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

  Another excursion had just begun, up an incline, with Derek at the rear. The peloton came to a stop when the riders heard a crash behind them. Derek stood about 50 feet back, holding the frame of his bike in one hand and the crank in the other. His strong legs had snapped the pedal assembly off. The bike-shop owner had never seen it happen before.

  “I don’t know about this biking thing,” Derek said through his crooked grin.

  Something about Derek told you not to worry for him. He’d take care of you, not the other way around. He was the guy you went to when you needed help. To O’Brien, Derek had that persona, the kind that deflected attention: I’m fine; let’s talk about you.

  O’Brien’s third son was born with Down syndrome, a shock discovered in the delivery room. Derek arrived at his next appointment and asked how everything went. O’Brien could barely speak.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Derek said, his smile a burst of reinforcement. “It’s going to be fine.” O’Brien never forgot.

  What amazed O’Brien most about Derek was not his body, but his personality. He brought a powerful calm to situations—an ability to soothe people and assure them that everything would be okay in the end.

  O’Brien knew some of the owners of the Twins, and they invited him to bring Derek to a game on a Monday night. Just as O’Brien arrived at Derek’s apartment, his wife called in a state of panic. Their three-year-old had fallen in the driveway and knocked his two front teeth out.

  O’Brien explained to Derek what happened. He had to rush back home.

  “Bring him over here,” Derek said calmly.

  He pushed a few buttons on his cell phone and spoke to a team dentist for the Wild.

  “He’ll see you,” Derek told O’Brien.

  O’Brien’s wife arrived with the boy in the back seat, his face covered in blood, his teeth gone. Derek stuck his head in to talk to him.

  “Hey, buddy, how you doing?” he said to the boy. “I heard you knocked your teeth out.”

  The boy nodded and stopped crying.

  “I’ve lost so many teeth in hockey from getting punched,” Derek said. “I just lost a tooth today eating a sandwich, and went to the dentist and he put it back in. You’re going to be fine. I’m going to send you to this dentist who works on me, who puts my teeth back in.”

  BUT SOMETHING WAS changing with Derek, and the Wild coaches noticed. To those on the outside, Derek was still a good quote, a jovial presence at his corner stall in the dressing room, a team leader by virtue of his tenure and standing among those at his position. Increasingly, he supported the fledgling charity work of Defending the Blue Line, a Minnesota-based organization aimed at getting the children of military members involved in hockey. “Boogaard’s Boogaardians” raised money to send children to hockey camps.

  Defending the Blue Line’s founder, Shane Hudella, a first sergeant with the Minnesota Army National Guard, found Derek to be unlike most stars he met—a guy who just as easily could have been a best friend working at the factory. Derek, beyond autograph sessions and meet-and-greets with the military, sometimes spent days with the National Guard, donning fatigues and shooting weapons. He told Hudella that someday, after he retired and took care of his family financially, he might join the military.

  Derek’s reputation as the everyman, underdog overachiever was intact. But things were different at the rink. Teammates and coaches saw a darker Derek emerge. Sometimes it took someone who had not seen Derek regularly to notice it.

  Matt Shaw had been the assistant coach in Houston when Derek played two years there in the minor leagues. He watched Derek run the hills outside the rink, spend an extra 30 minutes on the ice after practice, and always come back asking for more. Shaw watched Derek’s first two seasons with the Wild from a distance, proud that he and Aeros head coach Todd McLellan had helped mold Derek into something they initially did not think he could become: an NHL player.

  Shaw was promoted in 2007 to become an assistant for the Wild. He was surprised to learn that Derek had grown into a source of frustration for other Wild coaches.

  Derek was frustrated, too. Fewer of the league’s other enforcers wanted to engage Derek, so his number of fights declined. He thought he could be trusted to play an expanding role. But his average time on the ice fell from 5:23 in his rookie season to 3:56 in in his third year. He thought he had shown enough to deserve more respect.

  Shaw saw that Derek was sulking.

