“Let’s Get Ready to Rumble”
—“A Warrior’s Call”
Volbeat
It feels as if my life is a Quentin Tarantino movie. My life feels fucking surreal. It’s as if I’m one of Tarantino’s characters, waking in a deadbeat motel with his life turned inside-out and left trying to figure out how he got there.
One day I’m a popular member of the Detroit Red Wings, making more than $2 million per season. The next day I’m living on an NHL pension and signing autographs to pay my rent.
Watching a Tarantino movie is like pondering the universe. You don’t know where it starts and where it ends. There is no A, B, C order to any of Tarantino’s stories. You are never sure how all of the pieces fit together. That definitely describes my life. I’m really not sure whether I’m at the beginning or middle of my story. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a flashback. There have been moments when nothing seems real.
I swear that I have partied with every character from every Tarantino movie. John Travolta’s Vincent Vega character would not have been out of place with my after-hours crew.
My townhouse in Michigan was certainly full of “Inglorious Basterds” the night four years ago that I fully realized that my life had gone to shit.
At that time, my routine consisted of going to the bar at noon, closing it down, inviting everyone back to my place to continue the party, and then repeating the process the next day.
Then I met a woman named Sheryl who helped me realize that the people I was hanging out with probably didn’t have my best interests at heart.
One night, with my home full of my party friends, I grabbed a hockey stick from the corner and slammed it over a table, shattering the blade. I wanted everyone out of my house for good.
Call it a cleansing breath, a moment of clarity in an otherwise hazy existence.
One of the guys in my house was so scared he barricaded himself in a bedroom. He was so petrified that he refused to come out even to go the bathroom. He said later that he almost took a dump in a bedroom dresser because he thought I might kill him if he came out of the room. That’s fear.
Don’t start thinking for a minute that you are about to read a Hallmark Channel story about how I finally divorced myself from the bad people in my life and have stayed clean and sober since then. That’s not my life. It’s not that simple. The first step to surviving addiction is to surrender, to throw in the towel, to accept that addiction is too much for you to handle without help.
The problem is that I’ve spent much of my life in a role where surrender is not an option. I’ve been an NHL tough guy. NHL tough guys don’t surrender. We don’t admit we need help. Initially, addicts fight aggressively to keep drugs and alcohol. We won’t let anyone tell us what to do. But once we do surrender to the idea that we have to fight against our addiction, no one is more determined to overcome it.
The mental makeup of an NHL enforcer can be both a strength and a weakness.
Being a professional athlete does not mean that your life is always rainbows and unicorns. I’m an addict. There are no fairytale endings to addiction. I’m still a work in progress. Since I committed completely to Sheryl on December 31, 2010, she has helped me regain some focus in my life.
Since I committed to her and she committeed to me that cold December night, I have never cheated on her. I’m proud to say that. Maybe that doesn’t seem like something to brag about. That’s the way you are supposed to behave when you love someone. The devoted husband is the person I want to be. It’s not the person I was when I was an NHL player.
Cocaine was never my drug of choice. I’m a weed and alcohol guy. But if cocaine was around, I used it, primarily as a means to sober up after being drunk. I called cocaine “the equalizer.”
Those admissions should convince you that I don’t pull any punches in this book.
Since the start of 2011, I have made strides in my recovery. At that point, I was drinking a minimum of a fifth of Jack Daniels every day, along with several shots of Jager, and 15 to 20 beers. I also was dabbling in cocaine.
In the late summer of 2013, I’m still drinking, but only beer. I never touch hard liquor. I smoke marijuana legally. I have a medical card that allows me to use it because of the constant pain I have from my hockey injuries. I have severe arthritis in my hands and shoulder from all of the fighting I did. I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m just giving you the facts.
Right now I’m a functioning alcoholic. I want to stop drinking. I believe I can do it. And there is evidence to show that I can do it. I went a decade without touching a drop. But I’m not sober today, and I may not be sober tomorrow.
Because I played a physical game for 15 NHL seasons, my body is a high-mileage vehicle. My parts rattle, and I don’t start as well. My hands, because of the fighting I’ve done, look like the hands of a monster. I’m in constant pain. But I never ask for pain pills because I know where pill-taking will lead me.
This book is called My Last Fight because that’s how I view my substance abuse addiction. It’s a battle that I want to win, and I have to win.
But it is a grueling, ugly battle. It’s not one you want to watch. There is no one cheering me on from the stands as I fight this battle. It’s just Sheryl and me dealing with my addiction every minute of every day. My darkness can be overwhelming. I can be a sad, sick drunk, a suicidal drunk. Sheryl limits me to six beers a day, and some days I sneak in more. This is the toughest battle I ever faced.
Maybe this book will be therapeutic because it offers me the opportunity to set the record straight about my life. There are plenty of stories and so-called information floating around about what happened to me during my career and after I retired. Most of it is untrue.
Some of you think you know my story, but you really don’t. Forget about what you have heard because this is the real story. This is the raw, uncensored truth about my career and life. Since every bad decision leads to a great story, this book is full of great stories.
My hope is that this book entertains, enlightens, and clarifies what it’s really like to live on the roller coaster that is my life. Every day I wake up trying to find my balance. Every day I wake up not knowing what to expect. Every day I wake up wondering how exactly I got to where I am.
“Beware of false knowledge, it is more dangerous than ignorance.”
—George Bernard Shaw