CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

So where do we go from here?

Hockey is a really good game. It has never been played and watched by more people in more different countries than it is now, by more boys and men, by more girls and women, by more people of more different racial and ethnic backgrounds. It has never been played better. Its players have never been so skilled and fit. The NHL has never been a better league. It is where the world’s best players play. It is what kids in Moscow and Mississauga, Minneapolis and Malmö dream of. It is the world’s league, and the Stanley Cup is the world’s hockey trophy.

It is now a game that demands more. More time, more money, more of the life of its players and their families, because when more becomes possible—more tournaments, more special clinics, more months of the year—more becomes the norm. To put it simply, it took Connor McDavid more to make it to the top than it took Sidney Crosby, and far more than it took Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, and Gordie Howe.

It is the same for kids and their families in every field—music, dance, nanotechnology, it doesn’t matter what—just as it will be for their kids and their families in the future. Sports still teach what sports have always taught—teamwork, discipline, hard work, resilience, goal-setting, and goal-achieving—but with the greater commitment now required, these lessons are more intense, and the talent unearthed is even more remarkable. The more you put in, the more you get out. And for those few who do make it, there is recognition and money that might last a lifetime.

For some, sports have other impacts that also last a lifetime—and that is the big new question sports face. For former athletes, bad knees and bad hips might keep you from stretching a single into a double when you’re playing with your kids, or they might need to be replaced later in life, but they are no great burden. But what about a bad brain? Not even a brain like Steve’s, with CTE, but one that is depressed and anxious, that can’t remember, can’t decide, can’t sleep, can’t enjoy; with fifty years ahead of it, that can’t live a full life. That is a big burden.

Is this now the trade-off for a life in hockey or football? For many, it is. These athletes have made their choice, some will argue. They know what they are getting themselves into. Maybe not when they were kids, but their parents knew, or should have known. And later, after they have lived through the battleground of junior and signed their first pro contract, they’re adults and old enough to make their own decisions. Hockey is a tough game. Things happen. Did they think that all the masses of love and money that rain down on them from the heavens are just for donning the jersey and scoring a few goals? This is their danger pay. So some have paid the price, and it is awful and horrible, and something we all wish had never happened, but it has happened, because in a collision sport, it can happen. In life, it can happen.

Do you think Steve knew all this? He knew about the bumps and scrapes. He loved them. He knew about the cuts and lost teeth, the separations and tears. He caused as many of them in others as he ever received himself. He knew about broken zygomatic arches and concussions. He knew about the sort of pain that fills your body and mind and takes over your life. Do you think he also knew about memory loss and suicidal thoughts? Do you think he knew about the sort of pain that fills your body and mind and takes over your life and doesn’t go away? Do you think he knew about a life that might end fifty years before its time? Do you think he knew that these were part of the trade-off he was making? Do you think Keith Primeau knew about the seven years of pretending to his kids that he was just regular old dad when he was really someone else? What about Marc Savard?

But ask them, ask any player, if they would do it all again if they knew. Their answer is: “Of course. I loved to play. I’m a player. I loved playing even before I got all that money and attention. I loved being with the guys. I loved what we all went through together. I love the memories and feelings I still have. Any other life wouldn’t be me. Even if I do have some regrets and wishes—and who doesn’t—it’s who I am. Why would I reject my own life? How could I? If I did, what would I have left?”

But is this the only choice a player has? Was it for Steve? Is it the only choice for all those who now play and who will play in the future? Why is the only choice this game—the game as it is now—or not playing hockey at all? Why can’t the choice be between a tough, collision game—of cuts and bruises, tears, separations, and breaks, knee replacements and hip replacements-to-be; of rare, random, accidental concussions—and a game that is just as exciting to play and watch, but where a player is less vulnerable to the big injuries, to the injuries that change a life? Why isn’t that the choice?

—

What would it take?

Not that much.

Speed is hockey’s most defining element. It is also hockey’s greatest vulnerability. When a game starts in motion, when the puck moves from stick to stick and end to end, when the baton gets passed from player to player to player to player every forty seconds, when minutes pass—it’s as if, as fans, we forget to breathe. Then a whistle, then a breath, then all the _ooh_s and _ahh_s that have been stored up. Then the game starts up again. Baseball is a game to savour. Hockey is a game to feel.

Almost anybody can do almost anything if they are given enough time to do it. But then try to do the same thing at thirty-five kilometres an hour. Try doing it with a 225-pound (plus equipment) opponent or two coming at you, also at thirty-five kilometres an hour. Speed separates the gifted from the adept, the courageous from the big and strong. From its beginnings, hockey was called “the fastest game on Earth.” And it was—and over time it has learned to become faster. The ice got better, skates got better, coaches got smarter, shifts got shorter, players got fitter, rules changed. Now, more than 140 years after that first game in Montreal, there is almost nothing that stands in the way of speed, or the consequences of speed: the increased number of collisions; the force of these collisions; the increased severity of brain injuries.

Sports has always been a compromise between performance and safety. In skiing, we learn to control our speed so that when we go down a hill we don’t smash into a tree; and knowing that we won’t, we can learn to ski faster. In hockey, we learn to stop so we don’t crash into the end boards; so we can learn to skate faster. Safety doesn’t need to hold us back. It can make us better. Just as goalie masks made goalies better, safety can enhance performance.

Compromise doesn’t need to be a bad word. We say that to be good at anything today you have to go all out. You cannot hold back. You cannot leave anything in the tank, because if you do—in business, politics, sports—the other guy won’t, and the other guy will win, and you won’t. Steve Montador was an all-out guy; if he wasn’t, he would never have made the NHL. The league is filled with hundreds of Steves, and family rooms and bars are filled with thousands of guys who were like Steve but who weren’t all-out, who did hold back and didn’t make it. This is an all-out era. Compromisers lose.

But sport is a contest. It is something we create, and if we don’t find it interesting or fun, we don’t do it, or we change it, just as early pond hockey players did in Nova Scotia in the 1800s in the trial-and-error games they played, and just as it was at McGill in 1875. Just as it has been in all the decades since. Players play and coaches coach, and in all the other non-game hours of their day, they dream and scheme. What can I do different than I did yesterday? What can I do better? What is more challenging, more interesting, more satisfying, more fun? What can I do that the other guy can’t? What can I do to win? Hockey is always changing and has always changed, because players and coaches have always changed it. Imagine playing or watching a game with no substitutions, no changing on the fly, no forward passes, and five-minute or two-minute shifts played at a snail’s crawl.

There is speed that makes sense, and speed that doesn’t. We could bring back hooking and holding to slow down the game, but that would reward what we want to reject. We could bring back the red line for offside passes, but that would clog up the open-ice play we want to encourage. We could limit shift length, or changing on the fly, but that would be too restrictive and complicated. We could play four-on-four during regulation time as we once did in overtime, to encourage puck possession, to give extra space to players who have the talent to use it, who know how to slow play down and to speed it up. Modern players have the open-ice skills to play four-on-four without embarrassing themselves. Perhaps someday that might be the answer, but not now.

Two small changes might make a big difference.

First, we need to see “finishing your check” as what it is: interference. Finishing your check once didn’t exist even as a phrase in hockey, because the circumstances needed for it to occur in a game didn’t exist. The game was too slow; finishing your check requires speed. And when it did come about, it happened by accident. In the 1950s and 1960s, passing increased, but not all passes—especially by those more used to advancing the puck by stickhandling—hit their intended target. As a bad pass slid uncontrolled into an opponent’s zone, the attacking team did what was left for it to do: it chased after the puck, trying to regain possession. It forechecked. Forechecking was an attempt by a team to neutralize the disadvantage it had created for itself. It was a default strategy, and finishing your check was its unintended consequence.

