A Chris Simon memorial reading list, to remind you of what the NHL has known all along
Reading, and having the facts straight, is the right line of attack, since the NHL and hockey media will turn the page on the death of another fighter. Knowledge is a dangerous thing, eh.
Heads-up: this post contains mentions of suicide. If you are not up reading that today, it is OK.
“Another fighter,” said someone in the vicinity after receiving a push alert about Chris Simon the other night. Within two words, there were multitudes.
A suicide death summarized as “Former NHLer Chris Simon dead at 52” is something of an ‘everywhere and nowhere’ story. A player from the 1990s and 2000s “era when staged fights and intimidation were big parts of NHL life”1 dying young is not new, since Bob Probert, Derek Boogaard, Wade Belak, and Rick Rypien all around the start of the 2010s. Plus Todd Fedoruk, or Matt Johnson. The same goes when a once-fearsome offensive lineman or defensive contributor to a Super Bowl team from two decades ago dies at age 48. People know the pattern. The athlete makes it to the top by doing whatever it takes, without knowing it will take everything from him on “la chute aux enfers.”2
And, of course, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman still wants to “wait( to see what the medical experts tell us.” He reminds us of “all the progress that we've made over the last couple of decades to make the game as safe as possible.”3
Jesus, is the commissioner going on LTIR for breaking his arm by patting himself on the back?
One would hope the culture is not buying that dubious dichotomy. Sure, it seems to say, we screwed up 15, 20, 30 years ago. Back then, we were just dopes in suits.
Dude says that as if the New York Rangers, who play about a five-minute walk from Bettman’s office, do not employ Matt Rempe, whojust had four fights in his first seven NHL games. I do not know how worse for wear Rempe is after that. This is about the long run.
In combat sports, there are restrictions on how often someone can get in a boxing ring or MMA octagon, especially after being knocked unconscious. The Ontario Hockey League restricts a teenage player to three fighting majors per season before suspending them, and the Québec league has made it an auto-ejection.
And everything exists all at once now. The chatter about Rempe, who is 21 years old, makes you think of Chris Simon when he was that age in the 1990s, long hair streaming out of his helmet, repping Michipicoten First Nation.4 He was the first Indigenous player I had seen with such flow. It looked cool, and it spoke well for hockey that, for all the digs about its incessant conformity, Simon could bring that part of himself to the party.
Then you think of Simon being disabled and declaring bankruptcy at age 45, then dead at 52. You try to imagine Rempe at those ages, and other players now in middle age who are struggling. You cross-reference Rempe with Derek Boogaard — both hulking, both from the Western Hockey League. The last stop for Boogaard was with the Rangers before he died from opioid over-reliance at age 28. The horrors of his last years are told by his family and John Branch, of course, in Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard (W.W. Norton, 2014).5
Absorbing all that means eliding saying things are better now, so we have to accept those fates for others.
This is just a system of thought. We do not root for mega-leagues; we root for the sportspeople, their most essential personnel. They accept risks to stand up for their teammates. Then the NHL denies the Science, and puts out a press release calling the person “a fierce competitor”? That’s why I maintain active critical distancing from the NHL until the playoffs. They cannot take my second-hand joy of seeing players pass around the Stanley Cup.
People knew about the fisticuffs and the brain damage done well before the early 2000s. Sports Illustrated, particularly Peter King, had begun to write regularly about brain injuries to players in the early 1990s. The collisions between skating hockey players generate more G-forces than the collisions between bulkier football men. One would hope someone in the NHL offices put one and one together back then
Timeline-wise, Dr. Bennet Omalu discovered CTE in the early ’00s. It can only be diagnosed in the brain of a dead person. Major pro sports initially ignored Omalu, after decades of denialism about blows to the head. Simon showed symptoms, according to a doctor who saw him.6
One recent-ish book on that is Rick Westhead’s Finding Murph: How Joe Murphy Went From Winning a Championship to Living Homeless in the Bush. It was covered on SportsLit about 3½ years ago.
In recent years, the NFL and NHL have settled class-action suits, changed rules, and upgraded equipment tech to placate collective guilt about watching in this era. A third-party spotter is on hand to remove a player who shows brain injury symptoms, etc. But looking concerned now hardly nullifies injustices to players middle-aged fans watched 30 years ago.
