DRYDEN SAYS IT’S TIME FOR GAME TO CHANGE
In new book, hockey hall of famer explores Montador’s life and link to brain injuries
Ken Dryden was driving when he heard the news on the radio: Steve Montador had died.
He didn’t know Montador. Like a lot of us, he knew the name and wasn’t all that familiar with his NHL career. He felt the kind of sadness you feel when an associate you aren’t close with dies.
Dryden had already decided to write a book about concussions and head shots. For about five years, he’d written articles on the problem in hockey. He thought to himself: “This isn’t working ... I’m not in power, I’m not the authority. Someone else is the decision maker here. What is it that I can do?” Dryden said in an interview.
He didn’t just want to write about concussions.
“The central core of it has to be a person,” he said. “It’s the story of a life.”
His superb new book, Game Change, is about the brain and head shots and concussions — but even more than that, the thread that carries you through this wellcrafted story is the life of Steve Montador, a hockey player we came to know too late, an engaging young man of 571 NHL games who was destroyed too young by injury and circumstance.
Upon hearing of Montador’s death, Dryden called his friend and anti-head shot advocate, Dr. Charles Tator, and told him the news. Tator already knew. Dryden inquired if it was possible to get access to Montador’s brain. Not knowing Montador’s father, Paul, had a long-term relationship with Tator, the doctor told Dryden, “it’s all taken care of.”
This is where and how Game Change began.
“If I’m going to do this, it has to be centred on a person’s life,” Dryden repeated. “If it’s centred on a life, I’m going to need the willingness and participation of family members and friends, enthusiastic participation. They had to feel like this is something they would do, having their voices told through me.”
He didn’t just need co-operation from the family — he needed the family to enable his doctors to co-operate with Dryden.
“If the doctors don’t fully engage in this, I’m never going to get at the story.”
The story of one man’s battles with multiple concussions. The story of a hockey player and troubled man in so many different ways who came to life in Dryden’s words two years after he died.
For all his flaws, you couldn’t help but like Steve Montador. It seemed everybody did. You couldn’t help but want to cheer for him. You couldn’t help being drawn in to his engaging yet complicated life.
All the while knowing he was already gone.
And yet somehow, in this troubling tale, Dryden brought Montador to light and to life.
“They really liked him,” Dryden said of just about everybody who knew Montador. “He was this kind of guy who when 10 people were in a room and there are all kinds of things in common, within five minutes they were talking about him. He was that guy. It was Monty this, Monty that, have you seen Monty lately?
“And it bugged the heck out of them (his friends) that he wasn’t alive. It was like, you can’t forget this guy. And they couldn’t let go of him. Even now.”
The mystery of Montador’s life is how he died. The book does not answer that question, can’t really answer it.
Montador suffered numerous concussions in his career. But between that and the end, he battled with depression, anxiety, memory loss, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, uncharacteristic behaviour: It is the proverbial chicken-egg without a simple answer.
Did concussions — and the posthumous diagnosis of CTE, the degenerative brain disease — bring on all the other problems? Or was it the combination of the brain injuries in conjunction with all the human failings that led to Montador’s demise? Addiction can lead to depression, anxiety, memory loss. So can brain injury.
These questions have been asked before about hockey players, especially in the summer of 2011 when tough guys Rick Rypien, Wade Belak and Derek Boogaard were all found dead. The NHL was supposed to investigate those deaths. They say they did: If there was a report, it was never produced for public consumption.
“What killed Steve?” Dryden asked. “I don’t know. What generated those symptoms; depression, memory loss, difficulty of making decisions, anxiety, all of those things, are very, very likely from head injuries.
“Those kind of things can happen to others. But they don’t happen to a lot of others who are 32 years old. (Montador died at 35). That becomes the central question. Death or not can seem like it’s the issue. CTE or not can seem like it’s the issue. But let’s just say for a second that it’s neither of those things. Let’s just talk about the depression, the anxiety, the memory loss and all the rest of it. That’s lousy stuff. That’s a lousy life. Where does it come from?
“There tends to be a CTE or not CTE debate. That’s not the point of it. This is about other things. That’s the real central question. Steve was seven years sober, as they talk about it. And he was feeling those symptoms before losing it again. Things get confused. Is it death? Is it CTE? Is it something else? Is it a problem of transition after his career is over? Is this a problem of drugs and alcohol?
“It all starts with the brain.” That’s the connection throughout Dryden’s book. The doctors explain the brain with CTE in disturbing detail. The hockey players and coaches and friends explain who Steve Montador was. The level of detail in the book is explicit and rich and riveting and poignant and introspective and so terribly sad.
This is our game, the game we love, the game we grew up on. And people are damaged or dying.
This could have been our son, making it big, living the dream, then losing his life.
Ken Dryden lived the dream as an NHL player, winning six Stanley Cups in eight seasons with the Montreal Canadiens. More than 30 years ago he wrote The Game, the hockey book of all hockey books, and now Game Change can have a different kind of profound impact if Dryden’s treatise is taken at all seriously.
He wants head shots removed from hockey. All head shots. Head shots that come from elbows, from sticks, from shoulders, from fists. Zero tolerance. And one more thing: No more finishing checks.
Dryden, like NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, is a Cornell graduate. The two didn’t know each other in school but have become quiet fans of each other. Dryden gave Bettman a copy of Game Change recently. He has yet to hear back from the commissioner. He’s not sure he will.
“In hockey, there are answers,” Dryden said. “And I think Gary Bettman is the right guy to do this. Not only is he smart and capable, but he also has the authority. You don’t get authority from having a title. You earn that.”
In Game Change, Dryden writes that Bettman must “take off his lawyer’s hat and do far more than that because he has more than that in him.”
“This isn’t about CTE,” Dryden said. “It’s about diminished careers and diminished lives.”
“He (Bettman) doesn’t need to be a tobacco baron or a climate change denier fighting against the night,” Dryden wrote.
“When you can do something and you don’t,” Dryden said. “That’s what is inexcusable.”
And he’s tired of the so-called traditionalists holding on to ideals he believes are inconsistent with history.
“This isn’t about building up awareness of the problem,” he said. “There’s enough awareness. It’s about doing something about it. If I’m in a decision-making position and I see a problem and I see an answer, that’s really encouraging.
“Sure, there will be voices that say you can’t do it and the game’s not played that way. Well guess what, all of you who say you are purists and traditionalists, do you really know what the transitions of the game are? Do you really know what it was like at McGill in 1875? Do you really know the developments? Do you really know how we got to this game? Do you really know for the first 50 years there wasn’t a forward pass? Do you really know the implications of all of that? Do you really know how these things changed later on? Do you really know how you have a game that is very different now and the difference has to do with speed?
“You say you can’t change the game — guess what, the game is always changing.”