Mark Pavelich’s tragic journey: From 1980 Olympic hero to a mental facility 40 years later

Barry Beck had a dream. The former Rangers captain woke up one morning in the spring of 2019 in Hong Kong, where he had been coaching hockey for almost 13 years. Not one to easily recollect his dreams, the 61-year-old Beck was startled when he remembered the vision of being on a ranch and riding …

Barry Beck had a dream.

The former Rangers captain woke up one morning in the spring of 2019 in Hong Kong, where he had been coaching hockey for almost 13 years. Not one to easily recollect his dreams, the 61-year-old Beck was startled when he remembered the vision of being on a ranch and riding horses with former Rangers teammate Mark Pavelich. Beck had not seen or spoken to Pavelich in more than a decade, which was the first thing that made it odd.

Stranger, then, was when Beck logged on to Facebook in August and read the news: Pavelich had been arrested for beating a neighbor with a 4-foot metal pipe.

A hero of the 1980 U.S. Olympic team that beat the Russians and won the gold medal, Pavelich thought his neighbor, Jim Miller, had spiked his beer while the two were fishing earlier in the day in rural northeastern Minnesota. So Pavelich went over to Miller’s house and pummeled him, breaking two of Miller’s ribs, bruising his kidney and fracturing a vertebra. When the cops came, they found a sawed-off shotgun under Pavelich’s bed with the serial number filed off.

It was a culmination of previous signs that Pavelich was losing his grip on reality, but this one couldn’t be ignored. He was charged with four felonies and held on $250,000 bond, then deemed mentally unfit to stand trial. He remains at Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter, incarcerated in a place that Beck and Pavelich jokingly call “the cuckoo’s nest” on their weekly phone calls. Pavelich’s hearing is now set for June 26, after being pushed back, first due to an ongoing experiment with his medications and later due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“He’s a national hero in his town,” Beck said. “And he isn’t the kind of person who would say, ‘I need to talk to somebody, I think I have a problem.’ He was well off being out in the woods all alone by himself. He was very happy to live his life like that.”

Pavelich, 62, was the proud son of Eveleth, Minn., a town of just under 3,600. Herb Brooks, the lionized coach of that U.S. Olympic team, recruited Pavelich to come play for the Rangers in 1981, when Brooks took over behind the bench on Broadway. Pavelich played five seasons for the Rangers, totaled 355 games in the NHL, spent a year playing in Europe and then retired when the game wasn’t fun anymore.

He hunted and fished and made some good decisions buying land in Minnesota, Idaho, Arizona and Washington. He was always quiet, but those close to him knew his life was pockmarked with tragedy. What they didn’t know was how it was all piling up — how the weight was becoming too much, maybe the hits to the head were becoming too much, and how Mark Pavelich was about to crack.

“There’s just so much a person can take,” said his sister Jean Pavelich Gevik.

Focus your mind’s eye, and you can almost see the idyllic scenes — the big, happy family sprawling from the house, all broad shoulders and pretty faces. The summers spent in the woods and on the lake, the winters spent ice skating and building snowmen. The Pavelich children, three boys and two girls, all within about seven years of each other.

“My parents had the aggressive family plan,” Jean said with a laugh.

Mark was the third child, introspective and kindhearted. He didn’t mind being in the background, with that knowing grin on his face he would carry throughout his life. Jean was two years older, and she said they were “best friends — all [but] for a couple years there in our teens.”

Mark would lose himself skating, staying on the ice well after most of the other boys had gone inside to warm their hands. He had such a graceful motion that he made it look easy, and when they were playing hockey, he had such a creative mind he often caught teammates off guard. And he loved the game deeply, even if he didn’t talk much.

“We were squirts, probably 9 years old,” said lifelong friend Ronn Tomassoni. “There must have been another game going on, and we were sitting together with a group of guys who just had played, and I had bought a bag of peanuts from the concession stand, and I was sharing them, with him in particular. And he started to call me ‘peanut boy’ as a nickname. Thank God it didn’t stick.”

Despite growing only to 5-foot-7 (and always listing himself as 5-8), Pavelich was recruited to play hockey at the University of Minnesota Duluth. On Labor Day weekend before he left for his freshman year, he went hunting with older brother Dave and two friends, Tom Longer and Ricky Holgers, who was 15 years old and dating Pavelich’s younger sister, Carolyn. Scouting for birds, Ricky went off to one side and disappeared. Pavelich eventually thought he spotted a bird, raised his gun and fired. When they got to the scene, Ricky was bleeding out of the left side of his head. They rushed for help and Ricky was whisked off to the hospital, but died later that day.

