By Matt Clune

***

“I am going to bring Floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.”

“Long is the way

And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light.”

***

PROLOGUE: KNIGHT FALL

My brother tells his story so much that he has become the story. He’s had to tell it as part of playing pro hockey. But if you ask him, he mostly tells it for himself as part of a spartan-like routine which helps keep the darkness at bay. It reminds him the man he was is still out there, threatening to challenge the man he is now.

So he tells it — tell, tell, tell — to become, become, become. And that’s what happens if you do something enough — a job, relationship, hockey, drugs. It overtakes you. It becomes you.

This process, however, is long and grueling. After seven years, several hundred games in big league barns as a member of the Nashville Predators and the Toronto Maple Leafs, and in lesser ones as a member of much lesser teams, I can tell you it is in fact profound. For what began as a simple act of identification in church basements — “Hi, my name is Rich Clune…” — gradually spread and became a creed, one with brilliant flames that ignited the wicks of many souls still shrouded in darkness as they sat slouched listening to his tale.

After seven years, I have recognized the power of this process. My family has, too. And in this way we have also become the story.

But there is a problem with it. It is incomplete. Just a picture of an explosion, and not the pieces of shrapnel that came with it.

In my brother’s telling, he swears the people at the rehab clinic were laughing at us when we swung through their doors in the witching hours of an early May, 2010, night that’ll never seem too long ago. He had been to this rehab clinic before, yes, but swore it was a mistake.

Swore he was no addict — no one who needed help. Sitting around in a circle sounded like a bunch of bullshit to him. No, he was just a guy who’d partied too hard and needed a weekend to detox, so he could get back to playing hockey. After that, he swore he would never be back again.

And yet here we were at the same clinic. Not even eight months later.

There’s the rub: They weren’t laughing at us, per se. I should know. I was there, sober but just barely shaken clean by our torturous drive earlier that day — a 14-hour sojourn I sometimes feel like I’m still on. The triggers fade but never really die, so its memory remains a piece of shrapnel buried too close to an artery that I’d do more harm than good if I tried to remove it.

What the folks were laughing at was the cover story I’d tried to sell to the triage nurse in the East Toronto emergency room hours earlier. Mom and I had gone there with Rich and plopped him on a metal gurney in an adjacent hall as far from the other patients as possible. That the hall also gave us a chance to hide our mistakes was another part of its appeal.

Mom stayed with Rich while I checked us in. When I was next in line, a scream broke forth from the hall and made every patient look at me.

What have you done to him, they must have thought.

I had spent the better part of our 14-hour drive home along the rain-soaked New York State Thruway racking my brain for answers. I was certain I never shoved vodka down his throat or rolled his next joint. I didn’t know how. But I did smoke and drink alongside him.

What I did was be his little brother, even if I knew it was wrong. How could I not? He was the Batman to my Robin. The Boy Wonder never told the Dark Knight what to do. But something had happened to my brother. There was no denying that anymore, and it occurred to me in that moment waiting for the nurse, it wasn’t what I had done. It was what I hadn’t done. Which was anything. I hadn’t tried to stop him when I could have.

I had enabled the monster in him. And now we were really, seriously screwed.

The nurse’s questions — name, age, allergies — made my hand rattle against my leg. Tom Petty was right, I thought: God, it’s so painful when something — help — is so far out of reach.

“Now… what seems to be the problem tonight?” she finally asked.

I stared at her in deadpan. How much time did she have?

“Well,” I began, “my brother hasn’t been able to eat or drink for twenty four hours…”

And here came cover story’s kicker:

“I think he has food poisoning.”

“You need to bring him to see me.”

“I think he needs to see a doctor, ma’am.”

“Everyone needs to see a doctor. He needs to see me first.”

“How about I take you to see him?”

A beat passed, she nodded, then we pushed into the hall. I pointed towards the end of it like a kid who points at a lamp he broke WWE wrestling with his brothers. But what was at the end of my finger was no lamp. Rich’s screaming made certain of that. What was broken was a body, once human, now something else entirely — possibly, I thought, beyond saving. That made the walk all the more painful.

It’s one thing to show a person you love what’s broken; it’s entirely different to show a stranger. If you couldn’t forgive yourself for what you’d done, how could you expect them to?

Sure enough there he lay, sheets soaked through, one hand buried in his throat, the other barely clasped to Mom’s. They never showed Batman like that. I caught the nurse glowering as she took his vitals. Hospitals frown upon offering treatment to patients going through withdrawal. But this wasn’t just a patient. This was my brother, the most important thing in my world , and he was suffering, and all she could do was glower? I ground my molars.

“Well…” she said, looking up after removing her stethoscope, “he needs a doctor.”

My top teeth slipped off my grinding molars and caught the insides of my cheeks, raw.

“Help us do that. Please.”

At that moment, Rich puked on the floor with a violence indicating something other than food poisoning. She knew it. Her eyes admitted it, despite a reluctance to do so. She then administered an IV and put his name on a list of patients hoping to see an overworked doctor who, after Rich had been stabilized, would kick us into the night and leave us to face the truth that the road we’d been on, the road I’d learn we put ourselves on, was nowhere near ending.

It would only turn back to the rehab where my brother had said he’d never return. The nurse left after the IV started its molasses-like drip. I don’t remember the last time he had water. The IV should’ve been a fire hose. When she was gone, we did the math ourselves. The drip wasn’t going to get to him in time. The Knight was going to Fall, turn in his cape and cowl for good.

And Robin felt as though he was about to do the same thing as well…

***

The three Clune brothers at Halloween: Rich, Matt and Ben.

PART ONE: DOWN THE WELL

SIXTEEN HOURS EARLIER

Somewhere outside Albany, New York State Thruway, 12:00 PM, May 2010

This drive up the New York State Thruway from my college in Massachusetts to our home in Toronto is supposed to take 7.5 hours, door to door. Nine at the most if the border is busy. I’d done it at the start and end of the school year, not to mention all the times during hockey season when we’d play the upstate teams. I had distilled it to a science: Two hours to Albany, five to Rochester, six to the border, 30 minutes to cross, an hour to home. Seven and a half hours.

