CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Steve had not played for almost a year. Chicago could now send him to Rockford for up to fourteen days on a “conditioning loan,” to get him into playing shape. Or they could put him on waivers, which would allow every other team twenty-four hours to claim him, and his contract, with no compensation to the Blackhawks in return. If Steve were in Rockford, or on the roster of another NHL team, Chicago would get some relief under the league’s salary cap, yet this late in the season they would have no opportunity to use that relief to acquire another player for their playoff run. Given Steve’s injury, his age, his contract, and because the Blackhawks no longer thought he could help them, they put him on waivers. No other team claimed him.

Now Steve had his own choice. He could see the demotion to Rockford as one more blow in a season full of very big blows, and put front and centre in his mind the headaches and depression he was experiencing so that nothing else in his life mattered. Or he could still pick up his same paycheque for the rest of the season and for two more seasons—not risk further injury, and not subject himself further to this psyche-crushing, soul-crushing cycle of hope and despair.

He could go easy and feel lousy. Or he could go hard and feel lousy. To Steve, why not go hard? Why not play? Why not hope?

Steve made his debut for the Rockford IceHogs on March 15. It was his first AHL game in more than nine years. He thought he could help the IceHogs in the way he had always helped his team: being aggressive, pushing, forcing, never letting up. But not having played in almost a year, he wasn’t so sure of what he could do and what he couldn’t. He didn’t have the same feel for the game, or for himself. But he was certain he could help the team off the ice, as the experienced veteran who had played more than 500 games in “the Show.” He had done what his new teammates had only dreamed of doing.

With the IceHogs, he would arrive early for practice and stay late, he would work hard and train hard, he would put all of himself into what he was doing, as if he wasn’t sorry for a second that he was where he was—and not where he wasn’t. And if he did, what right would his new, young teammates have not to do the same themselves?

After practice, he went to lunch with them. Often he bought; after all, he was the one with the big NHL contract. Sometimes he took them to dinner. He told them again and again what he knew and what they could only hope—that the NHL was not that far away. That, sure, there were the Toews and Kanes and Keiths, the franchise-defining players, but there wasn’t much difference between the rest of the team and them. “Look at me,” he said to them. Sometimes in the NHL he’d been a 3–4 defenceman, usually a 5–6, sometimes a 7; always on the verge of being an 8 or 9 and out of the league. His IceHog teammates needed to know that they were amazingly, shockingly close. They had only to keep working, preparing, getting better for tomorrow by focusing only on today, because someday on the big team there would be an injury, a trade, a cap problem, and they would get their chance. But they had to be ready, because if they weren’t, that chance would pass to somebody else who wasn’t much different from them either, and who was ready.

Steve talked to his young teammates as if they mattered, and listened to them as if they had something to say. He had his own down moments—how could he not?—but never for long. “He knew he had a purpose,” Missy explains, “and he thought, ‘This is my purpose now. To help these kids.’” As Steve had with every team he played on, he did what needed to be done.

He was a player, not an NHL player or a veteran player, and his IceHog teammates were players, too. Less than a week after he arrived, he did an interview with the IceHogs Broadcasting Network. It was after practice in a poorly lit corridor near the ice; Steve was still wearing his jersey. The interviewer, in several different ways, asked him what it was like—to be playing again; to be back in the AHL. Steve said, “It’s a real blessing to be down here,” and that he was “definitely rusty,” and glad to have played his first two games on back-to-back nights so that he didn’t have time to worry too much about the challenges of returning to the game. On the ice, he said, he was still thinking about “where I’m supposed to be” rather than just being there. But while this community-station interview in Rockford, Illinois, was a long way from his scrum with the national media just outside Toronto the previous summer, he sounded upbeat. He looked at the interviewer the same way, listened the same way, paused before he spoke, and answered the same way.

The IceHogs had started the year slowly, improved in the second half of the season, and were still many points out of a playoff spot when Steve arrived. He played fourteen of the team’s final seventeen games, in which Rockford went 12–4–1, winning eight of their last nine games, and missed the playoffs by only two points. Steve got into one fight. The circumstances were predictable. The IceHogs were on the road, playing against their in-state rival, the Peoria Rivermen. Behind 3–2 in the second period, Steve went after Stefan Della Rovere of the Rivermen, they shoved, Della Rovere knocked off Steve’s helmet, then the two of them mostly held on to each other before the linesmen intervened. The IceHogs came back and won the game, 5–4. Steve was willing to do what players do and take the risk, even in a minor league that would take him nowhere.

When the Rockford season ended, Steve and seven of his IceHog teammates were brought up by the Blackhawks. The spares on every hockey team, those added for the hoped-for long, injury-laden slog of the playoffs, are known as the “Black Aces.” The legend goes that when “Wild Bill” Hickok was murdered playing poker he was holding two black eights and two black aces, what came to be known as the “dead man’s hand.” The Black Aces are a hockey team’s “dead.” Their unwanted. They practice in the same arena as the big team, but they have their own dressing room and practice time, lest they “infect” the regulars. And they love everything about being there. They get the taste of an NHL city during the playoffs, the feeling of excitement and importance that is everywhere, all the while dreaming that with the manager and coaches of the big team looking on, they will be spotted, rushed off the practice ice, and into the starting lineup for the series-deciding game, with only fabulously fulfilled dreams ahead.

