; I didn’t want to see another doctor. At first, I refused to go, but Matt Loughran, my friend from Idaho who was now in charge of the Rampage, helped Joanie convince me to go. When we got to the hospital, the doctor said there wasn’t really anything he could do for me. It would take a while for the medication to fully work again because I’d been off it. I started freaking out. My eyes had that crazy glare in them. Matt had never seen me like this before. I stormed out of the hospital and started pacing back and forth across the parking lot.
I was in a rough state for a few weeks. I was drinking then, and I started drinking more to calm myself down. My OCD lives more within my emotions than as physical manifestation—say, turning the lights on and off. I became paranoid that Joanie was lying when she told me she loved me. Or that I really wasn’t a good coach and my job was slipping away.
My anxiety kept me up at night. The insomnia was coming back, so I went to a doctor in San Antonio, who gave me some pills to knock me out. The pills made me groggy—I always felt dazed when I woke up. One morning, I stumbled into Joanie’s bathroom and bashed my chin on the counter. There was a huge gash and there was blood all over her mint-green vanity and matching bath towels. She was at work at the time. I didn’t want to deal with going to the hospital, so I found some thread and a needle in her drawer and stitched myself up.
When Joanie came home and saw my mangled face, she tried to get me to go to the hospital, but I refused. I didn’t want anybody’s help. I wouldn’t budge, so Joanie called Steve Ludzik—my old teammate, who was now the head coach of the Rampage. He and his wife were a huge support for us at the time. They invited us over for dinner and planned to have one of their friends who was a doctor come over to stitch me up. I showed up at the house looking like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. The Ludziks’ plan worked. I let the doc take a look at the gash, but I insisted on removing the thread from my chin myself. He was amazed that I could take the pain and that I knew how to stitch up my own wounds. He said I had done a good job, all things considered, but he needed to fix me up with the suture kit he’d brought or the gash would get infected.
Joanie and I married a year later. Joanie’s parents came to visit us at our ranch in Nevada, so we decided to make it official that weekend. We went up to Lake Tahoe and got married on a cliff overlooking the lake. In addition to her parents, her two sisters flew in to surprise her, and my daughter Dallyn was there. I met a few people in town earlier that day and invited them to come up. But I didn’t tell my mother we were getting married. I was so embarrassed about being married four times. My mom had liked Wife Number Three, but I don’t think she liked the others. I figured she would decide not to like Joanie because my track record proved that, inevitably, the whole production would fall apart. I didn’t want her to think, Oh, here we go again!
The wedding was close to perfect in every way, except for my mother’s absence. I regret that. She’s been the biggest support in my life, and I love her more than anything. Eventually, she and Joanie became great friends. Of course they would—they were both perfect and they both loved me! If there’s a lesson in this, it’s simple: always invite your mother to your weddings, regardless of how many you’ve already had.
We bought a ranch in Gardnerville, Nevada. It was in a beautiful location, on the edge of the mountains, surrounded by golden sagebrush. I envisioned the riding arena and the corral and the tack shed. I could picture how high the trees we planted would grow over our perfect, happy years together in this desert paradise.
I did my best to manage my illness this time. But I had taken the same medication for years—the same dosage and everything. You don’t realize when it isn’t working anymore, and it’s embarrassing to admit that you still have the disease. You don’t want to admit it to yourself, let alone anyone who can actually help. Drinking seems to make the obsessiveness and anxiety go away. You have a little more to drink here, a little more to drink there, and soon drinking is the only way to feel normal.
Joanie could see that I was slipping. She tried to help me and swore she’d stay beside me through everything. But she couldn’t have known just how bad it was about to get.
23
Open Wounds
ON FEBRUARY 10, 2008, FLORIDA PANTHERS FORWARD RICHARD Zednik had his neck cut open by the skate of teammate Olli Jokinen while the Panthers were playing the Sabres in Buffalo. It was a freak accident. Jokinen tripped after being tangled up with Sabres forward Clarke MacArthur. His leg kicked up and the blade cut into Zednik’s external carotid artery. Zednik grabbed his throat and skated for the bench, leaving a trail of blood behind him. The training staff stabilized him until he could be rushed to the hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery that saved his life.
My phone starting ringing and didn’t stop for a week. The accident couldn’t have been more similar to mine, and reporters wanted to know my reaction to the gruesome scene. Suddenly, everyone was talking about my injury again. I replayed the story over and over.
“It brought up a lot of things I never really wanted to think about again,” I told the Columbus Dispatch. “I thought about it probably every day for a year or two after it happened to me. It’s been more fleeting in recent years, but this brings it all back. I didn’t sleep last night. Not one single wink. I thought I was over it.”
I was working as a goalie coach for the Columbus Blue Jackets at the time. The Panthers didn’t renew my contract after the lockout season, when Dudley was replaced as general manager by Keenan and Jacques Martin took over as head coach.
