Clint Malarchuk releases book about battle with depression

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This article was published 27/10/2014 (4377 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Clint Malarchuk woke up from a two-week coma in Reno, Nev., after attempting suicide in 2008, he had an epiphany.

After battling mental illness for the better part of his life, the former Buffalo Sabres goalie decided to tell his story to help others deal with the same disease.

“I was alive for a reason. How did I survive a (self-inflicted) gun wound to the head? I decided to write a book about my struggles and my demons to get the word out there. I wanted to help others,” he said.

Malarchuk had already been dabbling with the idea of a book — he wanted to tell some of the funny stories that happened in his career — but the suicide attempt, not to mention having a bullet lodged in his forehead, changed the focus to a much darker area. The Crazy Game — How I Survived in the Crease And Beyond, has just been released.

Malarchuk sat down for an interview at the Winnipeg Free Press News Café Monday afternoon as part of his book tour.

He is best known for having survived arguably the most gruesome on-ice injury in hockey history when the skate of St. Louis Blues forward Steve Tuttle sliced his neck open and cut his jugular vein during a game in March 1989.

“It was just a random play. The puck was centred across the crease and my defenseman, Uwe Krupp, was hooking and holding (Tuttle) up and he fell back. His feet went up and I went down in the butterfly. Had I not flinched, I probably would have got the full force (of his skate) in my mask but your natural instinct is to flinch and I exposed my neck,” he said.

“In the first few seconds, the blood squirted about six feet in front of me and then it kind of gurgled. I knew it was a main artery and I thought, ‘this is it, I’m going to die. It’s probably a matter of minutes.’ ”

In true old-school fashion, Malarchuk walked to the trainer’s room under his own power while Jim Pizzutelli applied pressure to the wound. (While this was going on, three of Malarchuk’s teammates threw up on the ice, nine fans fainted and two had heart attacks.)

Pizzutelli, however, wasn’t phased. After all, he had served in Vietnam.

“He had seen some very graphic and traumatic things. He once had to take a helicopter ride with a decapitated body,” Malarchuk said.

(Part of his motivation for not lying down on the ice was he was taught as a youngster that you get up when you’re hurt unless you have a broken leg. Plus, he knew his mother was watching the game on TV.)

Miraculously, Malarchuk returned to practice just four days later and played in his first game 10 days after the accident.

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca