Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard Read online

  “I don’t think I’ve ever cried that long in my life,” he wrote in the first letter. “This year you have made me cry 4 times, that is the most that I have since I was 10 yrs old when I broke my brothers waterbed.”

  He talked about the condominium, how he had taken her design ideas to help make it something they could share, a place they could have friends and family.

  “I feel like such a disappointment to everybody, you, my brothers and sister, my grandparents, the people in hockey, everybody.”

  He said he was writing in the dark with the lights off.

  “I can’t look myself in the mirror still,” he wrote. “I feel like a failor [sic]. I wish I could have talked to you better and not just saying nothing is wrong when you asked me what was wrong. I know that you just cared about me and wanted to help. I want to give you the best life possible even if I stop hockey and you just want a normal life. If you really want that, I will do it and I will be happy with our decision.”

  He suggested that he could leave hockey behind and work the oil wells of Saskatchewan and Alberta. There was decent money in that, he reasoned, and he would be close to home.

  He apologized to Janella for past arguments, including one where he criticized a “sexy white skirt” she wore.

  “I get jealous but I don’t show it until I just snap,” he wrote. “Because everybody is looking at you! And they think why is she with that big idiot.”

  On June 29, in the afternoon, he wrote soberly about his excitement to see Janella the next day. He was coming to Colorado to visit.

  “I am not going to let you go ever again if we get back together,” he wrote.

  Janella waited for him at the airport. It had been nearly four years since they met, awkwardly and nervously spotting one another at a tiny, rural airport in Minnesota. Back then, she had pretended not to notice him walking toward her. This time, through the crowd in Denver, she watched carefully. Janella was determined not to be a pushover. She told Derek that she had to think seriously about their future together. She needed more time. He went back to Regina. She stayed in Colorado.

  Finally, near summer’s end, she told Derek she was ready. We will make this work, she said.

  Derek demurred. His friends and agents had been whispering to him that he needed to free himself of distractions. And Janella was a distraction, a girlfriend from long before he reached the NHL, someone Derek had outgrown and who threatened to hold him back. Focus on the future, Derek was told.

  Derek told Janella that he needed to concentrate on the upcoming season. Camp was starting, and he wanted to keep his mind clear of personal issues.

  The relationship was over.

  Janella knew it was only temporary. She and Derek were meant for one another, and he would see that. He was just focused on the NHL, on an opportunity he had dreamed about and suddenly found himself living. He would be back. They would get married and build a life together, with a house and a family and a dog.

  She took all of Derek’s mementos—his notes, his pictures, even his medical records—and kept them locked in a safe place, holding them until they came together again.

  She came to Minneapolis in the spring of 2007 to collect the last of her belongings. Derek’s mother, Joanne, was there at Derek’s condominium. Derek was not. Janella and Joanne talked, and talked, waiting for Derek to arrive. Janella was excited and nervous to see him. She did not know that Derek had no intention of seeing her. He waited for her to leave before he would return home. Finally, unable to wait for Derek any longer, Janella left.

  Moments later, Derek and a guest arrived. Derek introduced his new girlfriend to his mother.

  THE FIRST WILD game that Erin Russell attended was October 27, 2006—the game in which Derek shattered Todd Fedoruk’s cheek. Thin and blonde, Erin was a 21-year-old who had grown up in Minnesota. She knew hockey well, had even played it as a girl. But she did not closely follow the Wild.

  She met Derek at a nightclub in downtown Minneapolis called the Annex. Some of his friends knew some of her friends, and Derek spotted Erin right away.

  “She’s the one,” he jokingly said to Tobin Wright, a former Wild employee who had become a sort of manager for Derek and one of his closest friends. “Yep, she’s the one.”

  Erin asked why he was wearing a suit, and Derek told her that he was a bouncer. She believed him. She later found out that he was not a bar bouncer, but the Wild’s young, popular enforcer. A meathead, Erin figured. But he seemed sweet—attentive and eager to please. And she was struck by how he was so interested in others, as if his priority was to make everyone else comfortable and deflect attention away from himself. Not the stereotype Erin had in mind.

