Kevin Westgarth, a Stanley Cup winner and Ivy League grad, was one of the NHL’s last brawlers. He’s crossed an ocean in search of a place to become the player he always wanted to be.

By Brett Popplewell in Belfast, N. Ireland
Photography by Adam Patterson

“The Kevin Westgarth Story” airs June 24, 2015, at 9 p.m. ET on Sportsnet

sed to be the warrior was the noble, set apart from those he swore to protect by his acceptance of violence and by a code of conduct that kept him honourable. Medieval knights called this chivalry; to the samurai it was the way of the warrior. It didn’t matter what he accomplished day to day, all that mattered was that when the time came, he entered the battle and fought like he was already dead. That’s what made him noble. That’s what made him selfless.

Kevin Westgarth knows this. Not because he is a student of history and war but because he is one of hockey’s discarded enforcers. A wandering samurai who now finds himself alone and bleeding in a Belfast arena.

Barely a minute has passed since he threw his last punch, cracked a man’s helmet and ripped the skin from the mangled remnants of his reconstructed knuckle. The residual sounds of the brawl—bloodthirsty shouts and chants—echo through the stands, bouncing off the boards and rafters and finding their way into the corner of the dressing room where Westgarth sits, chest heaving, blood pumping out of that knuckle.

He unclenches his fists, stretches out his fingers and wipes the blood from his pads. Not long ago, he was cruising through the neutral zone, looking for a pass, when all of a sudden he was lying on his back, his legs taken out by a player on the opposing team. He was back on his skates in a matter of seconds, driving a quick jab to his agitator’s face. The gloves were off before the other team’s enforcer got close enough to take the first punch, but that enforcer was quickly down, tripped up on a stick and turtled on the ice while Westgarth threw five rapid rights to the back of his head, splitting his helmet. The crowd was just getting into it when the refs intervened, pulling Westgarth off and ushering him into this room to reflect on what got him here.

He doesn’t realize he’s being watched until a question is lobbed from the shadows.

“Does it hurt?”

The initial response is a reflexive “nah” that serves as a shield meant to deflect the question. But he’s slowly lowering that shield, has been for days. Looking at the missing scar tissue that used to make up his knuckle, he becomes more honest. “It always hurts a little.”

A trainer rushes in with a bag of ice to drape over the wound.

“Back in the NHL, there’d be a doctor here by now,” Westgarth says, repositioning the ice while his eyes search the room for a towel to ease the sting of frozen plastic on the hole in his hand. “I didn’t start that fight. The first guy slew-footed me. That’s pretty much the most disrespectful thing you can do out there.”

Westgarth bears no ill will to the helpless enforcer he just punched five times in the back of the head. “He was just doing his job,” Westgarth says of the man who came to the agitator’s aid and got pummelled for his courage.

There’s a code to this game, a code that Westgarth generally embodies. But tonight it’s been broken, first by the dishonourable man who tripped him and then by Westgarth himself. And though he’s not yet ready to admit it, he’ll soon concede that he wishes none of this had to happen.

The muffled cheers of 6,000 fans announce the end of play. They stomp on the bleachers above the dressing room, which will soon be rushed by the rest of Westgarth’s team. But for now he sits quietly with that bag of ice. He’s been here before, watching, listening and waiting to join them in victory. That’s how it was when he won the Stanley Cup. He’s on his feet when the others come in, quicker to congratulate them on the win than they are to salute him for the fight. He had a big part in that 6–3 win, scored one of his team’s goals before getting a game misconduct for doing exactly what his coach and teammates expect him to do.