Forechecking grew in use, especially after the NHL doubled the number of its teams in 1967 and minor league players with minor-league skills became instant major-leaguers. For these players and their coaches, forechecking needed to become not just a strategy, but the strategy. But for it to work, lesser-skilled players had to get themselves on top of their quicker, more skilled opponents before they could pass the puck to their teammates. If they didn’t get there in time, but almost did, and if they were moving too fast to peel off to try and catch up to the play, what could they do? Many just continued forward, crashed into their opponent, and waited for the referee to deliver his justice. But most often—happily, surprisingly for them—that justice never came. The referee let play go on. It was the referees, not the players, who adapted. Their reasoning seemed to be that the player almost got there in time; he was going fast and, like a driver putting on his brakes momentarily before powering through an amber light, looked like he was trying to stop. Besides, in an expanded league where disadvantage was the norm, forechecking and finishing your check offered an opportunity for lesser teams and lesser players to balance the larger injustice of an uncompetitive league. Finishing your check seemed a small price to pay.

But what about the injustice to the player who races back to get the puck; who, under the threat of a speeding body coming at him far more prepared for impact than he is, endangers his health or, risking a turnover, makes a pass before he is ready; who, if he does make a successful play, finds that it is to no advantage to himself or to his team because he has been taken out of the play by his opponent anyway—an opponent who, arriving late, made an unsuccessful play yet was not penalized for doing so because finishing your check is part of forechecking, and forechecking is part of the game?

By the mid-1980s, things had gotten even worse. With Gretzky and the Oilers and the growing European influence, with passes and not just a dump-and-chase, the game speeded up more. The most dangerous position on the ice became that of a defenceman, not a goaltender. By far. Goalies wore new cage-style masks that offered nearly perfect protection; defencemen, like Steve, with forecheckers able to finish their checks, played as if they had a target on their backs. Hooking, holding, “obstruction”—almost anything short of tackling was allowed for a time, because referees knew it had to be allowed for defencemen to survive. It was the compromise between performance and safety. But in 2005, after the lockout year, obstruction was no longer allowed. The game got faster, the shifts got shorter, the collisions more frequent and more damaging. And here we are. The forever compromise has been compromised. Safety has lost the day.

But what if “checking” were to become again what it had always been? One player has the puck, another wants it and uses his stick or his body to get it. He checks him. If a player, any player, doesn’t have the puck, he can’t be checked—whether the puck is two feet away from him or sixty—because that is interference. No big deal.

That’s how hockey was always played. And the forechecker can go as fast as he wants towards the puck carrier, he can fly, but he has to get to him before his opponent makes his pass. If he does, he delivers his hit and gives himself and his team a better chance of gaining possession of the puck. He has earned the advantage he created. If his opponent makes the pass first, his opponent has earned the advantage. That’s fair. And if the forechecker arrives after the pass is made and makes the hit, he gets a penalty. This is considered justice even in football: a pass rusher hitting a quarterback after he releases the ball is penalized. And so the forechecker must use his own judgment: Can I get there in time, or not? If he thinks yes, he keeps going. If no, he makes a different play. If maybe, he takes the chance or he doesn’t. He can go faster or he can go slower, the decision is in his hands. It’s up to him to control his own speed—it’s not up to his opponent’s defence partner, by hooking and holding, to do that for him. The consequences, good or bad, are his to face, just as they should be. The result: controlled speed, not uncontrolled speed. Speed that makes sense, not speed that doesn’t. Advantages that are earned, not advantages that aren’t.

No big deal. But a big impact.

The second change is no less rooted in the game: no hits to the head. Players and officials since the first game at McGill have recognized the vulnerability of a player’s head. A “high stick” isn’t something that is delivered to a shoulder, or an “elbow” to a hip. Rule-makers created high-sticking and elbowing penalties specifically to protect a player’s head. Yet there was an exception to this. For the head to get this special treatment, it had to be up at the moment it was struck. If it were down, the hit was considered to be the player’s own fault; the player was “fair game.”

This thinking arose out of the pre–forward pass era. If a player has to advance the puck up the ice without passing, he has to stickhandle, which is easier to do if he looks down at the puck. If stickhandling is to his advantage, the checker should have some advantage of his own. So a hit to the head by a stick or an elbow wasn’t allowed, but a hit to the head by a shoulder or a hip delivered with far greater force was not only okay, it was glorified, as long as the player’s head was down. It was a “freebie.”

There is another category of hit to the head that is also penalized but accepted: a fist to the head. It’s because it has never been seen as a hit to the head, but rather as fighting, which isn’t possible without some fists to the head, and is acceptable, in fact essential, because hockey is a passionate game different from other passionate games, and an emotional release is necessary.

This is all very admirably consistent, but even if it wasn’t, even if you wanted to make these changes, you can’t. The game is the game and you can’t change the game. It has been played this way for a hundred years. The traditionalist “knows” this.

But it hasn’t. The game has changed constantly. It is always changing. The traditionalist is blind. The game is much faster. A hit to the head from a shoulder moving at thirty-five kilometres an hour is a hit from a much different shoulder than fifty years ago. A hit to the head from the fist of a bigger, better-trained fighter is a hit from a much different fist. A hit to the head today is a much different hit.

The NHL created a Department of Player Safety in 2011 to review dangerous hits and to impose additional penalties if the department believes they are warranted. The length of suspension for these infractions has been increased over time. Rules have been changed. When it was implemented in 2010–11, Rule 48.1—“Illegal Check to the Head,” as the league terms it—stated that a “lateral or blindside hit to an opponent where the head is targeted and/or the principle [sic] point of contact is not permitted.” Which, put a different way, meant that a check was “legal” if the player who was hit ought to have been able to see the other player coming, if his head wasn’t targeted and/or made the principal point of contact by that player, even if the result were a serious and injurious blow to the head. Rule 48.1, as amended, now penalizes “a hit resulting in contact with an opponent’s head where the head was the main point of contact and such contact to the head was avoidable.” It also adds this as clarification:

In determining whether contact with an opponent’s head was avoidable, the circumstances of the hit including the following shall be considered:

(i) Whether the player attempted to hit squarely through the opponent’s body and the head was not “picked” as a result of poor timing, poor angle of approach, or unnecessary extension of the body upward or outward.

(ii) Whether the opponent put himself in a vulnerable position by assuming a posture that made head contact on an otherwise full body check unavoidable.

(iii) Whether the opponent materially changed the position of his body or head immediately prior to or simultaneously with the hit in a way that significantly contributed to the head contact.

In other words, for a hit to be illegal, the head no longer needs to be “targeted” but must not be “picked”, and no penalty will be given if the player has his head down, or if by changing his body position he attempts to draw a penalty on his opponent. Other hits to the head remain “legal.” Within and beneath this careful language, the message and its intent are clear: a thunderous hit from a shoulder that stops an opponent in his tracks should be legal even if it also makes contact with an opponent’s head, no matter the injury suffered, because that is hockey; and therefore it is legal. Simply, if it looks like a hockey hit, it is a hockey hit. The message is about the hit, not the head.

The rule is misguided in another way, too. It reflects a style of game and an understanding from another time. We don’t stickhandle up the ice anymore. We don’t give up the puck, to dump it eighty feet ahead, and fight to get it back. We don’t forecheck a lot. We want possession of the puck. So we pass. And when we pass, we look up and look around for teammates in open ice. When we see them, we drop our heads and bodies a little to see the puck on our stick, and make the pass. We might see an opponent coming right at us, but our vision is narrowed; we focus on the target of our pass. When we receive a pass, our heads and bodies also drop a little. We are looking at the puck. We might see an opponent coming at us, but again our vision is narrowed; we focus on receiving the puck. At the very moment we pass the puck or receive the puck, and for a few moments after, we are completely vulnerable. We are bent over slightly, but more significantly our attention is elsewhere. We are in no position to defend ourselves. This is not about a blindside hit, a blow from someone out of our possible range of sight. At this moment, we are blind to almost everyone. And because this is about a pass, the puck receiver, free of carrying the puck, breaking towards open ice, is moving fast. Think of Keith Primeau’s stories about how he got injured. Of Marc Savard’s. How many players received those injuries in open ice, cutting across the middle, getting hit by what they didn’t see? And because they didn’t see it coming, they weren’t ready for the hit they got.

