The Berserker of Hockeytown

of y Win

ike many teenagers from the hard-luck town of jp Windsor, Ontario—which looks out over a dark gray river at the even harder-luck city of Detroit— Bob Probert left home at the age of 17 with little money and a big dream: to play for the Detroit Red Wings someday, lie was headed 150 miles northeast to Wayne Gretzky's hometown of Brant ford to suit up for the Alex­anders, a junior club of the Ontario Hockey League. The gritty OHL was known for producing a certain brand of player: "enforcers," "goons," guys valued more for their fists than their ability to put the puck in the net.

Three years later, on November 6, 1985, Probert debuted in a Red Wings uniform at Joe Louis Arena. He realized his dream at 20, but his rise had just begun. By the time he retired, at the age of 37, he had become the greatest enforcer of the NHL's modern age, an era of blood and controversy, "the golden age of goons." Because of his pugilistic gifts, he found himself at the center of the game's glaring controversy: Why does the league allow players to commit acts of violence—in front of thousands—that would earn them prison sentences if they occurred off the ice? All the while Probert helped lead the lousiest team in the NHL— the "Detroit Dead Wings"—out of a 20-year drought and into a renais­sance that morphed the city into what it is today: Hockeytown.

Probert paid a price for his fame. The warrior had a dark side. After numerous drunk-driving incidents he was busied for smuggling cocaine across the border in his underpants— Tasered, suspended, disgraced. But the NHL relented, and its top enforcer was soon back on skates, more intimidating than ever. When he died unexpectedly at the age of 45 last summer, the men he bloodied mercilessly were the pall­bearers at his funeral. What greater honor could be bestowed on a man who left everything on the ice?

It all started with the Brantford Alex­anders. Probert's father, Windsor police sergeant Al Probert, had died of a heart attack six days before the teenager left home—an ominous beginning.

JOE KOCUR, Red Wings teammate: Probie was 17, going ofTto his first training camp. He lost the one guy who might have straightened

him out. He starting hanging with the wrong crowd.

BOB DUFF, columnist, Windsor Star: Off

he goes to play juniors, thinking about

his dead father. Sault Ste. Marie got him

from Brantford, and those guys were

into a party lifestyle—a lot of drinking,

cocaine And Bob was more of a fol­

lower than a leader.

DAN PARKINSON, Probert's father-in-law: Did his risk-taking stem back to his father's death? His father was a police sergeant, and Bob always had a fasci­nation with policing. He came from a police family and joined another one when he later married my daughter— I'm police chief of Cornwall, Ontario. It's interesting...with his personal diffi­culties he was never going to be in law enforcement, but he became an enforcer in hockey. Maybe that was as close as he could get to police work. DUFF: When the Red Wings passed on him in the second round of the 1983 draft, Bob was crushed. But he lasted till the third round and then heard his name: "The Detroit Red Wings select Bob Probert." This was his dream come true.

In the early 1980s the Detroit Red Wings owner, Bruce Norris, sold the club after

Inure llian 30 years of family ownership la Mike Hitch, founder of Little Caesars Pizza. The team had recently moved from the Olympia Stadium into Joe Louis Arena. In that 1983 draft, the Wings selected three players who would change the course of the team forever—a young scorer named Steve Yzerman and a pair of forwards, Joe Kocur and Hob Probert, whom the fans dubbed "the Bruise Brothers. "At the end ofProb-ert's first season in Detroit, the Red Wings had the worst record in the NHL. Yet the team was among the league leaders in pen­alty minutes. The following season the team made the playoffs and won a play­off series for only the second time in 17 seasons. The player the fans loved to watch was not the guy scoring the most goals but the man whose style of play captured the imagination of the city. In low-down Detroit, here was a man who was going to fight back and win.

