Derek Boogaard died in a haze of pounding headaches and drug addiction. Could anyone have saved his life?
Derek Boogaard’s death may have been a shock to hockey fans, but those close to him saw tragedy coming from a distance. In the five months between his devastating concussion at the hands of Ottawa’s Matt Carkner, they saw him slip ever deeper into throbbing headaches, vertigo, depression and addiction.
Now, a court will be asked to decide whether his employers in the NHL bear responsibility for his downward spiral. The Boogaard family has filed a wrongful death suit against the league, and their lawyer, William Gibbs, boils their case down to this one sentence: “You take a young man, you subject him to trauma, you give him pills for that trauma, he becomes addicted to those pills, you promise to treat him for that addiction, and you fail.”
There are a lot of questions to answer, but two stand out as pivotal.
First, did the NHL “subject him to trauma”? Does the league’s continued tolerance of fighting require hockey players to take undue risks with their health and safety? We know most hockey fans believe fighting is an integral part of the game, but what will a court say?
Second, did league administrators and doctors provide Boogaard a reasonable standard of care to deal with his injuries and his subsequent addiction to pain meds? We know Boogaard received a lot of narcotic pain pills in his career, and we know he was twice ordered into rehab programs by the league. He was on an unsupervised pass from his second rehab stint when he died of an accidental overdose at the age of 28. Was he overprescribed, and could anything more have been done?
The instant reaction among fans is generally to side with the game, if not the league. The players know the risks, we say. The game is fine as it is, we insist. From there, it’s just a short hop to loud denunciations of the victim. But Boogaard deserves our sympathy at the very least.
We know he died in chronic pain and crushing depression as the result of workplace injuries. If anyone still doubts the living hell that can result from repeated concussions, please reread Brett Popplewell’s investigation into Boogaard’s death (“Fall of the Boogeyman”), published in our very first issue in September 2011.
The question is whether anyone could have stopped that runaway train once it got rolling. Anyone who thinks the answer is easy or obvious hasn’t thought enough about it.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.
