from today’s Globe, KPD….good read.
www.bostonglobe.com
Early in the first period, minutes before his career ended and his life forever changed, Normand Leveille took a walloping check along the sidewall at Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver.
The hit by Canucks winger Marc Crawford rattled Leveille’s head against the boards, alarming enough to make one reporter wince and stand up from his seat in the press box. But it was not enough to deter the 19-year-old dynamo, a dazzling talent playing in his 75th NHL game, from rolling out for his next shifts and finishing the period.
All seemed OK as players on both clubs made their way to their respective dressing rooms for the first intermission.
The night was Oct. 23, 1982, now 40 years gone by, and all was not OK.
Disoriented and complaining of dizziness, Leveille collapsed in the dressing room between periods, and within minutes was rushed via ambulance to Vancouver General Hospital for emergency brain surgery. A congenital malformation inside his head was bleeding out — unrelated to the hit, doctors later said — and it took neurosurgeons some six hours to stem the bleeding, keeping him from dying.
No one that night, or the next morning, knew if the Bruins’ flashy second-year left winger would survive. What was clear in the moment, based on how doctors framed the severity of the bleeding and resultant brain damage, was that Leveille’s life as a hockey player had come to an end.
“Oh, let me tell you, he was going to be great,” then-assistant coach Jean Ratelle said while Leveille was in a coma.
“He was going to be better than Yvan Cournoyer,” Terry O’Reilly said the next morning as Leveille’s teammates, most of them up all night commiserating in the hotel lobby, left town to face the Kings that night in Los Angeles. “He was going to be better than Rod Gilbert. Just look at the way he was playing.”
Doctors and teammates were right, Leveille never played again. The good news, as most Bruins fans of that era know, is that he recovered a fair amount of his motor and speech skills and now, at 59, operates a camp and charitable foundation outside Montreal with Denise, his wife of 15 years. The couple also gets away each year to Thailand, far from the nasty bite of Quebec winters.
What happened to Leveille was unpredictable and could happen today, because few players, if any, are aware if they have such congenital malformations (known as AVMs, or arteriovenous malformations). AVMs are extremely rare and, therefore, not subject to screening in a physical. They typically only make themselves evident, and detectable via testing, upon bleeding out.
Leveille’s misfortune forever will remain a prime example of the fragility of an athlete’s health, that very thin line between playing a game for a living one moment and fighting for one’s career, or life, the next.
Hockey, and most every sport, delivers these moments time and again, and many of us have become somewhat inured to the reminders, even when as vivid and frequent as those scenes in NFL games with players on their knees, praying as a fellow player, with brain or spinal injury, gets placed in a stabilizing neck brace and stretchered off the field before a silent crowd.
Thankfully, the vast majority of athletes turn out OK, soon get back to work in most cases, and the scare is forgotten. But not always, as fans around here know.
That morning in Vancouver, with Leveille’s life still in the balance, had 30-year-old Mike Milburydisconsolately sipping coffee as he and teammates gathered in the Westin Bayshore lobby to load the team bus for the airport.
Puck drop at the LA Forum was about 12 hours away.
“Doesn’t this seem ridiculous?” Milbury asked me, the lone reporter on the trip who opted to stay in Vancouver. “Here we are, going to play a game in LA, and Normie’s in the hospital. What does any of this mean?”
The next few days offered this reporter a rare, at times excruciating, firsthand glimpse of the raw emotional entanglements around these catastrophic injuries. It included the privilege of meeting Leveille’s parents, Jacques and Therese, when they arrived the next day, and sitting next to them in a small hospital office for their first consult with one of the neurosurgeons who fought to keep their son alive.
“I close my eyes,” said a distraught Jacques, “and all I can see is Normand . . . that’s all, Normand.”
Time, the doctor told them, ultimately would deliver the outcome. They would have to be patient. The couple had not slept since the call Saturday evening from Ratelle, informing them of Normand’s plight. They were wide awake with worry during the cross-Canada flight.
“I’ll give you some of these,” Woodhurst said as he wrote a prescription for a sleeping aid, “but [as for seeing Normand], I don’t think there’s a pill anywhere that will help that.”
With Normand still in a coma, Jacques and Therese stood at his bedside in the hospital. Ratelle was there, too, to help translate and console. Their ache was palpable.
Barely 5 feet 10 inches, Leveille excelled on speed and courage, his legs and upper body lean and fit. Much of his head was bandaged. A ventilator aided his breathing, easing pressure on his brain.
Of all that changed for Leveille 40 years ago, his perpetual, easy smile endured. He has retained his love of Boston, his brief time here on top of the world, and still visits occasionally with Denise. He was here last month, per usual, for the club’s annual preseason golf outing. He can still get around a course, albeit only able to swing a club with his left arm, and last I asked, he usually shoots around 110.
“He says his heart will always be in Boston,” Denise told me as the couple watched a game in 2008 from the TD Garden’s ninth floor.
It’s his struggle with speech, she said, that most upsets him. Denise often is his interpreter, translator, and finisher of thoughts.
During that long-ago visit, Normand kiddingly told Denise that he hopes one day his ashes will be buried under the Garden ice.
“He says all the old ghosts in the old Garden never came to the new building,” she said, Normand next to her, beaming, enjoying his joke. “He wants to be the ghost — the good ghost — who helps them win the Stanley Cup.”
