CHAPTER SIXTEEN

As Steve was about to begin his career in Chicago, Marc Savard was ending his in Boston—and in the NHL.

For fourteen seasons, Savard had made magic. He wasn’t big for a hockey player, even as a kid. But he was a good skater, and what set him apart was that he could “see” the game. He always seemed to know what should happen next—and then, with hands as quick and adept as his mind, with a soft pass, he would make it happen. His joy was making plays. Offensive plays, his critics sometimes pointed out, not defensive ones. Twice he was the OHL’s scoring champion, playing for the Oshawa Generals, but he was drafted only in the fourth round by the Rangers, the 91st overall pick, because of his size. He spent his first two seasons of professional hockey moving between the Rangers and their farm team in Hartford, then got his chance after being traded to Calgary. For the remaining twelve years of his NHL career—first with the Flames, then the Atlanta Thrashers and the Bruins—he would be one of the top and most reliable scorers on his team.

During his junior years in Oshawa, Savard had discovered Peterborough, only an hour away. In years after, he would work out in the summers with Jay, Nick, Keats, and Steve. He and Steve also overlapped in parts of two seasons with the Flames. His career ended in 2011 after suffering a concussion, his second in ten months, while playing with the Bruins.

Savard remembers the concussions he had as a kid, but now only because he has reason to think of them. At the time, they seemed to be only big hits, moments that teammates would laugh at and reenact in the dressing room, as he did theirs; tough lessons that were learned the hard way. There was that game in Metcalfe, just south of Ottawa. He was playing Junior B, only fifteen years old—some players in the league were three or four years older. It was early in the season, and he was cutting through the centre of the ice, reaching for a pass, and got blasted. “I remember pretty much blacking out,” he says, “then crawling to the bench. I said to my dad after the game, ‘Geez, Dad, maybe we made a bad decision here. There are some big fellas in this league.’ My dad just said, ‘Let’s stick with it a bit more and see how it goes.’ I don’t think I missed any games.”

He also recalls an NHL game, with the Flames. “It was after a whistle, there was a little bit of a melee and a guy punched me in the back of the helmet.” Savard went to the bench, the trainer checked him out and asked him how he was. He said he was fine—“You’re a hockey player. That’s what you say”—and played the rest of the game. The next night, in the second period, he suddenly started to feel nauseous and tired. What followed, Savard says, “was like a week of hell.” The nausea eventually went away, but the fatigue stayed. “I was exhausted. I slept for three days straight.” But then he started to feel better, and after a week he was back. “I just played on, and everything seemed good.”

His next concussion came a few years later, when he was playing with Atlanta in a game against Montreal. “The Bell Centre had seamless glass and it was rock hard,” he recalls. “[Stéphane] Quintal hit me behind the net and my head hit the glass. I’m not even sure how much I missed that time.” In fact, he was out ten days. “But it was the same kind of thing. I was exhausted.”

Savard knew his body. If his shoulder felt a certain way, often even before a doctor or trainer told him, he knew that he’d be out of the lineup day to day, or seven-to-ten days, or he would try to play through it and not stop playing at all. He had had several knee injuries. He knew the symptoms and treatment. He knew how his knee would feel each day, and through each stage of healing, and he knew he would get better. Injuries are just a part of the normal rhythm of a season and of a career. They were not, and could not be, his focus. His focus was healing and health. It was getting back in the lineup. It was playing. No matter how severe, an injury is almost never career-ending when it happens. If doctors, procedures, and medications aren’t the answer, time and hope might be.

By this time, Savard was beginning to know his head as well as he did his knee. After each damaging hit, he knew he would feel an incredible fatigue that would last a few days, then he would start to feel better, and then he would go back to play.

Savard calls his next concussion the “massive one.” And while it represented the turning point of his career and was the cause of great debate in the media and around the league for days afterwards, Savard isn’t sure when it happened. “I think it was April, maybe January or February.” In fact, it was March 7, 2010. “I just got hit, and I don’t recall the hit at all. I was out cold for thirty seconds.”