Right now, we’re on hour four and still not in Albany.

I try to reason we can still make good time, but my mind is a meticulous beast, remembering the checkpoints like clockwork. Remembering what it wants to forget and forgetting what it wants to remember.

There are a couple of reasons for our delay.

One, it’s pouring rain — so thick our windshield is bleached opaque, the white of the water making it seem as if we’re on the river to Hades and not this forgotten interstate.

Two, we’re hungover, so my reaction time is a half-second slow. Had it been normal, I might’ve known we were in trouble before we left.

Final exams had ended the day before, and Rich was in town from L.A. Naturally, I wanted to show him off. After finals, we “celebrated” and didn’t get back to my dorm until 4 a.m.

But the real reason for our dreadful pace is we aren’t even moving. Right now, our car is parked on the side of the interstate in the pouring rain and my brother is on his knees, half naked but for a pair of skimpy gym shorts, vomiting his guts out across the muddy gravel for the sixth time already this morning.

The first time we stopped, we both puked and didn’t think anything of it. Hockey guys always said this was the mark of a good night. You got your money’s worth. Better on the gravel than the dates, I thought. We got back into the car believing the worst was over. At least I did. Not 10 minutes later though, Rich hollered to stop and threw his passenger door open before I could get us in park. I figured he had something he hadn’t gotten up.

I texted our parents we were on our way before he got back in, and we set off again. Surely the worst had to be over now.

We stopped every twenty minutes for the next hour.

After the fourth time, I surmised my brother wasn’t puking up leftovers. What was coming up was bile, grey and sinewy like the color of a monster. This monster was called withdrawal.

Evidently, at some point between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m., my brother had decided he could no longer live with this furry friend. Despite our long drive ahead, he felt the time to exorcise this beast was now. It’s never really a good time to go dancing with a demon, but I can tell you with the utmost certainly, it helps to not be encased in a car hurtling up an interstate during a terrible rainstorm.

I would have loved to have been at one of those “Passages” addiction retreats in Malibu you see on TV all the time. But your sins dictate your fate, not your wishes. In the hail of the howling rain, holding a plastic windbreaker over my brother’s shoulders, supervising his exorcism like a failed priest, is where this is destined to be.

We have no umbrella. We are both soaked, so this is the best I can do to keep him dry. Really, it’s the best I can do to make me feel like a real brother, a falsity that feels further exposed by the second. He finishes with a nasty gurgle then we limp back to our car, four-way signals flashing, and I heave him in the passenger seat before stepping through a sludge puddle to get into the driver’s side. I search the car for something clean for him, but there is only mayhem.

All our clean clothes, including those in my luggage, had been torn off after he’d clawed at his skin complaining of an imagined burning. But then he’d be naked and freezing, so I’d drape a new shirt over him only for the fire to return. He just kept screaming, and I’d never heard him scream. Then he began to shake, and I’d never seen him shake. Next he started punching things, and I’d never seen him punch anything off the ice. Then, worst of all, he started crying, and I’d never seen my big brother cry. All I’d seen, our whole lives, was his power. His strength. His posture as Batman. And it was that way of thinking of him that had actually enabled his monster.

***

My brothers — Rich and Ben — and I were obsessed with superheroes growing up, rotating through Superman, Spider-Man, Wolverine and the Ninja Turtles every Halloween. But nothing came close to the Holy Grail: Batman and Robin. We saw Keaton’s movie triple-digit times, possessed every toy, cave, action figure, costume. When Batman Begins came out, my younger brother and I saw it opening night then took the subway home through darkened tunnels, looking for bad guys. Though we were 16 and 13, it felt real. Hope often does. I mean, if Batman and Robin could fight so heroically without ever getting so much as a scratch on their armor — if they could do something extraordinary as humans — then why couldn’t we?

The problem with pursuing the extraordinary is we often expect the person within the pursuit to be of the same mettle. That’s why it was such a shock when Christian Bale got his butt kicked portraying Batman. No one had ever seen a hero hurt like that before, not on that scale. They were never allowed to. We wouldn’t let them. Now we understood we couldn’t be Batman and Robin — we weren’t that delusional — but there was something else extraordinary we pursued. In Canada, we could be hockey players. And in that pursuit, we found our own cape and cowl.

Hockey is religion — wrongfully, obsessively so — to most Canadians. It’s long past dedication, and the powers at be in the game and industry are dutifully aware of this. Like any good brand or religion, they choose to overemphasize the positive attributes while quietly sweeping the bad ones under the rug.

Hockey hits heavy on ideas like passion, heart, sacrifice and teamwork to get families and fans to sign up.

To them, it’s not dishonestly — it’s just good business. After all, would advertising the manipulation, egotism, humiliation and exploitation in the game of hockey make you or the next family want to buy that shiny new pair of thousand dollar skates?

When my older brother committed himself to pursuing hockey as a career, it was a pledge we didn’t take lightly. But we weren’t the screamers, pinning our hopes and dreams on someone to make it. Like most Canadians, we’re a band of loving, hard-working people who just want each other to achieve their dreams, who just, above all else, desire happiness. My parents would’ve sacrificed anything for that.

And the sport preys on it. Time, money and emotion were all invested in copious amounts to help us pursue what we thought would make us happy. Every tournament, practice and game across town at rush hour had stakes attached because if my parents were to give us the best, they asked for our best in return.

Rich promised he’d never give anything less, and he didn’t, accelerating things to a point where there was no pause for thoughtful reflection. There was no pause to consider key questions like “What makes a good coach?” and “What are we really trying to do with this game?”

Are we trying to make it to The Show at all costs? Or are we trying to teach kids that the real purpose of the endeavor is to be a human first and a hockey player second? Unfortunately, we failed to consider those questions. Not maliciously. Hockey is just what you’re supposed to do in Canada. It’s who you’re supposed to be. It became us.

