Leveille’s story a reminder of athlete’s fragility
Early in the first period, minutes before his career ended and his life forever changed, Normand Leveille took a walloping check along the sidewall at Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver
The hit by Canucks winger Marc Crawford rattled Leveille’s head against the boards, alarming enough to make one reporter wince and stand up from his seat in the press box. But it was not enough to deter the 19-year-old dynamo, a dazzling talent playing in his
75th NHL game, from rolling out for his next shifts and finishing the period.
All seemed OK as players on both clubs made their way to their respective dressing rooms for the first intermission.
The night was Oct. 23, 1982, now 40 years gone by, and all was not OK.
Disoriented and complaining of dizziness, Leveille collapsed in the dressing room between periods, and within minutes was rushed via ambulance to Vancouver General Hospital for emergency brain surgery. A congenital malformation inside his head was bleeding out — unrelated to the hit, doctors later said — and it took neurosurgeons some six hours to stem the bleeding, keeping him from dying.
No one that night, or the next morning, knew if the Bruins’ flashy secondyear left winger would survive. What was clear in the moment, based on how doctors framed the severity of the bleeding and resultant brain damage, was that Leveille’s life as a hockey player had come to an end.
“Oh, let me tell you, he was going to be great,” then-assistant coach Jean Ratelle said while Leveille was in a coma.
“He was going to be better than
Yvan Cournoyer,” Terry O’Reilly said the next morning as Leveille’s teammates, most of them up all night commiserating in the hotel lobby, left town to face the Kings that night in Los Angeles. “He was going to be better than
Rod Gilbert. Just look at the way he was playing.”
Doctors and teammates were right, Leveille never played again. The good news, as most Bruins fans of that era know, is that he recovered a fair amount of his motor and speech skills and now, at 59, operates a camp and charitable foundation outside Montreal with Denise, his wife of 15 years. The couple also gets away each year to Thailand, far from the nasty bite of Quebec winters.
What happened to Leveille was unpredictable and could happen today, because few players, if any, are aware if they have such congenital malformations (known as AVMs, or arteriovenous malformations). AVMs are extremely rare and, therefore, not subject to screening in a physical. They typically only make themselves evident, and detectable via testing, upon bleeding out.
Leveille’s misfortune forever will remain a prime example of the fragility of an athlete’s health, that very thin line between playing a game for a living one moment and fighting for one’s career, or life, the next.
Hockey, and most every sport, delivers these moments time and again, and many of us have become somewhat inured to the reminders, even when as vivid and frequent as those scenes in NFL games with players on their knees, praying as a fellow player, with brain or spinal injury, gets placed in a stabilizing neck brace and stretchered off the field before a silent crowd.
Thankfully, the vast majority of athletes turn out OK, soon get back to work in most cases, and the scare is forgotten. But not always, as fans around here know.
A little more than four years prior to Leveille’s career ending, Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley was rendered a quadriplegic on a devastating smack by notorious Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum. In October ’95, Boston University freshman Travis Roy, taking skating his first shift as a Terrier, careened headfirst into the rear boards and cracked his fourth and fifth vertebrae. He, too, lived the remainder of his days as a quadriplegic.
Pro athletes live in a world where the money is big, the potential awards high, their lives often full of fame and glamor. They also live with implied risk that can be beyond imagination.
That morning in Vancouver, with Leveille’s life still in the balance, had 30-year-old Mike Milbury disconsolately sipping coffee as he and teammates gathered in the Westin Bayshore lobby to load the team bus for the airport.
Puck drop at the LA Forum was about 12 hours away.
“Doesn’t this seem ridiculous?” Milbury asked me, the lone reporter on the trip who opted to stay in Vancouver. “Here we are, going to play a game in LA, and Normie’s in the hospital. What does any of this mean?”
The next few days offered this reporter a rare, at times excruciating, firsthand glimpse of the raw emotional entanglements around these catastrophic injuries. It included the privilege of meeting Leveille’s parents, Jacques and Therese, when they arrived the next day, and sitting next to them in a small hospital office for their first consult with one of the neurosurgeons who fought to keep their son alive.