Steve organized the golf games before the Black Aces’ practices, just as he had for Crosby and Tavares at Vail. He was the unofficial captain of the Black Aces. When the Blackhawks were in Minnesota for their opening-round series against the Wild, Steve, being back in Chicago, invited the guys over to his place, where they ordered in food and watched the games. Chicago beat the Wild, then the Red Wings, and Kings, finally winning the Cup against the Bruins. The team played twenty-three games; only one of the Black Aces, winger Ben Smith, played at all: 10:23 minutes in the third game of the final series. By that time, Steve was gone.

—

Mike Keating remembers the day. He had left Peterborough earlier in the week and was driving to Chicago. “Hey, I’m coming to see you,” he said to Steve. The Blackhawks were playing the Red Wings and were down three games to one in their series. “And Monty says, ‘Hope you brought a suit.’” Keats was too excited to ask him why. “So I get there, we’re at the arena and he’s got me walking in with all the players, going through the back corridors and up into the stands. He treated me like I was one of the guys. I ended up sitting with him on one side and [retired Hall of Fame defenceman] Chris Chelios on the other. That night he found out he was being sent home.”

The Blackhawks were in the midst of a tough series against Detroit. They hoped to have two more rounds of playoffs ahead. Steve had come back late in the year, played when he felt like crap, fought, almost helped the IceHogs into the playoffs, and was a Black Ace for the first time in his career. The day Keats arrived, a few of the other Black Aces had been told to join the big team, to practice with them and travel on the road. The rest were told they weren’t needed. Steve was one of them.

“When that happened,” Keats recalls, “it broke him a little bit.”

The next day, Steve did his exit examination with Dr. Terry, who reported “no complaints, symptoms or issues re: concussion.” He listed Steve as “Not disabled” on his Fitness to Play Determination Form.

Later in the day, Steve went out with Keats and some of the other now-former Black Aces. Keats ordered a glass of wine, Steve reached over and drank half of it. Keats was stunned. “Hey, c’mon man,” he said, “I don’t agree with this.” A short time later, Steve sent a text to Missy. “I’m drinking,” it said.

“That was the day that changed everything,” she says. His drink with Keats and the guys turned into a ten-day binge.

The Blackhawks won the Cup; Steve had a four-year contract with the team, but Steve didn’t win the Cup. A team goes through things together; it loses and wins together. The players know who is a member of the team and who isn’t, and that season Steve was a member of the Rockford IceHogs. Daniel Carcillo had played four games for the Blackhawks in the playoffs; he was a Stanley Cup winner. Steve tried to be angry about how he felt. He tried to feel sorry for himself. He just felt one more sadness.

A few days after his binge, he checked back into rehab. For the next twenty-one months, he would have some good days—and many more bad ones.

On June 27, three days after Chicago had won the Stanley Cup, general manager Stan Bowman announced that the team would be using one of its two compliance buyouts on Steve. With the Cup win, many of the Blackhawks players had earned bigger contracts, and the league’s salary cap would not be rising sufficiently to meet these new demands. By unloading Steve’s contract, the team would save $2.75 million in cap space in each of the next two seasons. Compliance buyouts had been agreed to during the last CBA negotiations—the ones in which Steve had played a part during his dark days at The Canyon Center. He would get his money, but at his age and in his state of health, he needed a contract to protect him, and that was gone. What he had helped to negotiate had ensured the end of his NHL career.

His days in rehab over, Steve felt well enough to become hopeful again. He went to see Dr. Kutcher in Ann Arbor, and Dr. Carrick in Atlanta. When he got back he was all excited. “I’m good,” he told his friends. “My head is clear.” He was proud of himself. He was working out again; he was going to AA meetings; he was sober. He had a plan. Kurt Overhardt, his agent, started calling around to NHL teams. There were no takers. But Steve was undiscouraged. He hadn’t really played for a year and a half, he said to himself. He’d have to prove himself again. But he was feeling better, and he got his buyout; if he had to play in Eastern Europe in the KHL, then that was the next best league, and it didn’t have to be forever. He would get in a full year of play, and then he would only be thirty-four, still lots of time for a 5–6 defenceman. He might get another shot. Then he’d know, he’d know for sure, if he could still play. He didn’t want to go out this way. He had come into the league as an undrafted free agent; he would go out on his own terms. Besides, playing in the KHL would be an adventure.

On August 11, 2013, he signed with Medvescak Zagreb. “Steve is a defender who played 10 years in the NHL and [in] four seasons he had more than 20 points per season,” Aaron Fox, Zagreb’s “athletic director,” said on the team’s website. “[He] has fully recovered from a concussion, is completely healthy…[and] will bring added stability to our blue line.”

Zagreb is Croatia’s capital and biggest city, with a population of almost one million. Medvescak had previously been in the Austrian League, and was one of only three clubs in the twenty-eight-team KHL located outside the old Soviet Republics. The other two were in two traditional hockey countries: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The KHL season began in early September. Medvescak, as a new team, would need to be put together quickly; Steve had to get there for training almost right away. Among his new teammates were Jonathan Cheechoo, who in 2005–06 with San Jose, had led the NHL in goals with 56, and Matt Murley, who Steve had played against in the Quebec peewee tournament twenty years earlier.

