There were times when Greg Terrion savoured the fame he’d earned living his boyhood dream.
When his name rose through Maple Leaf Gardens as he frustrated opposing superstars like Gretzky and Lemieux with his relentless speed and checking-line grit. Or when fans lined up at the gas station he owned — Terrion’s #7, painted blue and white — and he’d take time to greet each car and pose for photos.
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But near the end, few traces of Terrion’s great times remained.
For the fans who cheered his name through the 1980s, he was a faded memory. To many old friends, he seemed like a ghost. Only his family knew just how close he was to becoming one.
If you followed Terrion through his career, it’s unlikely that you’d recognize him now. The years had changed so much: His shape, his face, his spirit.
When he showed up at the annual gathering of former Toronto Maple Leafs in September 2018, his old teammates were surprised.
Terrion seemed cheerful. He’d lost a bit of weight. He was excited to pick up his bag of Leaf paraphernalia. He laughed, reminiscing about those long-ago days with teammates. He smiled.
But during the gathering, Terrion learned the news about his former coach, Dan Maloney. He was devastated.
Maloney had been one of the toughest guys in the game as a player and attacked coaching the same way. Sometimes he would challenge Terrion’s reputation as one of hockey’s hardest workers. At practice, Maloney often pushed him to go faster through grueling skating drills.
But Terrion never faltered.
As Maloney hollered, Terrion chirped back.
“You can’t break me.”
Maloney was known as a fierce brawler in his playing days. But recently he’d been deemed cognitively incapable of caring for himself after years of declining health and severe alcoholism. Terrion had learned he was staying in a facility for patients who suffered from dementia.
After the alumni gathering in Toronto, Terrion drove two-and-a-half hours east to Marmora, along Highway 7, the cottage-country route from which he took the number he wore with the Leafs.
Along the way, Terrion passed several other routes he’d travelled recently to rehabilitation facilities seeking help for anxiety, depression and alcoholism — all of which he believed were caused by brain trauma he suffered while playing in the NHL.
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When Terrion arrived home, he told his wife, Cindy, what he had learned. It wasn’t just Maloney, he said — there were others, too.
“You have no idea how many players struggle,” he said. “How many players are out there, suffering silently.”
Greg Terrion died a few weeks later. Less than two months after that Dan Maloney died, too.
There was little ceremony to mark the late-2018 deaths of those men beyond tributes to careers that had mostly paled with time. But not much was mentioned about their lives beyond hockey, about the burdens the game might have left them to carry. The two Leafs shared a fate that awaits many former players but is rarely discussed. They are among the many men for whom friends and family ask again and again: What could have been done to save them? And what can be done so this never happens again?
Cindy Terrion stares out her kitchen window, watching jagged blocks of ice drift down Beaver Creek, in Marmora, Ontario, a tiny town exactly halfway between Toronto and Ottawa. The water is black and cold and rising so high that it might soon swallow the wooden dock and red hockey net that rests on top of it.
It’s been one winter without him.
“It’s always there. It never really seems to go away,” Cindy says. “They say it does. But it hasn’t really gotten any better.”
They met in the sixth grade. Her father was a hockey coach and her brother played too. She was at the rink all the time. And that’s where she saw him for the first time, skating so effortlessly and fast. Cindy asked around and learned that the boy lived next door to one of her friends, one town over.
“Do you want me to ask if he’ll go out with you?” the friend asked.
Cindy blushed.
The next day, the friend came back.
“The answer is, ‘Yes!’” she said.
Greg Terrion went to the Catholic school and Cindy Fox went to the public school. The only place they could be together was at that local arena. So they met to go skating each week.
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Their first child, Jason, was born when Cindy was 16. The couple navigated teenage parenthood together while Greg became a junior hockey star with the Brantford Alexanders. He was drafted by the Los Angeles Kings in 1980.
They had three grown sons, and two grandchildren. An old chocolate Lab, named Fred. A house on the edge of the water, close to where they grew up, and where they’d shovel off a rough rink each winter and wave at passing boats each summer.
