Stop cheering hockey violence, before player's brains turn to mush

After his death, at age 73, Reggie Fleming was found to have had chronic traumatic enchephalopathy,

By Tom Hawthorn
Boulevard Magazine
November 30, 2011

On the second Saturday after my 15th birthday, the cover of The Canadian Magazine, which came with the weekend newspapers I had just delivered, featured the image of a half-dressed hockey player about my father’s age. His face was scarred and battered, greasy hair plastered to a sweaty and bumpy brow. The cover line read: “The agony of a punched-out bully.”

Inside, the writer Earl McRae told the story of Reggie Fleming, a Montreal guy who had gained a long hockey career despite limited skating and stickhandling skills. He occasionally put the puck in the net, but he was employed more for the damage his fists could do to an opponent’s face. Fleming was an intimidating presence, a ferocious fighter who rivals preferred to avoid. In hockey parlance, he was a policeman, a guy who maintained order through the threat of retaliatory violence should any of his more talented teammates be targeted. In the real world, he was a goon.

The article ended with McRae describing Fleming alone in the dressing room following a fight, blood pouring down his face. His hands tremble. Here’s how McRae told it: “Sometimes,’ [Fleming] says softly and haltingly, “sometimes I wish I could control myself just once. It’s ... it’s the kids. I go home and they see the cuts and bruises and —” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He lifts his hands to his face. For a long time he’s quiet and then, from behind the red swollen hands, a long, shuddering sigh. In the morning, the children will see him. He knows what they will ask. And he knows, as always, he won’t have an answer.”

Earl McRae's book

The story knocked me out. You didn’t read this stuff on the sports pages, where the world is divided into heroes and goats. Here was an athlete in all his complications — a thug, ashamed before his children, but also a man earning a paycheque as best he knew how. For a Canadian teenager, this was Shakespearean drama (and in an English I could understand on first reading).

The article, which became known as “Requiem for Reggie,” altered forever how I’d watch hockey, as a teenaged fan and, later, as a sportswriter. I loved the game for its speed, its majesty, and, yes, its violence — the spectacular and breathtaking way in which a bodycheck can change the complexion of a game. One Christmas, I got as a gift one of Don Cherry’s Rock ’Em, Sock ’Em Hockey videotapes. Liked the big hits. Cherry has produced at least 22 of those compilations. Now we know how grotesque my enjoyment has been.

Not so long ago, athletes who “had their bell rung” were told to “shake it off” and get back in the game. Now we know a concussion can have long-term consequences, perhaps even devastating ones.

Not so long ago, it was said no one got seriously hurt in hockey fights. Now we know that Reggie Fleming suffered brain damage. After he died, aged 73, two years ago, he was found to have had chronic traumatic enchephalopathy, a disease that alters behaviour and eventually leads to dementia. He paid a terrible price for those blows to the head, not the least of which was an early death.

Junior hockey returned to Victoria earlier this year, when the puck dropped for the inaugural game of the Royals. The atmosphere was electric; O Canada was sung with an operatic flourish by Mark Donnelly; and, the hockey was thrilling, as the young players exhibited tremendous skill.

In the first period, two players tussled at the blue line, dropping their gloves to throw punches. The crowd roared its approval, many leaping to their feet and punching the air.

I stayed in my seat, as did some others. Cheer a teenager as he punches another in the face? Can’t do it. Those young men were barely older than I had been when a magazine article revealed to me the ugly side of pro hockey.

Junior hockey permits fighting because the NHL permits fighting. Hockey would become even more savage without it, goes the argument. Besides, the braying crowds demand it.

Yet, they hold an Olympic hockey tournament without fighting. World championships, too. All the major sports — football, basketball, baseball, soccer — punish fighting with automatic banishment from the game. As does college hockey. As did the NHL before 1922.

The hockey world faces a crisis. Don Cherry used his bully pulpit on Hockey Night in Canada to dismiss as “pukes” the retired NHL pugilists who now question the role of goonery in hockey. Cherry apologized, sort of, weeks later, but the damage was done. He had estranged himself from some of the very players on whose bloody faces and sore knuckles he built a private fortune.

It’s time to ban fighting in hockey. Now. Before any of these teenaged players whose exploits we cheer wind up with brains of mush, like poor Reggie Fleming.

Creator of Canucks logo returns to his hockey roots

A stylized heraldic lion is the logo for the new Victoria Royals of the Western Hockey League. It was designed by the same artist who gave the Vancouver Canucks their breaching orca.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
July 4, 2011

VICTORIA

After the owners settled on calling their hockey club the Victoria Royals, the artist Brent Lynch went to work.

“Once you’ve got a name,” he said, “you’ve got to come up with an image.”

Royals is a good match for a city named after a monarch. But how to capture the sentiment in a single, punchy image?