Think of bighorn rams running at each other, their heads and horns colliding at thirty kilometres an hour. Think of gannets hovering in the air, spotting their target fish below, diving straight down, hitting the water at ninety kilometres an hour. They can do this because of bone and muscle and brain structures that have evolved over eons of time; and because they are ready. The bighorn rams can see each other, the gannets can see the water; they know what’s coming, and they prepare. Football and hockey players build up their neck muscles to give their heads a stability that bone, muscle, and brain evolution didn’t provide. Players’ necks are no longer just narrow bridges that connect body and head, but they splay out wide towards the points of their shoulders. Before the moment of impact, they flex. But when they are not ready for a hit, when players like Matt Cooke appear from nowhere, they can’t flex. Imagine a bighorn ram that doesn’t see another bighorn ram coming at him, a gannet that doesn’t see the water. Why don’t helmets work against concussions? Why do most concussions seem to occur with whiplash-like hits that spin a head around, and not from direct, straight-ahead blows? One you see coming, the other you don’t. One you have prepared for, the other you haven’t. Big football linemen hit each other hard and often; whippet-like wide receivers and defensive backs much less so. Yet the receivers and backs seem much more vulnerable than the linemen. One plays a predictable game; the other doesn’t. In today’s hockey, in the passing game, speed, distraction, vulnerability, finishing your check, hits to the head—it is a mix made for disaster.

—

Further within and beneath the language-dance of the NHL rule book is another message: you have to allow some hits to the head because you have to allow fighting—because fighting has always been part of hockey, hockey fans love fights, and fights symbolize the commitment of a hockey player that is different from the commitment of a player in all other sports. A hockey player, literally, is willing to fight for his team. Besides, if there were no fights, and no outbreak of stick-swinging resulted; if players were to find their emotional release in skating faster and checking harder, as almost every player now does and has always done; then real hockey fans, in their passionate defence of fighting, would have been living a lie all these years, and fighting’s critics, who aren’t real deep-in-the-bone fans, would win, and that would be too humiliating to take. So if some hits to the head are allowed—in fighting—to remain admirably consistent, then why not allow other hits to the head under some word-parsing, hair-splitting and re-splitting logic that is able to wrap itself up as part of the essence of the game?

Consider this exchange on Sportsnet between John Shannon, Scott Morrison, and program host Jeff Marek. It happened the day after Pittsburgh Penguins defenceman Kris Letang hit Marcus Johansson of the Washington Capitals during the second round of the 2016 playoffs. Johansson had carried the puck through the neutral zone over the Penguins’ blue line, and was bent slightly forward trying to fend off a check by Evgeni Malkin. Johansson’s head was up, his eyes were on his teammate Justin Williams to his left. Letang, unseen, was to his right. Johansson made a one-handed pass to Williams; Letang moved towards Johansson, braced himself, raised up his body to make contact with him, his upward momentum taking his skates off the ice, his left shoulder striking Johansson in the head. Letang had been averaging nearly thirty minutes of ice time a game for the Penguins, almost seven minutes more than any other Pittsburgh player. Later in the day of this interview exchange, the league would decide if Letang was to be suspended.

Marek begins, commenting about Letang’s hit: “A little bit late. A little bit to the head. What are we looking at here?” he asks his panel.

“Certainly late,” Shannon concurs, “I think it’s a single-game suspension.”

In the previous game of the series, the situation had been reversed: Brooks Orpik of the Caps had hit Olli Määttä of the Pens in the head with his shoulder after Määttä had made a pass, for which Orpik received a three-game suspension.

“Everyone in Washington will say why not three?” Marek says.

“Because it wasn’t as late,” Shannon replies. The panellists comment back and forth.

“And the injury factor, too,” adds Morrison. Johansson later returned to the game; Määttä did not.

But Shannon adds a caution: “Apparently Johansson is not skating this morning,” he says. He and Morrison agree that sometimes concussion symptoms are delayed.

Marek pushes back at them. “Would that be gamesmanship, though?” he asks. With Johansson not being at practice, he might be injured, and the NHL, not yet having made public its decision on Letang, might impose a longer suspension if it thought Johansson might not be back in the lineup for the next game. “Not to sound crass,” Marek continues, “but let’s be honest about it. It’s the playoffs.”

Shannon still believes the league will decide on the basis of the lateness and the nature of the hit. “I don’t think they view it as a blatant headshot,” he says.

Marek talks again about “lateness”: “As we’ve seen with the Department of Player Safety, they will allow a player to ‘finish the check,’” he says. “And listen, Kris Letang, you see a guy who has his head down coming over the middle, a chance to get a lick in on him. I get it.”

Shannon picks up on Marek’s point: “And the question becomes, did he have enough time to swerve away and miss Johansson? And at the same time, where was Johansson’s head position…was he reaching? Was he down?”

Morrison has a question: “Do you think [Letang] thought, ‘I’m going to rock his head,’ or, ‘I’m just going to rock him?’”

“I think he was just going to rock him,” Marek says. “He said, ‘Oh, oh, here comes a freebie. Tomato over the blue line and I’m going to get a shot in.’”

Morrison and Shannon agree again that Letang will get a one-game suspension, then suddenly realize the implications of their own judgment. “It’s devastating,” Marek says. “Letang has been Outstanding….” They make no mention of the impact on Johansson.

Listen to this other exchange from a Monty Python skit between a customer, Mr. Praline, and the owner of a pet shop. Half an hour earlier, Mr. Praline (John Cleese) bought a parrot from the shop. He’s back to register a complaint. “It’s dead,” Mr. Praline says. The shop owner (Michael Palin) says it’s not dead, “It’s resting,” and goes on to say, “Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue. Beautiful plumage.” Mr. Praline takes the bird from its cage, whacks its head on the counter, throws it up in the air, and watches it hit the floor. “Now that’s what I call a dead parrot,” he says. “No, no, it’s stunned,” the shop owner replies, then goes on to claim, “Norwegian Blues stun easily.” Furthermore, it’s not dead, “It’s probably pining for the fjords.” Mr. Praline is getting more and more exasperated: “It’s not pining, it’s passed on! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker!” To Mr. Praline, this isn’t about a parrot that is resting, stunned, or pining. It’s not about it being a Norwegian Blue with beautiful plumage. This is about a dead parrot.

For hockey, this isn’t about a player having his head down, an opponent with an intention to “rock him” or “rock his head,” or getting a “freebie,” or the importance of Kris Letang. This is about hits to the head. It’s not about the perpetrator, it’s about the victim. It’s not about the perpetrator’s inconvenience/pocketbook, it’s about the victim’s brain/life/future.

For hockey and its future, this isn’t about winning or losing old arguments. It is about tomorrow. Focus here. Start here. And when the debate gets quickly ensnarled—“but what if one player is shorter, what if one is leaning forward, what if . . .”—don’t be distracted from the point. This is about hits to the head. Look at the NHL’s own rule book for guidance and precedents. Rule 60.2 imposes a minor penalty for “Any contact made by a stick on an opponent above the shoulders,”…Rule 60.3, a double minor or more is imposed if an injury results from the contact, whether accidental or careless” [italics added]. It doesn’t say anything about whether the head was the main point of contact, or whether the player should have seen the stick coming, had his head down, or tried to draw the penalty. The league decided that a stick to the face is a bad thing. It is a penalty. Automatic. Period. As Sidney Crosby put it, concerning hits to the head and the league’s rules after he received his concussions, “If a guy’s got to be responsible for his stick, why shouldn’t he be responsible for the rest of his body?”

