CHAPTER TWELVE

The Cup run runneth over.

It was late June 2004. The bars along the Red Mile were still red with Flames jerseys; even a little green, with all the hard hats. The frenzy of Calgary’s miracle run to the final had died down, but the glow remained. The city felt good: summer-good; playoff-good. Iginla and Kiprusoff were still the team’s stars, but all of them were now heroes, Steve included. And with time finally to fathom what he had achieved, to the fans Marty Gélinas was even more than “the Eliminator.” Three series-winning goals, two of them in overtime. How was that possible? Three playoff series wins; three wins over division champions; the Flames scoring just two goals in the last two games of the quarter-finals against Detroit, winning them both, one of them in overtime. How was any of it possible? In a few short days, their playoff run had gone from unbelievably exciting to legendary.

When a player wins, he celebrates as long as he can; until somebody tells him to go home. He squeezes every bit of pleasure out of the victory, because he doesn’t know if that feeling will ever come again. The Flames didn’t win in 2004, but it seemed as if they had won. The team partied like they had won. And Steve, with no regular girlfriend, his family more than 2,000 kilometres away, had no one to tell him to go home.

“Marty [Gélinas] and I used to train at the gym at the Father David Bauer Arena,” Hayley Wickenheiser recalls. “That’s how I met Monty.” It was not long after the 2003–04 season had ended. Wickenheiser was twenty-five, a year older than Steve, and the best women’s hockey player in the world. She had won her first Olympic gold medal two years earlier in Salt Lake City, and would go on to win three more. Calgary, the base for the Canadian women’s team, had become Wickenheiser’s home. She also had a little boy, Noah, age four, whom she had adopted—the son of her former boyfriend. “Monty would come and train at the gym. We became friends and hung out occasionally. He became like a brother, and was very kind to my son Noah.

“Monty was always a larger than life, happy-go-lucky guy. He would come into the gym and say hi to everyone. He was an NHL player, but he didn’t take himself too seriously. He didn’t think he was better than anyone else. This wasn’t just an elite gym. I remember this one older gentleman, he had an oxygen tank and he was there for rehab, and Monty would always ride the bike beside him. The guy was probably eighty years old, and they’d just be chatting away.”

Steve was also a confusing set of contradictions, Wickenheiser says. “He would come and go. He was pretty aloof when he wanted to be, and a very cerebral person. He wanted to talk about life, about all kinds of things in life. Publicly and outwardly he was this big hulking strong man, a hero in the run for the Cup; in reality, he was always trying to figure out who he was. What his place was. I’m not sure he ever felt he was worthy of what he had.

“It’s a really insecure life, especially as a 5–6 defenceman. You don’t know if you’re going to be in the lineup, or even have a job, and he didn’t have a lot of stability outside hockey in his personal or family life. And one thing about Monty, he was like a very open book. He would tell you everything. Sometimes you didn’t want to know as much as he was telling you.

“Around that time,” she recalls, “he started to spiral into cocaine and a few other things.”

As a young teenager in Mississauga, Steve drank a little beer because most kids did. It was curiosity and rebellion. In North Bay, away from home, he drank a lot more, in that barber shop/hair salon getaway the players had. There were also the road trips with the team. A game is over, you’re tired, but you’re so pumped up you can’t sleep. You just shared this intense two-and-a-half-hour experience with your friends and you want to keep sharing it. What are you going to do in the middle of the night? Where are you going to go? To your room and study? You’re bigshots, kings of the world, and the beer only makes you feel bigger.

In Erie, Steve’s drinking got worse—and for the first time in his life it had gotten in the way of his role as a player. He had been just a kid in North Bay; whatever he gave the team was a bonus. But in Erie, especially in his second year there, he was a veteran. The Otters needed him to be a leader on the ice and off. As a rookie, you just need to be one of the guys. When you’re older, to lead, you need to be that and more. Too much beer made Steve seem too much like everybody else.