As he removes his pads, his thoughts turn to his wife, who was in the stands reliving a decade’s worth of anxiety when he dropped the gloves. He knows part of her wonders how different their life would be had he become a surgeon like he’d planned instead of the guy who risks his brain and his future every time he clenches his hands into fists. Regardless, this has been a good night, even if it is about to end with his wife reminding him that he didn’t come all the way to Northern Ireland to keep on fighting. He’d stop it all if she ever asked him to. But she never has and will probably never have to. Because if Kevin Westgarth has his way, that fifth right that reinjured his knuckle will be the last punch he ever throws.

slow breeze rolls off the North Channel, cooling the streets of Belfast as hockey fans exit the Odyssey Arena, make their way down a cobbled lane and head back to the many corners of a town trying to put its history of violence behind it. Somewhere out in the city, restless drug dealers fighting over turf are busy planting a pipe bomb on a car. But their activities do not impact the men, women and children who seem united as they head back into their segregated Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods. This is no man’s land, a chunk of repurposed soil on the banks of the River Lagan, a sanctuary where the neutral teal of a hockey sweater has replaced the sectarian colours of years past. Unlike soccer and rugby, bound and tainted by old allegiances, hockey serves a unique purpose here because even though it is a violent sport, it was imported to this town to give fans from across the old divide something to cheer for. And so Kevin Westgarth and the rest of the Belfast Giants view themselves as peacekeepers as well as hockey players—a particularly interesting concept to Westgarth, who has believed himself a peacekeeper since the age of 17, when he first propelled his fists into another boy’s head.

It is nearly midnight as Westgarth retires to his apartment next to a small Protestant enclave where years of bloodshed are commemorated in murals of gun-toting paramilitaries in front of the Union Jack. Not exactly the environment in which he thought he’d celebrate his 31st birthday, but it’s there that his wife, Meagan, wakes him in the morning with pancakes before he changes the gauze on his hand, says goodbye and makes his way to a ferry bound for the Scottish coast.

Because he is now—and perhaps forever will be—the last pure NHL enforcer to get his name on the Stanley Cup, he is interrupted on that ferry by fans, teammates and journalists as he fetches a coffee or pockets an apple from the canteen. There’s an awkwardness to this moment in Westgarth’s life, which he explains when he says that as far as hockey players go, he is unremarkable. His 16 points in 169 NHL games isn’t exactly a figure that attracts much attention back home. And yet he knows in many ways he’s unique. He’s had a privileged view of some of the moments that have changed the game over the past decade. He can say what the fallout was after Todd Bertuzzi broke Steve Moore’s neck or after Colton Orr pulled George Parros face first to the ice, because he had to live in it. He can describe the human impact advanced analytics have had on people’s understanding of the game because he’s a casualty of it. He can describe both the difficulty of brokering the deal to end the 2012–13 lockout and what it was like to go to sleep knowing the next day you might have to take one of Brian McGrattan’s fists to your face. Westgarth is more than just the last of the enforcers. He is a Princeton grad who gave up the orthopaedic scalpel for the hockey stick. A selfless figure who found purpose standing up for every single member of the Los Angeles Kings, and who may be one of the smartest men to have ever played the game. That’s why his former bosses, Brian Burke and Dean Lombardi, believe him destined to some day run his own NHL franchise or perhaps succeed Donald Fehr as head of the NHLPA. That’s why a camera crew is trailing the bearded warrior as he struggles to find his place in a changing world. They’re listening, along with his teammates, as he explains the lineage of the British Crown and why, in 1536, Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monasteries, leaving abandoned buildings similar to the one they’ll soon pass along a Scottish highway en route to their next hockey game.

So, when he says he has little time for advanced analytics and the statisticians who say his role is obsolete, those listening wonder if Westgarth, a guy who sometimes wears a Stanley Cup ring two fingers over from the one lined with old scars from Cody McCormick’s teeth, might know more about hockey than the whiz kids helping to make executive decisions for teams around the league.

But that’s a fight Westgarth does not wish to have. Not on his birthday. Instead, he says: “My entire career has been a statistical anomaly.” When he’s alone enough to fully articulate his thoughts, he describes how an A+ student who was never the best player on his team defied the odds and spent five years in the NHL. Then he reveals what it’s like to wake up and realize you’re one of the last remaining soldiers in a dishonoured war. “There’s a solace in reflecting on a career that shouldn’t have happened,” he says. “Scoring an NHL goal—it’s almost a statistical impossibility to get to do that. If you lace up a pair of skates in Canada, your percentage chance of getting to that is almost zero.

“I have always felt some type of responsibility over the people I’m close to—teammates, friends, family. I’m lucky to be a big guy. In hockey, that pays dividends. To be able to intimidate. It served me very well and I hope it served my teammates well.”

