Don’t cry. For just once, dammit, don’t cry. Kelly Hrudey is intent on getting his message across. He’s preparing to speak to an audience of academics at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, and accept a honorary degree in psychology. Mostly, however, he doesn’t want to cry. The president of the university is watching. C’mon, keep it together. Hrudey’s not intimidated by the situation, per se, although he’s never had the opportunity to seek a degree or a diploma at a post-secondary educational institution. Major junior hockey in Canada, particularly when he played, was either openly against players pursuing educational goals or only reluctantly accepting of it. But being in a university setting isn’t particularly scary, not to a guy who faced one-hundred-mile-an-hour slapshots in the NHL, or was the winning goalie in a Stanley Cup playoff game that went into four overtime periods. Now that takes nerve. Hrudey is just worried about his well-known penchant for choking up over almost anything. “I’ve always been one who likes honesty, and I’m not ashamed to say that I’m an emotional guy,” he says. “I can cry at the drop of a hat.”
This moment is about a lot more than that. Hrudey, at the age of fifty-six, is being honoured by the university for his work in mental health advocacy. It’s become part of his life story, the story he shares with his wife, Donna, their youngest daughter, Kaitlin, and the rest of their family. The story of hours spent in the living room trying to help Kaitlin breathe, relax and find “the garden,” a mental safe place for Kaitlin to help her deal with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Hrudey remembers how naive he felt when he learned of his daughter’s challenges. She was just eleven years old. “I didn’t know trouble was lurking, that this was already in Kaitlin’s brain, this thing that was trying to ruin her,” he says. “I didn’t know that this already existed. Donna and I admit we both missed all the signs. I’m not ashamed of that. I didn’t know I should have been looking. I’m lucky I don’t have any guilt with that. Once we made the connection, we were fast to act.”
Kaitlin is now twenty-five, working for a video and film production company in Calgary, living her daily battle. She, along with her father, went public in 2013 about her challenges. The two of them speak at countless events together, eager to get the message out about her struggle and how to help others see the warning signs and find help. For Hrudey, it’s been almost two decades since he faced a shot in an NHL game. He’s gone on to become one of Canada’s best-known hockey broadcasters, a fixture on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada, and he has been able to use that pulpit to increase public awareness and understanding of mental illness. He personifies a shift in sports culture over the past decade. It’s now legitimate and acceptable for athletes to admit to mental health challenges and be active in advocacy, where once it was something to be hidden, to be ashamed of or deny. “As proud as I am of my NHL career or my broadcasting career, the most proud I am is of the work we’ve done with the mental health initiatives,” Hrudey says. On this day at Mount Royal University, he manages to hold it together. Later, he says, “I buckled down. I’m very proud of the fact I didn’t cry.”
But Hrudey remembers a time, a quarter century ago, when he couldn’t stop his tears as he faced his inner demons. A time when he would come home from his job as an NHL starting goalie in a state of frustration and fear that his career might be over. There he was, in the prime of his career, the number-one goalie on the Los Angeles Kings, a flamboyant team that featured Wayne Gretzky and was like a travelling circus, and he could no longer stop the puck.
To most who watched him work his way through the New York Islanders system and then join the Kings, this was strange. A mystery, really. He had always exuded confidence, even cockiness. Hrudey played as if he knew everyone was watching him, with style and creativity. Unlike today’s goalies, he was an ordinary sized athlete, about five foot ten, certainly not a physically imposing figure between the pipes. Handsome, though, with a gleaming set of perfect teeth. He wasn’t an educated man, but he spoke well, and when it came to hockey he spoke honestly and from the gut. But when it all went wrong, all that confidence and swagger and style vanished. He would come home from the rink, put his head on Donna’s lap, and cry. “I thought I was the weakest guy on the planet,” he says. “I went from being a pretty good NHL goalie to, without exaggeration, being the worst goalie in the league. The game had me on my knees.”
ON MAY 27, FOR THE SECOND time in the ’93 Clarence Campbell Conference final, the two clubs headed across the continent on the day off between Games 4 and 5, this time back to Toronto. It made for a long Monday. The miles were starting to add up, but the Kings believed that, with the help of their luxurious private plane, they would handle the travel better.
After two games at the Forum, a multi-purpose arena where many kinds of events occurred only one of which was NHL hockey, the series was returning to Maple Leaf Gardens, a living, breathing hockey shrine that only occasionally played host to other events. It was hockey first at the Gardens. The Leafs draped blue-and-white bunting around the rink for Game 5, adding to the festival-like atmosphere, the sense that something important and memorable was happening. Stanley Cups had once been lifted by the home team in this arena, the last one twenty-five years earlier. Elvis had played the Gardens. So had the Beatles, three times. In 1965, a floor ticket for the Fab Four had cost just $5.50. Muhammad Ali had fought Canadian boxer George Chuvalo here. It was a place where history had been made many times, and most frequently by the hockey team that played here.
Glenn Anderson was born in Vancouver and had spent his career in Edmonton, only coming to play in Toronto once or twice a year. Once he became a Leaf, he began to develop his own relationship with the famous arena, a more intimate relationship. “It had such character. That’s why I liked it,” he says. “I would walk around the building, run the steps, stop and look at the pictures on the walls on a regular basis. Gradually, you found out the secrets of the building that the average person doesn’t know about. There were hallways underneath, secret doors, tunnels. It had its own personality.”
Game 5 started sluggishly, as if both teams were clearing the cobwebs from their hockey brains before settling in for another taut battle. Peter Zezel returned for the Leafs after the neck injury he suffered early in Game 3, but now Mark Osborne, another member of the Leafs checking line, wasn’t available. His wife, Madolyn, was delivering a baby. Kings rookie coach Barry Melrose had grown weary of Jimmy Carson’s ineffectiveness and figured his team could use a little edge, so he inserted big winger Jim Thomson for the first time in the series. Thomson meant more muscle for the LA lineup and was as different from Carson as a hockey player could get. Thomson had been a King previously then was lost to Ottawa in the ’92 expansion draft. LA got him back for the playoffs in exchange for a good goal-scorer, Bob Kudelski.
Little separated the two teams at this point. In the first four games, neither club had dominated consistently. Gilmour had outplayed Gretzky in the battle of the stars, while the other big scorers—Dave Andreychuk and Nikolai Borschevsky for the Leafs, Jari Kurri and Luc Robitaille for the Kings—hadn’t been dangerous at all. Wendel Clark and Marty McSorley had pretty well kept a respectful distance from each other since Game 1. There certainly hadn’t been any indication either was interested in another dance. Neither Felix Potvin of the Leafs nor the more experienced Hrudey had stood out, and the first four games hadn’t really turned on goaltending. Each team had won once on the road.
