What a summer. What a wretched summer. Derek Boogaard, dead from an overdose of pills and alcohol, alone in his Minneapolis apartment; Rick Rypien, who had suffered from depression for a decade, found dead in his home in Crowsnest Pass, Alta.
And now Wade Belak, a fourth-or-fifth-line guy, a seventh defenceman, a joker, a fighter, pale as the snow. His body was found in an upscale Toronto hotel and condominium complex Wednesday, dead at 35. Three boys from the Prairies, gone in four months.
One newspaper reported Belak hanged himself, though it seems impossible. Maybe it always seems impossible.
We know he suffered chronic pain from arthritis in his pelvis, which occasionally required cortisone shots, but felt physically able to go on the CBC’s
Battle of the Blades. We know he had two daughters. The eldest one just turned seven, and the younger one is five.
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But if he was a tortured enforcer, he was also a great actor of the age. I never met a happier-seeming guy in hockey. He always seemed at ease; he was freshly retired, and in town to appear on the CBC’s reality show, where he surely would have been the star. Except he’s dead, and hockey feels sick again, right to its stomach.
Of all the guys who play that increasingly anachronistic role, Belak was the last guy you expected to die young. He apparently told a Calgary radio station last week that he was happy and healthy, and his head wasn’t ringing. When he talked about his retirement with the
Post’s Sean Fitz-Gerald last week, he said, “I thought about having a press conference, but I didn’t want to make an *** of myself.”
And that was Wade. Like Boogaard, Belak was born in Saskatoon, and he smiled and cracked wise as he clung tenaciously to the edge of the National Hockey League. Once, when I asked him if he ever got special treatment in Toronto as a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs, he grinned and said, “I’ve got a sick table at McDonald’s, that’s about it.” When he was traded to Florida at the trade deadline after everyone had spent the week speculating about Mats Sundin, he said to TSN, “I blame Mats.” When asked once about his numerous tattoos, he said, “Yeah, I’ll be 60 or 70, all wrinkled and hangin’ out at the old folks’ home. But I’ll look tough, and I’ll be getting all the women.”
He was, in other words, a real person, and seemed so comfortable in his own increasingly inked skin. After starting with an appealing weekly show on Leafs TV when he was in Toronto, he had agreed to be a sideline reporter for the Nashville Predators TV affiliate. He was going to stumble with a figure skater on the CBC. Nine days ago he told Fitz-Gerald, “hopefully, this will be my transition into life after hockey.”
And here we are. As for a common thread, it’s not yet clear. Yes, Boogaard, Rypien and Belak were fighters, above all. Yes, there is a long and growing history that that job takes a real and sometimes terrible toll. If Belak did commit suicide, then his name has to be added to a heartbreaking list. Former enforcer Georges Laraque spoke to TSN radio Wednesday, and he said, “I hated fighting. I did it because it was my job. I hated promoting violence. I hated it, I hated it, I hated it.” In that, he is far from alone.
So while Rypien was afflicted with deep depression, and Boogaard was on painkillers, we don’t know why Wade Belak died. Not yet. Maybe never. We just know that there aren’t an awful lot of 40-goal scorers or puck-moving defencemen dying young, and that the men whose role it is to fight in the NHL are starting to vanish like professional wrestlers. This shouldn’t be a political issue in the sport; it should be a human one. And at some point, some deadly serious questions have to be asked about the role of enforcers in hockey, if only to understand why these men are gone too soon. This has been an unspeakable summer, which is exactly why it needs to be talked about.
But all that is for later. Wade Belak is for now. In 2007, when Belak scored his first NHL goal in four years, he called his parents and woke them up, and joked he’d ask his mom for five bucks, just like when he was a kid. At that rate she would have paid out just $40 in his 15-year-career; it would have been a bargain. And when he made that joke about a table at McDonald’s that day, Belak really answered the question. “I mean, I don’t go throwing around ‘I play for the Leafs’ to get free stuff all the time, because I hate doing that. But I could … I should enjoy it while it lasts. Soon I’ll be a nobody.”
Sadly, he never got the chance to fade into obscurity, and now he never will. And so we feel sick, all over again. We’re getting practised at how to react, what not to speculate, what to say, how to feel. It doesn’t get better, though. Just more and more familiar.
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