Can't Quit Now
by Leigh Montville
Sports Illustrated, Dec. 1, 1997
|
Five concussions, a bruise on his brain and a bout with depression couldn't change how the Rangers' Pat LaFontaine feels about hockey: He loves it | FFFFFThis was not what Marybeth LaFontaine really wanted. She sat in the good seats in Madison Square Garden and watched her husband come onto the ice two weeks ago with the rest of the New York Rangers as the lights on the scoreboard whirled and flashed and as that song Tubthumping, by Chumbawamba, was played as loud as possible on the sound system—"I get knocked down. But I get up again. You're never going to keep me down"—and she didn't know if she could watch. |
FFFFF"I don't know how this is going to go," Marybeth said to Tammy Keane, the wife of Rangers winger Mike Keane. "I don't know if I can take it."
FFFFFThe memories of less than a year ago were too fresh. This was the 18th game back for Pat, an undersized, 32-year-old center, from the grim aftereffects of a fifth concussion, which had caused him to miss most of last season. This was Marybeth's first game back. She had been wrapped up in the business of closing the old house outside Buffalo, setting up the new house in Greenwich, Conn., moving the three kids and two dogs from one place to the other and finding new doctors and schools and dry cleaners, taking care of everything in slightly more than a month. Unpacked boxes still filled the new house. The babysitter, Mokey McCarthy, brought from Buffalo to help for a week, was in her third week on the job.
FFFFFNow, finally, there was time to watch Pat play. As she settled into her seat, Marybeth couldn't help thinking that everything could have been so much easier, so much safer. Stay in the old house, the one she and Pat had built to their specifications. Live the same life they'd lived for most of their 10 years of marriage. Take the guaranteed contract for almost $10 million for the next two years. Retire. Maybe some doctors had cleared Pat to play again, to take chances, but hadn't almost everyone else told him to be smart, to grab the money, to begin to live the rest of his life? Hadn't she told him the same thing? "I couldn't do what you're doing," she had told him, flat out. "I wouldn't do it."
FFFFFThe game, hockey, scared her now. She had seen what it could do.
FFFFF"He was very emotional," Marybeth says, describing the bad times of a year ago. "I would walk into a room, and he would be crying. He cried a lot. Or he would be holding his head from the migraine headaches. They were terrible. He wouldn't leave the house for a week. He wouldn't change his clothes, wouldn't shower. It was all the classic signs of depression. I thought he was having a nervous breakdown."
FFFFFPat, a bouncy 5'10", 180-pound perfectionist who had almost willed himself into becoming arguably the best U.S.-born player in history, the star of the Buffalo Sabres, had been replaced by a zombie, a husk. His skin was pale. His eyes, the same wide eyes that had caused teenage girls to leave phone numbers and undergarments on his car when he was a 19-year-old playing for the New York Islanders, were now glassy. A man of many interests now had interest in nothing.
FFFFFOn Oct. 17, 1996, he was dropped by a hit from 6'6", 236-pound Pittsburgh Penguins defenseman Francois Leroux. The blow from Leroux's left elbow was to the left side of LaFontaine's head. As he fell, his helmet came off. He struck the right side of his head on the ice and went out cold. At first there didn't seem to be a problem. He regained consciousness after a few minutes, and though he sat out the rest of the game, he was able to drive himself home. He missed the next game but was back one week after the injury to play against the Montreal Canadiens. He appeared in six more games. He was fine.
FFFFFNo, he wasn't. The depression had landed in a thick cloud in his head. His hand-eye coordination had gradually disappeared. The migraines had begun. He couldn't remember the simplest things. He was gone, off to a different, scary world. Before the final game he tried to play, against the Philadelphia Flyers, he gave an emotional speech to the Sabres, an apology for the way he was performing. Buffalo coach Ted Nolan pulled him from the lineup. It was time to get help.
FFFFFThe Sabres sent him to the Mayo Clinic. An earlier MRI had indicated he had suffered no brain damage from the concussion. The more extensive tests at Mayo changed the diagnosis. He had suffered a bruise on the frontal lobe of his brain, the area responsible for personality and moods. The Oct. 17 concussion was the final blow, but the four earlier concussions (the first in 1990) had contributed to his condition.
FFFFF"Do you feel like somebody ripped out all of your enthusiasm?" a neurologistat Mayo asked.
FFFFF"Yes!" LaFontaine almost shouted. "Where'd it go?"
FFFFFThe neurologist used the analogy of a car operating on a reserve tank of gas. LaFontaine had been working on the reserve tank for a while. The final concussion had emptied the tank. The pieces of his memory, of his personality, that were missing would return, the tank would be refilled sometime in the future, but the only treatment was rest. The brain had to heal. LaFontaine would have to wait inside this new self for his old self to return. This would not be easy. "I had difficulty coping with the smallest things," he says. "I couldn't even watch a hockey game on television. I'd try, but the speed was too much for me. I couldn't keep up with what was happening."