The back-and-forth nature of the series mirrored LA’s season more than it did Toronto’s, which had been a steady, gradual improvement from training camp on. For the Kings, it had been a wild, lurching ride, a soap opera of a season filled with drama and uncertainty. At various points, it seemed the Kings’ season might go right off the rails and LA would miss the playoffs for the first time in the Gretzky era. Melrose, a coach with no previous NHL experience, had done a commendable job holding the team together. He’d been hired the previous summer after LA owner Bruce McNall had decided his team needed to replace GM Rogie Vachon, an iconic figure for the franchise from his playing days, and head coach Tom Webster. Losing in six games to the Oilers the previous spring in the first round had been a frustrating defeat, and McNall was tired of coming up short. In four playoff campaigns with Gretzky, the Kings had been unable to get past the second round. So McNall hired Melrose, who had been coaching Detroit’s farm club after winning a Memorial Cup in junior hockey with Medicine Hat, and gave the GM’s job to Nick Beverley, who had played briefly for the Kings in the 1970s and had been in the organization for twelve years in a variety of roles.
Melrose became the more significant, better known figure. He was a big Saskatchewan farm boy with a big personality and had played against Gretzky in both the NHL and the World Hockey Association. He was actually on hand as a member of the Cincinnati Stingers on January 28, 1979, at Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton when Gretzky signed a twenty-one-year “personal services” contract with the Oilers at centre ice. The Leafs had looked to hire Melrose as head coach in 1989 out of junior hockey, but owner Harold Ballard refused to let GM Gord Stellick replace George Armstrong as head coach. The Kings, by the summer of ’92, were looking for ways to at least get out of their division in the postseason, and Melrose seemed to be as good a bet as anybody. “Barry Melrose was a hot coaching prospect, and when I met him, I saw this was a guy who could work with Wayne,” says McNall. “And he was an LA kind of guy, where the other guys weren’t. Nick Beverley wasn’t an LA kind of guy. But he was behind the scenes, so it didn’t matter as much.”
The hiring of Beverley was evidence of a couple of problematic issues in the LA organization. First, he didn’t have the power of other GMs around the league. It was well known that McNall liked to have a significant say in personnel matters and liked to consult with Gretzky, so he wasn’t interested in giving any hockey executive full rein over his team. “I felt I knew it enough. I’d never played, of course, but I knew the game pretty well,” says McNall. “And I knew this market. I knew what would work and what wouldn’t work. Hockey operations, yeah, I was intimately involved. For the bigger transactions, I would make the call.”
The Kings lineup had been turned over significantly since McNall had purchased control from Jerry Buss in early 1988. The acquisition of Gretzky that summer had kick-started the overhaul. Gradually, the team acquired players Gretzky was keen on—Hrudey, Tony Granato—or players he had played with in Edmonton, such as Paul Coffey, Kurri and Charlie Huddy. “There was certainly a perception that Wayne ran the show,” says McNall. “I’d gotten a lot of players from Edmonton. They were great players, and Wayne knew them and how to work with them. That was important. If Wayne wanted something, I was going to try and listen to him. He was the greatest player in the world, and I was going to listen to him.”
That Gretzky was the power behind the throne in LA was accepted NHL wisdom. Until then, few NHL players, even the greatest ones, had influence over a team’s personnel moves, but Gretzky did. But then, of course, there had never been a player quite like Gretzky. He’d been in pro hockey for sixteen years. He’d played in the WHA as a teenager and joined the Oilers in the NHL merger in 1979. He had gone on to play for the first three Stanley Cups of the Oilers dynasty. So it wasn’t as if he didn’t know what he was talking about.
A number of players on those Oilers teams, notably Mark Messier, moved on to other clubs and became just as influential as Gretzky was with the Kings. But the belief that Gretzky was orchestrating moves in LA was something that could be twisted around and held against him.
He was hockey’s golden boy, nearly a perfect hockey player and ambassador for the game in many ways, and some people needed to find something about him that wasn’t so perfect. Some said he bellyached at officials too much, that he was a crybaby. Others sneered that he was trying to run the Kings. If you believed hockey players should just shut up and play, well, you could hold Gretzky’s influence against him. The fact was, however, that all the players that he might have had a say in bringing to Los Angeles were good players.
Gretzky says he had been encouraged to give his opinion in Edmonton under GM Glen Sather. “They always asked my opinion. But I never had final say. In Edmonton, Glen used to have Mark [Messier] and Kevin [Lowe] and me in all the time to ask what we thought,” he says. “Ultimately, I was a player. I knew that. For whatever reason, there was always this belief in LA that I was not only playing hockey, I was doing all these things off the ice. Which was so untrue. When they asked my opinion, I gave my opinion. And sometimes they didn’t like my opinion. And sometimes they did. But I grew up in a house where you respected authority. And I knew my place. I was a player.”
Perception was everything, however, and throughout the organization the perception was that Gretzky had influence. His teammates felt it. “The thing that I was soon to learn about playing on a team with Wayne Gretzky was that people are jealous,” says Hrudey. “I saw a lot of really good hockey players become preoccupied with how Wayne was treated, and/or really good players who couldn’t play there, because they let that jealousy become greater than it should have been.” McSorley, who had come to the Kings with Gretzky, says there was tension in the organization between the Oilers faction and people who were Kings loyalists and had been in the organization for years. People like Vachon (who stayed on as president), Beverley, scout Bob Owen and others. McSorley called the long-time Kings employees part of the “purple-and-gold” tradition that existed before Gretzky arrived and the team went to black-and-silver team colours. “I loved playing for Bruce. The only part I found confusing was that he didn’t seem to understand the purple-and-gold problem,” says McSorley.
At the press conference to announce the hiring of Melrose and Beverley, journalists asked pointed questions about lines of authority and how much influence Gretzky would have. “It was very complicated, because we were very close friends, and our families were close, and we had business relationships of all sorts,” recalls McNall. “Owning the Honus Wagner [baseball] card together, owning horses together, we owned the Argonauts together, all these things we had. So we had a very complicated, interrelated world together. At the same time, in theory, he was a guy who worked for me. I’m not sure who worked for who to tell you the truth! In theory, that was the case. I had to make sure our relationship wasn’t so warped or so weird that people couldn’t handle it.”
