Chris Snow, the assistant general manager of the Calgary Flames, passed away on Saturday after a four-year battle with ALS. He was 42.
Snow is survived by his two children, Cohen and Willa, and wife, Kelsie, who reported his death on Twitter, which came three days after she had announced that he’d suffered a catastrophic brain injury after going into cardiac arrest.
“We will never replace a person like Chris,” Flames general manager Craig Conroy said Saturday. “We simply pay tribute to him by moving forward with the same passion that he brought to his life each day.”
ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a rare neurological disease that primarily affects nerve cells responsible for controlling voluntary muscle movement, and has no known cure. It is named after the former New York Yankee slugger, who was famously known as the “Iron Horse” and set the original consecutive-games played streak of 2,130 before removing himself from the team’s lineup on May 2, 1939, due to his declining performance.
The disease is all too familiar to Snow’s family, having already claimed the lives of his father, Bob, two uncles, and a cousin. He was diagnosed with the disease in June 2019, but kept working in his job with the Flames and exceeded the 12-month prognosis originally given him, due to an experimental drug that worked by “silencing the effects of the mutated gene,” as Kelsie Snow explained in 2019.
“I am devastated with the loss of our dear friend and colleague, Chris Snow,” ex-Flames GM Brad Treliving said in a statement. “Chris inspired us all as he faced the relentless battle with ALS head-on, refusing to let it define him or derail his spirit.”
A native of Melrose, Mass., who studied at Syracuse University, Chris Snow met his future wife when they were both sportswriters for The Boston Globe and were married in 2007. He was a baseball writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune when the NHL’s Minnesota Wild hired him as their director of hockey operations in 2006. When the Wild made changes, the Flames brought Snow on board in 2011 as director of hockey analysis. He was promoted to AGM in 2019 and worked primarily in data analysis.
Snow’s life was frequently chronicled by Kelsie via social media, blog kelsiesnowwrites.com, and a podcast, detailing the frequent hospital visits and emotional toll the disease took upon their family.
“In a span of three months this disease we had outrun for three years caught up with us,” Kelsie Snow wrote in a post from January, when her husband had to be admitted to hospital due to pneumonia. “We ran so far ahead at the beginning that at times it felt like we would never slow down. Then went your smile and your swallowing. Slowly but steadily, we knew we were losing ground.”
— With files from The Canadian Press