The roiling anxieties, the gnawing deceits, the tamped-down frustrations had been piling up for more than two years.
But as they angrily knocked aside locker-room benches and shouted obscenities at each other, preparing for a ludicrous mismatch of a fistfight, neither Detroit Red Wings enforcer Bob Probert nor assistant coach Colin Campbell knew the worst of Probert`s troubles lay five months ahead.
The present seemed lousy enough, thanks. And they were both fed up. Fed up with each other`s constant companionship. Fed up with the adverse impact Probert`s alcohol-soaked saga was having on the entire organization. Fed up with the constant philosophizing or psycho-babble debates about what caused Probert`s unquenchable thirst.
Was it like the counselors said: a genetic predisposition, a chemical dependency, a disease? Or was Probert merely incorrigible?
At this point, the reasons hardly mattered. Someone was recruited to run a stopwatch and asked to yell ”STOP!” after Campbell and Probert had boxed a 45-second round.
Campbell was at Windsor Arena on this October 1988 day only because Probert was serving a training-camp suspension and undergoing treatment yet again for alcoholism. Red Wings management had assigned Campbell to be Probert`s round-the-clock guardian 11 months earlier. That meant Campbell had to attend Red Wings midday practices and night games, plus check in on Probert, make sure he took his Antibuse medicine, ferry him to probation meetings or practices, keep him ready to play. During this latest suspension, it also meant putting Probert through private workouts until he was cleared to play.
When Probert shambled off the ice shouting ”Be back in a minute” over his shoulder, Campbell assumed Probert was going to the water fountain.
But five minutes passed. Then 10.
Campbell angrily went looking for Probert and found him sitting in the locker room, dragging on a cigarette, shooting the breeze with a glad-handing fan who was raving how no one in the NHL was tougher that Probert and how
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”God made you this way, Proby! God made you to play this game!”
Hearing that, Campbell first shrieked an obscenity at the fan. Then, turning on Probert, Campbell lit into him.
More obscenties flowed. Now Probert was barking back. Soon the two Red Wings were pummeling each other-6-foot-3-inch, 215-pound Bob Probert, one of the most intimidating enforcers in NHL history, and his 5-9, 160-pound boss, who had retired just three years earlier but was hardly bothering Probert`s brick chin.
”It was the height of stupidity,” Campbell acknowledges now, breaking into a rueful laugh. ”But if he`d been really working hard on his comeback, Bobby would`ve killed me in 15 seconds-not the three rounds he needed instead.”
Campbell arrived at Joe Louis Arena the next day wearing some of his wife`s makeup to hide his two black eyes. Red Wings coach Jacques Demers took one look at him and asked: ”What the hell happened to you?”
Today, Probert seems on his way to the happy ending that looked impossible for him 3 1/2 years ago. And the Detroit Red Wings are atop the Norris Division, just as they were before Probert`s life and career began fishtailing out of control.
It started with some 1986 arrests for impaired driving and a drunken shoving match with Windsor police, followed by an infamous 1987 drinking binge at Goose Loonies bar during a playoff series in Edmonton. It ended at 4 a.m., March 2, 1989, at the U.S.-Canadian border, when Probert was taken to a windowless room for a strip search by U.S. custom agents.
From his underwear fell a packet containing 14.3 grams of cocaine.
Probert was kept out of hockey for 13 months after that. As serious and embarrassing as that border arrest was, that night was his turning point, too. After five years of shuttling between rehab centers, he finally conceded that he had a drug problem. At his arraignment in federal court in Detroit the next day, Probert wearily told the judge: ”I think I`ve finally hit my bottom, and it took a lot of pain and misery to get here.”
– – –
Probert`s crack team of lawyers is awaiting a date for a hearing before the U.S. Immigration Board of Appeals regarding his stalled deportation case. Until that`s resolved, Probert dare not leave the United States-that is, if he wants to come back.
He hasn`t played a game in Canada since Dec. 10, 1988. He can`t visit his hometown of Windsor or his widowed mother, Theresa, who still keeps his old bedroom intact.
”It`s brutal,” Probert says. ”Fourteen games a year doesn`t sound like a lot. But it`s hard to stay sharp when you`re skating on your own.”
He still meets weekly with his federal probation officer. He continues to submit to regular drug tests. He`s no longer required to take Antibuse pills, which would make him throw up if he consumed alcohol.
”But if I think I need it,” Probert says, ”I do. But a relapse hasn`t been a concern of mine recently.”
Probert says he hasn`t been to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting lately, either. He says he grew tired of people recognizing him or wanting to ask him about the last opponent he punched in the nose. But he enjoys giving anti-drug abuse speeches, especially to kids. He gets letters from fans who want advice on staying straight. He picked up his high school general equivalency diploma while in prison. After his release, he even registered for a college course at Wayne State.
When asked whether his life seems like a constant vigil now, Probert says: ”As far as staying straight-that end of it-it`s always in the back of my mind: What would happen if I ever screwed up? What would happen if I even slipped? . . . It would mean my career`s over, I`m thrown back in Canada, and I`ve got nothing. It`s all or nothing. And it`s in my hands.
”I can have everything I`ve always wanted, or I can have nothing at all.”
For a few years, nothing looked to be his destiny.
Several Red Wings say, ”You could fill a book with the stuff that went unreported.”
– – –
There were days when the Red Wings` airport bus detoured to the Riverfront Apartments to pick up Probert because he was too hung over to rise and make the two-block trip to Joe Louis Arena on time.
At least three times, Probert snuck into Campbell`s office and replaced the Antibuse in his medicine bottle with aspirin pills. He once snapped a hockey stick inches from a sportswriter`s face and growled: ”Your head.”