Something else that should marinate after the death of Simon is how we haven’t untwisted one of hockey’s great clichés. An old say is that the toughest players on the ice were the nicest ones, but it was always treated as an ‘oh, that’s a duality of man deal.’ But it could also mean that people who were sensitive and kind, on some level, were taken advantage of because of their physical size and strength. Big guys are often nice guys; they are always worried about being in someone’s way. So the reason good dudes became enforcers is because they were the most likely to worry about letting down teammates? That is more than messed up if that’s what the sports does with sensitive people.
There is a catalog of critiques of the NHL’s history of violence, some written in the 20th century. I read a shit-ton of books about sports, so I feel compelled to point out a few. SportsLit also has some episodes worth a peruse since they touch on the NHL’s negligence about brain injuries during Simon’s playing days.
Please receive it in all sincerity. Oddly enough, I happen to be halfway in age between Simon and Konstantin Koltsov, a one-time forward with the Pittsburgh Penguins whose death was announced the same day.
I have never minded that pro hockey has a major penalty for fighting, instead of automatic ejection. Registering as a conscientious objector means, to me at least, that you don’t cheer for it to happen, or cheer when it happens. It’s an ugly inevitability.7 Chris Simon, whatever went through his mind in his final years, should have no ragrets, not even a single letter, about doing what he had to do. He put it to journo Igor Klevner just months before the summer when Boogaard (age 28), Rypien (27), and Belak (35) all unalived themselves.
When I see my teammates picked on, I understand that you have to punish those people. And if someone runs into your goalie, a fight is unavoidable. You have to be able to do a lot of things in hockey. When a guy can fight and accepts a tough guy’s challenge, I respect that person. To be a tough guy is a serious and respectable choice. Maybe even as respectable as choosing to become a goalie. When a goalie makes a mistake — it’s a goal. When a fighter makes a mistake — it’s a smashed face and a lot of pain. (Russian Machine Never Breaks, March 24, 2011)8
It’s just, what are the care obligations on the other side? Care can mean aftercare from the league; it can mean fans caring that the NHL and the Players’ Association never give up on a former player being comfortable.
Because while it’s an easy take to say NO FIGHTING, men’s pro hockey needs to exercise that gasket periodically. The most cut-to-the-bone clear statement about fighting is that it cannot be banished until hockey has perfect refereeing. And, of course, the game is way too fast to get that from officials at ice level in real time.
Some limited menace spices up the game. And I might be blue-skying it, but we can hold that idea, and say it is gross that these athletes who played the role die too soon. They pay the price upfront, the NHL makes them whole later with their quality of life. It’s a fair trade.
And broadcasters and consumers of the NHL have to be responsible. I know, it seems like every CEO, almost every politician, and every media company these days acts like Russell Hammond from Stillwater in that bickering-bandmates scene from Almost Famous: “Didn’t we all get into this to avoid responsibility?”
When there’s a fight, beamed out on public airwaves along with the exposure to gambling content, they need to remind people of the harms. Read a 30-second acknowledgment: fights happen, but medical findings show that blows to the head of athletes shorten lives.9
Keep dreaming, I know. We can have some of that complexity. We need it.
Two lions of Canadian long-form
One place to start readin’ is with two Long-form Lions in Canadian sports journalism. Roy MacGregor, you know. Earl McRae (1942-2011) may not be so readily remembered. He has been gone over a dozen years and the last 30 years of his life were mostly as columnist-at-large in Ottawa.
The two men were tight. They worked together in magazine journalism in the 1970s.10 I did not know any of that as a ’90s teenager when teachers slipped me books by both that have become foundational. Both took on hockey violence and unchecked aggression.
As one might anticipate, with McRae it was his collection Requiem for Reggie. Long out of print, and I’m not letting my copy out of my sight. It is a snapshot of a much different time and place, when a journalist or critic was expected to commit acts of journalism to show people as they are — kind of like Dan Dillabough11 did the other day with a certain Very Serious Politician who says he’s going to bring back freedom, then reacts to someone using their freedom of expression by having them frog-marched out the door, now that you mention it.
