FROM THE BRINK AND BACK
FORMER FEROCIOUS NHL ENF ORCER SHARES HOW HE IS HEALING FROM A DAMAGING, DEMANDING CAREER
It’s the third period of a March 2015 game between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Philadelphia Flyers. Daniel Carcillo, a forward with Chicago, wants to feel something other than sadness. He doesn’t want to be out on the ice performing in front of 20,000 people. Not on this day and maybe not ever again.
A month earlier, Steve Montador, one of his best friends and a fellow NHL player, was found dead in his Mississauga, Ont. home. He was 35 years old. An autopsy would later confirm Montador had chronic traumatic encephalopathy ( CTE), a neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated head injuries.
In the months leading up to his death, Carcillo had noticed his friend’s cognitive functioning decline. He saw him slipping away, but he says he didn’t know how to help. The news of his death hit hard; Carcillo left the team and went home for a few weeks. In March, with a playoff berth already secured, Chicago called him back in to play. It was a meaningless late- season game. Carcillo didn’t need to be there, but he showed up anyway.
“I was totally out of shape and I was just in so much pain that I said, ‘ You know what? You don’t care about me. Well, f ** k it, I’m not going to care about myself either,’” he says on the phone from Chicago.
So, out on the ice, he goes hunting for a fight. He finds a taker in Pierre- Édouard Bellemare, a left-winger with the Flyers.
Carcillo shoves him, then shoves him again, and then both players drop their gloves. Carcillo is the first to swing. His helmet flies off his head as he starts wildly throwing punches. There is no plan here, nothing is calculated, Carcillo is just trying to hit anything he can. He smashes his bare first into Bellemare’s helmet, again and again. After weeks away from the game he tires quickly. Now it’s Bellemare’s turn.
He lands a punch against the side of Carcillo’s head. Then another one, and another one, and another one. Carcillo hangs onto Bellemare’s jersey and stays on his feet. Eventually the refs intervene. They pat Carcillo on the back, as if to say job well done. He skates to the penalty box with his head down, his shoulder- length hair falling over his face.
It will be his last NHL game. Before he steps into the box, he gives a royal wave to the crowd.
In the aftermath, Carcillo discovers that the fight resulted in a concussion. The consequences will be severe. Extreme light sensitivity, an inability to sleep, irritability, anxiety, depression — he spends most of his time in a dark room in his basement. He sleeps until late in the afternoon and loses motivation and the ability to communicate with his wife. Eventually, he will make a plan to end his life.
Chicago, meanwhi l e, heads to the playoffs where they win the Stanley Cup. Carcillo, who had played 39 games that season before leaving, has his name engraved on the cup alongside his teammates. Chicago invites him to the banner-raising ceremony, but he declines. “My wife was pleading with me to go,” he says. “I think now she realizes why I didn’t want to go. I needed to be done with that world. I needed to start healing.”
With the guidance of another retired NHL enforcer, CBD and psilocybin would become part of that journey.
Growing up in King City, Ont., life revolved around the rink. “We started playing as soon as we could walk,” Carcillo says. The signs of his deft skills — and his overwhelming ferocity — were evident early on.
He started as a goalie, but he kept leaving the net to hit people. His coach moved him to forward where he started to shine. He was fast, aggressive and reckless. He earned the nickname “Car Bomb” for his explosive style of play: He could go off at any moment.
“I had to instill fear in other people to not touch our top guys,” he says. And he had to answer for it. “I knew exactly what the code meant and that’s what I did. I caused a lot of punches and I gave a lot of punches.”
It caught up to him. Over the course of his career, he was diagnosed with concussions seven times. He had multiple surgeries for five knee tears and two horizontal ankle tears. He has arthritis in his ankles, knees, neck and back. He was suspended nine times and served more than 1,200 penalty minutes.
