The first step is admitting you have a problem.

For many, that seems to be the most difficult step to take.

It is a culture that forbids NHL players from showing a physical reaction to pain, where the guys who battle through debilitating injuries are revered and those who don’t are mocked.

I myself have been guilty of that before. We see a replay and think it qualifies us as a medical expert.

“He can’t be hurt that badly, can he?”

“If he really cared, he’d battle through it”

NHL tough guys are held to an even higher – impossibly higher – standard than the rest of the players they share the ice with.

But mental illness and drug addiction aren’t injuries you can just battle through.

Admitting you have a problem is a necessary step to recovery, but one that many will shun for fear of ruining their reputation in a game where appearances are everything.

Admitting weakness is a deathblow for an NHL fighter. It could be a career-ender.

That is why what Todd Fedoruk has done is so commendable.

The veteran of over 500 NHL games and a thousand minutes spent inside an NHL penalty box took a year off from hockey last year.

A mental health break.

He needed to get his life back in order after more than a decade of alcohol and drug addiction had derailed him, and nearly cost his everything.

His story is one that is eerily similar to that of the recently deceased Derek Boogaard. In fact, they were each others’ disastrous muse during the time they spent partying – and occasionally playing hockey – together in Minnesota.

Even though Fedoruk was already on the path to recovery, it was Boogaard’s death this summer that really sent a shock wave through him.

It could just as easily have been he, not Boogaard, who succumbed to a fatal concoction of alcohol and drugs. As Fedoruk says “I was doing the exact same things. Everything you put in front of me, I did”.

Fedoruk’s hockey career may be over. He has been invited to try out for the Vancouver Canucks, but with the team returning basically the same group of players that went to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals, there may not be room for the 32 year old brawler.

Finished or not as a hockey player, at least Todd Fedoruk is on the path to clean living, and that is a battle won that will mean more than any scrap inside the boards ever could.

Image from USA Today

Please read this accompanying article by the Associated Press, that was the inspiration for this article.