If some players try to abuse the rule, if they duck into a hit to draw a penalty, then penalize them. Use another of the league’s rules as a model: if a player attempts to draw a penalty by diving or “embellishing,” he gets a penalty, and perhaps a fine or a suspension as well. Do the same for a player “embellishing” head hits, except make the penalties more severe because his embellishment isn’t just about normal gamesmanship, about getting away with something in order to gain an advantage before the other guy does the same. Diving is merely an embarrassment to the game; head injuries are dangerous—to the player, but also for the game. Drugs, gambling, and performance-enhancing substances all bring a sport into disrepute, and all are treated harshly by the league. But players who end up damaged also bring a sport into disrepute. The NHL can say with complete justification that any attempt to undermine the league’s efforts to make the game safer for its players, and for youth players everywhere, for now and for the future, will not be tolerated and will be dealt with severely. A serious problem requires an equally serious response.

If there are other abuses, you find other answers. Players and coaches adapt. They adapt to every next game and to every next moment and to every situation and opponent in a game. That’s what they do. And they do the same with rule changes. When a player hits an opponent in the face with his stick, he now skates directly to the penalty box; no argument. If his opponent is cut, he gets a four-minute penalty; no argument. If he shoots the puck over the glass in his own zone, it’s a two-minute penalty; no argument. There should be no such thing as a “legal” check to the head. A hit to the head is a penalty. No argument. If a player applies physical force to an official, depending on intent and severity, the player is suspended for either three, or ten, or twenty games. No argument. In that rule, “intent to injure” is defined as “any physical force which a player knew or should have known could reasonably be expected to cause injury.” Do head injuries not similarly undermine the integrity and reputation of the game? A hit to the head with the intent to injure is a suspension. No argument.

And if this isn’t enough to dramatically reduce brain injuries in hockey, then you do what any serious person does when you face a serious problem. You do more.

This is where Gary Bettman comes in.

We all want the problem of brain injuries in hockey not to be a problem at all. We want it to be about bad luck, or something that comes out of nowhere, is treated, and is gone. We want for it to be about media hype, not reality; about public awareness of something old, not something new. We got through it before, we’ll get through it again.

We also want brain injuries to be about fighters and fighting, so that if we create the conditions for a style of game where the specialty fighter is too great a risk to have on the ice, then the problem goes away.

We want the answer to be equipment. The most advanced helmet manufacturers will tell you there is no evidence that better helmets reduce concussions. Then they go on and talk excitedly about the new helmets they are creating, and leave the impression that a better helmet is the answer. It isn’t. Neither is a better mouthguard. Or some new whole-body, rotationally stimulating gyroscope. None of these things are the answer. But where there is fear, there is hope. And hope-mongers. And we waste time, we waste careers and lives looking in the wrong direction.

We want for the answer to be science. We want for science to know, and to know now, and to tell us what to do. But science doesn’t work that way. Science is about learning. Whatever we think we know at any moment is only a placeholder for what we will know better in the future. The sun revolved around the earth until we learned differently. Science isn’t about certainties; it is about likelihoods, probabilities, the best we know at any particular moment. But decision-makers want certainties, and decision-makers who don’t want to make certain decisions hide behind science. They may acknowledge what we know, but they focus on what we don’t. They create doubt. After ignorance, after denial, after counterargument and strategic inaction, after being put into their final corner, that’s what tobacco companies did. That’s what lead and asbestos companies did. That’s what climate change–deniers do. They will wait for science to know, they say, because after all, we are all serious, modern, evidence-based people, aren’t we? Except science takes time, and games are played tomorrow. And people, and players, have to live with the consequences of tomorrow.

We want for awareness to be the answer. We want more scientific studies, more articles and books, more movies and investigative reports, more tragic stories of players we have watched and loved. We want to build a mountain of awareness so tall, so sad, so unmistakable, so unmissable that something will be done because it has to be done, because how can it not be done?

But the answer for brain injuries is not awareness. It is not in our scientists, researchers, equipment manufacturers, writers, or film-makers. It is in our decision-makers. Decision-makers decide.

Decision-makers will sometimes make the wrong decisions. When we think back a hundred years or more—to slavery, or to the absence of women’s rights—we now wonder, “How could they have been so stupid?” When we think back fifty years to the dangers of tobacco, or lead, or asbestos, we wonder the same. Fifty years from now, people will look back at us with the same incredulous eye about something. What are we getting wrong? Climate change? Global pandemics?

In sports, it will be brain injuries. How could they—how could we—be so stupid?

Gary Bettman has been the commissioner of the NHL since 1993. His contract, extended last year, expires in 2022. It seemed to some that Bettman might choose 2017 as a natural moment to retire. He would be sixty-five. It would be his twenty-fifth year as head of the league. It is the hundredth anniversary of the NHL, a season that will be filled with celebrations. Many of the league’s loose ends have been tied up—the CBA has been signed, TV contracts are done, the league’s franchises are more valuable and more secure than they have ever been. The expansion process is in order. One new city has now been added, Las Vegas; the other, Quebec, is usefully in place as a credible threat in case the fans or local politicians of an existing franchise’s city get too difficult. But if 2017 seemed a logical time to others for Bettman to leave, it didn’t seem logical to Bettman. His first ten years as commissioner were not easy. He is just getting good at this. Why would he want to leave?

Gary Bettman is in control of the hockey world. The league’s Board of Governors are his bosses, but since he won his salary cap in 2005, crushing the NHLPA, no one stands in his way. The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), led by René Fasel, has members from seventy-four countries, but it is no rival. Nor is the KHL. Nor is Hockey Canada, or USA Hockey, or any other organization or federation in any other country at any level. They set local priorities. They administer. But it is the NHL that sets the direction for the sport, and Bettman sets the direction for the NHL. Moreover, all these other leagues and organizations need the NHL. They need it for hockey to be a showcase Olympic event. They need it for the World Cup, World Championships, and World Junior Championships to generate the money they require that drives their programs and pays their salaries. Those who have power understand power. The rest of the hockey world understands that on any issue, if they disagree with the NHL, it is at their peril. They are all beholden to Bettman. They know it, and Bettman knows it.

The NHLPA, led by Don Fehr, has become more formidable again. Fehr’s background is in baseball; he was a protégé of Marvin Miller. Miller had worked for the United Steelworkers union. The Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) had played rag doll to the teams’ owners for decades; Miller was hired to head the MLBPA in 1966. With his silver-white hair and carefully ordered moustache, Miller was an elegant street-fighter. By the time he retired in 1983, replaced by Fehr, the players were no longer tied forever to their teams by a reserve clause, they could become free agents—and salaries increased, on average, from less than $20,000 a year to over $300,000. Fehr learned from Miller some basic lessons: Owners are owners; and players, no matter how highly paid, are labour. Owners need to run things, owners insist on that; the best a player can do is to be paid his proper piece of the revenue pie. Owners will never stop trying to control players or to destroy their unions. Players have to be good teammates, whether in a steel plant, or on a playing field or rink, and be ready to fight back. The average salary in baseball increased tenfold during Fehr’s tenure. He stepped down in 2009, and a year later was hired to head the NHLPA.

Fehr is an old-style players’ union leader. Like Miller, he isn’t looking to run the game; he leaves that to Bettman. He wants, instead, like Miller, to maximize the benefits to the players, by increasing the size of their piece and/or the size of the pie. Historically, that has meant mostly economic benefits, and in negotiations Fehr doesn’t like to push non-economic, quality-of-life issues too far, knowing that Bettman will ask for economic concessions in return. But for Fehr to do his job now, he needs to know that it is one thing for players to earn as much money as possible, and another for them to be able to enjoy that money for as long as possible. For them at age forty-five and seventy-five to have a brain that works. That is the job of a new-style players’ union leader. Safety and quality of life were Miller’s job when he acted for the steelworkers; less so when he worked for the baseball players. The game is changing for Fehr.

For Bettman, Don Fehr is an exacting adversary, but he is no threat. Bettman today finds himself in a place he must surely have never expected. Almost twenty-five years after being named NHL Commissioner, this American who never played the game is on top of the hockey mountain. He has no peers; he has no rivals. But with this reality has come another, that Bettman must also have never expected and may not want, for ultimate authority brings ultimate responsibility.