The Bruins were in Pittsburgh; the Penguins were leading 2–1 with less than six minutes remaining in the game. Boston forward Milan Lucic carried the puck down the left side, crossed the blue line, and passed the puck back into the middle to Savard. Penguins forward Matt Cooke saw the play developing and moved across the ice towards him. Savard took his shot, the puck left his stick, and he was extended into his follow-through and completely blind to Cooke cruising into range. At the moment Savard was at his most defenceless, Cooke, moving several miles an hour, struck Savard’s head with the full force of his 200-plus-pound body, making only incidental contact with the rest of Savard. Savard’s head snapped around, his body swung out of control to the ice. He lay on his back, motionless except for occasional twitches of a hand or foot, and then was carried off. In his team’s dressing room after the game, Cooke explained, “I just finished my check.” He was not penalized on the play.

The Bruins flew to Toronto for their next game; Savard remained in Pittsburgh at the team’s hotel. The following day he was seen by a doctor, did some tests, and was released, and he flew back to Boston. “I was just feeling frustrated,” he recalls, “and irritable. I couldn’t wait to get home. When I got there I remember just shutting the door and saying, ‘I’m going to bed.’ Then I just slept and slept and slept.”

He wanted darkness, silence, stillness. He wanted to be alone. So he slept during the day and stayed awake all night. He had always been something of a happy-go-lucky guy, but now people made him irritable, as he says, and he didn’t know why; and he didn’t like feeling that way, and he didn’t like not wanting to have people around him. But people brought light, and movement, and noise, and all of these things suddenly seemed to him so bright and quick and loud. “Everything bothered me,” Savard says.

This continued for weeks with little change. “These were some of the toughest days in my life. I just didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel at that point. I felt like crap every day.”

He’s not sure whether it was because his symptoms diminished or, as he put it, “the hockey player in me started to come out because the playoffs were just around the corner.” But he started to get excited; he had something to look forward to. He took the tests he needed to take, and passed them. “I got back on the bike and started working out again. I was getting myself ready for the playoffs. Sometimes, I admit, when they asked me how I felt, I told them great, and told myself great, because I wanted to play.”

The Bruins lost the first game of their first-round series against Buffalo; Savard was skating but not yet ready to play. As his return got closer, the Bruins started winning, so Savard rested a little longer. Boston won the series in six games, and in the next round they faced the Flyers. Savard returned to play.

Not playing for two months, jumping back into the fire of the playoffs, Savard didn’t know how he would feel. “I don’t remember the total feeling I had,” he says. “I remember feeling just still tired.” It was a different kind of fatigue. It had nothing to do with the state of his conditioning. It was as if his life-energy had been sucked out of him. “Suddenly, I just didn’t have anything to draw from.” The first game went into overtime; Savard scored the winning goal.

The Bruins won Game 2; Boston coach Claude Julien was carefully monitoring Savard’s ice time, limiting him to about fifteen minutes a game. In the third game, Bruins centre David Krejčí broke his wrist in the first period. Krejčí had taken over some of Savard’s roles when Savard was injured; now Savard needed to do the same for him. The Bruins won Game 3.

The fourth game went into overtime; Savard played over twenty-four minutes, the most of any Boston forward. The Flyers won, cutting the Bruins’ series lead to 3–1. At first, Savard had tried to persuade himself that he was tired because he hadn’t played in the previous weeks. Then, he thought, maybe if I keep playing I’ll feel better. When Game 4 was over, Savard recalls, “I don’t say anything to anybody, but I’m done.”

The Flyers won the last three games, and the series. When the round was over, the Boston Globe wrote, “Marc Savard didn’t have the ending he wanted. In 15:53 of ice time, Savard had three shots, was on the ice for two Philly goals, lost 7 of 10 faceoffs, and was involved in the too-many-men blunder in the third. Clearly, Savard needed more time to recover his touch after missing two months because of a Grade 2 concussion.”

