The Crazy Game

by Clint Malarchuk

  I found out the Thrashers were leaving Atlanta in 2011 the way pretty much everyone else did: through the press. It took me by surprise. I waited for a long time to see whether I’d be making the move to Winnipeg with the team. It was an anxious time, and a decision was taking way too long. Finally, I asked for permission to talk to other teams—I couldn’t afford to go jobless. Duane Sutter told me his brother Brent was looking for a new goalie coach in Calgary, but they had just wrapped up interviews. I called up the Flames’ GM, Jay Feaster, and sent my application in right away. He called me in for an interview, and I was in Calgary the next day.

  Shortly after, the Flames offered me the job. I was heading home to Alberta.

  35

  Lucky One

  CALGARY HAS ALWAYS FELT LIKE HOME TO ME, SO THERE WAS comfort in returning to the city. The Flames were a great organization. I got to work with one of the best goalies of his generation in Miikka Kiprusoff and helped develop the young goaltenders in their system. Kipper was a good guy to work with, but there’s only so much you can do for a superstar like that. And near the end of his career, you could tell that he just wanted out. He didn’t even want to play his final year.

  I enjoyed being part of the team mostly because of the relationships I managed to build with players. As a coach, I go out of my way to connect with them. I enjoy shooting the shit with struggling forwards next to the pool at the Anaheim Hilton, or cheering up a journeyman goalie after a bad game in St. Louis.

  The hockey world is tough, especially as a goalie coach. It’s better than it used to be. At least now, on most teams, the goalie coach has a full-time gig. But they don’t pay you like the other coaches. They say goaltending is the most important position, but goaltending instructors don’t get paid like it is. You’re living contract to contract—that’s stressful. A new GM comes, a new head coach comes, and you’re done. That’s why it’s cool being self-employed: it’s your job, it’s your show. You don’t have to worry about someone not liking you and giving you the boot. Being self-employed with my horse business is fun, though it’s not without its challenges. When the economy dips, you hurt.

  I love being part of the game because it lets me connect with people beyond it. In Calgary, I started to share my story at high schools. I’d stand in front of the entire school at an assembly and talk about the demons I faced and how close they came to killing me. Every time, students would line up afterwards to talk to me. Some of them opened up about their own struggles with depression and other forms of mental illness. I recognized the fear and confusion in their faces. I understood the hopelessness they faced. I did my best to encourage them to get the help they need. The first step is to let go and seek it. Nobody can conquer mental illness on their own—believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve been through enough to know now that sometimes you need help getting up. That’s why I really enjoy the opportunity to help people through my public speaking. I like that my story might have an impact on people.

  This book wasn’t easy to write. It took me back to a lot of places I never wanted to see again. I heard stories from people that I love about the things I did—the things I couldn’t fully see—and realized how painful and terrible it was for them. Every damn page of this book hurt. Deep down, I really wanted to finish this, but I didn’t realize that revisiting this turmoil was going to affect me the way it did. In the process of writing this book, my anxiety started to build again. As the words came together and I saw them on the page, the anxiety continued to grow—stronger and stronger until it consumed me like it had so many terrible times before. Over the course of three months, starting in October, as the contents of the book were reported and drafts were passed around, I started to lose control of my ability to deal with the anxiety, and the depression started to resurface.

  During one of the Flames’ west coast road trips, Joanie and my daughter Dallyn came to stay with me in San Jose. Dallyn is a teenager now. She’s a very pretty girl. A brunette. She’s super-outgoing and she loves to ride. She’s a natural, just like kids who put on skates and are zooming around the ice right away. Being on the road all the time (and being divorced three times) makes it hard for me to see my kids as regularly as I’d like to. We used to get together at Christmas all the time when they were younger. When we get to visit, it’s hard, because you enjoy the moment, but then you start realizing that you only have a day or two before you have to say goodbye.

  I was thinking about that as we sat in the hotel room in San Jose. Joanie was on her iPad, Dallyn was doing homework, and I was just sitting there in a chair. I started tearing up, trying not to cry. It had been a hard week. I still struggle with depression—the disease doesn’t go away, you just learn to manage it with medication and experience. But I’d been recalling a lot of painful memories putting this book together. I had re-read my journal from the rehab centre and was planning to visit with Tina for the first time since I left, because she lived in the area.

  “Dallyn, come here,” I said. She came over and sat on the armrest and put her arm around me.

  “You know I get depressed, right?” My eyes were wet. “I can walk around, go in the bathroom and cry. But then I’m hiding from you and I’m hiding from Joanie. You know I get depressed and I cry.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” she said.

  “And I’m crying now. Are you okay with that?”

  “Yeah.” She rubbed my back.

  I told her that the shooting had nothing to do with her. I suffered from an illness—that was all. I needed her to understand that none of this was her fault. Depression is a terrible disease that takes too many lives and leaves too many people thinking they played a part in the tragic end of the person they loved and lost.

  “Do you ever get depressed?” I asked Dallyn. I know it can be a hereditary condition. I’d be devastated to learn that she felt the same way I had.