Some tragedies are unavoidable — they can blindside you for whatever reason — but it’d be a mistake to say we never saw this coming. We did, we just didn’t put it altogether because we were drunk, like all Canadians, on this Dream.

I thought I was going to get my long-awaited taste of the Dream when I went to visit Rich in L.A. in 2010, only two months before our descent into Hell. He had just been promoted from the minors to the NHL. But by that time, signs of his deterioration had slowly begun to seep through.

The summer before, he’d called Mom, Dad and me into our basement to tell us he didn’t think he could stop drinking or smoking weed. In the off-season, he’d light up on our patio after my parents had gone to work, then again after the gym, at lunch, at night, before bed. Eventually, he did it before games, practices, sleep, meals. When he wasn’t smoking — which was rare — he was talking about when he could next.

After that meeting, he tried that first stint in rehab before telling them — politely he still assures me — to screw off. He had a hockey player to be, and while he did manage to abstain for a while, it was a white-knuckle attempt at battling a monster, which requires a different kind of fight.

At the time though, I thought his Band-Aid would be enough of a fix. But when the hell do those things ever really stay on?

I should have recognized the darkness in my brother’s eyes, the gauntness in his emaciated cheeks, when I came out to see him in California. And if I lied to myself and pretended I couldn’t because it was too hard to do so in the sun-drenched city, then the lights of the TV cameras and Staples Center arena surely must have been enough to illuminate his pain.

Rich Clune with the Kings in 2009. Noah Graham/NHLI via Getty Images

One thought crossed my mind while I stood in the famous arena waiting for his NHL game’s warm-ups to start. It sent a shiver crawling up my spine. I remembered a promise Rich had made to me and Ben so many years ago after a youth hockey game in Toronto. He’d lost that game, and when he got home, we stormed in on him taking a bath — raving about the WWF Monday Raw episode we watched while he was gone. Stone Cold Steve Austin brought out his championship belt in the episode and paraded it around and we just thought it was sweet. We wanted something awesome like that.

A scowl came over Rich’s face, as if he was disappointed he didn’t have something to give us. Then, like he’d come to a kind of conclusion, Rich looked up at us from his spot in the bathtub and promised us we would in fact get our memento one day when he made it big. He couldn’t promise it would be a championship belt or Stanley Cup trophy — but he was certain he could get his hands on a legitimate NHL game puck. He winked. We smiled, high-fived, then he returned to brooding in the tub. When I left, my foot caught a tiny puddle of water splashed on the floor. I felt its temperature. His bath water was ice cold.

I couldn’t keep my hands still in the Staples Center waiting for the warm-ups to start, waiting for that long promised puck. I could feel its cool rubber ridges cradled in my hand. More importantly, I understood its symbolism. Any moment, Batman would storm out of the tunnel and make it all come true. One by one though, L.A. players emerged until the last one glided out, and it wasn’t my brother.

Shortly after, the PA announcer boomed: “Tonight’s scratches for Los Angeles… Number 56, Rich Clune.”

My stomach sank, not because our sacrifice had been shattered, but because I was missing the validation I’d been led to believe his Dream would provide. Any consolation came hours later when we went to a bar and drank to excess even though I knew he expressed trepidation with it.

But we’d just been robbed of our moment in the spotlight and dammit, this would have to do! Years later, he told me after we kicked everyone out from the party, he tried to wake me and ask for help. But I was passed out drunk on the couch, so he said he stayed up all night smoking weed in his empty shower alone. Some sidekick.

The same thing happened the next three nights. He didn’t play. We drank. When it was over, and I had a flight to catch, we walked to breakfast in the South Bay terribly hungover, nothing out of the ordinary except for the fact that Rich couldn’t even speak he was so high. Surely, I had to say something now. But I knew if I did speak up, I would’ve brought our whole mission to a halt, and I wasn’t positive I could do that.

If it came to an end, who would we be? So I left him in his drunken despair and boarded the plane, unable to stop replaying the image of my brother the whole ride home. Forget to remember but can’t remember to forget.

I got back to college and felt I was left with one choice, as a tough-ass hockey player, I’d never been encouraged to pursue: I needed to talk to someone. I needed to express some feelings a lot of men had been encouraged to repress by the macho figures in their lives. I approached a close friend who, God bless her, listened to me and my tears. Her guidance, her compassion — it was spot on. She suggested we need to take hard action then and now. Forget hockey, this was his life.

When she asked me how I felt about that, all I could say was that I was blindsided by this. I didn’t see it coming. She nodded with a finality and went on her way. She could be of no help if I wasn’t willing to accept the truth. And I’m certain, growing up, when Rich looked into my eyes, possibly in the hopes of telling me he needed a break from hockey, I was of no help to him. Maybe I was tossing him a barbell when he needed a lifeline.

He finally decided he needed to break for the surface during our long car ride home.

***

Back in our car, the heat is intense. The pressure of trying to save ourselves and get home in time, is almost unbearable — what seems worse to me is if our fire goes out. If the fire burns out in this flood, we’ll be left with nothing. We’ll be dead. And it occurs to me that everyone has it wrong about being in Hell. It’s no inferno. It’s not an excess of brimstone and fire. Hell is an absence of fire. Hell is cold and lonely.

Screw it, I think.

If we’re in Hell, I’m not slowing down — so I gas the accelerator. Outside, our tires sweep up water, followed by the slight whine of our engine, and the needle on the dash creeps past 85 mph. It’s been a good half hour since we last stopped, and Rich is resting. What’s more promising is we’re finally entering Albany. This is progress and progress is hope, is it not?

I’d tried putting some music on to calm us down, but the CDs in the changer were all rap or rock. The radio was no good either, little more than static coming through our speakers. The pelt of the rain raking our roof would be our only music, and that’s fine because after a stretch, it put Rich to sleep.