And during summers in Peterborough there was the Shack, where everybody brought along a two-four. Things would get crazy at times, but not too often. There were the downtown fights, but growing up in Peterborough, if you were a kid, things like that happened. Drinking was a chance to loosen up a bit, laugh too loud, and say what you’d never say sober. It was about having fun. And, as Steve’s friend Mike Keating put it, “it gave you a little liquid courage to pick up girls.”

While being a jock offered Steve and his Peterborough buddies more opportunities to drink, it also held them back. People knew them. If they saw them a little drunk around town it might make them seem like good guys. More than a little drunk, and people would talk. Word would get back to their parents, to their hockey coaches. Some of the Peterborough guys played lacrosse in the summer for the local team. The people who saw them drunk one night might see them playing at the arena the next. The team might lose. So they had to pick their spots. If there was a two-day break between games—hockey in the winter; lacrosse in the summer—they could drink, but as Keats said, “You didn’t want to be playing guilty.”

Throughout his years in junior, his two seasons in Saint John, even in his first year in Calgary, Steve seemed no different from any of his buddies at home. They were all college-aged guys, and whether in college like Nick, or working a regular job like Keats, or playing pro like Steve or Jay, they were living a college life. But things were beginning to escalate for Steve. He now had money of his own. He was now one of the young guys on a team again, and being one of the guys in the early 2000s, for some, meant not only beer but cocaine. Alcohol at night to loosen you up and bring you down; a few hours later, cocaine to give you the boost you needed for the next day’s work. And Steve’s work was every day, weekends included. He wasn’t a regular on the Flames; he got almost no days off. He had a game or a practice almost every day—trying to keep his spot on the team, he had to be up for every practice, not just every game, and practices were at eleven. He didn’t have the whole day to rest and recover, to get ready for the game that night as the regulars did. Steve was, as Wickenheiser says, headed into a “spiral.”

One day at the gym, Steve told Wickenheiser his routine that summer: go out all night, sleep an hour or two, be at the gym at seven, work out, sleep in the afternoon, go out all night again. “I vividly remember one day he came into the gym and had two mismatched socks on, a black one and a white one, and then proceeded to throw three hundred pounds on the bench press and pound out eight reps,” Wickenheiser says, still amazed.

—

The summer of 2004 came to an end, but the hockey season of 2004–05 never returned. It was the NHL’s lockout year. When hockey had last been played, in the spring, the Flames had made their run for the Cup. And when you win, or almost win, the party never quite ends until there is another winner. There’s always someone around still wanting to celebrate.

Steve had been involved with the NHLPA since first coming into the league. A superstar has his own leverage; a players’ union protects everyone else. The NHLPA is the players’ team, and Steve was a good team player. The CBA between the league and the players would expire in September 2004. Until then, negotiations would follow their predictable path. Both sides would make respectful comments in public, and both would bad-mouth each other in private. Hatred and resolve would grow. There would be pretend talks during the summer, because the public needed to know that everyone was working tirelessly towards an agreement so the season could start on time. More importantly to those involved, both parties would need to demonstrate to their members—the NHLPA to the individual players; Bettman to the team owners—that they were doing everything humanly possible to extract the most from the other side and win the deal, which can’t happen if agreement comes too early. In fact, it couldn’t happen if the season started on time.

The beginning of the season would therefore need to come and go. There would need to be anxiety, then panic, and then with just enough time left to schedule just enough games to make a season of sufficient length to make the playoffs seem credible, a deal would be made. And the players would win because the players always win.

As it turned out, the season did not start on time. There was anxiety and panic—but then, when it came to the crunch, the negotiations went off script.

Both owners and players are competitors and both know how to win. But players have been teammates and team-players all of their lives, and know how to win together. Owners haven’t been, and don’t. In their own minds, players are team guys. In owners’ own minds, they are self-made men. In this standoff with the league, NHLPA head Bob Goodenow only had to do what he had always done: say no to anything the league proposed, offer no alternative, and wait for the owners to crack and say yes.

