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Post by SeaBass on Dec 11, 2020 8:03:57 GMT -5
It’s 9:45 a.m. on March 10, and Brian Lawton’s pounding on the door of Room 332 at the Residence Inn in Secaucus, N.J.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Nothing.
Then, louder, and still no answer.
Lawton’s panicking now.
The night before, Lawton had knocked on the same door, and just like now, no answer. He called the room. No answer. He texted and texted. No reply … until just before 10 p.m. when Mark Parrish, his fellow NHL Network analyst, finally texted back.
Parrish vowed then that he was fine, merely tired. He was going to bed early and the two would have breakfast the next morning to talk things out.
Lawton was worried. He had an uncomfortable, heated conversation with Parrish hours earlier.
The dispute started after a worrisome pre-production meeting two hours before airtime. After the meeting, Lawton confronted Parrish and told him he wasn’t fit to be on the broadcast. Lawton ordered an Uber that picked up Parrish at the studio and took him back to the hotel.
“No matter what, you call me when you wake up,” Lawton wrote in a text. “If you wake up at 5 a.m., you call me. I have my phone on.”
Lawton woke up at 6 a.m., and he waited for the call.
By 7, there was no call or text. Same at 8. At 9, Lawton called and still, no answer. He texted. No reply.
So now, after Lawton marches 100 yards down the hallway from his room, Room 302, he’s beating on the door to Parrish’s room.
After three or four minutes, Lawton’s mind is racing. He fears what he’s going to discover on the other side of the door. And then he hears a noise.
“Mark!” Lawton yells.
The door opens and there stands Parrish. His T-shirt is soaked with sweat. His hands are shaking. His eyes are bloodshot.
Relieved that Parrish is alive, Lawton walks in and looks around.
“Where is it?” Lawton asks.
Lawton searches the room. He looks under the bed. Behind the couch. In the fridge. In the bathroom.
“I didn’t sleep a minute last night,” Parrish says. “I felt like I was going to die. I had to have a sip of vodka every 20 minutes.”
“Where is it?” Lawton asks again.
“It’s in the freezer.”
Lawton opens the freezer and pulls out the 750-milliliter bottle.
It’s almost empty. How can anybody drink this much? he remembers thinking.
Lawton pours what little is left of the vodka down the sink. He drops onto the couch exasperated, then looks at the sad sight of this 43-year-old former NHL All-Star sitting in the desk chair next to him.
Parrish isn’t only Lawton’s television colleague.
He loves him like a “little brother.”
Lawton, the No. 1 overall pick in the 1983 NHL Draft, became an agent after his playing days.
He recruited Parrish as a client in 1994, when the 17-year-old was lighting it up at Bloomington Jefferson High School in Minnesota and later at St. Cloud State. He was front row and center during most of Parrish’s 12-year NHL career, until Lawton became a Tampa Bay Lightning executive and eventually their GM in the summer of 2008.
That was a month before Parrish was bought out of the final three years of his five-year, $13.25 million contract with his home-state Minnesota Wild, hastening his downward spiral.
Parrish was already drinking too much at that point. But after two rocky years with the Wild, the humiliation of being publicly kicked to the curb in a place where he was once a homegrown hockey hero, sent Parrish onto a destructive path.
He was embarrassed and despondent and became more dependent on alcohol to relieve his pain, depression and anxiety. He was prescribed medication by a neurologist to help with his anxiety and pounding head, but he quit taking those pills because alcohol did the trick. He kicked a heavy painkiller addiction not long after his close friend and former teammate Derek Boogaard died from an accidental overdose of alcohol and oxycodone in 2011.
But for years, family and friends, especially Lawton and former teammates and longtime pals Ben Clymer and Bret Hedican, tried to intervene. Parrish’s alcohol consumption was often the main topic of conversation during their get-togethers.
“It was really hard to watch. You’re losing a friend,” says Hedican, a Minnesota native and Florida Panthers teammate during parts of Parrish’s first two years in the NHL. “I remember saying to Ben one time, ‘I just don’t want to have us get that call,’ that call that says, ‘Mark died,’ and we didn’t do anything about it.”
By the time Lawton was dumping out the last of Parrish’s vodka in that New Jersey hotel room, the mood had shifted.
“Lawts, I need help.”
“Are you asking me for help?”
“Yes, I’m telling you, Lawts … I need help.”
