Chris Simon of the New York Islanders fights Todd Fedoruk of the Philadelphia Flyers in a 2007 game at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y.. Simon died in March.Jim McIsaac/Getty Images
Lauri Smith was visiting Orlando this past March when a journalist called about her ex-husband.
She had learned long ago to say “No comment” when reporters asked about Chris Simon, one of the toughest fighters in NHL history. She opted for the same approach this time around, especially considering the guy’s question: Do you have any comment on the death of your ex-husband?
She was stunned. Dead? He was 52, just a decade from his career on the ice, where he seemed virtually indestructible as an enforcer responsible for brutalizing any opposing player who endangered his team’s stars.
Simon's family believes the brain disorder chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) contributed to his death. Simon leaves the ice in a 2002 game against the Tampa Bay Lightning.CHRIS O'MEARA/The Canadian Press
“I thought it was a joke, to be honest, but then it was followed with my co-worker calling,” says Smith, an Ottawa-area law clerk who spent five years with Simon, who died by suicide on March 18.
For years, she’d been convinced that Simon had suffered a brain injury during a playing career that included stops in Quebec, Colorado and Washington. As far back as his 1993 rookie year with the Nordiques, she had researched his changing behaviour. Why had he begun blinking incessantly? Could blows to the head have triggered his anger-management issues? Can his employer help?
Those questions grew more urgent after their relationship dissolved and their son, Mitch, picked up the game. Would she have to worry about his head, too?
Sitting in Orlando last March, those unresolved questions intruded on her grief. At least with Simon’s death, she thought, the hockey world would be forced to recognize the devastating symptoms of the fighting she witnessed.
She thought wrong.
Instead, a new season has dawned with nary a mention of his name or chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain disorder Simon’s family believes led to his death. Smith, along with some of Simon’s old on-ice foes, want more accountability from the league and more assistance to prevent future deaths.
“I noticed after Chris’s passing that the story just went away,” she says. “No one’s talking about CTE and we should be talking about it more than ever. Did Chris have something hereditary? Was it a mental-health issue? Or was it actually CTE because of his job? I need to know for my son and the rest of the Simon family as well. And I think the NHL owes something to his family in terms of resolution.”
In death, Simon joined a tragic roll call of NHL fighters who died young – Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, Wade Belak, Jeff Parker and Todd Ewen, to name a few. All five men were posthumously diagnosed with CTE, which researchers say is caused by repeated brain injuries and can lead to depression, aggression, memory loss and physical impairment – sometimes long after triggering incidents.
Simon looks to shoot on Montreal Canadiens goalie Jose Theodore at Madison Square Garden in New York in December, 2003.KATHY WILLENS/The Canadian Press
In public statements, and in courtrooms, the NHL has denied any link between the game and the disease, and argued that it has gradually made the game safer by increasing penalties for fighting, introducing a concussion protocol and restricting contact to the head.
Two days after Simon’s death, reporter Frank Seravalli asked the NHL’s deputy commissioner, Bill Daly, if the league’s position had changed.
“No,” Daly said. “I think the science is still lacking.”
That’s consistent with the position the NHL took defending a lawsuit brought by hundreds of players who claimed the league ignored the effects of long-term head trauma. A judge declined to certify the class action in 2018 and the NHL eventually agreed to a US$18.9-million settlement with around 300 players – chump change compared with the reported US$1.2-billion the NFL has paid out so far related to a settlement in a similar case.
The Washington Capitals take a moment of silence for Chris Simon after he passed away, on March 20.John McCreary/Getty Images
There are many vocal critics of the league’s attitude toward CTE, but few as authoritative as a former World Wrestling Entertainment heel who went by the stage name Chris Harvard, so named for his Ivy League background. A mistimed drop kick in 2003 caused months of postconcussion syndrome, convincing him to retire and go back to school for a PhD in behavioural neuroscience under his real name, Chris Nowinski. As someone who approaches the issue as both a patient and a researcher, he can’t stomach the NHL’s position on CTE.
“People who care about hockey players need to recognize that what they are saying is not true, and we have to both push for them to tell the truth and also ignore what they’re saying as we try to help these hockey players,” said Nowinski, a doctor who co-founded Concussion Legacy Foundation, a charity that supports athletes and veterans affected by CTE.