FFFFFOne miserable day followed another. Marybeth and Pat's eldest daughter, Sarah, who was six at the time, had an incident on a school bus. One of the other kids told her, "Your daddy's stupid. All his brains fell out on the ice." She came home in tears. The Sabres suggested that maybe the family should take a trip south, try the good weather. They went to Disney World. Even the tamest rides, the kiddie rides, made Pat's head hurt. Marybeth said he looked green.
FFFFFWhen he came back to Buffalo, though, he started to feel better. This was in mid-February. The tank was refilling. The enthusiasm was coming back. LaFontaine started skating again. He started hanging around the Sabres again. At first he felt like a stranger—"like when you go back to high school four years after you graduate and everything seems changed," he says—but the tank kept refilling. He felt more and more at ease. He began participating in noncontact drills. He started thinking about the playoffs.
FFFFF"I was never going to do anything foolish," says LaFontaine. "My family always was first, hockey second. If I was ever told that I would be at a greater risk than anyone else playing the game, then I was prepared to quit. I'd had 14 years in the league, and I was prepared to go home. To retire."
FFFFFThe medical clearance didn't come until the summer. He took more tests than a prospective astronaut. The results from his doctors indicated he was fine. Three neurosurgeons told him he would be at no greater risk of long-term repercussions than anyone else who had suffered a first concussion. He said he was ready to rejoin the Sabres.
FFFFFThe Sabres weren't ready for him. They had thought he would retire, and their doctors suggested he should. The money they would have had to set aside to pay him—$4.8 million—had mostly been spent. If he hadretired, insurance would have paid 80% of the contract, and Buffalo would have paid the rest.
FFFFFOn Sept. 29, five days before the Rangers' season opener, Pat was traded to New York for a second-round draft choice and future considerations. He and Marybeth have been on the move ever since. Only now was there time for her to catch up with him, to stop for a moment. To watch a game.
FFFFFHe looked small on the ice, the way he has always looked, even while he was racking up 454 career goals and 512 assists. He looked fast, shifty, daring, the way he's always looked. The average size of the players around him had increased by maybe an inch in height, by maybe 10 or 15 pounds since he started in 1984, to more than 6'1" and more than 210 pounds. The New Jersey Devils' defensemen were dangerous hulks. He was a mouse challenging a succession of big cats.
FFFFF"You can't carry skeletons when you come on the ice in this league," Rangers coach Colin Campbell said recently. "Especially a guy like Patty. He's a puck-oriented player. He's always going to be in the middle of the action. At his size he can't take even five percent off his game and still be effective. He has to play the way he always has."
FFFFFThe usual perils of playing a game bounded by wooden and Plexiglas walls seemed magnified. LaFontaine's only concessions to his injury were a tighter, more padded helmet, double-strapped around his jaw, and a mouth guard to help absorb the impact of collisions. The unwritten rule during the regular season is that players shouldn't look for particular numbers to hit, that the hits should arrive according to situations, but Campbell felt players had been looking for LaFontaine, testing him. Then again, the puck-oriented player always gets hit.
FFFFFIn the first period LaFontaine was hit hard. Sliding past New Jersey center Doug Gilmour, he was caught in a small tunnel of space, a corridor between Gilmour and the boards near the New York bench. Devils defenseman Scott Stevens was coming from the other end of the corridor. "Everyone's fair game," Stevens would say later. "The way I've always been taught, you try to hit the best player on the ice. I saw it was Pat. Sure, I knew it was him."
FFFFFStevens lowered his shoulder. LaFontaine went flying. There was a moment—there will always be a moment for him now—when there was uncertainty if he would get up. But in a bound he was back on his skates, zipping toward the Devils' zone. He finished the game without incident.
FFFFF"Did you see that hit?" Marybeth was asked after the Rangers had lost 3-2.
FFFFF"I saw it," she replied. "It was the hit of the game, wasn't it?"
FFFFF She stayed for the whole game because she wanted to show her love for Pat and her support for what he was doing. This didn't mean she enjoyed it. She was nervous the entire time. No matter how well he plays—and he is playing well (at week's end he was leading the Rangers in scoring with 13 goals and 15 assists)—there will always be that "what if."
FFFFFMarybeth says he tried to explain himself one day. He used an analogy. He asked her to think of something she liked to do, loved to do. Something like...shopping. Suppose she were injured while she was shopping and, for a while, it appeared that she could never shop again. Suppose, then, she started feeling better. Suppose she talked to a number of doctors who assured her that she could go back to shopping. That there would be no risk. Wouldn't she go back? Wouldn't she shop again?
FFFFF"I'd shop from home," was her reply. "I'd shop from catalogs."
FFFFFThat option, alas, is not available in hockey.
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