The son of veterinarians, Westgarth was five when he started playing organized hockey in Amherstburg, Ont., where he tried as best he could to emulate Cam Neely, his childhood idol and the archetypal power forward. At 13, when most players destined to make the NHL begin taking off, he was getting cut from AAA teams. By 16, a growth spurt made him one of the bigger kids in his grade and changed how he played the game.

He has filed the photographic memories of his first bare-knuckle brawl next to obscure statistics about Icelandic alcoholism and facts about what concussions can do to the human brain. “I threw one punch,” he recalls of that first fight in junior. “He threw one too and he kind of fell down. I fell on top of him and got off the ice and was just like, ‘Holy crap. I did it. I am still here.’”

Soon, he was dropping the gloves every time he tried out for a new team. “It was a way to get me noticed,” he says.

He was playing travel hockey on the same team as his older brother when scouts from Princeton visited Chatham, Ont., to check out Brett Westgarth’s game. After they saw the younger Westgarth score a couple of goals and get into a fight, they suggested he come play for them as well. As Westgarth puts it: “I think they saw me as somebody who had SAT scores that could actually get into the school. I got accepted into Princeton in their engineering school. I deferred for a year and realized I didn’t really want to go into engineering and transitioned to essentially pre-med and wound up in psychology. It was incredibly interesting, trying to figure out what goes on between our ears.”

There was no fighting in college hockey, which allowed Westgarth to concentrate on the less martial elements of the game. But he knew that if he was to have any career after Princeton, his knuckles needed to get bloodied. Off the ice, he took up boxing with his brother and spent his summers sparring in the shadow of Tommy Hearns at the Kronk Gym in Detroit. There was an art and a science to the way men fought in the ring, which he admired. It gave the violence a sense of order and purpose, and would eventually bring discipline and skill to the way he fought on the ice.

he was struggling when he found her on campus. Alone by a piano, trying to play the one song she remembered from her childhood. He sidled up next to her on the bench, put his fingers on the keys and played the rest of the song by memory. That’s how Kevin Westgarth met his wife.

Meagan Cowher, daughter of former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Bill Cowher, had grown up surrounded by burly men who made their living smashing each other. But the boy sitting next to her seemed different. Well-read and fascinated by psychology and medicine, he could quote from Moby Dick and enjoyed the sound of a violin. It turned out he was the quintessential gentleman, stood up when she entered and exited the room and impressed his future father-in-law by the way he held his daughter’s coat, pushed in her chair and adhered to a code of conduct most men neglect. She’d always imagined herself as a career woman and believed she’d fallen in love with a future doctor. She knew he’d been training to fight, but had no idea that she was destined to spend the next decade following his fists wherever they took him. Nor did she understand that he’d already begun training his mind in preparation to become an NHL enforcer.

Westgarth had picked up a copy of The Code: The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL. He read it night after night, learning that the code had existed since the game’s earliest days. It was an inescapable force on the ice, described as “a living, breathing thing among us.” It made good men do violent things to ensure everyone answered for their actions—“You play hard physically in order to get yourself more space out on the ice, but you don’t take advantage of guys who aren’t in a position to defend themselves.” Whenever two heavyweights got into a fight, it was to finish something they generally didn’t start. It was the end result of a series of on-ice events that had rendered the game unplayable. When it was over, and the enforcers were bloodied and penalized, everybody else could get back to the game. That’s how the code worked. It’s what let Gretzky be Gretzky. But it wasn’t the enforcer’s duty to protect just the superstars; the enforcers were there to protect the code itself. And to them, the code was the game.

Dean Lombardi, the GM who signed Westgarth to the L.A. Kings and later became a mentor, is an intellectual who views himself as a general, his team as his army and his enforcers as his most selfless soldiers. On the ice, he employed Westgarth to lead the battle when no one else could. To stand alone in front of 17,000 people and fight with no shield and no way to blame his teammates if he lost or was injured. Off the ice, he came to see Westgarth as “a throwback to the ancient times of the warrior class.”

