The New Yorker | The Sporting Scene

Blood for the Blood God

A Wunderkind, a Breakaway, a Knife

by Erin Williams
November 2, 2017

The difficult part of covering hockey is that the players are extremely well-trained, from their teen years onward, to repeat each other's bland phrases. Few are the openly needy, the pugnacious, the crackpots, the entertaining wide-rangers and phrase-coiners of baseball in its winter sibling sport. So it's not particularly a surprise that the Montreal Metros captain, Shane Hollander, is an incredibly boring interview. He works very hard to be boring. It might be a whole other sport to him.

He answered questions the night it happened, not at once but several hours afterward, and answered all of those questions blandly. Officially, the delay was to send him to the hospital and get him checked out; unofficially, it just appeared to be a terrible idea to put him in front of the cameras so soon. He might say something out of turn, the adrenaline still high. He might be something other than boring. And anyway, none of the staff on either team were ready to share him yet.

Hollander, 26, is as Canadian as maple syrup: born in Ottawa to civil servants, sincere, hardworking, fanatically competitive but modest about it. Someone trained him along the way not to say sorey the way most Canadians do, but he routinely apologizes for any awkwardness or inconvenience. He plays hockey “the right way,” which is as tribal a phrase as you can possibly imagine. He has been the best at every level of the sport for his entire life. He went second in the professional draft at age 18, and bypassed the lesser leagues to join the Metros starting lineup almost immediately. Rookie of the Year, age nineteen. Led his team to back-to-back cups. He's been their captain since 2013.

Captains in Major League Hockey are a requirement: rather than let any player speak to the officials, all gripes, suggestions, and clarifications on-ice go through a designated representative. Every team has one. For the Admirals, it's Scott Hunter, of recent fame (The Talk of the Town, July 9). He's the classic kind of captain: charismatic, older, authoritative. The camera loves him. This is his first year as the only openly gay professional hockey player, after coming out spectacularly -- not to say recklessly -- on the ice and on national television last summer immediately after the Admirals won the Cup. By contrast, Hollander is soft-spoken, private, remarkably anti-charismatic. Except when he is playing hockey, he disappears in every room he's in.

In football, they break legs. Basketball tends towards ligament tears in the knees. Baseball has the dreaded comebacker, a batted ball that will leave a hell of a bruise, but only very rarely will it hit a man squarely in the face: break his nose, knock out teeth, shatter a cheekbone. In hockey, all those things happen all the time. Players -- male players -- are notoriously blasé about facial scars and gaps in their smiles, and protested ferociously against being required to wear helmets at all, much less the full-cage or cage-and-bubble face protection that is now standard for women’s play and every level of junior leagues. Major League Hockey is also the only professional league in North America that tolerates bare-knuckle fist-fights right in front of the fans.

So to say that something violent happened at a hockey game two weeks ago is to say that it was a Wednesday. Still. Something extraordinarily violent happened at a hockey game two weeks ago, and the chief reason it wasn't fatal is that Shane Hollander was there. During the second period at Madison Square Garden, if you had been watching from the press box, it would have looked like an ordinary play: the Metros with the puck, Hollander starting a breakaway, and two Admirals defensemen on his heels. A breakaway is a beautiful thing to watch, unimpeded footwork at incredible speed, and Hollander is known for his spectacular breakaways. He balances low over his knees, hands loose, a graceful figure of pure concentration. It seems almost a shame to allow defensemen to get in his way, but that's their job. They came at him from both sides, more a tackle than a check. The three bodies collided and landed in a heap on the ice while the puck, unguided, slid onward towards the crease. Squeak of the whistle, the goalie corralled the puck, and the three downed players, curiously, were not getting up to return to play.