One day Demers tried to tell him for the umpteenth time that he really ought to quit smoking. And Probert, nodding intently, pulled out a cigarette even as his Demers spoke and lit it with the blowtorch players use to curve their stick blades.
Not even a drunken-driving crash into a concrete utility pole six days before Christmas 1986 convinced Probert he had a problem.
The same strength that made him a great hockey enforcer helped make him an unrepentant addict, too. He foolishly thought liquor didn`t affect his play. He hated therapy sessions so much he sometimes approached them like games, boring in on his counselor until, according to a friend, ”Proby had found the one broken pane in their glass house.”
It was all the justification Probert needed to tune out.
But the Red Wings kept playing him.
They needed him.
He was arrested three times in 1986 alone for alcohol-related incidents, and he was suspended by the NHL for a gruesome head-butt of Toronto`s Bob McGill that still shows up on bootleg fight tapes. (Probert`s explanation?
”My arms got tired.”)
Midway through the 1987-88 season, a judge slapped him in jail for a night for skipping two mandatory A.A. meetings. But that was the year Probert also played in the All-Star Game. He just missed becoming the first NHL player to wrack up 30 goals and 400 penalty minutes in the same year. And he scored 21 points in the Wings` 16 playoff games to break Gordie Howe`s club record.
But prosperity was too much for him.
Even as a kid, discipline had been a problem for Probert. And alcoholism runs in his family. Bob`s late father, Al, a Windsor police sergeant, not only liked his drink, he once told a friend he sometimes let his two teenage boys, Bobby and Normie, have a few beers with him at home.
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But Probert`s father never lived to see him play pro. In 1982, at age 52, he died from a stroke, just one week before Bob left home for his first junior hockey season in Brantford, Ontario. Bob was 17. And by then, he thinks, he was already an alcoholic for about a year. Living on his own only made it worse.
”You`re young, you`re making all kinds of money, you`re in the limelight, and it`s party time,” Probert says.
He felt the same way after he joined the Red Wings in 1985-86.
He was playing across the river from his hometown, bringing the Joe Louis Arena crowd to its feet with his rare combination of size and skating ability, toughness and skill. The better he played, the more strangers were waiting for him at the arena exits. When he went out to clubs, someone else always seemed to be grabbing for his tab.
In the summer of 1988, the Red Wings began to hear unsavory rumors, and they hired a private investigator to tail Probert for awhile. Probert caught on quickly, but it really didn`t matter.
”What horror stories we found out,” GM Jim Devellano says.
– – –
If Probert could write this story himself, it would be this brief: He had a problem. He`s happy he dealt with it. Now he wants to move on.
Probert is not one of those evangelical rehab graduates who proselytize or make searing personal revelations. He doesn`t admit to much introspection. Nor does he regurgitate phrases that psychologists like to use. If anything, the last seven years have left him with a dim view of psychotherapy.
”I think a lot of it is a crock, a big money scam,” he says. ”You go sit and talk to this person, he shuts his notebook and says, `OK, thanks a lot, come back next week, that`s $100.` Some of them only gave me a negative attitude because of the way they try to downgrade you, break you, tell you you`re no good, or you`re never right, or your best thinking is what got you here. I truly believe some of those therapists had bigger problems than me.” When he talks like that, Probert can sound as though he`s not chastened or contrite or grateful for his second chances. But how much of that is just a tough-guy pose? How much is Probert`s admitted trouble with ”opening up with people”? How much of it is genuine shame?
There`s no avoiding the fact, though, that his case was like an open wound for the Red Wings from 1985 to 1989. It had a way of obscuring nice stories, such as Gerard Gallant`s ascent or Steve Yzerman`s comeback from knee surgery.
This may be the month when Probert`s laudable milestones are flying by again. But he`s still not without worries-some of them are more mundane than you might think.
”Like, I still have my boat in the Detroit River,” Probert says, ”and it`s kind of funny, but Windsor is such a stone`s throw away. I don`t know if there`s actually an international dividing line down the middle of the river or not, you know? But I don`t want to test it. I stay so close to the U.S. shore I`m almost scraping it most of the time.”
When asked what he would do if he could go back to Canada now, he grins and says: ”First thing out of the tunnel, I`d turn right into the Tunnel Bar- B-Q and get some ribs. I called over there once and asked them if they deliver across the river, and they won`t! I tried! After that, I`d go to my mother`s house. Then on the way back, I`d stop and get a Harvey`s Burger. They don`t have them over here. They`re flame-broiled. They`re great.”
He`s already fretting that the Red Wings could wind up playing a Canadian team for the Stanley Cup.
”I think this is our best chance since I`ve been here,” Probert says.
”I just don`t understand why we can`t get the Immigration officials to work out some kind of compromise. They can escort me over there with armed guards, or come here and pick me up, put me in shackles and handcuffs and chains, then drive me to the game, hook me back up and fly back with me, you know? It`s not like I`m a danger to society. Smoking is the only bad habit I have left. Half a pack a day. And I start those nicotine patches tomorrow.”
But the Stanley Cup-what about the Stanley Cup?
”If we`re in the Stanley Cup final and the last two games are in Canada?” Probert repeats, his eyes growing wide. ”Then I might just go over there and never come back. I mean, if it came down to the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals and it`s in Canada, I`m going. I`m there.
”Now, it`ll probably be the last game you ever see me wearing a Red Wings sweater,” he adds, laughing. ”But it`d be worth it. I`ll just wave goodbye at the border. No more worries. Just, `So long.` ”