It was 1975 and Dan Maloney sat in his living room in Bloomfield, Mich., his long arms folded across his knees, staring uncomfortably into the television camera.
He wore a white dress shirt with blue stripes and a red cardigan. His hair was neatly parted for the “Hockey Night in Canada” interview, shortly after he had been named the Red Wings leader.
“Being appointed captain is probably one of the greatest honours I’ve ever had in hockey,” he told the interviewer.
“I’ve always felt that a captain … has to be a leader on the ice as well as off the ice. I think on the personal side of things, he’s got to help guys out when they’re having problems.”
The camera panned to Maloney’s young family — his wife, Susanne, and their two children, 4-year-old Shelly and 1-year-old Tom. Maloney’s favourite dog, Blue, sat at his feet. It looked like the image of a perfect family, living their dream.
From the time he broke into the NHL with Chicago Blackhawks, Maloney was known as one of the toughest players in the game in an era known for bare-knuckled brawling. He finished his 737-game career with 192 goals and 451 points. He also accumulated nearly 1,500 penalty minutes — and close to 100 fights. He battled noted tough guys like the Blues’ Barclay Plager, the Bruins’ Terry O’Reilly and the Flyers’ Dave (The Hammer) Schultz. He once broke the jaw of notorious brawler Steve Durbano, splattering the ice with blood.
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After three years in Detroit, Maloney joined the Toronto Maple Leafs, where he played the last six seasons of his career before becoming a coach with the organization in 1982.
But since the mid-1970s, Susanne — whom he’d met while they both were high school students in London, Ont. — became frustrated by Maloney’s frequent boozing with teammates, which would often spill over into life at home. Beyond their private arguments, there was little impetus for Maloney to give up alcohol. His drinking blended in with the accepted culture of the game at the time. Teammates knew he liked to have a few, but no one thought anything of it.
Maloney was given the Leafs head coaching job in 1984. He was an old-school, hard-nosed coach, and he demanded the most from his players. He was known to toss a few garbage cans to punctuate his points
Terrion, a fast-skating workhorse, was always up for that challenge.
“I remember Greg Terrion very well. Vividly, actually,” says Tom Maloney, who used to watch from the sidelines while his father coached the Leafs. “He would work so hard that his face would be red at practices and every time he’d come off of a shift.”
Maloney was fired after two losing seasons as the Leafs head coach. He had more success with the Winnipeg Jets, but he lost his job partway through the 1988-89 season. The Maloney family settled into a lakeside cottage near Barrie, Ont., and welcomed their third child, Matthew, in 1990.
Maloney briefly returned to the NHL as an assistant coach with the New York Rangers in 1992-93, but he lasted only one season. The game was moving on without him.
Hockey was all Maloney had known— and with few opportunities emerging in the game, he needed to find a new career.
He started working in real estate in Barrie and, on the surface, it looked like he’d transitioned well to life beyond the game. Maloney was good at selling houses. He was intelligent, and he knew how to work with different kinds of people.
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But his charisma also helped hide the dangers of his increasing alcoholism. Maloney was capable of working hard all day and then binging each night. In part because of his success and personality, Maloney was able to avoid the scrutiny that might have pressured him to recognize that he needed to change. But his dependence on alcohol started to rip the family apart. They begged him to get help. He refused.
It escalated to the point where Susanne packed up their kids and moved to London, Ont. Despite the difficult end, Susanne would always think fondly of the life she and Dan had built — from that first time he’d playfully stuffed her in a locker, through their long journey through the NHL, raising a family together. While he lived his hockey dream, she was right there shouting “Come on, Danny!” from the stands.
But Maloney’s addiction and the pain it caused was too severe to continue their life together. He lived alone in the same house on the water where they’d once hoped to grow old together.
Maloney’s family visited occasionally. Matt, his youngest son, remembers some of those moments fondly — like the time he spent playing ball hockey with his dad on the long driveway at the house. But Maloney’s mood could swing swiftly. He could be happy and then miserable, patient and then suddenly not. When they went fishing, Matt never knew which version of his dad he’d get.