They never got up. They looked like they were wrestling on the ice, and worry rippled through the other players as they glided around nearby. Hunter, for the Admirals, waved to draw the attention of his bench's staff. Fans fell quiet. The Jumbotron went to a static cyan logo, and put on forgettable pop music: thus nobody was surprised when emergency equipment was soon hustled onto the ice. Usually, the concern is blows to the head and spine, and players are locked into cervical collars before being loaded onto a backboard, but that's not what happened here. Instead a scrum of trainers and medics skidded their way to the scene and began wrestling too: the medics pried at Hollander's arms. The three players pulled apart, one of them -- 29-year-old defenseman James MacIlvain -- was slugged onto the wheeled gurney without ceremony and dragged over to the ambulance exit with a trainer straddling his waist. Normally they move with deliberation, to give all parties time to assess the injured player; but as the medics scrambled away, it became clear why they were in such a hurry: MacIlvain had left behind an enormous bloodstain. It was shocking poppy-bright against the white ice. It hadn't been obvious until that moment because the Admirals home jersey is red.

It does happen, very rarely. In 1989, it happened to Clint Malarchuk in Buffalo: after a hard check, an opposing player's ice skate accidentally opened a 6-inch gash on the right side of his neck and severed the carotid artery. Convinced he would die, he stumbled five steps and into the arms of the man who saved him: his athletic trainer and a former combat medic named Jim Pizzutelli, who in the moment was able to clamp a hand down beneath Malarchuk's artery and slow the bleeding until doctors could stabilize him. Malarchuk never lost consciousness, but a number of fans passed out at the sight, and needless to say the live television footage was never re-aired. It's estimated that he lost a liter and a half of blood that day. Today, the league requires an ambulance onsite, and doctors sitting right behind the home team bench, as preparation for whatever danger might present itself. Today, most hockey leagues in North America require plastic or Kevlar neck guards to protect the soft tissue from laceration. But MLH does not.

James MacIlvain wore no neck guard: nobody in that game wore one. On review of footage, it's clear that he and his fellow defenseman Jerry Thompkins, 22, both caught up with Hollander at the same moment, and crashed more into each other than into their target. Thompkins was thrown backwards and hyperextended his right knee; the blade of his skate gleamed upward and managed to find skin on the front left of MacIlvain's neck.

A hockey skate blade is slightly convex, to accommodate balance adjustments. Similarly, the base of the skate forms a shallow concave C, so that either or both sides of the blade can touch the ice but the center does not, a space called "hollow ground." Skates are sharpened regularly to maintain their ability to grip and glide. In effect, poor Jerry Thompkins unintentionally lobbed a two-bladed fileting knife at his own teammate, and scored a direct hit. A four-inch laceration opened three important things in MacIlvain’s throat: his windpipe, a jugular vein, and his left carotid artery. Arterial blood is under pressure, so when an artery opens up, it gushes, sometimes visibly pulsing at the same speed as the heart. It is the most dangerous form of blood loss, and can result in loss of consciousness in under a minute.

Hollander was ready. That first evening, before a shaken scrum of reporters, he laid out the events in monotone, eyes unfocussed, unwilling to give any one camera his attention. He was factual. He never described his feelings. Having been knocked down forward under MacIlvain and Thompkins, he felt a hot liquid fountain onto his upper arm. He smelled blood. He shoved MacIlvain over, whipped off his bulky gloves in one motion as for fighting, and climbed on top of him as he lay on his side. Like Jim Pizzutelli of old, he closed his fist over MacIlvain's neck. He could describe how his palm seemed to float, the blood flow being so powerful, which is why he clasped both hands onto that neck and hung on grimly, strangling MacIlvain to save his life. Hollander had no memory of how the paramedics wrestled him off and took over stanching MacIlvain's wound.

Every player knows the lore, though it's not formally taught anywhere. Hollander could not name Jim Pizzutelli, but he could hold out his right hand in a C shape, knuckles rough and pink, and re-enact his understanding that if he had done nothing then MacIlvain would have bled to death. As it turns out, his technique was not perfect: he might have done better to occlude the artery below the wound rather than press directly onto it. But because Hollander used both hands, he sealed the windpipe closed against that hot wet fountain. MacIlvain didn’t bleed to death, and he also didn’t drown in his own blood.

Thompkins, in a separate press conference, avowed that he hadn't even noticed MacIlvain's bleeding at first, and tearfully proclaimed that he'd just been too slow, too worried about his own torn-up knee even to understand what his teammate needed from him. Thompkins thanked God that Hollander was there. MacIlvain, for his part, is not able to speak while his airway is healing. He is eager to type up his thoughts to reporters, however, about the Angel of Death who sat on his chest, brown-eyed and implacable, as his vision began to gray out. Couldn’t have been strangled by a nicer guy.