DUFF: The 1980s were a tough time in Detroit. Factories were closing and the franchise was teetering. They were prac­tically giving tickets away. BARRY MELROSE, former NHL player and head coach, now with ESPN: It wasn't Hockeytown yet. Detroit was depressed and depressing. The Tigers weren't win­ning. The Lions were no good. You'd look up and see 4,000 or 5,000 fans at Red Wings games, in an arena that seated more than 20,000. DUFF: The Dead Wings were the laugh­ingstock of the league. Other than Yzerman, they weren't a skilled bunch. KOSTYA KENNEDY, senior writer at Sports Illustrated: And it was the age of Wayne Grctzky—you've got Gretzky gliding around, making everybody else look like a statue.

DUFF: So the Red Wings built a team that was excessively tough. That's how they fought back, and people in Detroit love that kind of hockey. It's a

blue-collar town, a workingman's town where skilled players aren't adored the same way the fighters are. When Red Wings fans talk about Gordie Howe, one of the most talented players ever, they talk about his toughness. Guys like Probert and Kocur really fit that tradi­tion, which is one reason they're still remembered so fondly. Another reason, of course, is that they started winning. Today Detroit is the franchise everyone in hockey knows and admires. Those late-1980s teams were the ones that turned things around. KOCUR: We came to compete. Everybody was a battler, and the fans responded. The city went wild for us. It's not like New York, where people don't recognize the hockey players. In Detroit, the Red Wings were royalty. When the team's doing bad, it's like a dark cloud over everything. But when you're winning— winning games, winning fights—they treat you great.

KENNEDY: Suddenly the Wings got good, partly because they had the most feared enforcer. Probert was a big man, six-three and about 230 pounds, but he didn't loom in the locker room. This gladiator, the guy who does the fight­ing for his teammates, taking punches in the face for the team, had a kind of sad look. Off the ice he was humble, never braggadocious or chest-thumping. This was hockey with a human face, a bruised human face, with those top front teeth missing. You knew he'd played through all kinds of pain and infinite hangovers without complaining. TONY TWIST, NIIL enforcer, 1989-1999: Bob Probert became the measuring stick for the league, a gunslinger who never ducked a fight. Guys like me, who weren't as talented, figured it was an honor to fight him. We battled eight or nine times. With him you were in it for the long haul. (continued on page 104)

BERSERKER

(continued from page 78) He'd take a few punches, then start dishing them out. With no fear in his eyes—ever. He looked as though he enjoyed it. He had real hockey talent, too; if Steve Yzerman flipped him the puck, Probert could pass or score. Not like me. I was a hired hit man. My only job was to fight.

ROSS BERNSTEIN, author of The Code: The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL: Maybe the first modern enforcer, Probert watched game film to see who was a lefty or a righty, what punches they threw, how they moved.

TWIST: The fans wanted a fight. And let me tell you, when it happens—when you're at center ice, dropping the gloves, with 20,000 people on their feet, screaming your name— that's exciting. You're a rock star. KENNEDY: It's not like Probert fought because he was angry or thuggish. That's what people outside hockey sometimes think, but it's not so. The enforcers don't fight because they hate one another. They fight because that's their role. They fight to keep order. When Marty McSorley was the Oilers' enforcer, he beat on anybody who laid a hand on Wayne Gretzky. Because Gretzky was golden. Wayne couldn't fight his own fights even if he wanted to. What if he breaks his hand? Season over! So McSorley, the enforcer, fought for him, and he might not even fight the guy who messed with Wayne. He'd fight the other team's enforcer, even if they were friends. That's how play­ers policed the game.

During the off-season the Red Wings' trainer sent the Bruise Brothers, Probert and Kocur, to work on their left hooks with boxing trainer Emanuel Steward, a local who trained Detroit fighter Thomas "Hit Man" Hearns. When Probert fought at foe Louis Arena, "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" would blare over the loud­speakers. Fans wore shirts with his face and the maxim i,/it: moon, nan probif. on them. Thanks lo the winning, bruising st\le of play in Detroit, violence spread through the league like a contagion. In Dallas, fans could now watch fights on huge monitors while listening to "Macho, macho man! I want to be a macho man!" When Philadelphia Fl\ers enforcer Ed Hospodar was penalized for an infamous elbow to an opponent's jaw, he told reporters, "It was worth it." With the arrival of cable TV, highlight reels spread the gospel: The NHL was a game lo watch. Not everyone was onboard. "Curbing the fighting will mean more skillful play, more scor­ing, more excitement," argued Harry Ornest, then-owner of the St. Louis Blues. But it seemed the fans disagreed. And so the referees let it go. And finally, in Probert's third year in the league, the Red Wings won their division.

