Skate Cut Protection Gets An Emotional Hockey Dad Endorsement At The Nhl Gms Meeting

Tom Fitzgerald and wife Kerry watched their son Casey's American Hockey League game on a cellphone at a restaurant bar on Dec. 28 and saw him come out of the corner on an otherwise innocuous play holding his hand to the right side of his neck.

He had been cut by a skate blade just above his neck guard and was bleeding when trainers rushed to him and got him into an ambulance. The only update his parents received, from Hartford's trainer through his girlfriend, was that the bleeding was stopped and Casey was on the way to the hospital.

"He called us from the ambulance on the way to the hospital, saying: 'I'm OK. I'm going to be OK,'" Tom Fitzgerald recalled. "We kind of broke down there."

Casey Fitzgerald survived the skate cut to the neck, which came a little over a year since Adam Johnson died from one while playing in a game in England, and his father - the general manager of the New Jersey Devils - gave an impassioned plea on the subject Tuesday at the NHL GMs meeting.

"I don't wish that on any parent," Tom Fitzgerald said. "My message was just: 'Tell the players you don't want your parents potentially going through something like this, how scary it is. Put as much protection on as you possibly can because you're going to stop playing at some point, and you're going to have to live the rest of your life, so live it.'"