That first night, slumping thanks to the late hour, Hollander again and again disclaimed all accusations of heroism.

He clearly had no perspective on how it looked on the ice. Reporters were reluctant to bring it up to him directly, and of course the footage is gruesome to review. But those of us who were there saw him sitting on his haunches, as the gurney sped away. After a few moments he climbed back onto his skates, too stunned even to hunt for his discarded gear. He was absolutely drenched with blood. He wore the away Metros jersey, which is blue and white; but it was no longer the team colors across his knees, his chest, up both sleeves to the elbow. His bare hands were dripping, and his chin. It had splashed up so high that it beaded along the lower edge of his visor, in front of his eyes.

They stopped the game, of course. Players retreated to their locker rooms and arena staff had the unenviable task of cleaning the ice, which they did at first with towels. Then they brought out the Zamboni and ran it again and again over the bloodstain before it finally disappeared. Play did not resume till after word came back that MacIlvain, in the hospital, had been stabilized. Most of the players went back out and played out the entire remaining time, but when the captains had to go confer with the referee at center ice, it was one of the Metro alternates, not Hollander, who stood next to Scott Hunter for the Admirals.

What Hollander was doing for the next five hours was not made public. He reappeared, clean and in street clothes, at the hospital at which both MacIlvain and Thompkins had been seen that night. He sat down for the press, with his counterpart Hunter answering questions by his side. When reporters were finally exhausted he departed, always flanked by Metro and Admiral staff members. As much as Hollander keeps to himself, as much as teams close ranks to protect their own, rumors quickly circulated about what had happened in the locker rooms. Some vomited; some wept; some threw things; screaming matches broke out about nothing. The Admirals' executive staff placed a series of unpleasant phone calls to MacIlvain's father, his sister, his ex-wife. The equipment managers have seen blood before, though not usually this much at once. They gathered up jerseys and helmets and shoulder pads in buckets, and scrubbed them promptly in a detergent solution so they would be dry and ready to go when both teams departed the following morning. Various Metros have made oblique reference to mandatory swallows from a bottle -- in one version rye, in another whisky -- presumably after the third period ended. Hollander denies this rumor: he never drinks alcohol during the season. But he admits he wasn't in the locker room after the third period.

So what was he doing during those five hours? Did he go to the hospital because of an injury not disclosed to the public? Did Thompkins's skate hit two targets instead of one? Hollander chose the New Yorker for an interview because his father is a longtime subscriber. He sat down in a hotel lobby in Philadelphia after a recent game to talk.

His knuckles are still pink and chapped. His thick black hair swept off his forehead, his long face seems older and more mature than just two weeks ago. He glances awkwardly down at a text on his phone, face pinking a bit, then turns the phone all the way off and pockets it. He orders herbal tea and asks whether everyone is comfortable. It's like interviewing your dad, except your dad is 26 years old and has just been through a traumatic experience. He prefers to provide his insights with his gaze firmly on his own hands which lie clenched in his lap.

As he talks through what happened at Madison Square Garden, he remembers small details of the struggle: the hard breath out as MacIlvain came down on his back, disturbing the fine snow on the surface of the ice. The jammy feel of drying blood between his sticky fingers. The guttural groans MacIlvain made: “He thought I was attacking him, obviously. He was kicking and waving his fists.” Hollander doesn't remember the walk back into the locker room, under a silent, horrified crowd.

And then, halting, as if verbalizing it for the first time, he explains what happened next: assistant coaches stopped him in the middle of the locker room, in front of his teammates, and stripped him methodically of his gear. The room attendants took away his blood-soaked clothing and led him, naked, into the showers, where a gang of trainers had undressed to their shorts to await him with soap and washcloths. They stood him under the hot water and washed his face and his forearms and his legs and all over his body, hunting for wounds as they went. He recalls that they returned to the palm of his right hand several times, diligently trying to buff dried blood out of his lifeline. A travel coordinator soaped up a hairbrush and combed any clots out of his short hair. They inspected his teeth, and offered him glasses of mouthwash. (His mouthguard was thrown away.) While he was being washed, the floor of the locker room was scrubbed clean of all the droplets he’d left just from moving around. The staff toweled him dry like he was a toddler, and he let them do it. As they helpfully interfered with his perfectly normal ability to put on his own clothes, the social media intern arrived to take up his hands one after another, and clean under his nails with her own nail kit.