“OK,” Lawton says, “Here’s what I’m going to do.”
Lawton tells Parrish to clean up, jump in the shower. That he’ll be back in a bit with a plan.
Lawton had already put a lot of people on alert.
His first call was to Dan Cronin, the director of counseling for the NHL/NHLPA Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health Program, who helped get Parrish admitted into a rehab facility in Arizona.
Lawton asked the NHL Network to change Parrish’s return flight to Minnesota. He called Clymer, who bought Parrish a connecting flight from Minnesota to Phoenix and also booked himself a ticket in the seat next to Parrish. Clymer called Parrish’s wife, Nicholle, and asked her to pack a bag with her husband’s clothes and bring it to his office.
After a cold shower, Parrish called his wife and broke down. He remembers “feeling relieved and exhausted.”
When Lawton returned to Parrish’s room, he laid out the plan: Uber to Newark airport. Flight to Minneapolis. Meet Clymer there. Take 6:02 p.m. connecting flight to Arizona. Drive to rehab facility.
But Parrish pushes back. I can’t go home? I can’t kiss my wife goodbye? I can’t explain to my kids why Dad is leaving? He’s bargaining now.
But Lawton and Clymer had gotten close to convincing Parrish to seek help in the past. They worried he’d back out if his family tugged on his heartstrings. They held firm. This is the way it has to be.
In the basement of Parrish’s home in a western suburb of Minneapolis, there is all sorts of memorabilia from his playing days.
An All-Star Game jersey from 2002 when he scored 30 goals for the New York Islanders. His 2006 Olympic jersey. A Kodak picture he once took with Mario Lemieux. The puck from his first NHL goal during the 1998-99 Panthers’ season opener. Parrish scored twice that night, including the winner over the cross-state rival Tampa Bay Lightning.
And there’s an enormous bar with a couple of Northland vodka bottles still on the shelf.
Parrish is one of four partners in the Minnesota-based vodka company. His wife boxed up the rest of their alcohol and gave it to a friend. And those Northland bottles? Filled with water because “it seems silly to have a bar with no bottles.”
A wine cellar next to the bar is padlocked. Only Nicholle, who works in the wine industry, knows the combination. She needs a place to keep wine, plus Mark needs some Northland bottles for giveaways and signings.
How Parrish began drinking such a “grotesque amount of alcohol” that “I was literally liquifying my brain” is a story familiar to many alcoholics and family members of alcoholics.
“We’re spectacular liars, alcoholics,” Parrish says. “I got to learn firsthand how powerful the disease is. I’d keep telling myself, ‘Don’t make another drink,’ then I’d be making that drink and would tell myself, ‘Don’t make it so stiff.’ It’s like my hand wouldn’t listen. The hardest part for me, my parents (Barb and Gene) taught me to be a good person, and I’ve been so proud of how honest I was for the majority of my life, that I was a man of my word and could be trusted and relied upon.
“But I’ve told so many lies. You don’t realize the emotional toll that it takes on everyone else when you’re so wrapped up in it.”
He suddenly pauses: “I had no idea how far down I was. Where to start? … Where do I even start?”
Start on March 9, the day before he entered rehab. Parrish’s flight landed in New Jersey late the night before, and like “any good alcoholic,” he stopped at a liquor store on the way to the hotel for his customary 750-milliliter bottle of vodka. What did him in, he says, was lunch across from the hotel at Houlihan’s. He rounded out that meal with “four or five” doubles.
A few hours later, he stumbled into the conference room at NHL Network studios for a pre-production meeting with a dozen people, bumped the back of Lawton’s chair, and spilled Lawton’s 31-ounce iced green tea all over the table.
Initially, Lawton thought the spilled tea was merely an accident. “Clean it up. No big deal. Sit back down.”
This is the meeting where analysts contribute ideas so the production staff can plan the upcoming show. They discuss that evening’s docket of games and provide topics they’d like to talk about on air.
“As I’m sitting there, Mark was struggling with his comments. It was a red flag to me,” Lawton says. “Mark didn’t really say a ton. When he did, it wasn’t what I would call his best stuff as an analyst. That started to get me concerned. We’re sitting next to each other, and at some point I realized that I could smell alcohol. This is about 4 o’clock, and we’re going on national TV at 6.
“I don’t really get super nervous, but I started to get hot flashes. The meeting goes on and my temperature rises to about 102.”
