Those who are not fans of hockey may not know how brutally violent the game really is. I would go so far as to say it is the most violent of the North American team sports, much more so than football or lacrosse. This violence is aggravated by the speed at which the players move and the fact that they are are surrounded by solid glass walls. Furthermore, the rules against fighting used to be much more lenient than they are today, to the point that fighting (outright gloveless boxing) was a regular part of the game that many fans looked forward to. Even today teams will classify their players into two kinds. First there are the finesse players. These players are experts at skating and hockey maneuvers, and are usually smaller and are very quick on the ice. Their job is to get the puck in the goal and past the three or four players who are trying to stop them. Since there are very few rules against violence in hockey, the opposing team will do their best to intimidate, frighten and hurt these finesse players. They will crash into them at high speeds, slam them into the walls and otherwise throw them off their game. The second classification of players is popularly termed "Enforcers". The job of an enforcer is to protect the finesse players from physical attacks from the opposing team. If the opposing team manages to get to the finesse players the enforcers often will physically beat the offending adversary. As a result hockey players often break arms, noses, ribs, as well as suffer concussions and lose teeth. There have even been several hockey players who have died as a result of injuries on the ice.
In 2004 and 20005 there was a lockout in the NHL that resulted in several rule changes that decreased the number of fights that occurred during the games. The long term effects on retired players was a major factor in these changes. It had been seen that former professional hockey players had experienced traumatic brain injuries that left them susceptible to depression, suicide and substance abuse among other things.
The Last Gladiators explores these things through the life of Chris "Knuckles" Nilan from his childhood to his retirement and documents his struggles both on and off the ice.
We see his fights on the ice and his even more difficult fight to stay sober after he retired. One of the most fascinating things we see is interviews with his still estranged family (with particularly emotional testimony from his green beret father) about how they felt betrayed by Nilan's addiction. Today Nilan is a sports radio host in Montreal and has reportedly stayed sober since his third stint in rehab in 2010. He wrote a very interesting book which was published in 2013 called Fighting Back: The Chris Nilan Story, which talks about everything from his hockey career to his struggles with drugs and alcohol to his guns drawn encounter with "Whitey" Bulger, on whom the movie The Departed is based.
While The Last Gladiators may not be everyone's first choice when choosing a Netflix documentary it improves upon the usual sports documentary by showing a real life struggle with the world's fastest spreading disease: addiction.
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