None of these things mattered after the first day of the Kings training camp at Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains. A bigger story had taken over: Gretzky was seriously hurt. He’d had pain the previous spring in the playoffs against the Oilers from what seemed to be a rib injury of some kind, which also caused numbness in his hand. On a trip to Hawaii after the season with his wife, Janet, and various teammates, he couldn’t even sit to eat dinner. He’d lie on the floor. The pain seemed to subside over July and August, but after skating on the first day of camp it all came back. The thirty-one-year-old Gretzky was in so much pain he couldn’t bend over to tie his skates. He immediately went to hospital, and the initial diagnosis was dire. McNall called a few veterans together for a quick meeting and told them it was possible Gretzky’s career might be over. “I remember thinking not so much, What’s our team going to do? more, What’s the game going to do without Wayne?” says Tony Granato. Dr. Robert Watkins diagnosed the problem as a herniated thoracic disc.
Doctors couldn’t find many athletes who had suffered the same injury, but one female skier they located who had undergone surgery to correct the problem had subsequently had to quit her sport. Watkins told Gretzky that he would like to try rehabilitation first. “They put me on some sort of anabolic steroid that starting eating away at the issue,” Gretzky says. “I went two months without doing anything. It was a hard time emotionally. You don’t know where your career is going to be. I put on twenty to twenty-five pounds, partly because of the steroid. I couldn’t train, but I had the same appetite.” Friends were shocked when they saw the weight gain, adding to speculation he might not be able to come back. For McNall, it was a nightmare scenario. He was juggling his bank loans and trying to put together a deal to sell the Kings. Gate receipts for an LA game, worth $100,000 before Gretzky arrived, were now more than $1 million, and even that wasn’t enough to make ends meet. If Gretzky’s career was over, McNall’s teetering financial empire would suffer a crippling blow. “My money problems were worse without Wayne,” he says.
In training camp, the club tried to find some new answers. Melrose persuaded the club to sign speedy Pat Conacher and hardnosed winger Warren Rychel, who had both come to camp without contracts. “I saw we had skill, but not enough will,” recalls Melrose. Defenceman Rob Blake was beginning his fourth year, and Melrose decided to go with even more youth on the blueline in twenty-year-old rookie Darryl Sydor and nineteen-year-old freshman Alexei Zhitnik. Both were mobile and had offensive instincts. A popular Hollywood movie that year was My Cousin Vinny, starring Joe Pesci as a New York lawyer who goes to a backwater Alabama town to defend a relative accused of murder. Vinny, who speaks with a strong Brooklyn accent, pronounces “two youths” as “two yoots.” The line got big laughs. Starting in training camp, assistant coach Cap Raeder would refer to Zhitnik and Sydor as those “two yoots,” which never failed to loosen up the room.
Up front, Melrose moved Kurri to centre, an audacious move given that the classy Finn was thirty-two years old, had scored 497 NHL goals strictly as a right winger to that point in his career and was one of the highest paid Kings at $950,000 a season. “I had no allegiances to anyone,” says Melrose. The rookie bench boss also stitched together a new forward line of centre Corey Millen, left winger Mike Donnelly and Tony Granato. The line quickly became LA’s most consistent unit and one of the fastest lines in the NHL. “I don’t know if there was ever a smaller line in hockey,” recalls the five-foot-nine Granato. “I know it was the only line I had played on since bantam hockey where I was the biggest guy.” Robitaille was named interim captain, and the season began without Number 99 or knowing if he would return that season. Or ever.
After selling out all forty home games the previous season, the Kings sold out only six of their first eleven home games without Gretzky. McNall, dodging calls from international banks and other creditors, could barely sleep at night. The team got off to a surprisingly good start, but then a major new problem emerged. Hrudey, in his fourteenth professional season and the team’s only experienced goaltender, started to have problems stopping the puck. It wasn’t physical but more a case of the yips, to borrow a golf expression. When goalies are playing well, they talk about seeing the puck as large as a beach ball. For Hrudey, the puck was a golf ball in a sandstorm.
On Long Island, before he got to the Kings, Hrudey had been carefully groomed by head coach Al Arbour as the successor to Billy Smith. Hrudey was the apprentice goalie who would keep the Islanders at the top of the league after Smith had backstopped them to four Stanley Cups in the early 1980s. Hrudey even pioneered a goaltending technique that would eventually become standard for all goalies at all levels. “It just occurred to me one day that just standing up and being strong on your skates wasn’t cutting it anymore. So I started using this paddle-down move, laying the paddle of my goalie stick flat on the ice,” he recalls. “Al hated it. He just wanted me to stand up. I tried it a few times in practice, and he came down to my end and gave me shit about using this move. I loved Al, and I would follow him anywhere, but in this case I was pretty stubborn, because I knew I was on to something. First time I ever tried it in a game, I got scored on. But I was convinced it would work. I stuck with it.”
Hrudey played with Gretzky at the ’87 Canada Cup, and he believes Gretzky suggested to the Kings they should trade for him. In February 1989, LA did, dealing young defenceman Wayne McBean and goalie Mark Fitzpatrick to the Isles for Hrudey, who soon supplanted Glenn Healy as the starter in Los Angeles.
Hrudey was a player with a personality, a goalie who could give a team confidence and swagger. He had just missed out on the dynasty on Long Island and didn’t have a Stanley Cup ring or a long history of accomplishments. He was just a good goalie who seemed to carry the attitude of a great goalie. He fit beautifully with the Kings black-and-silver Hollywood look with his long hair, old-style goalie gear and trademark blue bandana. Hrudey averaged fifty games a year once he joined the team. Goalies such as Chicago’s Ed Belfour, Detroit’s Tim Cheveldae or Bill Ranford of the Edmonton Oilers might play more, but Hrudey was a workhorse and competitive. At $700,000 a season, he was one of the highest paid goalies in the game.
He played with “hate,” he says. “It was productive, easy for me to motivate myself to be as charged up as I could be for a game. I played in a high emotional state. I expended a lot of energy. You can’t do that unless you manufacture a reason to play at that level. I hated the other team, all those other guys, but for only the duration of the game. The second after a game was over, it totally disappeared.”
By the fall of ’92, Hrudey was snared in a generation gap between the old style of goaltending and the new butterfly technique popularized by Montreal’s Patrick Roy. While goalies like Roy were leading a revolution by starting to go down more, covering up the bottom part of the net and taking away the high percentage scoring areas, Hrudey was still trying to stand up with his pads together, the way he’d been taught. It was too late for him to join the revolution. “I was caught in transition,” he says. “I went in my career from trying to be a stand-up to more of a hybrid to a guy who was caught between eras. Guys like me and [Dominik] Hasek were developing this style where we were all over the place, or at least that’s what people thought. But it didn’t do us justice in the sense there was more rhyme and reason to it than people thought.”
