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

  “He was kind of in and out of the lineup that year,” Fedoruk said. “That’s when he needed these things, the pills, the painkillers and stuff. I knew he needed them because I was roommates with him.”

  Derek asked Fedoruk about some of the drugs he was taking, too, including oxycodone.

  “They really work,” Derek said. “Are you taking them because you need them, or because you like them?”

  Fedoruk saw trouble brewing. It was so familiar. He had seen it with other hockey players, and known about it with other enforcers. Fedoruk had lived it. He, too, had been in the throes of addiction, first with alcohol, then with pills, keeping it all secret and exploring his own counseling off and on for years. The worst bout was ahead of him.

  Now his teammate, his friend, was asking for advice.

  “It was kind of a sick, unhealthy relationship,” Fedoruk said later. “I was up front with him about my issues. I was in rehab and all this stuff and he knew it. I was trying to balance how I could hold on to the addiction part of it, live that style of life, be a dad at home and be a hockey player. I was trying to balance it all when, really, the booze and drugs had priority over everything at that time.”

  The hotel room they shared was a virtual pharmacy, both men holding prescription bottles filled with pills to allow them to play, and to fight, and to feel good during all the slow, dull, difficult hours in between. Some were on the bathroom counter, others hidden from view in their bags. Part of an enforcer’s code was to keep your problems to yourself.

  “I know you’ve got pain,” Fedoruk told Derek, “but be careful.”

  Derek, a young apprentice, was an earnest listener. To him, the pills were something to help him do his job, a tool handed him with the tacit approval of his employers, under the direction of team doctors who had his best interests in mind. Hockey players often had pills. Enforcers, Derek was learning, probably needed that kind of help most of all. It was normal.

  Derek loved Fedoruk’s company. He thought Fedoruk was hilarious, and Fedoruk liked to hear Derek’s low-octave heh-heh-heh chortle. Over plates of room service, the television on, each splayed on a bed, they traded stories about home and hockey.

  There were times that season when it was simply too hard for Derek to move his giant frame without feeling stabbing pain in his back or hips or shoulder. In the privacy of the hotel room, far from the arena lights and the outside world’s expectations of fearlessness, Derek needed help.

  “Todd,” Derek asked, “can you put a couple of pillows under my feet?”

  7

  THE FIGHT DID NOT seem different than all the others, except that Derek lost, which was unusual, and he lost a tooth, which no one really saw. Only in hindsight did any of it seem significant.

  It was October 16, 2008, an early-season road game against the Florida Panthers. The Wild won, 6–2, and Derek recorded an assist. It was his first point of any kind—goal or assist—since the playoff game against the Anaheim Ducks two seasons earlier.

  The fight Derek lost was against Wade Belak, an affable defenseman with a shock of red hair. Belak was born in Saskatoon, just like Derek, and grew up mostly in Battleford, Saskatchewan, not far from Melfort. As a teen, Belak played in the Western Hockey League for the Saskatoon Blades, whose general manager was Daryl Lubiniecki, later the Prince George executive who traded for 17-year-old Derek. Belak was a first-round NHL draft choice in 1994. Like Derek, he had a younger brother, Graham, drafted into the NHL, in the optimistic hope that the family name and a willingness to fight would carry him into the league and to similar stardom.

  By the time that Derek and Belak fought in South Florida in Minnesota’s third game of the season, the six-foot, five-inch, 225-pound Belak was 32, an improbable age for someone making a living as an enforcer. But teams viewed him as a solid defenseman with a willingness to throw punches with the heavyweights of the league. He could play decent minutes, fight when necessary, and keep the team loose. Belak seemed to enjoy his role. Others in the fighting fraternity liked Belak and respected him, Derek included.

  Belak clutched Derek’s jersey near the bottom, while Derek grabbed Belak’s near the collar. The players yanked themselves into a slow-motion spin, throwing spot-on punches with their free hands while trying to keep their balance. Like a campfire that smolders before suddenly crackling with flames again, the fight slowed several times before another punch reignited it.

  Each man took fists to the face, many times. Along the way, one of the punches knocked a false tooth out of Derek’s mouth. He never winced, not even as the officials slid between the exhausted fighters and nudged them toward the penalty boxes.