“He’s not the archetype of the enforcer,” Lombardi says. “In all of them, you’ve got this survival instinct that ‘I’ve got to do this to feed my family.’ You’ve got that American Sniper mentality that ‘I love my teammates and I want to protect them.’ Somewhere in there, you’ve got to find the justification as well as the will. But Westy went beyond that. There was an intellectual approach that motivated him beyond the barbarian approach.”

Westgarth wasn’t the first enforcer to be the best-educated player in his team’s dressing room, but no matter the lineage or how he rationalized the violence, there was nothing he could do to prepare Meagan for watching it. The first time she saw him fight, she was sitting with his family. “It was me, his dad, his brother and his mom, and before the puck dropped, both his dad and his brother stood up and started clapping. They knew Kevin had lined up right next to a fighter. I had no idea what was going on.

“When he is fighting, my heart starts to beat in my chest very, very quickly. I feel like it’s a mini–anxiety attack. My palms start to get a little sweaty and I can’t watch. I don’t watch. I sit in my seat just staring down, waiting for everyone to calm down, which lets me know that it’s done. Then I can finally take a breath.”

Westgarth fought more than 60 times in 224 games with the Manchester Monarchs, the Kings’ American Hockey League affiliate. Midway through his second season in Manchester, his right hand began to change as a result of countless bare-knuckle impacts with helmets, shoulder pads, teeth, orbital bones and skulls. He fought through the pain as his hand became increasingly deformed. It took two surgeries to repair the knuckle and a third to reattach a tendon in his pinky. He can no longer straighten that finger but can give a very detailed description of that last surgery, during which he sat awake and watched out of sheer curiosity.

In January 2009, Westgarth made his NHL debut with the Kings when he was called up for a game against the Minnesota Wild, whose ranks included the most feared enforcer of them all: Derek Boogaard. The NHL had already become somewhat fight-shy after the 2004 Bertuzzi incident that led to criminal charges and demonstrated that coaches could be legally implicated for sending their players out to assault members of the opposing team. No longer able to tap their fighters on the shoulder and tell them exactly what to do, coaches left their enforcers to figure things out for themselves. Looking back on that night in Minnesota, Westgarth recalls how uneasy and naive he was about all that was going on around him. “Raitis Ivanans was another enforcer in L.A., and we were on the same line,” he says. “I was there to possibly be his replacement. I turned to him and I’m like, ‘I kind of want to get into a fight and show what I can do. What do you think?’ And he’s like, ‘No, no, don’t worry about it.’ A minute later, he’s on the ice getting into a fight with Boogaard. I learned a little something that day: Everybody is worried about their own job, which you have to be.”

The following season, he broke David Koci’s jaw. He soon took Ivanans’s job and began accumulating the battle wounds to show for it.

He can tell you the origin of each scar on his face. The dent under his left eye was originally from a puck but got reopened by Steve MacIntyre and McGrattan. The line that cuts through his right eyebrow is from a minor-league bout with Guillaume Lefebvre. The flattened spot on his beak is from the time John Scott broke his nose. His bloodied face made the L.A. Times after that fight. Despite their obvious presence, he doesn’t see the scars when he looks in the mirror. And when others ask about them, he makes clear they’re all worth bearing for having lived his dream.

Though there is no physical blemish that commemorates the ultimate culmination of that dream, there is an emotional wound that Westgarth keeps well hidden. Five years after he signed with the Kings, he sat in his gear in the team’s dressing room, scratched from the playoff roster, watching the in-house TV feed as men he’d protected during the regular season scored goal after goal against Martin Brodeur in the 2012 Stanley Cup final. By the time he got on the ice the game was already won, but no one made him feel he wasn’t part of that victory. When it was his turn to hoist the Cup, his wife was beside him. It was the last time he suited up as a King.

our months into the current NHL season, Kevin Westgarth is lost in the corridors of a Scottish hockey arena, carrying his own gear and wondering how long it will take to find where he’s going. Blood seeps through the gauze on his bandaged knuckle as he searches for the visitors’ dressing room in the Braehead Arena on the outskirts of Glasgow. Soon he will pull on his Belfast Giants sweater and mark his birthday by trying, as best he can, to play not like the warrior he is, but like the power forward he always wanted to be. Tonight, though, he and his team are destined for defeat. In the dressing room after the final whistle, some of the Giants remove their pads and throw them against the walls, cursing the referees and looking, for a moment, like they might light all of Scotland on fire. But Westgarth is not one of these men. Though he, too, is angry, he channels his inner zen, or perhaps his future diplomat, and tells those most enraged by the loss that they must recover and move on.

