Bob Probert And Male Culture

Just before dawn a few years back, a Windsor friend of mine woke up and heard noise in his house. He checked the bed next to him. His wife was asleep. Was it his sister, who also lived in the house? Just to be sure, he padded out in his bare feet to the living room, where he found a stranger sitting on the couch. The stranger was enormous, and when my friend cleared the sleep from his eyes, he recognized the guy. It was Bob Probert. It was the NHL’s most feared enforcer.

This story has become legendary among my circle of friends because it’s so surreal. Can you imagine waking up in the middle of the night and going into your living room to find Bob Probert sitting on your couch? It turned out that Probert had been drinking in the same Windsor bar as my buddy’s sister. The two of them struck up a conversation. All this, the sister explained to my friend when she came out of the bathroom, shortly after the initial scary encounter. My buddy didn’t have to ask what they were doing. Open beer bottles were on the coffee table, and certainly somewhere was a little baggy of coke. Or maybe not so little.

The same friend emailed me yesterday to tell me about Bob Probert’s death from an apparent heart attack on a boat in Lake St. Clair. I didn’t know Probert, not personally, but his home is a few blocks away from my parents’ in the Windsor suburb of Lakeshore. His was one of the names that always came up in conversation during my early, violence-obsessed adolescent years. In its way, my native Essex County was proud of Probert, same as it was proud of other, troubled hockey enforcers who hailed from its water-gilt borders, including Tie Domi and Darren McCarty.

Everybody bewails how sad Probert’s story is—the alcoholism, the cocaine addiction, the legal trouble. Here’s the Globe and Mail:

Probert was one of the toughest fighters in NHL history, but he battled demons – drugs and alcohol – for many of the 16 years and 935 games he played in the league. He had a rare talent for someone known primarily as a fighter; when he was at his best, he also had the skill level of a top-six forward. Most of those close to Probert lamented that fact, that he had so much ability, and except for a handful of years, wasn’t able to harness it the way they thought he could.

And Mitch Albom in the Detroit Free Press:

Coming up in the 1980s, Bob Probert was the sort of warrior they now model video game characters after. Relentless. Brutal. Single-minded. Unafraid of blood. He was an enforcer, a goon, a guy whose main purpose was to make sure nobody messed with his team’s stars. Someone touched Steve Yzerman? Bob Probert touched back hard. Someone ran the goalie? Probert ran him harder.

What I think needs to be underscored here is that Bob Probert’s problems went hand in hand with his gifts—as well as his sport. As an enforcer for the Blackhawks and Red Wings, Probert stood up for his friends. He had his friends’ back. He was the sort of guy you could count on. Implicit in all these observations—all of which have been made, I’ll wager, during the sort of informal eulogies bound to happen in the wake of Probert’s death—was that Bob Probert was a man.

He was the epitome of a certain kind of man. The fights and the substance abuse went hand in hand in the male culture in which Probert excelled. Within that sphere Bob Probert was a legend. I feel the allure of that sphere. My own problems are evidence of that. But I also think this masculine sphere is growing ever more insulated from the greater culture. Ever more opposed to the greater culture. And few people illustrate that more than Bob Probert—a legend in one world, an absolute fuck-up in another.

Contemporary society doesn’t applaud guys who solve problems with fisticuffs. Today, violence is a form of surrender. That's pretty easy to get. What is harder for many guys to process is the vacuousness of the partying-to-excess spirit that also gets wrapped up in male identity. Certainly, Probert had a hard time processing that. Perhaps the drugs and the drinking didn't directly cause the toughman's death yesterday. But the fact that he died at the age of 45, in front of his kids, creates a powerful cautionary symbol, one that attests to the emptiness of the man's man existence. 

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