Stevens marks challenges overcome with induction to U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame

The rink arrived when Kevin Stevens was seven.

He was a mite and, suddenly, there was Hobomock Arenas, on Hobomock Street in Pembroke, Massachusetts, a rink with two sheets of ice and all the promise in the world. And even though Stevens was a multi-sport kid, a kid from an all-American family whose first love was always baseball, his aunt issued him a challenge for his time on skates.

One dollar per goal.

“That pretty much bankrupted her,” said Kelli Wilson, Stevens’ sister. “She couldn’t do it anymore because he was getting three, four, five, six goals a game.”

It was a scoring touch that was there from the start, a natural ability that combined with Stevens’ size to create the model of a power forward, a player who bulled through the NHL to the tune of 726 points (329 goals, 397 assists) in 874 games for five teams, most notably the Pittsburgh Penguins, with whom he won the Stanley Cup twice. It’s a talent and drive which has now earned him induction into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame, set for Dec. 4 in Pittsburgh.

It was everything he could have hoped for, wanted.

It was a dream. Until it wasn’t.

Stevens' career was derailed on May 14, 1993, when he headed down the ice, hunting a puck set for an icing in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Division Finals against the New York Islanders. Rich Pilon touched it and Stevens careened into him, the impact sending Stevens flying, his head hitting Pilon’s shield and knocking him out.

His face met the ice, crushing his nose and orbital bone and forehead so much that it had to be entirely reconstructed by surgeons.

“I can’t even watch it,” Wilson said, of videos of the moment.

Nothing would ever be the same.

But after it all, after the recovery and the descent into drug addiction, after the arrest and the jail time and another kind of recovery, Stevens is on the other side, in a place where he is helping others and content with his life, a place where he’s seeing his contributions on the ice be remembered and honored, even 22 years after he last played in the NHL.

“When he got into the Hall, he was so humble,” Wilson said. “He was like, 'Kell, I never saw this coming.' And I said, ‘Why not, Kev? You were one of the best American-born left wings, if not the best, in the country, in the world.’”

* * * *

Stevens grew up on street hockey, on football, on baseball, on basketball.

“I played everything growing up,” Stevens said. “I was one of those three-sport kind of guys in high school. You can’t really do that now.”

The intention had been to play baseball at the next level. But then Kelli headed to Boston College. The coach there, Len Ceglarski, lived in the next town over from Stevens in Pembroke and got to frequently watch him play. A scholarship ensued.

And when he realized that he couldn’t play both baseball and hockey – the seasons overlapped – Stevens settled into what would become his future.

“I could always score goals,” Stevens said. “I had good hands and I could score. But I had to learn a little bit about skating, be a better skater.”

It all blossomed when Stevens made the 1988 Olympic team, seven months that would sharpen his game and develop him into the player he would be in the NHL after four seasons at BC, a stretch that changed the way he regarded himself as a hockey player, including the heights he might reach.

And then came the Penguins.

Stevens made his Penguins debut on March 1, 1988, less than a week after he finished competing at the Olympics, and reached full-time status two years later, just before the team embarked on a run that would see them win the Cup in two straight seasons, 1991 and 1992.

It was a heady time, with Mario Lemieux and Tom Barrasso, Paul Coffey and Ron Francis, Joe Mullen and Larry Murphy, Mark Recchi and Bryan Trottier and Jaromir Jagr.

Stevens fit, on the ice and in the room, where he brought joy and life and seemingly never had a bad day. As former teammate Rick Tocchet, now the coach of the Vancouver Canucks, put it, “One of my favorite [people] and teammates of all time. He’s one of the best guys I’ve ever played with.”

“He was a power forward,” Recchi said. “You look back in those days, in the early 90s, late 80s, there weren’t a lot of legitimate power forwards. He was one of them. Rick Tocchet, obviously Cam Neely, they were the new wave of big guys who could skate and had a physical ability in the game and could make a difference in that way and they could score.

“Kevin, he was an unbelievable player. I played with him quite a bit. He was amazing. He didn’t really want the puck until the hash marks and below there, he said.”

He had the benefit of playing with centers like John Cullen and Francis, on the power play with Lemieux. But he wasn’t riding their coattails.

He hit his peak in 1991-92, when he scored 123 points (54 goals, 69 assists), second in the NHL in points scored behind Lemieux’s 131. Stevens followed it up with another 55 goals the following season, for 111 points. He scored 33 points (17 goals, 16 assists) in 24 games in the playoffs in 1991, leading the team in goals and third on the team in points behind Lemieux and Recchi, and added another 28 points (13 goals, 15 assists) in 21 games in the playoffs in 1992.

