Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2021. View the full list.
The sun rose on another cocaine-fuelled night and Donald Brashear could feel the high falling. He just needed to get inside to take another hit. He jostled the keys in the lock of his apartment, twisting and turning as hard as he could, but the door wouldn’t move.
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The landlord had warned him that he’d take action. He wanted Brashear gone — and now he’d changed the locks.
Brashear paced the halls for a solution and found the management office open. He snuck in and took a ring of keys hoping to find the master.
He tried them all. None worked. He thought about running right through the door.
Brashear stormed out of the apartment complex to the patio of the below-grade ground floor unit that he’d been told he had to leave. It was early enough on that June morning in 2019 that no one was around yet. He slammed his fist against a crack in the corner of the window to his bedroom, knocking out a large chunk of plexiglass. Brashear reached in, unlocked the window and pulled his 6-foot-3 frame through.
Inside, Brashear closed the curtains to the windows and the sliding door to the patio. He squeezed past the kitchen table, which nearly reached the counters on one side and pushed up against the couch on the other. The floor space of the tiny rental was consumed by the large, expensive furniture he’d brought with him after he had lost his house and then his condo.
Brashear took several beers from the near-empty fridge and sat at the table. He took out the packets of cocaine from the hidden pocket in his jeans. He looked at the bare walls around him, which always seemed to be closing in, suffocating him.
He laid out lines and inhaled the powder until the walls moved back and he could breathe again.
Several hours later, Brashear heard pounding at the front door. He looked through the peephole and saw the officers waiting. He brushed off the table and stuffed his last packet of cocaine in his pocket and bolted out the patio door.
Officers were waiting there, too.
Brashear laid on the ground, was arrested and stuffed in the back of a cruiser. With his hands cuffed in front of him as he sat in the back seat, he snuck the packet of cocaine from his pocket and hid it in his mouth. He held it between his teeth while he was searched again at the station. He felt the powder seep through the chewed plastic. His heart raced. In a panic — and high enough to think it might work — Brashear spit out the packet when he thought the officers weren’t looking. They turned just as it landed in his hands.
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He was once one of the most feared men in hockey. He had earned nearly $16 million and played more than 1,000 NHL games.
Now locked in a concrete box, the walls around Brashear were as close as they’d ever been. He laid on the small bed and closed his eyes, escaping on the last rush of his high into an exhausted dream.
Two years earlier, Simon Gagne sat in a locker room getting dressed for an afternoon pickup game, wondering what was happening to his friend and former teammate.
They usually played twice a week with a group of former pro and junior players who lived near Quebec City. Among the group of aging players, Brashear was usually among the fittest — still a physical specimen in his 40s. He’d trained as a mixed-martial arts fighter, played in pro leagues around Quebec and in a brief stint with a Swedish pro team when he was 42.
But Brashear’s attendance at their regular scrimmages had grown sporadic. There were long stints when he didn’t show up at all.
When he did, Brashear looked haggard. He’d gained weight and was unshaven. It was alarming for Gagne to see a friend who proudly maintained a six-pack in middle age, appear to be taking such poor care of his health.
Gagne was among a small group of teammates who had grown close to Brashear during their days playing together for the Philadelphia Flyers in the early 2000s — bonding over their shared roots as players who grew up near Quebec City and as two of the few Francophone players on the roster, along with Eric Desjardins. In retirement, they owned homes on the same lake and golfed together often.
Brashear also became close with Gagne’s family. They spent Christmases together. Gagne’s family seemed full of love. He had everything that Brashear had longed for. Gagne’s parents were his biggest supporters and they were proud of everything their son had accomplished. Gagne’s father, Pierre, regularly made the trip to Philadelphia to watch him play. When he did, he’d also spend time with Brashear.
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“My dad was a guy that liked to talk a lot about life,” says Gagne, whose father died of cancer in late 2014. “I’m pretty sure Brash opened up more to my dad about his life than he did to me.”
