From Sportsnet’s Megan Stewart:
Todd Bertuzzi was sitting with teammates in a popular Vancouver restaurant mere minutes before he passed out in a hotel lobby.
“I remember sitting at the Cactus Club and, all of a sudden, I started getting the sweats really, really bad. All of a sudden, my heart started going like crazy and I wasn’t sure what was going on. I kind of got scared,” he said today about his final playing days in 2013-14.
He’d managed to call his trainers for help. And then medical staff from the Vancouver Canucks came to the aid of the visiting Detroit Red Wings winger. It was the veteran power forward’s last season in the NHL on what would be his last trip as an active skater to the city where he’d played eight seasons and also where he’d faced criminal charges for a violent on-ice incident 10 seasons earlier.
He was having a panic attack. What started that night didn’t alleviate for years, he said.
Continued, with an audio clip of Bertuzzi addressing the issue:
I’m glad Bert’s worked through this stuff and found some peace.
As lucky as these guys are who make an impact in the big leagues, the career transition alone sounds tough. I’ll never try and condone what Bertuzzi did to Moore, but so many people heaped the blame entirely on him (compared to the coach, GM, etc.) It’s so easy and cheap to label a person from a distance as 100% bad and try to reduce them to a caricature, rather than a complex human being who made a mistake. I liked Bert as a Red Wing and it’s nice that his nephew is now part of the team.