Ray and Noreen Johns always show up for warmups.
Going back more than two decades, the Johns have made it a point to get there early enough to watch their son, Stephen, go through his pregame prep and look for the smile that flashes only when he’s on the ice.
“But he never looks at us,” Noreen said. “Never.”
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What Ray and Noreen don’t know is that Stephen always tries to spot them in the stands before every game they attend.
And on Feb. 3 at Madison Square Garden, after Ray and Noreen drove 400 miles from Wampum, Pa., to New York City, Johns couldn’t find them. He had to ask the trainers where they might be.
“It was going to be the first time they would see me play in person in two years,” Johns said. “They’ve taken me through so much and driven me everywhere. So I wanted to make sure I knew they were there for this.”
That’s when he gave a quick glance, one that both of his parents caught.
Then in the second period, after he scored an NHL goal for the first time in almost two years, Johns took it a step further. He stopped and pointed right at his parents.
“I never thought I’d do that again,” Johns said. “To have them there, I wanted them to know what that meant.”
Johns was playing in only his fourth NHL game after missing the previous 22 months because of post-traumatic headaches and post-concussion syndrome.
At times during that stretch, Johns was certain his NHL career was over. So sitting in the locker room after the game, he wept. And then he rushed to find his parents so he could give them a hug.
At the time, it was a hockey story. Johns, the hockey player, was back. He was the top-four defenseman the Stars had desperately missed.
But the 22 months Johns spent away from the NHL wasn’t only about rescuing a career. It was about rescuing a life.
The spiral started on March 29, 2018, in a game against the Wild in St. Paul, Minn. Johns made a pass out of the defensive zone near the boards. He braced for contact from Wild winger Marcus Foligno, but Johns’ foot slipped and his head and shoulder made direct contact with Foligno’s shoulder and elbow.
“I remember seeing stars. I never actually knew what that meant until that moment,” Johns said. “I’ve gone back and watched it a couple times. It’s hard to watch.”
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It seemed innocuous. No one saw it. Not the Stars coaches or trainers or the NHL concussion spotters, who were watching from the press box high above the ice.
Johns even took four more shifts after the hit.
“I was sitting on the bench watching the play go by, and it just looked like it was in fast forward,” Johns said.
During the first intermission, he was diagnosed with the fourth official concussion of his career. It was also his third concussion in the past six months.
It ended his 2017-18 season, but because he had dealt with concussions before, he figured he’d recover during the offseason and would be symptom-free in a few weeks, if not sooner.
This time was different. Johns trained over the summer at his home outside Wampum. And while he suffered from some post-concussion symptoms, he was nagged by a feeling that something was just not right. Chronic headaches sent him to a neurologist, who told him the headaches were a result of anxiety and stress.
“He said ‘Go home, have some beers and hang out with your buddies,’” Johns said. “The headaches will go away.”
The headaches did not go away.
Instead of golfing or seeing friends, Johns lay in bed all day with splitting pain behind his eyes and in the base of his skull. It was draining. He felt exhausted.
His symptoms hadn’t abated by fall, but Johns hoped they’d pass heading into training camp in Boise, Idaho. He had just signed a three-year contract, had a new coach he was thrilled to work with in Jim Montgomery and was going to be paired with a 19-year-old wunderkind in Miro Heiskanen.
But he couldn’t make it through a single practice. He tried to skate at a “training-camp pace,” but the chronic pain in his head and neck worsened every time he worked out or raised his heartrate.
“I was always taught the harder you work, the more success you’ll get,” Johns said. “And during the injury, the harder I worked, the worse I got. That threw my whole world upside-down.”
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Anxiety about what felt like a missed opportunity turned into full-blown despair as Johns and his girlfriend Taylor Zakarin searched for a solution and proper diagnosis. The Stars were supportive and gave Johns his space throughout the 2018-19 season.
He saw doctors in Toronto, Salt Lake City and Arizona. He went to neurologists, psychologists, chiropractors, acupuncturists.
At one point doctors thought Johns had a cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leak, so he went through three blood patch treatments. Each time, he and Zakarin spent eight hours in the hospital as blood was drained from his arms to the base of his skull. When the procedure was over, he’d lay horizontally for 48 hours to make sure the treatment was effective.
“It was the most painful thing I’ve done in my life,” Johns said. “If I moved at all for two days afterward, I would give myself a CSF leak. That sucked.”