Bettman had been losing to the players since he became NHL Commissioner in 1993. Player salaries had increased hugely and rapidly. To Bettman, this made no sense. It was up to each team’s owner to make his decision, to sign a player or not, and to pay what he wanted to pay. Anti-trust law said so, and Bettman was always careful to remind the owners of that. Still, it was incomprehensible to him that owners could not stop themselves from getting into bidding wars over players. Sure, players could become free agents and go to other teams, but other players also become free agents and can sign with theirs. Why send salaries higher and higher? For owners, mindless competition for players was an always-losing proposition, Bettman believed, and only one team can win the Cup. Twenty-nine teams will lose. Every year. Bettman made this case to the owners passionately, incredulously, relentlessly. Any other conclusion was insanity. Any other action taken was clearly that of a fool. But then the first day of free agency would arrive each year on July 1 and all hell would break loose. Owners chased players, budgets were blown to smithereens. Bettman fumed.

It took him a decade and billions of dollars lost to the players to understand. Players are great competitors and need to win. Owners are great competitors and need to win, too. But a player, when he becomes a free agent, can go to five or six teams and still have a chance to win. An owner can win only in one place—where he is. So owners chased, players were chased, contracts went higher, and no amount of Bettman exhorting and fuming year after year was going to change that.

Left to their own devices, owners will break ranks and lose. Antitrust laws prevented them from working together, so Bettman got their support to take things out of their hands. He got them to agree to amend their own bylaws. It would require a simple majority—sixteen teams—to approve any proposed CBA deal that Bettman supported—but it would now take 75 per cent, or twenty-three teams, to approve any deal he opposed. He needed only eight teams on side to block any proposed CBA—a number he had easily in his back pocket. Now when Goodenow said no, Bettman could say no, too.

The CBA negotiation script held into October, and November, and December, but then when a deal was supposed to follow, it didn’t. The season was cancelled. This time, the players cracked. On July 13, 2005, a new owner-friendly CBA was signed. Two weeks later, Goodenow was fired; the NHLPA imploded. Bettman won, and he has never lost since.

The NHL’s commissioner is an employee of the league. His authority rests with the Board of Governors. He needs their support; he himself can only influence. Bettman has always been adept at testing the winds and, if he finds them blowing the wrong way, shifting with them, or working patiently, calculatedly, to make them blow his way. He pretends that he must lead cautiously from behind. But with league revenues growing in multiples since his hiring, with fewer vulnerable franchises, and with most teams worth vastly more than in the decades before him—just as he did during the 2004–05 CBA negotiations, he has shown he can lead forcefully from behind when he wants to.

—

Steve worked out regularly during the early months of the lockout, but as with other players, without the usual urgency. If a day had to be missed or cut short, it was. There were NHLPA calls to participate in, meetings to attend. There were life details normally taken care of by the team that he had to attend to himself. Later in the season, he went to France to play for the Scorpions de Mulhouse. Mulhouse, once an industrial centre, the Manchester of France, is a picturesque and pleasant city of around 100,000 people, an hour’s drive away from Zurich and Strasbourg. The Scorpions were a good team in a weak league. Steve played fifteen pleasant and picturesque games.

Elsewhere during the lockout, things were not standing still. Minor league players were playing minor league seasons, making themselves a year better and a year more ready to play in the NHL. Including Mike Commodore. Because of the similarity of their family names, he and Steve had been the two “Doors” who had come out of the press box during the 2004 playoffs to help the Flames to the Stanley Cup Final. Commodore had played twenty games in those playoffs, but had played few enough regular-season games not to be caught in the subsequent lockout, and he was now playing and developing in the AHL. Junior and college players were moving one year closer to graduation, to compete for jobs in the pros.

With the new CBA agreement signed, the Calgary Flames could plan for the 2005–06 season. They were no longer a team that had missed the playoffs seven straight years, in need of help everywhere. They were Stanley Cup finalists, and seemed only a few strategic moves away from a big, contending year. They also had Dion Phaneuf ready to join them. Phaneuf, drafted in 2003 from the Red Deer Rebels, had been named the WHL’s best defenceman the following season, and would have played with the Flames in 2004–05 if not for the lockout. Instead, he stayed in Red Deer and won the top defenceman award for a second straight year. Phaneuf was strong and tough, a defensive and offensive force. He would score twenty goals with the Flames in his first NHL season, and finish third in the rookie-of-the-year voting, behind Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby.

