As some of you fellow hockey fans may recall, longtime enforcer Bob Probert had some rough few years to round out his life before it was cut short by a heart attack last summer. We know for certain he used cocaine (and likely other drugs) since the 80’s, much to the detriment of his career, family, etc. He was so powerfully high that when he was arrested in Florida a few years back he required repeated tasing to disable.
But now there’s a new question - was it just drugs or was it drugs plus all the blows he took to his head from the beginning of his playing days as a teen? Both explain his erratic behavior, risk-taking and lack of concern or even apparent knowledge of consequences to his actions, be it riding his motorcycle drunk (leading to crashing in the middle of Telegraph Road on a Saturday lunchtime) or plain old doing more and more drugs.
I realize it’s a chicken-egg argument and w/o a Wayback Machine we’ll never know for sure but it explains a lot to me about his previous behavior and makes me wonder about the seemingly ridiculous personal actions of some athletes today in sports where their brain takes repeated and serious bounces off the inside of their skull.
I’m not sure if i can find a link or not, but I remember reading that Probert’s dad died of a heart attack at around the same age. I think genetics probably had everything to do with his early demise.
No doubt, but I’m looking at how he lived his life in the decades before that.