It also didn’t fix the headaches.
Johns reached out to Sidney Crosby, who had missed 11 months in 2011 with a concussion. Crosby’s agent sent Johns a full list of Crosby’s doctors and specialists. Johns had already visited them all.
“It got to a point where everybody we saw ran out things to try with me,” Johns said. “I just lost hope.”
To understand Stephen Johns, you need to understand Wampum, Pa.
The borough of 700 residents sits along the Beaver River about 40 miles north of Pittsburgh. Wampum Road leads into town over a bridge that’s just referred to as the Wampum Bridge. Johns dreams of carrying the Stanley Cup across it someday.
There are no traffic lights. What passes for a downtown area is a smattering of stop signs and a handful of Italian restaurants.
“It’s the type of place that we can make fun of, but no one else,” Ray Johns said. “I guess you could say if anyone else made fun of Wampum, well, we’d whomp ’em.”
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Ray, who was raised on the outskirts of Wampum, has worked at ArcelorMittal, a steel mill, for 39 years and still pulls 12-hour shifts. Noreen has lived in Wampum her entire life, runs the books for a funeral home and babysits her two grandchildren, Johns’ nephews and neighbors, twice a week.
“People are born in Wampum, get married in Wampum, have kids here and then die in Wampum,” said Johns, who bought his own house just outside of the town in 2016. “And I love it here.”
Johns is a country boy who found hockey. He spent much of his childhood playing on his uncle’s farm; he and his friends would leap from one level of the barn into stacks of hay. They would go “corning”: grabbing a handful of dried corn, stuffing it in a backpack and running around town to throw it against buildings with aluminum siding to scare the people inside.
The farm also has a pond that would freeze in the winter. Johns would spend hours skating on the pond from the time he was 3. He, his older brother, Raymond, and cousin, Bobby Marshall, would build snowbanks to serve as boards for full-contact pond hockey.
Raymond and Bobby played organized hockey, so Stephen did, too. Growing up, it was Raymond, not Stephen, who flashed the most potential. “If Stephen had his brother’s hands he’d be an NHL goal scorer,” Ray said.
When Raymond stopped playing as a teenager because of juvenile arthritis and hip problems, Stephen kept going. He felt like he was carrying the hockey careers of both Johns brothers on his shoulders.
“No one ever said it, but I think I wanted to make it farther in hockey for him,” Johns said. “That’s something I thought about and it motivated me more to take my game to the next level.”
He was drafted in 2010 by the Chicago Blackhawks in the second round and began to put Wampum on the map during a four-year career at Notre Dame. It meant everything to a town that never meant much to those outside its borders.
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“I remember it was after my sophomore or junior year (of college), I was hanging out with some buddies and one of them stopped and told me, ‘Steve, we live our lives through you,’” Johns said. “That’s something.”
When Johns reached the NHL in 2016 and became an immediate contributor in the playoffs, Wampum reached the NHL. Jerseys with his name and number became common apparel around town. The closest ice rink is in New Castle about 21 minutes north. When you walk into the rink, there are two jerseys hanging above the door: one from Johns’ youth hockey days and a green Dallas Stars jersey emblazoned with No. 28. On the website for the Hess Ice Rink, you are greeted by a splash page that reads “Lawrence County’s only ice skating facility and practice site of the NHL Dallas Stars defenseman Stephen Johns.”
The town had a hero, which only added to Johns’ guilt when he couldn’t play the 2018-19 season. He felt he let everyone down, that he’d abandoned the town he spent so long lifting up.
He decided to spend his summer in Dallas instead of returning to Pennsylvania.
“I wasn’t afraid to come home, but I didn’t want to answer the same question for months and months on end,” Johns said. “So I kind of hid from reality in a lot of ways with that decision.”
While Johns hid from public reality, he was open with those closest to him, which he believes saved his life.
At his lowest, Johns found it nearly impossible to sleep. Even when he could, his rest was always fitful. Sometimes he just stared at the ceiling and composed suicide notes in his head.
His chronic headaches had turned into a mental minefield.
“I would wake up at 4 in the morning and think about it more, then I would take some anxiety medicine during the day to take a nap and it just put me into a vicious cycle,” Johns said. “I wasn’t really eating, I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t doing anything. … It took me a long time to escape that cycle of thinking those horrible things.”