Brain injuries in hockey are a problem. Indisputably. But in hockey, unlike in football, there are answers—good, doable, real hockey answers. That is the exciting part. The other exciting part is that Gary Bettman is the right person to implement these answers.

He can play “clever lawyer” at times, and he is good at that. With wordplay and an incisive mind, he can get himself out of almost any corner in which he finds himself, an essential skill for a sports commissioner. He can also play pit bull with lawyers representing players on the other side of the class-action concussion case, tell them that their lawsuit is going nowhere—as he has done—because they can’t prove causation, because they can’t prove that the players’ injuries happened in the NHL, and not in junior, or playing minor atom with Lorne Park, or from jumping down the front stairs as a two-year-old, or from abusing alcohol or drugs, or from hitting their head on a doorframe. And he can employ the same adept belligerence when governments attempt to intervene.

On June 23, 2016, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wrote to Bettman, introducing himself as the “Ranking Member of the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data Security,” the committee that has jurisdiction over professional sports. Blumenthal noted in his letter the NFL’s admission earlier in the year about the connection between playing football and CTE, and described the subsequent NHL response to the question as it relates to hockey as “dismissive and disappointing.” He pointed out to Bettman the NHL’s obligation to ensure the safety of its players and to “engage in a productive dialogue about the safety of your sport at all levels” because of the NHL’s position as “the premier professional hockey league in the world.” He also reminded Bettman that because many NHL teams “play in arenas financed in part or in whole by taxpayer funds and [because of] the hundreds of thousands of American children playing hockey, government oversight into the safety of your sport is appropriate, and a matter of public health.” At the end of his two-page letter, Blumenthal then set out nine questions for Bettman to answer, most of which related to CTE and its link to hockey; others to fighting, concussion protocols, and the education of players as to the risks of playing hockey. He asked for Bettman’s response by July 23.

On July 22, Bettman responded in the form of a twenty-four-page letter, single-spaced, that included forty-one footnotes and ten bibliographical references. He began by suggesting to Blumenthal that some of his questions “appear to be premised on misconceptions that have been repeatedly promoted in the media” by the lawyers for former players now “pursuing concussion-related litigation against the NHL,” and that he, Bettman, appreciated the “opportunity to correct the record” and to share with Blumenthal “important information on these topics.”

“First and foremost,” Bettman wrote, “we want to state in no uncertain terms that the health and safety of NHL players is a top priority for the NHL and its member Clubs, as well as the National Hockey League Players’ Association.” He continued: “Without question, head injuries, including concussions, are worthy of serious medical attention and care.” The rest of his letter continued in the same tone of restrained concern.

He told Blumenthal about the actions the league and the NHLPA have taken, its “Concussion Program”—“the first of its kind in professional sports”—its Injury Analysis Panel and “Concussion Protocol”; its Department of Player Safety, “the first of its kind in professional sports,” and the league’s efforts to inform the players of the risks of head injuries. But most of his letter focused on CTE and scientific studies, and how they relate or don’t relate to hockey and the NHL. He mentioned the work of several brain experts, and most notably cited the 2012 Consensus Statement on Concussion in Sport, of which many of these experts—including Dr. Robert Cantu, he noted—are signatories, and which states, as Bettman quoted, “It was…agreed that a cause and effect relationship has not yet been demonstrated between CTE and concussions or exposure to contact sports.”

“It is this medical consensus,” Bettman explained to Blumenthal, “that has guided, and will continue to guide, the NHL on the topic of CTE, unless and until there is sound medical evidence to the contrary that can be relied on.” Further, Bettman added, no scientific study has shown a causal link between concussions suffered by players in the NHL and degenerative brain diseases of any sort.

Bettman ended with a cautionary tale. It was the story of former NHL player Todd Ewen, a “so-called ‘enforcer,’” who committed suicide, who had suffered some of the effects of concussion, including depression, but whose autopsied brain showed no signs of CTE. Bettman quoted Ewen’s wife: “[W]e were sure Todd must have had C.T.E.,” she told the media, and because symptoms don’t always mean the existence of a concrete condition, she said she hoped that anyone suffering from these kinds of effects “takes heart.” Bettman concluded:

This, sadly, is precisely the type of tragedy that can result when plaintiffs’ lawyers and their media consultants jump ahead of the medical community and assert, without reliable scientific support, that there is a causal link between concussions and CTE. Certainly, a more measured approach consistent with the medical community consensus would be a safer, more prudent course. I hope this letter satisfactorily responds to your inquiry.

Three weeks later, on August 15, Blumenthal replied. It was short, only three pages (and four footnotes) long; more angry than it was substantive. “Your letter notes concussions can cause ‘long-term lasting effects’ like ‘permanent brain injury’ and ‘permanent brain damage,’” Blumenthal wrote, and yet “the league appears unwilling to consider even the possibility that concussions cause CTE.” Later he asked Bettman, “Why is the league so seemingly indifferent to seeking more answers—choosing to sit on the sidelines and ‘monitor’ the matter instead of urging and supporting research needed to determine whether hockey players are at a heightened risk of debilitating disease?” Before suggesting what Bettman’s actions might be instead, Blumenthal again reminded him that “The NHL is a big business that produces an estimated $4 billion in annual revenue. Much of that revenue is made possible by exemptions from federal antitrust laws, and local and state support. The NHL has a duty to behave responsibly in light of its public trust.” Blumenthal then wrote, “I urge you to establish a foundation to support independent, impartial research and understanding about the science of head trauma and brain disease later in life, vigorously working to uncover the truth rather than degrading science and the game.”

Blumenthal concluded, “I invite you to re-evaluate and resubmit your response, delineating the steps you are taking to advance science instead of dismissing it.”

A few days later, Bettman was interviewed by Jonas Siegel of the Canadian Press, and was asked about the senator’s second letter and whether he was surprised “how much Senator Blumenthal’s attacks…have gained traction.”

“[What Blumenthal said] hasn’t gained any traction,” Bettman replied. “In fact, we haven’t heard from very many people about it all.” Bettman went on to repeat that he believed “medical and scientific decisions should be made by scientists and physicians.”

Several months later, Bettman had not accepted Blumenthal’s invitation to “resubmit” his response.

The exchange between Bettman and Blumenthal presents two additional potential problems. Blumenthal’s suggestion that the league create a foundation to support independent research into head injuries allows Bettman to get off the hook with embarrassing ease, and with little effect on the problem Blumenthal seeks to abate. The NHL can commit a few or many millions of dollars to research, and while this learning happens, more players will have their future lives diminished. Science takes time. “Scientists and physicians” can only offer the best information available at the time. They can only help inform decisions made by decision-makers, who choose whether or not to be informed, and choose whether or not to understand the implications of that best information and whether they wish to apply it. Decision-makers make decisions.

Secondly, with his letter and his comments, Gary Bettman is pushing himself deeper and deeper into the wrong corner, from which he might find it easier to continue acting as his “clever lawyer” self, his least effective self. To fight back doggedly rather than deal with the embarrassment of changing his position—to his own detriment, and to that of the game and its players. Sometimes we lose when we win. Bettman can mock the weakness of the players’ position, he can sniff at a senator’s pretence of power and dance rings around him, he can delight in the incisiveness of his lawyer’s logic and win a lawyer’s fight and save his owners some money. Or he can take off his lawyer’s hat and do far more than that, because he has far more than that in him.

Look at the changes that have occurred during Bettman’s time as commissioner. Hockey has become a more international game. NHL players are now born and raised in Slovenia, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Kazakhstan, Hungary, and many other countries besides. That wasn’t possible even a decade ago. And hockey has also become a more North American game. There are NHL teams in more winter-free U.S. cities, and local kids are playing there—in California, Texas, Arizona, Florida—and making the NHL. That once wasn’t possible either.