When the meeting ended, Lawton hustled to the door to intercept Parrish. He asked Jamie Hersch, who was hosting that night’s show, to stay, too.
Lawton asked Parrish what was wrong and Parrish became instantly defensive, saying he was tired from a long week of broadcasting the Minnesota high school state hockey tournament.
“Mark was super emotional,” Lawton says. “And I’m super uncomfortable because we’re very good friends. I keep thinking to myself, ‘I’m doing him a service.’”
But as things got increasingly contentious, Lawton started to worry, “Am I misreading it? Maybe (spilling) the drink was an accident. Maybe I really didn’t smell alcohol. Maybe he really is just tired.”
Parrish yelled back, “I can’t believe you’re stabbing me in the back like this.”
“I look at Jamie, and her eyes are welling up, and I started crying, too,” Parrish says. “Lawts (never) actually said he knew I was drinking. He kept saying, ‘You seem off, Parry, you seem off, you’re sick, yeah, I think you’re sick.’ … Go have a nice dinner, get some sleep and make sure this is only a 12-hour flu and not a 24-hour flu.”
Lawton ordered Parrish an Uber, sent him back to the hotel and told the producers Parrish wasn’t feeling well. They arranged to have analyst E.J. Hradek, who worked an earlier show, stay and fill-in for Parrish. During the Uber ride back to the Residence Inn, Parrish tried to convince himself that this was “a one-time thing.”
You just made a mistake today. Get a good night’s sleep, come back tomorrow and prove your worth, just like after a bad game.
Parrish ordered a steak to his room and says he didn’t drink a drop of alcohol. He didn’t hear Lawton at his door a little later and responded to his texts by replying that they’d talk in the morning. He went to bed around 10.
A little after midnight, Parrish woke up. He had a tingling sensation up and down his arms and across his chest, like pins and needles. His heart was racing. Maybe a panic attack? “I guess the jig is up. I’m busted.” As the pain intensified, so did the anxiety.
He thought if he didn’t get a good night’s sleep, he’d possibly lose a job he loves.
He paced around his suite and then went outside and walked around the courtyard. When he returned to his room, that tingling sensation and racing heart didn’t let up. Then he remembered that bottle of vodka.
I’ll just have a couple drinks to calm this panic down.
In the midst of the second drink, he fell asleep.
Three hours later, at 4:30 in the morning, he woke up again.
The pins and needles had turned into nails, daggers even. His bed was soaked with sweat, his heart was racing. He contemplated calling 911.
Parrish grabbed his phone to call his wife, but it was 3:30 a.m. in Minnesota and he didn’t want to spook her and the kids.
“And, of course, I’ve got the rest of that unfinished drink from earlier sitting on my nightstand,” Parrish says. “I remember, I had my phone in one hand and I picked up the drink with the other. I took one sip, and the pain just, man, it just stopped like that. That was my spiritual moment, my aha moment … that God shot, as they call it in AA.
“I just remember looking at my left hand and looking at the drink and saying, ‘Oh shit, it’s you.’ It dawned on me right then and there that I needed help. That I obviously couldn’t do it alone.”
Nicholle, his wife of 16 years, had been asking Parrish to slow down his drinking for a couple of years at that point. He often considered going cold turkey but always found an excuse not to.
“I was lying to her about taking days off when I never would,” Parrish says. “Never, until this moment, did I actually really think I had an issue, yet I drank more than the average bear.”
Like Nicholle, his friends were not surprised Parrish had hit bottom. Clymer, a year younger than Parrish and a friend since their high school days at Bloomington Jefferson, had gotten close to sending Parrish to rehab a year or two ago.
But nothing in their past friendship could prepare Clymer for what he saw when he met Parrish after his flight from New Jersey landed in Minnesota.
From the moment Parrish passed through security at Newark, he started drinking. By the time he got to Minneapolis, he looked broken. His hands were shaking uncontrollably. He was sweating so profusely that he had to change out of the shirt he was wearing and into … a Northland Vodka T-shirt, which matched his Northland Vodka hat.
Parrish was going to rehab looking like a vodka advertisement.
He had already had plenty to drink, but he ordered more at the airport in Minnesota.
It was almost like “my last hurrah,” Parrish admits. “Like, if I’m going to rehab … I’m going drunk.”
Clymer called the facility in Arizona to ask if he should try to stop Parrish from drinking. They told him, while they’d obviously like him as sober as possible, to not worry about it now. Clymer guesses Parrish had 16 units of vodka while he was with him.