  A team doctor for the Florida Panthers examined Derek and noted that the post of the false tooth hung in his mouth by a piece of skin. He removed the hardware and recommended a visit to the Wild’s team dentist when the team returned to Minnesota.

  Derek in the penalty box after a fight for the Wild.

  The injury did not prevent Derek from playing the rest of the game. His assist came in the second period.

  The Wild played two nights later in Tampa, and Derek again played his usual number of shifts and minutes. On October 20, back in Minnesota, Derek was given a prescription for 15 hydrocodone pills from Wild team dentist Kyle Edlund, pharmacy records showed. It was just a start. Over 33 days, Derek received at least 195 hydrocodone pills from six NHL team doctors, according to medical reports and prescription records later collected by Len Boogaard. The records, and others collected, did not say how often Derek was to take the pills, or how many to consume each time. But it was a far greater quantity of prescription painkillers than Derek had been prescribed in his first three seasons combined.

  Five of the doctors were affiliated with the Wild. The sixth was a team doctor for the San Jose Sharks, Arthur Ting, who prescribed 40 hydrocodone pills for Derek when the Wild arrived two days before playing a game in California. While it was not unusual for team doctors to treat opposing players, since not all teams traveled with team doctors of their own, Ting, a former doctor for baseball player Barry Bonds, was under probation from the Medical Board of California, which said that he “prescribed dangerous drugs and controlled substances to friends and acquaintances, particularly athletes, for whom he kept no medical records or for whom the medical records were fictitious, inadequate, or inaccurate,” according to the Associated Press.

  A second spurt of prescription pills came in December. Sheldon Burns, the Wild’s medical director, and Dan Peterson, a Wild team doctor who shared a practice with Burns, prescribed 110 more hydrocodone pills to Derek over 27 days, the last on New Year’s Day, usually with no notation in Derek’s medical file to explain the reason, according to records. Amid those prescriptions for painkillers, Peterson also prescribed 30 pills of Ambien, the sleeping drug.

  That flurry of prescription pills began with one punch from Belak, who was on his way to becoming undone by demons of his own. On this night, though, it was just another hockey fight, barely noted.

  WHEN DEREK STEPPED into Sneaky Pete’s, familiar faces looked up to him and smiled. The bar’s owners and bartenders gave him high fives and shoulder pats. Everyone knew Derek. Like the character of Norm in Cheers, the owner said.

  When things got too crowded, or Derek just wanted to escape, he slid behind the bar, where a Derek Boogaard bobblehead doll was prominently displayed on a shelf. A stuffed bison head that Derek bought hung from a wall.

  Sneaky Pete’s opened in 2007 on North Fifth Street, on the northwestern edge of downtown Minneapolis, part of the Warehouse District that was quickly becoming a gentrified center of bars and nightclubs. A light-rail station was outside Sneaky Pete’s darkened-glass front wall. The new baseball stadium for the Minnesota Twins, Target Field, was just a block away, out the door to the right. The popular pedestrian-only Nicollet Mall was a couple of blocks the other direction.

  Sneaky Pete’s was operated by a couple of brothers of the Hafiz family, which also owned several ot
her bars in the area, including a couple of adult clubs featuring topless dancers. Derek became friends with Stewart Hafiz, who managed the place. He also became friends with Dillon Hafiz, Stewart’s son, several years younger than Derek, who sometimes supervised and worked the bar.

  During the day, Sneaky Pete’s was a typical sports bar and restaurant, with tall tables in the front and booths in the back. A long, snaking bar curled along the left side in the back half of the room, and televisions flickered from all corners. The men’s room had two-way mirrors looking toward the bar, so that people at the urinals could voyeuristically scan the crowd.

  At night, especially on weekends, Sneaky Pete’s took on the feel of a nightclub. Bouncers stood outside, keeping people waiting behind velvet ropes. A throbbing beat escaped through the walls and open door. Tables were stashed away to create a large dance floor. Brass poles were bolted to the ceiling and floor for women to climb and contort themselves. Dancing atop the bar was encouraged. Attractive women were stationed behind large troughs, offering ice-cold beers. Others female workers roamed the crowd, enticing patrons with sweet-flavored shots.