A crown? Too obvious.

Queen Victoria wielding a hockey stick? Too cartoony.

The commission to create a Royals logo for the team’s upcoming debut season marked a rare return to the graphic arts. The 57-year-old artist is more of a painter these days, having moved to Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island three years ago. His works are sold in galleries throughout British Columbia and as far afield as San Jose del Cabo, Mexico. Though he has been widely exhibited, he is not best known for his landscape oils.

Everyone knows his work, though no one knows his name.

His artwork has been likely worn by more people in more places than any other in the province.

It is popular with students and retirees, businesspeople and homemakers.

Brent Lynch

You can find it in baby cribs and gangsta cribs.

Judging by recent unsavory events on Vancouver streets, even yahoos and yokels like it.

Before dedicating himself to painting, Mr. Lynch had a long career as a graphic designer. Among his clients was a certain hockey team for whom he developed an image that was ubiquitous last month.

The breaching orca representing the Vancouver Canucks? That’s the handiwork of Mr. Lynch’s fertile mind.

Logos, he said, are “the ultimate popular art.”

The logo was released 14 years ago, following the team’s original stick-in-rink design (now used as a pleasing shoulder flash) and the uninspiring downward skate. In beating out four competitors, Mr. Lynch settled on the orca, a creature that was “top of the food chain, dominant, and unique to the West Coast.”

The letter C from which it breaches was selected to give the Canucks’ sweater a classic look, as though it was an Original Six team.

The artist also prepared a lumberjack image of a bearded Johnny Canuck character, but the ownership at the time did not care for it.

He has been doodling for as long as he can remember. Family lore has the boy scrawling on floors and bedroom walls as a toddler, once even using as a canvas his baby brother’s bald head. His mother was an artist and his father owned a grocery in Ladner, where he held Hawaiian Days and Cowboy Days sales, the colourful graphics associated with the events inspiring a boy who liked to draw.

In school, Brent cartooned when he should have been listening, his caricatures earning him the admiration of his classmates if not of his subjects.

“A classic Canadian kid,” he said. “Drawing teachers and getting in trouble.”

He attended art school in Vancouver and London, England, before getting a job as an illustrator with the Vancouver Sun, whose editorial cartoonists at the time were Roy Peterson and the peerless Len Norris. Mr. Lynch soon after left to form his own eponymous design firm.

He has designed album covers and advertising campaigns, opera broadsides and sporting posters, beer labels and corporate logos.

One of his more familiar non-sports logos is for the Bread Garden, featuring a baker with fresh bread at the end of a long oven peel. In 2003, he redesigned the White Spot logo, dropping the familiar chicken with a fork and spoon for a circular image containing the words “legendary restaurant.”

For the Royals, he created an heraldic lion. The beast is rampant (rearing on hind legs) and langued (exposing tongue). The beast holds an upside-down hockey stick where tradition might dictate a flagpole.

“I tried to keep it pure and simple,” the artist said. “Lions represent good things like strength, courage and loyalty.”

Sometimes, Mr. Lynch finds a home even for rejected work.

The Johnny Canuck character he designed for the Canucks ended up as the image for the Vancouver Giants junior hockey team. It features a Paul Bunyonesque character carrying a hockey stick, instead of an ax, over his shoulder.

By coincidence, the Giants will travel to Victoria for the Royals’ inaugural Western Hockey League game on Sept. 24. All the skaters will be wearing Lynch logos.

He was the NHL's oldest rookie and he scored in seconds

Bob Barlow holds a stick autographed by the championship Victoria Maple Leafs team in 1966. He has turned part of a basement into a shrine honouring his hockey career. Photographs by Deddeda Stemler for The Globe and Mail. BELOW: An elated Barlow celebrates his first NHL goal, scored just seconds after he stepped on the ice.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 13, 2010

VICTORIA

On hockey night, you can find white-haired Bob Barlow, 75, at the arena sitting in Section X, Row 8, Seat 14. He likes the seat designation, as it matches a uniform number he once wore.

Between periods, Barlow cruises the concourse at Bear Mountain Arena in suburban Colwood, greeting his cronies and handing out a free hockey card to children.

“I tell them dreams do come true if you work hard,” he said. “I tell them I finally realized my dream at 34.”

The colourful piece of cardboard features Barlow in the green, white and gold livery of the Minnesota North Stars. He wears No. 14 on his sleeves and a crew cut atop his head. The image comes from his O-Pee-Chee rookie card issued after he finally got a National Hockey League job after spending 15 seasons in the minor leagues.

All that training paid off. After a long apprenticeship, Barlow stepped on the ice on Oct. 12, 1969, as the oldest rookie in NHL history. Seconds later, he was on the scoresheet by firing a 30-foot shot past Bernie Parent of the Philadelphia Flyers.

