Here is my Tough Guy opinion of the week: while it is primarily a smutty hocke romance, think a lot of people only engage with the book “anxious giant hockey player fucks annoying twink,” and completely miss that Rachel Reid is very obviously trying to talk about the physical and psychological damage professional hockey does to athletes.
Ryan being an enforcer is not just aesthetic characterization, it is the central thesis of the novel.
As someone who comes from pro wrestling fandom rather than hockey fandom, a lot of the small details in the Game Changers series stood out to me immediately. In Game Changer, Scott casually taking steroids to heal faster and ignoring medically recommended recovery time after injuries is treated as basically normal athlete behavior. In Heated Rivalry, Ilya’s fake teeth are framed as almost a funny little character detail. My reaction to both was literally just “yeah, it really be like that.” Because once you spend enough time around contact sports, you realize the destruction of athlete's bodies is completely normalized.
Tough Guy is the first book in the series where Reid stops treating those details as background flavor and basically holds up a sign saying “hey maybe we should talk about what this sport actually does to people.”
There is a reason Ryan is not another superstar protagonist like Scott, Shane or Ilya. Reid specifically makes him an enforcer: a player whose primary purpose is intimidation and violence rather than technical skill. Ryan exists in hockey as a deterrent first and an athlete second. He gets traded constantly, struggles to maintain relationships, has almost no close friends, isolates himself from teammates, and exists in a role that modern hockey has slowly been phasing out over the last fifteen years.
After finishing the book I ended up going down a massive research rabbit hole about enforcers. I watched hour-long videos and read articles about concussions, opioid addiction, chronic pain, depression, memory loss, and the long-term psychological effects of repeated head trauma. And weirdly, it reminded me a lot of “hosses” in pro wrestling.
“Hoss” is a derogatory wrestling term for those giant steroid-abusing wrestlers who are not necessarily technically skilled performers, but get pushed because they are physically imposing and function as spectacle. They are valued more for size and intimidation than actual technical ability. Which is why the comparison immediately clicked for me: enforcers occupy almost the exact same role in hockey. They are not there because they are the best players on the ice, they are there to absorb punishment, intimidate opponents, and protect the stars.
And importantly, neither archetype started disappearing because people suddenly developed concern for athlete safety. Enforcers became obsolete because hockey got faster and more skill-focused. Hosses became less prominent because wrestling audiences increasingly started valuing technical ability and athleticism over sheer size. In both cases, the industry moved on because the role stopped being profitable, not because anyone cared about the long-term damage done to the people filling it.
Which is also why I think Fabian gets misunderstood by a lot of readers. People reduce him to “annoying pushy twink,” which, to be fair, he absolutely is at points in the story. But Fabian is also one of the only people in Ryan’s life who fully recognizes how horrifying Ryan’s situation actually is. Ryan minimizes everything because hockey culture teaches players to normalize pain, isolation, and permanent injury. Fabian looks at Ryan and sees a man having panic attacks on airplanes, self-isolating across nine different teams, and destroying his body for a league that would replace him in six months without blinking.
And the novel itself reinforces that point constantly. Reid literally includes another former enforcer who died from opioid abuse and whose funeral nobody attended. That is not random tragic backstory flavor text, that is the thematic core of the book.
So while Tough Guy is absolutely a smutty gay romance novel, I think reducing it to “anxious hockey giant falls in love with twink” strips away a huge part of what the book is actually trying to say about masculinity, violence, disposability, and the way professional sports industries consume athletes bodies for entertainment.
