![]() “We just wanted to get him out of the house and get some sun.” ![]() “We just wanted to try to bring his spirits up and make him forget about it a bit,” Brown says. It was Blues forwards and friends Logan Brown and Josh Leivo. It was October 2022, Perunovich hadn’t undergone surgery yet, and there was a knock on his door. As he says, exactly what he’d been doing the past two years. The next morning, the MRI showed a socket that was 30 to 40 percent broken, meaning surgery and six more months of rehab. “They didn’t need to be coming up to me - they knew how crushed I was,” he says. Several nodded their head in his direction. Teammates began boarding, one of them bringing the backpack that Perunovich couldn’t carry. He told the defenseman that everything “was going to be all right, and we’ll get through this again.” “Not one good thought was going through my mind,” Perunovich says.īlues general manager Doug Armstrong was the next to step on the bus and break the silence. ![]() He turned off his phone and sat with his forehead against the back of the seat in front of him. So while the Blues were wrapping up their win, Perunovich headed for the team bus, where he’d sit by himself, in the dark, for 20 minutes. The X-ray didn’t show the extent of the injury, so he would need an MRI exam the next morning back in St. His shoulder popped out of its socket a couple of times in the locker room, once as long as five minutes before they could get it back in. “Yeah everyone goes through it, and it’s not like I’m the only one, but once it happens again, you lose all that excitement.” “When you’re at home with your family in the summer, they’re excited, and they want to fly out to see you,” Perunovich says. In his mind, he had disappointed his parents, including his mother Susan, and siblings. Seeing those words would usually invoke thoughts of support, but not in this moment, not for Perunovich anyway. I think I was holding it in.”Ī text message from his father, Jim, pinged his phone: “Hope you’re all right little buddy!” I wasn’t full-blown bawling, but I could’ve been. “It’s maybe one of the worst times I’ve ever felt about myself. “Just thinking about the past few years - all I’ve been doing is rehabbing, and I was so looking forward to a fresh year,” he says. He admits this one wasn’t fluky at all, saying he put himself in a bad spot and “it’s on me.”Īs Perunovich headed to the visiting locker room at United Center, with each step causing more pain in his shoulder than the last, he got emotional. 17 after what looked like an innocent hit by the Blackhawks’ Michal Teply. “I can’t believe it’s taken 10 years for a reporter to call and say that an athlete has read it and it helped him come back.”īut Perunovich couldn’t even make it out of the preseason, leaving a 4-1 exhibition victory over Chicago on Sept. When The Athletic reached the co-author of St-Pierre’s autobiography, Justin Kingsley, his reaction to Perunovich’s plight and how the book played a role in his recovery was one of genuine interest. ![]() You have a few surgeries, you’re down on yourself, and you can either give up or keep fighting. “But that was one of the few I could go into the backyard, sit in the sun, and just keep reading. “Yeah, and I’m not really like that with books,” Perunovich says. It became a page-turner for Perunovich, who suddenly found himself opting for the written word over streaming TV. He read books like the 2013 autobiography of George St-Pierre, “The Way of the Fight,” which details the life journey of the mixed martial arts star who many regard as the greatest fighter in the sport’s history. sweater for Friday’s start of the IIHF World Championships, which runs through May 28 in Finland and Latvia, he credits the reading of self-motivation books over the past year for getting him back on the ice. He told himself that the only chance of that happening, though, was if he kept faith in himself, and that would require some rebuilding of his spirit.Īs Perunovich puts on a U.S. There were dark days, feelings that he let down his family and friends, and times when he wondered if the NHL team that took a chance on a 5-foot-10, 175-pound defenseman could keep that faith. But a serious shoulder injury during a preseason game against Chicago last September led to the third surgery of his young career and kept him on the couch. The Blues’ 2018 second-round draft pick would have done anything to have a hockey stick in his hand instead of a remote control. ![]()
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