Brashear remembers sitting with Pierre on the beach at the lake, listening to him tell stories about how much he’d loved watching his sons play hockey when they were young and how glad he was to be able to still spend time with them. Brashear and his ex-wife have two sons, Jordan and Jaxxon, who were born in 1999 and 2001. As they grew, he hoped to be the kind of father to them that he saw in Pierre. He told Pierre about some of the traumatic experiences he’d been through in his life. Pierre offered some paternal support, told Brashear to live the rest of his life to its fullest potential.
“I think I was kind of looking for that all my life,” Brashear says. “When he talked to me, I felt like he treated me like his son.”
Brashear retired without any debt. He owned his dream house outright. It had a pool, a spa, a golf simulator, a tennis court. The garage housed the Porsches and Lamborghinis he was known to drive around Quebec City.
With his NHL career over, Brashear tried to embark on business ventures to build on the wealth he’d earned as a pro.
In part to maintain the lavish lifestyle he’d grown used to — but also, he says, because he wanted to prove that he was more than just a “dumb hockey player.”
Brashear was known as one of the toughest enforcers of his era, enduring more than 200 bouts in his career. (He also was the victim of one of the NHL’s most egregious acts of violence, when Marty McSorley struck him from behind with his stick and left him unconscious on the ice, suffering from a seizure and a serious concussion.) But despite making millions in the NHL, Brashear never felt much pride in the fact that he earned his money by fighting.
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He wanted to show that he was capable of much more.
“I always respected those people who had to work 40 hours a week to make their money,” Brashear says. “I wanted to show my kids that I can be successful in real life too.”
He started a hockey stick company — Brash 87 — hoping to sell high-end sticks to people who couldn’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars. But that venture failed. He also bought two condominium buildings, hoping that real estate would be a good investment. But he struggled to manage the finances and found himself buried in debt, facing legal action.
His growing dependency on drugs pushed him further into debt.
Brashear says he didn’t feel the pull of addiction until he was several years into retirement. He didn’t start drinking until he was 28 years old. He was charged with refusing a breathalyzer when he was stopped under suspicion of drunk driving when he played for the Flyers in 2003, when he was 31.
He started using drugs recreationally after he retired and enjoyed the escape they provided, but he quickly became addicted.
He smoked a pack of cigarettes and drank close to 30 beers a night. He started using drugs like cocaine, GHB, and ketamine regularly, becoming more and more reclusive as he did.
He used a line of credit taken out against his previous paid-off house to fund his drug use, spending as much as $5,000 a week.
Now Brashear owed more than $2 million and was on the brink of bankruptcy. Even his closest friends didn’t know the extent of his dire situation.
As Brashear became more reclusive, Gagne heard stories within the small world of Quebec City about Brashear’s lifestyle and his questionable acquaintances.
But he became particularly concerned when he ran into Brashear’s son Jordan, who told him that he hadn’t seen his father in a while.
“My dad’s enjoying himself,” Jordan said. “It’s not going good.”
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As far as Gagne had witnessed, Brashear had tried to be close with his children, emulating one of his few positive parental role models, much like he’d seen Pierre Gagne be with his.
Several other friends who were close to Brashear had also noticed his decline. Frederic Cyr, who’d known Brashear since his rookie season with the Canadiens, had heard the same rumours as Gagne — and witnessed his haggard, erratic behaviour when he visited him. He knew that Brashear’s financial situation caused him a lot of stress, but he’d only recently learned that Brashear had turned to drugs.
Cyr reached out to Bryan Hardenbergh, the Philadelphia Flyers director of team services, who’d also become close friends with Brashear. He hoped that Hardenbergh might know how to access assistance that the NHL and NHLPA provides former players.
A week later, Hardenbergh met with Gagne and they agreed to get the NHLPA involved.
“We were scared that we were going to end up finding Brash dead somewhere,” Gagne says.
Without Brashear knowing, a spot was secured for him to enter a rehabilitation program in Arizona, which would be covered entirely by the players’ assistance fund.