Standing at the bar inside a Scottish pub following the game, Westgarth sips a pint of Guinness as a few hard-core Giants fans—men and women who took the ferry to Scotland with their team—note his presence and encircle him from behind. He knows they are there. Can hear them whispering as they pull out their markers in hope he’ll sign their Kevin Westgarth sweaters.

As the biggest name this team has employed since Theoren Fleury ignited these supporters back in 2005, Westgarth has a following he never had in the NHL. And though he is appreciative of his new fan base, he remains cognizant that back home, his former teammates are carrying on without him. Sipping his last post-game drink and counting the minutes until a 2 a.m. bus will return him to a ferry back to Belfast, he explains that sometimes it’s hard to lament the battle when you’re a casualty of a greater defeat.

There’s a precedent to his declining fortune that Westgarth knows as well as any student of conflict. The last vestige of Japan’s samurai class disappeared after the Second World War. But the respect for their kind had been eroded for generations; victims of their own failure to evolve and of political efforts to discredit their sacred status. He covers his mangled knuckle as he explains that politics are as much responsible for the disappearance of the enforcers as modern analytics or any other external force currently changing the game. “Hockey,” he says, “is always going to be violent. Not just a contact sport but a conflict sport. People have died. If you ask any of the enforcers, they will say they know what they’re getting into and gladly accept those risks to play this game.”

There is a view, shared by some, that the enforcer’s extinction was inevitable after the 2012–13 lockout. For Westgarth, that’s a frustrating thought because as a key member of the 31-player negotiating committee, he spent six months working on the current collective bargaining agreement that brought hockey back to the fans. And so he wonders if there was anything he could have done to try to stave off the elimination of his role.

But the truth may be that all of this was foretold before Westgarth dropped his gloves for the very first time. Says Lombardi: “I can remember when Harry Sinden and the last of those GMs, the icons like Cliff Fletcher and Bobby Clarke—even within those guys, there was a recognition that the days of the pure gunslinger were going to come to an end. That’s not something that happened overnight. That evolved.”

Westgarth could see this happening. On Jan. 13, 2013, one day after the collective bargaining agreement was signed, he became property of the Carolina Hurricanes, having requested the trade so he could get a chance at more ice time.

The urge to rebrand himself as anything but a gunslinger became paramount the next season on Oct. 1, 2013, when he sat at home watching as his friend and fellow Princeton alumnus George Parros engaged Colton Orr in an ill-fated bout that saw Orr pull Parros chin-first to the ice. The impact left Parros motionless and looking, for a moment, as if he were dead. Soon, Westgarth’s fear for his friend was joined by fear the incident would further the argument that neither Parros nor Orr nor any other enforcer had a place in this game. What Westgarth failed to understand was the effect that fight had on his wife, sitting next to him struggling to not picture her husband’s face on the unconscious man being stretchered off the ice.

By Christmas, Westgarth had played just 12 games with the Hurricanes. He was feeling lost and disengaged from the battle when he was granted refuge by Brian Burke, the Harvard-educated lawyer and vocal champion of the enforcer’s role who still clung to the view that “large hostile individuals are useful on a hockey rink.” Burke had turned the Calgary Flames into one of the last bastions of the warrior class and put Westgarth on a line next to McGrattan, who’d inherited the title of heavyweight champion of the league after Boogaard overdosed on the painkillers, to which he’d become addicted.

Westgarth’s season was on an upward trajectory into March when, in his third fight as a Flame, he raised his fists against Edmonton’s Luke Gazdic at centre ice. That’s when all his wife’s earlier fears became a reality.

Listening to Westgarth retell the details of that fight is like listening to a chess master analyze his own defeat. To Westgarth, everything was going fine until he made an ill-timed and ultimately costly move. “It was a pretty good fight. I’m having trouble getting free and I distinctly remember hitting him right in the middle of the visor . . . I made a terrible mistake, a slow, lazy change to get my left free, and I let go of his right arm. He came across and hit me in the side of the head and down I went.”