With Phaneuf’s arrival, the Flames traded Commodore. Needing help on the power play, they signed free agent Roman Hamrlík; with Hamrlík, and young defenceman Mark Giordano, who had developed more rapidly than expected in the minors, they traded Denis Gauthier and Toni Lydman. That left Robyn Regehr, Rhett Warrener, Jordan Leopold, and Andrew Ference, along with Phaneuf, Hamrlík, Giordano, and Steve. After his play during the 2003–04 playoffs, Steve assumed he would contend for a top-four defence position, which would be a step up for him but, from the perspective of the now Cup-contending Flames, not necessarily for the team. Their top-four, even top-six, defencemen needed to be better. A top 1–2 pairing plays the big minutes, regular shifts, and on power plays and penalty kills—a total of about twenty-five minutes a game. A 3–4 pairing gets some power-play and penalty-killing time, and plays about twenty minutes in all. Just as a fifth starter in baseball gives you innings, 5–6 guys in hockey give you minutes, fifteen of them, maybe. They eat up time, giving the big guys a breather until they can come back on the ice again. A 1–2 guy’s job is to win you games. A 5–6 (or seventh) guy’s job is not to lose them. Steve improved the team by being a better seventh defenceman than they had imagined he would be two years earlier. But that’s what he was. Then he had also been twenty-four, and seemed young. Now he was almost twenty-six.

For Steve, everything was confusing. In 2003–04, he had paid the dues he expected to pay and had always paid. Now it was payoff time, except that when the 2005–06 season began, he was in the press box even more than he had been before. He was surprised and disappointed. But he had felt that way before, and every other time he had picked himself up and worked harder. He was a team guy; he did what the team needed of him. If it wasn’t to play at that moment, it was to get himself ready for the next one, to practise and train hard, to be a role model and inspiration, especially to the younger players—to help make them better, to make the team better.

But this time, Steve was practising and training with less purpose, and less pleasure. He couldn’t stop himself from feeling this way, and he was upset and unhappy with himself that he couldn’t. And if his on-ice life wasn’t right, his life off the ice didn’t feel right either. You have to earn the party after, and you can’t play guilty. Maybe the drinking and drugs were holding him back, he began to think. He had always been a gamer. Whatever the situation, he would rise to the challenge, whether it was one that others had presented, or one that he had imposed on himself. If he were to stay up all night partying, he would still be in the gym at seven, drop 300 pounds on the bench press, and show everyone else, and himself, that he could do it. But this off-ice life didn’t feel right if his on-ice life wasn’t working. He was angry at his off-ice self. Everything began to feel shaky. Alcohol and drugs were putting his career and future in jeopardy.

In early December, after being a healthy scratch again, Steve went to see Darryl Sutter. He told the Flames coach what Sutter already knew: Steve was at a pivot point. He needed to play if he was to improve enough to stay in the league. Sutter agreed to trade him.

Calgary was on a ten-day, five-game road trip. They had lost in Nashville, won in Detroit and were on their way to Pittsburgh. Sutter met with Steve and told him that he had been traded to Florida. Rhett Warrener remembers the scene a short time later. The Flames players were on the bus in front of the hotel, about to leave for the airport. Steve was also in front of the hotel, waiting for a taxi to the airport to get to Miami. The bus left first. “And there was Monty,” Warrener recalls, “just standing on the sidewalk with his bag.” Warrener had played for the Panthers earlier in his career. In Florida, he knew, Steve would get a fresh start. He’d have a chance to find new interests and begin new habits. In Calgary, if a player did something wrong, everybody noticed and called the Flames office or contacted the media. In Florida, nobody saw anything because nobody was watching. Steve could hide in Florida. He could do anything. As the bus pulled out, “I looked back at Monty,” Warrener says, “and I remember thinking, ‘This could go either way.’”

