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

  “That was a dandy!” the announcer said, and his broadcast partner laughed.

  Fans cheered. Teammates on both benches watched the replay on the overhead scoreboard and banged their sticks against the outside of the half-boards fronting their benches. Rink workers arrived to repair the gouges in the ice and use shavings to cover the blood. At HockeyFights.com, fans were soon evenly split in declaring a winner.

  King went to the penalty box. A tiny remote camera in front of him, used for the television broadcast, showed him gingerly wrapping a towel around his bloodied knuckles. Scar tissue had torn off in chunks.

  Derek walked with his head down to the locker room, the roar within the Xcel Energy Center echoing behind him.

  It was his last fight for the Minnesota Wild.

  THE WILD MADE a meager attempt to re-sign Derek when his contract expired at the end of the season. Even before that, quietly in March, the team nearly completed a trade for Derek, sending him to Tampa Bay for league-fighting leader Zenon Konopka. It fell through at the last minute.

  Among fans and media, there was wide-ranging discussion about Derek’s value. His importance to the team was intangible and difficult to measure. On one hand, he was enormously popular, a good representative in the community, a respected voice in the dressing room. The stands at the Xcel Energy Center were filled with fans, young and old, wearing his No. 24 jersey. No player could make fans cheer the way the Boogeyman could. While he rarely scored, his presence probably made it easier for others to negotiate the ice. Derek would command a million-dollar-per-year contract, a lot for an enforcer, but his salary would pale compared to those of most teammates. Besides, he would be just 28 the next season. He probably had several years left in him.

  The counterargument was just as strong. Derek had averaged only 51 regular-season games, out of 82, in his five years in Minnesota. Injuries, from his sore back to his surgically repaired shoulder to the mounting number of concussions, were taking a slow toll. Even when healthy enough to play, Derek averaged little more than five minutes of ice time. In his Wild career, over 255 regular-season games, he had two goals and 12 assists. He had not scored a goal since his rookie year.

  He had 544 penalty minutes, about half stemming from five-minute fighting majors. But those were not the types of numbers associated with the nastiest players. Derek, playing more minutes than he ever had in the NHL, fought just nine times during the 2009–10 season—far fewer than Konopka’s 33 fights for Tampa Bay.

  Derek’s reputation as one of the fiercest fighters, so quickly established in his first two seasons, prevented him from attracting many fights. And more teams padded their rosters with pugnacious, midsized players, the type who could play on second and third lines but were willing to fight when needed. Rather than a single enforcer, teams were finding value in an army of scrappers. In June, before free agency began on July 1, the Wild signed one such player, forward Brad Staubitz. Derek, increasingly, was a heavyweight fighter in an era of middleweights.

  Of course, those were just the key points of the public discourse. Internally, the Wild knew all about Derek—the drug addiction, the attitude shift, the injuries that were never publicly noted. The team had no desire to re-sign him; not at the prices he would command. To guard against a public-relations hit, the team merely asked for a chance to match what other teams offered, knowing that other suitors would likely overpay for a damaged enforcer.

  They did. The New York Rangers offered a four-year contract worth $6.5 million. The Edmonton Oilers, a division rival of the Wild, offered four years and $7 million. The Washington Capitals and Calgary Flames, another Wild rival, were interested, too, and willing to come close to those sums.

  For Derek, the decision was between Edmonton and New York. There could not be two more different teams and two more different markets in the NHL.

  His family urged him to choose Edmonton. It was western Canada, and it was familiar. It was close to home—a day’s drive from Regina, close enough that his mother and relatives and friends could attend games semi-regularly. His half-brother, Curtis, lived in Alberta. Any of them could be there to help Derek through whatever personal problems he faced.

