Dave Feschuk: The night Stu Grimson became the Grim Reaper, thanks to three left hands from his opponent

In this particular life-changing moment, one side of Stu Grimson’s face was rendered cratered and bloodied.

The force of his opponent’s punches, three left-handed jackhammers, fractured his skull in two places, both above his right eye and below the cheek bone. The reconstruction of the disaster zone required 21/2 hours of emergency surgery and the insertion of a 15-centimetre stainless steel rod — a piece of which poked out of Grimson’s skin in a look reminiscent of Frankenstein.

And yet as Grimson convalesced in the wake of the worst beating of his professional life, his face rearranged by Dave Brown, the feared Edmonton Oilers pugilist, he had an epiphany. He was only three regular-season games into his fledgling career as an NHL enforcer. And even if Grimson looked every bit the part — six-foot-six and 240-some pounds — until that moment he’d been unsure the job was for him. As Grimson explains in his excellent new memoir, “The Grim Reaper: The Life and Career of a Reluctant Warrior,” he had arrived in the world’s best league terrified of the potential humiliation that would come with losing a fight in front of a big-league crowd. Though he’d carved out a reputation as a menacing presence in junior and in the minors, the mere idea of failing in the NHL nearly kept him out of it.

“I was a tough guy. Winning fights was who I was,” Grimson writes. “Getting my ass kicked in front of thousands of people was too much to ask of me.”

But in the days after his pummeling at the bloodied hands of Brown, Grimson felt differently. If this defeat was as bad as life in the league could get, perhaps life in the league was for him.

“I know it seems counterintuitive to a lot of people, but (losing that fight to Brown) was a very liberating experience,” Grimson said in an interview this week. “Because I got to a place where I was able to say to myself, ‘If I can sustain a loss like this, but I’m able to yank myself up by my boot straps and get back into the fray, what now do I have to fear?’ I really had nothing else to fear.”

So goes the NHL origin story of one of the game’s best-known denizens of the heavyweight enforcer era. After Grimson recovered from his injuries, he would go on to a 14-year career in the league despite a statistical resumé that included just 17 goals, the fewest by any NHL forward who has played 700 or more games, according to hockey-reference.com.

Grimson existed, of course, in the now-extinct reality that saw a select handful of NHLers get paid to fight, ostensibly to provide protection for stars like Paul Kariya, an ex-teammate of Grimson who provides an appreciative foreword to “The Grim Reaper.” Grimson was compensated handsomely for his work. Do the math, as he does in his book, and you realize he made a princely $26,000 (U.S.) for each of his 211 NHL fighting majors. By Grimson’s estimate, he won or drew about 80% of them.

Seen through the lens of today’s enforcer-free game, it’s difficult to fathom the extremes of Grimson’s hockey life. Now aged 54 and working as a corporate lawyer and an NHL Network analyst, he says he wrote the book, in part, to satisfy the hankering of fans who miss the kind of violence he helped perpetuate.

“I love where the game’s at today. These young athletes, they’re incredibly gifted,” Grimson said. “But there is a romanticism, a certain sense of nostalgia and a reverence for that (enforcer) era.”

Grimson, in his first foray into book writing, does a fine job sketching out his remarkable life’s arc. The adopted son of a Mountie who lived in eight different cities before he was 14 years old, Grimson grew up as an attention-seeking wild child known for daredevil tricks in speeding automobiles and occasional bouts of public nakedness. And as a fighter, he was a natural. The book tells the story of how he famously caught the eye of a scout for the WHL’s Regina Pats not on the ice but in a street fight.

If hardbitten hockey men saw Grimson as a prototypical tough guy, he saw himself as an all-round player who scored 24 goals in his final season in junior. So while the game eventually shaped him into a one-dimensional specialist in causing human harm, the transformation didn’t come without angst.

“You’re not turning my son into a goon,” Grimson recalls his father telling the coach of the Pats after Grimson struggled as a WHL rookie.

And Grimson quit training camp with the Calgary Flames in 1985 as he dealt with his conflicting feelings around the role. But after a detour to a job on a dairy farm and two seasons with the University of Manitoba — where he got a year’s probation after a fight that spilled off the ice led the RCMP to lay assault charges — the Flames happily took him back, and a goon he would become.

The career came with consequence. Though he broke his nose just once, he acknowledges he suffered a dozen or more concussions. Not that he disclosed the bulk of them to his team. Grimson writes that there existed a “code of silence tough guys imposed on themselves” when it came to injuries. If he has a regret it’s that he didn’t self-report his frequent head injuries, a course of action that might have given his repeatedly traumatized brain time to heal before it was subjected to the usual punishment. He figures he participated in some 393 fights in junior, the minor leagues and the NHL before he was actually diagnosed with a concussion.

“Make sense?” he writes. “Hardly.”

As it was, Grimson played his last NHL game in 2001, around the time an MRI showed atrophy on one side of his brain, a diagnosis he only received after a lopsided loss in a fight with Georges Laraque left him unusually foggy. And though he says he’s obviously concerned about what his future may hold, he has chosen not to participate in the concussion-centred legal action taken by dozens of former players against the NHL. He’s of the mind that he was aware of the grim risks when he chose to pursue hockey’s great rewards.

“I just don’t know that the league had all this important, critical, specific information, withheld it from us, and withheld it to the point where I was injured in some way,” Grimson said. “I accept some of the responsibility myself. I realized that by choosing a life in pro hockey, I put myself in harm’s way. We were prepared to live with the risks because as athletes, as individuals, we put far more value in the upside, which was to pursue a career as a pro hockey player and to live this lifestyle, which was a great one, an exciting one and a very comfortable one.”

It’s a lifestyle, it’s worth pointing out, that’s also led to the too-young demise of a string of Grimson’s tough-guy counterparts. Grimson argues in his book that it’s a mistake to lump together the deaths of Bob Probert, Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien and Wade Belak. They all did the same job, yes, but were different men who met their respective ends in varied circumstances.

Still, once an enforcer, always an enforcer. Decades removed from the hospital bed where Grimson decided to make fighting his life, and more that 18 years since his final NHL bout, the man they call the Grim Reaper says he still must occasionally resist the urge to drop the metaphorical gloves on a helpless civilian.

“I find even today I have to keep myself in check all the time. Whether it’s somebody cutting you off in traffic, whether it’s somebody jumping in front of you in line … it can trigger that response in me,” Grimson said. “You play the protector, this avenger-type role, and it’s deeply ingrained in you. So I am constantly, even as a 54-year-old man today, I find I’m constantly having to curb or keep that instinct in check.”

All these years later, Grimson has nothing left to fear — except, maybe the ever-present danger of the societal equivalent of serving five minutes in the box for road rage.