The day after Mother’s Day marked the eighth anniversary of the death of NHL player Derek Boogaard. As usual, his mother, Joanne, spent a quiet day of reflection at her home in Regina, Saskatchewan, and continued the tradition of writing a letter to her deceased son for publication in the Regina’s leadership position.
This year’s letter lamented a missed call from him the night he died. It details the events in the lives of his siblings, nephews and nieces, who primarily know “Uncle Derek” through photographs and stories told.
The end of his letter, however, was as much to the league as it was to Derek.
“The NHL still has a lot of work to do to recognize and accept responsibility for deceased players and those who suffer from CTE and don’t even know it,” she wrote, referring to chronic traumatic encephalopathy , degenerative brain disease. caused by repeated blows to the head.
Derek Boogaard, who suffered from CTE, was 28 and a popular Rangers henchman when he died of an accidental overdose of painkillers and alcohol in 2011. His death and subsequent diagnosis marked the beginning of a period of awareness of the long-term, sometimes fatal, consequences of brain injuries in hockey. Only football appears to be more dangerous among the major team sports in the United States.
(Read “Punch” OUR original series And documentary on Derek Boogaard.)
With the Stanley Cup Final underway, Joanne Boogaard and a growing group of former players fear that people have moved to a stage of acceptance — that the NHL has emerged from its concussion crisis by staunchly denying that hockey is responsible for brain damage. tormenting players and their families.
Other factors contribute to the lesser sense of urgency surrounding head injuries in the sport compared to the NFL, including hockey’s lower visibility in the sporting landscape and fewer headline-grabbing deaths.
But hockey’s strategy of deliberate denial stands out.
At Commissioner Gary Bettman’s annual conference league state address Before the first game of the Finals on Monday, neither Bettman nor anyone he spoke with said the words “concussion,” “brain,” “safety” or “CTE.”
The Boogaards’ lawsuits against the NHL were in court for years, but were ultimately dismissed, mostly on technicalities regarding jurisdiction and timing. The NHL rejected similar lawsuits filed by other families and accepted no blame in Boogaard’s death or others who suffered concussion or brain disease.
Last year, the NHL settled a case with hundreds of retired players who sued the league for hiding the dangers of head shots. The $19 million deal was far from the Billion-dollar settlement reached by NFL with former players five years ago.
“A lot has happened in the last eight years, with a lot of hockey players dying and a lot more suffering,” Joanne Boogaard said from her home. “I don’t want people to forget it. And I don’t want people to think that it’s over, that everything is better. It’s not.”
Unlike football, in which the sheer number of CTE cases (more than 100 in the NFL) and the eventual NFL public entrance Whether there is a correlation between his play and the brain diseases that have forced concussions into regular conversations around football, hockey has avoided such a shift.
“There’s this weird cultural disconnect where, presumably, players can read the newspapers and educate themselves about these issues, and their employer, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to want to educate them and prevent these injuries,” said Stephen Casperhistorian of neuroscience and professor at Clarkson University.
Two things seem certain: First, more and more players will die and suffer from CTE. “It’s one of those areas where the more you know, the worse the news is,” said Ken Dryden, the author and Hall of Fame goalie.
Second, the NHL will deny having played a role. This is what the league has done since the beginning.
After Boogaard’s death, Bettman was asked by The New York Times about a possible connection between hockey and CTE.
“There’s not a lot of data, and the experts that we’ve spoken with, who are consulting with us, think it’s way premature to draw any conclusions at this point,” he said in 2011.
“I don’t believe there has been, from everything I’ve been told – and if anyone has any information to the contrary, we’d be happy to hear it – other than some anecdotal evidence, there “There hasn’t been this conclusive link,” Bettman said.
Although there is uncertainty around CTE, which can only be positively diagnosed posthumously, it has been associated with dementia-like symptoms including memory loss, depression, and dementia. impulsiveness. Scientists still don’t know why some seem to succeed and others don’t, for example.