Evidence continues to mount in his favour. A 2023 Boston University study found that a person’s risk of developing CTE increased by 23 per cent with each additional year of playing hockey.
Though they didn’t focus on CTE, Columbia University researchers found last year that NHL enforcers died 10 years earlier than non-enforcers. And the enforcer deaths were more strongly linked to drug overdose, suicide and neurodegenerative disease.
Matthew Barnaby of the Colorado Avalanche, right, fights Darren McCarty Detroit Red Wings during a 2004 match. Barnaby estimates he racked up at least 400 fights between his junior and pro career.Brian Bahr/Getty Images
Considering the number of punches that enforcers endure, Nowinski said it’s plausible to assume they have a higher risk of CTE, and potentially other neurodegenerative diseases, than other players.
Scrappers from Simon’s era tend to agree. Matthew Barnaby, a forward on a tough Buffalo Sabres team that terrorized opponents in the mid-90s, estimates he racked up at least 400 fights between his junior and pro career, enduring an average of five punches per bout, or 2,000 blows in total.
“It has to have some cumulative effects,” said Barnaby, 51, though he has not yet personally noticed any symptoms.
Dennis Vial, who led the league with 30 fights in the 1995-96 season, said his head gives him little trouble aside from a bit of anxiety when he hears of fallen foes. He can’t help but wonder what the future will bring. “One day am I going to wake up losing my mind and turning into some violent person?” says Vial, who runs a small business in Nova Scotia. “Will my brain deactivate because of all these injuries? I don’t know.”
One of Barnaby’s former teammates takes a starkly different view. As president of the local Sabres alumni association, Rob Ray said he hears about all manner of health problems among retired players. “The issues I deal with for players who never dropped their gloves are just as bad or worse than those that did,” he says.
“People have a burr up their ass about that physical style of game,” he adds. “They say any player who got in a fight suddenly has something wrong with them. And that bugs the piss out of me.”
Today, those old fights remain like ghosts in his bones. He’s got a plate with five screws in his thumb from the time he tried to give the Islanders’ Steve Webb an uppercut. His jaw occasionally locks up from the time it was broken in a fight. He’s got arthritis in both elbows and his hands are always stiff. But his head? “I’m doing fine, I got a few businesses, wife, family, kids. I don’t have a problem,” he says.
Not everyone’s fine. When NHL players first launched their class-action lawsuit against the league for the effects of head trauma, Mike Peluso was one of the star plaintiffs. A veteran of nine seasons who won a Stanley Cup with the New Jersey Devils, Peluso struggled with grand mal seizures following a 1993 knockout by St. Louis Blues tough-guy Tony Twist. In the years since his 1998 retirement he says he’s battled depression, dementia and suicidal thoughts.
Mike Peluso, left, fights with Tie Domi of the Winnipeg Jets in 1993. Peluso struggled with grand mal seizures following a 1993 fight and since his 1998 retirement he says he’s battled depression, dementia and suicidal thoughts.
A few years back, he loaded some of his prescription medication into a bowl of popcorn, with plans to end his life, but couldn’t stand the thought of his Labrador Retriever, Coors, being alone.
Coors has since died. He keeps the dog’s ashes in a room off his basement for the day they can be buried together.
“Had I known the side effects, I never would have played this game,” he said in an interview at his townhouse in Hudson, Wis., where he said he receives little assistance aside from a US$830-a-month pension.
But that lack of help is starting to change.
Seven years ago, former goalie Glenn Healy took over as president and executive director of the NHL Alumni Association, then known primarily as the organizer of old-timers’ games. From the start, he was inundated with calls about suicide, depression and other problems among players, for whom he had nothing to offer.
So the association hired a medical director, three social workers, a dental consultant and created a mental-health network based in Ottawa, Pittsburgh and Sweden that can see players on a moment’s notice.
Healy says his staff is helping around 200 players right now with anything from brain scans to rent money. “Most of our calls come from the wives saying they want their husband back, or from a kid saying they want their dad back. It’s rarely the player.”
They can’t reach everyone. Peluso dismissed the idea of asking for the association’s help. But nobody’s about to do it on his behalf.
“I don’t have anybody,” says Peluso, surrounded by hockey memorabilia, including a photo of Healy, in his basement. “Hopefully I’ll get a will done some time, and when that time comes, it comes.”