Zagreb would finish sixth out of the fourteen teams in the league’s Western Conference—ahead of CSKA, the legendary Red Army team of Moscow—and make the playoffs. But the road trips were long and punishing, drinking came easy for Steve and the others, and Steve’s concussion symptoms wouldn’t go away. After eleven games, he came home.

He had been bought out by the Blackhawks, received no offers from other NHL teams, and had left the KHL behind. He had no place left to go. His phone still might ring, and he would keep on training in case it did, but this time Steve knew he was done. Until this moment, everything had been about his career. Now it was about his life.

He still had his place in Chicago, or he could go back to Toronto, but now without a team he had no real home. George Parros, his former Anaheim Ducks teammate, was playing in Montreal but had kept his condo in Hermosa Beach, and Steve rented it from him. One of a string of beach communities south of Santa Monica, Hermosa Beach was affluent, mostly young, with lots of cafés, bars, and beach-shack restaurants. Its biggest employer was 24 Hour Fitness. It was also a place for serious surfers, paddle-boarders, and beach volleyball players. It was a place for Steve to get some distance, thousands of miles away from his friends and family, from his old life, from too many people who would ask him too many questions. He had some thinking to do. He had to get himself back together and sort out what he would do next. With its sun and sea, Hermosa Beach was a place for him to get healthy.

He had no practices to get up for or games to play. He didn’t have teammates with needs he had to meet, or coaches he had to please. He didn’t have fresh injuries to heal. He could hang out at Starbucks with his laptop and live a summer life all year round. Nobody knew him here; he had no expectations to live up to. He had never liked to tell people he met that he was a hockey player. He certainly didn’t need to tell anyone now. He was single. He had money. He could put together the pieces of his life however he wanted them to fit.

He could also be alone. Nobody could just drop in. He could text or call his family or friends when he wanted, whenever he had something to say and was ready to say it, and everybody would be thrilled to hear from him. He could do it on “good brain days,” as Missy describes them, when he was sharp, and up, and able to sound just like Monty, and whoever he texted or called, he knew, would text or call others, and they all would say, “Monty sounds great. He’s surfing and paddleboarding. He’s in his flip-flops and doing a million things,” and they would all laugh and know he was all right because this was the Monty they knew. All of which would give him even greater freedom to do what he wanted to do, and to hide.

But the dark clouds wouldn’t go away.

Just before Christmas 2013, Nick Robinson, one of his Peterborough buddies, visited him. “Monty picked me up at the airport,” Nick recalls. “He was coming from this hypnotherapist and he had lost his wallet. So we spent the next hour and a half retracing his steps, going to all the places he had been that morning and afternoon. Then he gets this call, and the wallet’s at the hypnotherapist’s. That was my first experience with his memory problems.”

Nick wasn’t entirely surprised to find out that Steve had been drinking again. He hadn’t heard from him much in the previous few months, which was unusual. Nick had had a problem with drinking himself when he was younger, and had used Steve as his inspiration and changed his life. Now he feared Steve was turning away from those he needed most, right at the time when he most needed them—because he was embarrassed, because he didn’t want anybody to see this Steve.

But in the few days he was with him, Nick also realized Steve’s problem wasn’t just alcohol. “He was taking medication for depression and anxiety. He was having convulsions from all his concussions. I was also concerned about the decisions he was making, and the way he was talking and thinking. Monty was always a very deep thinker,” Nick says. “He would speak logically. He would speak effectively. He would speak articulately. And he was a very good listener. That’s why the dialogue between us was always so great. He would talk; I would talk; it was always fifty-fifty. Now he talked and talked and wouldn’t listen.” After a few days, Nick had to return to New York to go back to work.

Steve had no continuity in his life. No co-workers who saw him every day. He had nobody to return home to, no wife, no partner, no roommate who might notice something. Steve was on his own, just the way he wanted it.

A few weeks after his visit, Nick got a call from Steve. “I’ll never forget it. Monty says, ‘I’m going to follow your lead, chum. I am going back into the program.’ It was a pretty fantastic moment,” says Nick, “because I felt there was hope.”

Steve still saw Daniel Carcillo occasionally. Carcillo had been traded to the Kings that summer, and the two of them spent Christmas together. “I could tell that something was up with his head,” Carcillo recalls. “He was always forgetting his phone or his keys, and he didn’t really look you in the eye when he was speaking to you, or hold your gaze like he used to. It just looked like he was hurting.” Carcillo also knew what Steve was doing in all the hours he wasn’t biking or training or dreaming of what he might do next; what he was doing at Starbucks with his laptop. “He was researching concussions,” Carcillo says, “and what the fuck was going to happen to him because of them. And the more knowledge he gained, it seemed the worse he got, realizing maybe that he wasn’t going to reverse the symptoms and the memory loss and the headaches.” Carcillo had sustained several concussions himself. He knew that Steve was now doing a million different things because he loved to do a million different things, but also because he needed to keep his mind racing so he didn’t feel his headaches or his anxiety or his depression or anything about anybody, especially himself. But a million things weren’t always enough.

