Michel Petit and Steve Payne don't know each other personally.

They played each other a handful of times during the mid 80s when Payne's career as a natural goal scorer for the Minnesota North Stars was winding down and Petit's was ramping up as a physical Vancouver Canucks defenceman. But they share a bond: their lives were forever worsened by the game they love.

Petit and Payne are two of the dozens of players who've joined the ongoing concussion lawsuit against the NHL. Hall of Famers they may not be, but Petit and Payne are still some of the biggest names to join the class-action case.

While the NHL continues to do everything in its power to stop the lawsuit, including a recent argument wherein the league claims it cannot be sued for promoting and marketing violence much in the way Acclaim Entertainment did, current players such as Mark Scheifele and Gabriel Landeskog are raising their voices about the dangers of concussions. Scheifele and Landeskog aren't the type of players many have associated with concussions and the current lawsuit.

The common association with players involved in the lawsuit have been fighters and bit players. But Petit and Payne break the mould: Payne averaged 26 goals a season from 1978-85 and was a sniper in the purest sense. Petit, meanwhile, was known for blending skill and strength and played for ten teams over his 827-game run in the NHL. He had only suffered a shoulder injury before a concussion ended his career.

The two players could not have taken a more drastically different approach to the way they played the game, but both ended up in the same dark corner that the NHL's mythology-building machine swept over: their bodies are broken after giving themselves to the game they love.

For these two, hockey was as much a love as it was an opportunity. That their careers were both cut short by injuries is one thing; that they were robbed of a chance to continue pursuing their dreams is why they've chosen to put their names on a lawsuit that could change the game forever.

"I'm not looking for the NHL to write me a cheque for anything. I'm not looking for a single penny out of this," Payne tells VICE Sports.

What drives him is recognition from the league of wrongdoing on behalf of other players.

"I hope I don't become one of those guys, because that means I'm having trouble and problems that are beyond my ability to handle," he says of receiving financial reparation. "I just want [the NHL] to be there for these guys and help them get the treatment they need to at least live as normal a life as they can under the circumstances."

It all sounds very noble: expounding more on the eternal brotherhood of hockey players. But the growing feelings of resentment within that fraternity have given way to a war off the ice that's mounting with ammunition.

"If players were a lot more informed I think it would make a difference about how you would hit somebody," Petit says. "Nobody knew that if you got hit so many times you might have problems later on in life."

The concussion litigation against the league was a few players at first. Bit players and role players who fought their way onto NHL lineups and had to fight, both literally and figuratively, to stay there.

Then came Michel Petit, a living, breathing personification of the "tough son-of-a-bitch" defenceman one might imagine when fans talk about the good ol' days of the free-wheeling NHL in the 1980s and 90s. Petit became a household name in his day because of the skill he utilized, but also because of the pain he inflicted that made him a mainstay on the Rock Em' Sock Em' series.

The pain he experiences now is not what he had bargained for during his career. He suffers from vision problems, anger issues and short-term memory lapses that have forced him to have to write down everything he does.

Petit's deteriorating health stems from the concussion that ended his career. At the Phoenix Coyotes' training camp in 1998, Petit took an elbow to the temple, and had trouble keeping his balance.

"When I got to the bench the trainer said, 'You're done.'"

Two months later, after countless visits to the doctor, he received clearance to take part in full physical practice for at least a week to determine if he had any lingering symptoms. But Petit says Bobby Smith, the Coyotes' general manager at the time, forced him into the lineup, despite his insistence that he was not yet game ready.

Petit dressed for the game but didn't play one shift. Only later did he learn that while Smith wanted him on the ice, Coyotes coach Jim Schoenfeld had totally disagreed with the GM's insistence and kept him out of the lineup.

"It could've been a lot worse," says Petit.

He was quickly sent down to the Coyotes' IHL affiliate, the Las Vegas Thunder. There, he played an overtly and strangely cautious style. He suffered from headaches after every single game, despite trainers telling him that what he was feeling was normal due to not having played for so long.

Just six games into his stint with the Thunder, Petit took a seemingly innocuous bump to the chest that would change his life forever.

"I was down on my knees, not moving," he says. "The trainer came on the ice and said 'Oh, Christ, you're done.'"

For the second time in the season, Petit had a trained medical professional tell him he was done. But he was still allowed back on the ice. That hit caused him to fall repeatedly and, not putting the pieces together, mistakenly asking the trainer to sharpen his skates.

Petit had to fight to receive what he was owed on his contract. Looking back now, money was the least of his issues. His personality changed wildly after his concussion in Phoenix.

"I was so unbearable. I was angry all the time. Noise would bother me. If it was windy outside I had no balance. I always had a buzzing in my ear. For that full year after that concussion it was nasty," he explained.

It was that concussion that effectively ended Petit's career. He bounced around afterward—a handful of games here and there with teams in Germany, Italy and an attempted season with the IHL's Chicago Wolves. His playing days were done well before his 40th birthday. But the pain lingered.

The harsh truth came because of the questions he never thought he'd have to ask.

"In the end, I had to ask the doctors: What am I going to face later on in life?"

For some, there is the belief that players such as Petit knew what they were getting themselves into. The injuries were part and parcel of the physical game they played. He estimates suffering five or six concussions in his career. It's tough for Petit to get an accurate read because it's only recently that he's learned what a concussion even is.

That lack of knowledge is a plight that Steve Payne shared.

"Unless you got knocked out cold, we didn't think it was a concussion," Payne says. "I was always proud of the fact that I never passed out cold."

Throughout his career, Payne's injuries weren't dealt with as seriously as one would hope: questions about fingers in front of his face, perhaps some smelling salts, and then, back out on the ice.