Marty Gélinas, “the Eliminator,” who had signed with the Panthers in the off-season, met Steve at the airport in Miami. He had been aware of Steve’s drinking, but not the extent of it. When he heard of the trade, Gélinas and his wife sat down and talked. They agreed that Gélinas would suggest to Steve that he live with them, just until he was settled, of course. Gélinas knew what it was like to be in a new place: the Panthers were his sixth NHL team. “As a family, we didn’t know how to do this,” Gélinas recalls, “or how it would work. We had two young kids and my wife was pregnant. Sure we had question marks. But if someone needs your help to get back on track, to me it’s a no-brainer.”

Every morning, Steve left the Gélinas house before everybody else was up, but when he came back from practice, Gélinas recalls, “he would just be part of the family,” as he had been with the Babcocks in Peterborough. “If something needed to be done around the house, he’d do it. He did the dishes. He played street hockey with the kids. He took them to hockey practice. We all sat down and had dinner together. We chatted at night, sometimes had deep conversations about a lot of different things. He became one of us.” Steve stayed with them for the rest of the season. “We gave him some stability, and gave him a chance to see how a family man in a hockey family lived,” Gélinas says. “How when you get home from practice maybe you’ve got to cut the grass, or take your kids to something. I think that year Monty realized there was more to this than just the game. There had to be some structure. There was a life. There was something he could shoot for. He made such an impact on our lives. It was really good for my family, and it was good for Monty. And the way he talked with my kids, one on one. It was awesome. And they were young. Not everybody can do that. They still talk about him.”

Steve didn’t dress for the Panthers’ first game after the trade, nor for the second, a 6–3 loss at home to Ottawa. He played the third game, on the road against Dallas. The predictable happened—nineteen seconds after the Stars scored to take a 2–0 lead, Steve got into a fight with Bill Guerin. Before the period ended, the Stars scored again. The second period was different, however. The Panthers scored twice, Steve assisting on the second goal, then tied the game on a power-play goal by Joe Nieuwendyk, assisted by Gary Roberts. Then, on a power play, with only sixteen seconds remaining in the third period, the Stars scored and won the game, 4–3. As the game ended, Roberts—frustrated, angry—got a penalty for boarding.

Nieuwendyk and Roberts had both grown up in Whitby, Ontario—then a town of about 20,000, now a rapidly expanding bedroom community fifty kilometres east of Toronto. At age six, Nieuwendyk played tyke hockey for the Owls, Roberts for the Wrens. Thirty-three years later, Nieuwendyk, having played more than 1,200 NHL games, scored over 500 goals, and won three Stanley Cups, and Roberts, having played more than 1,100 games, and scored over 400 goals, and won one Stanley Cup, signed with Florida. They were both thirty-nine years old.

They were signed to be mentors to a group of promising young players—Jay Bouwmeester, Nathan Horton, Stephen Weiss, Gregory Campbell—all of them twenty-two years of age or under. Nieuwendyk and Roberts were to show them how winners—true pros—practised, trained, played in big games, worked with teammates, treated fans, took care of themselves, and lived. “Both Gary and I found it difficult,” Nieuwendyk recalls. The two of them were used to playing on teams that won most of the time, and always contended. They had played in hockey cities, or on playoff-bound teams that had made non-hockey cities, for a time at least, feel like they were hockey cities. They had played where hockey mattered and they mattered. They were also used to being better players, and weren’t used to being old. At this stage in their careers, they needed energy, hope, and possibility; they needed more than their own professionalism and pride to drive them. It turned out Nieuwendyk and Roberts needed more from the younger players than what they were able to give.

“Monty was really a breath of fresh air,” Nieuwendyk remembers. “He was fun and energetic.” Older than the young guys, younger than Nieuwendyk and Roberts, Steve could relate to all of them and they could relate to him. He helped Nieuwendyk and Roberts connect to the rest of the team, so they could have the impact that the team needed them to have.

Steve was still a 5–6 defenceman getting 5–6 ice time—between fifteen and eighteen minutes a game, rarely on power plays or the penalty kill; he even played on the wing at times (it was this adaptability, as he told his Saint John coach Jim Playfair, that made him a million dollars). But now Steve was a regular; he arrived at the rink for every game knowing—not wondering if—he was playing. He liked his teammates. He liked the flip-flops and shorts informality of Florida. He liked living in the caring environment of the Gélinas family. He knew he needed to change his life, and now he was ready to do it.