And when they weren’t enough, Steve drank; and when he drank two, he drank ten. For more than seven years he had fought those battles and won. Now he was losing. He no longer had a life-structure around him; the incentives of his career and of money were gone and not coming back, and he knew that, and he hated that. But he had so many other lives to live, and a whole big world to discover and learn about, and new people, and all the time and money he needed to do that. But what he didn’t have, what was gone and not coming back—and what he hated even more and couldn’t live without—was himself. He could still trot out the old Monty (or what he thought others thought the old Monty was, the one they loved), but not very often. And that Monty wasn’t Steve now. That Monty was gone.

“He knew what was going on with him,” Carcillo says. “He had all those extra sets of keys made. You don’t do that if you don’t know something.”

Steve tried to focus on what he might do next. He was good looking, he spoke well, he was smart and funny, he could be outrageous; players liked him and would talk to him. He could do something in broadcasting with one of the NHL teams or with the NHL Network. Or something with the NHLPA. He was a player through and through, and had a player’s mentality. He had been involved in two CBA negotiations; he was active and committed; he worked hard and did his homework. In the midst of his suicidal thoughts in the rehab centre in California, he had helped to get the CBA deal done. The NHLPA could be his new team, and he could help all those players in the league who were going through what he was.

Or he could help players from the team side of things. He hadn’t been drafted; he’d had to work his way into the league. He’d always had to improve, and to prove himself. He was a good teammate, and he had been through so much. Teams were getting younger. He had always worked well with young guys: he related to them, and they related to him. He could get involved in a team’s player development, for example. Craig Button, his old GM in Calgary, even imagined something bigger for him. Steve knew everything about a team and how it operated—not only about players and coaches, but about managers, owners, scouts, trainers, fitness people, and the guys who cleaned the arena—because he talked to everyone, and listened to everyone. Button thought Steve might run an NHL team someday.

There was also the possibility of doing something outside of hockey. He was a part-owner of Andy O’Brien’s gym in Etobicoke. The two of them had talked about what they might do together: O’Brien, the fitness guru; Steve, the spirit of a gym. Or they might do something different and new. A few years earlier, when he was living in Calgary, O’Brien had turned a house he rented into what he called a “Bed & Barbell,” with a gym in the basement, a yoga area, and an office suite where he did presentations on training and nutrition. “It was designed so that the athletes could stay with us for a couple of days and experience what it’s like to eat and train a certain way.” Steve had visited him and loved what he saw. “We even had organic bedsheets,” O’Brien recalls, “which Monty thought was the coolest thing.” Someday, the two of them might do something like this together, only bigger.

Or he could help out with different charities. He had once gone to Tanzania with the Right to Play organization, along with his Flames and Bruins teammate Andrew Ference. And if not Right to Play, then some other organization or group where he could help people. “He was always the first to care about something,” O’Brien says. “I really believed that his hockey career would have been the least of his accomplishments.”

And, of course, Steve being Steve, there would be some fliers in his future. “He was always the locker-room guy with the next big idea,” Vally says with a laugh. A clinic with one of Carrick’s gyroscopes; an online poker site in Russia. “He had this guy who was able to take money from North America, apparently legally, through a wired account and funnel it to Russia, because the headquarters were there. Monty called me and wanted me to invest in it. I said, ‘Monty, I don’t have the money,’ and he said, ‘That’s OK, I’ll front it for you, chum.’ I get off the phone and tell my wife. She’s like, “He’s crazy.’ I said, ‘Yep, he is.’”

Steve made calls on his good days in Hermosa Beach, but more often, unable to escape his present to think about his future, he was on his laptop, reading about all the products and treatments that might make his head better, all the ways of looking at life that might make him a better person. One time he called Vally and told him he had joined a group for sex addicts. Vally told him he wasn’t a sex addict, and accused him of being addicted to rehab groups. “But, Vally, Vally,” Steve said, “if I abstain from sex for eighteen months, then it’s going to be the most amazing experience, and I’ll get a better understanding of which girl is right for me.” Vally recalls, “He was months into it when he stopped.”

Steve also joined various men’s organizations. One called itself MDI, Mentor Discover Inspire. Its mission: “To cause greatness by mentoring men to live with excellence and, as mature masculine leaders, create successful families, careers and communities.” Another was called Full Spectrum Man, created by David Fabricius, a self-described “world renowned leadership, sales-motivation and life optimization speaker resource, a master executive coach, Fire-Walk facilitator and specialist trainer.” Its members went on two-day, sun-rise-to-sunset, intense mind-body-spirit training adventures. Steve liked the way the men talked, the meaning that they sought, the way they cared for each other. They didn’t know what Steve had done before or who he had been. They only knew what they heard when he spoke.

Steve wrote about these groups in his journal, about their principles and purposes, and why they mattered to him. But by this time, late winter 2014, his writing is hard to decipher, his thoughts were often incomplete and difficult to comprehend. Later his entries grew even more frenetic, then got better, then got worse, until they almost stopped.

Steve hadn’t seen his family or most of his buddies for months. But during one email exchange, his brother Chris had suggested that they create an annual tradition, a brothers’ trip to a Stanley Cup Final game. The Rangers had advanced and were going to play the Kings in the 2014 final. The two of them could meet up in New York. Vally, who was now working for the Rangers, could arrange the tickets. They might even see Nick. Early in June 2014, Steve flew to Toronto on his way to New York.

