Former NHL player makes admission about blindside hit on Marc Savard
“At the time, to survive in the game, I felt like Matt Cooke the player was the guy that made the middle of the ice harder for people to get to,” Cooke told The Athletic’s Joshua Kloke. “Now there’s a specific rule in place that I would have been suspended for a lot of games for that hit. But at the time, legally within the game, I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t get a penalty and I wasn’t suspended. I hate the fact that Marc was hurt.”
Cooke didn’t receive a penalty, nor was there any sort of discipline from the NHL.
For two months after the hit from Cooke, Savard said he was in “total darkness” and “total silence” all day before getting up at 11 p.m. to watch TV on mute and with the brightness down. He didn’t want to talk to anyone who called to check on him.
“Just the thought of talking to a friend on the phone seemed like a huge mental and almost physical effort,” Savard wrote in a 2017 Players’ Tribune article. “I was so irritable because of my symptoms that it was hard to be around people — even the people I loved.”
Cooke and Savard never spoke after the hit. Cooke said he wanted to apologize and attempted to reach Savard for a month.
“You can only get rejected so many times,” Cooke told Kloke.
“I wasn’t in any mood to talk to him that night, so I never talked to him,” Savard told The Boston Globe in 2016. “I never heard from him.”
The hit was essentially the beginning of the end for Savard. He was diagnosed with a concussion and missed a good portion of the 2009-10 season. He returned for the Stanley Cup playoffs, and scored the game-winning goal in overtime against the Philadelphia Flyers in Game 1 in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Savard admitted he wasn’t 100% for the series against the Flyers. Even though he was cleared to play, “protocols rely on the player telling the truth about how they are feeling.”
The Bruins were ultimately eliminated by Philadelphia, and Savard went into the offseason with headaches almost daily. He missed all of training camp and the first 23 games of the 2010-11 season. Savard was eventually cleared, but his return lasted just 25 games before a clean hit from Matt Hunwick sent Savard’s head into the glass.
Savard’s name is on the 2011 Bruins Stanley Cup and officially retired in 2018. He’s an assistant coach with the Calgary Flames, and is in a much better place these days than the “dark days” after the hit from Cooke.