  Edmonton was one of the NHL’s smallest markets, they argued, but the Oilers were the No. 1 sports franchise, with a voracious fan base, a loud arena, and a history of Stanley Cups. It was Wayne Gretzky’s old team, one of the most successful in the league. Derek might enjoy being a proverbial big fish in the small pond of central Alberta. The Oilers and Wild were division rivals. Derek was familiar with the roster and the facilities. He would be able to return frequently to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, play in front of his fans and friends, and show the Wild what they gave up when they set him free.

  Ryan Boogaard, still Derek’s unofficial scout, saw it from the on-ice perspective. He thought the Oilers were a far better fit than the Rangers. He liked Edmonton’s core of young players. He told Derek that Oilers coach Tom Renney, recently arrived after several seasons with the Rangers, had shown a willingness to rely mostly on a single enforcer. And Renney was from British Columbia and coached junior in the Western Hockey League. Derek, with his lifelong clashes with authority figures, might like Renney’s relatively mild-mannered coaching approach.

  New York coach John Tortorella, Ryan told his brother, rarely relied on one enforcer. His previous teams in Tampa Bay—especially the later ones, after the Lightning won the 2004 Stanley Cup—featured a few pugnacious toughs, but not one well-known fighter. And the temperamental Tortorella was from Boston and had never played or coached in Canadian junior. He was a notoriously prickly personality.

  Besides, the Rangers were nowhere close to the leading sports franchise in New York. Baseball, football, and basketball were all more popular than hockey. In the hierarchy of New York franchises, the Rangers, despite their long history and deep fan base, fell somewhere in line near the Jets, Nets, and Mets, below the Yankees, Giants, and Knicks. Derek would be a small fish in an extremely big pond.

  But Derek was intrigued from the outset. Doug Risebrough, the former Wild general manager who had drafted Derek and shepherded his rise to the NHL, had been hired the previous fall as a consultant to Rangers general manager Glen Sather. The Rangers were interested in an enforcer to beef up their roster. Risebrough knew just the man. As Derek was about to become a free agent, Derek and Risebrough met for lunch. He wanted to make sure he could recommend Derek in good conscience.

  Sign him, Risebrough told the Rangers. Derek is the toughest enforcer in the league, comes from a good family, and is beloved by teammates. Marian Gaborik, the Rangers’ scoring star who had spent years with Risebrough and the Wild, could attest. He had joined the Rangers the year before, and he told Derek how much he liked the city and the team. Derek would be reunited with his good friend and serve, again, as his primary protector.

  The Rangers had sent Derek a DVD, placed inside a wooden box engraved with the team logo and delivered to him by courier in Minneapolis. It was a promotional video that the team used to seduce prospective players. It showed stirring scenes of Manhattan, the skyline, Times Square, Broadway, and Madison Square Garden. And it featured a roster of New York celebrities—Regis Philbin among them—encouraging the viewer to come to the Big Apple.

  The decision was a cinch. Derek chose New York.

  What could be bigger? he thought. It would be the pinnacle of his career, a chance to represent an Original Six franchise at Madison Square Garden—“The World’s Most Famous Arena,” as it’s called, home of the Rangers and Knicks in the middle of midtown Manhattan.

  For anyone who still wondered whether Derek Boogaard had arrived—anyone from Melfort or Prince George or anywhere else that Derek imagined those people might exist—playing for the famed Blueshirts would be the final word.

  Derek, despite the pleas from his family—all but Aaron thought Edmonton was a better idea—never seriously considered the Oilers. He never liked the city, and he never liked the team. Derek also
held out hope that his relationship with Erin was salvageable. He knew she wouldn’t want to live in Edmonton, either. It wasn’t that much different than Regina. But she would love New York.

  “Derek is obviously the biggest and the toughest, and I think we needed that presence here,” Sather told reporters during a conference call on July 1, 2010.

  “It’s one of those things,” Derek said that day, “where New York knows what type of player I am and what I bring to the table. I love doing what I do, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world, you know?”