Jacques, a truck driver in Montreal, and Therese, a nurse, were told that Normand, if he lived, likely would have permanent paralysis on one side of his body and speech issues. They hung on Dr. Barry Woodhurst’s every word, hoping for . . . hope. They were made aware of what the worst could be, and that the best would bring a lifetime of challenges.
“I close my eyes,” said a distraught Jacques, “and all I can see is Normand . . . that’s all, Normand.”
Time, the doctor told them, ultimately would deliver the outcome.
They would have to be patient. The couple had not slept since the call Saturday evening from Ratelle, informing them of Normand’s plight. They were wide awake with worry during the crossCanada flight.
“I’ll give you some of these,” Woodhurst said as he wrote a prescription for a sleeping aid, “but [as for seeing Normand], I don’t think there’s a pill anywhere that will help that.”
With Normand still in a coma, Jacques and Therese stood at his bedside in the hospital. Ratelle was there, too, to help translate and console. Their ache was palpable.
Barely 5 feet 10 inches, Leveille excelled on speed and courage, his legs and upper body lean and fit. Much of his head was bandaged. A ventilator aided his breathing, easing pressure on his brain.
Of all that changed for Leveille 40 years ago, his perpetual, easy smile endured. He has retained his love of Boston, his brief time here on top of the world, and still visits occasionally with Denise. He was here last month, per usual, for the club’s annual preseason golf outing. He can still get around a course, albeit only able to swing a club with his left arm, and last I asked, he usually shoots around 110.
“He says his heart will always be in Boston,” Denise told me as the couple watched a game in 2008 from the TD Garden’s ninth floor.
It’s his struggle with speech, she said, that most upsets him. Denise often is his interpreter, translator, and finisher of thoughts.
During that long-ago visit, Normand kiddingly told Denise that he hopes one day his ashes will be buried under the Garden ice.
“He says all the old ghosts in the old Garden never came to the new building,” she said, Normand next to her, beaming, enjoying his joke. “He wants to be the ghost — the good ghost — who helps them win the Stanley Cup.”
N.H. Upon entering BU at age 17, according to Greer, he was the youngest player in Division 1 hockey, but left Commonwealth Avenue after 55 games under coach David Quinn’s watch to play junior hockey in Quebec before signing with the Avalanche in the summer of ‘16 at age 19.
Many, if not most, NCAA players who leave for the NHL before finishing their degrees never find their way back to academia. Greer signed with the Bruins in the offseason, a two-year deal that guarantees him $1.525 million, a touch more than the typical college grad.
“It is easy [not to return], you know?” mused Greer, “You look at your paychecks and ask yourself why do you need to pursue school — but I’ve always been entrepreneurial, and someone who’s always had aspirations outside of hockey. I’m fascinated with the tech industry and business in general . . . maybe start a business of my own and run a business my way, because I think I have a lot of creative ideas I want to pursue.”
Greer’s course work is done online. His current course is entitled “Applying Mathematics in the 21st Century.”
The virtual classes are often held in the evening, which is often when he’s lining up at left or right wing with a No. 10 on the back of his Black-and-Gold sweater.
Initially, while at Kimball Union, Greer committed to Penn State.
“Then other schools began to recruit me,” he said, overheard by goalie Jeremy Swayman in the Bruins dressing room.
“Yeah, but not by Maine,” chirped Swayman, the proud ex-Black Bear.
Greer decommitted from the Nittany Lions, opting instead for the Terriers, and all these years later is within reach of that BU degree.
“It’s been a journey,” he said, pondering where the degree will take him. “I realize there is so much more to life than hockey. I’ve always been someone to believe that life will take you . . . that you’ll meet people in your lives and that’s meant to be. A lot of people stress about what they’ll do after college, but realistically I think I am in a position right now that I’ve been successful among the best of the best in my profession, and I am going to meet amazing people in my career. Then you never know what will happen . . . and I think getting that degree will help me.”