  Derek invited Erin to a game and gave her two tickets so she could bring a friend. Just as the women arrived and took their seats in the seventh row at the sold-out Xcel Energy Center, Derek was beating up Anaheim’s Shane O’Brien. A period later, Erin saw Fedoruk tug on Derek’s jersey, entice him into a fight, and collapse on the ice as the sellout crowd of 18,568 fans roared in wonder. This was the same humble, soft-spoken guy she had met at the club?

  The Wild won, 3–2, in a shootout after neither team scored in overtime, improving the team’s record to 9–0–1. Of the game’s 65 minutes, Derek played 1 minute, 42 seconds. He had three penalties in four shifts and spent 12 minutes in the penalty box.

  He had a throbbing right hand, a burgeoning reputation, and a new girlfriend.

  STRATEGIES VARIED FOR fighting against Derek. Get close to him, to counter his reach advantage, and do not let him hold you straight out with his left hand. Hit him quickly and often, to keep him from setting up his one big punch. Switch hands and vary punches and dekes, to keep him off balance. You weren’t going to knock Derek down. But you could make him slip to the ice.

  And, after the fight with Fedoruk, the best strategy of all was to avoid him. Avoid his giant right fist, certainly. Better, avoid him altogether.

  Derek fought 10 times in his second season, but only six after he knocked down Fedoruk. No one wanted to be his next victim.

  But Derek was hurting, too. He played in only 48 of the season’s 82 games. Most of the absences were due to injuries, but he was a healthy scratch from the lineup a few times, kept out because coach Jacques Lemaire wanted other players available for specific matchups. Maybe the other team had no true enforcer, or too much speed for Derek to handle. Maybe Lemaire wanted a boost on the power play or the penalty kill, and Derek rarely played on those special teams. Derek’s average ice time dropped from 5 minutes, 23 seconds as a rookie to 4 minutes, 38 seconds in his second season.

  But he was still prized by Lemaire. Years later, watching an NHL game after he retired from coaching, Lemaire wrote a Twitter message to his followers: “This is the kind of game I used to tell Boogey to find a face to smash with his fist. I’d say ‘Go punch a face, then take a seat.’ ”

  Derek’s first fight after the Fedoruk takedown was against Laraque, then playing for the Phoenix Coyotes. Derek had missed a couple of games with a sore quadriceps, and a couple of others with a strained rotator cuff.

  An ESPN player poll released later in the season called Derek the second “toughest player” in the NHL, behind Laraque.

  “Here we go! Boogaard and Laraque! The heavyweights!” the television announcer said as the men stood in front of one net, fists raised. A graphic, entitled “Tale of the Tape,” prepared in advance for the moment, quickly appeared at the bottom of the screen. It noted that Derek was six foot seven and weighed 270 pounds. Laraque was six foot three and 243.

  Derek grabbed Laraque with his left hand and pelted him in the face with a couple of right hands. Laraque countered with a jab that dislodged Derek’s helmet. Derek stumbled forward and nearly fell, sliding to one knee before standing again. The men clutched one another and tried to throw punches, but neither could get arms extended. It looked like they were boxing inside an invisible phone booth. Laraque jabbed Derek hard with a left hand to
the side of the head. He wrestled Derek backward to the ice, folding his legs beneath him.

  Derek was prescribed codeine that night by the Wild team doctor—one of the first times, records showed, that he was prescribed a painkiller. He missed the next 10 games with strained ankle ligaments.

  He played through most of December, but did not fight again until January 9. In the days leading up to his next fight, according to pharmacy and medical records, a Wild team doctor prescribed Derek Ambien—20 pills on January 4, and 20 more on January 8.

  On January 9, Derek was battered by Calgary’s Eric Godard.

  Godard and Derek had first fought in the Western Hockey League in 1999. Derek was 17 then, and it was his first fight for the Prince George Cougars. Godard was a 19-year-old from Vernon, British Columbia, who played for the Lethbridge (Alberta) Hurricanes.

  Godard was never drafted into the NHL, but he signed with the Florida Panthers and was eventually part of a 2002 draft-day deal with the NHL’s New York Islanders. In the summer of 2006, he signed with the Calgary Flames, a division rival of Minnesota’s and a team in need of a capable enforcer to combat the likes of Derek. Calgary placed Godard with its minor-league affiliate in Omaha.