I was pissed about how the whole thing went down. When Martin was hired after the 2003–04 season, it was clear that he and I didn’t connect. And Martin had told Keenan he wanted his own guy. Keenan told him he could do what he wanted but suggested he ask the starting goalie, Roberto Luongo, who he wanted to work with. Luongo really liked me; he and I had a great relationship.
And during the lockout season, I dropped all my shit to go and coach in San Antonio—which I thought was pretty honourable of me to do. In 2005, we held a prospect camp up at Teen Ranch, near Orangeville, north of Toronto. Duane Sutter and I ran it. Keenan and I got to talking about my next contract during the camp. He had to leave before anything was settled, but I told him I wasn’t worried about it. I’m a handshake guy and so is Mike. But it’s not a league where you can rely on a handshake. You can’t depend on anything unless you sign on the dotted line.
Keenan called me on June 30, the last day before my contract expired. He said, “Clint, you’re done. We can’t bring you back.”
I thought he was joking. I said, “Okay, Mike.”
He said, “Seriously.” And then it hit me. What? I was shocked.
The news came so late, all the other jobs for the upcoming season were filled. So I was out of hockey for about a year, working as a horse dentist and chiropractor in Garnerville, Nevada. We probably saw about two thousand horses each summer. It was busy, but I missed hockey.
Doug MacLean, the general manager of the Blue Jackets, had been the assistant coach in Washington when I played there. He gave me a shot with Columbus in 2006. Ken Hitchcock—the guy who sold me my skates when I was a kid—was the head coach. Hitch is one of the best people in the game. He�
�s a brilliant coach but also a wonderful man.
Pascal Leclaire was the main man between the pipes in Columbus—a great goalie whose career was cut short because of bad luck with injuries. He was one of my favourite guys to work with—we connected very well. But MacLean was a lot like Keenan when it came to goalies. If a tender let in a bad goal, he’d kick open the door up in the press box or throw a chair. He’d yell at the Zamboni driver if the ice was bad. He’d probably yell at the popcorn guy if there were too many unpopped kernels at the bottom of the bag. But I mean that in a nice way. He was a great guy, just very passionate and demanding. I could relate to that. So my role with Pascal was to help take the pressure off. I used to pull a lot of pranks and chirp him. I used to tap reporters on the shinbone with my stick when they’d come in the room after practice—it really hurt if you hit it right—and Pascal always got a kick out of that. We joked around a lot. He knew I had his back, no matter what happened. I’d go to war for that kid any day. He was loyal to me and I’d always be loyal to him.
I was probably closer to Pascal than anyone else in the organization. But even he had no idea what was going on inside my head at the time. I hid everything from the team. When the press kept calling after the Zednik injury that winter, I didn’t let on that the memory of the accident still haunted me. The nightmares came back. It just kept getting worse. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t want anyone else to know. I didn’t want to put a big spotlight on it and expose everything all over again. I felt ashamed at having gone back to that place, for being unable to overcome myself.
It wasn’t all bad. I actually had a brief NHL comeback with the team when Pascal got hurt on a road trip out to Vancouver. I strapped on the pads to replace him in practice. I was pretty good. With this new hockey gear, you don’t feel the pucks hitting you! And it’s light! I was facing NHL shooters in an NHL practice—it was 1987 all over again. The players were trying to bury it on me. Hitchcock was watching, so they didn’t let up. I thought, This is great! Go ahead, Rick Nash, shoot it! I was kicking pucks aside. Gary Agnew, one of the assistant coaches, came up and told me to stop going down—he thought I was going to have a heart attack or something. I was panting pretty hard, but the competitive side of me just came out. I had so many guys come up to me after that and tell me how amazed they were that I could still kick out the rubber. “Holy shit, you can still play!” It was great. I felt like I could sign a million-dollar contract and make the comeback official. I was sore for about a week, though.
Shortly after that, I suited up for another practice in St. Louis. It didn’t go as well, but all things considered, I did pretty good.
Even so, I decided to stick with coaching.
24
Open Bottles
IN COLUMBUS, MY ALCOHOLISM REACHED THE POINT WHERE THE people around me couldn’t see the OCD because my drinking appeared to be my most obvious problem. It was just a mask, of course—a way to cover up a more deeply rooted issue. But that’s basically the textbook definition of alcoholism, isn’t it?
The private obsessions persisted.
Joanie stayed back at our ranch in Nevada during the season while I went back and forth to Columbus, because I was on a consulting contract. I’d be there for two or three weeks at a time. Not knowing where she was and what she was up to drove me crazy. It was an old, irrational fear creeping up on me. Sometimes, I would call her fifteen or twenty times a night. She had no idea what was going on. I’d pick a fight with her, just trying to have something to argue about. Anything.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at home.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, ‘nothing’? What are you hiding?”
She’d hang up and I’d call back. “Why don’t you want to talk to me?”
“I do!”
It was the same dance, over and over.
In the spring of 2007, towards the end of my first year with Columbus, we went on a road trip that took us through Nashville. Joanie got a call from a taxi driver. I was piss-drunk in the back seat.
“I have your husband,” the driver said.