He describes all this with a profound incredulity, as if it were something he witnessed from a great distance away rather than experienced in his own body. The puzzle is that such a private, self-sufficient person allowed it to happen at all.

"It wasn't about me," he insists. "It was something they needed to do. The players, the staff, the fans. It happened to all of us. It would have been --" here he gropes for a word, "-- irresponsible of me to object." He might have been able to fend them off, sorey, sorey, but he instantly recognized the need for others to participate in the ritual for which he had been chosen.

It continued into the night. His teammates clonked their helmets against his bare head, one at a time, as they said goodbye and headed back out onto the ice. Building employees sneaked him out of Madison Square Garden and drove him to the hospital, always reaching out to touch him and make sure he was still there. An Admirals trainer insisted on another inspection of his arms, in case any lacerations had been missed. (Hollander affirms, once again, that he was not injured in any way.) He fielded many phone calls that night, and ignored many more. He ignored the internet, though the internet clamored and still clamors for his attention. Hunter arrived after the game concluded, coaches from both teams, MacIlvain's father, Thompkins's parents and girlfriend. They shook his hand, grabbed his shoulder, wept against his chest, and he believes it would have been irresponsible to beg off all that concentrated attention. It went on for hours, till MacIlvain was out of surgery and the vigil could move to his bedside. At every level, the priests and deacons of hockey reaffirmed the belonging of the members of their flock. When asked whether he needed to do any weeping, Hollander consciously unclenches his hands and shakes his head.

“It wasn’t about me,” he says again. “It could have been anyone.” He agrees with the idea that all of the interpersonal affirmations have provided some insulation from being traumatized by the events he witnessed. When he blew up his official itinerary to return to Madison Square Garden the following day, to thank the staff who had cleaned up the bloody mess, they lined up to ask for hugs. “So many people out there care about me. I don’t want to let them down.”

"Do I sometimes have nightmares? Of course. I'm not some -- some hockey robot," says Hollander with distaste. It's not a secret that people have called him exactly that in years past: no sense of humor, no charisma, no love for the dirtier aspects of the game. Playing “the right way” both on and off the ice has not, heretofore, won him the complete acceptance one might expect. In an incredibly white sport, he is biracial, Japanese on his mother's side, and much ink has been spilled about whether that one fact has driven him to both achievement and self-effacement. "Everyone on the team had nightmares. But we come together, we deal with it as a team, and we come back stronger."

Usage of the same cliches to describe a near-fatal exsanguination and a missed shot on goal might sound, to the generalist ear, like rank callousness. To the world of hockey, however, it sounds like the expansion of existing mantras to encompass a new experience. Hollander may not have any other language to use, so he uses what he knows. As a generationally tall poppy in a league that detests tall poppies, he dutifully denies the individual and returns power to the team, the league, the tradition.

When asked whether any rule-changes could make the sport safer, he declines to suggest anything. This, it seems, is a power he considers firmly out of his hands. "It's a full-contact sport. I busted my collarbone just last spring. We all know the risks." Unstated is the difference between the abstract knowledge about a dangerous game and the concrete experience of a slit throat spraying blood into your teeth. A true hockey nerd, Hollander indicates his familiarity with all the old arguments about the slow introduction of mandatory safety equipment; the culture of routinely minimizing injuries; the glory in fist-fights, which other sports consider barbaric; the dubious utility of concussion protocols. He is familiar with all this, but doggedly, worshipfully neutral. "I'll refer you to the league on that question," he says, several times in a row. "The league would know better than I do."

