In that frail, pale body and the way he drove it during almost 20 years in the most punishing professional sports league in the world, Doug Gilmour was the best evidence that will may triumph over genes, desire over size and ultimately, heart over head.
Every little guy on the planet, every junior prospect written off as too small, every hack in every industrial league in the country -- and thus, really, anyone who has ever played the game and anyone who finds in it lessons for how to live an ordinary life -- could look upon Mr. Gilmour and think to himself, "If he can do that, maybe I can do this."
Yesterday, at 40, an age when ambitious politicians are routinely pronounced far too green for the biggest jobs and corporate executives are still deemed to be bright young things, he packed it in.
That marvelous, beaten-up body, he said with his dimpling grin, "is telling me that the time has come."
So was the new Toronto general manager, John Ferguson Jr., whose first decree when he was appointed late last month was to announce that the club had no plans to re-sign Mr. Gilmour.
But No. 93's left knee had been talking to him anyway. It was ruined in his eighth shift of his much-ballyhooed rebirth -- his second -- as a Maple Leaf late last season when, in the second period of a game against Calgary, the playoffs just weeks away, he collided with Dave Lowry of the Flames and was last seen painfully crawling to the bench.
In the awkward crash, Mr. Gilmour hyperextended the knee, partially tearing both the medial collateral and anterior cruciate ligaments. He never returned to the ice after that, and has still not sufficiently progressed in his long, slow rehabilitation to the point where he's even skated this year.
"I've never been through an injury like this," he said yesterday, which, given the abuse he has taken in his almost two decades in the National Hockey League, spread among seven clubs, is saying a piece.
There was a while when he was feeling a lot better, he said, but as the physiotherapists upped the ante and the weights, he found, as his lovely, weeping wife Amy put it yesterday, there was no proverbial there there in the knee -- "no muscle to push with."
He had already determined that if the Leafs didn't want him, he would retire, but it took a couple of weeks nonetheless for Mr. Ferguson's pronouncement to sink in. When it did, it "simplified everything for me," he said.
Last Tuesday morning, with the couple's two young boys, Tyson and Jake, safely in school and daughter Madison, 18, settled at the University of Windsor, he went out for the morning papers, began going through them, and said to Amy, "I think I'm ready to retire. I think I'm ready to call it a day."
Thus began what she called the "strangest week" of their life.
That night, he went out for dinner with teammates and friends Gary Roberts and Tie Domi, and began dropping broad hints they stubbornly ignored. Two days later, he woke up and phoned Mr. Domi, who by then was in California for a wedding, to formally break the news. Once Mr. Domi found his voice, they cried; then he spent the better part of two hours trying to talk Mr. Gilmour into hanging on for a few months to see whether the knee would improve.
Mr. Domi spent the rest of his California break by the pool, burning out his BlackBerry as he tried to write the fine speech he gave yesterday at the downtown Toronto restaurant where Mr. Gilmour's retirement became official.
Mr. Domi should know the effort was worth it, and that he got it absolutely right: It was true, as he said, that Mr. Gilmour had skills other players could only envy, but "what made the fans and his teammates love him was his heart, and his grit, and his determination.
"We all tried to match his all-out work ethic."
Mr. Gilmour's numbers alone are enough to land him in the Hockey Hall of Fame after the mandatory wait: In 1,474 regular-season games, he scored 1,414 points, almost one every time he dressed; accumulated 1,299 penalty minutes; 12th on the all-time list for games played and 13th on the all-time points list; one Stanley Cup, with Calgary in 1989; twice an NHL All-Star, and a Selke Award as the top defensive forward, this in his stellar 1993 season with the Leafs, when they came within a hair -- and a Wayne Gretzky goal -- of making it to the final.
Not so shabby for a Kingston guy who was picked only 134th overall -- in the seventh round, by which time at an NHL draft, the stands are empty but for shattered teenagers and their parents -- and made $80,000 his first NHL season, and who remembered yesterday how he wistfully looked at the $400,000 Mike Liut, then the highest-paid member of the St. Louis Blues, was earning and thought, "Hey, if I can make that for a couple of years I'll be set."
But the statistics don't capture, or even begin to measure, the breadth of Mr. Gilmour's contribution or essence, particularly in Calgary, where as my learned Globe and Mail sporty colleague, Eric Duhatschek, wrote yesterday, the team never really recovered from his departure, and in his first go-round with the Leafs, the very team to which he was traded from the Flames.
As the Toronto captain, Mr. Gilmour led by sterling example, working, despite his diminutive size, behind the net and along the boards, where a game is so often won or lost, with the best and biggest of them -- virtually impossible to knock off his skates, indefatigable, and utterly unafraid. He was known as a big-game player who could rise to the occasion when it mattered most and failure was staring him in the eyes. As he used to tell his teammates, "Don't shy away from the fear and pressure -- face it and go after it."
I was writing for the Toronto Sun during the early 1990s when the Leafs came as close to the Cup as they had come for decades, and two memories stand out. One was in May of 1994, when the Leafs were playing the Canucks in the playoffs, and Mr. Gilmour's ankle was so battered he needed four needles a game just to keep the pain at bay so he could play.
But the better one came at the end of the glorious Cup run the year before, or perhaps it was the year before that.
I was among the first in the dressing room, and Mr. Gilmour came out to face the press wearing just a white towel, though I do believe he had his false teeth in. His body was cadaverous -- without an ounce of fat, ghostly in colour, covered with bruises and cuts. I was in a porky phase, and realized that I outweighed this small, fierce man -- he was under 160 pounds at the time -- who had endured such punishment over a bloody second season of playoffs.
I told Amy that story yesterday; she laughed and said there have been a couple of times, once when she was pregnant, when she weighed more than her husband, too. For a few minutes, we both marveled at the machine that was Killer Gilmour.
On a hockey Web site yesterday, I found one of his rookie cards for sale. The description went like this: "This card does show some wear around the edges and corners, with a small crease in the bottom left-hand corner, but is otherwise in nice shape." Just like the man himself.