“What?”
“He is hurt and bloody, but he is all right.”
I had gone out on my own and gotten hammered at a bar. Then I had talked myself into a fight with a group of guys. I held my own, but there were three, maybe four of them. Somehow, I managed to get my ass into a cab. The driver found Joanie’s number in my phone because I was a bloody, incoherent mess. She told him where I was staying and made sure he got me there.
The next morning, I went to the rink with my dress shirt covered in blood. I’d only brought one shirt on the trip and didn’t have time to buy a new one. My eye was swollen like a grapefruit. The Blue Jackets sent me home to Nevada.
Joanie picked me up at the airport. My face was still swollen. I knew then that the drinking was out of control and my job was on the line. But I also believed it was a problem I could fix on my own.
That summer, my drinking just got worse. I spiralled out of control. My head would spin as I thought about the possibility of losing my job, losing Joanie, losing everything that meant anything to me. I believed that people were out to get me.
Joanie’s ex-boyfriend, as I’ve said, was a bodybuilder. They had a terrible relationship. She hated him, but I still became obsessed with the idea that Joanie would leave me for a bodybuilder. “Tell me you don’t love me so I can get on with my life,” I told her.
My mother kept telling her not to worry about it. “That’s just how he is. You have to get used to it.” I have to admit that, as much as I love my mother, that was an enabling philosophy.
This part of my life is difficult for me to talk about. Obsession is an embarrassing issue. But we’ve got to push through. We’ve got to get this shit out. It’s important to admit to insecurity so deeply rooted that it calcifies in your core. I had jealous thoughts so poisonous, I could feel them burn through my veins. It overwhelms every rational part of you.
Growing up, it was family and hockey. My family was fucked; hockey represented hope. Thank God I was good at it. I had to be the best. I’d do anything to get there, goddammit. I’d get on the ice first, leave the ice last, make sure that no one could put in the same time or effort that I did. I’d win by default.
I used to ask my mom—honest to God—at thirteen: “Do you think I’m better than that goalie? Do you think I’m better than that goalie?” I’d lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, worrying that some other guy was better than me. I had to be the best. Have to be the best. In junior, the backup goalie would have a good game and I couldn’t stop worrying that he might be better than me. I’d get up and do a double workout the next morning.
Whatever I was emotional about, I was obsessive—and competitive—about. Relationships were impossible because they became the thing I was emotional about, obsessive about, and competitive about. Who is she really thinking about? Who does she want to be with? Who else has she been with? Am I better? Am I stronger? Taken on their own, these are normal feelings. You’re lying if you say you haven’t had them before. The problem is when these questions become all you can think about. Consider the average level of insecurity as a one or two on a scale of ten. True obsession hits ten and doesn’t relent.
Back in Buffalo, when I wasn’t in a relationship, as I left the house I’d do all the regular OCD things—checking the stove, locking the door, going back and checking again, going back … and so on. That was the easy shit to deal with. Then, when I met my second wife, it all changed. I was at the rink, worrying about whether or not I was the best lover, the best husband, the best man. With a game to play, I couldn’t afford to have to think about this shit. The only way to get it out of my head was to ask her, every day, before I left the house: “Are you sure you love me?” I couldn’t leave until I was certain. Then I’d be out of my mind and I could play the game. It was about the competition. Not the sex—the
competition.
When I had a handle on things, I could recognize those thoughts as irrational. I’d still have them, but I could push them aside and not give a shit. But without proper medication, I couldn’t turn them off. It was a voice in my head that just kept talking and wouldn’t let the issue die. Was he better in bed than me? Was he more built than me? Was he funnier than me?
That two-year span, when things fell apart in Buffalo and I was sent to the minors, I never stopped feeling that nagging insecurity, that constant voice in my head—driving me to insomnia, driving me to insanity. I was on my knees, praying—God, I can’t make this stop. Either take me or fix me.
The feelings haunted me with Joanie, too. There was nothing between her and her ex-boyfriend, the bodybuilder. But I couldn’t shake the idea that she secretly loved him. I couldn’t stop thinking she was disappointed that I wasn’t a juice monkey, too. If she didn’t think I was pretty great, she wouldn’t have stuck by me through this shit. I recognize the logic in that. But of course, the logic didn’t click. I was driven to the edge all over again. The voice would never stop.
So that’s it; there you go. That’s obsession. Embarrassing and ugly—the worst parts of a man, unrelenting and taking over until you lose control completely.
25
I’d Never …
A COUPLE OF MY LOCAL FRIENDS, WACO AND DAVE, WOULD COME over to ride and rope in the arena. We’d drink in the barn all day and night. As long as I could drink and ride, I’d be okay. I wished I could drink and ride forever. For a while, the voices in my head would stop and let me relax. I’d drink almost thirty beers a day. When we got short on beers, we’d go and get more. But when the parties ended, the thoughts raged back. Only I’d be drunk and irrational. “I just want to die,” I’d tell Joanie. “I just want to kill myself.”
The Crazy Game Page 17