Abruptly, after a very good start to the ’92–93 season, the confidence that made Hrudey such a good fit in LA started to evaporate. Perhaps it was that nagging sense in the back of his mind that his style of goaltending was no longer in vogue. His problems began on December 1, in a game against Chicago at Milwaukee, a time when the NHL played “neutral site” games as a means of cultivating fans in non-NHL cities. Hrudey stopped forty-four shots, but strange doubts had started to bother him. “The day before, I’d had something weird going on in my head,” he says. “I would have a bath most nights on the road the day before a game. A nice warm bath, stretch, read some book, usually some Western Canadian mountain book. To keep my connection with Alberta, I’d read Canadian explorer books. For some reason, that night I had these doubts enter my head. Things were going well. But I thought, Can I keep this up?”
The Kings, with Hrudey in net, beat Pittsburgh and Hartford at home, then tied Montreal 5–5 in Phoenix in another neutral site game. He allowed five goals on twenty-eight shots, and Patrick Roy allowed five at the other end. “The seeds of doubt were really growing,” he says. “Then it went right in the ditch. I went from being doubtful to thinking my career was going to end. It just happened.” He went from cocky to dazed and confused in a matter of weeks. After games, he would cry in his wife’s lap. “I felt great at the start of every game,” he says. “But if anything bad did happen, it all went badly in a hurry.”
He let in five goals against Quebec, then five more to Edmonton on thirty-one shots. Rookie Robb Stauber was the backup, a twenty-five-year-old with lots of AHL experience but little in the big leagues. Stauber played a game, then Hrudey returned to face Vancouver and allowed six goals. Stauber started another game against Philly but gave way to Hrudey part way through the game. Hrudey allowed four goals on only sixteen shots. He gave up four more in another start against the Canucks and then five to the Habs on January 2. The NHL was a high-scoring league that year, but these numbers were dreadful. The Kings were reeling. Hrudey was living his hockey nightmare.
Gretzky had survived his scare and was coming back to play. The last thing the Kings needed was for goaltending problems to undermine the return of the game’s brightest star. After weeks of workouts, Gretzky skated for the first time on Christmas Day. Twelve days later, on January 6, he played his first game of the season to WELCOME BACK WAYNE placards in the stands.
Melrose, of course, gave Gretzky the captaincy back. Gretzky’s mother, Phyllis, flew in for the game, as did his father, Walter, who had suffered a brain aneurysm and had a physical therapist by his side. Gretzky told reporters he didn’t want to be a “snail” when he returned. He picked up two assists and had three shots in his first game back, but the Kings lost 6–3 to Tampa. “When I first came back, there was an enthusiasm and an excitement and an adrenalin that you fly off of and flow under, and I had that,” says Gretzky. “I thought, Wow, this is pretty good. Then I hit a wall. I was really not a very good player. It was Barry’s first year, and I’m sure he thought, Oh my God, this guy’s an overrated player.” Number 99 had two goals and twelve assists in his first eleven games. Then, in his next seven games, he had no goals and five assists.
Hrudey was just awful again in Gretzky’s return game, giving up those six goals to Tampa on just twenty shots. In eight appearances between December 8 and January 7, he allowed forty goals and his save percentage was a dreadful .830. The numbers suggested he was right, that he was the worst goalie in the NHL, and there was no sign the veteran goalie was coming out of it.
On January 17, the Kings were playing the Rangers at home in an afternoon game. Stauber was starting again. A miserable Hrudey was taping his sticks and drinking coffee two hours before the game in his stall next to the door leading to the ice. “The door opens and Barry Melrose walks in, and right behind him is Anthony Robbins,” says Hrudey. “It wasn’t that unusual, because we had all kinds of Hollywood people and celebrities and stars coming through. Anthony was a big deal at the time. A minute or two later, Barry calls my name and waves me over to where he and Robbins were standing. I was thinking, Why in the world would Tony Robbins want to meet the worst goalie in the league? Barry says, ‘I’ve been working with Tony for a while. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to work with Tony to help you get over this.’ The first thing I thought was how great that my coach was going way out on a limb to get me help. In that era, sports psychology wasn’t that big. It was, Go figure it out on your own. Slug it out or we’ll get somebody new. There was no help. Without any hesitation, I agreed. The only thing Barry asked was would it be okay if he sat in and listened to what I was going through. I had no problem with that. I’m an honest guy, I’ll reveal everything about me. It might not be what the head coach needs to hear from his starting goalie, but I needed to get out of this too.”
Robbins, an ambitious thirty-two-year-old entrepreneur from North Hollywood, had first gained wide exposure as a “life coach” and self-help guru four years earlier through his Personal Power audiotapes. He quickly gained a following and became a bona fide celebrity. His appearance on the Kings scene caused a lot of eye-rolling, lots of it from other teams, and some of it from other Kings players. McSorley thought it was a lot of psychobabble. He was old school, like most of the LA players. Other teams had psychologists, but Robbins was a TV star, and his involvement seemed more about Hollywood than healing. Hrudey, however, was open to anything that might help.
Melrose had seen Robbins on television one night while he was coaching junior hockey and was captivated. “So when I got hired in LA, I called up Tony and we met at the Santa Monica Airport,” recalls Melrose. “We had lunch together. He flew in on his helicopter. We had a great talk, spent two or three hours together.” After weeks of watching Hrudey struggle and lose confidence, Melrose believed Robbins might be able to help. “You have to be receptive. You have to be open-minded, and you have to be willing to really put yourself out there,” says Melrose. “And Kelly was. I just kept waiting for him to get it back, and he never did. So I approached him about sitting down with Anthony.”
Hrudey recalls their first session. “I sat in a regular chair, and Anthony stood in front of me. He’s six foot seven, so obviously it was on purpose. A position of power. I understood all that. He asked me, ‘When you feel really good about yourself, what do you feel like?’ It could be a Hollywood character, a cartoon character, anything or anybody. It was really easy for me. The Gulf War was coming to an end, and I loved watching General Norman Schwarzkopf on TV because of his presence. He was a general through and through. He was in charge. He was everything I felt in net when I was playing great.” Robbins then asked Hrudey who he felt like when he was playing badly. “I went back to my days growing up in Elmwood, a community in Edmonton,” says Hrudey. “If my mom wasn’t working, I’d race home from school for lunch and she’d have two fried baloney sandwiches for me. And I’d watch The Flintstones. I’d think of Fred Flintstone in Mr. Slate’s office getting shit. So I’m telling this to Tony Robbins and Barry Melrose. After every goal I let in, I’d just feel like Fred in the chair, shrinking from Mr. Slate. Talk about being real. I’m laying it all out on the line. We had a good chuckle over it, but it was really scary. I remember looking over at Barry, thinking, What the fuck is my head coach thinking right now?”
