Out Like A Lamb As Debilitating Migraines Took Their Toll, Bruising Bertsch Retired To Salvage His Health

Jay Bertsch was at center ice Saturday night, losing a fight with his emotions. It was a different experience for 8,567 in the Arena, many of whom watched Bertsch grow from a tentative 17-year-old to a 20-year-old tough guy.

But there he was in street clothes, 20 pounds under his playing weight, finally letting the crowd know how vulnerable he really felt.

With cheers rising and lights dimmed, Bertsch reluctantly walked to the blue line for the last time to take his place with Spokane’s starters. He wasn’t the only one in their ranks fighting pregame tears.

Bertsch had always bounced out on the ice eager to punish and protect. Now, after 15 years, it was ceremoniously over.

Big brother is moving on.

Repeated blows to the head - bombs he calls them - triggered a chain reaction of severe headaches. The diagnosis was trauma-induced migraines. Medication helped at first, but lately the battering had begun to take a more visible toll.

His weight dropped. The circles under his eyes turned to bags. He spent nearly two weeks last month in hospitals.

“Going to pro camp (with New Jersey in September) and fighting there as much as I did, and fighting as much as I did when I came back … it just kept getting worse,” Bertsch said after the Chiefs dedicated Saturday’s win to him. “The doctors said they couldn’t maintain or control it.”

Few paid for the thrill of the ride the way Bertsch did.

“After the migraines I get I couldn’t do anything for two or three days because I was so weak,” he said. “The migraines would absolutely take me out. I’d be sick, riding back on the bus, throwing up, having headaches. Doing that all the time, it did get worse.”

The low came on a bus ride last month when the Chiefs pulled into Pincher Creek, Alberta, to practice.

“I got off the bus and the left side of my body went numb,” Bertsch said. “I couldn’t pick my (left) foot up. The left side of my mouth dropped. The left side of my tongue was numb and I was droolin’ out of the left side.

“That was a scare.”

Boxers aren’t the only ones who’ve had their neurological wires crossed.

Bertsch is lucky. Doctors tell him the prognosis is bright.

There are those who aren’t as fortunate, who went too far. Bertsch says one ex-player in his hometown of Lethbridge “is still being rehabilitated” after taking too many shots.

“I never played with the guy,” Bertsch said. “He’s come around a lot in three or four years but it shows you what can happen.”

What can happens is the role - tough guy - can get to be too much.

“The last couple of months people I think knew I wasn’t feeling good, because I was getting beat up,” Bertsch said. “I had no confidence about getting hit in the head. That’s not the way I was.”

Nothing’s the way it was.

“The whole reason (for having to quit) is because of the fighting,” Bertsch said. “The neurologist in Seattle told me that now, every couple of months, I may get a migraine but not to the extent that I’ve been getting them. We talked for hours, did tests, went through an MRI.

“She sat me down and said, ‘I’m telling you, it’s not healthy for you to play. I don’t think you should play anymore.”’ Since his mother suffers from migraines, Bertsch says he probably would have had to deal with the occasional debilitating headache even if he hadn’t picked up a hockey stick.

But what he did on the ice - the fight-a-night regimen - convinced doctors that he was not only making it worse, he was playing with his future.

“Not many people can go out there every night willing to get their head bashed in,” he said. “Fighting on the ice on sharp blades with 220-pound guys throwin’ bombs at each other is a risk. Prime example: me.

“I can’t play any more because of it.”

The news otherwise is good.

“There’s no (brain) damage,” Bertsch said. “I’m not going to be slurring my words or walking with a cane. They found out what it was soon enough and got me out soon enough. They said, ‘You’re not going to have to go through what you’ve been going through.”’

There were nights when he didn’t want to fight, “when I still had a headache from the night before or two or three nights before,” he said. “You’d just got rid of that migraine and you’re thinking, ‘God, I got to fight again tonight.’

“But in the big picture it was worth it.”

So don’t, he says, read his misfortune as the result of a poor decision.

He insists he would change nothing. Although it’s been a rocky couple of months leading up to Christmas for him and his family, he says his five years in major junior hockey will stand as the best years of his life.

“When you love something as much as we do, as players, it’s worth it,” he said. “How many people get to experience what I did? I played with some great guys last year who came real close to winning a championship. We played 72 regular-season games plus playoffs. In that time we loved each other.

“Your emotions run when 10,000 fans are screamin’ you on in overtime. You just don’t get that playing table tennis at a yacht club. I’ll never have experiences like that or friends like that again. I went through a lot with Kevin Sawyer, Sean Gillam and Leeber (Greg Leeb).

“Leeber phones me every night to make sure I’m OK. People have been there for me, caring. It’s been a pleasure to play here, to be surrounded by the (front-office) people here - Mike (Babcock) and T.D. (Forss), Tim (Speltz) and Bobby (Brett). They understand the pressure and politics of hockey and understood what I put into it.”

The Chiefs, Bertsch said, “did everything to find out what was going wrong with me. The doctors in Spokane, Dr. Klock and Dr. Carlson, spent hours helping me. They were fantastic, sitting with me every day, rushing down to help me out.”

Knowing what he knows now, if Bertsch had a son would he raise a tough guy?

“I’d put some boxing gloves on him and teach him how,” he said, if that’s what his son wanted. “I’d tell him to keep his head up and throw hard.”

It’s over, so suddenly and depressingly that Bertsch says more than once he’s tossed himself awake worrying about life after hockey. But he needs no prodding to get on with it. He’ll take the educational benefits he has accrued and go to college in the Arizona desert, away from the snow and ice that were the backdrops of his first 20 years.

He said he’ll stay at least through next month before going to junior college in Scottsdale with an eye on eventually getting into the school of business at Arizona State.

“I’m looking forward to wearing shorts and sandals to school,” he said. “I think I need that. I don’t know how good I could have been but I know I’m not going to dwell on it.

“It’ll kill me if I do.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (1 Color)