“After the series, I went into a bit of a depression,” Savard says. He was tired, but he was used to being tired. He was disappointed, but he had been disappointed before. This was something more. “I really felt horrible. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know what’s going on with me. I don’t feel like myself.’ I was just feeling down, really down on myself. Down on everything.” His girlfriend, now his wife, was in Peterborough. “I basically didn’t want to be with her because I was just irritable. I didn’t want to talk. I think I was pretty mean at the time.”

He went back to Peterborough, took it easy, slept, but nothing changed. When training camp began in September, he was still in Peterborough. Later that month, he drove to Boston and spoke at a press conference. The next day, Kevin Paul Dupont of the Boston Globe reported:

A somber Marc Savard, his eyes welling up a couple of times, stood in the TD Garden dressing room yesterday morning and made it clear he won’t be able to play hockey for a while.

“I am definitely going to take my time,” said the Bruins’ No. 1 center, “and make sure that I am 100 percent in every aspect before I even think about playing.” What ails Savard, in the broad and often-ambiguous definition, is postconcussion syndrome.

Dupont then listed the most common effects: “nausea, headaches, dizziness, seeing spots, and depression.” When he asked Savard the most difficult one for him to deal with, Savard replied, “Oh, probably the depression part.” The article states that “his tone [was] somber, his emotions clearly stirred.”

“With no training camp,” Savard recalls, “I was having a tough time. I didn’t know what I really wanted to do. I wasn’t really interested in hockey because of what I’d been through.” But now he was in Boston. “I got back to being around the rink, and seeing the guys, and then I started working out a bit.”

He started feeling better again.

On November 19, Savard got the go-ahead to begin practising with the team. After his first workout, he reported that he felt “great.” Four days later, he went to Pittsburgh to be tested by Dr. Micky Collins, a well-known clinical psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The session lasted six hours. “I went through tests that I’d never gone through in my life,” Savard says. The clinic’s staff pushed him almost to the point of exhaustion, then at his weakest, they tested him some more. He was also given the baseline tests that he had done every year at training camp. “In some areas I passed with flying colours, and in others, I wasn’t any worse than I had been before. They said I was ready to go if I felt ready to go.”

Savard was now cleared to participate in contact drills.

His press conference in September about his depression and recovery had touched a nerve in big, tough Bruins fans. In an interview in late November, Savard spoke of how important the support of those fans had been to his recovery. “[Y]ou find out that so many people have struggled with this thing. All those letters from fans. I got at least [ten] thousand….I was going through a tough time, then to read those stories….It’s pretty incredible, huh?”

Since that game in Pittsburgh almost nine months before, Savard had had one wish: “I wanted to feel normal again. I wanted to do normal stuff.” So he did all kinds of treatments and took all manner of tests so the dizziness and depression would go away, and mostly they did. Then he realized that the absence of symptoms didn’t make him feel normal; only playing did. If his symptoms wouldn’t go away, that didn’t mean he couldn’t play. That meant he had to play. This wasn’t about feeling normal to play hockey. This was about playing hockey to feel normal. Normal was playing hockey.

There was nothing in the tests that said he shouldn’t try. It was up to him, and how he felt. “I was on the ice a lot more, and skating and working with the workout coach,” Savard recalls, “just getting ready for that day to come again where I could play.”

It didn’t take long. “I don’t remember the date. I just remember the crowd and the standing ovation. It was a really great night for me. I was a little emotional. I missed playing so much. And after that I started to feel pretty good.” He was “with the guys again, doing the everyday stuff that I’d done for the last fourteen years. I’m good. I’m good.” Three weeks and ten games later, a story in the Boston Herald describes him as “a shadow of his former self.”

“I wasn’t as effective, that’s for sure,” he says about his play after he returned. “I’m a guy that saw the ice really well, and was always a step ahead.” Now it was as if everything was just there as it happened. He wasn’t foreseeing anything. A big player can power his way to open ice; everyone else has to get there first. If Savard couldn’t do that, his whole game wouldn’t work. He’d always have to play in a scrum of bigger, stronger players, with no space or time to see the ice, to make his magic.

