Derek Boogaard, once the most feared enforcer in the NHL, was found dead of an overdose of alcohol and prescription pain killers at the age of 28 earlier in May. If you’re not a hockey fan, chances are you’ve never heard of Boogaard, or enforcers, for that matter. “Enforcer” is the polite term for a hockey goon.

Lots of hockey players fight, but goons are fighting specialists. In theory, a goon’s job is to protect his more agile, goal-scoring teammates from cheapshots by other players who would like to take the star out of the game. As Scott Lemieux notes, some teams have goons that do little but fight each other for the spectacle. Most hockey leagues ban fighting, but the NHL exalts fighting as a tradition. A fight can bring an entire stadium to its feet. Replica jerseys of popular enforcers fly off the shelves.

John Branch of New York Times spent six months piecing together the the life and death of Derek Boogaard, from his hockey-crazed childhood in Melfort, Saskatchewan, to his glory days in the NHL, through his agonizing physical and mental disintegration and lonely death. The multimedia package “Punched Out” transcends sports reporting. This series is an investigative triumph, a compelling piece of science writing, and above all, a the tragic story of a guy who sold his soul to play in the NHL.

Part I: A Boy Learns to Brawl

Boogaard grew up in small town Saskatchewan, the son of a Mountie. Boogaard was a gentle kid who would have preferred scoring goals to busting heads, but his immense size and lackluster skills marked him as a goon in the making. “Like so many Canadian boys, Boogaard wanted to reach the National Hockey League on the glory of goals. That dream ended early, as it usually does, and no one had to tell him,” Branch writes.

Boogaard’s big break came at the age of 15 when he lost his temper as he was being hauled off the ice for an earlier penalty. He pushed off the referee and dove into the opposing team’s bench, swinging. His dad, the cop, was appalled, but a scout was very impressed. That rampage was Derek’s ticket to the big leagues.

Part II: Blood on the Ice

In the second installment, Branch elaborates on the role of the enforcer in the NHL:

Imagine in football, if a linebacker hit a quarterback with what the quarterback’s team believed was too much force. The equivalent to hockey’s peculiar brand of justice would be if those teams each sent a player from the sideline — someone hardly valued for his skill as a player, perhaps rarely used — and had them interrupt the game to fight while teammates and officials stood back and watched. In football, as in most sports, such conduct would end in ejections, fines and suspensions. In hockey, it usually means five minutes in the penalty box and a spot in the postgame highlights.

Branch describes the physical and psychological toll of the enforcer’s job. Boogaard once hit another player so hard that his cheekbone had to be surgically reconstructed. Despite years of boxing lessons, Boogaard was lax about defense. Teammates recall that he’d take several punches for the opportunity to land one good blow. Boogaard was still a young man, but his hands were so mangled from years of bare knuckle brawling that his family wondered how he’d be able to hold a pen when he got old. By his late twenties, he had bulging disks in his back, a shoulder that hadn’t been right since his teens, and a repeatedly broken nose that was excruciating to reset.

Like many NHL players, he became dependent on painkillers to mask the damage he was inflicting on his body and sleeping pills to cope with the gruelling travel schedule. Less dramatically, but more ominously, Boogaard was racking up concussions and hiding them.

Part III: A Brain ‘Going Bad’

Boogaard staggered through the 2009-2010 season in a haze. “His demeanor, his personality, it just left him,” John Scott, a Wild teammate is quoted as saying. “He didn’t have a personality anymore. He just was kind of — a blank face.” He lost the will to fight on the ice and took some bad hits because he wouldn’t return a punch. The team gave him time time off. He drank, swallowed pills by the handfull, racked up huge credit card bills, rented expensive sports cars, and logged more time in drug rehab. On the night of his death, he was just hours out of drug treatment.

Boogaard’s family donated his brain to a team of researchers in Boston who study concussions in sports. He was the fourth dead NHL player to have his brain examined by the research team, and the fourth to be posthumously diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a disease similar to Alzheimer’s caused by repeated blows to the head. The researchers have found CTE in the brains of over twenty dead NFL players so far. CTE may explain why the formerly goodnatured and conscientious Boogaard behaved so erratically during the last months of his life. The researchers were shocked at the extent of brain degeneration in a relatively young man.