  But he was promoted in time to make his debut with the Flames against Derek and the Wild. Starting near center ice at Calgary’s Saddledome, two seconds after the Flames took a 1–0 lead, the two traded jabs and overhand punches with metronomic steadiness. Derek hit Godard with a couple of blows to the face and seemed to be in relative control before Godard hit Derek twice on top of the head with his right fist. Derek fell to one knee, stood back up, and was hammered twice more again. He dropped to a knee again, but Godard, clinging hard to Derek’s jersey, did not let him stand a third time. He dragged him sideways to the ice and fell on top of him.

  The Calgary fans cheered as the men stood and slid away. Derek, dazed, skated toward the wrong penalty box. Redirected, he slipped into the visiting penalty box, but quickly left for the dressing room.

  Derek sat out a week. He missed three games. The team, required by league rules to publicly reveal injuries that might affect a player’s chances to play, reported that Derek had a “head” injury.

  The Wild and Flames played again on January 26, this time in Saint Paul. During a television timeout in the second period, Derek and Godard lined up next to one another, awaiting a face-off. They spoke calmly, like two men discussing the weather.

  The puck dropped. Gloves flew. The two took turns swinging right fists, rhythmically, like lumberjacks working a two-man saw. A few punches connected. Godard jabbed Derek with a left fist full of Derek’s jersey, knocking Derek’s helmet to the ice. The chorus of the crowd lowered an octave, from a collective ahhh to an ohhh. A hard right hand to Godard’s face loosened his helmet, and the response of the crowd rose in anticipation again.

  Derek hit Godard with another hard right, then pulled the back of Godard’s jersey up over his head. Another punch sent Godard to the ice. As officials converged, Derek dropped to his knees to get an angle to throw a couple of low uppercuts—emphatic, spiteful punctuation to the end of the brawl.

  “That’s un-Boogaard-like, but he does get a couple of extra ones in there,” the Wild’s television broadcaster said.

  Derek skated away with blood on his lip and a scrape on his cheek, road rash from the rough cut of his own jersey being rubbed into his face.

  “It wasn’t from his fists,” Derek explained to reporters later.

  The season continued in fits and fights. Derek sat out four games in March because of lower-back pain. But he was on the ice again on March 22 against St. Louis, ready to fight D. J. King.

  The two had much in common. King was 26, a native of tiny Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, part of a First Nations tribe. He and Derek had crossed paths years earlier, in the Western Hockey League, but never fought. King was not a big fighter then, but he showed an affinity for it, and certainly had the size for it, at six foot four and 230 pounds. Coaches steered him toward a role as a brutish enforcer, and King was willing to do it, seeing it as his only chance to reach the NHL. He was drafted by St. Louis in the sixth round of the 2002 draft. Like Derek, he graduated from the WHL and built his skills and reputation in the East Coast Hockey League and the American Hockey League.

  He had been promoted to the Blues, and already had beaten up a string of respected enforcers: Shawn Thornton, Scott Parker, and Darcy Hordichuk. Now, midway through the third period of an easy Wild victory, it was time to face the Boogeyman.

  It was no contest. Starting in front of the St. Louis bench, Derek pounded King with a battery of right hands. The two got tangled tightly, which was King’s strategy, before Derek escaped enough to unfurl two overhand fists to the back of King’s head. With King’s face ducked, Derek crushed him in the jaw with an uppercut, then swung wide with his right hand for a series of blows to King’s ribs, below the armpit.

  It was as if Derek wanted to display his full arsenal. For 60 seconds, Derek battered King, but could not knock him out. He threw about 30 punches and landed half of them, some squarely.

  “It’s time to go down, son,” a television announcer said.

  Finally, like boxing referees stepping in to save a fighter and declare a technical knockout, the officials barged in during a lull.

  King had proved his fearlessness. He would get more chances at Derek.

  Derek had proved that he was, in just his second season, an enforcer to be measured against.

  THE PINNACLE CAME on the night of Tuesday, April 17, 2007. It was Game 4 of a first-round playoff series with the Anaheim Ducks, and Derek’s last name—Boo-guard, not Bow-guard—echoed through the Xcel Energy Center.

  He was on the bench. Minnesota was on its way to a victory, the game paused as officials sorted through a series of rough hits and cheap shots. Derek stood against the wall, jabbering through a straight face at the Ducks players. Fans grew louder and louder. Lemaire gave Derek the signal to get on the ice.