Not that he remembers it all, not his first five concussions, and not every game of his first Stanley Cup run in 2013, where he played a key role with Chicago. But he remembers how it felt hoisting the Cup overhead, after reaching the peak of his sport. Not joy; not glory. “I was dead inside when I raised that Cup,” he says.
Carcillo retired at 30 and his friendships dissolved as he sunk deeper into a depression. His symptoms persisted. Medical tests revealed he had the testosterone of a 70- year- old man. His cortisol levels were three times higher than the average person. He began to lose hope.
Finally, after weeks of messages from Riley Cote, an old teammate and friend, Carcillo agreed to make a trip to Boulder, Colo. Like Carcillo, Cote was an enforcer and, like Carcillo, he had to find his way after a life in hockey.
Cote had some advice to offer. Carcillo decided it was time to listen.
“That trip changed my life,” he says.
Cote, who retired in 2010 after eight seasons in the NHL, fought more than 250 times in professional hockey. His career, he says, mostly involved “getting punched in the face and going to the bar and drinking beers after.”
But in his last year of hockey, he started making some changes. He shifted to a plant-based diet. He leaned out, dropping the weight he had packed on to be a heavyweight fighter.
“It was an accumulation of the game and my role pushing me into a corner,” he says on the phone from Pennsylvania, where he lives. “The previous year, I didn’t do great in my fights mainly because my mind wasn’t in it. I realized how hard it was on my emotions and spirit to jack myself up to fight guys like Georges Laraque, Brian Mcgrattan, Colton Orr, on a daily basis. I was just spiritually tired. Emotionally tired.”
The day Cote retired, he stopped drinking. He cut down on processed foods and sugar. He started practising yoga and meditation and “rewiring his brain.” He began using cannabis for pain management and as an anti- inflammatory tool, and he turned to psilocybin for its promising neuroregenerative and neuroprotective properties, he says. He also created the Hemp Heals Foundation, a non-profit that supports sustainable agriculture and natural medicine, in addition to co-founding a hemp-derived CBD company, BodychekWellness.
“I just started to heal, to spend time on myself and fix the damage that I caused,” he says. “I fought a ton, man. I went from being an absolute f **king disaster and really a very mindless human being to a very mindful one.”
Cote shared his story with Carcillo, and led him through a therapeutic psilocybin experience, which, Carcillo says allowed him to get out of a loop he had been stuck in.
“Thank God he got that plane ticket and actually showed up,” Cote says. “I’ve seen a radical change in Daniel. It’s amazing to see. I don’t want to take credit for any of it, it was just me lending him a hand and showing him some tools. He did the work.”
I HAD TO INSTILL FEAR IN OTHER PEOPLE TO NOT TOUCH OUR TOP GUYS. AND HE HAD TO ANSWER FOR IT. I KNEW EXACTLY WHAT THE CODE MEANT AND THAT’S WHAT I DID. I CAUSED A LOT OF PUNCHES AND I GAVE A LOT OF PUNCHES. — DANIEL CARCILLO
The players, who formed a bond when they were teammates for two seasons with the Flyers, weren’t strangers to cannabis or psilocybin ( Carcillo estimates that at least 75 per cent of NHL players use cannabis).
But, in those days, they were not using drugs with any intention or purpose other than to escape. This was different.
“The No. 1 cause of death after traumatic brain injuries for men is suicide,” says Carcillo. “You have to speak honestly about this stuff and you have to give these guys as many options as possible. When there are no more options that’s when the suicidal ideation creeps in.”
They began exchanging research studies, and talking more about plant- based medicines and natural approaches to heal their wounds and their minds.
“Riley is the one who really stayed on me and helped me,” Carcillo says. “He helped save my life.”
Now Carcillo is trying to return the favour by shining a light on some of the darker corners of hockey to right his own past and to make sure future hockey players are aware of the consequences of a game played full-tilt and without limits.