Robbins trained Hrudey to change his way of thinking by imagining his positive and negative images of himself as a picture-in-picture scenario. “My big picture was Fred Flintstone; my little one was Schwarzkopf. I had to turn that around and see Schwarzkopf as the big picture,” he says. “I carried a laminated index card with me the rest of my career. It had only four points. The first one was ‘Schwarzkopf.’ The second was ‘picture-in-picture.’ The other two were technical things. One was ‘toes out,’ because I’m naturally pigeon-toed, and sometimes I could get myself caught, and I needed my toes out for balance and manoeuvring. The last one was be at the ‘top of the crease.’ From that day forward, until the last day I ever played in the NHL, I looked at that card before I went out for warm-up and before the start of every period. I still have it somewhere in storage. Anthony Robbins saved my career. And Barry.”
The episode demonstrated something important about Melrose to Hrudey. “Typically, when guys go as low as I was, they go one other place, and that’s away. They don’t survive in the National Hockey League. They go someplace else,” says Hrudey. “I don’t want to make it sound like Barry was all fun and giggles. Barry really pushed us, made us all accountable, and he was full throttle. But when a guy is completely broken, most coaches give up on that. They don’t have time to focus on one guy when you’ve got twenty-two other guys trying to pull on the rope.” Hrudey’s teammates noticed too. Granato says, “I remember thinking, This coach is secure enough to feel comfortable bringing someone else into his locker room that he feels can help us. Other coaches I’ve been around, or organizations for that matter, would say, No, we’re not doing that, it’s out of protocol. Great coaches and great organizations look for whatever can help. There’s a confidence in that.”
Hrudey immediately felt better after meeting with Robbins, but it didn’t immediately translate into better goaltending. That took months. The Kings could have made a trade for a goalie. They knew the Leafs were dangling Fuhr, an ex-Oiler who would have fit a transactional pattern for the Kings. But the price was high, and the Leafs were looking specifically for a winger to play with Gilmour. For LA, getting Fuhr would have likely cost them Tomas Sandstrom and Stauber, plus another piece of the future. There were other options for trading goaltenders. Around this time, Washington sent Rick Tabaracci to Winnipeg for Jim Hrivnak and a draft choice.
Instead of making a deal to get a goalie, the Kings stuck with those they had and made a totally different move, one that created more conflict in the organization. The previous season, Paul Coffey had been acquired by the Kings in a massive three-team, seven-player blockbuster with Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Los Angeles had surrendered a first-round pick in the transaction. Three first-round picks had gone to Edmonton from the Kings in the Gretzky deal, and trading a first-round pick to get another ex-Oiler didn’t thrill long-time loyalists in the Kings organization. “Yeah, there was a lot of awkwardness,” says McNall. “All the scouts had done a great job. They felt in a way that their jobs were being undermined.”
In early January, Kings management had told Coffey they wanted to restructure his $1.1-million contract. “I guess Bruce had some issues. That’s all I know. As a player, you just want to do what helps,” says Coffey, who had two more years on his deal at $1.3 million and $1.4 million. “So I agreed to defer some money. But I guess that wasn’t enough.” On January 28, the Kings lost to Calgary 2–1 at home. Coffey, a minus-2 in that game, shared a Manhattan Beach apartment with teammates Jim Hiller and Rychel. “The next day, early in the morning, like six o’clock in the morning, I got a call, and they had traded me to Detroit,” says Coffey. It was a six-player trade that also included Hiller, with Carson coming back to California. Carson had scored ninety-two goals in his first two NHL seasons with the Kings but had been moved in the Gretzky deal with Edmonton. Now he was coming back to the Kings, along with minor league forwards Gary Shuchuk and Marc Potvin, both of whom had played for Melrose in the Detroit system. The deal came as a shock to the Kings dressing room. “We had traded Paul Coffey for Jimmy Carson!” says McSorley. “It was hard to believe.”
Gretzky was downright angry about the trade and confronted McNall on the team plane. “Barry Melrose did not believe Paul Coffey was a good defensive player,” says McNall. “He was an enormously talented offensive defenceman. I had gotten Coffey [from Pittsburgh nine months earlier] because Wayne said, ‘He’s available. Let’s grab him.’ But then Barry Melrose is on his case, and we really need a different kind of player for that role. So I said okay, and they went ahead and traded Coffey. Well, Wayne was furious with me. He was mad. He was mad at me because he knew I could stop whatever I wanted to stop. We argued on the plane. It was a heated discussion that everybody around us was listening to. I tried to explain this was what our people wanted to do. He was not happy at all.” Coffey was surprised by the move. “I enjoyed Barry Melrose as a coach,” he says. “If that’s what he thought of me, fine. He coached a real fast, upbeat game, and it was a great bunch of guys. He preached a lot of the same stuff we did in Edmonton. He got a lot out of that team. Barry was good to me. He coached a take-no-prisoners attitude. We had some good young defencemen in Blake, Zhitnik and Darryl Sydor. It was time for those three guys to step up and shine.”
Gretzky’s influence, seen as all-encompassing outside LA, obviously had its limits. “I don’t know if it was a big, loud argument,” Gretzky says of his confrontation with McNall. “It was more a question of, you know, I’m just not sure you trade a Hall of Fame defenceman who happens to be, in my mind, one of the great defencemen who ever lived and ever played, one of the most unselfish teammates I’ve ever had. I was just questioning trading him for two guys in the minors. It had nothing to do with Potvin or Shuchuk. I had a great deal of respect for both of them as teammates, and they were a huge part of our success. But there’s only one Paul Coffey. That’s what I told Bruce, that’s what I told Barry, and Nick. But, as I said to them, ‘Hey, it’s your team. I’m just a player. I’ll do the best I can. But it doesn’t mean I can’t give my opinion.’ ” Gretzky all but omits Carson’s value, and the truth is the Michigan native was by that point a shadow of the young star who had made such an impact on Southern California. He was only twenty-four, but he was finished as an impact NHL forward. He’d never been a great skater, and his scoring touch had vanished. Other teams thought he was afraid.