  “What’s up?” Shaw asked Derek one day. “What’s up with you? Where’s the Derek that I know?”

  Derek would not look Shaw in the eye. Guilt? Shame? Shaw could not tell. He just knew that the player he once trusted to work harder than anyone else on the team was not there anymore. Derek was no longer the first one on the ice and the last to leave. He was still relaxed away from the rink, still threw playful barbs from his corner of the dressing room. But something was gone. It was hard to pinpoint it. Derek was just . . . distant. He would sleep for 12 hours in hotels on the road. He fell asleep in the middle of card games on the airplane. Teammates looked at one another, smiled, and shook their heads.

  The dressing room was an insular place, a clubhouse for players. Coaches tended to pass without stopping and team executives rarely entered. Their primary link to players—their moods, their attitudes, their concerns—resided in a web of people like team trainers and equipment managers, unsung grunts in the background of every organization that kept the day-to-day operations moving.

  That is how coaches or executives would learn that one player arrived in the mornings smelling of alcohol, or another was having trouble at home, or another was not working hard to rehabilitate an injury, or another was poisoning the positive attitude inside the dressing room.

  Wild management had not heard bad things about Derek. But something had started percolating in the back of Tom Lynn’s mind. The assistant general manager, a former Yale hockey player, and part of the Wild’s original staff, Lynn began to note an unspoken trend around the league. While evidence was anecdotal, enforcers were more likely to have personal problems, he thought. Lynn saw it mostly from afar, through roster moves and whispers, but the tallies of names could not be ignored. Something about that role, it seemed, made players more susceptible to problems like addiction to alcohol and drugs.

  Maybe it was the role itself—the pressure of the job, the eternal spot at the bottom of the roster, the pain hidden behind a facade of fearlessness. Or maybe the role attracted a certain devil-may-care personality, young men from rough backgrounds who were more susceptible to personal problems whether they fought or not.

  Lynn had not connected it to Derek, who seemed to be different than other enforcers in so many ways—quiet, a kid with an admirable work ethic and from a good family. But then Lynn started hearing things from the dressing room. Derek was taking Ambien, and not just the usual amounts. Most players used it as a short-term solution to sleeping problems caused by rugged travel schedules or discomforting injuries, but Derek was constantly asking for it.

  THE WILD WAS desperate to keep Derek on the ice, but injuries made it increasingly difficult. In December 2008, before a game in Calgary, doctors administered an injection of Toradol into Derek’s sore right shoulder.

  Toradol, the brand name for ketorolac, was a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory used to treat acute pain over no more than a few days. It is what athletes of all kinds sometimes received as a last resort to mask severe pain in places and joints like the knee, ankle, elbow, and shoulder.

  Such an injection came with heroic undertones. For decades, athletes gamely took last-minute, painful shots to get them on the field, the court, or the ice, and myths had been built around such acts of brave desperation. Basketball player Willis Reed of the New York Knicks cemented his legacy by making a surprise start in Game 7 of the 1970 National Basketball Association Finals, a selfless return credited to his ability to withstand a huge needle filled with painkillers.

  But Toradol, a blood thinner, could inc
rease the risk of life-threatening heart conditions or circulation problems, and it could cause serious stomach and intestinal bleeding. One warning was to never use Toradol if the patient suffered from any sort of closed-head injury or bleeding on the brain—something such as a concussion. In 2011, a group of former National Football League players sued the league for its widespread use of Toradol, saying that its dangers had never been fully explained to players and arguing that the masking of pain—including symptoms of a concussion—was dangerous. By 2013, most teams in Major League Baseball had stopped using it. Several European countries had banned its use entirely.

  For Derek, the shot on December 29, 2008, was the first of at least 13 such game-day Toradol injections over two seasons, records showed, several from doctors of other teams while the Wild was on the road. Many of the injections to his shoulder came on nights when Derek expected to fight.

