At last year’s International Ice Hockey Australian Tour, theAIHL.com’s reporter Gemma Fagan had the chance to speak with former NHL player Keith Primeau, who played across the Red Wings, Hurricanes and Flyers in a 1037-game, 15-year career. Since retiring, Primeau co-founded the Stop Concussions Foundation, a foundation dedicated to educating players, parents and coaches about the effects and symptoms of concussions.

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During his playing career Keith Primeau played a gritty, aggressive style of hockey and never shied away from dropping gloves when it was called for. Unfortunately for the robust two-way centerman, years of playing his hard style of hockey caught up to him. After sustaining his fourth documented concussion during the 2005-6 season, he was forced to call time of his NHL career due to post-concussion syndrome.

With his NHL career behind him, Primeau knew that he couldn’t just stand by watching others suffer through what he had and decided something had to be done about it. So he teamed up with Kerry Goulet, a former hockey player who also knew first-hand what it was like to suffer with post-concussion syndrome, and they founded the Stop Concussions Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that would help to educate and raise awareness on the cause, effect and consequence of concussions.

“It’s important that we understand the severity of the injury,” Primeau said. “In North America we’ve made real progress but not to the extent we need especially at the medical professional level. There seems to still be some lagging as far as the understanding but parents seem to be taking more responsibility when it comes to their children.”

“I guess the biggest thing is education, educating yourself on the injury and, when you do that, you create knowledge so when the injury presents itself, if you understand the severity of it, you understand there’s a real problem. Then you can deal with the issue and so most important thing is at the grassroots level that we understand that sports is just a game and if a child gets hurt we need to pull them out of competition in order to get medical attention.”

Although concussions have always been present in the sport of hockey, it always lurked in the shadow. It was an issue that no one really talked about whether it’s because hockey is perceived to be a sport of the toughest and the fittest, no room for the “weak” or maybe it was purely for the fact there was a huge lack of understanding of just how severe brain injuries can affect a person.

Either way that all seemed to change in 2009-10 season when NHL superstar captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins Sidney Crosby was diagnosed with a concussion after receiving two knocks to the head in a matter of weeks each other. The NHL and the media were finally sitting up and paying attention.

While Crosby certainly wasn’t the first NHL player to suffer with post-concussion syndrome, he was definitely the player who seemed to get people talking.

“For us in North America the first big name concussion sufferer was Eric Lindros,” Primeau noted. “Sidney Crosby certainly brought it into the spotlight for us in a national and international stage in North America. You never like to see anyone get hurt but it certainly put it into mainstream media.”

“People started to realise that it was severe especially in the fact that he missed the better part of the year trying to get better. You hope that it doesn’t happen often but it certainly brought it into the forefront of North America news and again it’s a reflection for the grassroots to understand that this very real and it’s important that we recognise it.”

So with brain injuries now under the microscope where does it leave the hockey “traditionalist”? With the pressure from many parts of the hockey community calling for a full ban on hockey fights, the former power forward who himself made a career out of fighting has even started to question its place within the sport.

“I don’t want to sit on the fence but there was a point in time where I would say I was a hockey traditionalist and I always felt when I dropped my gloves that it was the inherent risk that I accepted and that there was a place for fighting in the game,” admits Primeau. “But the more we get into this the longer this goes on the more I start to change my position to the fact that if we are trying to remove head contact then that includes fighting because fighting includes punches to the head and that’s what we need to get rid of or minimise at least.”

Primeau was for all purposes a quintessential hockey player of his era, knowing what he does now would he himself change the way he approached the game? Would he still play a style of hockey that would lead him down the path he now has found himself?

“If I knew then what I know, I can’t say that I would have changed my course. I wouldn’t change the way that I play, I wouldn’t change the way I handled each concussion because that’s who I was, that’s how I was raised, I was bred to fight through injury and thought that was courage. The reality of real courage is being able to have the voice to speak up and say I’m hurt, I don’t feel well and I need to get better. That’s part of our outreach. We are trying to make people understand you need to have a voice and courage is saying I don’t feel well and that’s part of the reason behind Stop Concussions.”

Even though dealing with post-concussion syndrome has been a challenge at times for the Toronto native, he never lost track of what it felt like to be ‘normal’. He used that as the driving force to get better. Since 2012, a long seven years since he hung up his skates, Primeau finally can say he is healthy again.

“We need to understand that no two concussions are the same, even my own personal concussions they were all different,” said the former Flyers captain. “Different side effects, different symptoms, same thing with other people. That’s where it becomes very trying; there’s not one type of therapy that can help every individual. It’s specialised and at times it takes long period in order to get better and then people get frustrated by the lack of improvement or the length of time it takes to improve. That’s where depression can set in. For me, I understood I knew what normalcy was and I wanted to get back to that point. It took me the better part of seven years but I was able to achieve it and it’s nice to feel some semblance of normalcy again.”

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We can’t change the past but we can definitely learn from it. Visit the Stop Concussions website, Facebook page or Twitter to learn more about the effect of concussions and post-concussion syndrome.