He called Vally from Toronto; Vally told him he’d pick him up at the airport. “Then he says to me, ‘I am going to fly private.’ And I say, ‘Monty, private is 8,000 dollars…250 bucks can get you to Hartford.’” Vally pauses. “He flies private. So he arrives and comes into my place like a bull in a china shop, right away to the fridge, grabbing beers, throwing them back. My mother-in-law, who loves him, stayed up all night with him, trying to talk to him. I woke up in the morning and he was out on the beach with a dozen beers around him in a lawn chair, on the phone. He hadn’t slept. We had a day planned where we were going to feed the kids and go paddleboarding. Now he had to sleep.” The next day was no better. “He’s on the phone, and I’m like, ‘Monty, what are you doing?’ And he says, ‘I’m trying to get a helicopter to go to the city for the game. I don’t want to get stuck in traffic.’ And I’m like ‘Monty, where do you plan to land the helicopter?’ He says, ‘On the beach.’ And I’m like, ‘Monty, what the hell are you doing, man?’ In the end, he took a cab, but he was rude. He was angry. He couldn’t hold a thought.” The weekend was a disaster.

It was the last time Vally saw Steve.

About this time, Steve met Chantelle Robidoux. Chantelle was from Buffalo but had moved to L.A. after high school, more than a decade earlier. She had two friends back home who had married former Sabres players—and teammates of Steve—Rhett Warrener and Sean O’Donnell. Her friends introduced Chantelle to Steve in L.A. A few months later, Chantelle told Steve she was pregnant. Steve, with a hundred thoughts in his head, now had one more.

In late August, Mike Keating visited Steve in L.A. Keats was excited to see Steve; Steve was not excited to see him. “He just wanted to be as far away from everybody as possible,” Keats recalls. “I’d say, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ And the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Everyone’s all over me.’” On this trip, Keats says, “I started to realize this was much more serious than I thought.”

Steve told Keats about the “men’s groups,” and about how they were going to open his mind. “He thought if he couldn’t fix what was already broken, maybe he could open up more of what was already there.” He told Keats about all the other things he was taking and doing. “He had these pills that stop your anxiety. He had pills that stop your depression. I said to him, ‘We know rehab doesn’t work for you. We know AA doesn’t work. Obviously, these mentors don’t work either. What are you looking for?’”

Steve also told Keats about Chantelle and the baby. Steve didn’t know what to do, Keats remembers. He didn’t know what to think. He rambled. Keats interrupted him and told him he thought that the baby might be the answer he needed. He would now have a child to focus on. “Hey, this is the only thing in your life that I haven’t seen you do a hundred per cent,” Keats told him. “Whatever you don’t know, you’ll figure out. You’ve just got to step up.” Steve thought Keats might be right, and got excited, and then panicked, and then he didn’t know.

“I remember one day in L.A., and we were just done,” Keats says. Wrung out. “There was nothing more to say and we started crying. It was like, ‘What’s going on? How? Why?’ And I knew we couldn’t answer our own questions. Finally, I said, ‘Today is going to be a better day than yesterday. Yes it is.’ And I wrote on his mirror, ‘Today is a good day,’ because Monty used to write messages on his mirror all the time. And when he saw it, we laughed, and it was like ‘Yeah, yeah, okay, here we go.’”

In September, Nick Robinson got married in Greece and Steve was one of his groomsmen. Nick had arranged everything. He lined up boat excursions and dinners for all of the guests. Everyone would get there a week early. There would be twenty-five of them in all, the Peterborough hockey guys—Steve, Keats, and Jay—included. Nick bought all of his attendants “these suits,” as he referred to them. “They cost me $600, $700, together! They were as cheap as shit. Polyester. I knew they’d destroy them anyway. Dark blue; with white shirts and a tie.” Nick, the groom, Smokey Robinson; the others, the Miracles.

Everybody arrived, the boat trips and dinners were great, but Steve went off the deep end. Nick sent him and Keats an email a few nights later suggesting they should ease up a bit. Steve responded right back: “I totally agree, chum. I will clean it up.”

“They were both great on our wedding day,” Nick recalls, “but that night, Monty was back in full effect. He was firing the DJ up, he had all the tunes going. He was just covered in sweat, and he was a big boy, probably 230, at this point. Just a beast on the dance floor. He had ripped the ass out of his pants, and by the end of the night he was just in his boxer shorts and his dress shirt.”

At a different time, this would have been another great “Monty story.” But this wasn’t funny anymore.

“That was the last time I saw him,” Nick said.

—

When Steve returned to California, he checked back into rehab.

Steve’s life was filled with people who wanted nothing more than to help him, because they loved him, and because he had helped them. But he never went to them for help.

“When Monty wasn’t in a good place and things weren’t going well, I wouldn’t see him very often,” Andy O’Brien says. “He’d just kind of disappear, and only reappear after he’d sorted out his problem, when he knew what he had to do and was already doing it.” And whenever O’Brien did see him, he sounded good. He had thought things through. He had made a plan, and the plan made sense. So whatever O’Brien or Vally or Keats or Nick, or Steve’s parents or brother or sister or former teammates had heard, Steve might have gone through a rough stretch, but he was okay again. That’s what they wanted to believe and had every reason to believe, and anything else would mean not believing in him—and out of friendship and loyalty and love, how could they do that? The stories they heard about him were something to wonder about, but not to be concerned about. And Steve came to realize that if he could hide from others, he could hide from himself.

