from Amazon
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
One punch
When your entire life is distilled to one skill and nothing else, what do you do?
I’ll be honest with you — it might be the hardest job in professional sports. I know I had a hard time playing that role. The threat of losing, the physical suffering, the humiliation of defeat — none of that is easy.
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He wasn’t quite good enough to play in the NHL unless he brought to it a very particular set of skills.At first he resisted. “I wasn’t comfortable with the idea,” he says. Grimson chose instead to go to university for two years, where he earned his first credits toward a degree in economics — as well, he says, as the maturity to accept his fate. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he says, “except to say that I grew up a bit. I picked up the emotional equipment I needed to assume that role.”
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Belak said something similar: “On nights you knew you had to fight, there were nerves, you never slept the night before. But you dealt with it or you didn’t. You don’t really get over it, you just go out and do your job.”
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Probert died with clear evidence that he had sustained chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He had shadows on his brain from his many fights; his future, had he lived, might have included dementia, memory loss, and severe depression. And there’s no real reason for Grimson to believe that he somehow escaped without the same damage.
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