  PART III

  NEW YORK

  9

  DEREK WAS NERVOUS ABOUT playing and living in New York, but he tried not to let on. In the two months before he left Minnesota, after he signed with the Rangers, he told people how excited he was to play in Madison Square Garden. He told friends about his 33rd-floor apartment at the Sheffield on 57th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, with views of Central Park through the skyscrapers of Columbus Circle. The apartment was rented for $6,900 a month from Aaron Voros, a former Wild teammate who had spent the previous two seasons as a forward with the Rangers.

  No. 24 was taken by another player, so Derek deftly chose jersey No. 94, representing 1994, the last year that the Rangers won the Stanley Cup. That team broke a 54-year championship drought behind the likes of captain Mark Messier, winger Adam Graves, goalie Mike Richter, and defensemen Brian Leetch and Sergei Zubov. It was a tough team, backed by enforcers Joey Kocur and Jeff Beukeboom. Derek knew the history.

  In New York, there would be sponsorship opportunities he had never fathomed. He would bring the burgeoning Defending the Blue Line charity to New York to establish roots. He would find endorsement opportunities and business offers he never would have received in places like Edmonton. Derek saw the potential. But it still scared him.

  In the summer of 2010, Derek lived in one side of Gaborik’s cavernous apartment near the Walker Art Center on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, while Aaron lived in the other. They had to shout to hear one another. Tobin Wright, the business manager for both Derek and Gaborik, also had a real-estate license and made preparations to sell the unit for Gaborik. He stepped into Derek’s bathroom and saw a crystal wine stopper, with a Wild logo, on the counter. Why would Derek have a wine stopper in here? Wright wondered to himself. He picked it up. It had a bulbous handle on one end and a smooth, flat surface on the other.

  When Wright touched the flat end, white powder rubbed off onto his fingers. Wright looked around. Nearby on the counter was a dollar bill, rolled up. Derek, he surmised, was crushing pills and snorting them.

  When summer began, Derek and Aaron, both single, celebrated with several weeks of parties and barhopping. They spent several weeks in Manhattan Beach, California, visiting Derek’s agent, Ron Salcer, and getting into a routine of workouts and parties. On the beach, Derek lifted, pulled, and coiled shipping ropes, giant spaghetti noodles as thick as logs, in a one-man tug-of-war to build strength. He tried to get a tan. The brothers shot videos that showed Derek, a bit heavier than usual, making jokes, playing in the waves, learning to use a stand-up paddleboard, and driving a convertible Maserati he had rented.

  Wright called Salcer and told him what he had found in Derek’s apartment. When Salcer confronted him, Derek denied anything unusual. He took Ambien on occasion, he said, but he would never crush it. Somebody must have left that in there during a party or something.

  But then Derek showed up to the apartment one day, around the first of August, with 100 OxyContin pills.

  “Where did you get those?” Aaron asked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Derek replied.

  “What are you doing?” Aaron said. “We’ve worked our asses off.”

  Their relationship had grown increasingly tangled. It was weeks earlier, at a bar in Minneapolis, that Aaron had met a young woman he began dating. Derek liked her at first. But as he saw Aaron’s one-night fling evolve into a relationship, he was not happy. The more Aaron saw his girlfriend, the less Derek saw of Aaron.

  Derek had not gotten over his love for Erin, and, as if filling a void of his own, he began to contact her with increasing regularity as his final weeks in Minneapolis loomed and anxiety rose in advance of his move to New York. Erin could not fully resist the overtures. “Magnets,” she called them.

  Aaron began to worry. He had grown increasingly protective of Derek. Now, less than a year after Derek was in rehabilitation, as he nervously awaited his move to New York, he was coming home with bags of prescription pain pills. He was contacting Erin. He was hanging around people that Aaron didn’t like. Every summer, it seemed, the number of people who elbowed their way into Derek’s life grew, and Aaron was skeptical of their motives. He saw how Derek surrounded himself with people at restaurants and bars, people he considered friends, and when it came time for the bill, they all looked away.