“He was pretty low, super embarrassed about having to do this,” says Clymer, 42. “I kept telling him I was proud of him and that ‘the biggest way you could disappoint people would be by not going through with this and by continuing what you’re doing.’”
What boggled Clymer’s mind, the more Parrish drank on that flight to Arizona, the more sober he seemed to get.
“He was not well when I first saw him,” Clymer says. “His skin color wasn’t proper. And then when we were getting off the plane, he was totally normal.”
As Parrish and Clymer walked to the rental car shuttle, they walked past a bar.
“I want to have my last drink with you,” Parrish said.
Clymer teared up.
“I wanted it to be his last drink, too,” Clymer says.
They rented a car, then Clymer drove Parrish to the Meadows facility in Wickenburg, Ariz. They arrived just before 10 p.m.
In the parking lot, Clymer made Parrish change out of his Northland shirt.
“I’m like, ‘Dude, I’m not bringing you into rehab wearing a vodka shirt,’” Clymer remembers saying.
Clymer felt like he was dropping one of his kids off for camp. But he felt a tinge of guilt as he left because he and Lawton hadn’t been completely honest about one major detail.
Parrish thought he was going to be in Arizona for a few days, maybe a week, not 45 days.
“It felt like a shitty thing to do to a friend, but I’m thinking, ‘Maybe now’s not the time to tell him he’s not coming home in a week,’” Clymer says.
And part of it was hope.
“It felt weird driving away, knowing that my life was going to continue on, and his life was going to take an absolute U-turn,” Clymer says. “I was really happy he was doing it, but I knew the fight that was ahead of him.”
In the 25 hours before arriving at Meadows, Parrish figures he drank enough vodka to fill more than two 750-milliliter bottles.
“I don’t remember what my blood alcohol was, but I kind of wish I do,” Parrish says.
After taking a number of tests upon arrival, Parrish was led to his room.
“I just slept,” Parrish says. “I just remember being so tired and I don’t know, obviously it had a lot to do with the amount of alcohol, but just mentally shut down.”
Three or four days later, when Parrish was more alert after coming off some heavy withdrawal drugs, he worried about how obvious it would be to the world that he suddenly went missing.
Clymer set up a meeting with Parrish’s partners at Northland to explain what was going on, and Nicholle emailed The Athletic’s Islanders beat writer, Arthur Staple, to let him know, without getting into details, that Mark would be out of the loop for a while. The two co-hosted a twice-a-week podcast.
Another of his concerns was his radio duties. On Wednesdays and Fridays, Parrish appears on the “Power Trip,” the No. 1-rated morning show in Minnesota, on KFAN, one of the highest-rated sports radio stations in the United States.
Clymer met with the show’s hosts, Cory Cove, Chris Hawkey and Paul Lambert to fill them in. The three were relieved. They knew Parrish had a severe drinking problem.
Since retiring, Parrish says vodka, and the occasional whiskey, helped him fight off severe anxiety.
“I’d wake up in the morning and my to-do list would be, ‘Go to the laundromat, go to the dry cleaner, call Mike’ — four or five nothing things that should be no big deal for a retired guy in his 30s,” Parrish says. “And I couldn’t even decide which one to do first. I would just spin. I would be walking in circles and finally Nikki would be like, ‘Why don’t you just take a shower?’
“I’d take a shower and come out and I’d be just as anxious. She’d have to walk me through just the simplest things. And it started wearing on me. Every morning was a roll of a dice as to whether I’d wake up OK or my anxiety was off the charts.”
The simplest tasks became too much to handle. Parrish figured one drink couldn’t hurt. That’s not enough to get him drunk. But then, “One drink turns into two. … If I had to pick up the kids, my brain’s telling me to have a drink. I started to have a couple drinks before picking up the kids.”
When his wife found out, she was horrified. “All of a sudden, Nikki’s picking up the kids and she’s driving everywhere,” Parrish says.
At one point a few years ago, after an alcoholic episode, Mark’s older brother, Geno, was so worried, he actually lived in the house four days a week for more than a month.
Parrish used to coach high school hockey at Orono. He says he resigned in part so he could keep drinking and not get in trouble. When he worked on the broadcasts of state high school tournament games, he says he never drank on the air but always had one waiting for him afterward.
