TORONTO — Marcel Dionne has just been benched—by Marcel Dionne.
The purest goal-scorer in the shinny game and its only member of the NHL’s 1,000-point club is doing whatever the opposite of double-shifting is.
“You go ahead,” he tells a teammate, taking a gulp of old arena air. Every happy hack and generous has-been on the bench is decked out in classic L.A. Kings purple and gold—the colours that spring to mind whenever Dionne’s name is mentioned.
Dionne is the guy who edged some kid named Wayne Gretzky for the scoring race in 1979-80. It was he, and not Gretzky, who was voted as the best player in the league by his peers that season. Only three men have scored more goals than Dionne’s 731: Gretzky, Gordie Howe and Brett Hull.
But now he’s 62 and taking every other shift off in a casual charity pickup game. The first game of these charity tournaments is fine, but by the second he starts to ache, his shoulders especially. The third game of the day is a struggle. He could be your father’s age, maybe your grandfather’s, so it’s not shocking to see that his speed has grown crow’s feet too. Yet when he does carry the puck across the blue line, you can bank on a sharp shot or a tape-to-tape pass—and there’s no way you’re stealing the puck.
The Hall of Famer awoke in his Niagara Falls, Ont., home at 4 a.m. today, as he often does, and took the highway to Toronto to help raise awareness for the ninth annual Scotiabank Baycrest Pro-Am through a shinny game. The last two years, the legendary centre’s quick smile and still-high faceoff percentage have helped the tournament raise more than $23 million for Alzheimer’s care and Baycrest’s research on dementia. He’s gassed, though, and he wonders if this might be his last year in the tournament.
“You meet different people. Some people are really gung-ho,” Dionne says, packing away his gear in the dressing room. He applauds the concept of the Pro-Am, for which amateur teams must raise a minimum of $25,000 to play alongside and against NHL legends. “And the team that raises the most money gets the first pick. I was the first pick one time, so I don’t have to worry about that anymore. This is good. I can still score a few goals.”
The Drummondville, Que., native leads a decorated list of NHL alumni who will lace them up alongside weekend warriors May 1-3 at Toronto’s Buckingham Arena. Wendel Clark, Paul Coffey, Curtis Joseph, Doug Gilmour, Denis Savard and Ray Bourque are among the 40-plus former NHLers contributing to the Baycrest Foundation’s mission of delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s and improving care for those stricken with the disease.
Gilmour lost his father to dementia. NHL Alumni Association president Mark Napier is watching Alzheimer’s ravage his father-in-law’s brain. A younger Dionne saw his father devastated when his dad’s uncle succumbed to the disease.
“I had another uncle – great-looking guy, six-two, six-three, followed me my whole hockey career. And he was first diagnosed at 62. I would ask my parents about him: ‘How’s he doing?’ They’d say he was fine. But they were with him all the time, and they’d start catching things.”
Dionne’s uncle would put in a home because the dementia turned to aggression. He visited him one day, but left his wife at home.
“I told her, ‘You’re lucky you didn’t come, because I was hoping he’d die.’ I was with his wife and two of his daughters, and it’s just awful. Just awful,” Dionne says. He shakes his head. “The eyes are like glass.”
Dionne entered the NHL in a helmet-free era. Victims of Alzheimer’s were ignorantly called “crazy people,” he recalls, because the research was immature, the terminology inaccurate. He recalls Blackhawks prospect Steve Ludzik, now 53, suffering seven or eight concussions. Ludzik was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at age 40.
“Rick Martin of the Buffalo Sabres, when he passed away [in 2011 at age 59], his friend donated his brain [to research], and they discovered he already had signs of dementia, but nobody knew that,” Dionne says. “He got hit, slew-footed, and went down—had a convulsion. You see it on the ice, it’s not pretty to watch.”
After that 1978 incident, several of Martin’s teammates began wearing helmets.
Still, Dionne believes NHL fights and headshots aren’t the only culprit.
“It’s not so much the head. Everyone talks about the head. A concussion is”—Dionne slams an open hand hard on chest—“whiplash. A concussion happens to your kid riding his bike, any combination of things. They try to prevent things, but….” Dionne’s voice trails off.
Ironically, dementia isn’t even the focus of Dionne’s fundraising efforts. He donates time and money to MS, the Heart & Stroke Foundation, and is heavily involved in finding a cure for prostate and colon cancer.
“One in seven men will have cancer. I’ve had issues myself since I was 50 and kept an eye on it,” he says. “Every man will have an enlarged prostate; some cancers are more aggressive than others. We’re raising millions and millions, but one drug costs $1 billion to develop, the pharmaceutical companies tell you.”
When you’re 20 years old and the wind is rippling the crown on your hockey sweater and you’re leading one of the greatest forward lines of your time, you don’t think about this stuff. Everyone around you is fit, fast and fearless.
“But at my age now, you lose a lot of friends. And when it gets to that point, what do you do? Your golfing partner now’s coming to you and needs help. I know a couple of hockey players, some of my heroes—I won’t say their names—are in that level right now. They’re still independent, but they need guidance,” Dionne says.
“I keep busy. I’m independent. I’ve never worked for anybody, so I’ve been retired for a while, but I have projects and businesses. You don’t see me get up in the morning and do nothing.”