He also runs the Chapter 5 Foundation (his late friend,
Montador, wore that number), which helps players navigate retirement. Now, instead of spending his days at the rink, he’s more often on the farm where he grew 750 hemp plants this past summer to harvest CBD.
He’s also a member of the Chicago chapter of Decriminalize Nature, a national network advocating for decriminalizing and expanding access to entheogenic plants and fungi, like psilocybin, iboga, cacti and ayahuasca.
In December, he helped bring a resolution forward to Chicago’s Committee on Health and Human Relations to support the adult use of entheogenic plants. The resolution passed 50- 0.
Carcillo says he wants to help other people impacted by trauma, such as firefighters, first responders and veterans, not just athletes.
“These are people that are in extremely high- level trauma communities,” he says. “Not only head trauma but emotional trauma. I feel for them because I struggled so bad in transition, and I can’t imagine being a paramedic and coming home from a really rough call. You don’t want to put that on your family, right? So if you have to internalize all that, you’re going to blow up eventually.”
Carcillo knows first- hand how dark things can get. He also knows how lucky he is.
“I want people to be able to heal themselves,” he says. “I want them to look at every option, look at everything, so you don’t lose hope.”
In his own life, Carcillo is dedicated to a regiment of microdosing CBD and psilocybin and embracing positivity.
He says a funny thing happened on the farm a few months ago: He noticed he was proud of himself.
“I was looking at the plants and I had t his thought. It was, ‘ Look at what you did, man. You did a good job.’ And I was like, ‘ Who the hell was that? Who is talking?’ Because as an athlete you are always criticizing yourself. You are always putting yourself down. It’s just this negative self-talk and that change was huge, that was huge in my recovery.”
He says he feels reinvigorated, like he has found a new purpose. “I have to continue down this road. I’ve seen two really, really close friends of mine die. I don’t want to see that happen anymore.”
Asked which friends he’s referring to, Carcillo names Montador and Ray Emery, whose body was pulled from Lake Ontario in July 2018, and then he keeps going, listing many of the hockey players who have died far too young and have later been found to have CTE.
“Derek Boogard. Rick Rypien. Todd Ewen. Bob Probert. The list goes on and on, man.”
He pauses. The line falls silent for a moment.
“It’s scary,” he says. “It’s really scary.”
For most of his life, Carcillo says he had been operating from a place of anger. He was always fighting, everything and every one. He no longer feels that way.
“I honestly feel like I’ve been reborn and it gives me chills every day,” he says.
“There are days I wake up and I think about where I am today, and I’m just sitting there crying, just good tears, because of the path that I’m on. It just feels so right. And it’s so far away from what my previous life was. I’ve been searching for that. I’ve really been searching for who I am as a person because I’m not a hockey player named Daniel. I’m Daniel who played hockey.”
Carcillo says he doesn’t want to force anything on anyone, that every case is different, but he wants to share what he has learned, about unconventional healing and the potential of plant medicine.
He wants to see his friends and colleagues, the people he used to earn a paycheque to hurt, be able to move onto the next phase of their lives with as little pain as possible. He wants happiness, not anger.
The reminders of his past are still present. There are still bad days, but he feels better equipped to handle them now. His work will continue, even in death — he plans to donate his brain to CTE research — but he is grateful to be on a different path.
He laughs when he’s asked about his old nickname, Car Bomb. It’s still in his Twitter handle, still a part of his story, even if that side of him no longer exists.
“That guy’s dead now,” he says. “He’s died a couple of deaths.”
Now, that name means something else.
“That’s there as a reminder of the person that I never want to be again.”
THERE ARE DAYS I WAKE UP AND I THINK ABOUT WHERE I AM TODAY AND I’M JUST SITTI NG THERE CRYING, JUST GOOD TEARS, BECAUSE OF THE PAT H THAT I’M ON. IT JUST FEELS SO RIGHT. AND IT ’ S SO FAR AWAY FROM WHAT MY PREVIOUS LIFE WAS. — DANIEL CARCILLO