Some family members wondered if head injuries had anything to do with his unpredictable mood and reliance on alcohol. Through his career and otherwise, Maloney had sustained his share of blows to the head. There were the fights, of course. But that was far from the only head trauma Maloney sustained. He took several hard falls during drunken spells and was in a few car accidents — including one in the early 1990s when he was thrown through his windshield. Eventually, Maloney’s license was taken away.
To many, Maloney seemed like a success. When he wasn’t drinking, he was polished and well-dressed. He was kind and loving. He was an early-riser. A hard worker who earned his wealth and the right to enjoy it.
Maloney sometimes took Matt to Leafs games, where he was always swarmed by fans looking to talk to him.
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But as time went on, those trips became less frequent. When Matt was older and studying in Guelph, Maloney would sometimes make plans with his son to go to Toronto to watch the Leafs. Then hours before game time, he’d call him, drunk, saying he couldn’t make it.
“It was devastating,” Matt says.
Every summer, cars would line up at the “No. 7” Esso Station on Highway 7 in Marmora as fans stopped to fuel up and chat with Terrion. He bought the station with his uncle and branded it with the Leafs’ blue and white, trading on the fame Terrion earned while making less than a $100,000 a season throughout his NHL career.
Terrion’s time in the NHL ended when an argument with Leafs coach John Brophy created a rift that he believed was behind a demotion to the minors in 1989. As he spent months riding buses from town to town, Terrion fell out of love with the game. He retired at the end of the season, when he was 28.
At the time, few players could make enough to live comfortably when they were done playing the game. In the early 1990s, as more and more players in the NHL began to ink lucrative contracts, former players like Terrion were embarking on second careers.
During his playing days, Terrion’s tenacity was tough on his body. He took many hard hits to the head but knew the well-established rule of the game: Never show weakness if you get your “bell rung.”
Terrion always planned to return home when the game was done. He grew up nearby in Crowe Lake and loved to be out on the water fishing or hunting, deep in the woods. His family owned a campsite on Beaver Creek. He went there with his sons, where they’d track muskie or hunt deer — just sitting out in the quiet for days.
At home, Greg and Cindy often embarrassed their three sons by playing old ’80s hits and dancing. The boys would scoff as their parents twirled slowly to “Lady in Red,” a favourite, in the middle of their living room. The couple spent hours drifting across Crowe Lake together, fishing during the day and watching the sunset at dusk. In the morning, they’d be up by dawn. Cindy would make coffee as Greg got ready to go out fishing again. She’d watch him walk to the dock, climb into the boat and fade away in the morning fog.
Just as he had on the ice, Terrion worked tirelessly at the service station. He sold used cars on the side. Cindy ran a small café at the station. Their sons Jason and Ryan worked the pumps.
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Terrion continued to operate the service station until the early 2000s, but the grind of running the place became too much to justify the dismal financial return. After selling it, he found work repairing machinery in factories. At first, he was nervous about how he’d be received by coworkers who had trained for decades for the position he’d dropped into in his 40s. But Terrion endeared himself to his coworkers with his work ethic and sense of humour. It also helped that he was a former Leaf.
He enjoyed the trips that sometimes took him on the road for months, working large jobs out west. At times he seemed comfortable, even happy.
Dan Maloney sat in the back seat, angry and confused. His long spiral had quickened. As much as he fought against it, his alcoholism and cognitive decline were quickly killing him.
And now he was in the back of a police car, heading to jail.
Maloney had been through a long list of programs for alcoholism over the years. And he had extended stays at addiction centres in Guelph and Toronto. But little had helped.
It was always a painful process. The effect of alcohol withdrawal can be severe. Maloney had a difficult time keeping his hands steady. He likely suffered worse symptoms, but always tried his best to hide his pain.
In the summer of 2016, he suffered a severe seizure related to alcohol withdrawal. The seizure was so devastating that doctors likened it to a stroke.