WAYNE GRETZKY, from Gretzky: An Autobiog­raphy: Hockey is the only team sport in the world that actually encourages fighting. I have no idea why we let it go on. Fights probably bring a lot of people into the build­ing. But how many people do they keep out of the building? I've met people in L.A. who say, "Well, we don't go to the games because it's too violent." To me that's just sad....

Every time I bring it up with the league, they point to these studies about how many people want fighting.

MARTY MCSORLEY, NHL enforcer, 1983-1999: The league never knew what to do with us tough guys. Put us on a poster or be embarrassed by us? But they couldn't keep Bob Probert off the All-Star team. KOCUR: He joked that he was gonna start the first fight in the All-Star Game. He had my back. Everyone knew if they came to Detroit and tangled with one of us, they'd have to fight us both. They'd feel a little uneasy lacing 'em up before the game, and Steve Yzerman could feel safer. BERNSTEIN: Even when Probert's team was bad, he created drama. He sold tick­ets. Why? Because fans like fights. Every time the Olympics come around, you hear, "Oh, what lovely skating, with no fighting. Why can't the NHL be like that?" Here's the answer: Nobody would watch! It's part of what's great about hockey. I mean, there's a reason the goalie's the only one with a face mask. The other guys risk their faces and teeth—that's the code. They're account­able. If you spear an opponent, trip him or high-stick him, you might get smashed in the face. Not necessarily by the guy you speared, especially if he's a star like Gretzky or Yzerman or Sidney Crosby. The other team doesn't want its stars get­ting hurt or thrown in the penalty box. But the enforcer, he's more expendable. And he's coming after you. STEVE LEVY, ESPN: They were the gladia­tors, the guys who sacrificed their bodies for the team. That's why they were loved. And Probert was Maximus.

BERNSTEIN: It was a legendary role, the old-school enforcer. Fans love you because you're

the biggest, baddest man on the ice. Your teammates love you because you're selfless. You fight so they don't have to. But it's also the hardest job in sports. These guys were walking ice bags. You're constantly injured, your hands most of all. But you have to play or they'll replace you with some kid from Moose Jaw or Medicine Hat. It's tough to replace a Gretzky or a Crosby, but they can always find another tough guy. TWIST: Your hands always hurt the worst. I'd spend the whole off-season trying to toughen up my hands. I'd start with sand— fill two pails with sand, put 'em on the floor and pound away at the sand. Then pails full of lead pellets—that hardened my hands a little more. And then I'd punch the floor. Not hard enough to break bones, just to con­dition the hands. They swell up, then you ice them. It tightens up the tendons and liga­ments. You have to remember, we weren't like boxers who fight twice a year. We'd fight twice a week with no gloves. And we lived for those fights! But you do get aftereffects. I'm 42, and my hands have so much scar tissue, they'll bleed when I bump into a wall. It's as if the skin's about to fall off. BERNSTEIN: A lot of enforcers led troubled lives. A lot of them were single—drunks, druggies. Some had mental problems. It's not a normal life. You sit on the bench most of the game and then get sent in for a minute, just to fight. The job was constant stress. You're waiting for a tap on the shoul­der from your coach or your captain. Or it might be subtler than that. They might say, "I can't believe they hit Steve like that." That's your signal.

So tell me—are you going to go straight home and read bedtime stories to your kids? No, you're icing your hands. You're as beat

up as any pro football player. Taking pain­killers. Drinking to come down after the game, or if it's not booze it might be drugs. You may need uppers to get going in the morning, and the cycle starts again. KOCUR: In the morning you'd start with a red-eye. It's a Canadian thing, beer and tomato juice.

KENNEDY: That's a preemptive hangover fighter. Those guys drank more beer than anybody alive.

