Corey Hirsch, then a Rangers backup and a former Canadian national team goalie, was living a hockey player’s dream in May 1994: an Olympic silver medalist and about to be a Stanley Cup champion, and he was only 22.
Yet, none of those trophies mattered the day he got in his car, drove to a cliff near his home in British Columbia and came so close to flying right off it at 140 mph, as Hirsch poignantly recalled in a Players’ Tribune piece published Wednesday, detailing his battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“I’m coming up to the edge of the cliff. This is the end,” he writes. “And then — for whatever reason — this vision pops into my head. I slam on the brakes, and the car starts skidding — and skidding … and skidding. It skids for what seems like forever. Until it stops. All I can do is sit there, sobbing and sobbing. Please, I think, somebody help me.”
That heart-stopping moment in 1994 arose from a never-ending stream of suicidal thoughts that consumed Hirsch for four years of his 11-year NHL career. The mental darkness started the night of May 6, 1994 — he can pinpoint it exactly — in between games of the Eastern Conference finals, during which Hirsch was a third-string goalie for the Rangers.
“I was standing at a bar in Washington, D.C., with two of the Capitals’ black aces,” he writes. “We were having a beer, just laughing and telling stories, when all of a sudden, completely out of nowhere, and completely for no reason whatsoever… I had this thought. It was a horrible, ridiculous, dark thought.”
And they didn’t go away.
Hirsch hid the pain from his Rangers teammates and coaches because he did not want to risk his chances in the NHL. Instead, he sought temporary relief through injury, bringing a stick blade back to his room one day after practice and slamming his hand against it, so the team doctors would send him home to Calgary to recover. He couldn’t hit hard enough to break it, however, and he played on, harboring the oppressive secret.
After the Rangers traded him to the Canucks in 1995, Hirsch hit rock bottom before seeing the light, visiting a psychologist who diagnosed him with OCD, a “treatable” illness.
“Just saying it out loud took a huge weight off me,” Hirsch writes.
Hirsch played nine more years in the league, bouncing between four teams and their AHL affiliates, and finished his career overseas before retiring from the game in 2006.
Hirsch, the former AHL goalie of the year, served as a goaltending coach for the Maple Leafs and Blues and now, at 44, works as an NHL analyst for Canadian TV network Sportsnet.
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