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Johns was depressed and lost. His parents struggled to connect, and Zakarin often feared the worst when she left the apartment and went to work. When their texts and phone calls went unanswered, they feared the worst.
“Those were the times you start getting so worried that something horrible has happened,” Zakarin said.
Johns has a smile Zakarin refers to as his “Stephen smile.” It’s something she noticed when they met through a mutual friend and started dating in 2016, but it disappeared for almost two years.
“He wasn’t Stephen anymore,” Ray Johns said. “Our son was gone.”
The structure he knew as an athlete was gone, and during rare moments when he would show up at the rink, he went out of his way to avoid being a distraction. When teammates asked how he was doing, Johns often gave a one-word answer: “shitty.”
But he was way worse than shitty.
“It’s one of those sports culture things, I didn’t want to be a distraction,” Johns said. “I definitely regret that. I wish I would have taken a hold of it a lot sooner (with teammates).”
Meanwhile, his symptoms grew so severe that even idle background chatter could trigger a headache. So for 17 months, Johns and Zakarin didn’t go to a restaurant and avoided almost all social situations. On the off chance his symptoms didn’t create a problem, the stigma surrounding them would. Driving was one of the few activities he could handle. He’d hop in his black Chevy Silverado and turn on the saddest music possible, plunging deeper into his own misery.
“As terrible as it sounds, the only way I could be happy was if I was getting more depressed,” Johns said. “That sounds like bullshit and doesn’t make any kind of sense at all, but it’s true.”
There was no one turning point that put Johns on the road to recovery. Much of those 17 months are a blur. But somewhere along the way, Johns reached out for help. He told Zakarin about his depression and his suicidal thoughts. Then he told Stars general manager Jim Nill and his agents Steve and Brian Bartlett. In one of the scariest moments of his life, Johns leaned on those who cared about him.
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“He was open with me about that, and for that, I’m forever grateful,” Zakarin said. “I’m so grateful he felt like that was something he could talk to me about without judgment, something he could talk to me without fear I would freak out.”
Zakarin said the first reaction, one she had to fight, was the urge to fix it immediately. There was also an internal battle of when to let out her own stresses without complicating her boyfriend’s.
“It’s not something just a regular person can fix,” Zakarin said. “As a partner, the main thing you can do is make sure you are there and you are hearing them and you are there for them. Sometimes when people are going through this they want to say it and hear those words out loud without judgment.”
But Johns’ vulnerability also led to frustration.
“I just felt like the handful of times I was sitting in the doctor’s office telling them I was suicidal, having a breakdown it was just, ‘OK, let’s try this,’” Johns said. “I was so vulnerable and I wouldn’t even feel comfortable opening up, like, to my parents and they would just say, ‘I don’t know what to do for you Stephen, we’ve tried everything.’”
Eventually, Johns found the right people. Terry Moore, a physiotherapist in Guelph, Ontario, was the first outsider Johns felt really listened and supported him. Lorenzo Gonzalez, a Dallas acupuncturist and physical therapist, was also key to his recovery. Johns also connected with an effective therapist through the NHLPA after a suggestion from Nill.
But in the end, Johns says Zakarin was the most effective doctor he had.
She carried her own struggles. She feared freaking out in front of Johns would only put more pressure on him to get better. She would have her own breakdowns, away from Johns, where she would just have to let herself “feel it all” privately. When she was around Stephen, she always let him know she was strong for him.
Zakarin was an art curator at NorthPark Center in Dallas for six years, a role she held until April. She planned on going to graduate school for art history two years ago, but when Johns got hurt she put that plan on hold to spend more time caring for him. Now that he’s playing again, she feels confident enough to enroll in classes this fall.
“Without her I don’t know where I’d be,” Johns said. “I probably wouldn’t be here anymore.”
But even after Johns found a support system, he felt incomplete. He needed something to get up for each morning beyond doctor’s appointments. “I needed hockey,” he said.
He had already tried a comeback, in February 2019. It lasted all of one practice, and the ensuing breakdown he had afterward led the team to gently tell him there was no need to rush a return. But staying away only made things worse and so, after missing the first meeting before training camp in 2019, Nill sat down with the defenseman to put a new plan in place – one that kept him around the team.
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Johns started attending meetings and skating more often. He started attending team social functions and was more present with teammates on game day.
There was a fine line between providing structure and pressuring Johns into thinking he had to return to the NHL. Nill went into the 2019-20 season assuming Johns would never play. It was never about getting him back into an NHL game. It was about making sure Johns didn’t become a harrowing statistic.