Maloney was unable to walk. He showed signs of dementia. He was 66 years old and had difficulty caring for himself. He could carry on a conversation, but was incapable of simple tasks, like making breakfast. Doing laundry, taking out the garbage, or taking medication for his diabetes on a regular schedule seemed too complicated. Maloney could recall specific details about his NHL playing days, but he struggled with his short-term memory.
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Maloney stayed at Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital in Orillia for more than three months, recovering from his seizure. It was a safe place for him to live — and rehabilitate — with regular food, medication, and no alcohol.
He missed several NHL alumni events, like the Heritage Classic outdoor game between the Jets and Oilers, for which he was supposed to coach — and the Centennial Classic, between the Leafs and Red Wings, on New Year’s Day.
That summer, in 2017, Maloney suffered another serious seizure. He was in the hospital for a month. He returned several more times after repeated benders that autumn. Over the course of just a couple of years, Tom Maloney estimates his father was hospitalized at least 20 times, including three extended stays.
By then, Maloney was 67 years old and some of his family members believed there was much more to his cognitive issues than his alcoholism.
“He wasn’t that old of a man. He had a lakefront property. He could have had 10 more good years,” Tom Maloney says. “He could have been fishing and hunting and all of those things that he loved to do. But he wouldn’t have been able to do all of these things until we knew what was going on.”
After much effort, some members of Maloney’s family arranged to have him evaluated by a gerontologist. The doctor found Maloney not competent to make his own personal care decisions.
In Maloney’s capacity assessment, the doctor indicated that he wasn’t a candidate for an addiction recovery program, Tom Maloney says, but instead should be treated for brain trauma recovery.
But Maloney resisted neurocognitive testing. Jack Valiquette, one of Maloney’s former teammates and a close friend, drove him to Baycrest Hospital in Toronto, where he was supposed to undergo testing for brain trauma. But when they arrived, Maloney refused to get out the car. He made Valiquette turn around and drive him back to Orillia.
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While Maloney’s family hoped to have him moved to a facility closer to them in London, the appeal process with the consent and capacity board kept Maloney in limbo, living in the hospital as though it were his apartment.
Then one day in June 2018, Maloney left. He took a cab to a Montana’s restaurant in Orillia and ordered a drink. And then several more. When a bartender cut him off, Maloney was angry. She called a cab to come and pick him up.
When the cab arrived, the bartender went outside to explain the situation to the driver. Maloney followed, yelling. Then, according to a witness, Maloney put his hands on the bartender’s throat. Maloney let go quickly and was shoved to the ground by another patron.
As he got up, Maloney didn’t seem to understand what he’d done. He continued yelling and was shoved back down.
When the police arrived, Maloney was handcuffed and put in the back of the cruiser. He spent the night in jail. No charges were laid.
In July 2018, a room finally opened up at the Arbor Trace, an Alzheimer’s and dementia care facility in London. Tom made the two-and-a-half-hour drive with his mother and brother to pick up his father and bring him back to London — hoping they could finally get him the help he needed.
The sleepless nights didn’t arrive until Greg Terrion hit his mid-40s. The anxiety was overwhelming. The thoughts kept whirling.
He’d obsess over small things: Tasks that needed to be finished … items he couldn’t find … the fact that he couldn’t sleep …
“My brain won’t stop,” he’d tell Cindy. “I just can’t get my brain to calm down.”
A family doctor prescribed Trazodone, a drug that can decrease anxiety and insomnia related to depression. The pills helped a bit, but not quite enough. So Terrion would add a glass of rye to the mix — and just one more … and maybe another. That would do the trick, for a while. It calmed him down just enough that he could close his eyes and rest.
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The next night, Terrion would do it all again. But his mind never really stopped. He could only mute it for a bit.
And the anxiety grew.
“I need something to just get me down,” he’d tell Cindy as he poured another glass. “I can’t stop. It just won’t stop.”
Terrion was convinced that there was something wrong with his head. He had been told after an MRI that there were indications he’d suffered brain damage.