At that moment, Meagan was across town in a friend’s kitchen, the game on in the background. Suddenly, everything stopped. She found herself staring at the television as her husband lay stricken on the ice, his mouthguard spat out by his side, a referee motioning for help while the Edmonton crowd cheered louder.

Her eyes grow misty as she recounts what it is like to watch your husband get knocked out over and over on instant replay by a punch he didn’t see coming. “I got in the car and I’m driving as fast as I can to get there because I just want to see him with my own eyes and make sure he’s OK.

“I walked into the arena and outside the dressing room he’s just kind of sitting there by himself. The game’s still going on, the arena’s still full of people and he’s just sitting there waiting for the game to finish so that he can see his teammates and let them know that he’s OK.

“He gave me a big hug and kiss and said, ‘I’m sorry. I messed up.’ We sat on folding chairs and watched the game. I was there with him for only about 15 minutes and went back to the hotel, because for him, it was weirdly isolating. I knew he would probably rather be in his locker room with some of his teammates trying to feel more normal.”

To have sustained just one concussion in more than 100 bare-knuckle fights makes him one of the luckiest of all enforcers. He is thankful that his physical toll has been almost entirely confined to the battering ram that is his right hand. Just as he is thankful that the post-concussion syndrome he suffered after that fight in Edmonton lasted only about a week. He was back in the Calgary lineup 11 days later, and though he fought three more times with the Flames, he redoubled his efforts to convince himself and others that he could actually play, closing the last half of the season with seven points, including four goals, one of which he chipped past Henrik Lundqvist.

But not even Burke could keep him with the Flames when the season was over. Westgarth travelled north to the same ice on which he was concussed and tried out for the Edmonton Oilers. He made his final stand in the NHL on Oct. 2, 2014, landing more than a dozen punches against Vancouver’s Tom Sestito in a pre-season scrap. Three days later, he sat in Edmonton GM Craig MacTavish’s office inside Rexall Place, listening as MacTavish said, “I don’t think we’re going to need you.” The Oilers had already packed up his equipment by the time he left that meeting. An hour and a half later, they had him on a plane, heading home to his wife.

Before long, almost every other enforcer in the NHL would have a similar experience. Soon, even McGrattan was relegated to the AHL.

s he stands in the hills of Braniel looking down on Belfast, Westgarth’s scraggly beard and tweed cap give him the air of an Irish shepherd as he expounds on what got him here. He says he had a sense of finality when he was cut from the Oilers, a realization that his NHL career was over. But finality takes a while to get used to. Soon, he was being courted by a Canadian coach working in a land with two hockey rinks and a 14-year connection to the game. His wish to find himself led him to pack up his gear and come to the island of his grandmother’s youth. He’s here now playing hockey, but also contemplating doing an MBA alongside his wife. No longer interested in becoming an orthopaedic surgeon, he spends his downtime wondering if maybe he should follow Lombardi’s advice and become a lawyer, or if he should work toward becoming what Burke believes him to be: a future NHL GM. It is the urge to change with the changing world that sets him apart from other enforcers like McGrattan and Orr—discarded warriors who continue to cling to the belief that one day their masters will remember that hockey is a game of honour, not stats, and return them to their place in the NHL.

“I know there’s no going back,” Westgarth says. Just as he knows there’s no way to recreate the same energy he felt every time he got into a fight on an NHL rink. Nor a way to place a statistical value on the comfort his presence used to give the players he was there to protect. “I will take the pride of being an enforcer to the grave with me. It was something I really worked hard at. If people find that off-putting or kind of unsavoury, then they don’t know enough about it. To me, it’s the most selfless thing. It was done for my teammates.”

There’s a sadness that comes with being the last of one’s kind, which Westgarth laments when he explains: “Heavyweight enforcers were usually the guys everybody liked the most—gregarious and a good time to be around. That was always the strange duality of their existences on the ice.

“I don’t think I would have ever made it without fighting. Every single practice, I was out there trying to make my skating better, trying to improve as a player. At the end of the day, without fighting, I wouldn’t have been there in the first place. I wish I could play hockey like Patrick Kane and dangle around everybody and score goals and win the game and that’s the end. I don’t think that’s in my nature.”