In October 2018, Parrish was arrested for drunk driving. It never made it into the public airways, so other than Nicholle, Parrish hid the arrest from most of his family and friends until recently. But instead of the incident being a wake-up call, he says the guilt sent him into a downward spiral.
“When I look back at all the times Nikki tried to help me, tried to slow me down … she just couldn’t because I didn’t believe (I had a problem),” Parrish says.
There’s a red, 25-ounce CamelBak water bottle that Parrish still has. It’s a reminder about how far off track he got. Before almost any drive, “I’d prepare myself a drink.”
The bottle held the same amount of liquid as one of his 750-milliliter vodka bottles, so he’d fill the water bottle to the top, half water, half vodka.
The “Power Trip” airs from 5:30-9 a.m. weekdays. Parrish is on the entire 3 1/2 hours Wednesday, the final two hours Friday.
Parrish loves doing the show and has become close friends with each of the hosts. But like everything else in his life, it causes anxiety.
“On the days that I would go into KFAN, the last couple years, that water bottle would pretty much be gone,” Parrish said. “I mean it’s a 15-minute ride that early in the morning, and that thing would be gone by the time I got into KFAN.”
The crew from the morning show suspected it wasn’t water in that bottle that never left Parrish’s side. And the look in his eyes sometimes told Hawkey, “He wasn’t completely there with me.”
The first time Parrish checked in with Lawton and Clymer from rehab, they couldn’t believe how much better and happier he sounded.
“It took me awhile to make some phone calls,” Parrish says. “For some reason, my brother was the hardest one to call. I don’t know why. It took me a couple weeks till I called him, and he definitely let me know he was not happy.”
What Parrish didn’t realize until he talked to Lawton the first time was that roughly 36 hours after he arrived at rehab, the COVID-19 pandemic caused the NHL to suspend its season.
That meant no viewers would wonder why he wasn’t on NHL Network anymore. When he wouldn’t be on KFAN the next few months, the pandemic could be an easy excuse.
“I was there five or six days when I realized I was staying 45,” Parrish says, laughing. “One of the therapists was like, ‘OK, you’ve got 39 days left.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ I just thought, ‘Lawts, Clymer, those sons of bitches tricked me!’”
All joking aside, the first week was tough.
Parrish was put on major withdrawal drugs and was heavily sedated for much of that time.
It wasn’t until the second week that the nurses and doctors told Parrish that he had been dubbed, “Miracle.”
“They couldn’t believe with the lab tests, everything that I had, where my body was at, what my numbers were, that I was still alive,” Parrish says.
The biggest concern other than his liver was evidence of wet brain, something doctors were able to diagnose with an MRI.
“It’s basically cell death,” explains Dr. Marvin Seppala, an addiction treatment expert and the chief medical officer at Hazelden Betty Ford in Center City, Minn. “Anytime we drink even one shot, one beer, one glass of wine, we’re killing brain cells. But we have so many of them that for people who don’t drink heavily, the social drinkers, you kill a few, it’s no big deal. Not going to notice. If you really have a severe alcohol use disorder, you can develop wet brain, but we hardly ever see that anymore. It’s a rare situation.”
Seppala said it’s an extremely serious condition that can cause difficulties with cognition and memory and eventually severe dementia. He has never treated Parrish, but because Parrish was told that the type he had was reversible, Seppala assumes Parrish was run through a battery of cognitive and memory testing.
“During the course of treatment, what you see with people that have cognitive damage from alcohol use is that in the first month, they get a lot of it back,” Seppala says. “Then the next five months, there’s a slow return of memory. After six months, you got what you’re going to have, basically.”
While at Meadows, Parrish attended “family” group meetings, met daily with a therapist and started AA meetings in the evenings. He has been stringent in attending all of his meetings since, albeit virtually because of COVID-19. Between AA, large group meetings and a couple of special meetings that include current and former pro athletes, mostly NHLers, Parrish has meetings Monday, Wednesday and Thursday nights and Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.
On the “Power Trip,” one of the most popular things they do occurs every Friday morning. It’s called the Initials Game, and it’s not easy. Lambert, Hawkey, A.J. Mansour, Parrish and other contributors act as contestants, and let’s just say that for the longest time, Parrish wasn’t doing well. Soon after returning to the show, Parrish won his first Initials Game in a calendar year. He has won the contest two of the past five weeks.
“The joke is my brain’s working again,” Parrish says.
