Just sitting on a couch next to the most feared enforcer in the National Hockey League is more than a bit disconcerting. With his shaved head, scowling eyebrows, and a face etched by a lifetime of slashes, punches, and pucks to the skull, 6'3", 220-pound Chris Simon looks like a serial killer’s mug shot, anxious to leap off the page and strike.

“Chris Simon,” says Georges Laraque, Pittsburgh’s bruising forward, “is one tough dude.” How tough? Over a 16-year NHL career, he’s had 107 fights and served 1,772 penalty minutes. Last March, in a widely publicized incident, he delivered a slash so vicious to the head of Rangers forward Ryan Hollweg that the NHL handed him a league-record 25-game suspension. Simon is so tough, in fact, that the question at hand—is he ever scared?—has the New York Islanders heavyweight totally stumped. He thinks long and hard. “I’ll tell you,” he says at last. “I’m never scared on the ice, and I’m not scared by much in my day-to-day life. But there was this time…”

With that Simon begins to recount an incident of three years ago when he was out hunting alone in the woods near his hometown of Wawa, Ontario. As he sat squatting on a rock waiting for prey, a female moose strode in front of him, about 15 yards away, with her two calves. “No big deal,” Simon recalls. “But then, out of nowhere, a bull comes up behind them. He probably weighed 1,000 pounds—you’re talking about an animal that could stomp and kill me very easily.” Upon spotting Simon, the bull inched closer, swaying back and forth. An attack seemed inevitable.

That is, until Simon stood up, cupped his hands, and screamed: “Go away! Get lost!” At that, the bull turned and walked off.

Chris Simon is so tough that even 1,000-pound beasts don’t screw with him.

Hit Man

Throughout a professional career that began in 1988 and has taken him to six NHL franchises, Simon has thrived as one of the most famous hired goons in the sport’s history—a man who makes the ice safer for smaller, quicker, more skilled teammates. With Quebec in the early 1990s, he served as All-Star center Joe Sakic’s personal bodyguard. Later, with the Washington Capitals, he offered similar protection to offensive phenom Jaromir Jagr. On the Islanders, star winger Bill Guerin knows he’s covered. The concept is simple: You touch one of his teammates, Simon makes you pay. “The guy is downright scary,” says Rick DiPietro, the Islanders’ goaltender. “Not only is he humongous, but he’s a brutalizing puncher. Playing against him sucks. But as a teammate, there’s nothing better. He always has our back.”

Were Simon a boxer, he’d be George Foreman, circa 1973. There’s little speed or flash to his pugilistic styling; he simply grabs a handful of jersey with his right hand, draws back his left fist, and drops it repeatedly, like a sledgehammer. “He’s remarkably accurate and as strong as anyone,” says Donald Brashear, a Capitals forward and one of the league’s best brawlers. In 1992, when Brashear and Simon were playing in the American Hockey League, the two squared off for their lone encounter. It was one-sided. “He threw this big left, and I dropped to my knees instantly,” recalls Brashear. As the victim of one of the dirtiest hits in NHL history—a stick to the head eight years ago from Boston’s Marty McSorley that resulted in a grade-three concussion—Brashear knows dirty players. But his opinion of Simon is high. “Chris is a fair guy who knows what’s right and what’s not,” Brashear says. “He plays hard if the game calls for it, but he’s not trying to kill anyone.”

And despite the touchy-feely ethos of the new NHL, where league rules put the emphasis on speed and finesse more than fighting, Simon makes no apologies for his style of play. “Nothing personal,” he says. “Just doing my job.”

Simon knows he’s an NHL dinosaur—a protector when few true protectors are left. Had he been active back in the ’60s and ’70s, when the NHL was loaded with toothless thugs and eye-gougers, he would likely have gone down as just another hard-nosed player; these days, he’s accepted by an increasingly image-conscious league as a tolerable evil. “He’s a throwback to a league that no longer exists,” says Bill Fleischman, who covered the “Broad Street Bullies” Flyers of the 1970s for the Philadelphia Daily News. “There was a time when every team had enforcers with defined roles. That’s changed dramatically.” Thanks in part to rule changes that penalize and even eject players for instigating fights, the average number of fights per game is down to .55 from over 1.0 in the ’80s, when slugfests were embraced. “They’ve really beaten up on guys who fight,” says DiPietro. “I don’t like that. To me it’s hockey.”