This relative peace continues. Wait, is he asleep? I keep my left hand cuffed to the wheel while my right lands beneath his nostrils. I feel the air before I see its gentle puff fog up the passenger window. Still breathing. Thank God, if He can be thanked. I drag my thumb across Rich’s head, brushing a bead of sweat away that’s absorbed by his sopping brown hair.

Mom had rubbed our heads like this when we were kids, and hopefully it will let Rich know, wherever he is, that he’s not alone right now. Neither are we, it seems. There’s a new sound outside — a high-pitched wail followed by flashing lights. A New York State Trooper is speeding after us.

I check the needle on the dash: We’re going 90 mph in a 65 zone.

Peace, it seems, never really lasts.

***

Photo by Graig Abel/Getty Images

PART TWO: BATS

Save for the odd mishap — skipping class to lift weights or hocking a pinch of Dad’s chew, only to puke it up on Mom’s nice carpet — my brother Rich had been a peaceful kid growing up, seemingly untouched by any demons until, like any teenager, he had his first run-in with alcohol. It was a half-full beer someone passed to him at a family party, not in any sort of conspiratorial way, but rather something just to be hip.

I’m certain Rich took it as such at first while draining the last of the amber liquid, including the foam swishing at the bottom. But then a half-beer became a full one and one turned into seven, at the age of fourteen, and what started as innocent slowly turned maniacal. Isn’t that how temptation works? You start with something small and before you know it…

The further his life corroded, the more he learned to master its chaos, to live with it, and in a funny way, use it: Rich scored, won, and performed until he was drafted by an NHL franchise. The phenomenon seemed counter-intuitive — the crazier he lived, the better he did — but dangerously prevalent.

Theo Fleury, a decorated and possibly future Hall of Fame hockey player, spoke of reaching the pinnacle of his career while simultaneously landing at the bottom of his personal life battling sexual-abuse demons. Stephen King reached an unparalleled level of prolificity during the years he found himself strung out. Perhaps you learn to weather the storm the more it rages, to soldier on even when all the signs point to taking shelter. Rich certainly did this — even when he reached his greatest trouble at the age of 20.

He got himself into a bad situation that we won’t detail in depth here. To deal with it, a select few parties were involved — Rich, his agent, and most importantly, our parents. They met in Toronto one evening to discuss a plan. They only agreed to it after Rich vehemently assured them he was not in any real trouble, but rather a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He actually was, as the later-resolved situation would reveal.

But rather than take the time to address the problem over the course of a few months, which would have meant taking a break from his career, he begged them to let him return to his junior hockey town so he wouldn’t miss a game. After his 20-year-old junior hockey season, Rich would turn pro so there’d be no more projecting how good he might be — only what he was. If he was nothing, it would be over with his NHL franchise. So my parents agreed he’d be allowed to go back but with one condition: no alcohol.

In the car ride back to town, Rich promised them he wouldn’t so much as be seen holding a bottle of beer until the season was over. But when Mom looked him in the eye to measure his mettle, Rich ordered her, his fingers twitching, to speed the car up or they’d miss curfew and this would all be for naught. My parents believed his plea — what parent wouldn’t? — then dropped him off and hugged him bye before returning to Toronto.

(Back home, Ben and I waited under the care of my cousin. When we asked where Mom, Dad and Rich were, he only said “at dinner.”)

After Rich was sure our parents were gone, he turned back from the door of his land parents’ home and went to his pickup truck, where he collected a joint he had tucked in his ashtray. He smoked it while he walked several blocks, under cover of darkness, to a local dive bar.

He pulled his jacket hood tight so as not to be recognized and found a stand-up table towards the back. The waitress handed him a menu and asked if she could start him off with a glass of water while he took a moment to decide what he wanted to eat and drink. He interrupted her before she could finish. There would be no food. Only something to drink. A beer. Any beer. She brought in a bottle, and then six more of them, all of which he drunk in a matter of minutes until he felt, weed and booze coursing through him, at “ease.”

So much for the one condition.

He paid his bill with what the measly stipend money the average junior player had then stumbled into the bathroom before his walk home. Inside here, there was no one else. Only the sight of his reflection in the mirror graffitied with hockey stickers. (There’d be no escape from hockey in Canada.) He did not recognize what stared back at him in the mirror. He remembered the good 14-year-old kid who promised our parents he would never give them anything less than his best. And what he was looking at was a creature who had just flat out lied to our parents. Deception could hardly be considered someone’s best.

It’s tricky to discern who’s at fault here in my brother’s story. A great deal rests with Rich himself — he’d be the first one to admit that and he has on many occasions — but what’s concerning is the culpability of the supporting characters. My parents, his agent, his coaches. The authority figures present in his life.

I’m not here to shame them — after all, I am also partly responsible for his downfall — but the egregious failure of the adults in charge to recognize the deeper problem to which his troublesome situation pointed and take swift, hard action underlines the importance of the moral responsibility we have to help the people who can’t help themselves.

I used to hope my brother’s story could never happen again, that it was just a terrible confluence of factors, but the trouble with hope is it can sometimes masquerade as wishful thinking. Sometimes, it flat out ignores the most brutal of truths. Almost a decade later, another 20-year-old junior hockey player would prove that. And that boy’s name was Terry Trafford.

Terry Trafford was a 5-foot-10, 190-pound kid from Toronto who’d spent his entire four-year junior career — the maximum eligibility for a player — with the Saginaw Spirit franchise. By all accounts, “Traff” was your typical 20-year-old : handsome, a solid skating stride, decent stick skills, and a strong athletic ability inherited from his working-class family. People recalled him being edgy but most would agree that Trafford got on with a majority of his teammates because, like front-line infantry, they shared in the pursuit of the same goal: the Dream.

Trafford also had a girlfriend, each the other’s love of their lives, and smoked weed. Just like my brother. A fact not so entirely shocking for any 20-year-old kid, but the difference between Trafford and your average kid’s story was his troubles reached an apex when he was caught smoking on an official team trip in February, 2014.