Hockey is no longer just a Canadian game played by Canadians who fight and have no teeth. It has become a mainstream sport to more people in more places. Others, in other countries, have the right to feel—and do feel—that hockey is theirs, too. But two things stand in the way of the game’s greater possibilities. Cost—equipment, ice time, travel to faraway places for year-round tournaments and games—and, most crucially, brain injuries. More than thirty years ago, Paul Montador couldn’t resist the instincts and pleadings of his kids to play hockey. Today, more Paul Montadors and Donna Montadors do.

Again, for Gary Bettman, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Football and the NFL offer useful lessons. Football is a much more popular game in the U.S. than hockey. On Friday nights at high schools, on Saturday afternoons on college campuses, on Sunday afternoons in big-city stadiums, football offers a chance for people to gather in the same place at the same time, to feel and express the pride and community connection we all want to feel—about our high school, our college, our city, our country, not just about a game or a team. To lose football would be to lose all this. The stakes are high. This is why football needs to find an answer. But football’s answer is more difficult than hockey’s. Football requires body contact. One set of bodies must force the ball up the field; the other set of bodies must resist—and out of their athletic crouches, the players’ heads are involved in the action on almost every play. And every year, bigger bodies are harvested, learn to hit harder, and get hit harder back. Those who make decisions in football, with its much more elusive answers, can’t run away from the problem fast enough. Their biggest hope is that football is, and can be made to be, too big, too important to fail. But now, because the public won’t let them run away entirely, its decision-makers are running away by appearing to run towards the problem—by giving money for brain research, by mandating independent doctors to search out head hits from high in a stadium, by restricting body contact in practice, or for kids of younger ages. Between Monday and Thursday, in the stories we read, everything seems hopeful, if not quite promising. Then on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday afternoons, we watch, and we see the unbelievable collisions; we see Roger Goodell’s deer-in-the-headlights look of frozen fear whenever the subject of concussions comes up, and it is utterly clear: the NFL has no answers.

Hockey has always been in the shadow of football in the U.S.; the NHL in the shadow of the NFL. Bettman and others in hockey resent that the NFL’s dark shadow of brain injuries has spread over the NHL as well. They argue that the NFL’s problem is its reality, not the NHL’s. Yet the NHL has also benefited from this shadow. The football situation is so bad, and the NFL’s handling of it by Goodell so inept, that hockey and Bettman have come to look better—and better than they deserve—by comparison. The NHL has before it both obligation and opportunity. If it chooses to do what needs to be done to prevent brain injuries, what it is capable of doing, the NHL will be the league, not the NFL, and Bettman will be the commissioner, not Goodell, that does things right. The NHL can emerge out of its own brain injury shadow more respected, its reputation enhanced. The actions it takes might also put pressure on the NFL to do much better, an important result for everyone. And the bonus for Bettman and for the NHL, its great good fortune, is that all of this is much easier to pull off in hockey, because hockey’s answers are easier.

But first, Gary Bettman and the NHL must recognize that brain injuries are a big problem in hockey. They need truly to believe this, and to reflect it in the ambition of the actions they take. They need to approach this not as a _yes, but…_problem: “Yes, but…the NFL’s problem is worse”; “Yes, but…we were the first league to establish an injury committee”; “Yes, but…the scientists don’t really know yet.” _Yes, but…_is the wrong distracting message, and it gets us nowhere.

Bettman and the league need to recognize, too, that this is not a CTE-or-nothing problem; this is about diminished careers and diminished lives. In the First World War, soldiers who emerged from the conflict and looked fine but were somehow different were said to have suffered “shell shock”; in the Second World War it was “combat fatigue”; now it is PTSD. But they are the same thing. Many of these soldiers couldn’t cope; many became alcoholics. They were seen as weak, as cowards, unable to move on to the responsibilities of the rest of their lives. Now we know their conditions were real, that their brains were physically damaged by the concussions that came from the shock waves of exploding devices around them. Steve Montador looked fine. Keith Primeau, Marc Savard, and scores of other former NHL players look fine. But their injuries are real. Bettman and the NHL need to know this.

They also need to recognize that the game has changed. Gary Bettman has never played the game, but the hockey guys he has around him have never played this game. That is the crucial point. The game that, in their memories, moved a hundred miles an hour when they played, didn’t. The crushing hits they felt and gave that were like no others ever, weren’t. The “bell rung” they experienced is not the “bell rung” that today’s players are experiencing. These are dedicated hockey guys, but their “inside the Beltway” thinking has put the sport and its players at risk. Trust what you see, not what you know. This is a faster, more exciting, more dangerous game. The evidence is found not in our memories, it’s in the injuries we see around us. And the message of these injuries is clear: A hit to the head is a bad thing. Hard hits, frequent hits to the head, are very bad things. Head hits rattle the brain. They change the brain and change the person. Life becomes different. Steve Montador, as his dad said, lived seventy years in his thirty-five-year life. But in the last year, except at brief moments, Steve wasn’t Steve anymore. He was gone. The worst thing, what is most haunting and tragic about Steve, is that when he changed, when he died, he thought it was his fault.

Gary Bettman and the league also need to understand that the players have not changed. Players play. They will play no matter what doctors or their wives or their families tell them. And hockey players will do all this, and more, because they are hockey players. A lawyer involved in class action concussion suits in football and hockey was asked why so many more football players than hockey players sue. He said that when football players leave football, they hate the game and hate their team. When hockey players leave, they love the game and love their team.

But a player who loves to play is a vulnerable player. He is one who, if the moment requires that he go through a brick wall, will. He can be manipulated. He can be seen as weak. He can be treated by decision-makers with contempt, not respect.

Gary Bettman and his lawyers may be right. Perhaps some of the brain damage suffered by the NHL’s players happened in junior or on a backyard rink. Perhaps this absence of certainty will affect causation and liability, at least to a degree. But if, as the NHL contends, a player does arrive in the league already damaged, if that is a real possibility, perhaps the league might take note of the importance of this, might decide that it doesn’t want any pre-existing condition to be aggravated, and implement the rules necessary to protect these players. After all, they are its players. After all, as the league likes to say, this is the “NHL family.” Whether the league has a legal obligation to do so or not, maybe it would be a good thing—the right thing—to do. And it is so doable.

All of us need to be saved from ourselves at times. Steve did. It’s why we have traffic lights. The league needs the players to go full out when it’s time to go full out. The players need the league—its doctors, rule-makers, and decision-makers—to say stop when it’s time to stop.

The NHL’s whole system of doctors, rule-makers, and decision-makers faced a test late in the 2016–17 season. In the endlessness of a regular season, players are in and out of the lineup, injuries happen, every day is a new story, nothing has visibility for long, the season goes on, and life goes on. In the playoffs, each series is its own dramatic saga. Every game is anticipated and argued about. A player’s health is scrutinized—before a game, during a game, and after a game. When a player’s injury is a concussion, all of the one-off concussions of the past seem to come together, and the experiences of Marc Savard, Keith Primeau, Steve, and others suddenly matter. The need to play, versus the need to heal. The consequences of now, versus the consequences of the future. Everything is suddenly complicated. Everything consequential. Day after day.

Clarke MacArthur, an undersized, heart-and-soul left winger from Lloydminster, Alberta had played 548 NHL games, including one season with Steve in Buffalo, but only four games since February 16, 2015 when, while chasing down Jay McClement of the Carolina Hurricanes, the two of them crashed into Ottawa Senators goalie Robin Lehner, MacArthur striking Lehner’s right shoulder face-first. It happened the day after Steve died.

MacArthur came back to play the following September, but during a pre-season game, after minor contact with teammate, Mark Fraser, his concussion symptoms returned. The symptoms were less severe this time, and he was soon back playing. But three weeks later, in a regular season game against Columbus, another seemingly innocent collision put him out of action the rest of the year.