“My job was pretty much, get them the puck and go to the net,” Stevens said. “If no one takes me, they give it to me. It was pretty simple back then.”

He could skate and pass and hit and shoot. He was a physical presence that demanded attention both because of what he represented and what he could do.

“When you think of the best power forwards over the years, when you’ve got a guy like that, plays the game tough, scores 50 goals, great hands, scores clutch in the playoffs, scored some big goals for the Penguins in his career,” Tocchet said. “When you talk about that era, the top power forwards, he’s in the top.”

* * * *

It was when the Penguins were going for their third Stanley Cup, in 1993, that Stevens got his first taste of what would become an addiction. He was in New York City and someone handed him something. It was cocaine.

He barely knew what it was, he said. He certainly didn’t know what it would mean. He took all of 15 seconds to decide.

“I was 28 years old and I never did a drug,” Stevens said. “I didn’t even know what drugs really were. That’s the crazy thing. I never did anything, I never smoked pot. But for some reason I did it, not thinking it was going to affect my life.

“Things changed. For the next 24, 25 years, things did change.”

It was a progression, a slide into need.

“When the addiction part started, that was pretty much hell on earth for a quarter century,” Wilson said. “Those were heartbreaking times.”

It was the height of his career, when it seemed like he had everything, all he could have ever wanted. That, though, was hardly a bulwark against the desires roiling his body and his brain.

“When I hit addiction, I was going for a third Cup. I was scoring 50 goals a year. I was playing with Mario,” Stevens said. “If you wanted someone’s life, you wanted mine.”

It all happened quickly, the cocaine and the collision and the surgeries. He was struggling, spending a couple of months in the hospital, but ultimately it took a handful of years before the addiction fully took hold, helped along by the heavy use of painkillers that came after the injury.

He had been a rink rat, a player who was all hockey all the time. That dropped away. His career petered out, as he played for the Boston Bruins, Los Angeles Kings, New York Rangers and Philadelphia Flyers, before a return to Pittsburgh.

“Addiction takes, it keeps taking and taking, until it takes everything,” he said.

Stevens tried rehab after rehab, was arrested twice, in 2000 and 2016, on drug charges. But he was granted leniency by the judge in the second case, an arrest for intent to distribute oxycodone, after his family and friends gathered more than 150 letters of character reference. He was given probation and ordered to work on anti-drug efforts.

He has been sober since. He started a foundation, Power Forward, with Wilson, that helps fight addiction through education, empowerment and innovation and is working to remove the stigma of addiction. It helps enable people going through addiction get access to sober homes, to places where they can continue their recovery, a bridge out of rehab.

As Wilson said, “As great a hockey player as he was, what he’s doing off the ice right now is tremendous and actually, literally, we are saving lives.”

“Kevin finally figured it out and it’s so great to see him now, doing what he’s doing,” Recchi said. “He’s got charities now; he’s really helping out people. … But it was so hard to watch him go through that. Addiction really is a powerful thing and a scary thing. To see your friend go through that is not fun.

“He’s helping people now and that’s powerful right there, knowing you got through it and now you’re helping people.”

There is an alternate universe in which so much of what Stevens went through could have been different. There’s a world in which he went with his first love, baseball, following in the footsteps of his father, Arthur, who played two seasons in the farm system for the Cincinnati Reds as a catcher. There’s a world in which the Penguins win Game 6 in 1993 and Game 7 – and the collision that sent his career and his life spiraling – never happened.

There’s a world in which he didn’t use drugs.

But that’s not the world that Stevens is living in. The former player has come so far from where he was, from the depths of his addiction and the rock bottom he reached.

He is now a member of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame.

“If you look at my career, it’s like seven great years, then that night in New York City, and then I had seven years of pain, kind of suffering and kind of struggling,” Stevens said. “But today, can I look back and really be upset at what happened to me? I can. But I can’t live in that space. I can’t go back and live. I wish it was different, but a lot of people wish their lives were different. I wish it didn’t happen the way it happened. But it did.

“I’m here today. And this is what I have to do: You have to live for today and you can’t live in the rearview mirror.”

He can only look forward. See himself, see the plaque, see the next person he can help.

One day at a time.

“Just to build yourself back up after you’ve lost everything, it’s tremendous,” Wilson said. “And just the strength it takes to do that, I’m really, really proud of Kevin. … There won’t be a dry eye in the place.”