Pavelich was found in the woods, curled up, covered in blood.

The Holgers family was as empathetic as one could hope for, inviting Mark over for dinners, telling him it wasn’t his fault, that mistakes happen. Tomassoni was already off in Troy, N.Y., playing hockey at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Pavelich’s sister Jean soon left for St. Cloud State. Mark’s parents did what they could to console him, but it was 1976, and grief counseling was not commonly understood.

“I felt like I abandoned him,” Jean said. “I don’t think it was dealt with enough, but they didn’t have the counseling they have now, and the resources.”

Tomassoni kept in touch, and during that freshman year, Mark used to rub it in how he was getting good grades at Duluth taking classes such as “team sports” and “bow and arrow,” while Tomassoni was struggling with physics and chemistry. Tomassoni would go on to coach hockey at Harvard in different capacities for 17 years. He’d come back to Minnesota in the summers, and Mark taught him how to fly fish. They would drive about a half-hour west to Hibbing, Minn., the closest place they could find ice in the summer to keep in hockey shape. They would hang out a lot, but the hunting incident never came up.

“I’m 18 years old; what do I know at 18 years old?” Tomassoni said. “It’s one of those things, you don’t want to bring it up because you don’t know how he’s going to react to it. I certainly didn’t have the wisdom I have today. It’s something we never discussed.”

Brooks was at the University of Minnesota and coached against Pavelich at Duluth at least a couple times a year. So Brooks knew how good the little centerman was when he invited him to Colorado Springs in the summer of 1979 to start assembling the Olympic team. The rest of the players quickly saw how talented Pavelich was, even if they didn’t really get to know him all that well. A lot of them had heard about the hunting accident, but nobody mentioned it.

“I never knew the whole story; he never talked about it,” said U.S. captain, Mike Eruzione. “It wasn’t like, ‘Hey Pav, what the hell happened?’ ”

Pavelich was perfect for Brooks’ system, in which he wanted all five skaters to attack together. Brooks wanted to inspire creativity, and have his players go out there with no fear and with confidence in each other. That fit right in line with Pavelich’s mentality, and he excelled. He assisted on Eruzione’s game-winning goal against the Russians, arguably the biggest upset in the history of team sports. The ragtag group of American college kids then beat Finland in the final, completing the fairy tale and winning the gold medal.

Pavelich hardly said anything the whole time.

“He’s always been distant; that’s always been his nature,” Eruzione said. “That’s how he was even during the Olympic year. He kept to himself. He was a great teammate, great in the locker room and practices. Hell of a player. He just was shy.”

Eruzione recently wrote a book, “The Making of a Miracle,” and sent one to Pavelich in the facility. Pavelich read it in one day and gave it “two thumbs up,” Eruzione said. The two chatted on the phone for a while, which Eruzione took as a good sign that the new medication was starting to work.

“I talked to [1980 teammate] Jack O’Callahan after I talked to Pav,” Eruzione said, “and I said, ‘Jack, that’s the most I’ve ever talked to Pav — even when we played in the Olympics.’ ”

When the Olympic team was invited to the White House by President Jimmy Carter, Pavelich did not attend. He also passed on a parade in his honor in Eveleth. He wasn’t drafted into the NHL, but when Brooks was hired to take over the Rangers before the 1981-82 season, a few of his Olympic players were called to join the team, including Dave Silk, Rob McClanahan and Pavelich.

The team was full of big personalities, with Ron Duguay and Ron Greschner spending most nights (and some mornings) enjoying the Manhattan nightlife. Don Maloney and brother Dave were outgoing, and Nick Fotiu brought a Staten Island toughness. Defenseman Reijo Ruotsalainen was one of the first Finnish stars in the league.

That first season, with Pavelich as his center, Duguay recorded the only 40-goal season of his career.

“Herbie came to me one day and said, ‘Ron, you’re allowing Mark to get into the corner and work the corners too much,’ ” Duguay said. “Meaning, Mark played with no fear, and he had no stop in him to go into the corners against the big guys and getting the puck and just coming out with the puck, because he was so skilled, and finding me. Well, I saw that as a strength — he gets the puck, gets it to me, and I score.”