  Downstairs was darker and mellower. With a straight bar hugging the entire right side, it had the feel of a speakeasy.

  In 2010, the StarTribune called Sneaky Pete’s “downtown’s most popular party bar.” Maxim magazine made a habit of declaring it one of America’s top sports bars.

  There were stretches when Derek was at Sneaky Pete’s several nights a week, especially in the off-season. He was easily recognized. Sports fans knew who he was because of his stature in the Twin Cities. Everyone else assumed he was an athlete because of his size. They called him “Boogey,” or the “Boogeyman,” and sometimes an impromptu chant of his nickname broke through the din.

  Derek smiled sheepishly and agreed to every autograph request. He stood for photographs, often with young men, everyone raising their fists like prizefighters at a weigh-in. Derek was embarrassed by the attention, but he soaked it in, too. He managed to be both approachable and awe-inspiring. Friends constantly tugged him away from conversations because Derek was not good at walking away.

  He often sat at a table in the back, his back to the wall, where he could see people approaching and where friends could provide a buffer when he wanted one. He sipped on Bud Light.

  Derek tried to drag teammates to Sneaky Pete’s, but most had more private lives, or they lived closer to the team’s headquarters in Saint Paul, or they were married with children and did not frequent the bars. Derek insisted one spring that the Wild hold an end-of-season party at Sneaky Pete’s, and so the team did, renting out the lower level.

  But most of the time, Derek went to Sneaky Pete’s by himself or with some his non-hockey friends. As in high school, Derek found himself a magnet to people who were not hockey players. One of his best friends was Tobin Wright. Eight years older than Derek, he worked in hockey operations for the Wild at the time that Derek was drafted. Wright left the club during the lockout and became a certified player agent, aligning himself with Ron Salcer, a veteran Los Angeles–based agent whose Minnesota clients included Derek, star forward Marian Gaborik, and defenseman Brent Burns.

  Wright was a sort of business manager for Derek and the others, organizing their public appearances and handling whatever daily headaches they encountered. Wright’s relationship with Derek spanned many years and places. He knew Janella from Derek’s days in the minor leagues. He was with Derek the night he met Erin.

  In the summer of 2007, Wright introduced Derek to Jeremy Clark, who soon became Derek’s closest friend in Minnesota. Clark, a taut and tightly wound former mixed-martial-arts fighter, raised in a small town in northern Ontario, owned a gym called Top Team. It began in a cramped end of an industrial building hidden off a small road in suburban Eagan, but Clark slowly took over the space next door, and the space next to that, creating a maze of rooms filled with mats and heavy bags and gym equipment. One room had a full-size boxing ring.

  Clark slowly found a niche training hockey players. Eventually, entire teams were sent to be trained by Clark, and Clark was being summoned across the country to train teams, including some in the NHL. Derek was his most famous client.

  “I get to train this monster,” Clark thought to himself when they met. Derek could lift enormous kettle bells that Clark could barely budge, and stretch rubber strength bands twice as far as anyone else. The first time he stepped into the boxing ring with Derek, Clark was scared. He moved like a moth, trying to avoid Derek’s fists. Derek had a switch, and Clark saw it flip a few times while boxing, usually when Derek’s brother Aaron hit him in the nose. Clark came to recognize it when he watched Derek fight in the NHL. Saying that Derek snapped implied that he lost all control. It was a switch, and Derek knew when to throw it.

  Derek liked the art of the fight, and he liked studying and practicing technique, but Clark could see how the teeter-totter of emotions could get to a man. Not knowing when the fight would come, but knowing that it always did, and that it might be the last, and that it had to be done within the boundaries of written rules and an unwritten code, and that the long stretches of time between the fights were a blend of private worry and tedious training, hidden behind a veneer of invincibility and the persistence of public graciousness—well, there might be nothing like that in sports.

