Former controversial Dallas Stars player died of apparent suicide, stunning NHL
Claude Lemieux happily agreed to talk, but when he walked around the corner and extended his right hand, there was still a high degree of trepidation.
This was not your standard pro athlete agreeing to an interview. This was Claude Lemieux, who had a highlight reel that featured some of the nastiest plays in the history of any sport ever played.
His cold blue eyes could cut through a bench full of players. If he was sneering, he could intimidate a school of sharks.
He was also a pleasant man who was nice to talk to. As is often the case, the image that he projected during the game was not the man he was away from it.
Sadly, the former NHL player who lasted 21 seasons in the league died this week of an apparent suicide. Lemieux, 60, left behind a wife and three children.
Learning a person died by suicide always sends a moment of sadness through your body. In this case, just three days prior to his death, Lemieux was the torch bearer before Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals between the Hurricanes and Canadiens in Montreal, where he played from 1983 to 1990.
.JPG "Hi_j0128(7).JPG")
Meeting Claude Lemieux
In 2003, the Dallas Stars acquired Lemieux from the Phoenix Coyotes in a trade because former Stars GM Bob Gainey, who was a team adviser at the time, liked him and thought he had something left.
Lemieux was 37, and had a reputation as one of those players who knew where to be, and when, around the ugly areas on the ice in a playoff game. He had won four Stanley Cups in his career.
Age had robbed him of the skills that he possessed early in his career when he was one of the better two-way players in the game, but the plan was he could be a solid third-line addition who would be an asset in tight games.
He also had a reputation as one of the dirtiest players who ever played in the NHL. Players hated playing against him.
During the 1996 Western Conference finals between Detroit and Colorado, Lemieux’s brutal cross-check of Detroit’s Kris Draper into the boards resulted in Draper requiring multiple surgeries. It only heightened what was a nasty rivalry between the two teams, which spilled into the next season when Detroit’s Darren McCarty went after Lemieux during a game.
In the 1986 playoffs while playing for Montreal, Lemieux famously bit the finger of Calgary’s Jim Peplinski.
“He’s the fiercest competitor I’ve ever played with,” former Dallas Stars teammate Bill Guerin said in 2003 of Lemieux, whom he played with twice. “Everybody’s intensity level is different, but in the playoffs he was a different story.”
By the time Lemieux arrived to the Stars, he knew what people thought about him.
When we talked at length one afternoon in Colorado after a practice, he was professional, polite and nice. I talked to him regularly for the remainder of that season, and he was a good guy.
During the Stars’ second-round playoff series against the Anaheim Ducks, Claude used me to put out there that Ducks goalie Jean-Sébastien Giguère’s “pads” were too big. A lot of players had complained about Giguère’s equipment, but would not go on the record with it.
Lemieux did, and I reported what Lemieux said. One thing about Claude, his Canadian-French accent could be a tad thick. I thought he said “pads.”
The next day he comes into the locker room, and he says to me with a big smile, “Pants! It’s not ‘pads.’ It’s his pants that are too big. It’s my damn accent!”
Lemieux’s time with the Stars was a dud. He was at the end of his career, and he didn’t know it. That happens a lot. Aging players often can’t accept that their bodies no longer can do what made them.
He couldn’t, and quickly the coaching staff wanted him out of their locker room.
His stint with the Stars lasted only 32 games. He bounced around teams overseas over the next few years, before finishing his NHL career in 2008-09 when he played 18 games for the San Jose Sharks at the age of 43.
As a player, he was a survivor and a pro who earned all of his reputation. The good. The bad. The dirty.
But know this, Claude Lemieux the person was not Claude Lemieux the player.