Terrion believed that he had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, better known as CTE, a neurodegenerative brain disorder that is commonly linked to repetitive brain trauma. The condition causes the progressive loss of cognitive functions, which leads to the development of dementia. The effects resemble Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease and can lead to premature death. Currently, CTE can be detected only posthumously. Terrion wanted his brain to be tested when he died.
“Cindy, when I’m gone,” he said. “I want you to know there is more to this than just the alcohol.”
Throughout his career, Terrion played through several concussions. The symptoms that he felt later in life — impulse control, impaired judgment, anxiety, depression — have all been linked to brain trauma.
He was one of more than 300 retired players who attempted to create a class-action lawsuit against the NHL. The suit claimed the league had failed to protect them from head injuries or warn them of the risks of playing. The NHL opposed the suit and has denied there is any provable connection between head trauma sustained while playing the game and the health issues that some players have experienced afterward.
More than half a dozen deceased NHL players have been diagnosed with CTE, including Bob Probert, Derek Boogaard, Steve Montador and Todd Ewen. Several of those players were known to suffer from addiction and depression.
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“There are clear suggestions that the rate of traumatic brain injury is higher in subjects in care for addiction services,” says Dr. Bernard Le Foll, who conducts clinical trials to research the connections between addiction and mental health at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. “That suggests that maybe traumatic brain injury creates a vulnerability that may enhance risk for addiction or a difficulty to quit drugs altogether.”
Dr. James Bjork, a professor of psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies the relationship between traumatic brain injuries and addiction amongst war veterans, says there are generally two types of alcoholism. The first is characterized by habits formed in adulthood, often in response to emotional symptoms — commonly referred to as self-medicating.
The other is more hereditary and manifests by mid-adolescence. This type of person often suffers from other mental illness and shows poorer control over harmful decisions. This group might be vulnerable to the effects of traumatic brain injuries, because their ability to control their behaviour and emotions is already compromised, Bjork says.
Alcohol is also often used to counter anxiety, creating a dangerous spiral. As the body builds up alcohol tolerance, the mind creates more anxiety — leading to the need for more alcohol, says Le Foll. It can be a difficult cycle to break.
But both researchers stress that these are still early days in our understanding of the relationship between brain trauma and addiction.
“It’s an area that needs far more work,” Le Foll says.
Regardless of the cause, Cindy Terrion knew that her husband needed help. She begged him to get it.
She reached out to GreenStone, an addiction treatment facility in Muskoka. When Terrion agreed, he took out more than $20,000 in an advance on his NHL pension to pay for his month-long stay.
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While at GreenStone, Greg met Rob Ford, the embattled mayor of Toronto who was seeking help for his own addictions. The two became good friends. Later, when Ford learned that Terrion didn’t own a computer, he had one shipped to their house in Marmora as a gift so they could keep in touch via email.
Terrion returned from GreenStone looking healthy and sober. Cindy was optimistic. But a week later, he started drinking again.
This time, Cindy contacted Terrion’s old teammate, Rick Vaive, who had been through his own battle with addiction. Vaive told Terrion about the Emergency Assistance Fund, provided by the NHL and NHLPA. Terrion did not know it existed.
He went back to GreenStone for another month, a trip that was covered by the fund. Terrion managed to go a little longer without having a drink once he returned home. But less than half a year later, he was back again.
“I can’t help it, Cindy,” he told his wife. “If you could just get inside of my body … I can’t explain it.”
In London, Maloney was put on a feeding tube and a liquid diet because of a painful stricture in his esophagus. He was monitored by a thoracic surgeon for the condition. He received treatment for the festering wound on his foot. His improvements were closely monitored. The intent was to get him living independently again.
His family visited often. Susanne would pick up her ex-husband to take him to London Knights games, where they watched together — the way they’d met all those decades back. Other times, she’d visit him at the facility just so they could go for a walk with her dog, which Maloney had a soft spot for. She took him shopping for shoes and clothes, and on other small errands. He went to see their grandson play hockey and baseball. Sometimes, they went out to get ice cream at Dairy Queen, even though he wasn’t supposed to. Maloney loved Blizzards.