  “You think of getting in an argument with a driver on the road, or you have a confrontation with somebody, and you’re all riled up and you think about the confrontation for the next two days,” Clark said three years after he met Derek. “It eats at you. ‘I shoulda, I coulda, if he would have just stepped forward I woulda . . . ,’ and you boil it over in your head. And you’ve got to think these guys got to do that. And they’ve got to get themselves to the point where it’s man on man, full out, and then they’ve got to shut that off and come and talk to the press and be part of the team and take pictures with kids and handshake and go home to a girlfriend, wife, kids, whatever the case is. And then, the next night, bring that emotion back up and be the toughest guy in the league and the one that wants to eat somebody alive. And then repeat 80 games a season.”

  There’s a toll, Clark thought. There has to be. He never could quite pull it out of Derek. But he knew it was there.

  Aaron had come to spend the summers in Minneapolis with Derek, sharing an apartment between his seasons as a minor-league hockey player, trying to reach the NHL. Clark took to calling Aaron “Nick,” like his family members did. They fell into the lazy rhythm of summer. Summer, not hockey season, was Derek’s favorite time of year.

  For a Brooks and Dunn country music concert at Xcel Energy Center, the three men spent a day shopping for matching shirts, hats, Wrangler jeans, and belt buckles. They arrived looking a bit like backup singers at a Western chuck-wagon show, with a hint of Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short in Three Amigos.

  Derek and Aaron became fixtures at Clark’s house, and good friends with Clark’s wife, Jennie. Derek sat on the back deck, chatting away as Clark worked in the yard. He was, in many ways, like the neighbor kid who just hung around, looking for company. When Clark had training assignments for a team in Russia for a couple of weeks in the summer, Derek went with him. He was always up for an adventure.

  More than anyplace, though, Clark’s gym became Derek’s second home. Derek’s pictures soon adorned the walls. Clark eventually converted a loft space into a small apartment for Derek, with a refrigerator and a shower, a couch, and a bed, a place where Derek could nap during the day or sleep overnight.

  In the warehouse-like room with the boxing ring, giant dock doors rolled up to allow daylight and fresh air to enter. Between training sessions, the men sat on folding chairs, chewing sunflower seeds and talking, sometimes through the afternoon and into the dusk.

  They climbed to the roof, using a ladder on a chair to pull themselves onto the fire escape. The view stretched over the trees and marshes of the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge, south of
the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. The downtown skylines of the Twin Cities gleamed in the distance. Clark and Derek turned on music, usually country music, and talked until deep into the night, often about growing up.

  “If Boogey could have come off the ice and hit a switch, and become 5-10 and 185 pounds and a normal guy, he would have,” Clark said. “In a heartbeat. In a heartbeat.”

  DEREK’S THIGHS. Pat O’Brien had never seen anything like them. When Derek sat down in a chair, his thighs arced upward, as if he were smuggling a ham in each pant leg.

  O’Brien, a Minneapolis chiropractor, had worked on hundreds of athletes, many of them NHL players. In some ways, Derek had a prototypical build, with thick legs and a broad backside. But he also had abnormally huge hands. His arms were not rounded with bulging muscles, like those of a compact bodybuilder. They were long, like massive pistons. If he ever punched me, he’d kill me, O’Brien thought.

  Derek, persistently bothered by a back that might need surgery, first came to O’Brien at the recommendation of Gaborik. For a couple of years, O’Brien saw Derek at his office several times a week, using his hands-on, non-surgical remedies to keep his body in working order—massage, acupuncture, whatever made Derek feel better. He worked on his jaw, his neck, his shoulders, back, and wrists. He saw the hands, scarred by cuts and teeth marks.

  The two became friends. Derek called from the grocery store, reading a label and wondering if it was something he could eat. He worried about what he put into his body.

  Derek became an avid cyclist during the summers, strengthening those thighs with long rides along the bluffs of the Mississippi River with O’Brien, Aaron, and several others. Derek’s size made him look a bit like a clown atop a tiny bike. He would fall behind the group as it climbed hills, then fearlessly whiz past on the way back down, pulled by gravity and his own weight. O’Brien and others marveled at how his thin-wheeled bike held him up. One morning, after a long ride, they found that it barely did. The rims on the wheels of Derek’s new bike were bent out of round.