Finding Murph by Rick Westhead

Author:Rick Westhead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2020-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

13

The Silverback

For Joe Murphy and his new friend Freddie Wolner, the summer of 1995 was a prolonged party.

After several seasons of success with the Blackhawks, Murphy had become a legitimate Chicago sports celebrity. He was asked to make an appearance when Nike opened a new sports store, and he was a guest of honour at the National Sporting Goods Association trade show in Chicago, where he and Nicholls helped to demonstrate V-Formation’s inline skates.

Murphy moved out of the John Hancock tower and into a home in Lincoln Park, a tony Chicago neighbourhood popular for its tree-lined streets, its leafy park trails and an ever-changing collection of markets and beer gardens. Murphy spent days off with Probert and Wolner and enjoyed touring art exhibits. The trio explored Chicago’s eclectic neighbourhoods, and Probert and Wolner listened as Murphy held court.

He’d talk about the physiology of horses, the migratory patterns of polar bears and the sheer strength of Rwanda’s silverback gorillas, the 400-pound giants of the jungle that boasted incredible strength on a diet of bamboo shoots and leaves. “Joe would call himself a silverback and refer to his body being a temple and had little figurines in his place of all these animals,” Wolner recalled. “There was just so many things that fascinated him then. There was this art fair in the Old Town section of Chicago, and Joe loved to walk through it. I remember one night, he bought this piece of art. My wife and I looked at each other. He spent maybe $2,000 on it. It was like a velvet canvas with blue lights on it and an Asian gladiator. It was the most bizarre shit that you could ever imagine. But Joe was fun and impulsive in that way, and that was one of the things that made him so, so lovable.”

Wolner also recalled Murphy opening up to him about his cocaine use. “We were in his house and he kept going into his basement. He’d been down there for a while. We had two girls with us at his place. I’m upstairs with the two girls by myself and he keeps going downstairs. Finally, I asked him what he was doing and he’s like, ‘Here, do this.’”

“At that time in Chicago, if you were in your 20s or 30s, that’s what everybody was doing,” Wolner said. “We used to go to a bar called Martini Ranch where all the Hawks would go after games. You could go in and order a Heineken with a hundred-dollar bill and the bartender would give you a Heineken and a crumpled-up napkin next to your beer, and inside the napkin was a bag of blow.”

Many of Murphy’s former teammates insist they never knew about his drug use. In repeated interviews as he wandered the streets of Kenora, Murphy would change the subject whenever I asked him whether he had used cocaine and other recreational drugs as a professional athlete. During his pro hockey career, he may have deftly navigated two lives,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.