Learning the extent of his son’s brain damage changed Len Boogaard’s perspective on his son’s death. As hard as it was to lose a 28-year-old to an accidental overdose, the brown shadows spreading over Derek’s brain foretold a future that might have been even worse:

The Boogaards learned of the surprising severity of the brain damage. And they heard about the prospects of middle-age dementia.

It was then that Len Boogaard stopped listening. Something occurred to him that he did not expect.

For months, he could not bear the thought of his son’s death. Suddenly, he was forced to imagine the life his son might have been left to live.

The NHL remains officially skeptical about the link between CTE and Boogaard’s career as an enforcer. The league has no plans to change the rules for fighting.

As one CTE researcher observes, it’s hard to know whether Boogaard’s drug abuse accelerated his brain degeneration or vice versa. In a sense, it doesn’t matter. By the time we’re invited to consider this chicken and egg problem, Branch has skillfully established that fighting, orthopedic injuries, pain killers, addiction, and CTE were inextricably linked in Boogaard’s demise. Towards the end, Boogaard liked to hide his pills in colorful plastic Easter eggs and stash them around his apartment. Branch has an eye for these kinds of telling details.

Maybe the drugs made Boogaard’s brain damage worse, but his fights injured him so badly that he needed powerful painkillers to play, and no doubt the brain damage sapped his impulse control in the face of constant access to drugs and booze. It’s a chicken and egg problem, but the NHL is watching this hen house.

To learn more about CTE and contact sports, check out Offensive Play, Malcolm Gladwell’s classic 2009 New Yorker essay about brain damage in the National Football League. Boogaard’s brain is in the same brain bank that Gladwell describes.

Canadians like to think of themselves as more civilized than neighbors to the south. We’ve become accustomed to the idea that professional football players and boxers are damaging their brains in pursuit of athletic glory, but it’s a shock to think of hockey in the same category. Punched Out has prompted a lot of soul searching amongst fans. The series raises questions about what players like Derek Boogaard are asked to endure for our entertainment.

[Photo credit: MattBritt00, Derek Boogaard vs. Steve MacIntyre.]

Ever since she broke the news in March that former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky was under grand jury investigation for the alleged sexual abuse of a high school boy, 24-year-old Sara Ganim of the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa has covered the unfolding scandal with unrelenting determination.

Sandusky was indicted on multiple counts of sexual abuse and the University of Penn Board of Regents sacked legendary head football coach Joe Paterno and university president. Such a dramatic gesture might have deflected public outrage against the university, if Ganim hadn’t revealed in November that that authorities missed opportunities to investigate Sandusky, starting in 1995 with concerns about Sandusky’s treatment of a boy he later adopted.

A janitor told his supervisor that he saw Sandusky assaulting a boy in the shower at Penn State in 2000. The campus police investigated Sandusky for a similar shower incident in 1998, but no charges were laid. A member of the coaching staff said he told his superiors that he saw Sandusky raping a boy in the shower in 2002. Nothing was done to stop Sandusky, besides requesting that he not shower with boys at Penn State anymore.

The complaint that sparked the grand jury probe wasn’t lodged until 2008. The mother of a high school football player whose team Sandusky was coaching began to suspect something was wrong when her son started asking questions about databases of “sex weirdos” and Sandusky demanded to discipline the boy. The boy eventually told his mother that Sandusky had been abusing him.

The Penn State sex abuse scandal has been called the biggest story in the history of college sports, but Ganim inists it is a crime story, not a football story. The sexual abuse of children by authority figures within powerful institutions is not unique to Penn State. Read my interview with Ganim in The Backstory.

[Photo credit: PSUPix. Caption: “Penn State football coach Joe Paterno accepts a crystal football from Athletic Director Tim Curley in a post-game celebration of Paterno’s 400th win.”]

This is the second in a series of posts honoring the memory of David Montgomery, a distinguished labor historian who served as the lead judge for the Hillman Foundation’s Sol Stetin Award.