By this time, Trafford’s career had not assumed the trajectory he had anticipated. Like my brother, being 20 meant this was Trafford’s last year, and everything — his future, possibly even his girlfriend’s — was riding on it. But Trafford’s plan wasn’t panning out, which sometimes happens for those of us who dare to Dream. That resulting anxiety was undoubtedly at the heart of the troubling behavior team officials noticed. But getting caught smoking weed on the trip was it — Trafford was deemed a trouble-maker — when it should’ve been seen for what it truly was: a cry for help.

Trafford was eventually kicked off his team, and his story ended tragically. Eight days later, after a state and provincewide search, his truck would be found parked behind a Walmart in Saginaw. Terry Trafford and his hockey gear were both still inside.

He had killed himself.

Terry Trafford could have been my brother. They were both in their 20s when their troubles climaxed, both were good players from good families, and both struggled with the pressure of a Dream slipping through their hands like dry sand on a vast beach. The only difference is Rich drove off to get high while Trafford went elsewhere. The pieces of his tragedy eventually resulted in some changes by the team and the league, who swore his death would not be in vain. A leaguewide memo mandated all players must undergo a three-hour mental health assessment. There are also annual Mental Health Awareness nights promoting foundations whose aim is to end the stigma of mental illness, suicide and so on. Each team also has made a mental health professional available to players.

But the truth is these are Band-Aids aimed at stopping a situation should, Lord forbid, one like Trafford’s ever happen again. They address symptoms, not problems, not what is needed. What is needed is change. A systemic shift in thinking. What Trafford and my brother and countless others need are more individuals who embody this change and a system that is concerned with the value of the player as a person — and not the other way around.

Terry Trafford’s funeral service in Toronto in 2014. AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Frank Gunn

Sports needs more men like Maurice Kelly.

Kelly is what you’d call a football lifer. A former NCAA defensive back at Southern University who parlayed his hard hitting, workmanlike style into a 10-year pro career with stops throughout North America, Kelly is not what you would call a “soft” man. Known as “Crash Kelly” back in his playing days, today he simply goes by “Mo” and serves as the vice-president of player engagement for the Seattle Seahawks.

A father and husband, he uses his formidable size to tackle issues instead of opponents as part of head coach Pete Carroll’s player-centric philosophy that has branded him a renegade in some more archaic circles. Quite simply, Carroll believes if the individual is cared for as a person, they’ll be a better player, and it is in this brave new world Mo executes his simple but complex role of life coach — which some have called the most important in the organization. Just ask former Seahawk Ricardo Lockette.

On Nov. 1, 2015, Lockette was blindsided by a Dallas Cowboys safety and knocked unconscious, suffering severe ligament damage in his neck that would require career-ending treatment. In the blink of an eye, without a say in the matter, Lockette’s Dream was over. He “never saw it coming,” but six months later, Lockette was alive and recovering with hope in his eyes and closure in his heart. You could see it at his retirement press conference, and you shouldn’t have been able to. Here was a man who’d had his Dream unfairly snatched away yet radiated genuine gratitude and not because of a chunk of change in the bank or that college degree he had to fall back on. Lockette credited something else for his profound perspective: Mo Kelly.

When he did so, that moment must’ve been as strange for everyone in the press conference room as it had been when Lockette first heard Mo give him financial advice as an NFL rookie. How often do you hear a legitimately compensated professional athlete who had escaped a nightmare, with money in the bank and as well as a college degree, thanking a tough-as-rusty-nails man for showing him something that has no hard cost to administer, for showing him compassion?

Lockette said that was the most important thing he had. Mo had taught Lockette he was a person first and that he would continue be long after his playing career ended whenever God had decided that it was to end. Mo was front and center at Lockette’s career-ending press conference.

Terry Trafford deserved this culture. My brother did, too. We all do.

***

The State Trooper’s response on the Thruway couldn’t have been further from that.

Back on the Thruway, the trooper impassively scans the disarray in of our car parked half buried in slop. He surmises we’re in Hell, but the only guidance he offers two 20-somethings clearly in over their heads is how to pay our speeding ticket or file a court date should we choose to contest it. I take his ticket and throw it behind me right in front of his eyes. He stares a beat then returns to his cruiser. In the intervening moments, Rich has closed his eyes and curled up against the window. Putting on one last show had sapped what strength, if any, remained. I pull some sweaty blankets over him and watch the Trooper’s cruiser disappear over the horizon.

The sky darkens again. It had stopped while he pulled us over. The Flood is to return and lengthen our time on the road and the time until I can get Rich help, if I can at all. I turn the engine over and the radio station we’d been listening to before snaps back on, but this time without static. A song plays, clear as ever. Rich is almost out cold so I juice the volume. I would’ve lit incense if I thought it could help. The lyrics go:

Stranger than your sympathy

And this is my apology

I’m killing myself from the inside out

And all my fears have pushed you out

And I wished for things that I don’t need

And what I chase won’t set me free

It is the song “Sympathy” by The Goo Goo Dolls. I listen closely as Rich rolls over, clutching my arm. I wonder how I’m going to find something that frees us from this monster. We’d tried to fight it — medicine, hot showers, steam showers, and of course prayer — but nothing worked. Maybe there was no answer. Maybe there’d never be one.

My jaw slackens. Maybe all that’s left to do is bring Batman home and bury him…

***

Credit: Tom Szczerbowski-USA TODAY Sports

PART THREE: A NEW BAT-SUIT

We skid up to our childhood home nestled in a row of chestnut shingled roofs in East Toronto after 10 p.m. If it were earlier, kids would be on the street playing ball hockey Dreaming of one day playing in the Staples Center. I want to show them what that pursuit can cost, but no kids are there. All I see are ghosts mystically dancing in the half-light, perhaps ours from that age.

