This might be old news, but I was pretty moved by this story on Brashear. Poly For Capitals' Brashear, Fighting's a Way of Life By Mike Wise Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, May 2, 2009 Outside the Washington Capitals locker room, the most feared fighter in the National Hockey League stared at a sealed envelope that had just been handed to him by a reporter. On the front, in neat, cursive writing, a relative whom Donald Brashear has not seen for 18 years, had written simply, Donald. Brashear clutched the envelope in his swollen left hand, the hand he has shaped into the cudgel of a fist in 223 fights over 15 violent seasons in the NHL. He thought hard about opening it, whether he wanted to peel back the _layer_s of his past, because, he said, there are some things I don't want to know, some doors I don't want to open. When the Capitals step onto the ice at Verizon Center this afternoon for the first game of their second-round playoff series against the Pittsburgh Penguins, Brashear will not be skating with them. In a first-round game against the New York Rangers, Brashear caught an unsuspecting Rangers forward in the face with his forearm, sending him crashing to the ice and breaking an orbital bone. The blow, and an encounter with another Rangers p_layer_ before the contest, earned Brashear a six-game suspension. For fans of professional hockey in North America, he is an imposing 6-foot-3, 235-pound forward, one of the sport's most recognizable enforcers, a black man playing a predominantly white man's sport whose skating and stick skills have been dwarfed by his ability to pummel opponents with his fists. Brashear, 37, is known as a loner. He lives in a sparsely furnished, two-bedroom apartment in Penn Quarter. No pictures of his two boys or his friends hang on the bare walls, no awards. Nothing. He broke off an engagement to a woman he adored last month because we want different things. It's just too hard for me to be in a relationship. Brash don't trust anybody, said Frederic Cyr, whom Brashear met when Cyr tended bar at Montreal's L'Action almost 20 years ago. What he has in life is his friends and teammates, and when he leaves hockey he will miss all that. Except for a half-brother, he does not speak to his family. For almost 30 years, he has largely cut himself off from the rest of the world because of what happened to him as a child. On this day, Brashear walked toward his gleaming black Cadillac Escalade in the parking lot of the Capitals' training complex, opened the driver's door and put the envelope on the passenger's seat with his belongings. A connection to his childhood remained in the envelope, which sat there, unopened, on the drive home. I worry about opening that window because you start to care