Everything about Dustin Byfuglien has always been unusual.
He was a forward on the Stanley Cup champions who switched and became a standout defenceman. Impossibly big, impossibly fast, impossibly versatile. A player capable of spectacular manoeuvres, bodychecks and mistakes.
Try to come up with a precise comparison in terms of another star in NHL history. Good luck with that.
The idiosyncrasies of this quiet giant of an athlete have continued to play out this fall with his surprise refusal to play for the Winnipeg Jets. At this moment he can’t actually play for anyone after privately undergoing ankle surgery that will keep him out for some time.
Byfuglien is on his own timetable, calling his own plays. Good for him. Will he eventually return to play for the Jets? Hard to say. Would he play for some other team — say a team like the Maple Leafs, who could certainly use a defining force on their blue line? Perhaps. Any team interested in trying to acquire the 34-year-old Byfuglien would have to cough up substantial assets, and a team such as Toronto would need to clear cap space.
But that’s getting way ahead of our story.
The primary story is that Byfuglien, who isn’t saying anything publicly about his reasons for taking a sabbatical, is the latest in a long list of hockey players who have chosen to walk away from a sport they excelled at, one that rewarded them with a handsome income.
How far back do you want to go? In hockey, Carl Brewer, with his intense dislike of Punch Imlach making his hair fall out, walked away from all-star status with the Leafs in 1965, although he returned to the game. Twice. Brewer’s famous quote that explains many an athlete’s muddle was to say that he loved hockey, “but hockey didn’t always love me back.”
The late Ted Lindsay quit in 1960, sat on the sidelines for four seasons, then returned for one more.
Ken Dryden sat out for one season. Ron Ellis left the Leafs for two years.
“The hockey life is like no other career in the working world,” Ellis wrote in his book, “Over the Boards: The Ron Ellis Story.” “But it does present all the normal problems and challenges that the average person has to overcome.
“Hockey players are real people with real problems.”
Ilya Kovalchuk stepped away from the NHL and a $77-million contract (all dollars U.S.) before returning to the KHL, then the NHL.
Paul Ranger mysteriously left the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2009 just as his career was starting to get rolling and didn’t come back until the 2012-13 season with the Leafs. Depression was partly at the root of Ranger’s decision to leave hockey.
“You know the old saying, the light’s at the end of the tunnel, right? I could no longer see the light. It was gone,” Ranger said last year. “If I don’t get healthy I may not be here … on Earth.”
That’s a recurrent theme with many of these premature departure stories over the years: the stress of the game, the internal battles many of these athletes fight with the same silence, secrecy and shame that non-athletes do.
Families. Spouses. Children. Illness. Addiction. Sexuality. Finances. Regrets. Friends. Life choices. Love. Trust. Commitment. Being one of the best in the world at a sport doesn’t make one immune to these issues.
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Last December, 30-year-old Patrik Berglund left $12 million on the table and walked out on the Buffalo Sabres, saying he’d just had enough of pro hockey. He’s back playing this season with Djurgardens in Sweden.
None of this is confined to one sport, of course. Bjorn Borg quit tennis at age 26. In the most celebrated recent example, 29-year-old Andrew Luck abruptly packed it in this fall after six seasons as the quarterback of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts. Luck talked about “not being able to live the life I want to live,” and said he had no choice but to leave the football industry.
It’s unclear whether Byfuglien’s situation is similar to Luck or Borg or Berglund or Brewer. With athletes, we only even begin to understand what they choose to reveal. In the case of Byfuglien, that’s very little. That’s common among today’s athletes, a belief they need to be viewed as one-dimensional and must at all costs shield their vulnerabilities from public view.
Those of us on the outside search for clues when something’s amiss, as we do with Byfuglien. Three seasons ago, the native of Roseau, Minn. could have gone to unrestricted free agency if he wanted to escape Winnipeg.
“It’s close to home, closest I’ll ever get to playing near my home,” he said at the 2016 all-star game in Nashville. “So many good things I like about Winnipeg. I can do the outdoors stuff I like to do. I have no problem being up there.”
A few months later, he happily re-signed with the Jets. Similarly, his salary of $7.6 million per season doesn’t seem to be the problem. If it was, he could have shown up at Jets camp and then opted for ankle surgery. He wouldn’t be suspended without pay, losing $43,000 a day.
So it’s not Winnipeg and not the money. Unless something has changed.
“It’s a complicated issue,” says Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff.
It usually is. Byfuglien’s decision has hurt the Jets, who have won six of their first 13 games. Compassionate folks might see there’s a person at the centre of this storm. Perhaps a person in distress. Certainly a person at a personal crossroads of some kind..
Byfuglien may seem unusual, but unusual people still face everyday challenges. Sometimes the healthiest choice they can make is to just walk away.
