Book review: Pain Killer: A Memoir of Big League Addiction

Reviewed by Adam Laskaris

Brantt Myhres’ life story isn’t the type of book you’ll be likely to finish in one sitting.

Pain Killer: A Memoir of Big League Addiction illustrates the sacrifices of former National Hockey League (NHL) enforcer Myhres on his road to sobriety, and his many fights on and off the ice. It’s written in a conversational tone — no ghostwriter to guide his words — and really, pulls no punches in describing exactly the highs and lows of an extremely chaotic NHL career.

Divided into four parts, Pain Killer is a harrowing look inside the life of Myhres: the man who has the distinction of being the only player in NHL history to be permanently banned from the league due to off-ice substance issues.

The book’s prologue begins with Myhres retelling a story about an inebriated motorcycle crash, one of many instances in the book where both the reader and narrator wonder exactly how he managed to stay alive.

It’s a book about hockey, sure, but it’s focused on much more than that — diving deep into the emotional stress Myhres went through during his playing career to transition from a hopeful skilled forward in the youth hockey ranks to a 6’4 fighter who earned a reputation as one of the toughest players in the NHL.

In Myhres’ NHL draft year, he played in 55 games and fought 45 times, winning more often than not. It’s the losses, he said, that often elicited the strongest emotional response.

“There aren’t many ways to shake off that awful feeling,” Myhres says at one point about losing a fight. “But one is to fight again.”

Making his NHL debut in 1995, Myhres’ career was 154 games for seven different teams, nine teams in the American Hockey League and International Hockey League, and a stint in the British Elite Ice Hockey League with the Newcastle Vipers. Myhres was far from a star player — he scored just eight points in his career and averaged less than five minutes of ice time per game during his NHL tenure.

While he played more NHL games than the vast majority of hockey players ever will, Myhres still has a soft side to him — talking about getting jitters playing on the same ice as childhood heroes like Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. He discusses how much he hated fighting and all of the nights and days he had pregame fears of how his next showdown would go.

But Hockeyfights.com lists Mhyres as having 55 fights at the NHL level, nearly one every three games. In short, he spent just about as much time in the penalty box as he did on the ice.

With every new chapter, Myhres’ stories seem more far-fetched than the last one — bribing his urine testers with free tickets to his games, sneaking around the regulations at rehab facilities, and going to bed 30 minutes before his alarm on more than one game day. But he has a natural way of telling each one in such vivid detail that captures your attention and makes you want to read to the next page but makes you wonder how much more of the book you can really consume.

Myhres admits to many nefarious activities while battling alcohol and cocaine addictions — several instances of driving while under the influence, bribing police officers with his hockey card, and multiple contract breaches that he often got caught for, but usually skirted his way out of. Myhres calls out the systems and the people that failed him throughout his life but never does it in a way where he avoids personal responsibility either.

Myhres doesn’t touch much on his Indigenous background until later on in the book — mostly because it wasn’t something he was actively acquainted with for much of his lifetime.

Being Métis through his dad’s lineage, Myhres and a team of acquaintances opened up Greater Strides Hockey Academy in 2011, aiming to create an Indigenous athletic facility for youth in Alberta, which ran camps for the following five years.

It’s a story where you already know the ending, of course — and it is a mostly happy one, with Myhres having been sober for 13 years, inspired in no small part by his daughter’s birth — but every new page makes you wonder exactly how he’ll navigate his way through each situation.

Over his three seasons as a team-player liaison with the L.A. King’s from 2013-2016, Myhres discusses finally seeing a new sense of purpose in his professional life that he hadn’t quite known since his playing days ended.

Pain Killer is far from an easy read, and it’s as much gut-wrenching as it is oddly inspiring. While fighting is far less common in the NHL these days than Myhres’ era, it’s quite the reminder of the very real turmoil many professional athletes may be dealing with behind the scenes.

Brantt Myhres. Pain Killer, (New York: Viking Press, 2021).
ISBN: 9780735239418