In late September 2014, during his long, quiet hours in rehab, with no alcohol, no workouts, and no CBA to worry about, with nothing to distract him from himself, Steve did a lot of thinking. The past year had been too much: the concussions, the dizziness, the depression, the hope, the loss of hope, the contract buyout, the end of his career, the drinking, the memory problems, the downs, the ups, the downs, the downs, losing himself, trying to find himself. The future. All these balls in the air. Then one more—he was going to be a father—and at Nick’s wedding all these balls had come crashing down.

How could he be a father? His own life was out of control. He couldn’t even manage himself. He loved kids; he was great with kids. But this would be his own kid, all the time, every day, all of his life. And if he was going to be a father, he would have to jump in with both feet. As Vally said about him, he was a “two-foot jumper,” but how could he do that now? But how could he not? He and Chantelle weren’t going to get married. They didn’t even really know each other. She seemed nice enough, but now she would be the mother of their child. He had come close to marriage a few times, then just when it seemed that some really funny, athletic, beautiful woman was finally the right one and there was no other next step left but to get married, he’d find something wrong with her and be gone. He wanted something perfect for his own family. That seemed worth waiting for. Now a different world was closing in. With women, maybe Steve had a problem with commitment—or maybe he just liked his life the way it was. Maybe he didn’t want to give it up. How could he live with himself if he did give it up? How could he live with himself if he didn’t? He was stuck.

He had built up his body only to slowly destroy it, then had learned to build it up again. Now he went to the gym only to get respite from the guilt he felt, to stop thinking about the alcohol and the anti-depression, anti-headache, anti-pain, anti-anxiety stuff he was putting into his system. He had loved to learn—he couldn’t wait until the adventure of tomorrow; now he didn’t have the energy, the attention span, the memory to learn anything. He used to talk to his friends hour after hour, going deep into life and its meaning; now he didn’t talk to any of them unless it was to lie to them about all the great stuff he’d been doing and all the great plans he had for the future. He had lived by a code, The Four Agreements: Be impeccable with your word; Don’t take anything personally; Don’t make assumptions; Always do your best. Principles that had become more than points of pride for him: they had been his identity, that he had now broken again and again.

When he came out of rehab in late September, Steve had made up his mind. He would find stability in his life; he would be a good father to his child; he would move back to Mississauga. So he cleaned up Parros’s condo, flew to Toronto, and rented a house less than 200 metres from his childhood home on the cul de sac on Avonbridge Drive; less than a kilometre from the QEW, the highway that would connect him to his child in Buffalo. Instead of his baby being the one additional ball in the air that would send the others crashing down, the baby would be his answer. Keats was right. The baby would be the only ball that mattered; the one that would give meaning to all the others. The baby would give him the reason for the stability he needed, and the will for him to achieve it. The baby would be the answer. He bought baby and parenting books. He bought baby furniture. His journals began to change. His thoughts were clearer; his writing more legible.

Then a few days before Halloween, he turned dark again and went back into rehab, only for a tune-up. He was there a week, and then back to Mississauga. Some days were good. Other days were not so good.

In December, he and Missy went to Florida together. They saw the Panthers play; Missy had some clients to see. They went to a concert. They flew back to Chicago for Missy’s Christmas party, then drove to Detroit to visit her family. On December 21, Steve drove home to Mississauga. It was his thirty-fifth birthday.

Christmas wasn’t so good, but Christmas often wasn’t very good. It brought out too many family stresses and complications; and now, too many questions, asked and unasked. But by early in the new year, while things were still never not down and up, he seemed largely fine. Keats drove down from Peterborough and they had dinner. It was the first time Keats had seen him since he got back from Hermosa Beach. “It was like one of the old dinners we used to have,” Keats recalls. “It was great. I thought he was getting out of his funk. At dinner, he talked about reading those baby books, and he wasn’t drinking, and I was like, ‘Okay, all right, we’re getting back on track here. This is good.’”

A few days later, in mid-January, Steve chartered a plane and flew to Ibiza, a notorious party island in the Mediterranean off the east coast of Spain. January is not the best month to go to Ibiza, and commercial flights connect the island easily to North American cities. Steve didn’t need to charter a plane, but that wasn’t the point. He wanted to get away. A few days later, he wanted to get away again and flew to Colombia. He had a buddy in California who knew a shaman who performed religious ceremonies in the Colombian rainforest. The ceremonies involved ayahuasca, a tea-like hallucinogenic brew that indigenous peoples in Peru believe produces spiritual understanding about the nature of the universe and one’s true purpose on earth. Ingesting ayahuasca often causes vomiting and diarrhea, which believers see as the purging of negative energy and emotions from one’s body that have built up over a lifetime. Ayahuasca can also be potentially dangerous for those with a pre-existing heart condition, and those who take antidepressants.

When Steve got back to Toronto, he called Nick, all excited. “He was explaining all this to me about all these people in this hut in the woods of Colombia, and everyone is throwing up their demons. And he says to me, ‘I had a spiritual experience; it’s changed my life. Something happened to me there. I am going to get back into the program. I am going to stop drinking. I want to prove to you and to everyone that I can get my shit together. This time it is going to be different.’”

