Of all his tattoos, the one that means most to Tim Schaller is the one on his chest that explains the bond with his older sibling: “Blood brothers” it says, “because he’s got my blood in him.”
Sure, he’ll contribute to the Milwaukee Admirals in the box score this season and help develop some of the younger players with NHL futures, but Tim Schaller’s most important assist came when he was a teenager.
Dave Schaller, Tim’s elder brother, was 19 and had beaten one health scare, and life had gotten back to normal, at least as normal as it gets for a family with a college freshman and a multisport high school athlete.
Then Dave got some more bad news.
“It was strange,” said Tim, who is 2½ years younger. “He actually had testicular cancer a couple years prior to that. And then the new thing, aplastic anemia, was completely unrelated.
“It was weird because my brother, I always looked up to him, he was always the strongest person I knew and he crushed testicular. And then the second thing, he just looked weak. I know my brother. He’s a big, bulky kid. And he looked weak and I was like, OK, this isn’t good.”
Aplastic anemia is a rare condition that can be fatal
Aplastic anemia is a rare and serious condition that occurs when a person’s body stops making blood cells. Symptoms include fatigue, bruising or bleeding and shortness of breath, according to the Mayo Clinic. It can be short-term or chronic, and it can be fatal.
The Schallers’ parents, Susan and Robert, didn’t initially tell Tim how bad Dave’s condition was, Tim said, nor did doctors. What good would it have done to have a 16-year-old – with everything a 16-year-old already faces – worry any more about the unknown?
“A couple years down the road they told me how serious it was,” Schaller said. “I was like, geez, he was pretty much living on machines.
“I got tested to be his donor for the bone marrow. The same thing, (I was thinking) ‘ah, just a blood test, in case he needs some of my blood,’ not knowing just how serious it was.”
Tim’s marrow matched Dave’s perfectly, and he didn’t hesitate for even a minute when asked to donate. Initially he might not have fully understood the procedure, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. This was his brother, and his brother needed help.
“At first I was like, what the hell, Dave? It’s baseball season,” said Schaller, who grew up in Merrimack, New Hampshire.
“Then he got rushed to Boston and I’m like, OK, there’s no baseball season this year.”
That was Tim’s favorite sport at the time.
Bone marrow transplant helped save brother’s life
“They literally brought the bags of my bone marrow up to his room and started pumping it into him right away,” Schaller recalled. “That’s when I kind of got a sense of, OK, this is a little more serious than what everyone was telling me. So I kind of started putting pieces together and knew that there was something seriously wrong with him.
“Like anything in his life, Dave battled through it and he’s completely fine now.”
In an odd way, Schaller said, he probably made it to the highest levels of professional hockey partially because of the ordeal, not in spite of it.
In a successful bone marrow transplant, the recipient’s body quickly begins to use the donor’s marrow to create healthy cells and the donor’s system begins to make up for what it lost. But the short-term effects of the actual harvest procedure meant Schaller would be sidelined more than a month to recover.
“I couldn’t carry a backpack, I couldn’t carry anything because they put 100 holes into my (pelvic) bone, so it was so brittle I couldn’t do anything,” Schaller said.
“I was a toothpick growing up. So I gained 20 pounds in six weeks from doing nothing.”
Also, knowing he’d be down, Schaller underwent surgery for a wrist injury from hockey.
Schaller went from ‘toothpick’ to veteran NHL, AHL player
Sixteen years later it’s easy to laugh about the ordeal.
“I like to joke with my parents, if it wasn’t for that, I’d still be a toothpick and I wouldn’t have made it this far in hockey,” said Schaller, who has played in 276 National Hockey League games and more than 300 in the American Hockey League.
“So I used that 20 pounds and I started working out, bulked up a little, so it actually worked out for the better in that sense of it.”
Schaller, 32, signed as a free agent with the Admirals, his fifth stop since 2019, following seasons with the Bakersfield Condors (2021-22) and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins (2020-21) of the AHL and a 2019-20 season split among the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks and Los Angeles Kings and AHL’s Ontario Reign.
Schaller describes himself as a blue-collar player with “the least flashy game you’ll see.” He prides himself on being able to get along with teammates of all ages and backgrounds, and on being durable. Schaller played in all 82 games with the Boston Bruins in 2017-18, and he has played in all 27 of the Admirals games.
Although Schaller has scored a modest 12 points on six goals and six assists (heading into a game Dec. 27 against the Chicago Wolves), eye-popping numbers aren’t the reason he’s in Milwaukee.
An NHL veteran and the second-oldest player on the team behind captain Cole Schneider, Schaller is tasked with helping the team’s younger players grow on and off the 200- by 85-foot sheet of ice. At times he has worn an assistant captain’s A on his sweater.
“Someone who’s been there and had a taste of it and maybe is in a different position now, they’re able to share how it went for them, how did they maximize the opportunity when it came,” Admirals coach Karl Taylor said. “I never played in the NHL, so I can’t tell them that.
“So the younger guys on a call-up, say a player gets an opportunity, they can pull them aside and say, look, this is what I did right, this is what I did wrong, watch out for these pitfalls, here’s some tips.”
‘Timmyheads’ cutouts make debut; Jimmy Fund helps raise money for cancer research hospital
The younger guys got a different look at Schaller during the team’s Dec. 9-10 trip east, when several dozen people showed up to the games against the Hartford Wolf Pack and Springfield Falcons with 3-foot cutouts of Schaller’s face, complete with a modest mustache.
The origin of “Timmyheads” traces to Schaller’s two-plus seasons with the Rochester Americans, his first AHL team out of Providence College, and it illustrates two things: the bond between brothers and the ability to turn a horrible experience into something good.
As a joke, Dave Schaller and some of his friends took oversized images of his brother’s face to a Rochester game and put them against the glass. Then the heads grew in both size and number when Tim got to the NHL with the Boston Bruins.
“Oh, it’s hysterical at first,” Schaller said. “And all of a sudden there were more and more and more. I was like, what’s going here?”
Heads and T-shirts were sold to benefit the Jimmy Fund, which supports the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Boston-based research hospital with affiliated clinics in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Schaller estimated $30,000 had been raised.
“He was almost more popular in Boston than I was,” Schaller said. “He’d be walking around at the bar and everybody’s like, ‘Are you Dave Schaller, the Timmyheads guy?’ ‘Yeah, that’s me.’
“It was awesome.”
Schaller has several tattoos, mostly on his arms, images that seemed cool at the time. But hidden, like the long-healed holes in his pelvis from the marrow donation that saved his brother, is the first one Schaller got, when he was still in his teens, one that has a more personal meaning.
“It’s right there,” he said, pulling back his shirt to show the ink on his chest that includes a hockey stick, flames and a message.
“Just ‘blood brothers’ because he’s got my blood in him. … He has the same one.”