A photograph captured him with both arms in the air in celebration, his toothless grin evidence of a lifetime spent dodging pucks and sticks.

“Took the puck to the bench, told (coach) Wren Blair, ‘What’s so hard about this league?’ ”

As his teammates laughed, Barlow added, “Why didn’t you bring me up a little sooner?”

Back in the 1960s, Barlow used a modest playoff bonus to put a down payment on the split-level rancher he still calls home. The basement includes a small wet bar decorated with memorabilia from his hockey career. Among the items is the puck from his first NHL goal, mounted on a small wooden base.

The basement includes pucks and pennants, stickers and programs, autographed hockey sticks and a library of hockey books.

He brought out a watchcase. Inside could be found jeweled rings from each of the five championships he won in the minors. He wears a different one each night he goes to the rink to watch junior hockey.

To play on a championship team — at any level, in any sport — is to be bonded with teammates forever.

The first pro title he won came with the old Victoria Maple Leafs in 1966. A city not known for exuberant public displays went nuts for the Toronto farm team as it battled the Portland Buckaroos for Western Hockey League supremacy.

Barlow lived in an duplex in Esquimalt in those days, waking each morning during the playoffs to see a new rhyming sign posted by a hockey-mad neighbour.

“Here will lie the Portland Bucs,” read one, “laid to rest by Barlow’s pucks.”

The hard-fought series included an incident during which Barlow tussled with defenceman Jim (Red Eye) Hay. Both miscreants were dispatched to the penalty box for two minutes to contemplate their misdeeds. As they caught their breath, a reporter overheard an exchange between two old friends.

“Whatcha doin’ after the series?’ Hay asked.

“Been thinin’ about goin’ to Portland,” Barlow replied.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I just bought a big place,” Hay said helpfully.

“That so.”

“Yup. Be sure and bring the family and stay with us.”

“Okay,” Barlow said. “And thanks.”

With that, they returned to the ice to do battle.

Victoria won the series, Barlow leading all goal-scorers with 10.

The team flew home aboard a Viscount turboprop to be greeted at Pat Bay airport by about 100 fans and family members. At Memorial Arena, another 600 gathered beneath a marquee reading, LEAFS YOU ARE THE GREATEST. A junior band played. The crowd spilled out onto street, blocking traffic. A civic reception and a dinner were held that night.

“A great hockey team,” Barlow says of the Victoria squad.

A year later, two of his teammates were called up by Toronto as playoff reinforcements. Milan Marcetta and Autry Erickson, an Albertan who was named after cowboy singer Gene Autry, both got their names engraved on the Stanley Cup. Erickson qualified for the honour though he only ever wore Toronto’s storied blue-and-white sweater for a single game, making him one of the most obscure players to win the Cup.

Erickson died in Phoenix last month of stomach cancer, aged 72, his passing mostly going unnoticed. Even Barlow had not heard the sad news.

He nearly died himself three years ago after suffering a heart attack while doing yard work. Barlow was unconscious in hospital for three days. Doctors were worried about possible oxygen deprivation.

“They were ready to pull the plug when he woke up,” his wife, Marilyn, recalled.

They did not take into account an old athlete’s fighting spirit.

He now has a large bump near his collar bone beneath which rests a defibrillator. For a guy who often sported a black eye in his playing days, it looks like just another lump endured in a rough and tumble sport.

Barlow went hunting for another memento. It captures what it was like to be an ice warrior in those days.

Every month, he gets an NHL pension cheque. The total: $5.16.

He waits until he has three before cashing them. It saves on banking costs.

Five generations
Bob Barlow and his wife Marilyn (nee Mutrie) are at the heart of five generations of exceptional athletes.

Marilyn's grandfather, Lot Roe, was a world-class speed skater.

Her father, Dr. Ralph Dory Mutrie, was inducted into the North Bay (Ont.) Sports Hall of Fame in 1987 as a builder for his contributions to figure skating. He became active after Marilyn took up the sport. She continues to train yung skaters at the Juan de Fuca Recreation Centre outside Victoria. She was named coach of the year by Skate Canada in 1992.

Hugh Barlow, Bob's father, won the Allan Cup in 1947 with the Montreal Royals.

Bob and Marilyn's daughter, Wendy Barlow, was a world-class professional tennis player who competed at Wimbledon. She has been inducted into the Greater Victoria Sports Hall of Fame. Today, Wendy Pattenden is president of Canadian Sport Centre Pacific.

Hillary Pattenden — Wendy's daughter and Bob and Marilyn's granddaughter — is an all-star goalie for the Mercyhurst College Lakers in Erie, Penn. It is her dream to play for Team Canada at the Olympics.

Hillary Pattenden is a junior at Mercyhurst College and a possible future star for Team Canada. Her grandfather, Bob Barlow, played pro hockey for 22 seasons.