A few days later, Gretzky had a meeting with McNall and Melrose in Quebec City. Gretzky was unhappy with his play and suggested perhaps the team would be better off without him. It was unclear exactly what he was suggesting, other than that he thought he was playing so poorly others deserved to be playing ahead of him. At the same time, he felt he wasn’t playing enough to get back in the groove. The situation had to change one way or another. Melrose had built a lineup without him and had grown accustomed to giving those players certain minutes and playing them in certain situations. Now, he needed to adjust and start giving those minutes back to Gretzky. “That’s when we decided for the rest of the season I was just going to play him twenty-five minutes a night,” says Melrose. “He was going to kill penalties. He was going to play. The rest of the year was going to be designed around getting Wayne Gretzky back to being Wayne Gretzky. That is what we tried to do from then on. He got better and better. His endurance got better. You could see the old Gretzky sparkle come back. That got us going into the playoffs.”
Neither that meeting nor the Coffey trade fixed much in the short term. By the end of February the Kings were sputtering along at 27-29-7, seemingly going nowhere. On February 27, the Leafs and Gilmour strolled into town and handled the home team easily, 5–2. Hrudey gave up all five goals and didn’t appear again in the Los Angeles net for almost three weeks. Gretzky might have been working his way back, but LA still didn’t have a goalie.
The Kings tried twenty-two-year-old David Goverde in goal twice. The first time, Goverde gave up five goals in Winnipeg, and on the second try he gave up eight at home to Washington.
The front office was so agitated that they signed thirty-two-year-old minor league journeyman Rick Knickle from the International Hockey League San Diego Gulls. Knickle was actually eleven months older than Hrudey, and they had played against each other as juniors in the Western Hockey League, Knickle with Brandon, Hrudey with Medicine Hat. Knickle had played fourteen years in the minors without getting a single NHL minute and had already given up and retired once. But the Kings gave him a chance for a salary of $68,000 for the rest of the season, as well as a $500 bonus for every win and $2,000 per shutout. He started a February 18 game at Chicago and promptly gave up seven goals in a loss to the Hawks. He then got his first NHL win, on February 22, and cried in the dressing room after. “I thought his dog died,” said Melrose.
Knickle became a colourful, inspirational NHL character and a media darling that season. His presence also created tension in the dressing room as Hrudey desperately searched for his game and Stauber demanded more opportunity to play. Stauber, in fact, said he wanted to be traded if he wasn’t going to play. Knickle registered five more wins until he played his final NHL game on March 29. By that point, Hrudey was starting to come around with the help of Robbins. Melrose knew he needed one goalie for the playoffs. When he’d won the Memorial Cup in Medicine Hat, it was with Fitzpatrick, the goalie the Kings had traded to get Hrudey, playing most of the games. In his gut, Melrose knew that if the Kings were going anywhere in the postseason, it would have to be with either Hrudey or Stauber. He just didn’t know which one, and he wanted Knickle around as insurance.
Stauber got the nod for the final game of the regular season, an indication Melrose was still undecided, but he was terrible, giving up six goals to Vancouver. To start the playoffs against Calgary, Stauber didn’t even dress. Melrose started Hrudey in net against the Flames with Knickle as his backup. In the first three games, Hrudey gave up seventeen goals, including nine in Game 2, and the Kings lost twice. By Game 4, Stauber was back in as the starter as the controversial Kings goalie carousel continued to turn. LA won three straight with Stauber and exploded for eighteen goals in the final two games to eliminate the Flames.
Stauber, naturally, started the second-round series against the Canucks. But after LA lost the opener, it was Hrudey’s turn again. This time, he didn’t give the job up. Stauber saw no more action in the ’93 playoffs.
By the time the haphazard Kings season delivered the club to the conference final against the Leafs, Hrudey was back in form, cocky and playing with “hate.” He had his mojo back. The sessions with Robbins had helped, as had the refusal of Melrose to write him off. Backstopping the Kings to victory in the second round of the playoffs for the first time in team history gave Hrudey the sense of belief he had lost during the regular season. Despite all the troubles he’d had, his teammates still viewed him differently than most goalies, who were generally seen as flighty or eccentric. Hrudey was more like one of the other players, and he was combative, which his teammates liked. “Kelly was one of us. You didn’t know he was a goalie,” says Granato. “He was a huge part of the success of that team. I know it was a roller-coaster year for him. But everybody believed in him, and everybody wanted him to be a big part of it.”
The conference final would be Hrudey’s series to win or lose. The team and the coach had stuck by him, and he was determined to pay them back.
BY THE SECOND PERIOD of Game 5 after a mundane and scoreless first period, the Hrudey-Potvin matchup had become even more of a focal point as the veteran Hrudey jousted with the rookie Leafs netminder in what became the first goaltending battle of the series.
The Kings took a 1–0 lead at 1:53 of the second period on a two-on-one break with Leafs defenceman Sylvain Lefebvre caught up ice. Andreychuk had tried unsuccessfully to bat the puck out of the air to prevent the break, but Robitaille sped away with Shuchuk on his right. Potvin stopped Robitaille’s slapshot and Shuchuk’s rebound attempt. But as the Leafs goalie went to cover the puck, Robitaille poked it free and Shuchuk knocked it in for the first goal. The Kings started to dominate the game, and by the five-minute mark of the second were up 14–6 shots as the Gardens crowd grew restless. The Leafs had won Game 4 with a strong, sturdy effort, but now they were back to looking like they had in Game 3, aimless and spiritless.
The Leafs offence, hot and cold through the series, couldn’t create much of anything. Their best chance might have been when Todd Gill found himself alone at the right circle, but his rising slapshot hit Hrudey square in the mask, denting his cage. Soon after, Kings blueliner Tim Watters was accidentally hit in the face by teammate McSorley’s stick. There was blood all over the ice, along with two of Watters’s teeth. He skated off to the dressing room holding a piece of gauze to his bloody mouth, but he would return. Broken teeth had never stopped an NHL player, something consistent throughout the history of the sport and still the case today.
The Kings jumped ahead 2–0 on a goal by Kurri, but by then the score could have been more one-sided if not for Potvin. He was athletic and sturdy, and the Kings needed something special to beat him. First came a pretty four-way passing play, Sandstrom to Zhitnik to Kurri to Rychel. Rychel hammered a slapshot that Potvin stopped, but the puck bounced right back to him. He shot again. Again a rebound that Potvin couldn’t control. Kurri, who had continued to play centre even after Gretzky returned in January, buried the loose puck high over Potvin’s glove. To that point, LA had a 13–3 advantage in shots for the period and were threatening to run the Leafs out of the Gardens. With five minutes left before the second intermission, the Leafs had only nine shots on goal.