McRae wrote in the first person. He followed the CFL defensive-line menace Angelo Mosca around on the wrestling circuit to subtly call out the league for not paying better. He broke into the hospital room of Detroit Tigers pitching phenom Mark Fidrych when ‘The Bird’ was laid up with the devastating knee injury that rendered him a one-season wonder.
And, of course, there was the eponymous piece. A magazine take-out on Reg Fleming (1936-2009) that didn’t spell it out, but strongly hinted that the former ‘policeman’ on the Bobby Hull-era Chicago NHL teams had cognitive issues. By the time McRae caught up to Fleming, he was around 40, still bashing away in a league likely closer to the NOSHO than The Show.
“Sometimes,’ [Fleming] says softly and haltingly, “sometimes I wish I could control myself just once. It’s ... it’s the kids. I go home and they see the cuts and bruises and —” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He lifts his hands to his face. For a long time he’s quiet and then, from behind the red swollen hands, a long, shuddering sigh. In the morning, the children will see him. He knows what they will ask. And he knows, as always, he won’t have an answer.”
It stuck with sports fans who read, for sure. It was questioning what Canadians were always told about the on-ice violence. That was part of The Code, no one ever really got seriously injured in them, and it works.
Just a few years later, MacGregor wrote his novel The Last Season. It is almost a Canadian equivalent to Darren Aronofsky’s film The Wrestler. As MacGregor said when he came on SportsLit in 2020, so many former players thought it was about them.
In that chat with Neil Acharya and me, MacGregor said his manuscript was first set in the political world. He found out hockey worked better. Something of a tragicomic elegy, it is, leaning on the book jacket, about:
“Felix Batterinski (who) grew up tough in Northern Ontario where hockey was the only way out of a life of grinding poverty. He got out and enjoyed fame as a hockey ‘enforcer’ for the Philadelphia Flyers. But fame is fleeting.”
While MacGregor jibed that it “only had a cultish shelf life,” count me in that cult. I come back to The Last Season every few years. Every so often I put a copy in someone’s hands, don’t get it back — which is fine, books are meant to be shared, like the credit on a game-winning goal — and look for a new one, like the crab looking for a new shell.
It was tickling that MacGregor confirmed a crucial secondary character in the novel, a sportswriter named Matt Keening, was based on Earl McRae. One framing device is excerpts of Keening’s journalistic account of what happened to the character. It reminds us that it’s a choice to identify with the fighter and move on from him.
“For that matter, can there be any more guilt than that which falls on the fan? Who was it but the average fan who made of Batterinski a false god? And turned from their worship when the god was cast down? Where were the cheers on Felix Batterinski’s last lonely night on earth? (The Last Season, p. 300)
I cannot know how the bad chemicals in the brain of Simon possibly interacted to lead to his death.
Where one can do a little more free-associating is to remember another big book on hockey that was published during his prime NHL years. In 1998, when Chris Simon was a winger who helped the Washington Capitals reach the Cup final, Jeffrey Z. Klein and Karl-Eric Reif published The Death of Hockey: Or How a Bunch of Guys with Too Much Money and Too Little Sense Are Killing the Greatest Game on Earth (MacMillan Canada, 1998).
It was called, by Quill and Quire, “one of the best ‘state-of-the-union’ books on sports to come around in a long time.” It was a laff-riot. I have never been able to unsee their likening of Bettman to Nathan Thurm, the chain-smoking corporate lawyer character Martin Short created on SCTV and brought to Saturday Night Live. Some of it was of its time and has probably aged badly; after all, putting a team in Phoenix helped create Auston Matthews, who was born one year after the Coyotes came to town.
Klein and Reif wrote for the Village Voice, so they weren’t exactly mainstream. One passage that sticks pertains to fighting. One man, or both, had an editorial role somewhere where he could bring in outside writers. He regularly gave space to a superfan who wrote about recent fights and potential upcoming bouts between NHL heavyweights in a column called “Mike Beaver’s Mixin’ It Up.”