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One day, as Susanne and Maloney were walking out of Arbor Trace, an elderly lady sitting on a bench lost her slipper. Maloney stopped, bent down and picked it up.
“Here you go, dear,” he said. “I’ll get this on for you.”
And he carefully put the slipper back on the woman’s foot.
Susanne also took Maloney to weekly meetings at the Alzheimer Society for London Middlesex, where they were counselled on how to better understand and cope with his condition.
In early November 2018, Maloney received another assessment by a capacity assessor the family didn’t know and who wasn’t connected to Arbor Trace. Maloney had pushed to be retested but refused to speak to doctors who had done the previous assessments. The mental health team at Arbor Trace where Maloney had been living for several months was not consulted. Tom Maloney told the capacity assessor he didn’t believe his father could take care of himself.
A few days later, Maloney’s friend Dave Hutchinson arrived with the intent of bringing Maloney back to Barrie.
Susanne stopped in that day and met Maloney in the lunchroom. He was waiting for the official word about his latest assessment. They shared a short visit, sitting together at the table. It was the last time she saw him.
Later that day the capacity assessor who conducted the latest test sent an email confirming that Maloney was competent to make his own decisions.
He walked out of Arbor Trace that afternoon, Nov. 8, 2018.
He died 11 days later from the effects of a ruptured esophagus.
Cindy Terrion woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a metallic clank. It sounded like a toolbox opening.
“What is he doing?” she thought. Then she remembered what Greg kept there.
Cindy rushed downstairs and found him with a rifle in his hand, searching for the bullets. He was distraught.
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“What are you doing?” Cindy asked.
“I can’t keep on like this anymore,” Greg said. “I can’t go on …”
“Greg, no,” Cindy said. “You don’t want to do this.”
He looked at her, eyes filled with pain and fear and confusion.
“No,” he said. “I guess not.”
The next day, Cindy took all of the guns out of the house and refused to tell Greg where she put them.
He continued to spiral. He carried an unhealthy amount of weight. He fought with insomnia. He battled anxiety and, at times, paranoia. Sometimes, he’d call Cindy and accuse her of being unfaithful without any proof or hint of logic. But his mind kept spinning and spinning. And he tried to drown the chaos in rye and Diet Coke.
In January 2018, Terrion went to the Canadian Centre for Addictions in Cobourg, about a half-hour from Marmora.
Terrion arrived so drunk that he had to stay in an isolated room while he went through alcohol withdrawal.
When Sean Lewis read the name Patrick Gregory Terrion, it didn’t register that the new client he was assigned to counsel was the player he’d watched with the Maple Leafs as a teenager. Lewis and another counsellor had to carry him down the stairs because he couldn’t walk on his own. It took almost five days for Terrion to go through withdrawal.
“He was probably close to death when he came in the first time,” Lewis says.
Every day, Terrion met with a group of men who also suffered from addiction. Many of them remembered him from his days with the Leafs. Terrion connected with the group right away. They bantered and playfully mocked each other. Terrion dished it out as well as he took it and he seemed to enjoy the camaraderie. It was like being in a locker room again.
The men shared entries from the journaling they did each day, telling the stories of their lives — the good and the bad. Terrion became particularly close to some of the younger guys in the group, giving advice and telling Lewis if he thought one of them was struggling.
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“He was like a father figure,” Lewis says. “He would try to solve all their issues. I’d say ‘Greg, you’re here for yourself.’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah, but this guy needs help.’”
After a couple of stints in the addiction centre in Cobourg that spring, Terrion spent the summer of 2018 back home. He took a trip to the family campsite to build a new hunting stand. He spoke often about getting back out in the woods during the upcoming hunting season.
In early September, he drove to the annual Maple Leafs alumni meeting in Toronto, where he seemed to be rejuvenated by being back among his old teammates and peers — and where he learned about the health of his old coach, Dan Maloney.
The next week, Terrion attended another alumni event — this time as a past guest at the Canadian Centre for Addictions in Cobourg. He caught up with old friends and gave Lewis a hug.