I carry Rich over my shoulder and head for our house. There is no parade to welcome home the big, tough hockey players. Only silence. We crumble through the door left unlocked for us, and I dump him in the basement shower, keeping the lights off so as to not hurt his eyes. I blast the water on high hoping it’ll rinse his stink and make it look like I brought him back in better shape. But he falls to the floor, failing to stand beneath the pressure, so I slump him against the tile wall while the water rushes over us both. Perhaps I need to rinse my own stink.

The drain gurgles when the water carrying most of the shit he’s covered in, along with the broken pieces of the Batman armor he’d donned for so long, goes swirling down. I regard his muscles: They’re not vein-ripped or steel hardened like comic book depictions. Instead, beneath tattoos he never remembers getting, his muscles bear wounds I thought he could never get. I’ll be happy if I never see that fake bat suit armor again.

I leave the shower door open in case he has to call for help. Then, for the first time in 14 hours, get a moment to myself alone in our family kitchen.

Pictures are what we have on our walls, and they tell the story of our lives. I focus on the ones that do not show hockey: a family vacation to Phoenix, a high-school graduation, Mom and Dad’s wedding photo, and the family party when Rich first got drunk. He’s older than 14 in most of these pictures, and it occurs to me that he’s spent almost ten years fighting this monster alone. Those years are preserved in celluloid. I think about that and when I look closely, I can notice his eyes darken from one photo to the next. If I move quick enough, his destruction plays like my very own tragic movie — all leading up to this moment.

A YouTube clip of Rich’s last game for L.A. in the 2010 Stanley Cup playoffs lives online. At its end, with the game a foregone loss, his coach sends him out to fight. Rich shouldn’t have even been on the ice. He got high on a park bench that morning as the sun was rising. He looked like shit and played worse. Yet here he was. After his opponent pummels him, the clip pans to Rich as he heads to the lockers. You can see his eyes are not eyes, but empty wells leading to nowhere. I think that pan makes for a fitting final shot of the little picture movie I’m watching here in our kitchen. I can’t take it anymore. I finally go upstairs.

I creep to Mom and Dad’s room at the end of the hall past Ben. Though I’m quiet, Mom and Dad wake. I don’t even have to knock. Kids never do when parents finally sense trouble. They send me back down with fresh clothes and a towel while debating who will come with us to the hospital. After all, someone needs to stay with Ben. Back downstairs, the water has run cold. I kill it and offer Rich a towel along with the new clothes. Time to go, I tell him — but his pain has worsened.

He’s hyperventilating between whimpers, clutching his stomach, eyes cemented shut. I set the clothes on the toilet and wrap the towel around his shoulders, plopping down beside him on the wet tile. A set of glass blocks in the shower let in natural light from outside. Save for whatever trickles through them, we’re in utter darkness. Time to go, I again tell him. He still doesn’t respond, just traces a bead of water along my forearm that’s fallen from the shower head.

“You think I’m gonna die, Matt?”

“No. We’re gonna be okay. We’re gonna fix this, man. Do you think you’re gonna die?”

“I don’t know, bro. It’s real bad. It’s worse than you think.”

“How bad? Wasn’t it just the drinking and smoking?”

“Nah.”

When he says that, I can feel the last part of me — the part that somehow still hopes this might be a weekend fix — slide off my body, just like that water bead he’s tracing.

“It was everything. I did everything. I don’t know for how long. But I do everything.”

I gulp and look away. Mom appears in the door, car keys in hand, bundled in a jacket with blankets, water and a small overnight bag. She’s ready to go to war. She has to be. Several members of my extended family are addicts, so she’s seen this monster before. She’d just hoped she would have never passed it on to her own son. Rich looks up at Mom, an unspoken truth passing between them in the way it only can with mother and child. He pukes once more before she helps him into new underwear then, under his own weight for the first time all day, marches to her car like a prisoner marching his last mile. I stay in the shower a few more minutes.

He did everything?

The last of the water twists down the drain. Everything is all gone.

After the hospital, we’re in rehab listening to the chief clinician give us the nuts and bolts of what’s about to happen with Rich after everyone’s finished chuckling at my food poisoning cover story. We agree to place Rich in their care, but more importantly, he has finally surrendered to that arrangement for real this time. The clinician’s words have no effect on me. I’m too exhausted from the drive, from the road, from the life we all haven’t been living.

In the end, there is nothing more to do but sign a few papers, which Mom of course does. They’ve in fact already taken the bag she’d packed and exchanged it for an ID bracelet tethered to his wrist with a cheap plastic clip. When it’s time to go, I spot orderlies leading Rich down the rehab hall in a pair of slippers towards what will be his room, like something out of Cuckoo’s Nest. That movie ends sadly.

Mom takes me by the hand. Together, we swing out the metal doors into approaching dawn. She has work tomorrow, and I have to figure out how to live the next part of my life without my brother. Before we go, I glimpse one last look at Rich before the doors seal shut. This is a kind of goodbye for us, which frightens me because there are no reassurances in goodbyes. But mostly I know this is kind of goodbye where you know you’ll never see who you’re looking at again.

I don’t remember when I wake up next because every time I do, Rich isn’t there and Ben and I want him to be. So I convince myself I’m still asleep or dreaming or back on that road. And even though it’s not prison and we’re in the same city, we can’t visit Rich. They call it “dissociation from everything he used to know.” In the end, though it’s the right thing to do, I find it a hard pill to swallow — one that gets stuck between your stomach and mouth and the more you try to swallow.

The questions people ask make it throb more. Folks stroll up to our house all the time, and given that Mom and Dad have jobs, bills and two other kids to raise on top of a third in rehab, the role of spokesperson falls to me. But I’m not ready for this. My little brother and I, we’re sidekicks. Hero isn’t in our job description.

So when Dad’s at work and Mom’s crying and only has me to console her — I’m not used to that, not prepared, because I’m still a child, even though I should be. So I don’t want to talk and if I have to, I don’t want to lie. But I of course have to. I can’t tell anyone where Rich is so I lie when people ask me, either in person or online. I come up with more creative cover stories when I text people from Rich’s blackberry — though I’m tempted to tell the drug dealer texting Rich for a “hook up” to swing by our house so I can hook him up with a baseball bat to the face.

