The Hockey News’s Sam Stockton posted an essay regarding former Red Wings and Blackhawks enforcer Bob Probert’s legacy as a “tragic hero” who paid the hard way for being the NHL’s premier enforcer, perhaps of all time:
Perhaps the most succinct description of Probert’s game comes from one of his contemporaries, enforcer Chris Kotsopoulus: “He was like a battleship cruising the ice ready to take on all comers. Plenty of guys were just simply scared sh–less of him.”
But for Probert, hockey never seemed to exist in a vacuum. Booze, drugs, and addiction were close at hand away from the rink, and on the ice, it’s not that his work wasn’t appreciated, but its cost didn’t become clear until it was too late.
A tragic hero if ever there were one, Probert battled addiction and legal trouble throughout his NHL career. There were car and motorcycle accidents, DUIs, an arrest for cocaine possession at the Windsor-Detroit border, and several stays at rehab.
Then, as is so often and so cruelly the case, Probert paid the greatest price for the enforcer’s lifestyle once he’d entered a new era of his life—as a family man. At the age of 45, the father of four died of a heart attack suffered while boating on Lake St. Clair between Michigan and Ontario.
Posthumous examinations of his brain at Boston University revealed that he had suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (better known as CTE), a by-product of his years as a professional bare-knuckle brawler.
The tragedy of Bob Probert makes irrefutably clear the connections between the role of the enforcer, hockey culture, substance abuse, and head trauma. Once the toughest man in the NHL, Probert’s life ended well before his time because of the physical abuse he could absorb and mete out on a hockey rink.
Continued; in a way, I remain in awe of what Probert accomplished as a combination power forward and power enforcer on the ice, but I’m incredibly grateful that the hockey culture is changing and moving away from accepting the kind of shit he had to deal with off the ice.
