When Toronto neurosurgeon Dr. Charles Tator heard the sad news about Colby Cave, the Edmonton Oilers forward who died Saturday at age 25, Tator immediately flashed back to his earliest days as a doctor.
Tator, 83, is best known as Canada’s foremost expert on concussions, but he began his career as an emergency-room physician. And in those formative days he remembers encountering a patient around the same age as Cave suffering with the same condition that ultimately claimed Cave — a colloid cyst. Tator said a colloid cyst, a type of congenital tumour, can range anywhere from the size of a pea to the size of a grape. And though it’s never cancerous, it can be dangerous. As it grows, because it is located in the middle of the brain near vital fluid pathways, it can block the necessary flow of brain fluid. This can lead to an increase in pressure in the brain, which can, in turn, lead to a fatal brain bleed, the apparent cause of Cave’s death.
As a young doctor, Tator saw a 20-something young man die of the worst effects of a colloid cyst. Though he has successfully removed several such cysts in the intervening decades, he can’t remember seeing many fatal cases along the way, and certainly not another one involving a professional athlete.
“It’s very, very rare,” said Tator, speaking over the phone from his Toronto home. “It’s a rare type of tumour and a rare type of problem that developed in it, on top of that.”
In other words, for those attempting to make sense of the senseless, Cave’s death — which came after he was airlifted from his home in Barrie to Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, where he underwent emergency surgery and was placed in a medically induced coma — was likely a tragic case of bad luck.
“That’s the way I would think of it. Very bad luck,” Tator said.
This was only supposed to be the beginning for Cave. A career in professional hockey – even one as a fringe NHLer like Cave, who broke into the league as an undrafted free agent with the Boston Bruins back in 2017 — is an enviable way to start a young life. Cave played 67 games in the NHL with the Bruins and Oilers over the past few seasons, and many more games in the minor leagues, where he had most recently been a regular with Edmonton’s AHL affiliate, the Bakersfield Condors. But he earned more than $1 million (U.S.) in salary as he yo-yoed between the AHL and NHL, according to CapFriendly.com. And along the way he built a network of teammates and coaches and executives who held him in high esteem.
And he was married, just last summer, to Emily Cave, who shared video of the couple’s emotional wedding vows on Instagram this week while pointing out that, in the lead-up to his death, Colby had been complaining of a headache.
“I dare anyone to find someone who had a bad thing to say about Colby Cave,” Jason Davidson, Cave’s agent, said in a phone interview. “I don’t think there’s a human on earth. I really don’t. And I’ve been in this business long enough, I know I definitely can’t say that about myself.”
Eric Gryba, the former NHL defenceman, was one of the many mourners who made the pilgrimage to Cave’s hometown of North Battleford, Sask., on Monday. Gryba, who lives in Saskatoon, made the hour-long drive alongside his wife and parents, travelling in a caravan that included Jared Cowen, the one-time Maple Leaf. Together they joined a seemingly endless line of cars — at least 15 kilometres’ worth, according to some estimates — on Saskatchewan’s Highway 16, designed to provide comfort to the Cave family as they made their return from Toronto via the Saskatoon airport.
Gryba called the gathering both “hearth-warming and heart-wrenching.” Warming to see a community that has seen its share of tragedy rally around a family in need, wrenching to think about a young vibrant life cut too short.
“But if anyone’s going to come out of something like that, it’s a young athlete who’s in peak physical condition. He’s 25 years old and is going to be as resilient than anybody,” Gryba said. “It just didn’t cross my mind that he wouldn’t come out of it. And that was the really hard part, just hearing he didn’t make it.”
If pro athletes are often cast as invincible gladiators, Cave was a Saskatchewan archetype. As a junior, he served as captain of the Swift Current Broncos for two seasons. Davidson said the red-headed centreman with the rugged features and the soft smile could have been a stand-in for a cartoon superhero.
“He could make a good Hercules with that chiseled chin of his,” Davidson said.
He occasionally made a good tough guy, too. Earlier this season, while playing in Bakersfield, Cave caused a social-media stir when video of one of his fights went viral. The clip culminated with Cave knocking his opponent unconscious with a thundering right. The story continued that Cave later texted his fallen foe, 19-year-old Marin Pospisil, to check on Pospisil’s health.
It was one of 16 fights in which Cave partook between junior and the pros, according to HockeyFights.com. And while Tator is on record as one of the most vehement critics of fighting in hockey, and while he has not examined Cave’s medical records, he said that, given what he knows about colloid cysts, Cave’s career choice likely had nothing to do with his demise.
“I don’t think there was any evidence of trauma being a factor. So this was truly a spontaneous thing that didn’t have anything to do with (hockey),” Tator said. “He could have been an accountant or a lawyer, not necessarily a hockey player.”
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As a beloved hockey player, Cave’s life likely would have been celebrated this week with a ceremony that went beyond a sombre motor brigade. But in the age of COVID-19, plans for a proper memorial have been put on hold, said Davidson.
“Any other time, you’d have the hockey community and the North Battleford and Saskatchewan community coming together for a memorial or a funeral to honour Colby and pay respects to the family,” Gryba said. “But in this day and age, it’s just not possible … You feel for the family, that they can’t have a traditional ceremony for him. It’s just a very uniquely crappy situation.”