The only obstacle was Brashear.
Take your time, think a lot.
Think of everything you’ve got.
For you will still be here tomorrow,
But your dreams may not.
Brashear sat on a chair holding his harmonica to his mouth with two clenched fists, adding his own melody to Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son.”
The music drifted from a garage filled with the instruments of a one-man band, scattered with empty beer cans and liquor bottles. Before losing his house, Brashear spent nearly every night in that makeshift music studio. He played by candlelight, boxing with his breath — a sharp inhale, a sharp exhale, back and forth — trying to connect the notes to a song that lived deep within him.
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Sometimes through those nights, the notes sounded like something real, like a dream that makes sense only while we’re in it. But by morning the melody always faded with the high.
When Gagne and Cyr showed up at his house that night — on March 11, 2018 — Brashear thought they were there as old friends looking to catch up. Cyr traveled to Quebec City from Montreal to be there. They arrived at Brashear’s house at the same time, pretending it was a coincidence.
They settled into what seemed like just another night of laughter and music. They sang karaoke over beers and whisky.
As “Father and Son” played, Brashear closed his eyes tightly and rocked back and forth. The song resonated deeply with him.
Like the music he tries to play, Brashear remembers his life in fragments.
Shadowboxing with his father, who seemed like a giant, learning to dip and dodge and punch. The first feeling of something like love.
The sharp, bruising sting of an electrical cord cracking across the boy’s flesh. The first memories of pain. The neon lights of a bar shining through the windshield, while the boy sat alone in the backseat, drifting to sleep in the solitude, fearing only when his father would return to the pickup truck after drinking away the night.
He doesn’t remember the journey from Indiana, where he was born, to Quebec City to live with his mother, who’d left him with his father when he was 3.
He remembers the blows he took from his mother’s new husband — the second grown man to hit him — and the garbage bag the man taped around his waist and the bottle he handed him, because only babies wet the bed.
It was only a short time, somewhere between kindergarten and the third grade, but enough to pick up more fragments to store away.
He cycled unhappily through two foster families until he landed in a third when he was 8. It was a large family, a mother and father with four kids of their own and always at least four more foster kids, coming and going. Brashear was the only one who was Black. It was a fact that he couldn’t help but notice — pointed out to him through the racist taunts of older kids in the schoolyard.
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He first found peace on the ice.
When he learned to glide on skates, he felt what it must be like to really love something. The game was an escape.
Every night, he’d pretend to get his schoolwork done and then slip out with his stick slung over his shoulder, frozen hand-me-down skates dangling from the blade. He trudged through the snow and winter chill to that new world, gripping his stick with double-layered gloves and playing pickup puck beneath the floodlights.
“That’s where I felt happy,” Brashear says. “I was having fun. I could play. I could be me.”
Later, he found an escape through music — learning to play piano while still in high school. Despite carving out an NHL career as an enforcer, fighting made Brashear anxious. He loved to hear the roar of fans, but knew their love was conditional. He knew his place in the NHL was, too.
Often on the road, Brashear would find a piano and play. Once with the Flyers, his teammates and team personnel gathered in a crowd around him while he played in the lobby of a swanky hotel. Everyone just stopped and listened and Brashear made his escape through the notes.
“He just sat down and started playing it and people were like, holy shit,” Hardenbergh said.
“It was beautiful.”
That night in March 2018 — as Gagne and Cyr sang along in his garage — “Father and Son” reached its final line. Brashear pulled his harmonica away and sang it loudly: I know I have to go.
After a couple of hours in the garage, Cyr left Gagne and Brashear alone to talk.
Gagne told Brashear about the program in Arizona and that the cost would be covered by the players’ emergency assistance fund. Brashear listened, admitting that he needed help. But it would take two months before he finally decided to go. In June 2018, Brashear took a flight to Arizona.
The old fighter leaned forward, through the window, handing coffees to surprised customers.