“I will never forget,” says Nick. “We talked about how we all had the ability to change the world through even very small actions. He believed that something as little as spending forty-five seconds with the man in the toll booth, or helping a woman carry her baby carriage down a flight of stairs in the subway, or seeing someone who looks dishevelled on the street and making eye contact with him and saying, ‘Hi, how are you?’ could change the course of that person’s day, and, effectively, their life, and therefore the world.

“He really believed that. He thought he could spread something positive, and that it was infectious. He was talking about all this. He was rambling a bit, but not much. He was like the old Monty. When I hung up I remember thinking, ‘This guy is going to get his shit together, and I’m going to have this friend back, and our kids are going to be about the same age and they’re going to grow up together.’” Nick and his wife were about to have a baby, too. “He just sounded unbelievable, and I remember saying to my wife, ‘Wow, this guy is going to figure it out.’

“The next call I got was that he had died.”

—

Steve went to lunch with his dad the day after he talked to Nick. “Conversations with any of my kids tend to happen in snippets because they are all incredibly busy,” Paul says. But on this day, neither Paul nor Steve had any other place to go. “We talked about concussions and the state of his brain, and how he was doing, and how he was dealing with that. I asked him what he was thinking of doing next, and right away he said, ‘I think I can have a positive impact on people’s lives.’” He had said the same thing to Paul six months earlier, when he and his dad had their last long talk.

“It was very clear to him what he was going to do,” Paul says. “It was just a matter of figuring out the ‘how.’ But it was pretty clear he wasn’t going to be able to do any of these things unless he was able to clear his mind and get it functioning in a way that he could be reliable and consistent and steady, and not make irresponsible decisions and do irresponsible things, and be so forgetful.”

It was Steve’s memory loss that most disturbed Paul. He had seen glimpses of it, and heard some stories, but even he didn’t know how bad things were. The service manager at Steve’s car dealership in Toronto later told him that Steve used to call him every week or two from California. “He was always forgetting where his car was, he said, or he’d lose his keys. He was on Steve’s speed dial, so Steve would call and they would locate the vehicle through GPS.” Paul was also aware of Steve’s charters to Hartford and Ibiza, and his trips to Colombia and to Las Vegas, where in recent months at Caesars Palace he had lost more than $200,000 at blackjack. Steve had never been a big gambler.

Paul and Steve had a complicated relationship. They were alike in many ways: curious, highly independent, full of energy. Both wanted to know everything; both learned fast and wanted to move on. But Paul was more of a manager. He liked to see the big picture, all the problems and possibilities, then encourage those around him to see things the same way as he did, as if they had reached the same conclusions themselves. By contrast, Steve was a doer. He saw what he saw, then jumped into the action. He saw answers first; Paul saw problems. When other hockey parents had imagined their kids as future NHL stars, Paul hadn’t. When he had encouraged Steve to pursue other parts of himself, particularly at school, Steve had often taken this as disapproval—as Paul, a baseball guy, not caring about hockey, and what Paul thought mattered to Steve.

A few years before, when Steve was with the Ducks, he and Paul had had one of their talks. Steve asked his dad, “Are you proud of me for making the NHL?” Paul thought for a moment; he knew right away how important the question was to Steve, and how important his answer would be. “And I said, ‘You know Steve, I am so proud of you for all the great friends you have chosen. I am proud of you for the people you help and the things that you do. I’m proud that you take good sportsmanship seriously, and I’m happy for you that you made the NHL. I’m proud of you, and I’m incredibly proud of you, for all the hard work you put in because you were never the star of any team, but you made a commitment, and set a goal. And you worked.’

“And I said to him, ‘I’m happy, I’m incredibly happy, that you achieved your dream, and I’m proud of you for the man that you’ve become.’ And Steve had this quizzical look on his face, and I said, ‘You know, I would be just as proud of you if your talent had only taken you to the AHL, or the ECHL, or if you had worked just as hard at something else and were just the man you are. Those are the things that make me proud as a father.’” Paul pauses as he remembers that day. “I think that satisfied him, although, you know, I think he wanted me to say I was proud of him for being an NHL player.”

—

Steve made several phone calls during the few days after his conversation with Nick and his lunch with Paul. To the usual people: Paul and Donna, Chris, Lindsay, Missy. He drove to Buffalo to see Chantelle and to put the crib together; the baby was due in less than two weeks.

“I noticed that he was talking fast,” Missy says, “but when he’s excited about something that’s his normal.” Steve called Daniel Carcillo, too. Carcillo had heard about Ibiza and Colombia and knew that wasn’t good, but they talked about other things. Steve told him that he had been to Buffalo to put together the crib.