Of course, they caught flak for that from the NHL folks. Why do you publish that? Well, it happens during the games that the NHL stages and people get off on it, so it is worth the examination. It was also doing fan service to a niche group of fans who might not find it in the hockey coverage in New York tabloids and broadsheets.12
Either way, it was a tell. The NHL did not mind excessive or stagey fighting, or illegal checks to the head. It was just message control; if no one writes about fighting, we can get new sponsors and fans to sign on before they notice it. And by then, they might have bought into it since live hockey can be intoxicating.
The sensitivity suggests there was knowledge about the harm caused by fighting.
Over a quarter-century later, the causations between the frequency and force of blows to the head in hockey and early death are established. But as Bettman or Nathan Thurm would say, “Are they? I don’t know that they are.”
That should not stand. A fan has a right to pull back and say, not another fighter; the league doesn’t get to skate from decades of negligence to placating in the present.
Besides the Rick Westhead and Roy MacGregor appearances in 2020, some SportsLit episodes connect with the life of Chris Simon. Here they are, sorted from the most recent.
Ted Nolan, My Life in Two Worlds: A Coach’s Journey from the Reserve to the NHL and Back (2023)
Nolan and Simon bonded as coach and player with back-to-back championship teams with the Soo Greyhounds in the OHL. Thinking good thoughts for Nolan.
Justin Davis, Conflicted Scars: An Average Player’s Journey to the NHL Draft (2023)
A good book about the “moral audit” Canadian hockey is facing. Davis played for two of the same OHL teams as Simon, though not in the same timespan, and went to a NHL camp with the Washington Capitals while Simon was on that team.
Corey Hirsch, The Save of My Life: My Journey out of the Dark (2022)
Athlete memoirs such as the one Hirsch published in 2022 somewhat soften and lighten what is harsh and disturbing. The former goalie has had a long fight with his condition of pure-O OCD, and Simon was one of his teammates.
Hirsch, at various stages, has always emphasized that hockey saved him, rather than confirming any biases that it exacerbated his struggles. That’s a key distinction and reminder that the industry can keep that up with former players.
Brantt Myhres, Pain Killer: A Memoir of Big League Addiction (2021)
Myhres’s NHL and American League days coincided with the playing days of Simon. His book talks about fighting substance use disorder, and the anxieties unique to enforcers, especially on the eve of a game when they knew they were going to have to fight.
It is acknowledged that this is a lot. Building a sensitivity in one’s rooting is essential. Enough of us do it, and a change will come.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
March 19-21, 2024
Hamilton, Ont.
“Canada’s Chris Simon, former NHL enforcer, dead at 52,” The Canadian Press, March 19.
Mikaël Lalancette, “Le décès de Chris Simon ébranle la communauté hockey,” Le Soleil, March 19, 2024.
“Canada’s Chris Simon, former NHL enforcer, dead at 52,” The Canadian Press, March 19.
Some reports tied Simon to Wikwemikoong, listed on his Wikipedia page. His dad was from there, but Simon was a member of Michipicoten, whose band office is in Wawa, Ont., where the player grew up and lived.
Branch is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, and Boy On Ice earned the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing (2015). Boogaard also has family who are in policing, and it seemed like they earned a huge assist with sourcing and deciphering Derek’s medical history.
Andrew Seymour, “Ex-NHL enforcer Chris Simon files for bankruptcy, court documents say he's broke,” Ottawa Citizen, May 30, 2017.
See Tom Hawthorn, “Stop cheering hockey violence, before player's brains turn to mush,” Dec. 7, 2011.
Igor Klevner, “Chris Simon: Being a Tough Guy is Serious & Respectable Choice,” Russian Machine Never Breaks,” March 24, 2011.
Charles A. Popkin, MD; Cole R. Morrissette, MD; Thomas. A Fortney, MD, et al., “Fighting and Penalty Minutes Associated With Long-term Mortality Among National Hockey League Players, 1967 to 2022,” jamanetwork.com, May 10, 2023.
MacGregor was also one of McRae’s eulogists at his public funeral in 2011.
Correspondent for the CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
Klein and Reif once quipped that hockey was the fifth-most popular sport in New York City, “after baseball, basketball, football, and municipal corruption.”