Dave Feschuk: ‘Finding Murph’ is a difficult reminder the NHL needs to find a way to protect its players’ well-being

In the annals of tragic stories of lost hockey souls, they don’t come much sadder than Joe Murphy.

How can it be that the No. 1 pick in the 1986 NHL draft was last seen homeless on the streets of Regina, battling signs of mental illness and addiction when he wasn’t busy seeking out a place to sleep? How can it be that a member of the vaunted NHL fraternity — a guy who won a Stanley Cup with the Edmonton Oilers in 1990 and played parts of 15 seasons in the world’s best league until 2001 — has found himself living in such squalor at age 53?

There are no simple answers to such questions, of course. But TSN reporter Rick Westhead’s new book, “Finding Murph,” offers the closest thing to a comprehensive picture of a once-promising hockey life gone off the rails. Not by coincidence, the book doubles as an important document to the shamefully blind eye the NHL has long turned to brain injuries and their long-term effects on the health of its players.

Murphy’s story is complicated, of course. In a game of conformists, he was often a man apart. He was the petulant star talent who spoke of himself in the third person and once left a bench midgame only to be found reclining in the dressing room, announcing himself fed up with linemates who wouldn’t pass him the puck. He was the free spirit who showed up to the rink late and left early, rarely a proponent of hockey’s sacred lunch-pail grind.

“He didn’t grasp the concept of work ethic,” ESPN analyst Barry Melrose, a former teammate, says in the book.

But for every coach Murphy infuriated, there were teammates who came to understand his uniqueness.

“I just don’t know if he knew how to care sometimes,” former teammate Steve Smith surmises. “There were a lot of demons in Joe.”

Those demons manifested themselves in many ways. Murphy, during his time in the NHL, smoked Marlboro Reds (which at the time wasn’t particularly uncommon). He ate copious fast food (pizza and a Coke were a typical breakfast). He gambled heavily on sports (although not, he insists, on hockey outside of an occasional ProLine ticket). And he was generous with his winnings. Chuffed by netting $50,000 from Super Bowl XXXI — Green Bay over New England in 1997 — the story goes that Murphy offered $10,000 cash to the St. Louis Blues teammate who would score the winning goal in that night’s game against Detroit (a payment he never made after the Red Wings won in a walk).

Sometimes, mind you, post-game beers turned into recreational pursuits of a more worrisome kind. Inhaling cocaine eventually became a part of Murphy’s nightlife routine. Still, Murphy’s sad post-career trajectory goes beyond a cautionary tale of the dangers of one too many epic hangovers.

The possibility is raised that his decline could been fuelled by the crushing pressure attached to being the No. 1 pick from Newmarket who never quite panned out. As Neil Smith, GM of the Stanley Cup-winning 1994 New York Rangers, says in the book: “No matter how much money they made, no matter how much fame they’ve had, no matter how many dreams they’ve lived, the pressure on (NHL players) is so immense that the rest of us don’t understand it because we’ve never been there.”

Above all, the book repeatedly points to a more likely root of the evils that seem to so cruelly haunt Murphy — the cumulative effects of the multiple head injuries he suffered as an NHLer. In a series of interviews Westhead conducted with Murphy a couple of summers back on the streets of Kenora, Ont., where Murphy was bouncing between a shelter and sleeping in the bush, Murphy traced the beginning of his downward spiral to a vicious 1991 hit from Shawn Burr that slammed Murphy’s head into the boards, knocked him unconscious and left him, in the days and years that followed, a different person. Cleared to return to the game despite the violence of that hit, Murphy found himself on a breakaway and, in a grim testament to the addled state of his brain, shot the puck into the corner.

It’s horrifying stuff, especially considering the league’s concussion-spotting protocol, almost 30 years on, continues to lack transparency.

While the book acknowledges the messy business of explaining human behaviour, the writer, in this case, is armed with rare insight, specifically access to Murphy’s medical records.

Examined by a neuropsychologist in 2014, Murphy was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome — cognitive and likely psychological injuries as a direct result of the physical beating he took in the NHL.

“It’s easy to pass judgment and say he’s crazy and eccentric,” Murphy’s sister, Cathy, told Westhead in the TV documentary that begat the book. “He didn’t go in (to the NHL) crazy and eccentric.”

There’s a gutting moment in “Finding Murph” that makes Murphy’s descent seem entirely avoidable. As Murphy’s post-retirement problems mounted, as he blew through money on good times and bad investments and seemed troubled enough for his family to be concerned, his late father convinced him to phone the NHL-NHLPA substance-abuse program to ask for help. Murphy made the call, but says he was told by the voice on the other end of the phone that, because he was no longer in the league, there was nothing the program could do for him.

The NHL-NHLPA program is confidential, which means those who run it couldn’t comment on Murphy’s case even if he was a successfully rehabilitated patient. The NHLPA has insisted there is always help available to players and ex-players alike. Ditto Glenn Healy, the former Maple Leafs goaltender who is executive director of the NHL alumni association, who has insisted that any member of the NHL fraternity who is in distress has a friend in his association. The organization has repeatedly reached out to help Murphy.

Murphy, it has been concluded by some, doesn’t want to be helped. And maybe there’s some truth in that. Still, Westhead lays plenty of responsibility for Murphy’s lot in life at the feet of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. As undeniably deft as Bettman has been in minimizing the damage to his league from concussion-related lawsuits that once posed an existential threat to both hockey and football, Bettman has been decidedly less convincing as a staunch advocate for player health. As Westhead writes, when it comes to concussions, the league has “thrown loose change at a million-dollar problem.”

“The NHL didn’t (in Murphy’s era), and doesn’t now, want a frank and transparent discussion about the long-term health of its players,” he writes.

The book offers mounds of evidence to back up those claims. And it leaves a reader wondering: Why must the discussion around the well-being of hockey’s on-ice workforce be so adversarial?

Hockey greats with the best of intentions have tried to help. Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goaltender, has eloquently and reasonably suggested a ban on all hits to the head. In response, NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly, in sworn testimony around concussion-related litigation, dismissed Dryden as someone with “a flair for the dramatic (who) likes to grandstand.” Eric Lindros, who had his career cut short by concussions, has for years proposed a progressive concussion-research plan that would see each NHL team kick in $1 million apiece — a little more than the cost of a minimum-salary role player. Lindros, on that front, has often been treated by the league as a stranger. Murphy has known the feeling.

It’s a needlessly sad state of affairs still marring a multi-billion-dollar industry. And there’s no sadder Exhibit A than a former No. 1 pick last seen living rough in Regina.