Although technically still under contract to the Arizona Coyotes, Chris Pronger finished his playing days with the Philadelphia Flyers before concussions knocked him out of the game.Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
A man full of contradictions, Chris Pronger is today wearing a suit, glasses, and with a stylish bit of stubble on his face and that giant 6-foot-6 frame, he can come across as a school teacher type – thoughtful, pensive, challenging and occasionally acerbic.
Pronger is nobody's angel and never pretended to be. Someone who could shift from humour to prickliness in the time it takes to swat the puck away from a potential goal scorer, Pronger could change the course of a game with a great pass or a howitzer of a shot – or casually beat on an opponent silly with a hockey stick, wielded as a baseball bat.
In an era when the blandest of hockey talk passes as the norm, he is a sassy wise-ass who didn't mind verbally sparring with anyone – universally loved by those he played with; and mostly hated by the ones he played against.
And in perhaps the greatest contradiction of all, here is one of the NHL's great serial offenders, whose career ended because of post-concussion syndrome, now working in the NHL's player-safety department, helping to assess discipline after being on the receiving end of eight league-imposed suspensions during an 18-year career.
It would be akin to attending your 20-year high school reunion and discovering the kid that spent half his time in detention hall is suddenly the school's vice-principal, now meting out discipline.
"Yes, but he's not just the former bad boy from the principal's office," said Brian Burke, who drafted Pronger into the NHL in 1993 for the Hartford Whalers. "This guy would have been in the principal's office, but as a straight-A student. For people who don't know Chris, he's very independent, and he's very intelligent.
"I like the fact that he's there, working for the league," Burke added.
"Sometimes, the FBI will use a felon to check computer systems. To me, it's key that the guys who handle discipline need to be hard, hockey guys. They have to understand physical contact is the most distinctive part of our game vis-à-vis hockey in the rest of the world."
Pronger is part of the largest single Hockey Hall of Fame class in history. He, Nicklas Lidstrom, Sergei Fedorov and Phil Housley are all entering in the male player category; while Angela Ruggiero was elected in the female player category, and Bill Hay and Peter Karmanos as builders.
Pronger and Lidstrom are both Stanley Cup champions and four-time Olympians, but couldn't be any different as players. Lidstrom is frequently described as the perfect human being by peers and opponents alike, and Pronger is the irritating, hard-to-love tough guy who just made better the teams he played.
"If you look at the role of a captain, you can lead in a lot of different ways, but there are not many guys who could lead in numerous ways," said Al MacInnis, Pronger's long-time defence partner in St. Louis and the man who preceded him as the Blues captain.
"Prongs had a great feel for the temperature of the game. He could change it with a big hit, a big play, a fight. If you were a GM or a coach and made a list of the things you needed and wanted from a No. 1 defenceman, I'm not sure Chris is missing any.
"I don't know if there's an advantage being 6-foot-6, so he could look over the offensive line, but his passing and puck-handling skills, man, they were elite. I played mostly special teams with Prongs, power play and penalty killing, and he was so good with the puck – he could hit the open guy, no problem at all. He had physicality, a great stick, hockey sense.
"If you were a GM or a coach and made a list of the things you needed and wanted from a No. 1 defenceman, I'm not sure if Chris is missing any."
After Burke drafted Pronger, he left to join the NHL as its chief disciplinarian. One of his best customers turned out to be Pronger, who was traded from Hartford to St. Louis for Brendan Shanahan. Those first four years with the Blues, Pronger spent a lot of time in the penalty box – over 100 minutes a season, culminating in a high of 180 minutes in the 1997-98 season (a year in which he also managed an eye-popping plus-47 rating).
That year also marked the first of Pronger's four appearances on behalf of Canada's men's hockey team at the Winter Olympics.
"I suspended him several times," Burke said. "He was putting baseball-grip swings on guys when he was killing penalties. It got so bad I flew to St. Louis to warn him, which I did with other players too. I said, 'Chris, I'm getting a tape every night on you, so you better clean it up or the next one's going to be a big one.' To his credit, he said, 'Okay, I hear you,' and I didn't suspend him again. He's very intelligent. He's grumpy. When you're with the league and you go talk to him, he's very defensive. He says, 'Other guys are worse than me.' Well, no, they're not. But he's very bright and he enjoys the debate and the give-and-take."