  He took the first shot before the game in Calgary, after missing Minnesota’s previous game, because he had had a fight with the Flames the last time. The second Toradol injection came two nights later, when the Wild hosted the San Jose Sharks on New Year’s Eve. Derek and Jody Shelley had fought four times before, and it was early in the second period that they ran into each other again. After a big check by Shelley—a man from Manitoba who was six years older than Derek and measured a beefy six feet, three inches and 230 pounds—he chased Derek from behind, soon getting Derek’s attention. The gloves were off. The fans were up. Derek pounded Shelley quickly. His right fist shattered Shelley’s helmet, and a piece of it flew through the air clearly enough for television cameras to capture and replay.

  Four days later, at practice, Derek was “blind-sided by a teammate along the boards and hit the right side of his head against the glass,” a team medical report read. “Derek felt momentarily dazed,” had “some fogginess to the right field of vision.” The symptoms persisted. Derek missed five games with an apparent concussion. Publicly, the team reported that Derek was out with an “upper body” injury.

  Derek’s season ended early, 10 games short of the scheduled 82-game conclusion. Derek finished with three assists in 51 games. He had nine fights, only two more than teammate Craig Weller. Rookie Cal Clutterbuck stepped in for several fights, too, and the Wild signed six-foot, eight-inch defenseman John Scott during the season to help fill the void created by Derek’s injuries. Derek’s importance to the team was slipping.

  The Wild finished two points out of the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference. After the last game, coach Jacques Lemaire resigned. Within days, Doug Risebrough was fired as general manager. The two men most responsible for building Derek’s NHL success were gone.

  DEREK AND ERIN were engaged, but it felt more like the end than a beginning.

  When they first met, it did not take Erin long to see past the brutality and folklore of Derek’s public persona. She met him at a club, and soon watched him crush the face of Todd Fedoruk. Boogey was a folk hero, the opposite of Derek. Derek was shy and patient, rarely angry. He was a go-with-the-flow type, aiming to please. He worried about everyone else’s comfort and happiness. He wanted to be liked.

  And he was deeply in love with Erin.

  He bought her expensive gifts. He gave her a car and helped pay for her courses at a Minneapolis art institute. He was protective of Erin, proud to call her his girlfriend, still surprised that someone so beautiful would want to be with him. He liked that other men left her alone, knowing that she was the girlfriend of the Boogeyman. He liked to have someone who depended on him.

  She loved that it made him so happy to see others so happy.

  “He was like a puppy dog,” Erin said. “You didn’t have to say anything. You just had to be there. You had to be next to him. Sometimes he preferred that you didn’t say anything. He was a very quiet person. He just wanted somebody to be with him.”

  She worried about him getting hurt, but Derek seemed to injure others more than he got hurt himself. Erin did not follow the NHL closely, and Derek would not tell her when the Wild played a team with an enforcer that he expected to fight. He did not want her to worry.

  Their relationship took a course much like Derek’s four-year relationship with Janella. Derek and Erin spent quiet hours wandering shopping malls and eating at restaurants. They dreamed about places to live and went to open houses. They, too, shopped for a dog—and bought one, only to find that their high-end apartment building would not allow it.

  And as with Janella, Derek’s relationship with Erin unraveled over bouts about money, fears of distrust, and the fact that Derek, especially, seemed to become something different than what he was.

  Erin recognized the toll on Derek’s body, especially his lower back. Derek declined suggestions for surgery, partly because his father had had back surgery, and it had only seemed to make things worse. Len was eventually relegated to desk work, unable to continue as a beat cop in Regina, and ultimately transferred to the RCMP’s headquarters in Ottawa.

  But Erin, over a couple of years, began worrying less about Derek’s physical injuries and more about his mind. Derek began to repeat himself. He would tell a story, and soon tell it over again. His sentences occasionally came out muddled. His memory slipped. Erin noticed. Concussions, she thought, collecting those episodes in the back of her mind.

  Derek dismissed it all with a laugh.

  “Yeah, I got hit in the head too many times,” he joked.