Throughout Probert's career, his drinking was legendary. The club paid a private detective to follow him from bar to bar to keep tabs on him. He started missing practices and team flights. He roughed up a cop in a bar and bolted from the Betty Ford Clinic. When Probert got caught drinking at two a.m. the night before a game that ended the team's 1988 campaign, coach Jacques Demers told reporters the Red Wings might have advanced in the Stanley Cup playoffs if Probert had stayed sober. In 1989—seven years after Probert first lefl Windsor—U.S. Customs agents caught him driving from Canada into Detroit in a car littered with beer cans and an empty booze bottle. They strip-searched him and found 14 grams of cocaine in his underpants. That got him three months in prison. Suspended from the NHL, then reinstated, he went on to crash his Harley into a car. His blood alcohol level was triple the legal limit, with traces of coke. The Red Wings let him go. "The Bob Probert saga is over," said fellow Bruise Brother Joe Kocur. But Probert still had plenty of fight in him.

KOCUR: With his NHL buddies, Probert was okay; we kept him out of trouble. When he went back to Windsor to see his old friends, that's when he got messed up. MCSORLEY: I'd been suspended myself [for an infamous hit on Vancouver's Donald Brashear], so the media came to me. I said, "Let him rehab, get healthy, get back in the game. Isn't that what we do when politicians get in trou­ble?" But nobody wanted to hear it. MELROSE: I saw him at his lowest, when all the shit was hitting the fan. Same Bobby. Did we hug and have a heart-to-heart? No. He was hurting, but he didn't want to show it. I said, "Bobby, it's good to see you. You doing okay?" He smiles and says, "You know me, Barry. I'm still here."

PARKINSON: Bob still had to learn how to walk away from a drink. He knew that was his Achilles' heel.

DUFF: He was married by then. His wife, Dani, has to be close to a saint for all she went through. I got the impression she was tough on him, but she defended him when he was down. When he was arrested at the border, thrown in jail, she stuck with him. PARKINSON: We're a police family, and his troubles with the law certainly raised eye­brows in my professional circles. But if you believe in a marriage, like my daughter does, you go through it good and bad, thick and thin. The lowest point came when he was in prison in the States, away from his fam­ily and friends.

Probert returned to the NHL on March 22, 1990. To the surprise of many, rather than crack­ing down on fighting, the league seemed to get even more violent. Said Glen Sathet; president and general manager of the Edmonton Oilers,

in 1991, "I dun 'I think there is anything wrong with the game today. The buildings are almost full. It's an exciting game. If it's not broken, don V fix it." Proberl moved over to the Chicago Blackhawks and immediately became a target for every enforcer coming up in the league.

RICK TELANDER, columnist, Chicago Sun-Times: Probert signed on with the Black-hawks in what was likely to be his last chance in the NHL. I was baffled by the guy. He'd go over-the-top as a Fighter but was quiet and courteous off the ice—when he wasn't wasted on alcohol or cocaine. Like most sportswriters, I was sick of athletes lying about how they'd changed for good, gotten clean and sober. So I arranged to have din­ner with him. I ordered a shot of tequila and placed it on the table, close enough for him to smell it. We looked at the drink. Finally he toasted me with his Coke and watched me throw the shot back. He was smiling, but I knew it was hard for him. Real hard. KENNEDY: It was weird for Red Wings fans when he went to Chicago. That was a heated rivalry between two of the league's original six teams. By then, late in his career, he was more one-dimensional, more of a goon. But they didn't even hate him in Detroit. He was unhateable.

KOCUR: We fought that year. You want to know how it happened? I was out of the league; nobody had offered me a contract. Probie came to Detroit with the Blackhawks, and I pulled him aside. "You gotta do some­thing to get me back in the game," I said. Well, that night he speared everybody, did everything he could to make the Wings miserable. The next morning's newspa­per said REDWINGS MUST GET TOUGHER. So