Parrish learned a lot of life lessons in rehab, and thought a lot about his past.
How did he fall so far?
His brother, Geno, 45, who also played hockey at St. Cloud State, said the irony is in college, he was the party animal and it was Mark and former Huskies teammate Matt Cullen who used to come to house parties and drink cranberry juice and water.
Mark says he didn’t have his first taste of alcohol until his 20th birthday.
It wasn’t until he turned pro that he started to drink more often.
He then became addicted to painkillers.
He actually remembers breaking his leg at age 15, being put on painkillers and liking them immediately.
His rookie year, he had his wisdom teeth removed and was reminded how much he liked what the painkillers did to him. And as more and more injuries and aches and pains occurred along his NHL career, he got hooked.
Parrish’s voice gets somber as he brings up Boogaard, who died in Minneapolis 9 1/2 years ago during his first night home after leaving rehab in Malibu.
“It tears me up. I was running side by side with Boogey,” Parrish said. “I think about that all the time. How that beast of a man lost the battle … and how somehow I survived it? … I was doing way more painkillers than he was.”
One summer while Mark still played for the Islanders, Geno lived with his brother.
One night, Geno noticed Mark nodding off while driving the two of them to the marina. “Halfway there, we were going over the yellow line in the middle of nowhere, and I look over, and his eyes are almost shut,” Geno says. “I grabbed the wheel and was like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’”
Geno took the keys from his brother and drove home later. After that, Geno noticed lots of signs of addiction. Fatigue, asking the same questions over and over again, a poor memory. He also discovered his brother was not only getting painkillers prescribed by doctors, but also through the mail. He confronted his brother, and Mark “starts throwing out all the stuff like, ‘My knees and my hip and my ribs and my …’ All these excuses.
“So the summer I lived with him was really eye-opening.”
Parrish surmises that he got hooked on painkillers while playing for the Islanders in the early-2000s, but things got a lot worse during the 2004-05 lockout and magnified after the Wild bought out the final three years of that five-year contract in 2008. He was humiliated.
“Did I need the painkillers for the pain? At times, maybe,” he says. “But primarily, it was just to kill the frustration, the heartache, the disappointment of what happened here in Minnesota.”
His ego took a hit as he spent the final four years of his career playing mostly in the minors after hundreds of games in the NHL. He played 62 games during that stretch with Dallas, Tampa Bay and Buffalo, but “mostly played the Reggie Dunlop (‘Slap Shot’) role” for AHL teams in Bridgeport, Norfolk, Portland and Binghamton.
One day at rehab, Parrish decided to sit in on a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He says he had the epiphany, “Holy crap, I was a fricking painkiller addict. I raised my hand and I shared my story and it felt amazing to admit it. It wasn’t even something I realized I was hiding.”
When Boogaard died, Parrish says for the most part he was scared straight. During a painstaking, very difficult “summer of hell,” Parrish says he went cold turkey off of painkillers. He admits he has used them since after some surgeries, like one on his shoulder, but he says he’s always made sure to get off of them.
He says he’s lucky to be alive because he often dangerously mixed alcohol with painkillers. That’s what ended his friend’s life.
“I got a horseshoe and about 8,000 four-leaf clovers jammed up my ass, I think,” Parrish says.
Parrish has been sober 135 days. If you’re doing the math from March 11, his first day of sobriety in rehab, you may sense something’s not adding up.
On July 28, about 30 minutes after someone dropped off some bottles of vodka for Mark to sign, he got into an argument with his wife … and he drank.
“I had been around alcohol so many times since (rehab), but whatever snapped that day, I just remember being upset about something and next thing you know, I was sitting on the couch with half a bottle of vodka in my hand,” he says.
Nicholle texted Clymer. Clymer told her to take the kids and leave, that he’d be right over.
When Clymer arrived, Parrish handed him the vodka with a look of shame and Clymer took away Parrish’s recovery coins and sobriety medallions.
A little while later, Geno and their parents arrived and, soon after, Parrish began violently throwing up. His mom called an ambulance and Parrish was taken to the hospital.
Parrish says he hasn’t had a sip of alcohol since. But he knows he’s not magically cured.
For one thing, his anxiety issues remain.
One of his first nights out in public after returning from rehab was June 18 for his 16th wedding anniversary dinner at a restaurant in Minneapolis.