In February 2006, the NHL schedule shut down for more than two weeks, for the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. During the much shorter All-Star breaks in other years, Steve might charter a plane with a few teammates and their wives or girlfriends, and go somewhere hot, or fly off by himself to some place he thought might be interesting. But this time it was different.

The Panthers played their final game before the Olympic break on February 11 in Buffalo, and wouldn’t play again until the 28th. Steve didn’t tell his teammates; he didn’t tell Keats, Jay, Nick, or Vally; he didn’t tell Gisele Bourgeois or Marty Gélinas. His coach, Jacques Martin, and his general manager, Mike Keenan, didn’t know. He didn’t even tell Paul, Donna, Chris, or Lindsay until the day he left. He just got on a plane, flew to California, and checked himself into rehab. It was at Milestones Ranch in Malibu. He was there two weeks, as much time as he could risk in order for his rehab to go unnoticed. Then he flew back to Florida, resumed training when the team’s practices began again, and continued with the season.

The Panthers’ strength and conditioning coach, Andy O’Brien, didn’t know about Steve’s rehab stay, either. This was O’Brien’s first NHL job, and he had known little about Steve before the trade from Calgary two months earlier. At first, Steve was just another guy who worked hard in the gym—and the guy who kept knocking over the hurdle. O’Brien had a runner’s hurdle in a small area just outside his office. It was for the players to do stretches each morning, to open up their hips before going onto the ice to skate. The hurdle was made of metal, pieced together, and “if you hit it at all with your foot it would fall apart and make a pretty loud noise when it hit the floor,” O’Brien recalls. “And every morning I knew when Monty was there because every morning I’d hear the hurdle hit the floor. Some days I literally counted the number of times he kicked it over. But every time he did, he’d put it back together and try it again. He had this clumsy, bit of a train wreck, element to him. It was very endearing, very sincere.”

After the Olympic break, Steve and O’Brien grew closer. It began with Steve’s workouts, then as he began to hang around, he and O’Brien began to talk. Their conversations grew long and intense. “I didn’t really understand the significance of all this for him at the time,” O’Brien says, “why Monty had this extra compulsion to drive himself as hard as he did.” It was several more months before Steve told him about his rehab—and by then, Steve was starting to put some of his own pieces together in his mind. “He was beginning to make training a big element in the journey he was embarking on to change his life.”

For Steve, it was hockey that had always made life work. But now, on this non-playoff team in this non-hockey market, surrounded by successful on-ice and off-ice people, he was beginning to realize that life made hockey work as well. He went to Alcoholics Anonymous every morning he was at home (that’s where he was before the Gélinas family got up, something Gélinas came to know only later), and most days on the road. Going into rehab and to AA helped him give up one life; taking on the family habits of Gélinas, the playing habits of Nieuwendyk and Roberts, the wellness habits of O’Brien, and the life habits of all of them, would help give him another.

“For Monty, this wasn’t just about changing one or two behaviours. It was about embracing a new way of living,” O’Brien says. “He was giving up an old obsession and gaining a new one. The way he exercised, and respected his sleep. The way he respected his nutrition. He could see an element of purity in the way he was living. He started to realize that what he put into his body and what he did the night before might overcome anything he did in his next day’s workout. So he didn’t want to put anything toxic in his body at all. This wasn’t about dealing with addiction. For him it was about adopting healthy living.”

And as always, once Steve was in, he was all in. He wanted to know everything. “If he heard about something, he’d ask me my thoughts, we’d debate it, and he’d want to try it. And he also wanted to explore things on his own, have his own experiences, know for himself.” He talked to everybody and tried to learn from everybody. He wanted to be better, and he wanted to discover and uncover and maximize everything that was in him as a hockey player and as a person. For Steve, this wasn’t overcoming; this was pursuit. This wasn’t grimness or desperation; this was joy. Possibility. He couldn’t wait to get to practice, to get to the gym, to do every rep he was supposed to do, and ten more. He couldn’t wait to get to the health-food store and the grocery store. He couldn’t wait to meet the next person; he couldn’t wait until he could be off by himself to read or think. He couldn’t wait until the next day. Some of his Peterborough friends were worried about him, about this “fanatical pursuit of health,” as O’Brien puts it. It felt manic. It had a hint of instability about it. O’Brien disagrees: “I can say with certainty that at the times I knew him, from Florida to late in his life, he was a very, very healthy person.”