Only on broader, more philosophical questions does Hollander allow himself individual opinions. "I drive a sensible car, and I always wear my seatbelt. I don't smoke. I try really hard to do everything right." His expression darkens, a double line between his brows. "But it's impossible to protect yourself from every possible hazard, and I'd be an insane recluse if I tried. I wouldn't be able to play hockey if I tried." Hockey is the only job he's ever had. It organizes his days, his seasons, his meals, his sleep patterns. He is young enough that he cannot yet imagine what life might be like after he is no longer able to play. It is fair to call hockey his first and maybe only love. He refuses to engage with the idea that it's the sport itself that might be the problem, and that improving the sport’s safety record might mean altering it beyond recognition. Even now, even after keeping James MacIlvain alive with his bare hands, he cannot criticize hockey for putting him in the position where that heroic act became necessary.

"We all know the risks," he repeats, then pauses. Slowly, his voice never leaving a gentle monotone, he strays off-message: "Maybe we glorify those risks too much. Maybe it lets us convince ourselves that we're brave."

With a blink, Hollander seems to recognize he's in unfamiliar territory. When asked what bravery means to him, he rambles his way back to cliche. "Every 18-year-old kid coming over from Europe to play in a small Canadian town, especially if they don't speak much English. That's pretty brave. Some guys' careers, being willing to move to a whole different division to be close to family, that’s a brave decision. Scott Hunter, he was brave."

After years of secrecy and what he himself calls "crippling paranoia," Hunter tossed aside all caution and beckoned his longtime boyfriend out onto the ice to join the wives and children of his teammates when the Admirals won the cup in June. In the months since, he has received incredible fan support, including from fans of divisional rivals; he's also seen a fair amount of disapproval for him, for his sexuality, for the disruptive nature of how he chose to disclose it. Trash-talk on the ice sometimes gets ugly. Locker-room talk can be awkward and go silent when he walks in. He's lost a few friends. The MLH press releases about him are clipped and polite rather than warm. He knew there were risks, and did it anyway, and thus far has no regrets at having forced a conversation about what playing hockey “the right way” really means. Hunter doesn't consider himself brave, but when he hears that Hollander does, he is touched: "When I first met Hollander he was this nervy, coltish rookie and now he's matured into the most righteous player in the league. Honestly, that's the biggest compliment he could give me."

And what of Hollander himself? Does he not think of himself as brave? He makes eye-contact for the first time.

"I don't know," he says, frowning. He thinks it through for a long moment. "I hope so."

His first act of bravery may be upon him already: Hollander reached out to his various sports-equipment sponsors and has acquired several different models of neck guard to try out. He is still testing them out, in search of a model that does not chafe or interfere with his style of play. At his level of fame and influence, he can request a custom model, and receive it in the mail in a few days. “I haven’t worn one in a game yet,” he says. “But I think it’ll happen soon.” If it does, he will be one of the six per cent of players who wear one voluntarily. Neither the Admirals nor Montreal, nor any other team in MLH, has indicated that they will require neck guards on their players going forward.

Hollander has played four games already since that night, waving awkwardly whenever the away crowds chant his name. Flowers still arrive daily at his home arena in Montreal, and also here at Madison Square Garden, and thrown onto the rink at games Hollander is playing in other cities as well: red rose petals by the bucketful. He is transported separately from his teammates to avoid the mobs of strangers who want to shake his hand. Internet pundits have been trying out ghastly nicknames for him: Sacré-Couer, Bloody Hollzy, Red Leader. A number of fans have made their own jerseys, with the Metros logo but in home Admirals colors, but MLH frowns on such trademark violation, and has made noises about confiscating them if worn to arenas. Viewers near and far feel the need to do their part to commemorate and participate in the event they witnessed. After eight years of consistent excellence, perhaps Shane Hollander has finally been accepted into the pantheon of hockey greatness.

He finds all the attention a bit much, but he smiles. “I hope they all become Metros fans,” he says, always loyal.

No hockey player I've spoken to, across any team, has been willing to reflect on the danger inherent in the sport they love so much. To a man, they proclaim that it was just incredible bad luck. James MacIlvain was chosen as the sacrifice this time, and the sacrifices will continue, at random, until someone dies or until the sport comes to an end, whichever happens last. Players make their ritual gestures, put on their lucky socks, abjure the equipment that would actually protect them because it is not required, and then strap machetes onto their feet all over again. They cannot disappoint their teammates.