As soon as they arrived, he wanted to leave. “But it was our anniversary. I was just terrified. White as a ghost, I was almost shaking, sweating,” he says. “The restaurant was almost empty, but that did nothing for me. But I got through it, and I remember getting back in the car and I was just wired. I was so excited that I made it through.”
Parrish keeps track of his days of sobriety on his phone.
His AA sponsor recently told Parrish to stop counting days like he’s trying to reach some kind of athletic milestone. If he gets to 1,000, he’s not going to earn a silver stick (or vodka bottle) from Alcoholics Anonymous.
“You never heal. You’re just in recovery,” Parrish says. “Because of COVID, nobody’s going to bars, but I’ve gotten pretty good in restaurants. I ask for their best kiddy cocktail or what one of Nikki’s friends makes me, Lemadine.”
That would be lemonade and grenadine.
One elephant in the room? The vodka company. Parrish still owns a piece of it and doesn’t plan to sell his share.
In his first week of rehab, Parrish met with a psychiatrist.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“Well, I own a vodka company.”
“You’re not serious,” she said, while laughing.
“I actually am. And my wife sells wine.”
Parrish says he spent much of the 45 days in rehab “mentally preparing” to be able to live life while still owning a piece of the company. His Twitter avatar is a Northland bottle.
“I’m not around the alcohol on a day-to-day basis. I like what the company has to offer, the business model, what we do for the community,” he says. “Do I still get nervous? Yes. I’ve actually canceled a few appearances because of fear. But every time I’ve just sucked it up and gone, I’ve been fine.”
And Nicholle is happy he’s working toward being a better man, father and husband.
“When he finally admitted he needed help, I felt a million pounds lifted off my shoulders that I didn’t realize I was carrying,” she says, tearing up. “It’s just nice to be able to rely on him again. … He’s a bigger participant in our kids’ lives again. They can tell he’s just more present.”
Geno tried to urge his brother to go to rehab countless times, as much as anything for his kids, 12-year-old Gianna and 10-year old Turner. “I have repeated year after year after year, ‘Mark, you’re not going to regret what you did to your friends. You’re not going to regret what you did to your family. You’re not going to regret the money that you blew, the opportunities that you blew, the jobs. You’re going to regret not remembering raising your children.’”
Geno may not have thought so, but Mark was taking that to heart all these years.
“They were so young when I really started to have a drinking problem,” Mark says. “They don’t even know their father sober. That hit hard. It still does. There’s still days where I wake up and the depression gets me on that one.
“I want to be an example for them and we’ve been honest with them and if I can’t make it to Turner or Gianna’s practice cause Daddy’s got to get on one of his calls to make sure he stays sober, they understand. I’ve had talks with both of them. There’s been a lot of apologizing.
“But you know, they don’t seem to really care so much about the apology. It’s just that Daddy doesn’t drink anymore. And, of course, Turner goes, ‘That’s good, Dad. You know what? I’m never going to drink, too.’ I just said, ‘Thanks, son. I appreciate the support. But this is Daddy’s issue, not yours.’”
Geno says he’s grateful Lawton was there to intervene that night at the NHL studios.
“If Brian Lawton had not been there at the perfect time, the perfect place, the perfect vulnerable state in my brother’s life, we might not be talking about this right now,” he says.
And Lawton is thankful Mark was willing to listen. “People do get broken, but they get fixed, too,” Lawton says. “I always believed that this is a chance for Mark to have a really great life. I feel he’s got a path to a great future now. And I was losing hope.”
Parrish is a Minnesota hockey hero and public figure, so at times he wonders if he’s walking around town wearing a big neon sign on his forehead that says, “Alcoholic.”
“I don’t believe Mark likes holding secrets,” Hawkey says. “I think this is going to be such a relief for him. I’m sure it’s embarrassing and I’m so sorry he’s going to have to go through that. But I think this is going to be such a cleansing for his soul, for his life.”
Parrish doesn’t want to hide anymore. He doesn’t want to lie anymore. And he doesn’t want to feel like garbage anymore.
“There’s a lot of people that are battling this, a lot more than people realize,” he says. “And I think I’m in a fortunate position to give them a voice. But mainly, just honesty. I just want to be honest. I’m tired of being uncomfortable around people.
He also likes waking up every morning with a clear head, “not being hungover and not trying to figure out where I can go sip a bottle of vodka without anybody noticing,” he says. “I like the responsibility now. I get to be the driver.”
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