It looked like an easy night at the office for Hrudey, dented cage aside. But Granato was penalized at 15:12 of the second for raking his stick across Bill Berg’s face, and the game changed when the Leafs power play cut the LA lead to 2–1. Mike Krushelnyski was standing to Hrudey’s left as the puck went back to Rouse at the right point. Normally, a left-handed shooter like Krushelnyski would spin clockwise towards the net and go to tip an incoming shot with his backhand. Instead, Krushelnyski squared up to Rouse, and when the low shot came in, he used his forehand like a pitching wedge to elevate the puck. It was difficult to execute, but he did it perfectly, and the puck went high into the LA net. That seemed to wake the Leafs up. Hrudey needed to make big stops on Wendel Clark and Anderson before the period was over to keep the Kings in the lead to start the third period.
As the third began, Potvin, in his white home jersey with black pads and gloves and a black Koho goalie stick, kept giving his team a chance to win, making quality saves off Robitaille and Gretzky. The Leafs were starting to turn up the pressure on Hrudey, wearing all black save for his white blocker and white goalie stick, wrapped in white tape. Potvin stayed close to his goal line as though attached by a short rope. Hrudey spent much of his time outside the blue-painted crease, aggressively challenging shooters or playing the puck. He would venture out near the blueline at times. Potvin would go down in the butterfly as though preparing to kneel in prayer, opening up the five-hole between his pads. Hrudey stood upright, his catching mitt held up near his left ear, with his small pads pressed tightly together so as to never open the five-hole. He looked like he was sitting in a straight-back chair. The contrast between the styles and appearance of the two goalies couldn’t have been greater. There was an age difference of only eleven years between them, but they seemed like goalies from different centuries. Hrudey looked like he could have played the position wearing a ball cap instead of a mask, like the goalies in the 1920s. He belonged to a dying breed of goaltenders, but he was determined to prove he could still compete with the young whippersnapper at the other end. Visions of Norman Schwarzkopf danced in his head. Fred Flintstone was nowhere to be seen.
At 8:43, the Leafs tied the game 2–2 on a strange goal by Lefebvre, of all people. After breaking up a dangerous looking LA charge, both Lefebvre and Rouse uncharacteristically joined the rush going the other way. It was not how Burns would have drawn it up. He didn’t forbid his defencemen from going on offence, but definitely not two at a time. Lefebvre took a drop pass from Gilmour and went to take a slapshot from the left circle. As Lefebvre shot, Sydor lost his balance and slid into Hrudey, knocking the veteran goalie’s skates out from under him like a bowling pin as he came out to challenge the shooter. Hrudey still somehow managed to get a piece of the shot, but as Sydor slid into the Kings net, the puck rolled in with him. The Leafs defenceman was credited with the goal, but surely the Kings defenceman deserved the credit, or at least an assist.
Potvin’s excellent goaltending had kept the Leafs in the game, and he’d avoided giving up a killer third goal. Now it was tied. The ice, tilted one way for forty minutes, had begun going the other way. With four minutes left, Gill spotted Gilmour cutting between Blake and Zhitnik and hit him in stride with a pass. Both Kings defencemen hooked at Gilmour and he fell to the ice as the puck rolled harmlessly to Hrudey. Zhitnik went off for hooking, but it could just as easily have been Blake, and just as easily been a penalty shot. The Leafs still had a power play in the dying minutes of regulation time.
Hrudey turned away Ellett’s point shot, then stumped Andreychuk in tight. He made another save on a low point shot from Gill through an Andreychuk screen, but the puck squirted loose to a wide-open Gilmour stationed at the right post. The Leafs centre lifted the puck towards the yawning cage, but Hrudey, kneeling on the ice, stretched out his left pad and glove and made a terrific stop. Then it was Andreychuk again, walking out of the left corner without an LA player on him. He drilled a knee-high shot, but Hrudey’s stand-up technique meant there was no room between his pads. He squeezed the puck and held it, knowing Andreychuk was looking for a rebound. That made it five saves for Hrudey on the Leafs power play with the game on the line, three of them from fifteen feet or closer.
Unable to get the winning goal past the LA goalie, the Leafs tried another time-honoured hockey technique. They ran him. If you couldn’t beat him, soften him up a bit. Zezel’s slapshot went wide, but Berg drove hard towards the net with two Kings on his back and rammed into Hrudey, his right elbow crashing into the goalie’s head. Maybe the Leafs pest was looking for a rebound, maybe he thought he’d make sure Hrudey wasn’t getting too comfortable. The net came off its moorings and Berg landed on top of Hrudey. The puck, however, wasn’t in the net. Hrudey was standing his ground, while his teammates hadn’t managed a shot for the final seven minutes of the third period.
The overtime period was the first of the series. It was abundantly clear early that referee Bill McCreary, like Dan Marouelli in Game 1, had no intention of calling any penalties regardless of what transpired. The philosophy was “Let the players decide the game,” but all the hands-off approach really did was put the skilled players on both teams at a major disadvantage. It allowed the checkers and grinders to decide the game, not the highly paid stars, a peculiar philosophy for a sport trying to sell tickets and attract a major US television network. Hrudey made a spectacular kick save on Anderson, and then Potvin made a good paddle-down save on Millen, precisely the goaltending technique Hrudey had pioneered in the mid-1980s. Lefebvre ran Zhitnik face first into the end glass in the Leafs zone, leaving the Kings defenceman woozy. “He’s not sure what rink he’s in,” chuckled Neale. Zhitnik spent much of the rest of the game sitting on the bench with a towel draped over his head. “He might as well have asked the lady beside him for her scarf,” recalls Melrose. “That’s how that building was set up. You were in the middle of the fans.”
Toronto was now getting more of the chances, and Hrudey was under siege. For the goalies, it was less about form and technique and more about athleticism and being willing to compete with bodies flailing around their creases. Potvin made a save sitting on his goal line. Hrudey blocked a point-blank shot from Mike Foligno and held on.
Potvin was cool and composed in his butterfly stance at his end, while Hrudey was furiously fighting and coming up with different ways to keep the Leafs at bay. He improvised, dropping his stick, grabbing at the puck with his blocker. All around him, players were being tackled or otherwise dragged to the ice. For the second time in the game, Watters, minus two teeth, pushed Clark offside on a Toronto rush with no interference call. Both Gilmour and Andreychuk were hooked rather obviously from behind while on partial breakaways, but still no penalty. “Bill McCreary has his whistle in his wallet,” said play-by-play announcer Bob Cole. The Leafs, and Burns, screamed in protest. The ice around the LA net was covered in brown stains from fans pelting the area with soft drinks in paper cups.
