#Havoc battle group boston how to

As those shots grew harder and more accurate over the years, Artie stayed in goal, taking the bruises for his son.Īccording to local lore, in his first year of competitive ice hockey, six-year-old Kevin scored 175 goals. Kevin had quickly taken to skating and soon he was shooting pucks on Artie, who played goal in his boots. Even though he couldn’t skate himself, Artie also knew that hockey was an important sport in New England - and damned if his son wasn’t going to be great at that, too. The boy would be good at every sport he played Artie knew it. By the time Stevens could walk, Artie had already taught him to catch, throw and hit. While Artie cherished his two daughters - Kelli, the eldest, and Kim - he carried a special pride for his boy. “It was like a Norman Rockwell painting,” Kelli Wilson, Stevens’s sister, recalls of her family’s time on Jeanette Drive. Games carried on until it got too dark to see the puck and Patricia called her family in to warmth and dinner and The Brady Bunch. He’d set up the nets just as school was letting out, when the frozen bogs filled with kids on skates. They raised three kids - two girls and then a boy - in that bungalow at the end of Jeanette.Īrtie shoveled and watered the ice each day, often with a cigar dangling from his lips. He married his high-school sweetheart, a local pageant queen named Patricia. A star athlete in his day, Artie had made it to the minors as a catcher in the Cincinnati Reds’ system. He was locally famous for the joy he brought with each bundle of letters. “Artie,” as everyone knew him, was a bear of a mailman whose booming laugh was matched by an outsized sense of humour. As patriarch of the home that served as the nexus for all neighbourhood games, Stevens’s father, Arthur, was the natural caretaker of the makeshift rink at the end Jeanette Drive. Sitting in his cell, he prayed for one last chance to put the pieces of his life back together.Īs a toddler, Kevin Stevens learned to skate on the cranberry bogs behind his family’s small bungalow.

But his arrest for dealing oxycodone in the spring of 2016 felt like bottoming out for good. For more than two decades, Stevens lived with a disease that took everything from him. He was never the same player again, and the end of his NHL career was accompanied by a descent into addiction - both to party drugs, like cocaine, and opioids. A big man who could pass and score, Stevens was heralded as one of the best power forwards in the game - and was rewarded with one of the NHL’s highest salaries.īut all of that ended after a horrific on-ice injury in which the bones of his forehead were crushed like potato chips, causing permanent damage to the frontal lobe of his brain. Stevens hoisted two Stanley Cups with the Pittsburgh Penguins in the early ’90s, playing left wing beside Mario Lemieux. How did it come to this? he asked himself.Īs a young man, Stevens had embodied the American Dream: The athletic son of blue-collar family from Pembroke - just south of Boston - who was the captain of every high-school varsity team, took a full-ride to an an elite college, and then became an Olympian and an NHL star. And he thought about the pills and a quarter century of addiction. He thought about his dad, who’d believed in Stevens to his last breath.

#Havoc battle group boston how to

He thought about his sisters and his mom and the worry they must be feeling not knowing how to help him. He thought about his newborn, already without a father. He thought about his teenaged children reading the headlines and seeing his picture in the paper, again. Now he looked at the concrete of his prison cell, hoping that he had found it. Stevens had fallen so far, and for so long, that he had forgotten there was a bottom. He’d felt it before in doses, but never quite like this. But the sinking inside felt something like fear - and shame and panic and loneliness. At six-foot-four and more than 300 pounds, Stevens hadn’t feared much in his 50 years, and he wasn’t afraid of them. These were hardened criminals who’d accepted their fates, he thought.