  I never found out whether my father suffered like I did. Alcohol consumed him and was a battle for me—an attempt to deal with problems I couldn’t grasp. I’ve always wondered if my father might have understood my obsessions and compulsions. I wonder if he understood depression. Was he haunted too? I wonder if that might have changed things between us. Had he gotten help, could it have saved my family a lot of pain and anger? I’ll never know.

  “No, Dad,” Dallyn said.

  “Thank God. Do you understand it, though?”

  I explained the disease to her. I told her about OCD and depression and post-traumatic stress. I told her about chemical imbalances and the shame and the guilt and the feeling of helplessness. I told her because I don’t believe in hiding anymore. Too many people do that. The truth is ugly; it might be difficult to share with the people you love. But you owe it to them and to yourself to do so. Held inside, the truth is destructive.

  I hugged my daughter and felt so lucky to be alive. My life was far from perfect, but I still had it. And I had a beautiful wife who had loved me through the darkest times. I had three incredible children who meant everything to me. I had a strong, wonderful mother and a loyal brother and sister whom I love very much. I had friends who would drop anything to be by my side when I needed them. I was the luckiest man in the world, but once again, I could feel it falling apart.

  During a game against the Vancouver Canucks in January, my old friend John Tortorella tried to get into our dressing room between periods to fight our coach, Bob Hartley, after a brawl-filled first period. Torts thought Hartley was to blame. The ordeal was caught on camera—excited little John Tortorella trying to push through a wall of Flames players, including enforcer Brian McGrattan, who could pretty much flick him aside. I was inside the locker room, and when I heard that John was trying to get into our room, something snapped inside of me. It was like I was back on the ice, taking on the world. I charged out and shoved my way through our players until McGrattan caught a hold of me. Torts was gone by then—and he was lucky. The camera caught the vicious snarl across my face. Someone was challenging my team, and I didn’t care who i
t was. You stand up for your boys. I’ve fought my own brother, so an old hockey pal? Wouldn’t think twice about flattening his nose. Don’t get me wrong: we would have made up afterwards. A fistfight is a fistfight—no hard feelings.

  But that incident really had nothing to do with what was going on with my emotional and mental state at the time. It was just instinct. Writing and editing the book was stressing me out, and eventually it started to show. In February, I started to self-medicate again, turning to alcohol to crank down my anxiety. Joanie was back home at our ranch in Nevada, while I was in Calgary with the team or away on road trips. When I wasn’t distracted by my job as the Flames’ goalie coach, I was alone with my thoughts—my words, my story, my book. They haunted me. I entered a depressive state, compounding my anxiety. It was the same thing all over again, and I could feel it rising inside of me. It affected my work. I didn’t realize that others could tell, but they knew. My anxiety began showing up in my personality at the rink. I used to be so good at hiding it.

  On March 26, 2014, I was called into an office at the Saddledome. Brian Burke, the team president, was there along with Bob Hartley, the head coach. There was another familiar face too: Dan Cronin. Dan is a part of the NHLPA’s substance abuse program, and he helped me get to rehab after the shooting incident. Now he was set to help me again.

  Brian said my behaviour with the team had seemed depressive and erratic. He asked if I had been drinking. I was in shock. How could they tell? But I should have known by now: you can’t hide these things. Not truly. They asked me if I wanted to go to a treatment centre to get help. They offered to send me. “Yes,” I managed to say. “And I need help with my mental state as well.”

  I was gone that day.

  The players’ association sent me to a rehab facility in Los Angeles. I cried through the first two and a half days—I was so low. I was so sad. Here we go again. It was shameful. I felt like I had let everyone down. But I was in a different place, experience-wise, than I was the first time. I knew what lay ahead. There was no denial this time. I had to deal with mental issues, anger issues and alcohol issues. There were no wasted days.

  We worked a lot, specifically on my anger during my sessions with therapists at the clinic. They helped me find ways to deal with the anger and anxiety that overcame me at times. We talked about what to do when I’m feeling the rage build up—I know where it comes from, but I needed tools to control it.

  The words “Thy will be done” have always echoed in the back of my mind, lingering from my various experiences with faith. Those words came back to me when I was in rehab for a second time. I’d say them over and over as I walked around the grounds of that facility in Los Angeles, a city where a few months earlier I had sat down by the pool of a hotel during a Flames road trip and laid out my thoughts for this book. Here I was again, in the middle of a new chapter that seemed to take me back to the beginning. “Thy will be done,” I said—because every time I’ve fallen, there has been something there, waiting to catch me. A blade was millimetres away from ending my life. A handful of pills stopped my heart. A bullet is lodged in my forehead next to my brain. A narrow margin exists between life and death. I have clung to the finest of threads and returned—eyes blinking, heart beating—only by the grace of something much larger than me.

  Call it God, call it fate or call it blind luck. Any way I look at it, it breaks down to one simple, essential thing. I call it purpose.

  But “purpose” isn’t easy, and mine was going to be a daily battle. I tried to change my habits and make sure I was focused on staying in the right emotional, mental and spiritual state. It was like an essential mental tune-up. But again, these issues don’t just go away. I expect that they will return, but each time they do I know I’ll be stronger than I was before.