He laughed at the shock on their faces as they drove up to receive their orders.
Usually, they’d recognize him. How could they not? Donald Brashear was one of only a few Black people who lived in the area and he happened to be famous.
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Pierre Sévigny knew that word would get out when he hired his former Montreal Canadiens teammate to work at his Tim Hortons. But like Gagne, he’d watched his friend fade away during the few old-timer skates that Brashear would show up to. Sévigny had known Brashear since they’d played peewee hockey and worked at a local hockey school together as teenagers, long before they played for the Habs in the mid-’90s.
Brashear’s criminal record made it difficult for him to land a well-paying job. Along with the arrest for breaking into the apartment and possession of narcotics, Brashear was convicted of assault and received 18 months probation for his part in a brawl in a parking lot following a game in a Quebec hockey league in 2011.
Like everyone else, Sévigny knew about Brashear’s financial troubles and issues with the law, which spilled out into newspaper headlines.
Of course, the fact that one of the NHL’s most famous enforcers was now working at a coffee shop hit the headlines too.
During Brashear’s very first shift in October 2019, a customer took a photo of Brashear in his Tim Hortons uniform, as he obliged them with a smile. After the customer shared the photo, it went viral as news outlets picked up the story of a former NHL millionaire working a minimum wage job.
Brashear didn’t follow the news though. He didn’t care what people on social media were saying — the uninformed rumours and half-truths spread as complete strangers revelled in the schadenfreude.
To many, it might have seemed that Brashear had reached his lowest point. But to him, this was the beginning of his rise.
It had been more than a year since Brashear left his rehabilitation program in Arizona a week early, frustrated by requests to revisit the trauma of his childhood and believing he didn’t need to be there.
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Back in Quebec, Brashear was determined to stop using — but found himself back in a cycle that seemed unbreakable. He went to a different treatment facility for a week, before leaving.
His financial situation continued to spiral.
In November 2018, Brashear’s company, Brash Properties 87, went into bankruptcy and faced civil suits for failing to appear in court. He lost his properties and was ordered to pay nearly $200,000 for mortgages that had not been fully repaid. He was forced to sell his own house and his relationship with his family and loved ones continued to suffer. He remained estranged from his two sons and only saw his young daughter, from a different relationship, sporadically.
In his desperation, Brashear had tried selling drugs to earn money to make his late payments. But he found that he was his own best client, using more than he sold.
Brashear moved into a condo, becoming even more reclusive. He’d become so dependent he took increasingly dangerous risks to access drugs.
He worried about his health as he continued to abuse them. He worried about his heart quitting. Sometimes he wondered if it would be better if it just did — his life seemed too far gone to fix.
Whenever Cyr came to check on Brashear, he’d find his fridge nearly empty. He kept a couple of bags of uncooked pasta in the house, but little else. Still, Brashear wouldn’t discuss the extent of his desperation. Cyr left several gift cards to a grocery store on Brashear’s table so he’d be able to buy food but couldn’t blow the money on drugs.
It all culminated with Brashear’s arrest in June 2019, with him sitting in that jail cell.
That July, Brashear checked into another rehabilitation facility in Quebec. It was supposed to be a month-long program, but he stayed for five. Brashear worked during the day and checked in to the facility in the evenings.
In August, Gagne brought Brashear to Hardenbergh’s wedding on the Jersey Shore. Brashear reconnected with old teammates, like Peter Forsberg, laughing about long-ago days when they were still NHL stars.
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“We were all the guys that used to hang out together with the Flyers, sitting at the same table, having fun,” says Gagne. “But Brash was drinking water. That was tough for him.”
When the music and dancing started, Brashear slipped away. Gagne searched for him and was worried when he didn’t turn up. His old teammates worried that he might have gotten himself into trouble until Brashear called Gagne to tell him he’d gone back to the hotel to avoid the party.
While working at Tim Hortons put some much-needed cash in Brashear’s pocket, it also gave him a sense of pride. He was part of a team again. He had responsibilities. He had structure. He woke at 5 a.m. happy to go to work.