Inside the Giants dressing room, Westgarth ponders his future while also regaling his teammates—many of them older than him; the majority of them Canadians who never reached the NHL—with tales of what it was like to have lived not just his dream, but theirs as well. Future cops, coaches and students themselves­, they’re all looking to a life beyond the game. And yet they sit and listen like children as he recounts how when he hoisted the Cup above his head, he could feel the bell bend in his hand. Every member of this team is thankful for his presence here. Not just for the stories he shares, but for the ones they will one day be able to pass on about the time they played hockey alongside a Cup winner. To those clinging to the end of their careers, Kevin Westgarth is validation. A man who, like them, is trying to play as well as he can for as long as he can. None of them understands that he is torn between the needs of this team and city, the hopes of his wife and his increasing understanding that a hockey career is just a window of time. All the while, he reflects on the damage that the battles caused. Not to his hand, his head or to the faces of the men he left concussed or convulsing on the ice, but to his mother and wife who never wanted to see him fight. And though he’s bothered by that damage, there is no relinquishing the pride he took from his many victories and defeats. Especially not when the wound of being dishonoured and cast out of the NHL is as raw as the hole on his knuckle. There’s a bitterness there, but also a strange satisfaction in having been one of the NHL’s last enforcers.

“It’s somehow comforting,” he says. “To go out with an entire group of players that I’ve always respected. I wish it hadn’t happened, but it’s maybe minimal solace to be on the front lines of the last hurrah.”

Regardless of his lost place in the North American game, Westgarth still means something here. Especially to the Giants and their growing horde of fans. That’s why they’re packing this arena and why his face appears on the Jumbotron. In this unlikely place, Westgarth has regained his role, safeguarding this team’s stars—men whose names mean little back home but who mean everything to the team’s quest for another championship. Here, Kevin Westgarth, the warrior whom Dean Lombardi, Brian Burke and Craig MacTavish ultimately deemed unnecessary, has emerged as an inspiration to the children of conflict who have become his greatest fans. Here, he is not just needed, he’s wanted. Even the politicians—loyalist and republican alike—are willing to stand before TV cameras and cheer his name while his coach urges him to settle in and lead the Giants to glory.

There’s an irony to Westgarth’s newfound place that seems lost on everyone except him. The day after his birthday, Westgarth, along with his wife and teammates, wanders freely through Belfast’s streets on a pub crawl, venturing in and out of bars and neighbourhoods where the lone Northern Irish member of the team—their backup goaltender—dares not go. His absence is a sobering reminder of a fragile détente, of why armed police in bulletproof Land Rovers patrol past concrete and metallic walls that still divide the former stomping grounds of the Irish Republican Army from those of their unionist foes. Here, where the maintenance of peace sometimes requires police to carry machine guns and erect checkpoints to screen civilians for bombs, the toll of the fight has left people exhausted. And there lies the irony. For in this city, Kevin Westgarth—human casualty of the NHL’s own newfound détente—is still expected to fight.

And yet he, too, has become exhausted from battle.

Though he has accumulated 20 points in 30 games, he has barely fought, which is problematic because whether he likes it or not, that’s still part of why he’s here—to enforce the code. And now he has broken it, along with that defenceless man’s helmet. Not because he wanted to please his coach, but because he followed the advice his father gave him before coming out here: “I hope you don’t have to fight anymore. But if you do, I hope you beat the crap out of them so they leave you alone.”

Seated with his armour hanging on a hook behind him, Kevin Westgarth explains for the last time what it’s like to be a roaming samurai searching for peace. “To be feared,” he says, “is helpful in this line of work. If you can win the fight without throwing a punch, you’re way better off. I have the hands to prove it.”

Content to end his career as a Giant, Westgarth makes his final preparations to move beyond the game. Because he knows that fear alone will not guarantee him peace on this ice. For the longer he stays, the more likely he is to be followed. Soon, men like McGrattan and Orr and the rest of the wayward enforcers might be brought in to arm this league. Then the code will become spectacle. And for Kevin Westgarth, that’s not worth fighting for.

This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.