How Corey Hirsch rebounded from despair
Last February, I was going through Facebook at work, and came upon an incredible post from retired NHL goaltender Corey Hirsch.
He was offering his gratitude for his new lease in life after being picked up by Sportsnet as an NHL analyst.
The job had rescued him from some dark places, and he didn’t hold back any of the grim details. He was fired from his job as an NHL goalie coach in St. Louis, and his marriage had fallen apart.
I thought how brave of Corey Hirsch to open his heart so publicly. At the same time, I thought I wanted to meet him and have him tell his story in the Toronto Star.
However, I was sure others had beaten me to the punch. But when I got Hirsch on the phone, I asked him if any other reporter had reached out to him.
It turns out no one else had. He was open to meeting.
I quickly got approval from my editor to interview him and take a photographer.
I met Corey in a downtown Toronto hotel and he was just as open as he was on Facebook. He was filled with gratitude and he wanted to thank some people along the way.
I later talked on the phone to well-known hockey analyst Elliotte Friedman, who had been instrumental in Hirsch’s hiring.
Here is the story that ran on the front page of the Toronto Star sports section on Feb. 14, 2015.
It is No. 7 on my top-40 list of favorite stories I wrote in a 35-year career at the Toronto Star as I count down the days to retirement.
Ex-NHLer Hirsch rebounds from despair
By Curtis Rush
Last year, sitting at home alone in Phoenix, retired NHL goaltender Corey Hirsch felt like a failure, a nobody.
The phone wasn’t ringing. Nobody was returning his calls. He could barely drag himself out of bed. He dreaded every day.
His 15-year marriage was over and the St. Louis Blues didn’t renew his contract as a goalie coach.
It was a double whammy.
At his peak, he made $650,000 (U.S.) in 1996–97 as an NHL goaltender, but that was 20 years ago with the Vancouver Canucks. His career lasted about 10 seasons, spent mostly with the New York Rangers and Canucks.
After retirement, he worked for Hockey Canada and then was hired as a goalie coach with the Maple Leafs in 2008. In 2010, the Blues hired him as their goalie coach. When the Blues lost in the first round of the playoffs last spring, Hirsch was let go.
Now he had no job and bills to pay. At 42, hockey was the only thing he knew.
Hirsch tried to get work. He paid his own way to Philadelphia for last summer’s NHL draft. He interviewed with a few NHL teams, but nothing came of it.
“Things weren’t going well,” Hirsch recalled in an interview in a downtown Toronto hotel. “And the bills were piling up. What am I going to do? I started thinking, what’s going to happen to me today?”
The ego was not just bruised, it was destroyed. As an NHL player, Hirsch got the gold glove treatment everywhere he went.
A highlight was playing in the 1994 Olympics, but he was so young and naive, “I thought this life was going to last for-ever.”
Foolishly, he didn’t even think to take a camera to Lillehammer, Norway.
Now, nobody was knocking on his door. He had to learn to approach people.
“As players, people come to us,” Hirsch said.
“We don’t have to go to them. But guess what? Once it ends, unless you’re Gordie Howe or Wayne Gretzky, nobody is looking for you anymore.”
One day, he woke up alone. His wife was gone and his three children — Alexa, 16, Hayden, 14, and Farrah, 10 — were with her (they have shared custody).
On the outside, it looked like a perfect life. A home in Phoenix. A family. But when the marriage ended, there was a house to sell, assets to split. A new place to live.
He was losing hope. But suddenly something clicked, and he thought that if he changed his thinking, something good would happen.
He tried it. Days went by and, he thought, it wasn’t working. But he kept at it. Positive thoughts.
“We’re always looking for the big things,” he said. “There are a ton of good things that happen. We’re healthy and (in his case) I got to watch my daughter dance.”
Through Twitter, he found a great supporter in Stacy Lymber, who is a transition and lifestyle strategist who works mostly with ex-hockey players.
“He’s inspiring,” she said on the phone from Buffalo, N.Y. “But the sadder part about it is there are thousands out there more like him, not just hockey players. They’re lost, basically.”
Out of the blue, Hirsch tweeted something out about a hockey game he was watching, and Sportsnet hockey analyst Elliotte Friedman saw it. He thought his analysis, in less than 140 characters, was very good and could transfer to a bigger stage.
“I follow Corey on Twitter, and I’ve talked to him a bit over his career,” Friedman said by phone. “He always had a kind of snarky and sarcastic and pretty funny way of looking at things. Some of the stuff he says is pretty funny and biting.”
Friedman said he had “no idea” Hirsch was in a bad place when he put him in touch with Mitch Kerz-ner, executive producer of studio production for NHL on Sportsnet.
“We weren’t close enough that he would share that kind of thing with me,” Friedman said.
“The one thing you learn, though, covering this business is when players retire, it’s not easy.”
Kerzner took Friedman’s advice and checked Hirsch’s Twitter account.
“I saw some things on Twitter that I liked so I gave him a call,” Kerzner said over the phone. “I think he’s got a lot of insight, but witty insight.”
Hirsch now works for Sportsnet as a freelance NHL analyst.
He said he felt comfortable right away in the studio.
“It seemed to click,” he said.
Prior to this, Hirsch had reached out to the NHL alumni, which put on a broadcasting workshop that furnished him with training and confidence to enter a new arena.
“His desire to find an area that he was passionate about and ignite a spark like hockey did is not easy,” said Wendy McCreary of the NHL alumni association. “Corey was a natural.”
Hirsch was so moved by his turn of luck that he took to Facebook this week to tell his friends the story and it touched a nerve with hundreds of readers, including former teammate Kirk McLean.
Hirsch doesn’t want to come across as a sympathy case. He just wants his story out there so others can be inspired. He is also not suggesting that people with clinical depression can just snap out of it like he did.
But what about the tweet, that game-changing tweet?
Hirsch can’t remember it, and neither can Friedman.
“I wish I did,” Hirsch says before leaving to do research on the Boston Bruins and Vancouver Canucks game Friday night.
The tweet doesn’t matter much anymore. What matters is that, in Hirsch’s mind, bad things can be blessings in disguise.
“It’s weird sometimes,” he says, “how we think the worst thing that could ever happen to us turns out to be one of the best things to ever happen to us. I was let go by St. Louis. At the time, I was devastated.
“But it led me to this.”
