Gare Joyce

Gare Joyce writes regularly on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.

I’m thankful a sin of omission by me didn’t cost one of my favourite hockey players of all time.

After a week that featured evidence that old-time NHL tough guy Reggie Fleming had suffered severe hockey-related brain damage that led to his death, after a week that featured a multi-platform urinating match between a renowned neurologist and the flogger of Rock'em Sock'em hockey videos, there doesn't seem to be much left to be said about concussions and other head injuries in the game.

I'll try nonetheless.

You're not supposed to play favourites in this business and, in all honesty, I can say that I don't have favourite teams. I do, however, have favourite players, those whose skills and character stand out and make my job an occasional pleasure.

One of my favourite junior players over the years was Alyn McCauley. If you don't follow the junior game as much as the NHL you might think I'm plucking a player out of the margins. Not the case, at all.

For a stretch in the '90s he was the best junior in Canada, winner of the CHL's player-of-the-year award. He played on a couple of teams that won the world juniors and, on the second trip, he was indisputably the best player on the Canadian side despite a pretty bad case of bronchitis. I tried to hunt down a surgical mask when interviewing him after those tournament games.

From this you can glean that he had game and was a gamer. The most chilling thing I've seen in hockey had McCauley as its centrepiece.

If you followed the Leafs in the late '90s and early 2000s you might remember the night that New Jersey's Sheldon Souray ran McCauley into the end boards at the ACC. I was there that night. In fact, I remember talking to McCauley the morning it happened. And I remember thinking that night that I had seen the last game he would ever play.

And that isn't the most chilling thing I've seen in hockey. I was there the night that he was knocked out by a puck in the side of the head in Oshawa. I felt pretty sick seeing it --although probably not as sick as the Leafs brass. Cliff Fletcher and others were in attendance when McCauley and the Ottawa 67's came down to take on the Generals. Toronto had just acquired McCauley as a piece of the trade that sent Doug Gilmour to New Jersey. And that isn't the most chilling thing I've seen in hockey either.

No, the most chilling thing I've seen in hockey didn't happen on the ice. It played out in the dressing room after a game in March 1997. Ostensibly, I was in Belleville to check in on the progress of McCauley after the concussion he suffered in Oshawa. The 67's were in a playoff tilt with the Bulls and McCauley gave it something more than the old college try.

He was the best player on the ice for Ottawa. He was on the ice almost every other shift. He was on the ice for penalty kills and power plays. He was on the ice with a large bull's eye painted on his helmet and a sign that said "HIT ME."

Okay, no bull's eye and no hit-me sign, but still, every player on the Bulls knew exactly how vulnerable McCauley was. Maybe a few of them would have played it straight but a few would have taken liberties and some pleasure from separating McCauley from his senses.

There were some red flags that night, even to the uninformed eye of the correspondent. I wrote: "Before the first intermission, McCauley stood at centre ice, feet straddling the red line, bent over at the waist, while his teammates filed into the dressing room. In front of a crowd of 3,000, he sought a moment alone with his thoughts."

I was wrong to write that. Yeah, it was a poetic flourish more wrought than written on deadline. It wasn't what I thought at the time. I should have written: "McCauley played hurt and shouldn't have played at all."

Thankfully, McCauley made it through the game without getting his neural pathways re-scrambled. Brian Kilrea, the 67's coach, told me that he "had to back off usin (McCauley) as much as I usually would ... as much as I'd like to." I punched that into my column uncritically, but I hadn't seen Kilrea back off using McCauley at all and should have noted it.

The most chilling scene came after the game. I went down to the dressing room to talk to McCauley. He sat on a bench with his head hanging, chin on his chest. When he lifted his head, he was glassy-eyed, completely spaced out. You would have taken away his keys and wouldn't have allowed him to drive his car in this condition -- in fact, you wouldn't have expected him to be able to find his car in the state he was in. He was impaired, drunk without touching a drop, like a boxer who had taken a 10-count 10 minutes before.

I asked McCauley about his health, his fitness to play. He was the team captain. He said the stuff that team captains say. He said: "My legs aren't where I'd like them to be yet. I'm not in game shape, but tonight the concussion didn't bother me. The doctors gave me medical clearance to play Friday night, but I still felt a little dizzy sometimes in that game. Tonight it was just my legs. Playing games back-to-back is a tough way to come back."