  Once again, the NHLPA and NHL were a great help. Dan Cronin and Andrew Galloway from the players’ association had been there when I first went into rehab, and they were a big support in getting me help a second time. They do a fantastic job of taking care of players and employees who need help. When I suffered the jugular injury back in ‘89, no one mentioned anything about mental health to me. We’ve come a long way in the last twenty-five years. More and more teams are becoming conscious of these issues. The Calgary Flames have their own team psychologist, and many other NHL teams do too.

  I think a lot of the attention on mental health is the result of all the information coming out about the links between post-concussion syndromes, like CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), and depression. Sometimes I wonder if head trauma affected me. For years, we’d see players get hit in the head by a check or in a fight, and it’d be diagnosed as “getting your bell rung.” The players would shake it off and get back out there. No one considered the permanent implications of brain injuries. Now, with everything I’ve been through, it just makes me wonder. I’m sure a lot of other former players think about it too.

  Mental illness is still too often considered a private issue because its effects go unseen. At every NHL training camp, experts come to speak to players about the dangers of substance abuse, gambling, and so on. They did these annual sessions back when I played, too. But now, they also take time to talk about mental health. That wasn’t even a phrase hockey players would have known the meaning of back in my day. Mental illness was a reality then, but not one that we knew how to face. Today, that’s changing. But a group session does little to actually encourage someone who is struggling to get real, meaningful help. I’d like to see a system set up where a player can seek confidential support and know that his coaches, the general manager and ownership won’t be informed about it. It has to be confidential. There is so much denial amongst players because they think they are going to ruin their careers—their lives—if they actually seek help. A twenty-four-hour help line with assured confidentiality, or something like that, is the next step forward for the NHL.

  In August 2011, Rick Rypien, a young man who played in the Vancouver Canucks’ system, killed himself after a long, painful battle with depression. I had always respected the way Rick played the game—his competitiveness, his attitude, the way he fought guys much bigger than him. I had heard that he was struggling and I wanted to reach out to him. By then, most people in the hockey world knew part of my story. They all knew about the skate-blade accident, and most had deduced that the shooting incident wasn’t really an accident that happened while I was shooting rabbits on the ranch. But I hadn’t discussed the reality of my struggle in depth. When the terrible news about Rick came out, I broke down. I don’t think that I could have saved him, but I know I could have helped. I know that I could have, at the very least, looked him in the eye and told him I knew what he was going through.

  You have to understand one thing: I was very sick. People who are going through this kind of thing don’t know what the hell they’re doing. When I pulled the trigger, I had no idea where my head was. The last thing I was thinking about was checking out permanently. It was a random thing. It wasn’t about leaving my loved ones or anything. Looking back, I wonder why I wasn’t thinking about them. But you’re not thinking about anything. It’s hard to explain. Trying to describe depression to someone who has never really had it is hard. If you were to break your back, the pain would be excruciating. You can try to describe that, but someone listening is going to say, “I can imagine it was.” Unless you experience it, you can’t know. If you break your leg—your femur—right in half and it’s sticking out of your skin, it looks gross, but no one else can really feel it. I felt it and I’m trying to describe it. I was in so much pain.

  Eventually, I hope, we will get to a point where the stigma that surrounds mental illness will diminish so that no one feels they need to fight it alone. We need to be at a place where people seek help for mental illness just like they would for any physical ailment. We have come a long way in this regard as a society. And in sports, we are getting closer. We are getting better at realizing that being “tough” has nothing to do
with suffering in silence.

  On April 26, 2014, I got out of rehab and flew back to Calgary. It was a Saturday. Joanie flew in the next day. Before I had gone into rehab, she told me, “Remember, we are a team.” I called her every day while I was in the facility. Joanie and her family—along with my strong, wonderful mother—have been my team all along. They never let me down. They never stopped fighting for me.

  Back in Calgary, Joanie and I started packing up the things we planned to take back to the ranch in Nevada for the summer. The rebuilding Flames hadn’t made the playoffs and the season was done. I didn’t go back to the Saddledome at all. Brian Burke called me that Tuesday. He asked if the doctors had prepared me for the possibility that I wouldn’t be returning to the team. “You know we can’t have you back,” he said. I thanked him for helping me through the season and for getting me the treatment I needed. I have a great deal of respect for Brian. He said the team would look to help me out in any way possible as I moved on to the next chapter of my life.

  And with that, it was done. I was no longer a member of the Calgary Flames’ coaching staff. I was officially unemployed, facing a great, terrifying unknown—with my life about to be splayed out across the pages of this book.

  We rented a U-Haul trailer and packed up everything in our condo, hitched it to the back of my silver pickup and started out on the twenty-two-hour trip back to Nevada. It was hard to drive out of Calgary and leave everything behind. Joanie and I didn’t say much as we drove down the highway and the city disappeared behind us. Nothing needed to be said. The last bump was behind me now; I had no idea how many were ahead. But right then, we were moving forward, moving on. We stopped for the night in Grand Falls, Montana, and I found an AA meeting to attend. I had committed to going to one every day, and I planned to see that through.