There are at least nine publicly known cases of deceased NHL players with CTE, including Boogaard, Bob Probert, Steve Montador And Todd Ewen. Other files are currently being examined. Several other players who never reached NHL and died before the age of 40 had the disease, including Andrew Carroll And Kyle Raarup.
Last year’s settlement between the NHL and some former players gave the illusion that the concussion case had been settled, but the effect was more like pressing a reset button. The few people who refused the settlement or who never joined the larger case can pursue their individual claims; They are expected to receive instructions on how to proceed at a hearing in Minneapolis on June 16.
Among those moving forward is the family of Montador, who played 10 years in the NHL and died in 2015 at age 35. A long-pending lawsuit filed by Montador’s estate argues, among other things, that the NHL “completely failed to provide him with crucial medical information about the lifelong ramifications of head injuries.”
Montador’s father, Paul, is eager to return to fighting the NHL in court.
“My son would be alive if the NHL had not dealt with concussion issues and recognized the impact of concussions, and potentially CTE, on its players,” Paul Montador said.
Montador watched Bettman’s recent testimony in Ottawa. Like others, he was disappointed but not surprised.
“If they had handled the situation differently from the beginning, he wouldn’t have had to act like a lawyer,” Montador said. “He could behave like a human being.”
The day before Bettman testified, Kelli Ewen, Todd Ewen’s widow, filed a lawsuit against the NHL in federal court in California. The claims include negligence, fraudulent concealment and wrongful death.
Todd Ewen played 11 seasons in the NHL and committed suicide in 2015 at age 49, fearing he had CTE
Lili-Naz Hazrati, a neuropathologist at the Canadian Concussion Centre, examined Ewen’s brain and concluded he did not have CTE – a surprising revelation subsequently judged to be incorrect by others, including scientists from Boston University Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center.
In the nearly three years between these competing diagnoses, Hazrati served as a witness to the NHL in its litigation, and Bettman used Ewen’s erroneous results to argue against the CTE links. He criticized the “hype” and “fear-mongering” in a statement. 2016 letter to Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
Critics paint Bettman and the NHL as the sports equivalent of tobacco salesmen or climate change deniers — deliberately obfuscating issues that few people still debate in order to protect their own interests.
“It’s hard to know what’s going to push the NHL to the right on this issue,” said Chris Nowinski, co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, affiliated with the CTE Center at Boston University. “What is clear is that it is not science that will convince them.”
Dryden sees a simple solution: use rules to eliminate most hits to the head. Concussions will never be completely extinct, perhaps in any sport, but Dryden believes that any blow to the head – whether accidental or not, whether with a shoulder, stick, fist or elbow – should be penalized.
“Football faces an immense challenge: the real answers are difficult,” Dryden said. “In hockey, that’s not the case. This is the part that is so annoying.
For now, the NHL has tickled the subject with its rule bookpenalizing hits that appear to be aimed at the head and allowing officials to determine whether or not they were preventable.
“The brain is not impressed by all these explanations and distinctions,” Dryden said.
The league still supports a culture of unarmed combat (the video game NHL 19 includes itincreasing the energy level of the winning team) — although fighting is in decline, which Bettman applauds while asserting, without evidence, that a certain level of fighting is necessary as a “thermostat” to deter more acts violent.
At the start of the playoffs this year, superstar Alex Ovechkin of the defending champion Washington Capitals was involved in a notable event.
Two weeks later, at the parliamentary hearing, Bettman said, “I don’t think there’s much we can do” to reduce head injuries. He has promoted the league’s concussion protocols, “updated regularly,” he said, since 2010.
“The profound contradiction is that if all science is anecdotal, as Mr. Bettman said during his testimony, then why bother having these protocols? » said Casper. “What are they for?”
Joanne Boogaard is still waiting for someone from the NHL to say that yes, they could have done more to help stem Derek’s onset of CTE symptoms and, perhaps, save his life.
She and her ex-husband, Len, no longer expect that kind of frankness. They didn’t want to participate in the settlement because they didn’t want the NHL’s money.
“It’s not about the money,” Joanne Boogaard said. “Just be responsible. Be a sports leader.
