Bob Probert: The NHL's Undisputed Heavyweight Champ and its Ultimate Tragic Hero

Bob Probert was the NHL's heavyweight champ for 16 seasons, the baddest enforcer in a golden age of tough guys. His premature death reveals that period's cost and the connection between fighting, addiction, and head trauma

The late Bob Probert (1965-2010) is the closest thing the NHL has to a heavyweight champion. Over the course of 16 NHL seasons, he fought 232 times, according to HockeyFights.com, and he retired with an even 3,300 penalty minutes.  As fighting continues to fade from the modern game, it’s difficult to conceive of a new contender emerging for his all-time belt.

The respect Probert garnered from his peers is unparalleled. In the foreword to Probert’s autobiography Tough Guy (written with Kirstie McClellan Day), Detroit teammate Steve Yzerman (who became a Red Wing two rounds before Probert did in the 1983 Draft) recalls the 1988 NHL All-Star Game: “All the greats, like Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier, were there, and the first thing they wanted to do was meet Probie. I remember them coming over and asking me, ‘Can you introduce me to the big fella?’ He was revered by players, and it wasn’t just because he was a tough guy, it was because he was a great player.”

Perhaps the most succinct description of Probert’s game comes from one of his contemporaries, enforcer Chris Kotsopoulus: “He was like a battleship cruising the ice ready to take on all comers. Plenty of guys were just simply scared sh--less of him.”

But for Probert, hockey never seemed to exist in a vacuum. Booze, drugs, and addiction were close at hand away from the rink, and on the ice, it’s not that his work wasn’t appreciated, but its cost didn’t become clear until it was too late.

A tragic hero if ever there were one, Probert battled addiction and legal trouble throughout his NHL career. There were car and motorcycle accidents, DUIs, an arrest for cocaine possession at the Windsor-Detroit border, and several stays at rehab.

Then, as is so often and so cruelly the case, Probert paid the greatest price for the enforcer’s lifestyle once he’d entered a new era of his life—as a family man. At the age of 45, the father of four died of a heart attack suffered while boating on Lake St. Clair between Michigan and Ontario.

Posthumous examinations of his brain at Boston University revealed that he had suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (better known as CTE), a by-product of his years as a professional bare-knuckle brawler.

The tragedy of Bob Probert makes irrefutably clear the connections between the role of the enforcer, hockey culture, substance abuse, and head trauma. Once the toughest man in the NHL, Probert’s life ended well before his time because of the physical abuse he could absorb and mete out on a hockey rink.

Tough Guy’s prologue recounts the details of the final day of Probert’s life. It reveals that he’d been prescribed three OxyContin a day to numb the pain his trade had left him with but that he took eight. His wife Dani was responsible for administering the pills; Bob would fly through them without her supervision.

What’s most striking in re-visiting Tough Guy more than a decade after its publication is the spartan acceptance with which Probert greeted the most grueling aspects of life in professional hockey as an NHL enforcer

He is so blunt in recounting his journey through major junior and into the NHL that there can be no doubt of his veracity. He recalls drinking his first beer at 14 and acknowledges that he was dealing with alcoholism by age 17, during his first season in junior.

“I could not have just one or two beers. If I did, I’d have 12,” Probert writes of that season. “The thing you’ve got to remember is it’s not like we had a normal nine-to-five job. We’d put in two hours at the rink, be done by noon, then go for lunch somewhere and have pops.”

So many enforcer origin stories seem to feature an inciting incident in which a coach tells a young player vying for a roster spot that fighting is the fastest path to securing your place. 

Think Warren Zevon’s “Hit Somebody!,” in which a fictional enforcer named Buddy dreams of scoring goals only to be chastised by coaches to remember his role, continually re-asserting that Buddy’s value comes out only when he drops the gloves. A scout from the Flames came down from Saskatoon said, ‘There's always room on our team for a goon. Son, we've always got room for a goon.’