Johns said some of his lowest points were followed by calls from Nill. Nill and Stars interim coach Rick Bowness helped set a tone the rest of the organization followed.
With that structure joining a more solid support system, Johns’ symptoms started to abate. He was doing more and working out, but he had more energy and wasn’t laying around the house.
“He’d get home, and he was so energized,” Zakarin said. “He was so much happier, even though he was doing so much more.”
It contributed to a better sleeping schedule and sense of comfort. Finally, the suicidal thoughts stopped, too.
By early December, Johns began to believe he’d play in the NHL again. He told his parents as much when he was home in Wampum for Christmas.
Sure enough, two weeks later Johns was assigned to the Texas Stars for a conditioning stint. He was going to play hockey.
Johns was supposed to make his AHL return on Jan. 10 against the Toronto Marlies. He was jittery. It had been so long since he played that he’d even forgotten his pregame routine.
“It was like going in blind – like, what do I do now? Do I tape my sticks? Do I stretch?” Johns said. “I had to find muscle memory just for a simple pregame routine.”
Zakarin had driven down from Dallas for the occasion. She had a glass of white wine and was ready to watch from the loge level at the H-E-B Center in Cedar Park. Johns had about 70 percent of his gear on when they were told the game was delayed.
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“Then we were told to put our gear back on and then back off,” Johns said. “And then it was just canceled.”
Marlies assistant coach Rob Davison had a seizure in the locker room and was rushed to the hospital. (Davison ended up being OK and communicated with players that evening).
Johns and Zakarin got into his car and started laughing out of exasperation after the cancelation.
“We didn’t know how else to react,” Zakarin said. “We’d waited so long for him to play and then they canceled the game? What else can you do but laugh out of exhaustion at that moment?”
Trying to spin it forward, Johns and Zakarin talked about positives. He’d gotten a dress rehearsal for his first game, one he could use for his real first game the following night.
It worked. Johns had a four-point game – the first of his professional career – and put together one of the most dominant performances you’ll ever see on AHL ice.
For the first time in 22 months, Zakarin saw the “Stephen smile.”
On Jan. 18, he was back in the NHL, returning in Minnesota, where his career had been derailed. It was the first of 17 games he would play before the NHL season was suspended in March.
Even though he’s back, the old Johns hasn’t returned. He’s fully aware that he is living a new normal; he’ll never be the person he was before the chronic pain and depression, and he’s OK with that. He’s embracing a new normal, and that means remembering the future is uncertain.
The morning after that game against the Rangers, one of the best of his life, he suffered excruciating headaches. Johns struggled to even make it through a team video session. He worried that his goal against the Rangers wasn’t a crowning achievement, but the end of the line.
“I thought my career was over in that moment. Like, really over,” Johns said.
That’s when Bowness met with Johns. The Stars interim coach had planned on not playing Johns in back-to-back games, but after his performance against the Rangers he was going to give the defenseman the option.
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Johns broke down when Bowness asked him if he wanted to play against the Islanders.
Bowness didn’t say anything at first. He sat next to Johns and put his arm around him. He told him it was OK, that he didn’t have to worry about playing. It was one of the most powerful things a coach has ever done for Johns.
“I can’t thank him enough for that,” Johns said. “He cared about me, not just Stephen, the hockey player.”
Johns didn’t play against the Islanders, but he did play the next game and the one after that. After five games, Bowness credited him from going from a “question mark to one of our most important players.” By the end of February, Johns was playing the best of his NHL career.
“Somehow, I came back as a better player,” he said. “Maybe it was all the frickin’ hockey I had to watch.”
How he recovered remains a mystery.
“It was just time,” Johns said. “That’s not a great answer for someone looking for help, but that’s what it was.”
That’s one of the reasons Johns was hesitant to share his full story. He’s gotten hundreds of messages on social media asking how he fixed his medical issues.
“I don’t have the answers to a head injury and I want to help when people ask,” Johns said. “But it’s not like I can say this works or this doesn’t.”
While he was reticent, Johns said it’s important for an active NHL player to be talking about these things because emotional trauma and mental health remain taboo topics.
Johns wants that to change. He wants people to know that it’s OK to ask for help. It takes time, it’s not easy, but there’s hope.
Top Photo: Danny Murphy/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images