Not a lot of people remember Pavelich getting leveled or knocked unconscious, but he sure took a beating. The NHL was far more physical in those days, and a lot of times the diminutive Pavelich would come out of the corner without his helmet. A suspected concussion limited him to 48 games in 1984-85, but he was so quiet that nobody seemed to notice any difference.

“I remember one time we were having a couple beers and I said, ‘You know Pav, I wish I was like you, maybe one day a week,’ ” Dave Maloney said. “He just seemed to have an inner quiet to him. He wasn’t not aware or not alert. He was just Pav. He just went about his own thing.”

During Pavelich’s first two seasons with the Rangers, Eruzione was part of the team’s broadcast crew, and he tried to convince his old teammate to do an on-air interview.

“I said, ‘People want to know about you, it’s New York City, it’s a big market,’ ” Eruzione said. “And he goes, ‘Rizzo, you know I don’t care about that.’ I went back to our director, and they then offered him $1,000 in sporting goods equipment — hunting, fishing stuff. I told him that, and he said, ‘All right, I’ll go on, but only with you.’ So the only reason I got to interview him was because he liked to hunt and fish.”

That was about as much as any of his teammates knew about him. Duguay said Pavelich never went out on the town with them, but he would occasionally ask him to come out and have a few beers with his buddies when they were back in Minnesota playing the North Stars. Maloney remembered Pavelich had a Jeep, and in the back was “his bow and arrow and his fishing rod, and another pair of corduroys. And that was about it.”

Pavelich scored 133 goals as a Ranger, including a team-high 37 in 1982-83. On Feb. 23, 1983, he scored five goals in an 11-3 rout of the Hartford Whalers, tying Don Murdoch’s single-game club record (a feat matched this season by Mika Zibanejad). But the Rangers never made it out of the second round under Brooks and he was fired in the middle of the 1984-85 season.

When Ted Sator took over the following season, the system went from creative and attacking to slow and plodding. Pavelich was benched for two consecutive games in March, and so he then skipped two practices and a game. Sator drove up to his apartment in Westchester, but Pavelich didn’t open the door. Hockey wasn’t fun anymore, so Pavelich wasn’t playing.

The summer before that season, he had married a 21-year-old from Cherry, Minn., named Sue Koski. After he quit the Rangers, he wanted to go to Scotland to play on a team with a high school teammate, but the Rangers wouldn’t relinquish his contract. They ended up trading him to the North Stars, where he played the final 12 games of the 1986-87 season to complete his deal.

He and Sue had a daughter, Tarja, in the summer of 1987, and they spent that winter in Italy, where Pavelich played for the Bolzano Foxes. Sue filed for divorce in 1989, Pavelich made a two-game comeback for the San Jose Sharks in 1991-92, but that was it for hockey.

Kara Burmachuk had been a piano prodigy, and was giving lessons in Minnesota when Pavelich brought his young daughter to her in the winter of 1990. Burmachuk was 10 years younger than Pavelich, but after a while, he asked her out. They were married by Burmachuk’s father in the family home, and soon moved to one of Pavelich’s recently purchased pieces of land up the road from Lutsen, Minn., on Deeryard Lake, where they built their home with their own hands.

They lived a peaceful life, and Kara got so good at painting with acrylic that she supplemented their income. Mark fished a lot, and the two worked on the house while raising Tarja together. They built a small balcony outside of Tarja’s room, 5 feet by 4 feet. They were still figuring out what kind of railing they wanted to put around it, and below, Mark had assembled a retaining wall out of stones that were between 8 and 12 inches in diameter.

On the night of Sept. 5, 2012, Mark had some pain in his leg that he thought was deep vein thrombosis, and he and Kara stayed up most of the night considering going to the hospital. They didn’t, and the next morning Mark worked on one of his boats for a while and then went to take a nap. That’s when Kara went out to the balcony with no railing, where there was better cell phone reception.

She fell and cracked her head open on one of the rocks.

Mark woke up, found her, and called 911. He then called Jean’s husband, Larry Gevik, who lived next door. Two other neighbors, Jan and David Morris, were alerted by a friend who was listening to a scanner and they ran over to help.

There was nothing they could do. The doctors said Kara likely died upon impact. She was 44.

Kara’s cell phone was nearby, and there was blood on a rock. Later, the doctor at the hospital said “the injuries were consistent with a fall onto the rock wall,” according to the Cook County Sheriff’s police report filed by Deputy David Gilmore. The Morrises socialized with the Paveliches a couple times a week, and told the police that Mark and Kara didn’t show any signs of domestic strife. At the funeral, Mark’s mother, Anne, said it was the first time she had ever seen her son cry.