Scotty Bowman, the coach, brings me back. My second game's against Chicago. Awk­ward? Yeah, but I knew my role. You can see it on YouTube. We dropped the gloves and went at it hard, really battling, doing our jobs. Finally the fight's over and we're lying on the ice. I gave him a little hug and said, "Thanks for getting me back in the game." Probie laughed and said, "No problem." DAVID SINGER, founder, HockeyFights.com: If you created a Hall of Fame for enforcers, he'd be in the first class. John Ferguson, Dave Brown and Dave Schultz are up there too, but when we started giving our biggest award to the best fighter of the year, we called it the Bob Probert Award. We've got a Probert page that lists hundreds of his fights at HockeyFights .com, and he won most of them. Some are legendary, like his 1992 rematch with the Rangers' Tie Domi. Domi had showed him up in their first fight—Probert got cut, and Domi skated off gloating, pretending he was wearing a championship belt. Everybody knew a rematch was coming. When the Red Wings came to New York, Madison Square Garden was absolutely wild.

The first time Probert fought Tie Domi of the Rangers, he was still playing for the Red Wings. The brawl was so violent, even fans were shocked. The New York 'Times ran a headline: ra.\<;ers

AXI) RED WINGS IX A T1F. OX BRAWL WAY. After the

game, Proberl said, "He's a goon. I'll get that little dummy back in Detroit." Domi followed up, "lie keeps calling me 'dummy.' lie's not known to be a rocket scientist." Before the rematch, on

December 2, 1992, Domi told a reporter, "You know how much I've been looking forward to this game. If it's a good fight, it still may pick up the league and get the real game back." Less than a minute after face-off fans got what they wanted— arguably the greatest fight in hockey history.

LEVY: I was there. The buildup was like a heavyweight title fight. People had been talking about it for weeks. Usually the Gar­den didn't fill up till 10 minutes into the first period, with Wall Street fat cats rolling up late in their limos. But that night every seat was full, everybody standing. Probert was on the ice from the start. The Rangers sent Domi out after the first whistle, less than a minute into the game. They dropped the gloves and it was on.

BERNSTEIN: It was an epic battle. Domi was short and relentless, like a pit bull. Probie was taller; he had a hard time getting a good shot down on Domi, but he got his shots in. About 50 of them.

LEVY: Probert was in a tough spot. He tow­ers over Domi—if he clocks him, mops up the ice with him, well, he's supposed to. He's Bob Probert. I'm sure there are Rangers fans who'll say Domi won, but I thought Probert got the best of it. And you know what? I bet I'm like those fans in one way: I can describe that fight from memory, but I couldn't tell you who won the game.

Bob Probert played eight more seasons in the NHL, retaining his unofficial title as the game's heavyweight champ for most of them. He suffered miserably from years of fights and injuries, and his wife had to control his access to painkillers. When he became a father all his friends agreed he changed. He stopped drinking, stopped get­ting himself into trouble. "lie was absolutely crazy about his kids,"says Duff, "tucking them in with those big, aching hands. He loved his Harley, but after his kids came along he started restoring old Chevelles. He said, 'You can't take four kids for a ride on a Harley.'" Probert stayed involved in the game as an NHL alum. On July 5, 2010 he was with his in-laws and his kids, boating on Lake St. Clair. At about two p.m. he developed chest pains. He collapsed. His father-in-law performed CPR on him but was unsuccessful. Probert was pronounced dead at Windsor Regional Hospital that afternoon. He was 45 years old.

KOCUR: I was a pallbearer at his funeral. I looked up and saw all the NHL guys he went to war with. They all showed up. When the funeral was over they lined up in two rows, like a tunnel. We carried the casket between them so they could all salute Probie. The funeral was beautiful. Us old players sat around telling Probie stories, laughing and crying. At the end we put the casket on a special sidecar of this custom Harley, and off it went. LEVY: His funeral was the essence of hockey. It was a reunion of the tough guys' fraternity, the ones who used to beat up one another and then go out for beers together. Will we see Probert's like again? No. Not with the rules of the modern game. But you have to ask the question: Who's ever going to stand up more than he did, endure more pain, give up more heart, to win?

U.S. CUSTOMS

AGENTS STRIP-

SEARCHED

PROBERT *~

AND FOUND , 14 GRAMS OF COCAINE HIDDEN IN HI UNDERWEAR.