To quiet his doubts, he told himself that he hadn’t played for the better part of a year. It had only been one bad game, after all, or two, or only one bad week, or two. He just needed to get his feel for the game back, and then he’d be able to see everything better and faster again. He just had to stick with it.

Things did come back in time, Savard remembers, at least here and there. “I definitely had some moments where I felt real good. I had a couple of games that I felt like my old self. Making play after play some nights, then I’d go about three games not doing anything. But then having another good night.” He looks back on that time and on himself, and says, “I never thought about this until I stopped playing, but I don’t think I had it anymore.”

On January 15, 2011, the Bruins were trailing Pittsburgh, 3–2, in the third period in Boston. Savard skated the puck up the right boards across the Penguins’ blue line and, with time, turned to face across the ice, waiting for his teammates to get into scoring position. Pittsburgh defenceman Deryk Engelland closed in on him. Engelland is a few inches taller and was skating in a mostly upright position. Savard, bent slightly, made the pass as Engelland, with his hands and arms extended, pushed Savard’s head into the glass. Savard went down on his knees, holding his head. The Bruins trainer rushed out. Quickly, Savard was up and skated to the bench, and was back playing on his next shift.

After the game, he said he was “a little woozy.” The next day, his neck was sore, but he had no concussion symptoms. He had received a blow to the head, but except for a few short-term side effects, he was fine, he thought. This was a good test. He must be healing.

A week later, the Bruins were playing the Avalanche in Denver. Savard chased down a loose puck in the Colorado zone, almost into the left corner. Avalanche defenceman Matt Hunwick went with him, and as Savard made his pass behind the net, Hunwick—with a short, sharp motion—drove into him, Savard’s body hitting the boards, his head hitting the glass. “It wasn’t anything massive,” Savard recalls. “But I remember falling to my knees and seeing black again. And I’m in a bit of a panic, and I stay there, and when my eyes come back, I could see dots. I remember seeing the trainer coming out and I told him, ‘I think I’m done. I just can’t do this.’”

What disturbed Savard so much was the sheer routineness of the play, the kind of hit that can happen a few times in any game. To Savard, it now didn’t matter what he felt like the next day, whether his symptoms were better or worse than before. It wouldn’t matter what doctor he saw, or what tests he passed. “I had battled through it all. I tried three times to play again, and it just wasn’t going to happen. It was the last game I played.”

It is now several years later. “I feel pretty good,” Savard says. “I still have my issues. When I say ‘pretty good,’ my wife will tell you that I’m not good. I have some anxiety, some panic situations that I get medication for. But I don’t get too many headaches anymore. I have some memory issues, especially the short-term. But other than that I’m pretty happy. I help out with hockey, and try to keep myself occupied, and that’s a big thing for me.”

He had never had panic attacks before. “I ended up going to the emergency twice a few years ago. I thought I was having a heart attack. They tested me and told me my heart was fine.” He skates occasionally, but takes that pretty easy. He plays golf all summer and is still good enough to play in some Canadian Tour events. He has started working out again with a trainer. “But it’s just thirty minutes a day,” he says. “Nothing strenuous. Just to keep me active.” As for any kind of nine-to-five job, “That would be impossible, I think.”

He and his wife saw the movie Concussion shortly after it came out. “It was quite moving for us to watch. She was really disturbed,” he says. “It kind of scared me seeing what happened to some of these guys later on in life, and their anger issues, and what they were doing. I was basically telling myself that they had taken way more blows to the head than I ever did. It was the only way I could say to myself that it’s not going to happen to me, right?

“I just try to keep everything normal and to live a normal life. So that’s kind of what I’ve been doing.” Hockey was always at the centre of normal. Now he has a new normal: “Going to the kids’ hockey, raising a little girl, playing golf, spending time with my wife, and just trying to be happy.”

“It was sure a difficult time in my life,” he says, thinking back. “It’s not something that I’ve ever really talked about. I try to stay out of the spotlight. But I guess stuff needs to be said at some point.”