In all, Pronger played nine seasons for the Blues before being traded to Edmonton for a year, where he helped the Oilers reach the 2006 Stanley Cup final, at which point he asked to be traded for personal reasons. By then, Burke was running the Anaheim Ducks and he acquired Pronger for Joffrey Lupul and Ladislav Smid, plus two first- and one second-round draft choices, one of which produced Jordan Eberle for the Oilers and another generated Travis Hamonic for the New York Islanders.
One year previously, Burke had signed Scott Niedermayer away from the New Jersey Devils, so he could play with his younger brother Rob. With Pronger and Niedermayer in the lineup, the Ducks won the 2007 Stanley Cup.
"It's tempting to say he put us over the top, but I don't think that's fair to Scotty Niedermayer," Burke said. "Once we had them both, we were good enough to be a championship team."
Burke eventually moved on to Toronto and his replacement, Bob Murray, traded Pronger for salary-cap reasons to Philadelphia, where he made another trip to the Stanley Cup final in 2010.
But in the fall of 2011, Pronger took a stick in the eye from Mikhail Grabovski, then of Toronto. Four games after coming back, with his vision still not completely right, Pronger took a hit into the boards from Martin Hanzal of the then Phoenix Coyotes – and hasn't played since.
For a long time, Pronger dealt with the fallout from postconcussion syndrome, unable to play with his children, unable to focus or concentrate or even spend time in a brightly lit room. Gradually, his health improved, and he is technically still under contract to the Arizona Coyotes, who acquired his rights last season in a deal for Sam Gagner that provided the Flyers with some salary-cap relief. Under Hockey Hall of Fame rules, it didn't matter that Pronger is not officially retired from the NHL, only that he be out of the game for three years to warrant consideration.
Pronger actually flew to Arizona to take a physical this year, which he failed with flying colours. He now works for the league and says his health is improving.
"On an overall day-to-day life standpoint, I'm doing pretty good," Pronger said after Friday's ring ceremony at the Hockey Hall of Fame. "I still have some issues with my eye, but they're manageable. As long as I'm not doing too much, I'm good."
Pronger doesn't shy away from the fact that he played the game on the edge – and sometimes crossed the line.
"Even growing up, in minor hockey, I was always a kid hitting, sticking, slashing, spearing," he said. "I don't know if you know, but I have a bit of a temper. It took me a while to grow up and mature and harness that in a better way later in my career.
"The game has evolved and changed so much, I don't know if you can compare the 1990s and 2000s to now – it's just a completely different game. Players are much different. It's a much younger league. I came into the NHL, there were a couple of 20-year-olds and the rest were mid-20s to early 30s. Having an 18-, 19-, or 20-year-old on the team was unheard of. Now it's common. Guys get drafted and come right in the league. I don't know if you could play like I did now."
According to Pronger, his light-bulb moment came when he had children of his own.
"You've got to learn to have patience," he said. "I think maturity comes with age – you turn 30 and you think, 'maybe it's time to grow up a little.' I had my own kids and had to deal with that, so obviously, I couldn't keep being a kid myself."
As for Burke, he says Pronger never much cared what people thought of him. Pronger once said, he played to win, not to make friends, and didn't expect a lot of sympathy from opponents around the league once his injuries piled up, noting that would be hypocritical.
"This guy, when you compare him to Nick, Nick did some things with the puck that Chris could never do," Burke said. "Nick had a coolness to him – he was the Fonz on the ice. His temperature never went up. But Chris Pronger was a Sioux warrior. This guy was a legendary warrior, who played hard – not just dirty, but hard – the way this game was meant to be played.
"Remember when we won Cup in Anaheim? Everybody mobs the goalie; they're all together, except Chris Pronger, who goes to pick up the puck. Afterward, people were saying, 'that's kind of a selfish thing to do; he just wanted the puck.'
"Well, what they don't know is he gave me the puck. After the game, he said, 'you put us all together, you deserve this more than anybody, I got this for you.' And after, when the criticism started, I said, 'Chris, tell them what you did.' And he said, 'I don't care what people think. I'm not telling anybody anything.'