On the surface, he seemed happier. But that internal battle still raged.
On the night of Sept. 27, Cindy left a message for Lewis asking him to convince Terrion to go back in for treatment. His phone was off and he didn’t get the message. That night, Greg repeated the words he’d said to her several times before.
“I just want to die,” he said.
He stayed in the bed the next morning and into the afternoon. Cindy laid down beside him, cuddling into him. He asked her to feel his chest and see if it felt hot. She placed her hand on his heart.
Terrion hadn’t been able to keep food down. Cindy asked if he felt well enough to have some soup from the Chinese restaurant in town. She left the house to run errands and to pick up their order.
While she was out, Terrion got out of bed and walked out into the living room. He picked up a glass and poured some rye.
When his son Tyson returned home for a weekend visit, he found his father on the floor, his head leaning against the wall. He was facing the wide windows that look out over Beaver Creek, shattered pieces of the glass that held his last drink beside him. The official cause of death was a heart attack.
Glenn Healy gets the same call, often. It’s rarely one of his former NHL colleagues. It’s usually a wife, a son or a daughter — someone desperate to get their husband or father back.
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“I never get a call from a player,” he says. “They’re too proud. They don’t call.”
As the executive director of the NHL Alumni Association, it’s Healy’s job to watch over more than 1,100 former players. In the bigger picture, the Alumni Association builds partnerships with businesses and charities to create financial opportunities for former players – in conjunction with an umbrella association of the different franchises. But on a more direct level, it’s also intended to help the many former players who find themselves in need.
Healy was aware of the struggles both Terrion and Maloney endured, but he’s unable to speak specifically about either.
The transition to life after the NHL is hard for many players, Healy says. In particularly dire situations, the Alumni Association tries to help players financially or guide them toward treatment, he says. Most of these cases are directed to the Emergency Assistance Fund, a partnership between the NHL and NHLPA that is funded by the fines and suspensions of current players.
In a statement, NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said that the Emergency Assistance Fund has played a significant role for many years in supporting former players.
“Needs have varied, and each player’s situation is different,” Daly said. “Some requiring immediate attention for health and well-being reasons and others requiring funding over a period of time to get through rough times and to make ends meet.”
Daly added that the NHL and NHLPA also fund programs for current and former players, to help them transition into careers off the ice.
Depending on the circumstances, a former player who needs financial or medical help can receive assistance almost immediately, says Healy. Each case is reviewed by a small board made up of representatives from the NHLPA and the NHL, which is headed by Pat LaFontaine.
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“They do a really good job. They are super secretive, as we are, of all the players’ privacy,” Healy says. “There are players that will get help and no one will even know that they went and got help. Nobody.”
That assurance doesn’t always help. While the NHL’s alumni are often referred to as a brotherhood, many players find themselves isolated when they need help the most. Part of that is due to the persistence of a culture that frames seeking help as a weakness — as something to be ashamed of.
“We’re a proud group,” Healy says. “And we’re reluctant to reach out.”
But part of it is also due to a lack of awareness. Several former players interviewed for this story describe a disconnect within the perceived “brotherhood,” with many unaware of the program.
A few years ago, Kurt Walker founded an organization called Dignity After Hockey, trying to raise money to provide care for former players he believed weren’t getting the help they needed. Walker — who played for the Leafs in the late 1970s — was angry about the lack of support provided to retired players.
“My dad was helping homeless retired players who were mentally ill or sick,” says Zoe Walker, his daughter. “He was fed up and tired of it — the whole thing got him to the point of ‘no more’, and that’s how Dignity was born.”
Walker died in August 2018, at the age of 64.
While stories like Terrion’s and Maloney’s surface, some colleagues still in the game have to tried to find ways to help.
Since becoming president of the Maple Leafs in 2014, Brendan Shanahan has sought to build a strong relationship with the franchise’s alumni association and has attempted to bridge a gap between the organization and its former players.
“It’s incredibly important to me that our alumni don’t feel forgotten,” Shanahan says. “I think it’s not enough to just wait and hope for players that need help to come forward. I think a lot of times it’s through word of mouth through family and old teammates.”