I get so sick of lying I decide to do what my brother did. I don’t use. I don’t drink — for two years. I find another way to escape, and it is through a relationship with a girl who’s totally wrong for me. I date her and show up late to my summer job, skip gym sessions where I should be training for my next year of college hockey and most importantly skip nights at the coffee shop where I should be writing with my younger brother.

It occurs to me that I am walking my brother’s line, choosing to do as he did, when what we should have chosen was each other. At nights, I wander our neighborhood streets crying to my best friend on the phone, looking up at the sky through the dense foliage of trees — searching for a sign of the brilliant bat signal. But sadly there is no signal and worse, no Dark Knight.

Later that summer, I pull up to my house, ready to pack a bag of clothes quickly for a weekend adventure. The light of summer’s dusk hits me and with it, the image of kids in front of our house playing ball hockey. They’re back. But another noticeable light bathes the young dreamers, and it’s not the streetlights, but the glow of our kitchen TV bouncing through our front door. That TV hasn’t been on all summer, but someone is inside the house watching it.

I can hear laughter from the kitchen. I open our door. Rich is inside with Dad.

As the summer had slogged on, we’d been allowed to visit Rich once a week for an hour to grab a coffee or a bite on Spadina — so I wonder if his presence in the kitchen is perhaps just another of these visits. Offering the seat beside him, Rich tells me he is actually home, that rehab had said he’d been doing so well they decided he could continue his recovery through outpatient care.

When he finishes his explanation, he returns to the crazy story he’s telling Dad over a bite of food. I thought we should have kept talking about his release but evidently Dad doesn’t think so. He’s not interested in it. Instead, he’s cooked his boy a steak, a potato, some corn on the cob and a plate for Ben and I, too. How did he know I would show up? He didn’t.

Rich continues telling his story. I try to maintain my shitty poker face while he continues his story, but my brain is stuck trying to work through the situation the way your knife gets stuck on a knot in a steak.

Stuck remembering Hell. I try and work through the knot, try and swallow the pill in my throat, but there is no relent. I need a drink. Rich and Dad ask for one, too, so I grab three sodas from the fridge. But Rich corrects me with an order for two — Dad likes to have a beer and he should be able to in front of Rich. He has learned a lot about himself in rehab, namely that he doesn’t have to let other people affect him. So I grab two sodas and lob Dad a beer across the kitchen. He cracks it and takes a sip and in a moment of irony, Rich cracks a stupid joke — something trying to count all the beers he’s ever had in his life.

I stare daggers at him. The knife finally cutting through that knot and the throbbing pill in my throat finally explodes as it lands in my stomach.

“How the fuck can you make a joke?! After everything that’s just happened?! After all the shit we just went through! We had to lie for you, lie to Ben! This wasn’t supposed to happen, and you’re just gonna sit there and make a fucking joke? You should be apologizing. Where’s my fucking apology? WHERE’S MY FUCKING APOLOGY?!”

I slam my hands and burst into tears, which I try to hide by burying my head in my lap. I notice I’ve broken my dinner plate into pieces and steak juice is oozing across our white counter. Dad grabs a paper towel and quietly mops it off the counter and the floor, as my tears mix with the concoction. They are the tears that I wanted to cry every mile of our long drive home. Every time he winced. Every time I couldn’t help him. Every time I wanted to have my big brother to cry to but he was gone, somewhere else.

But now my big brother is home, and I need to cry in front of him. I need to be the little brother again. It’s my damn right to be. So I cry and cry and cry a lot more.

Rich calmly stands with his renewed legs that have carried more weight than I’ll ever know and puts his arms around me, cradling me, assuring me he’s sorry for everything that’s happened. He never meant for it to go down like this. But he’s also something else: grateful not just for having survived but for a second chance. For an opportunity to live a better life than ever. He’s not perfect. He will make mistakes. We all will. The only difference this time around is that when when we lose our way, we’ll no longer be ashamed. We will be each other’s hero.

In place of the fear that I had on that long ride home is now filled with peace because I know, despite the journey’s twists and turns, the rain, the storm, the police — all roads eventually end. At the end of ours was recovery, a process that began in that very car when I began to change the way I saw my brother.

It’s true what I said about goodbyes. When I left Rich in rehab, I never saw that same guy again. No, when I look up from crying in his arms in our kitchen, with Dad beside us, I see a new man, my real brother, and for the first time ever, eyes that are finally clear and purposeful. Later that night, he tucks Ben and I into bed where we sleep peacefully knowing that when we wake next our big brother will be there to guide and protect us. And us to do the same for him.

A couple of weeks later, Rich, Ben and I are in his car driving. The first place Rich went after he got home from rehab was the gym, and he’s been going ever since. We found a trainer who believes in us, feeds us, hangs out with us. He still runs the same gym and loves us as much as he did then. I’m at the wheel again in the car because that’s just what middle brothers do. The windows are down. Toronto shines. All is as it should be. We get to a red light and stop.

As we wait, Rich rifles through radio stations a mile a minute, then suddenly settles on one playing a song I can’t quite hear at first beneath the sounds of city life. But Rich somehow knows every note of it. The light is still red as I look at Rich, curious.

“What — what is it?”

“You know man, in rehab someone gave me an old iPod that had like ten songs. They were shit except for this one.”

He juices the volume knob and gestures to the lyrics coming over the radio. They sing:

What I chase won’t set me free.

The song is Sympathy by The Goo Goo Dolls.

“I listened to it every day. It’s what got me through.”

Ben and I steal a glance at each other. I can’t help but smile. Rich puts a bare foot up.

“Just drive, bro.”

The light changes green. A car behind us honks. We drive on.

***

The three Clune brothers: Matt, Rich and Ben.