Larry Gevik struggled to live with the scene of trying to revive Kara. Soon thereafter, they found out he had pancreatic cancer. Three months later, Larry died, leaving Jean with their three kids.

“I can’t even imagine Mark living with that, alone, in the same house,” Jean said. “And I wasn’t there for him. I was dealing with my kids and their grief, and my own. I feel like he could have had a lot more support after that. And he didn’t.”

For a while, Mark seemed to be OK. He had given his gold medal to the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, but in 2014, he sold it for $262,900, splitting the money with his daughter, who was a new mother. In 2016, a lot of the players from the 1980 team organized a “fantasy camp” in Lake Placid, where fans could interact with their heroes and play some hockey. Mark showed up to three of the first four games, packing his two border collies in his truck and driving from Minnesota to upstate New York. He even laced up the skates and played in two of them.

“Once the camp was over,” Eruzione said, “he got in his car and he drove back, and you didn’t hear from him again until the next possible team function.”

Around that same time, Tomassoni had a friend fly up from Florida and they went to Pavelich’s house on the lake to go fishing. The big boat was being repaired, so they took out a little row boat and caught a bunch of small walleye before the skies opened up, complete with thunder and lightning. They had to take the long way back to the house along the shore, and were soaked when they returned.

Pavelich cleaned the fish and told Tomassoni and his friend to take them back to Tomassoni’s house, where they would cook them up fresh. Tomassoni’s friend was a terrific chef, and he made fish cakes. Pavelich seemed like his normal, kind, giving self that day. Tomassoni and his friend still talk about it, and they have a name for the recipe: “Pav Cakes.”

Soon, the solitude was too much. For a man who strived to be alone, there was just too much heartbreak, too much tragedy chasing him down. There might also have been too many hits to the head. It was just all too much.

He started slipping. He told the sheriff that someone put sludge in his gas tank. Another time he said it was cut-up tinfoil. Another time he thought it was his neighbor John Zattoni, and soon thereafter, Zattoni’s boat had holes smashed in it. He suspected Pavelich, but never pressed charges. Another neighbor brought Pavelich cookies, which Pavelich thought were poisoned. He kept them in his freezer for evidence.

Jean lived right there, and she saw it happening. So she got her siblings together and confronted Mark. It didn’t work.

“It just wasn’t handled right,” Jean said.

Soon after the confrontation, Jean was convinced Mark was the one who slashed the tires on her RV parked in a nearby lane.

Then came Aug. 15, 2019, when Pavelich went fishing with Jim Miller and then beat him up with a pipe. Everyone said they were “shocked.” Mark might have been fearless on the ice, but no one ever knew him as violent.

“This was in no way, shape or form the Mark Pavelich I know,” Tomassoni said. “He’s one of the kindest, more gentle souls you would ever meet.”

But things change. People change. Brain chemistry changes.

Tomassoni and Jean both believe his actions are a result of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the result of all those blows to the head. It has been a common theme among retired athletes, but can’t be proven until an autopsy is performed. A lot of different people have reached out to help, with Beck leading the way with his regular Facebook updates. The NHL Alumni Association keeps all of its work confidential, but executive director Glenn Healy made its mission statement very clear: “We will never turn our back on any player,” he said.

It’s been almost year since Pavelich was incarcerated, and the hope is he can get the right medication and into a facility where he can get the ongoing help that he needs. Then all the charges have to be dealt with.

“He’s in a really good place right now,” Jean said. “We’re getting him back.”

Whenever Pavelich is released and the courts deem he can be integrated back into society, there is a plan. Jean and Beck, among others, have started a public charity with the goal of helping retired players. Former goalie Clint Malarchuk — whose throat was slashed so gruesomely by a skate in a 1989 NHL game — is involved, and he owns a ranch near Reno, Nev., where he uses equine therapy to help mental illness. They have started a GoFundMe page to raise the money to establish the charity, which they plan to call The Ranch: Teammates for Life.

It’s a manifestation of Beck’s dream, the one he had before he even knew what was going on with Pavelich. But now he knows the whole story, and the dream seems like a precognition. It’s hard to tell if it will ever come to fruition, or whether it will be the help other former players need before they end up like Pavelich.

But a dream is better than no dream.

“Mark doesn’t want to be the poster child for mental health,” Beck said. “But we would like to see him be able to tell his story, and not have someone else tell it for him.”

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