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Shanahan grew up in Toronto through the 1970s and early 1980s, idolizing the players he watched in the blue and white sweaters at the Gardens or on “Hockey Night in Canada.”
He fondly remembers Terrion as a “Johnny Hustle-type” player who worked tirelessly. And he remembers Maloney as a notoriously tough player who became an equally tough coach.
“When you grow up in Toronto, these guys are all heroes for you,” he says.
But hero status on the ice offers no guarantees when the game is over. Shanahan knows the challenges many players face when their playing days are through. There have been circumstances where the Leafs organization has learned that a former player is struggling with a financial or medical need and the team has stepped in, he says. Those instances have been taken care of quietly, beyond the help offered through the Emergency Assistance Fund, he says.
Still, there are some — players suffering from the lingering effects of injuries they sustained in the game and struggling to support themselves — who don’t find the support they need. And both Healy and Shanahan say there are more players suffering than most realize.
“You’re never going to be able to replace the feeling of what it was like to be a Maple Leaf or a professional athlete,” Shanahan says. “I think it’s important for us to continue to find and capture some of the guys who are struggling.”
After his death, Maloney’s brain was donated to the Canadian Concussion Centre at Toronto Western Hospital. Some of his family members hoped to find answers regarding the trauma that they believe he’d sustained either while playing or through the subsequent falls he’d taken in his later years.
“It’s important to note that my dad would never want to do anything to make the NHL look bad,” says Tom Maloney. “If you were to say ‘You’re going to have an 11-year career and coach for several years, but these are the risks’ — he would do it again and again and again.”
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The Canadian Concussion Centre looks for evidence of CTE in the brain of deceased people who have suffered head trauma, and commonly in former athletes who played contact sports like hockey and football.
In August 2019, Tom Maloney was contacted by the centre and told that studies of his father’s brain revealed features of CTE.
The results offered some clarity for what Maloney had endured as he battled through addiction and cognitive decline. But the diagnosis was expected, his son says, and it brought little relief from the harsh reality of Maloney’s end.
“He died alone and without dignity,” Tom Maloney says. “It didn’t need to happen that way.”
After Terrion’s death, his family grappled with the past — the good times and bad — sorting through the legacy of the man they loved as he fell apart.
Tyson — the youngest, who found him — took a trip to the hunting cabin on Beaver Creek. It was something they had always shared, father and son. They would spend days in the wild, playing darts and cards, fishing and hunting. Terrion left it to Tyson and his own young son.
Tyson climbed up into the hunting stand they had put up the summer before. He thought about how his dad always looked forward to getting back there again. The stand sat up on a ridge in the trees, overlooking a valley. Tyson stayed there for three days, in the patter of rain that fell on the roof his father built.
“That was his paradise,” he says.
Ryan, in the middle, clashed with his dad the most. They were similar.
“We told each other the things that no one wants to hear but needed to hear,” he says.
He remembered his dad not only as a former Leaf, but also the man who pumped gas alongside his family, shaking hands and snapping photos, working hard at life after his dream was done.
“He made me who I am today,” Ryan says.
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Cindy considered having Greg’s brain tested for traces of CTE. She knew that he wanted to prove there was more to this than alcohol. He wanted people to understand why he couldn’t shut his brain off.
Cindy thought about the fight — and how the league had battled to discredit the claims of yesterday’s players like Greg during the NHL concussion lawsuit. Part of Cindy still wanted to keep going, but what good would it do now, she thought. Nothing would bring Greg back. It was over.
“He didn’t have to prove anything to me,” she said. “I knew.”
Jason, the eldest, dug into the adoration he first felt while watching his dad play for the Leafs.
“He was my hero,” he says. But near the end, even visiting the house was hard. His hero wasn’t himself anymore.
Once, during a rare moment of clarity, Terrion shared a request with his son. One that Jason swore to live by, to honour him.
“Jay,” Terrion said. “Don’t end up like me.”
(Top photos: Getty Images)