EPILOGUE: THE RETURN OF THE SIGNAL

THREE YEARS LATER

Ontario Reign locker room, Southern California

In January, 2013, I was playing minor-league hockey in Ontario, California, a town located an hour east of L.A. I’d long dreamed of moving to the city with Ben to pursue a career as a writer, but when I graduated college, it felt like I wasn’t quite done with hockey and hockey wasn’t quite done with me. I never really knew why. I’d have to find out later.

So rather than taking a gig in an agency mail room, I took the next best thing: slinging it out in minor league hockey. It’s a great icebreaker, to get the lay of the land working a job to pay the bills, and it let me spend my spare time writing. By then, Ben was in college just outside of Nashville, and Rich was back East, slugging it out in the AHL, where, by all accounts, he’d probably remain until his current contract expired. But a funny thing was happening in professional hockey that season — a series of events conspiring towards a more remarkable end to this story than anything we could write.

The NHL had been locked out for the first part of 2012-13 until a last-minute agreement was reached and a mad scramble ensued to save the year, which meant a truncated training camp and more importantly, a shortened waiver-wire. The waiver system is basically a clearance sale: When a team puts a player on waivers, they offer said player to every other team for 24 hours. It’s a mechanism unions instituted to give players one last chance at finding their way to the big leagues before being banished to the minors. Very seldom are players salvaged.

Rich had been exposed to waivers four straight years and four straight years gone unclaimed. Just like clockwork. We had every reason to believe this year would be the same as the many ones that had passed. It was hard to complain though: Rich was healthy, in a good rhythm, and that was enough. Evidently, though, it wasn’t enough for Someone else.

In my locker room on the final morning of Rich’s waiver eligibility, I was pouring burnt coffee into a Dixie cup. If it was bad before, the plastic layer of the cup melting from the heat makes it absolutely putrid. I needed some gum to mask the taste. Standing beside me is my trainer, Tom, who was scrolling through his Twitter. I munched my gum and drank the extra terrible coffee. With a team meeting set to begin, Tom mumbles something to me.

“How’s it going, Cluner?”

“Same shit, different pile, T.”

“Not today it isn’t. Your brother just got picked up on waivers.”

I look at him with a grimace from the coffee replaced by a sharp, growing curiosity.

“Fuck off.”

“What?”

Someone in the room yells at me to take a seat for the impending meeting.

“Why did you just tell me to fuck off?”

“I don’t — wait, say what you just said to me again.”

My coach steps out of his office. The meeting is beginning. I am now late.

“Your brother just got claimed off waivers this morning,” Tom repeats. “He is going back to the NHL. This is real, man.”

Coach rings me up for a twenty dollar fine — money I really don’t have in the minors — and he’d probably forgive me for it if I take my seat right away but I can’t. I have to know the truth.

“Who picked him up, T?”

Tom shows me his Twitter pulled up on his phone.

“Nashville.”

Nashville. An hour from where Ben is currently going to college. I take my seat for the meeting, smiling, realizing Someone had been watching Rich through his ups and downs, highs and lows, and what they saw was enough to change his fortune. We never had the slightest clue. Isn’t that the way miracles work best?

The meeting ends and I dash to my phone, finally getting to Rich after three calls. When we both calm down, he says it’s true, that he was sleeping when his roommate saw he’d been claimed on TV. Even he didn’t believe it at first. Then his agent called, followed by someone in Nashville, confirming what he had hoped for, what we had hoped for, against all odds.

One month later, I am in the Honda Center in Anaheim, waiting for a hockey game. By a stroke of scheduling luck, the visiting team is Nashville. It is near the start of warm-ups and I’m alone in the vast canyon of empty seats in the lower bowl. Though it is full of sights to behold, my eyes remain locked on one location: the tunnel where the visiting players are to appear. As it always does, my mind remembers what it can’t forget. Remembers the trip I’d made all those years ago to Southern California in the hopes of seeing my brother’s Dream materialize only to watch him be a late scratch three games in a row.

Now here in Anaheim, my cellphone will tell you tonight is almost three years to that trip. What it won’t tell you is this time around I didn’t have to fly across the country to force something that wasn’t ready to take shape. It won’t tell you I have been placed here because Someone, whom I suspect to be the true author of this story, has decided that this is the right time for the Dream to play out. And it plays out like I always imagined it would.

No PA system announcing Rich Clune as a scratch. No letdowns or three-day benders. This time, the Dream plays with only the sight of an older brother emerging for warm-ups, searching the stands for his younger one, who’d rented a car with what little money he had, to come watch a promise be fulfilled. The Dream plays with me catching his eyes as soon as he steps on the ice, dressed in a gleaming helmet and crisp uniform adorned with major-league logos.

He looks to be in the same Bat suit he’d worn before, but I know better now. I know this suit is forged from a different armor, one that can bear holes and scars, one capable of breaking and bleeding: a human armor that can be destroyed, repaired, and be all the more heroic for it. His eyes betray this recognition, too. Mine betray tears.

He glides to a spot on the ice in front of me and with a flip of his stick sends an object over the glass which lands by my feet, in a puddle of water. I pick it up: It is a hockey puck, not unlike the one he’d promised to get us when we were a couple young guns with nothing but wrestling stories to our name.

A knowing grin crosses his lips and then he’s off to join his teammates, leaving me to cradle the cool rubber in hand. Leaving me to know, as only a brother (or sidekick) can, that outside in the parking lot, somewhere up in the sky, high above the marine layer and Hell, in the place where the angels live and the demons cannot go, a particular patch of sky will be lit aglow with a familiar shadow encased within — testifying that the signal of the Bat has returned, along with the Dark Knight, after his long while in Hell.

Oh, yes, the Batman has come back — and he has brought Robin with him, too.

***

Matt Clune is a writer for the screen and for print with his brother, Ben Clune. They live in Los Angeles. Rich Clune recently re-signed to play a third season in the Maple Leafs organization in 2017-18.