MEMORIES OF EWEN
More than just a tough guy
The next time you’re watching a hockey game at the Bell Centre or on TV and you start cheering when two players drop the gloves, you might want to remember Todd Ewen.
You might also want to remember Bob Probert (age 45), Wade Belak (35), Steve Montador (35), Derek Boogaard (28) and Rick Rypien (27) — all former National Hockey League tough guys whose lives tragically came to an end way too soon within the last five years.
Ewen, who was part of the last Canadiens Stanley Cup championship team in 1993, died Saturday at age 49 in St. Louis, where he was living with his family.
“It’s an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound,” St. Louis County police spokesman Sgt. Brian Schellman told the Montreal Gazette on Monday. “It is being classified and investigated — there’s no foul play — as a suicide by our department.”
There have been reports Ewen was battling depression for years.
In 518 career regular-season games in the NHL, the 6-foot-3, 230-pound Ewen had 36 goals, 40 assists and 1,911 penalty minutes, including 146 fighting majors. The big kid from Saskatoon didn’t make it to the NHL because of his stickhandling skills after being selected by the Edmonton Oilers in the eighth round (168th overall) of the 1984 entry draft.
“I’m not being disrespectful … Todd Ewen was an average hockey player who knew if he wanted to stay in the NHL (fighting is) the only thing that could keep him there,” Jacques Demers, who coached the Canadiens to the Stanley Cup in 1993, said Monday.
“These guys, they had a thankless job and if they wanted to stay in the NHL they had to fight,” Demers added. “I never, ever remember sending one of my players out and say: ‘Go fight.’ But I also sent them out when I knew there was trouble and they knew their job.”
It’s hockey’s “code” ... and it really has become outdated — whether fans like it or not.
The debate about whether fighting should be taken out of the game heats up every time another former enforcer turns up dead — or a George Parros gets knocked out cold on the ice — but the number of fans who want it out of the game seems to be growing. In an unscientific poll last week on the Montreal Gazette’s hockeyinsideout.com website, 45 per cent voted that they would like to see fighting eliminated from the NHL. But more than half still want it in.
When the Canadiens held a rookie tournament last weekend in London, Ont., the young Habs had seven fights in three games as they tried to prove their toughness and willingness to stand up for their teammates. Prospect Michael McCarron, who is 6-foot6 and 231 pounds, proclaimed that the Canadiens are a team that will not back down.
“It has to (end),” Demers said about fighting in the NHL. “It has to. They got to put an end to it. There’s more to hockey.
“We’re all a little bit hypocrites in this,” the former coach added. “When Probert would fight a Todd Ewen, when Probert would fight whoever he had to fight, everybody would stand up. They’re going to tell me they didn’t like fights? But those guys paid a price for it.”
Demers coached Probert — considered by many to be the king of NHL tough guys — with the Detroit Red Wings. The 6-foot-3, 225-pounder battled drugs and alcohol during his career and died in 2010 from heart failure. Probert’s brain tissue was donated to researchers at Boston University, who discovered he had the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Probert and Ewen had two epic on-ice battles on Jan. 24, 1987, when Ewen, who was with the Blues at the time, knocked down the giant Red Wing with one punch — a solid right to the jaw — in the first fight. When the two players got out of the penalty box they dropped the gloves again and got into a second 40-second slugfest that ended with both players falling to the ice.
“That was memorable because it was like two men blessed with tremendous heart and character,” Demers said. “It wasn’t putting on a show for the fans … but wanting to prove who would stand up to be there for their teammates and I can never forget those two fights. They were unbelievable battles between two big-time heavyweights.”
Off the ice — as is so often the case with NHL tough guys — Ewen was a totally different man.
“He was a really genuine guy … an artist,” Guy Carbonneau, the last Canadiens captain to hoist the Stanley Cup, said Monday about his former teammate. “Whenever we were on the bus or on the plane after games he was always drawing things … making things with rolls of tape. He liked to create stuff with his hands.”
The Canadiens traded Ewen to the Anaheim Ducks after the 1993 Stanley Cup season and he started working on a children’s book titled A Frog Named Hop — as both author and illustrator — dedicated to his two boys, Tyler and Chad. Ewen also liked to sculpt and played four musical instruments.
“I never liked the label ‘goon,’ ” Ewen — whose on-ice nickname was “the Animal” — told Steve Bisheff of the Orange County Register in 1993 when he was working on his children’s book.
“It conjured up this image of a neanderthal with a 17-inch forehead who can’t skate three feet without falling down.
“I have to explain to children that there are two parts of me. I am different things in different situations. I think that’s what people tend to forget. There are businessmen who have this cutthroat personality at work and then when they come home, they’re completely different. That’s the way it is with me. When you come watch me at a hockey game, I’m working. I get paid to do this.”
This is how Bisheff started his article about Ewen:
“He would seem, by all accounts, to be the perfect Disney hockey player. The guy who moulds children’s minds by day and pounds opponents’ faces by night. He is the goon who would rather be drawing a cartoon.” Bisheff’s article ended this way: “Fighting and writing is what seems to keep Ewen going these days. That and this dream he has. The dream that someday A Thug Named Todd might eventually become more famous for A Frog Named Hop.”
Sadly, Ewen will now be more famous for the way he died.