David Montgomery deserved to be the first winner of the Sol Stetin Award because he was the preeminent labor historian of his generation. No one had as big an impact on what became known as the New Labor History. This was first of all because he brought to it a distinctive shop-floor perspective, derived I think from the decade he spent as a machinist and Communist organizer before he entered academics. Once he found his footing–his dissertation on the labor movement during the Civil War era, while impressive, was more conventionally conceived–Montgomery never deviated from the view that the central subject of labor history should be, as he wrote in an influential collection of essays, “the battle for control of the workplace,” that the battle should always be seen by labor historians from the perspective of the workers themselves, and be understood as essentially political and transformative in nature. Hence the reservations he held about the New Deal, which, he wrote in a prescient essay, “was simultaneously liberating and co-optive for workers,” at once rescuing them from the heavy hand of managerial control while opening “a new avenue through which the rank and file could in time be tamed and the newly powerful unions be subjected to tight legal and political control.” A challenging perspective like this one is the essential ingredient in energizing a field of study.

History is, of course, a joint enterprise, and others with different ideas, pioneers like Herbert Gutman, are also to be credited for the New Labor History. No new subject can be the product of one person. But more than anyone else, it was Montgomery’s scholarship, always passionately argued, that infused a subject that had been a backwater of labor economics into an innovative, core subject of study in American history. No one, moreover, excelled Montgomery as a graduate trainer, and especially in his years at Pittsburgh, he salted the field with a grand cadre of labor historians, many of them now occupying senior positions in the profession. They will no doubt be testifying in the coming days to what studying under Montgomery meant to them. But for a contemporary of David’s like myself, what I most admire is that he entered an essentially dead field and made a live subject of it. And it is for this, that at his death, I celebrate David Montgomery’s life.

David Brody is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Califoria, Davis and an affiliated faculty member at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkely. He received the Stetin Award in 2008.

David Montgomery, the first winner of the Sidney Hillman Foundation’s Sol Stetin Award for Labor History and subsequently the award’s lead judge, died on December 2 at age 84.

Montgomery was the nation’s leading labor historian. His many articles and books, especially Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872; Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles; and The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925, profoundly reshaped our understanding of the history of American workers.

More than other historians, Montgomery took his readers into the workplace, into the iron mills and railroad shops and munitions plants and electrical equipment factories of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which he saw as central to shaping workers’ consciousness and political struggles. The key to working-class organization and advance, for Montgomery, lay in the militant minority, in the shop stewards, radicals, ethnic leaders, and itinerant organizers who populated the landscape of industrial America. Clear-eyed about labor’s defeats as well as its victories, Montgomery had a firm faith in the power and ingenuity of working people in fighting for better lives and a better society.

David’s intense interest in the details of work life – workers’ tasks and routines, their efforts to control the pace of work, and their complex relationships to machinery, supervisors, and one another – reflected his own decade as a machinist and union activist in New York and Minnesota. As a young member of the United Electrical Workers (and of the Communist Party until 1957), he once arranged for W.E.B. DuBois to address his fellow workers during Negro History Week, typical of David’s lifelong commitment to anti-racism and his respect for the intellect and vision of his fellow workers. Only after FBI harassment got him fired from one job after another did Montgomery finally leave the machine shop for the groves of the academy.

After earning a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, Montgomery spent fourteen years at the University of Pittsburgh before being appointed the Farnam Professor of History at Yale University. He shaped labor history as much through his teaching as his writing. Thousands of students had the startling experience of hearing David speak for the first time; his normally shy demeanor changed at the podium, as he held forth about history with passion and in cadences more associated with the Petrograd Soviet than with the snoozy atmosphere of an academic conference or a university classroom. Montgomery trained several generations of graduate students who today hold senior positions in history departments all across the United States and who have pushed labor history forward in myriad directions. A dedicated internationalist, Montgomery co-founded and long edited International Labor and Working-Class History, which has promoted an ever more global and comparative view of the history of workers.

David never abandoned his core belief in solidarity even after he ascended to highest ranks of academia (including serving as president of the Organization of American Historians). Many New Haven workers remember him as the professor who, without fail, would show up at their picket lines, not the usual passtime for senior Yale faculty. In the machine shop, the library, the classroom, and on the picket line, David Montgomery spent a long fruitful lifetime fighting for workers’ advancement, equal rights, and social justice.

Joshua B. Freeman is Professor of History at the City University of New York and a Stetin Award judge. He has written extensively about the history of labor, modern America, and New York City.