I thought I saw Craig Cunningham die this past Saturday night.
He crumpled to center ice at the Tucson Arena, twitched or convulsed for a moment and then went flat and limp. He was still β too still to be alive, I thought, from my perch in the press box radio broadcast booth.
The on-ice response was immediate. Members of both the Tucson Roadrunners and visiting Manitoba Moose waved frantically to the bench for medical attention. Several members of the pregame Scottish bagpipe and drum band, actually firemen in kilts, rushed to Cunninghamβs side.
Cunningham didnβt move. At all. EMTs were cutting his game jersey off of him within another minute or so, furiously pumping on his chest as he was lifted onto a stretcher and rushed off the ice, to the hospital.
The hushed crowd that Iβd estimate at about 4,000 stood and gasped. I made a quick run through the upper deck, surveying the crowd and absorbing their reaction of horror.
Back on the air, doing Roadrunners radio with team media chief Tom Callahan, I did my best to remain calm and report the situation as the minutes unfolded with more uncertainty. The game was delayed, then postponed. No concrete medical information was available. Callahan, a veteran hockey man at every professional level, explained on-air that during his career heβs learned a crucial personal lesson: That hockey isnβt more important than life.
But we still had no answers for what we had witnessed.
I looked around at the hard-boiled hockey people in the press box β team and league personnel, team scouts, and media folk. Traditionally they are not an emotionally warm and fuzzy kind of lot, and pro hockey can be a cold, brutal business. But all seemed as shaken as the fans around us.
We thought, as the crowd murmured, that Cunningham might have died before our eyes.
Eventually I walked slowly by the locker room to leave the arena and a fan asked if I was all right. I wondered what he meant, then looked at my hands. They were trembling.
This kind of collapse, of a professional hockey player in his physical prime at only 26 years of age, before a game has even begun, is most rare. I canβt remember ever witnessing anything like it in my decades of hockey, nor could the other broadcasters or team personnel I talked with.
Iβve seen a football referee suffer a heart ailments on the field, or a coach have a seizure on the sidelines, but this kind of public, life-threatening collapse is unknown to me β and most importantly, unknown territory for Cunningham.
As of this moment Cunningham is still with us, reportedly touch-and-go at Banner-University Medical Center with his Mother and two brothers at his side. Roadrunners general manager Doug Soetaert described Cunninghamβs condition as βcritically ill.β
βWe donβt know whatβs happened, the doctors are trying to find that out. Theyβre dealing with him as we speak and itβs a changing target every day,β Soetaert said.
The Roadrunners and parent Coyotes have handled the situation respectfully, as have the vast majority of Tucson fans. There was, incredibly, some audible dissention from a very few ticket-holders when the TCC arena announcer declared, a few minutes after the emergency, that the game was postponed.
I wrote here a couple weeks ago that the Roadrunnersβ marvelous beginning was a fairy tale that would have to end. And so it has β but the show must go on. The Roadrunners plan to take the ice again on Saturday, without their young captain, to continue their first AHL season.
Iβll stand in the broadcast booth and will offer a sincere Thanksgiving that Iβm there. As our Roadrunners appear my heart will race 1,000 miles an hour as the image of Cunningham, collapsing near center ice last Saturday, plays over and over in my mind. It is a horror-movie film loop that will not fade for me, nor for many others, Iβm certain.
Iβll try to replace that nightmare in my mind with my greatest hope: That Cunningham gets up, smiles, walks out of the hospital and tells us all that he did not die last Saturday.