As Gardens public announcer Paul Morris tonelessly announced “last minute of play in the period,” Leafs defenceman Jamie Macoun shot the puck into the right corner of the LA zone. It was retrieved by Rouse along the right boards, and he shot it around the boards to the far corner. Andreychuk chipped a short pass to Anderson, who made a quick circle coming out of the corner to elude Gretzky’s outstretched stick and headed to the net. Anderson’s first shot hit Conacher and bounced high in the air into the slot. At the moment it was going to hit the ice, Anderson short-hopped it with a backhand swing of his stick and at 19:20 chopped it under Hrudey as he was leaning to his left to end the game. The Kings goalie toppled over onto his left side then lay his head down once he realized the puck was behind him. McSorley drifted past him in disbelief, like a zombie on skates.
“It was kind of a lucky bounce,” says Anderson. “I just kind of slapped at it with my backhand.” Coaches and trainers on the Leafs bench high-fived. Potvin skated down the ice into the Kings zone to join the celebration. It was a temporary moment of triumph for Anderson against his old Edmonton teammates, players like Gretzky, McSorley, Huddy and Kurri. “At that point, you just want to prove who’s better,” says Anderson. “It was like playing your best friend in a game of golf. No way are you giving him a mulligan.” Anderson skated off the ice, one arm raised in triumph. It was the only period of the game in which the Leafs, with twelve shots, had outshot the Kings, who had ten on Potvin in the extra session.
Anderson’s winner was the thirty-fourth shot of the night for Toronto, and Hrudey had made thirty-one saves. Without his brilliance in the final minutes of regulation, LA wouldn’t even have survived until overtime. “That was my best game of the series,” he says now. “I played great.” Potvin had stopped forty-one Kings shots at the other end, his best game of the series as well. The Kings had blown a 2–0 lead in Game 5, and a 2–1 lead in the series had also evaporated. “Hey, we were playing against a good team,” says Gretzky. “One of the great things about Pat Burns is he was one of the best defensive coaches in hockey. I knew it was going to be tough. It wasn’t going to be easy, and they had the personnel to be a defensive-minded team.”
At least the Kings no longer had to worry about their goalkeeper, who was back to being a consistent, central part of the team. His goaltending style might have been going out of fashion, but his competitiveness was old school and inspiring. Hrudey had survived his personal crisis. He could be the goalie a team could lean on once more.
IT’S TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, and the memories of that difficult time in his career can still cause Hrudey to pause in the middle of a conversation to collect himself. His voice breaks and he chokes up. He’s as emotional in his mid-fifties as he ever was, and you realize how shattered he was back in the ’92–93 season and how scared about his career. The part he didn’t talk about at the time, and never has, was even more frightening. He and his wife, Donna, had established a nice life for themselves in Redondo Beach with their two kids. They’d go to Disneyland often, or get Gretzky to recommend the trendiest restaurants in Los Angeles. They were building a house back in Calgary, with plans to move there one day to live at least part of the time.
They were also expecting the birth of their third child in the middle of all he was going through that season as a professional athlete. Kaitlin was born on January 27, 1993, just after Hrudey had met Tony Robbins and just before the Kings made the Coffey trade. Doctors quickly discovered she had a hole in her heart. Not unusual, but worrisome. Of greater concern was Donna. She had hemorrhaged terribly while giving birth. “She was in serious, serious trouble. She was minutes from passing away,” says Hrudey. “She was just bleeding out.” Doctors were ultimately able to get the bleeding under control, but it was an awful scare. Hrudey’s professional world was a mess, and now he’d come close to losing his wife. He didn’t tell a single one of his teammates.
“I never shared it with anybody. I told Barry about Kaitlin’s heart issue, but that was it,” he says. “Other than my family, nobody knew about Donna. I’d already been weak, and I thought, I can’t share something that might make me look weak again in their eyes.” He was still part of that culture of male strength in which struggles with problems, particularly mental health or emotional challenges, were kept secret. You might love and trust your teammates, but at that time there was a line athletes didn’t dare cross.
Those were hard times for the Hrudey clan, and dealing with Kaitlin’s anxiety and OCD over the past fourteen years has been very hard as well. Painful for her, challenging for her family. For five years, Hrudey and Kaitlin have been talking about her fight publicly, and he believes his athletic background has helped him. “In sports, we fight and we battle for everything. You have to dig in, have to find focus,” he says. “When I was doing those breathing sessions with Kaitlin, focus was paramount. It was about dropping a lot of other things, and the priority was to get her to ‘the garden.’ A lot about what I’d learned as an athlete was about perseverance, and I could apply that to this.”
The Mount Royal University honorary degree is gratifying for Hrudey as he tries to bring more of his message to the sports world. “Canadian mental health experts say one in five are suffering, but I’d say the number is far greater,” he says. “First of all, a lot of people don’t like to talk about it. And just from talking to people, I believe it’s got to be at least three or four in five that suffer. Every single day, I get emails, texts, phone calls with people telling me about their personal experiences. But let’s say one in five is the accurate number. That means if you’re a coach on a hockey team and you’ve got twenty or twenty-three players, you’ve got to understand you’ve got four or five people on your team that are going through something.” In recent years the NHL has been forced to confront some harsh truths in the wake of the suicide deaths of Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien and Wade Belak and players, particularly tough guys, are coming forward more regularly to tell the league and its fans about the strain and the mental cost of the game. Talk to any former NHL player and he’ll be able to tell you a sad story about a former teammate who has struggled with depression, alcoholism or drug abuse in his post-hockey career. The good news is that the stories are now being told, not hidden, and former star athletes like Hrudey are making mental health advocacy part of their life’s work.
For Kaitlin, the battle continues. “It looks to us like she’s finding her sweet spot where her life might be headed down the road,” says Hrudey. “She’s been so inspirational for so many people sharing her story. But the fact of the matter is it can come and go.” Journalist Joe O’Connor was one of the first to write about Kaitlin, in the National Post newspaper in 2013. “Joe wrote that it’s a life sentence, and he’s so right,” says Hrudey. “The only reason I kind of hesitate in sharing that is I don’t want to scare people who are just starting to learn about themselves or a loved one. They hear that and think, Oh my God, I can’t get through today. How am I going to do this for my life?”
That, of course, is where the comparisons end between Hrudey’s fight with his inner hockey demons and his daughter’s fight. His was contained to a few months in one season of a long, successful career. After the spring of ’93, he played another five seasons and another 211 regular season games, although only one more playoff game, which came in his final season with San Jose in 1998. The run with the Kings in ’93 was the most successful playoff effort of his career, and the battle with the Leafs among his most treasured memories. “I thought they were a very good team,” he says. “But I thought we were the better team.”