  Derek stepped over the boards and glided effortlessly in a graceful arc, as if propelled by the deafening cheers that engulfed him. He kept his kind, sad eyes on the Ducks bench. He smirked. He shrugged. There was no fight. But the message had been sent.

  The Ducks had 71 fighting majors that season, 20 more than any other team. When one brawler went down—as Fedoruk had, to Derek’s right fist, in October—the Ducks merely reloaded. At the time they traded away a broken Fedoruk, they received six-foot, five-inch George Parros, as if to specifically counter Derek.

  Before the series began, the Ducks bragged of having six players willing to drop the gloves. They were a modern vision of the Broad Street Bullies, finding success in planting intimidators across the roster.

  The Wild really had just one fighter. The team accrued only 14 fighting majors during the season, of which Derek was responsible for 10. And one of the storylines before the series was which side had the better philosophy toward intimidation.

  In Game 1, in Anaheim, Derek took the ice for the first time and barreled over Anaheim’s Corey Perry within seconds. He was penalized for charging. The Wild lost by a goal. In Game 2, Derek compiled 14 penalty minutes, none of them for fighting. The Wild lost by a goal again.

  Game 3 was in Saint Paul. Derek had the flu, and team doctors fed him intravenously with two liters of prescription fluids and electrolytes. Lemaire scratched Derek from the lineup and tried to replace him with scoring punch to spark the Wild’s meager power-play unit. The Wild lost by a goal for the third game in a row.

  There was nothing to lose in Game 4. Derek was back in the lineup. It was his assist, on a pass to Pierre-Marc Bouchard, that helped tie the game in the second period.

  That turned the game. The Wild scored three times in about eight minutes of the third period to secure its first playoff victory in four years. The contest then devolved into one of bombastic surliness, the Ducks bent on avenging the loss by leaving the Wild bruised and battered. Derek was saddled on the benc
h for most of it, including a fight between Minnesota’s Brent Burns and Anaheim’s Perry. Another fight steered most of the players into duels. That was when Anaheim’s Brad May approached Minnesota’s Kim Johnsson. He gave Johnsson a shove and hit him in the face. Johnsson dropped to the ice with a concussion.

  Derek, an attack dog on a leash, was unable to rush to the defense of his falling teammates. Many of them adored Derek. About half a dozen of them had played alongside Derek back in Houston, when they had five-figure salaries and drank Bud Lights in sports bars and $700-a-month apartments. They respected how hard he had worked to reach the NHL and were thankful for his willingness to defend them through fighting, a job they could not imagine for themselves. They appreciated Derek’s humility, his eagerness to help young players, his penchant for handling media and public-appearance requests. There was nothing Derek would not do for them. Yet here he was, caged in the bench, unable to get out.

  The chant began.

  Boo-gaard, Boo-gaard, Boo-gaard, Boo-gaard . . .

  It grew louder, like something heard over the horizon that slowly moves closer, a wave that rises in the distance and builds as it approaches the shore.

  Derek looked back. Lemaire nodded. Derek, needing no further assurance, slid effortlessly over the half-boards and onto the ice. Never had Derek soaked in such adulation. People loved him not for what he did, but for who he was.

  In the off-season, he signed a three-year contract worth $2.63 million. His $750,000 salary the next season ranked Derek among the highest-paid enforcers in the NHL, trailing only the likes of established bruisers like Laraque ($1.3 million) and Donald Brashear ($1.1 million).

  But it did not place him among the top 500 highest-paid NHL players. Nineteen of Derek’s own teammates made more.

  THE IDEA FOR the “Boogaard Fighting Camp” for children wasn’t really Derek’s, but he was the one to answer for it.

  Todd Ripplinger, the Regina Pats scout who had discovered Derek in the old Main Arena in Melfort a decade earlier and helped rekindle his love for the game after he quit during junior, was a partner in an indoor rink and training center in Regina. The place hosted a constant stream of camps, filled with children learning the skills of hockey—skating, shooting, goaltending. Two of Derek’s Minnesota teammates, goalie Josh Harding and defenseman Nick Schultz, ran youth summer camps at the center.