He had eleven months to heal. Then in a training camp scrimmage in September, 2016, he was caught unawares by a high, hard, but not shuddering hit from Patrick Sieloff. Again, MacArthur was shut down. He took every treatment, followed every protocol, and tried as hard off the ice as he always had on it to get himself back playing, maybe even harder this time because he was thirty-one years old and knew this might be his last chance. Harder too because he had just signed a big five-year $23.25m contract and was embarrassed not to earn it and not help his already injury-depleted team fight for a playoff spot in the tightly competitive Eastern Conference.

By January, 2017, MacArthur was feeling a little better. He was training harder, and his teammates and coaches began to believe, as he did, that he might just make it back. And what a difference that would make if he could, late in the season, in the midst of a playoff race, being the kind of player and guy he is. In mid-January, he took a baseline concussion test that he and everyone knew he would pass. But he failed. The team announced that he wouldn’t play for the rest of the year. His career seemed over.

But MacArthur kept at it—working out and skating day after day by himself. He knew that as good as he might begin to feel, he wasn’t okay unless his baseline tests said he was. “So I studied up for those tests,” he said later, “and did…all the things you can possibly do to be ready for [them].” And everyone knew that’s what he would do, because that’s who Clarke MacArthur is. He works hard in the gym, hard in practice, and if he wants something he will do what it takes to achieve it. For MacArthur, this was like a Stanley Cup game itself. The test was his opponent. What were its strengths? Its weaknesses? He had to beat it.

Then, near the end of the season, what was never going to happen, happened. He passed the tests, and on April 4, after the Senators had lost five straight games, he skated out onto the ice and played his first game in eighteen months. It’s hard to know who was the most emotional about his return—his teammates, his coaches, his wife, Jessica, his parents, the fans, or MacArthur himself. Even the media. It was so right. So perfectly just.

Then things got better.

In the first round of the playoffs, the Senators were leading the Bruins three games to two. The sixth game was in Boston. MacArthur scored the game-winning, series-winning goal in overtime.

It was beyond belief. So thrilling, so life-affirming, it didn’t matter if you hated the Senators or hated hockey and everything about it. It didn’t matter if you were a player, or coach, or GM, or owner, or fan, or journalist, or a doctor and knew something about concussions and felt your insides empty every time you saw MacArthur on the ice. It was such a great story. How good he must feel. How proud he must be. “It’s ecstasy that you can’t get anywhere else,” MacArthur told Toronto Star reporter Bruce Arthur a few days later. “Scoring in OT, scoring the game-winner, I always say it’s got to be like a 6/49 lottery knocking on your door and saying you’ve won $50 million.” But even better than the lottery, he had done it himself, through his own sheer will.

And this was exactly how it should be. How life should be. Four concussions in eighteen months tells us a lot. It is the writing that is unmissably on the wall. But it doesn’t tell us everything because we don’t know everything. Sometimes things happen that we don’t understand. We have to allow for that. We have to believe that we can create our own destiny every bit as much as science creates our destiny for us. After all, the concussion tests only say “not now.” They don’t say “not ever.”

Once MacArthur had started things in motion, once he kept on trying, kept on training, kept on showing up at the rink, once he had failed his baseline test but wouldn’t go home, what was going to stop him? Once he kept feeling a little better, and a little better, it was clear the team needed him and he needed the team, and the playoffs were getting closer. Once that mountain of hope and need to play built and built, higher and higher, and the story got better and better, who was going to say no to him? Who was going to tell him he couldn’t play? MacArthur, his wife, his parents, his teammates, his coaches, his GM, his owner, the doctors, the NHL’s Department of Player Safety, Gary Bettman? That would be so unconscionably cruel. He just wanted to feel normal again, and as it was with Marc Savard, normal was to play.

In Game 2 of the second round of the playoffs, Ryan McDonagh of the Rangers struck MacArthur with a high, hard, but not shuddering check. He left the game with what Ottawa called an “upper body injury,” what they and MacArthur later said was a pinched nerve in his neck, unrelated to the previous concussions he had suffered. Clarke MacArthur returned to the lineup for Game 3.

He played every game for the rest of the playoffs, nineteen in all, as the Senators beat the Rangers in six games. MacArthur recorded two assists in the series-winning game. The team lost to the Penguins in the next round, in the seventh game in overtime. He had three goals and six assists in all, seventh most on the Ottawa team, and averaged over fifteen minutes of ice time a game, seventh highest among the Senators forwards.

A few days after the season was over, MacArthur talked with Ottawa Citizen reporter Ken Warren about all the amazing ups and downs of the year for the team and for him. “It’s great to be back,” he said. “As much as I wanted it to happen, I never dreamed it would happen—let alone about how far our team got.” As for next season, suddenly circumspect, he said, “I just want to take a week or two and see how I feel. I still love playing the game.” He told Warren how, now more than three weeks after his initial injury, he was still feeling discomfort in his neck. “I feel pretty good,” he said. “I just want to make sure I’m all sorted out. It’s my neck, not anything else. It should be good. From the first round [against Boston] I could feel it. I will get an MRI and go from there.”

Hope, need to play, possibility, dream, excitement? The brain, as Dr. Lili-Naz Hazrati said, will tell its own story.

—

Then there was Sidney Crosby, Steve’s buddy from Vail. In a career filled with improbable moments, the 2016-17 playoffs may have been Crosby’s most improbable. Two days before MacArthur suffered his injury, Crosby, coming off the left wing, got a pass from teammate Jake Guentzel and cut to the net. Washington Capitals’ star Alex Ovechkin closed on him, cross-checked him across the shoulders, his stick glancing upwards, striking Crosby on the top of his helmet. Off balance, Crosby fell towards Capitals defenceman Matt Niskanen, who raised up his stick in front of him in cross-check position, hitting Crosby in the face. Play went on; Crosby remained on the ice.

Seven months earlier, Crosby collided in a pre-season practice with a teammate, felt his concussion symptoms come back, and missed the first six games of the year. It had been five years since his last concussion. In the time between, Crosby had won NHL trophies for most points, most goals, and MVP during the regular season and playoffs. He had captained the Penguins and Team Canada to a Stanley Cup, Olympic gold medal, World Championships, and a World Cup of Hockey Championship (where he was also named the MVP). He had become universally acknowledged (again) as the best player in the world. Then came that nothing moment in that nothing practice.

A story about Crosby in the Toronto Star a few days after his injury began, “We kind of hoped we were past this.” Based on what? According to whom?

Then Crosby returned to play, and had one of the best of his many outstanding seasons. He led the league in goals, was second in scoring, and second in voting for the league’s MVP. And the Penguins, ahead 2–0 in their series against the Capitals, the NHL’s regular season champion, were suddenly a favourite to win another Cup. Now this.

The debate started up again. Hockey’s critics criticized. Its defenders defended. It sounded like Marek, Shannon, Morrison, and the dead parrot all over again. Niskanen raised up his stick. It was intentional. No, it was accidental. Niskanen should be suspended. No, he shouldn’t. Ovechkin’s vicious hit had started things. No, it didn’t. It was a “hockey play.” No, it wasn’t. Niskanen received a game misconduct, but was not suspended for any further games. Intentional? Accidental? The brain doesn’t distinguish. The next day, the Penguins announced that Crosby had suffered a concussion. His playing status was termed “day-to-day.” He did not play in Game 4.

Commentary about Crosby and his concussions that had been put on the shelf for five years, came down off it again. For his part, Crosby did what he had learned to do. Immediately after his injury, he made no comment, left the public eye, and retreated into a world of the few he trusts most, and mostly into himself. As he said later, “I know my body,” and he needed quiet to know what his body was telling him. Three days after his injury he appeared again for practice. The next day, he passed his baseline test and engaged in full practice, which included the usual incidental contact. Hockey commentators assumed, at best, he wouldn’t dress for Game 5 a day later. The Penguins were ahead three games to one in the series; if Crosby had any thought of playing again in the playoffs why not give himself a few more days to heal. It only made sense. That night, he played more than nineteen minutes, about his playoff average, got an assist on a goal by Phil Kessel, and played in the hard areas of the ice, in the corners and in front of the net, in the way he always does it.