Years after he retired and began being plagued by the kind of persistent health problems that Petit was experiencing did his eyes open to the sad realities of how concussions impact players later in life.

"I had no idea," he says. "Nobody had ever explained [concussions] to me."

And why would anybody have? Payne was a goal scorer. His hands were used for finding the back of the net, not for slugging opponents. And throughout his career with the North Stars, few did it better in the Gopher State.

Payne hit his stride during an improbable North Stars run to the Stanley Cup Final in 1981, amassing 29 points in 19 games.

"It was the most special time of my entire career," he says.

He parlayed that strong playoff run into a Team Canada training camp invite for the 1981 Canada Cup. There, a 23-year-old Payne walked into a dressing room with Guy Lafleur, Mike Bossy and a 20-year old kid from Brantford who would go on to become the greatest goal scorer in NHL history.

"In an exhibition game I played on a line with Wayne Gretzky," he says. "I could do no wrong. I was spoiled to play with players of that calibre."

He never played in less than 70 games throughout his first seven seasons in the NHL, but as the 1985-86 campaign got underway persistent knee and cervical spine injuries (the latter similar to the injury Gary Roberts would later suffer from) forced him out of the North Stars lineup for long stretches. He'd go on to play only 48 games the next season.

But at the start of his tenth season, Payne was feeling better than he ever had and started to believe that he had a few years left in his career. A blindside hit from Dale Hunter in Washington, however, aggravated his neck injury again.

A subsequent trip to the clinic led to doctors telling Payne they wouldn't have suggested playing after the first surgery he had in his career, let alone the latest. The news was jarring: getting hit the wrong way just once more could've cost him the use of his left arm because of where the damage was in his spine.

With a 4-year-old and a 10-month-old at home, Payne made the decision to end his career and be there for his children. If he were without children at the time?

"I would've been a big enough knucklehead that I would've kept playing," he says.

Still, things were hardly rosy on the home front after his retirement. Short-term memory issues were reoccurring and he still suffers from it to this day. In his 40s, however, he noticed his anger was out of control.

The change in his temper had become so drastic that it cost him his marriage. His wife, Kim, told him that she couldn't live with him because his persistent anger was too much to handle. She walked out on him in 2008 and they were divorced soon afterward.

"I didn't know why I was angry all the time," he says.

Alone, he began to stare his demons directly in the face. More trips to the doctors revealed just how much concussions contributed to the anger.

"I can still feel the anger building," he says, "but I have to recognize it and squash it before it causes problems."

More education about concussions led to more concerted efforts to deal with his anger issues. By 2012, he hadn't seen his ex-wife in over a year. They reconnected over a cup of coffee and immediately she noticed a huge difference in his demeanour.

Eventually, they became close again and remarried. If Payne was being served a new lease on life, he wasn't about to waste it. He moved out of the hectic city environment to the quaint town of New Richmond, Wisconsin, and started to learn more about the effects of concussions later in life.

The lifelong hockey man is now part of a team that's bringing attention to the issue more than ever before.

"I'm not a doctor," he says. "I was just a jock."

My conversations with Petit and Payne were weeks apart and neither knew I had talked to each other. When I asked them both, respectively, if they were angry about the way their careers ended—be it Payne not hitting 300 goals or Petit not playing 1000 games—they both answered in what felt like unison: "Absolutely."

It's an anger they've come to terms with. Rather than let it boil over, the anger now simmers.

"I don't even know if I'm over with that yet, all these years later," says Payne.

The anger has led to a demand for action. Both insist financial motives aren't at the heart of them joining the concussion lawsuit. With all they've learned about the adverse effects of concussions, they want to know why they were treated the way they were. Even if there was relatively no knowledge about what a concussion was throughout their playing days, both believe that doesn't mean they couldn't have been protected by teams and the league.

"You get hit, you don't say much about it," Petit recalls of the way he and teammates would deal with head injuries. "But then all of a sudden you're asking questions because you don't remember: 'What's the score? What period are we in?' It's bizarre. At the end of the game you're sitting there telling yourself 'I just played a game and I don't remember any of it.'"

While some of the world's leading neurologists conduct concussion research, former players have begun to do some digging of their own. When Payne did indeed begin to do research into what exactly a concussion was, what he learned wasn't pretty.

"The other thing that I discovered was that once they accumulated, it's a multiple factor in the negative," he says. "I didn't realize there would be long-term effects and that some of those effects wouldn't manifest until well after it had happened."

The lawsuit has drawn clean lines in the sand: those who side with the league and those who side with the players who've joined the suit. Even within ex-players, there are factions.

"A lot of guys wanted to join the lawsuit but are still with their former teams but they're not right," says Petit. "They don't want to jeopardize their income."

Why join a lawsuit that could take years to resolve and could threaten to alienate them from others in the hockey community? Again, as if on cue, two players with very little connection to each other make echoing statements.

After a concussion ended Petit's career, he says he "wanted to send a message that teams could not drop players and act as though nothing happened."

"I just think it's the right thing to do," offers Payne, adding that there was "no way" the league didn't understand concussion ramifications during his playing days. "I have a lot of teammates that I've seen since retirement that've struggled. Clearly, they have mental issues and clearly they're deteriorating."

Petit now has a toddler-aged son. He's been asking himself whether he should pass his love of the game onto his son and get him on skates.

"I don't want my son to go through what I went through. If he loves the game and wants to play the game, that's great. The first concussion he has, I tell you, he's done. I'm not going to let that go on.

"It's a great game. It's the best game on Earth. But we have to do something about it to ensure everyone is taken care of."