There was no one rock bottom for Graeme Bonar, there was a series of them.
Once a highly rated prospect with the Montreal Canadiens, Bonar was a natural scorer who led the Ontario Hockey League with 66 goals for the Soo Greyhounds during the 1984-85 season.
But a nasty injury derailed his chance at an NHL career before it could start. Then there was a decade of addiction to alcohol, painkillers and cocaine as he wandered from one minor pro outpost to another.
By 1996, he needed help — badly.
“I reached a point where I thought, I’m truly afraid I’m going to die, but at the same time I’m afraid to live,” said Bonar, now 54.
He checked himself in to a treatment centre in Hamilton and spent 123 days in rehab, exorcising his demons.
“It gave me the foundation to say it’s OK to live your life without drugs or alcohol,” he said. “I started to figure out slowly who Graeme Bonar was again.”
He’s been clean and sober for 24 years but just as important, Bonar went back to school and became a social worker and addictions counsellor, now working with clients who are in the same place he once was.
“It was a gift that was kind of dropped in my lap,” said Bonar, who grew up in Mimico. “No job in the world gives you this satisfaction.”
Outside of hockey-mad Sault Ste. Marie, where he remains a household name for his achievements with the Greyhounds, only hardcore Habs fans and hockey historians would remember Bonar’s career.
He was a first-round choice by Windsor in the OHL draft, but after a lacklustre first season he was traded to the powerhouse Greyhounds, coached by Terry Crisp, who would later lead the Calgary Flames to a Stanley Cup.
“It was the best thing that happened to me,” Bonar said. “I learned an awful lot about the game and I learned an awful lot about life.”
Under Crisp, Bonar blossomed into a fearsome sniper, helping the Greyhounds win the OHL championship in 1985.
“He didn’t realize how good he could be and the talent that he did have,” said Crisp, now a broadcaster with the NHL’s Nashville Predators. “He just evolved and became a scoring machine the year we went to the Memorial Cup.”
In 1984, the Canadiens took Bonar in the third round of the NHL draft, with the 54th pick.
The Habs have so many retired numbers that rookies and other prospects get training camp numbers starting at 50. When Bonar attended his second camp in 1985, his Greyhounds number — 29 — was waiting for him.
“I thought, ‘Hey, I’ve got a real shot here,’” Bonar recalled. “I think the last guy to wear 29 in Montreal was some guy named Ken Dryden.”
In 1986, Bonar’s junior career was over and he attended his third training camp in Montreal. He was leading the team in scoring after eight pre-season games, but just before the start of the regular season he broke his wrist and hurt his ankle.
He was sent to the Habs’ farm team in Sherbrooke to recuperate, then learned he was being called up to the NHL.
But first, there was a game in Halifax.
That night, Bonar suffered a freak injury, severely damaging his Achilles tendon and ankle. There would be surgery and treatment and the occasional period of hope, but his ankle never recovered fully.
The looming call-up by the Habs was as close as Bonar ever got to the NHL. He has the memories from training camps and pre-season games with the likes of Bob Gainey, Larry Robinson, Guy Carbonneau and Mario Tremblay, visits with Jean Béliveau and Henri Richard, but not a single NHL game.
“In Montreal, there was this hockey royalty that could show up at any particular time,” said Bonar. “You take a lot of it for granted when you’re at that age, and I certainly did.
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“Then within a year and a half, by the time I reached my 22nd birthday, I was done.”
That’s only partially true. His NHL dream was over, but Bonar hung on, playing essentially on one good foot with the gnawing reality that his ankle was never going to heal properly.
“I wasn’t ready for the real world yet,” he said. “I was afraid. I mean, what am I going to do?”
The constant pain in his ankle led to an addiction to booze and painkillers — “Tylenol 3s, Percocets, whatever you can get your hands on,” he said — as well as cocaine.
After he left the Habs organization, he played another seven years in places far from the hockey spotlight: Indianapolis, Saginaw, Flint, Rochester, Brantford, even Jacksonville.
“It broke my soul, to be honest,” Bonar said. “One day you’re out having wings and a beer with Bob Gainey and the next day you’re in Jacksonville.
“It’s hard to go from being the top-rated right-winger in Canada to two years later basically skating around on one foot,” said Bonar. “I let that feed my addiction for years.”
After becoming clean and sober, Bonar obtained his degree as a social service worker. He’s worked at a treatment centre in Guelph and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and in 2008 he was the winner of the CAMH Transforming Lives award, given to people with lived experience who help others suffering from addictions or mental illness.
Since 2010, Bonar been a case manager at Hope Place Centres, a men’s live-in treatment facility in Milton, where he is “adored,” according to Trista Robertson, the manager of programs and services.
“He brings harmony to the workplace,” Robertson said. “People stay here because of him and they share that very openly.
“The way he can relate to them is unreal,” she added. “The way he can perceive human nature having lived through something like that is priceless as well.”
Bonar said he’s still working on himself, but after 24 years of sobriety it gets easier.
“You don’t worry about yesterday, you don’t worry about tomorrow, you just worry about today,” he said. “I take pride today in being kind and gentle and trying to be the best person I can be.
“Those are my goals every single day.”