The Penguins lost. In the first period of Game 6, Crosby was hit in the nose with a stick. In the second period, going to the net, he was knocked out of control and flew crumpled into the boards striking his shoulder and head. In a single instant, 19,000 Penguins fans sucked the air out of the arena. Crosby got up and continued. At the end of the game, Hockey Night in Canada host Ron Maclean said in summary that how Crosby had dealt with this tough, punishing night “will stamp out a lot of conjecture….It’s done,” MacLean said, then as if hearing his own voice and becoming suddenly aware of everything that had come before for Crosby and other players, he caught himself and said, “Maybe it’s not done.” For games afterwards, when Crosby went onto the ice a confusion of feelings went with him—about him and his play; about him and his health. About hope; and about fear.

Crosby’s play through the playoffs, in wins over Columbus, Washington, and Ottawa, had seemed more up and down than usual, and in speculation about the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoffs’ most valuable player, he was rarely if ever mentioned. That changed in the last few games of the finals against the Nashville Predators. Tied 2–2, Game 5 would turn the series one way or the other. And Crosby dominated. He dominated in every way—in what he did and how he did it; in making his teammates better and his opponents worse. The Penguins won 6–0. A few nights later, they won the sixth game and their second straight Stanley Cup, and Crosby his second straight Conn Smythe Trophy.

Had Crosby been affected by his concussion? He said nothing about it. To many, it seemed rash that he had come back so soon after the injury. He doesn’t play a safe style of game. Gretzky and Mario Lemieux both gave themselves space with their ability to imagine the possibilities of a play, and then their ability to create it—Gretzky with his passes, Lemieux with his puck-handling and reach. Crosby, in today’s faster, more congested game, has always had to fight for his space. His is a game of skill and will. He is the most Canadian of hockey’s great stars. By continuing to play, he couldn’t add much to what is already in the record books. He might only add to his legend: remember the year Crosby returned from his concussion and, mucking and scrapping, took his team on his back, and won. But Crosby didn’t keep playing to add to his legend. Legends play, as others do, because their team and their teammates need them, because the season is still there to be won, and because every player has only a few Stanley Cups in him. If Crosby didn’t quite know that in 2009 when he was twenty-one and won for the first time, at twenty-nine, he does now. Other teams improve, age catches up, the salary cap spreads Cup-winning players to the four winds of the league. Every year might be a player’s last, best chance.

When concussions don’t disappear into the distraction of a long season, when they matter every day, every game, we can see them for what they are. For two months, the 2017 playoffs offered an unmissable view of the twisting, turning, haunting, complicated state of concussions and the game. In the celebration and glow of achievement that follows, the draft, and free agency, this can be quickly forgotten. The question is now what it has always been: how can we make better decisions about concussions? How do we create the circumstances for Gary Bettman, where it is difficult for him not to do what needs to be done, and easy for him to do it?

First, Gary Bettman and the league need to recognize that the problem of brain injuries comes from the way we play. And how we play in the future is not inevitable.

Bettman might use his clever lawyer’s mind instead to get out of whatever awkward box he has put himself into, and put himself into a better one. He might say that science is crucial in informing us and guiding us and that, in fact, he and the NHL will work to enhance and speed up science by helping to fund its best and most promising research. But he could also say: Whatever science says about the connection between hockey and brain diseases, too many of our players are experiencing lingering effects from their injuries—whether to their knees or hips, or to their heads—and we want to do something more about that. We are always looking to reduce injuries in our game. That’s why we created the Department of Player Safety (“the first of its kind in professional sports”). So we are going to take a comprehensive look at our game, as every sport should, to ensure that it remains the great, exciting game to play and to watch, but to see how we can make it safer, too. And because of the public’s interest, we will put particular focus on head injuries.

There is a phrase many of us love and often use because we want it to be true, and we know it can be true. Ever hopeful and unconquerable: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Yet, when facing deep-seated, complicated problems, the obverse of the phrase is more often true: Where there’s a way, there’s a will. Because after experiencing failure upon failure, the will grows tired, and committing our whole selves to something and failing, hurts too much. The will is not gone, it’s busy scaling shorter mountains. It is a will that needs a way. It needs a first step, that leads to a next step, and to a next, each one possible, all of them together leading excitingly towards something big and doable. Give me a way and I will give you a will. If you don’t, I will change what I know I can change, and manage the rest.

It is why awareness isn’t the answer. Awareness speaks only to the will. It is why scientists aren’t the answer and decision-makers are. For a decision-maker, a problem without an answer, a what without a how, a will without a way, can be ignored and denied. They can try to sell you something they can do with their eyes closed and sell it like crazy as if it’s the real answer, the real how, the real way, but which speaks instead to the dimensions of the problem as they see it, and not of the problem itself.

Until now, it seems as if Gary Bettman and those around him do not believe that there is a way to make this game just as exciting to play and to watch, just as successful off the ice and on, but significantly, appropriately safer. No answer; no problem. No way; no will.

But there is a way. Bettman and others could bring together the most respected people in the sport, whoever they are—players, former players, coaches, former coaches, as well as doctors and researchers—from Canada, from the U.S., from wherever in the world, and pose to them the question, and have them answer: How do we reduce the frequency and force of blows to the head? These are people who know the game, who know what makes it exciting to play and to watch, who are capable every day of seeing it with fresh eyes: what it is, not what they already know it to be. People who understand that there are a hundred ways to play the game, and to play it successfully, excitingly, and to win. If two players race into a corner for the puck, they know it isn’t about who gets there first, or who hits whom, but who controls the puck and makes the play. They know that there is more than one way to make the play successfully, and that some ways leave a player more vulnerable to a head hit. What, then, are the best ways to make that play successfully and safely?

These players and coaches will come up with good answers. They are among the most creative people on earth because they are among the most competitive people on earth. They are always looking for something new and better so they can win. In this case, as it relates to hits to the head, what is that something better? Put them around the same table to talk about this, and do it in public so everybody can watch them and listen to them and think along with them, and understand as they understand; and online, so people are able to add their own thoughts. So when the discussion is over, it’s not really over. So people will continue to talk about it, and think about it. And so the media will, too. And parents. And other players and coaches, at all levels. Because if these actions are good enough for the best in the world to take, they’re good enough for them. So that when games are played, if what is implemented isn’t good enough, as with every game plan, they can adapt and make it better.

For Gary Bettman and the league, this is not just about acknowledging problems, it is about focusing on answers. It is a chance to turn what can feel like grim necessity into exciting possibility. A chance not to run away from a problem, but to run towards an answer. A way and a will together. A chance to resolve, not manage, something that is not fair, not right, and not necessary.

Two small changes—no hits to the head; no finishing your check—and one process: actions of a dimension consistent with the dimension of the problem; actions to achieve, not just do; actions that Gary Bettman can implement easily. Actions that leave him no reason not to.

Steve Montador and others are gone. But something good can come out of something very bad. 2017 is the NHL’s one-hundredth anniversary. It is a natural time to look back, to see where we’ve been, to see where we are, to see where we’re going. To celebrate, and to thank those who have made the game what it is. But the best kind of celebration always looks forward even as it looks back. The game of the past doesn’t matter much unless the game of the present is strong; unless the imagined game of the future is even better. Maurice Richard and Gordie Howe gave meaning to Cyclone Taylor and Howie Morenz before them, and Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky to Richard and Howe, because each made the game better. It is the players who come after 2017 who will give meaning to the NHL’s first hundred years. Gary Bettman and the league need to give those players the chance to make the game better still. To make 2017 an anniversary worth commemorating.

Gary Bettman’s contract runs five more years. During that time, he could play out the string, make lots more money, and feel the daily assurance that comes from doing what he already knows how to do. Or he could take on some big, important things. He could use the considerable power and skills he has developed to make hockey the exciting, amazing, safer, better game it can be in the future. Gary Bettman doesn’t need to be a tobacco baron or a climate change–denier fighting against the night. His biggest contribution is still ahead.