It was clearly not just his legs. It was his concussion. It was his decision to play through a concussion. It was the doctor's decision to clear him to play through a concussion. It was the team's decision to send him over the boards that night and the next -- the 67's were going to host the Bulls the next night.

I should have written that I believed that McCauley shouldn't have played. If I had been as brave as Alyn McCauley was, I would have written that. I didn't. He had his life invested in the game and I was earning a paycheque. He did a hard thing, however ill-advised. I did the easy thing rather than stepping up.

I wrote: "McCauley's head will clear and Cliff Fletcher will feel better. And if McCauley is something more than a boy wonder, it might go a long way to ending a run of dark nights at the Gardens." Spooky. If Sheldon Souray's hit on McCauley had done something worse than knock McCauley out for more than a season, if it had a tragic, life-altering or even life-ending outcome, it would rank among the darkest nights in the history of the franchise.

There was a great piece in the Queen's Journal by student writer Andrew Bucholtz last winter. Concussions and a knee injury had knocked McCauley out of hockey prematurely and he was working as an assistant coach at Queen's, just a commute from his hometown of Gananoque, Ont. McCauley dodged the media in easing himself into retirement and allowing his head coach to speak to team issues.

McCauley spoke to Bucholtz because he wanted to go public with his hard-won wisdom on head injuries. I felt okay, but I didn't have the backing from the doctors I saw that I would have liked," McCauley said. "Even when you get over the physical obstacle of confidence, you've got your self-confidence. Even though my brain seemed like it had healed and everything seemed fine, I had to go out there and prove to myself that I was okay and capable of playing at that level.

"For a player like me -- for most players -- you can't have any hesitation in your game."

Though McCauley said to me back in '97 that he had clearance from his doctor, it at least seems that he had something less than absolute clearance. That's just a part of the culture of the game, stuff that goes farther back than Reggie Fleming.

McCauley told Bucholtz that he had been "sick to his stomach" when he found out that one of his Queen's players had played through a game with a concussion but didn't tell the coaches. McCauley said that he felt that the message to players had to be that they were risking paralysis and death when they were stepping back on the ice with brain bruising or bleeding.

But that player, who only came forward to the Queen's staff with his concussion symptoms at a later practice, was doing exactly what McCauley did with the 67's.

I felt sick to my stomach the night they took Alyn McCauley off on a stretcher at the ACC. I also felt sick to my stomach, though, when I read that story in the Queen's Journal, and McCauley's admission that he shouldn't have been playing so soon after his earlier concussions. I glorified what was recklessness by a teenage player with a concussion.

You can forgive the teenager on that one but not the messenger. I accepted the team's line on McCauley's injury. That line doesn' t square with McCauley's recollection. Make your own judgment about the team but the messenger deserves a share of the blame once more.

I shouldn't have so readily accepted as fact that the team had medical clearance to play McCauley 25 minutes a night when, in fact, for the good of his long-term health, he probably shouldn't have even been practising.

I don't love hockey as much as Alyn McCauley or Brian Kilrea. I don't love it as much as Reggie Fleming did to keep playing for more than a couple of decades, from NHL shrines to forgotten barns in backwaters.

I don't love it as much as guys who sell Rock'em Sock'em videos. That is to say, I love the game conditionally.

When the game lets a young man like McCauley take awful risks I hate the game. When it actually encourages a young man like Alyn McCauley to take awful risks with permanent, irreversible neurological damage I hate the game even more.

I know, as does Alyn McCauley, that his story isn't an exceptional one, that it isn't an unusual occurence. It is almost certainly a nightly one.

And when those in the press box and those in front of the cameras glorify anything that puts players at risk for brain injury -- not anything causing brain injury but anything that elevates the risk -- we're committing something just short of a crime.

I've played my role in that and only some of my sins have been sins of omission, like in Alyn McCauley's case. Embracing and even just tolerating unnecessary violence in the game might drive up circulation, ratings and video sales, but it does a disservice to young people at all levels of the game, not just NHLers and juniors.

Alyn McCauley didn't always listen to the doctors when he was playing but he told the Queen's Journal that he came away with a new understanding of the concussions by attending a medical conference and listening to experts in neurology. Those who blindly embrace "old-school" values, those who won't hear out the medical experts out of hubris or commercial interests, aren't just resigning themselves to ignorance.

No, they either unwittingly or cynically condone a culture that can leave its brightest lights in total darkness.