While reporters called Sévigny looking for a story, Brashear ignored requests for comment. He didn’t care about the headlines or the picture that went viral, but he remained happy to smile for photos or sign autographs for fans who came by as he worked the window.
Sévigny was glad to have his old teammate working beside him again — and that structure seemed to help him. Sévigny’s wife gave Brashear a large uniform that fit and gloves to make sure his hands didn’t get cold when he’d reach out the window.
“I wanted him to be happy in his life,” Sévigny says. “That’s the point.”
And for the first time in several years, Brashear started to feel like he could be.
“I had a goal,” Brashear says. “And nothing was going to stop me from getting to where I wanted to be.”
After a couple of months at Tim Hortons, Brashear took a job at a car wash, for a bit more than minimum wage. He also started refereeing in local beer leagues.
“All right guys, I want a clean game,” Brashear would tell the players, as he checked the nets before each game. “I have one rule: If you guys start fighting, I don’t give out penalties. I jump in the fight.”
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There were few scrums on his watch.
Brashear continued to attend a program through Portage Quebec, an organization that focuses on rehabilitating clients who suffer from addiction and reintegrating them into everyday life. The cost of the program was covered by the players’ emergency assistance fund. Eventually, he started working with other clients, helping counsel them through their own journeys.
Brashear was able to re-connect with his sons, bridging some of the void caused by his absence. Jordan and Jaxxon both knew about the pain their father endured as a child and had sympathy for how it affected him. They say they love their father and are proud of his strength and perseverance. But they’ve also learned to be happy in their lives, with or without him.
That winter Brashear also started playing in a local semi-pro league in Quebec, where he was paid a few hundred dollars per game — and once again, heard fans cheer his name.
He felt the rhythm of his skates cutting across the ice. He didn’t think about all of the battles he still had to fight in the world beyond the boards. He didn’t worry about the personal bankruptcy he filed on Jan. 7, his birthday. He didn’t feel consumed by the addiction he still fought to conquer. He didn’t feel the shame or anger he’d harboured toward himself. He didn’t feel alone.
And on snowy nights, when the winter chill was just right, Brashear would grab his skates and head to an outdoor rink near his apartment. He’d stickhandle across the rough ice, beneath the lights. There would be no roar, no punches, no pain. Just a boy found in a game, again — the rise and fall of his breath, escaping.
Brashear sits in a chair across from his therapist, thinking about his life, thinking about the fragments. It’s the start of a new year, with hope for a new beginning.
Over the past year the global pandemic wiped away the game he loved and Brashear found himself pushed back into isolation. He endured the stringent terms of his bankruptcy and still battled the call of addiction, especially as he dealt with severe anxiety attacks for the first time.
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It was another year of rising and falling, trying to make his life connect.
He visits his therapist often, working through the pain that he’s carried with him since childhood — along with the regret of everything he wasn’t given.
He ponders a question about those pieces of that past. Can he see a hopeful future, despite those painful memories? Can the loathing, the rage, the loneliness be replaced by something positive?
He’s been learning to quiet a voice inside, he says — the one that was set within him when he was young. An adult voice, telling him he can’t be anything more than he is.
Brashear doesn’t like to revisit the trauma. He doesn’t like how it closes in. How it returns when he is alone.
He is quiet for a few moments.
“I’m happy,” he says, finally. “I’m just thinking about the present. The present is great — but it was a long road.”
His eyes well with tears.
“There is a child inside of me,” Brashear explains. “Every time I’m looking for an answer, I’ll talk to the kid inside. I’ll certainly choose my words and make sure I don’t hurt him.”
That is how he sees it now, there’s a boy inside of him who needs to be told that he’s loved and worthwhile. There’s a boy who needs to be told people are proud of him. There’s a boy who needs to know that it’s OK to keep some fragments from life but just as OK to let others go.
(Graphic: Wes McCabe / The Athletic)