And in finding this new life, Steve appeared little haunted by his old one. He didn’t seem to have days where, so in need of a drink he hid himself away to avoid the temptation. He went with his old friends to bars and restaurants where they drank, and he didn’t. He didn’t go as often as he did before, nor did he spend as much time in Peterborough during the summers. Still, his friends were his friends, and his old friends were still as funny and likeable even when he was sober, and he was still as funny and likeable to them. He liked his new self. He liked it at least as much as he’d liked his old one, and his friends did too. Steve’s new life “seemed all very comfortable and natural to him,” says O’Brien.

Steve was also finding a new life in reading. The book that had the greatest impact on him was The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. Steve read it and reread it; he highlighted sections of it; he kept it with him on the road. First published in 1997, The Four Agreements was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than seven years. In it, Ruiz relates his own story. Born in Mexico, he almost died in a car accident while he was attending medical school. Yet, as damaged as his body was, his mind remained fully alive. At that moment, Ruiz writes, he understood what for him became a simple truth: “I am not my body.” Later, as a doctor treating patients with all manner of illnesses and injuries, this truth took on greater meaning for him. To help them heal their bodies, he realized, he had to help them heal their minds.

The “Four Agreements” he details in this book, Ruiz says (though others have disputed this), come from the spiritual traditions of the Toltecs, a people who inhabited parts of south-central Mexico more than 3,000 years ago. Ruiz believes that every child is born as a blank page, free, and with every human possibility in front of them. But the world that they are born into—of parents, families, schools, cultures, societies—has already determined countless understandings about what they are and how things work, which every child learns, both by reward and by punishment. By this process of “the domestication of humans,” as Ruiz calls it, the child comes to live everyone else’s life, not his or her own. The book is about how we can live a life that is centred in ourselves—that is our own. It is, as it describes itself, “a practical guide to personal freedom,” detailing four “agreements” to live by.

The First Agreement: Be impeccable with your word. The word impeccability, Ruiz explains, comes from the Latin prefix im-, meaning “not,” and peccare, meaning “to sin.” Even if individuals and institutions in the world around us are not speaking and living out their own truths, we must know our truth—in order to express it and to live it. We must speak about others and about ourselves “without sin.” This First Agreement, Ruiz says, “is the most important one and also the most difficult one to honour.”

The Second Agreement: Don’t take anything personally. When others say something about you, or do something to you, it’s not about you. It’s about them living their lives and filling some need they have, which can be hurtful to you if you allow it to be.

The Third Agreement: Don’t make assumptions. We assume everyone sees the world the same way as we do. They don’t.

The Fourth Agreement: Always do your best. This is the action you take to realize the first three agreements.

And if you do live up to all four of these agreements, Ruiz says, “You are going to control your life one hundred per cent.”

The Four Agreements is a harsh message in a gentle story. Nobody and nothing in the world is what they should be. Everybody’s truth is false. The path to your own life is not about forgiving others; that makes them too important to your life. The path is about becoming, each of us individually, in control of our own life. It was Gisele Bourgeois who had given Steve the book. She wanted him to know that in a life his parents had first lived for him, then his parents and coaches, then his coaches and managers and the media and fans, that it was his life. He had to shut out the thousands of voices around him and hear only his own. He had to know that even if he was a team player, it wasn’t because others—the players, coaches, and fans—said so; it was because he said so. Because he said impeccably that this is what he was.

The Four Agreements meant so much to Steve, O’Brien believes, “because Monty was a guy who had a lot of hope. He had faith in what was coming around the corner. He understood that no matter how hard things are, you can always get through them. That drove him to find solutions, to seek out better opportunity no matter what situation he was in in his life. I know there was never a moment he didn’t believe in himself. Or that he didn’t believe he was capable of getting to the next level. That’s so important for a guy who’s in the American League, then called up, then sent down, then a healthy scratch; moving back and forth from defence to forward. He always believed he was capable of getting to that next level. In anything.”