Steve also spoke to Marty Gélinas. “I had heard some rumblings that he was struggling a little,” Gélinas says, so he called him. “Monty said, ‘I’m doing great,’ and he told me what he was doing and what he was going to do. It sounded like he had it all figured out.” Steve called Craig Button, who had been his general manager in Saint John and Calgary. It was Button who had seen something in Steve that no one else had, and signed him as a free agent. He and Steve had bumped into each other a few times in the years since, and in January, Steve called him. A month later, Steve called him again. A ten-minute talk turned into an hour, as was often the case with Steve. Steve told him about being back in Mississauga and about the baby, and about putting down roots. They talked about broadcasting, coaching, and Steve’s work with the NHLPA, especially during the CBA negotiations. “It was as if Monty had come to this very busy intersection,” Button says, “with all these things going in all these different directions, and he didn’t know which one to take.” [I said to him,] ‘You have a lot to offer,’ and yet I was vague.” Button seems upset at himself now. “I didn’t give him enough of ‘You should try this, or that.’ But he sounded good, no different from any other time that we talked.”

Steve texted his former Saint John coach, Jim Playfair. Playfair hadn’t heard from Steve in some time. “It wasn’t many words,” Playfair recalls, “it was something like, ‘The world is awesome. I’m going to be a dad. How is your wife? How are the boys?’ Honest to God, there could not have been a more uplifting, encouraging sign.”

Andy O’Brien last saw Steve five days before he died. Steve dropped by O’Brien’s gym and came to the office to talk with him, but he was busy with another client, so Steve hung around a bit and spoke with some of the CFL players who were training there. Other years Steve would be there every day, always at the same time, and O’Brien could plan his schedule to fit in one of the deep, nourishing talks they liked to have. But now it was over a year since Steve had played his last game (in the KHL). He still came to the gym, but only a few days a week, at different times, for a few minutes or a few hours depending on how he felt and what else he had going on. He and O’Brien didn’t talk much that day, but he knew that Steve would be back in a day or two and they would talk then.

Yet it was clear to them that things were not the same. Once, their relationship had been underpinned by mutual expectation, and a little bit of hope. Now the relationship had hope, but only a little bit of expectation. That didn’t feel right to either of them, but neither of them knew what to do about it.

“Probably the biggest thing I noticed about Monty during all those good years was the peacefulness he conveyed,” O’Brien recalls. “He seemed very grounded. When I first got to know him, he wasn’t.” That was after Steve had been traded to Florida from Calgary, and before he went into rehab for the first time. “He looked like a guy who was struggling. I used to notice that he would go off on his own at times, into a room, to reaffirm some things through some positive self-talk. And it was really clear that, while he was struggling, he was winning the struggle. He had turned himself into somebody who was very, very much at peace with himself. He was very comfortable in his own skin. He was a very, very zen, calm, confident, secure person.”

But “there was this very unsettled feeling about him when he wasn’t in a good place.” Now, when he came to the gym, “It was like seeing a different person,” O’Brien recalls. “It was his demeanour. His ability to maintain eye contact. His ability to just sit still and breathe and not feel the urgency to talk or the urgency to move around.” He couldn’t do those things. “The quality that had made Monty so distinctively himself was changing. He seemed always rushed. He was on his phone a lot. He just didn’t seem present when he was there. He would say, ‘Let’s go grab lunch,’ then not show up, and then show up randomly later on. We would get into a conversation, and midway through it would end because he had something else he had to do. A couple of times he lost his keys; a couple of times in the same week. He lost his passport.” O’Brien thinks back. “There were very, very few circumstances in that last year or two where I saw him getting better. He just seemed to get a little worse every time.”

For Steve, everything was moving faster. And the faster things moved, the faster he talked, and the more persuasive he tried to be about how well he was doing, the less persuasive he was. He was Monty trying to sound like Monty, and yet he didn’t sound like Monty at all. But the spirit was there, they all saw it—Keats, Nick, Button, Playfair—and if the spirit was there, the body would follow. It didn’t matter that nobody around him—not his family, not his friends—had grabbed him by the shoulders and shaken him, and stared into his eyes until he couldn’t do anything but stare back; for him to see their fear; for him to see the need to do something. Because they didn’t feel they had to. He was Monty.

The thing is, though, that Steve would never let anyone get close enough to grab him by the shoulders and pin him down. Especially not his family and friends. He found ways to keep them away. It wasn’t hard, just a few out-of-the-blue texts would make them feel close enough that no one would wonder enough to get close enough to see what he didn’t want them to see. He was up against it, but he didn’t know, and his family and friends didn’t know, just how up against it he really was. All of the conditions he was dealing with: the depression, the anxiety, the loss of control, the inability to sleep, the memory loss, the inability to focus, to think rationally, to work things through; the residual pain in his neck, his shoulders, his back and knees, from thousands of little abuses. And all of the drugs he was taking to deal with all of these conditions.

Nobody knows the exact events of Steve’s last few days. Nobody really wants to know. Steve was found dead at about 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, February 15, 2015, in the house he had rented only a few hundred metres from his childhood home in Mississauga. He was found by a woman whom he knew a little and who had been with him the previous few days. His autopsy showed evidence of opioids, THC, benzodiazepine, and cocaine in his system. Opioids are used in the treatment of pain. THC is the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis. Benzodiazepine, or benzo, best-known under the brand name Valium, is used to treat anxiety and insomnia. Cocaine, among other things, can offer a quick “king of the world” rush of energy and euphoria. Opioids and benzo together, or cocaine and opioids together, can result in respiratory depression and death. Steve was thirty-five.

Four days later, Morrison Montador Robidoux was born.