  Their worlds never seemed to completely blend. Erin did not know the Boogaard family well, and the family was persistently and, in Derek’s view, unfairly skeptical about Erin. The Boogaards had never been sure about Janella, either, wondering if she was good for Derek’s hockey career. But they had respected that Janella’s relationship with Derek began when he was a poor, unknown teenager. Erin arrived just as his career bloomed with fame and wealth.

  Despite the completion of Derek’s customized condominium in Regina, intended for use in the summers, Derek spent less time there every off-season. Erin was not a fan of Regina and had little interest in being there. That did not endear her to Derek’s family.

  But Derek was there enough to create some memorable times, like when Aaron shot a rubber-tipped dart that struck Derek in the neck, leading Derek to shove Aaron through the drywall. There was a time that one of Derek’s high school friends from Regina came to a party and pulled out cocaine, and Derek kicked him out because he did not want drugs in his home.

  Summers were a time when Derek reconnected with family. He would box and train during the days, and occasionally play recreational hockey at a Regina rink. He would call his father and ask him to watch—watch the toughest guy in hockey, a well-known player in the NHL, play a couple of hours of rec-league pickup games without any fighting. Len did.

  But the pull toward Minneapolis was an ever-stronger one. Derek, now in his mid-20s, had less contact with his mother and father and his siblings. Ryan was a young RCMP member, assigned to far-flung posts in Saskatchewan the way his father had been a generation before. Aaron was a professional hockey player, playing in Pennsylvania in the American Hockey League. Krysten, at six feet, five inches, was a starting center for the University of Kansas women’s basketball team.

  Derek had grown closer to Curtis, the half-brother he did not know he had until he was 18. Curtis was 10 years older, worked as an operations manager for an oil-and-gas company, and lived in Lloydminster, Alberta, on the border with Saskatchewan. He came to Derek’s games when the Wild played in Edmonton and Calgary. Curtis and his wife were raising three children, and when the youngest was born, Derek rushed there and held the boy in his arms.

  But family was far away, and age had a way of widening the distance. The rest of the Boogaards increasingly worried about the strangers who, like meteors, drifted in and out of Derek’s orbit in Minnesota. Derek would call and mention another name that his parents had not heard before, and they worried about that person’s motivations and influence.

  They knew
Derek was in love with Erin. But they noted how she talked about Derek—she focused on what he bought, what they did together, where they planned to travel. Sensitive to how others treated Derek and what they expected from him, they worried that Erin did not love Derek for who he was, but for what he did for her.

  The family’s concerns about Erin only drew Derek closer to her. After Derek and Erin had been dating for about two years, Derek made a call to Mike Tobin, his former billet father in Prince George, asking about wedding rings. Tobin, owner of a jewelry store, was surprised at the size and extravagance Derek considered—custom designs, two-karat diamonds. He remembered Derek as the jeans-and-T-shirt teenager who never had more than few dollars in his pocket.

  Derek and Erin went to a Minnesota jewelry store and designed a ring. It cost about $55,000, according to the Boogaard family. Derek and Erin were informally engaged for months, until the ring was ready in the spring. When it arrived, Erin took pictures of it on her finger from several different angles and e-mailed them to friends and family. “We’re engaged!” she wrote.

  By then, Erin admitted later, she had reservations about getting married at all.

  BETWEEN THE END-OF-SEASON departures of Lemaire and Risebrough, Derek had nose surgery to repair the airways that had been crushed from blows to the face. He was prescribed 40 pills of oxycodone by the oral surgeon.

  A week later, on April 21, Derek had surgery to repair the labrum of his right shoulder. It was the day of a farewell press conference for Risebrough, held at a sports bar called Tom Reid’s Hockey City Pub, two blocks from Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul.

  “In a touching scene,” the StarTribune reported, “Derek Boogaard, in pain after being discharged from shoulder surgery Tuesday, was driven to Tom Reid’s by his fiancée, Erin Russell, because he wanted to thank Risebrough.”

  Derek arrived just as the press conference ended. With his right arm hanging from the passenger window, he asked someone to tell Risebrough that he was outside. Risebrough came out. Derek thanked him.