—

In the 2005–06 season the Panthers earned ten more points than they had the season before the lockout, but missed the playoffs for the fifth straight time.

Steve went back to Calgary that summer. Hayley Wickenheiser recalls a conversation they had one day after a workout in the gym. “Monty asked me to sit in his car and he told me that he had been to rehab. He just wanted me to know that, he said, and he wanted me to know that he was an alcoholic and that he was going to change his life. I remember being taken aback, but he was attempting to do his cleanse.”

Steve did the same with Keats. “I was working in Hoboken, New Jersey, at the time,” Keats says. “I remember him calling and telling me that he was an alcoholic.” He sounded serious, but Keats knew what would follow, what had always followed with Steve: an even bigger than usual Steve-laugh, because he had sucked Keats in again, and that Keats would never hear the end of it. Keats didn’t realize that something might be different this time until Steve started talking about “making amends.” They were buddies. Buddies don’t need to make amends to buddies. Keats had been as drunk and stupid with Steve as Steve had ever been with him. “I remember saying to him, ‘You don’t have to do this [make amends] to me.’ Then we laughed a bit. I actually said I was proud of him for doing this.”

The Panthers got off to an indifferent start to the 2006–07 season, then had a bad November, winning only three out of thirteen games. They had a new goalie, Ed Belfour, who at forty-one was giving the team the same strong goaltending that Roberto Luongo had provided for the previous five seasons. Luongo had been traded to Vancouver in the off-season in a multi-player deal that included Todd Bertuzzi, who the Panthers believed would give the team the scoring and attitude they needed. Instead, after recording a goal and three assists in his first game, Bertuzzi injured his back a few games later, had surgery, and never played for the Panthers again. Joe Nieuwendyk, also with recurring back problems, played only fifteen games, went on injured reserve, and retired.

The Panthers improved during the second half of the season, but they had too much ground to make up. Their veterans were too old or too injured, or both; Gary Roberts went to the Penguins at the trade deadline. The young guys were too young or not good enough, or both. The Panthers needed more than what their players could give them, Steve included.

Steve was now twenty-seven years old. He had been a solid player and a good teammate all his life. At times, and to some coaches’ or managers’ eyes, he had been more or less than that—or would become more or less. But really, truly, after all these years—through youth and adolescence, substance abuse and sobriety; after all his training and learning, hope and hard work—he was what he was going to be. No less, but no more.

Nieuwendyk, for almost twenty years, had played with good teams against good opponents in the NHL and at the Olympics. He knew Steve as an opponent, a teammate, and from watching him play. “Monty was always a gamer,” he says. “He liked to be involved. He wanted to help the team. He was physical and gritty. He played hard. He wasn’t a fun guy to play against. And he wasn’t very big, but he would do anything for a teammate. Stick up for him. Drop the gloves. He was a good skater, and could carry the puck. He was a good first-pass guy. It’s just that when the walls were closing in on him he tried to make a harder play than he needed to.” If he was playing against him, Nieuwendyk says, he’d make the walls close in. Get on him quickly, cut off the passing lanes, turn Steve’s hard-trying instinct against him, get him to do something he couldn’t do. “He would have been better served at times to just play the simple game.

“I think he wanted desperately to be an everyday player. He wanted to make an impact. To be one of the core guys. Monty really searched for that kind of respect and stability. I think he chased it throughout his career. He was a great 5–6 pairing guy, but he was never going to be anything other than that.” Steve was the type of player that moves around, and goes from team to team. “He didn’t have to worry about family,” Nieuwendyk says. If he was traded, or became a free agent, “He was a guy that could say, ‘Okay, gotta close up the apartment. I’m off to the next stop.’”

On the ice or off, Steve could fit in everywhere, and not make a home anywhere.

—

Late in the season, Steve celebrated a milestone. “Monty invited me to his one-year anniversary of being sober,” Gélinas says, “where AA gave him that medal. It was pretty special.”