As he explains it in Tough Guy, Probert never needed that sort of convincing: He was big and tough, and so he fought. Fighting was “something extra that [he] could use to get ice time,” but it’s not as though he needed to be persauaded of its utility.

Of course, that doesn’t mean Probert was immune to or unaware of the fragility of his chosen profession: “It was embarrassing not to win [a fight], and then you lose the next one, the team could get rid of you or send you down. All of a sudden it’s like ‘This guy is not helping us win games, and he’s not changing the momentum. He’s actually hurting us, so let’s trade him or get someone else who’s tougher.’”

He writes that upon breaking into the NHL “liquid lunches” were “almost mandatory” as a team-bonding activity, with lunches on afternoons where there wasn’t a game to get ready for invariably accompanied by beers. According to Probert, “it brought the team closer.”

Probert shows no resentment toward the culture of the sport that defined his professional life, the sport whose side- and after-effects led to his premature death. He seems to have no regrets about his chosen path, and it appears that he simply accepted as intractable reality the hockey culture he was thrust into.

The same goes for the hazing rituals we have learned to associate with hockey culture. After retelling the story of being ritually tied up and shaved with teammate Mark LaForest (referred to affectionately as “Trees” throughout the anecdote), Probert writes “the next day we all had a laugh about it. It was water under the bridge. I was officially a part of the team.”

In much the same way he embraced fighting, Probert accepts these toxic rituals as part and parcel with being a pro hockey player, and to him, the rituals seem more fun than they do harmful.

Here again, the tragedy of Probert’s story only intensifies. Fighting, drinking, drugs (Probert notes that he did cocaine for the first time with teammates after winning the Calder Cup with the Adirondack Red Wings in 1986), and even hazing took their toll in part because Probert’s acceptance came so willingly.

Probert was a phenomenal and protective teammate. He was a willing foot soldier. Those qualities, which made him so professionally successful, cost him his life.

In his essay “Get in the Ring: A Celebration of the 1988-89 Detroit Red Wings” (re-published in Grantland’s Detroit: Stories From and About America’s Most American City), Sean McIndoe wrote “the late ‘80s were still part of hockey’s era of mutually assured destruction, when enforcers really did ride shotgun for superstars, instead of just vaguely threatening to from the bench. And Yzerman had the meanest bodyguard of them all: Bob Probert.”

McIndoe goes on to refer to Probert as “a rare spectacle: the undisputed heavyweight champion of the league, but one good enough to play a regular shift and score 20 goals a year.” He points out that part of what made Probert so terrifying is that he didn’t seem angry out on the ice; instead, he was a character out of a Cormac McCarthy novel—patient and methodical in the deliverance of violent justice.

Probert’s physical prowess will never come into doubt. Given the changes NHL hockey has undergone in the years since his retirement, it’s hard to imagine that some new fighter will ever emerge as a challenger to his all-time belt. However, like so much of what might have seemed innocuous fun in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we now know that this era of rock-em, sock-em hockey was anything but free from cost.

So as we reflect on Probert’s legacy, we would risk compounding his tragedy further still if we failed to heed the cautions his untimely death illuminated.

As recently as April, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman denied the link between playing hockey and CTE, a link that is in little doubt amongst serious scientific researchers. This continued refusal to acknowledge reality is nothing short of a slap to the face to Probert and others like him, whose post-retirement lives were painful and far too short as a result of the head trauma they’d suffered.

Further still, even if Probert accepted a culture of drinking, drugs, and hazing as early as his junior days, we must do better. We know that these rituals (or some version of them) persist across the hockey landscape today. It is a paramount responsibility of those in charge of overseeing hockey at any level to bring those cycles of addiction and abuse to an end, before further generations are swept into their maelstrom.

Bob Probert is one of the most popular Detroit Red Wings of all time. He is the NHL’s ultimate enforcer, and he always will be. He was an addict. He died far too young.

None of that can be changed, but, for anyone who loved or respected what Probert brought to the ice, learning from his tragic story is an essential step in protecting young hockey players for generations to come.