Now 40 years in the past, Normand Leveille’s life-changing injury a reminder of an athlete’s fragility - The Boston Globe
The second-year Bruin took a hit that rattled his head against the boards, but all seemed OK as he finished the first period. It was Oct. 23, 1982, and all was not OK.
www.bostonglobe.com
Early in the first period, minutes before his career ended and his life forever changed, Normand Leveille took a walloping check along the sidewall at Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver.
The hit by Canucks winger Marc Crawford rattled Leveille’s head against the boards, alarming enough to make one reporter wince and stand up from his seat in the press box. But it was not enough to deter the 19-year-old dynamo, a dazzling talent playing in his 75th NHL game, from rolling out for his next shifts and finishing the period.
All seemed OK as players on both clubs made their way to their respective dressing rooms for the first intermission.
The night was Oct. 23, 1982, now 40 years gone by, and all was not OK.
Disoriented and complaining of dizziness, Leveille collapsed in the dressing room between periods, and within minutes was rushed via ambulance to Vancouver General Hospital for emergency brain surgery. A congenital malformation inside his head was bleeding out — unrelated to the hit, doctors later said — and it took neurosurgeons some six hours to stem the bleeding, keeping him from dying.
No one that night, or the next morning, knew if the Bruins’ flashy second-year left winger would survive. What was clear in the moment, based on how doctors framed the severity of the bleeding and resultant brain damage, was that Leveille’s life as a hockey player had come to an end.
“Oh, let me tell you, he was going to be great,” then-assistant coach Jean Ratelle said while Leveille was in a coma.
“He was going to be better than Yvan Cournoyer,” Terry O’Reilly said the next morning as Leveille’s teammates, most of them up all night commiserating in the hotel lobby, left town to face the Kings that night in Los Angeles. “He was going to be better than Rod Gilbert. Just look at the way he was playing.”
Doctors and teammates were right, Leveille never played again. The good news, as most Bruins fans of that era know, is that he recovered a fair amount of his motor and speech skills and now, at 59, operates a camp and charitable foundation outside Montreal with Denise, his wife of 15 years. The couple also gets away each year to Thailand, far from the nasty bite of Quebec winters.
What happened to Leveille was unpredictable and could happen today, because few players, if any, are aware if they have such congenital malformations (known as AVMs, or arteriovenous malformations). AVMs are extremely rare and, therefore, not subject to screening in a physical. They typically only make themselves evident, and detectable via testing, upon bleeding out.
Leveille’s misfortune forever will remain a prime example of the fragility of an athlete’s health, that very thin line between playing a game for a living one moment and fighting for one’s career, or life, the next.
Hockey, and most every sport, delivers these moments time and again, and many of us have become somewhat inured to the reminders, even when as vivid and frequent as those scenes in NFL games with players on their knees, praying as a fellow player, with brain or spinal injury, gets placed in a stabilizing neck brace and stretchered off the field before a silent crowd.
Thankfully, the vast majority of athletes turn out OK, soon get back to work in most cases, and the scare is forgotten. But not always, as fans around here know.
That morning in Vancouver, with Leveille’s life still in the balance, had 30-year-old Mike Milburydisconsolately sipping coffee as he and teammates gathered in the Westin Bayshore lobby to load the team bus for the airport.
Puck drop at the LA Forum was about 12 hours away.
“Doesn’t this seem ridiculous?” Milbury asked me, the lone reporter on the trip who opted to stay in Vancouver. “Here we are, going to play a game in LA, and Normie’s in the hospital. What does any of this mean?”
The next few days offered this reporter a rare, at times excruciating, firsthand glimpse of the raw emotional entanglements around these catastrophic injuries. It included the privilege of meeting Leveille’s parents, Jacques and Therese, when they arrived the next day, and sitting next to them in a small hospital office for their first consult with one of the neurosurgeons who fought to keep their son alive.
“I close my eyes,” said a distraught Jacques, “and all I can see is Normand . . . that’s all, Normand.”
Time, the doctor told them, ultimately would deliver the outcome. They would have to be patient. The couple had not slept since the call Saturday evening from Ratelle, informing them of Normand’s plight. They were wide awake with worry during the cross-Canada flight.
“I’ll give you some of these,” Woodhurst said as he wrote a prescription for a sleeping aid, “but [as for seeing Normand], I don’t think there’s a pill anywhere that will help that.”
With Normand still in a coma, Jacques and Therese stood at his bedside in the hospital. Ratelle was there, too, to help translate and console. Their ache was palpable.
Barely 5 feet 10 inches, Leveille excelled on speed and courage, his legs and upper body lean and fit. Much of his head was bandaged. A ventilator aided his breathing, easing pressure on his brain.
Of all that changed for Leveille 40 years ago, his perpetual, easy smile endured. He has retained his love of Boston, his brief time here on top of the world, and still visits occasionally with Denise. He was here last month, per usual, for the club’s annual preseason golf outing. He can still get around a course, albeit only able to swing a club with his left arm, and last I asked, he usually shoots around 110.
“He says his heart will always be in Boston,” Denise told me as the couple watched a game in 2008 from the TD Garden’s ninth floor.
It’s his struggle with speech, she said, that most upsets him. Denise often is his interpreter, translator, and finisher of thoughts.
During that long-ago visit, Normand kiddingly told Denise that he hopes one day his ashes will be buried under the Garden ice.
“He says all the old ghosts in the old Garden never came to the new building,” she said, Normand next to her, beaming, enjoying his joke. “He wants to be the ghost — the good ghost — who helps them win the Stanley Cup.”
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