A story that ended too soon
Simon’s complicated life and sad final chapter all too familiar in hockey
On the surface, Chris Simon was a classic Canadian story.
He was born to an Ojibwa father and an Anglo-Saxon mother in the tiny town of Wawa, Ont. He moved to the bigger town of Sault Ste. Marie as a teen, seeking better opportunities in hockey. He wound up playing 782 NHL games with eight franchises, was on a Stanley Cupwinning team in Colorado, and his teammates adored him. A lot of people would sign up for that ride.
The actual story was so much more complicated, of course, darker and sadder and harder. Chris Simon died in Wawa on Monday night; a cause of death was not provided. He had four children, and two ex-wives. He was only 52.
People used to say there were at least two Chris Simons. There was the giant who loved hunting and fishing and was a gentle, caring teammate. Then there was the sixfoot-four, 235-pound hulk on the ice, the one who didn’t just fight but sometimes snapped.
“Even though he did his job the way he did, I don’t think he had an enemy on the ice,” said former goaltender Corey Hirsch, who only played one game with Simon but played against him in the Memorial Cup and throughout their NHL careers. “I just don’t recall anyone going, ‘I hate that guy.’ ”
Some had good reason. In one season, with the Ottawa 67s in the OHL, Simon was suspended eight times. In Sault Ste. Marie, he was suspended for eight and 12 games for stick incidents. In the NHL, Simon called Mike Grier a racial slur on the ice in 1997; Simon apologized to Grier in person, and Grier accepted it.
Ten years later Simon became the only man ever to garner more than one 25-game suspension: one when he slashed Ryan Hollweg in the face after being hit into the boards, and one for stomping on Jarkko Ruutu’s leg. Those two incidents only came nine months apart and were the seventh and eighth suspensions of his NHL career.
He had been, to that point, an inspirational story. Simon talked about how, after he was drafted into the OHL at 16, he started drinking in the big city of Ottawa, in an environment populated by his 19- and 20-year-old teammates. The drinking became a problem, and one year, Simon served a 20-game suspension from his own team.
Ottawa coach Brian Kilrea traded Simon to be closer to Ted Nolan, who grew up on a reserve outside Sault Ste. Marie and is Ojibwa. He was coaching the Sault Greyhounds after his NHL career ended, and he got Simon sober and straightened him out. They talked a lot about Simon’s First Nations identity, and reconnecting to it. It worked.
“I know that if it wasn’t for me stopping drinking I would not be here today playing in the NHL,” Simon told the Washington Post in 2000, during his best NHL season. “I don’t know that I’d be alive. I’m a better person for it and a stronger person. Not drinking doesn’t bother me anymore. In the beginning it was tough, but now it’s my life and I’m happy being sober. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
He quit drinking at age 19, on New Year’s Day. He was a role model.
Simon would play those 782 games for Quebec, Colorado, Washington, Chicago, the New York Rangers, Calgary, the New York Islanders and Minnesota. He totalled 144 goals, 161 assists, 1,824 penalty minutes, and 115 regular- and postseason fights, some of which were terrifying. He played five more years in Russia after his NHL career, piling up penalty minutes in a foreign land. His final season came in 2012-13.
And then he came back, and things went wrong.
Simon always loved going home to Wawa, people said; he could hunt and fish and connect with the land and his family. But by 2017 Simon had filed for bankruptcy in an Ottawa courtroom, and it was grim reading: Despite more than $15 million in NHL earnings, plus whatever he earned in the KHL, he was more than half a million in debt.
He had missed child support payments for three years; he claimed he hadn’t been able to work since a knee injury ended his playing career, and that he had early symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. He said he suffered from depression and anxiety, that he had PTSD, and that he had arthritis in his hands, back, shoulder, knees and neck.
It was a mess. That was seven years ago.
“This one hits hard to home because, you know, I this is the work that I do,” said Hirsch, who is a leader on mental health in hockey. “It’s just like, how many other guys are out there that are on the edge like this, white-knuckling it, you know?”
Also on Tuesday, it came out NHL defenceman Konstantin Koltsov jumped off a hotel balcony in Miami, which local police ruled a suicide. Koltsov played parts of three seasons with Pittsburgh, was a hockey coach and the boyfriend of the world’s No. 2 women’s tennis player, Aryna Sabalenka. He was just 42.
Simon, though, fits a larger pattern of enforcers who died early, and we can almost list them by memory: Wade Belak, Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, Bob Probert, Steve Montador, Todd Ewen, John Kordic, on and on. A 2023 study of 6,039 NHL players from 1967 to 2022 found that enforcers died 10 years younger than their counterparts, and more often of “neurodegenerative disorders, drug overdose, suicide, and motor vehicle crashes.”
We know that fighting is bad for you. We just ignore it, sometimes.
And now, Simon is dead at 52. He was a small town kid whose grandfathers both played hockey; he was a First Nations story, a junior hockey story, a substance abuse triumph story, an NHL archetype, and finally, an ex-NHLer whose money was gone and whose body was broken, and maybe nobody could help anymore.
Chris Simon was a Canadian story, all right. And it all ended too soon.