  He told Derek that those friends—“leeches,” he called them—were taking full advantage of Derek’s wealth and fame.

  “I know,” Derek would say. “I just can’t say no.”

  One summer night, when Aaron and his girlfriend were at Sneaky Pete’s, Aaron saw Erin. She asked to talk, to let her explain everything that had happened between her and Derek. Aaron did not want to hear any of it. He walked away.

  Within an hour, Aaron’s cell phone rang. It was Derek, furious, demanding that Aaron apologize for his rudeness toward Erin.

  On Aaron’s 24th birthday in mid-August, in the presence of their friend Jeremy Clark, Aaron and Derek bickered about Erin again. Aaron screamed that he was not the only one who felt that way about Erin; Jeremy thought so, too.

  Derek stopped. His head turned slowly toward Clark. You do? Suddenly, the three of them—Derek, Aaron, and Clark, like boyhood brothers back in the Melfort basement—were in a fist-swinging scrum on the lawn of the apartment building.

  By then, the first batch of 100 OxyContins was gone. Derek replaced it with another 100. He told Aaron that he bought them for $6,000—$60 a pill.

  Aaron did not trust his brother with the pills, and he worried about the speed with which Derek went through them. Derek let Aaron take the pills and divide them, stashing them in drawers or closets. Only when Derek came to Aaron and asked for some, insisting that his back ached and that he needed the pills to combat the pain, would Aaron hand any over.

  “What am I going to do?” Aaron explained later. “Deny this guy the pills that he just spent six grand on? Is his back really that hurt?”

  Derek tried to hide his anxiety about the move to New York. He wanted summer to last forever. Friends promised to visit, and Derek talked about making a big, immediate impact with the Rangers. Privately, he worried that he would be unable to live up to the expectations.

  Derek wanted Aaron to quit hockey and come live with him in New York. But Aaron had his own aspirations to pursue, even if the long-term prospects looked shaky. After being drafted by the Wild, Aaron had joined the Pittsburgh Penguins organization. He played three seasons divided between the American Hockey League and the East Coast Hockey League. Now he had a contract in the lower-tier Central Hockey League, for a franchise in Laredo, Texas, on the Mexican border. Like Derek, he did not know what else he would do if he could not make a career out of hockey. He did not want to give up now.

  In early September, Derek left to catch his flight to New York to join the Rangers. When he arrived at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport, though, he panicked. He could not remember whether he had packed his latest batch of OxyContin pills. He wanted to rummage through his suitcase, but worried about doing it in the terminal, in front of people who might recognize him. He walked back out of the airport. He arrived back at the apartment, missing his flight, and dumped his suitcase. The pills had been packed, after all.

  Derek rebooked his flight to New York for the next day. But he was suddenly worried about getting caught with the pills.

  “Send these to me in a week or so,” Derek told Aaron, handing
them to him.

  For a few weeks, through Rangers training camp and before Aaron left for his own hockey season, Derek texted and called his little brother from New York to ask the whereabouts of the pills. But Aaron knew it was a crime to ship prescription pills, and he worried about his status as a Canadian resident living and working in the States. For several weeks, Aaron waffled—torn between getting caught and disappointing his older brother.

  Finally, Derek erupted. Forget it, he said. Just take them back to where I got them, and give them to a friend who is coming to visit me soon in New York. Aaron carried the bag of prescription painkillers to Sneaky Pete’s, he said later, and handed them over.

  He was relieved to be rid of them. Aaron left for Texas for the hockey season. He and Derek barely spoke for many months.

  LEN BOOGAARD SENT the e-mail on the evening of October 13, 2010.

  “I am the father of Derek BOOGAARD and need to make contact with Doug RISEBROUGH ASAP,” he wrote to an administrative address for the New York Rangers. “I can be contacted via the noted e-mail as well as my work e-mail.”

  He provided two e-mail addresses and two phone numbers. “Regards, Len Boogaard,” the note ended.

  Aaron had told Len about Derek’s late-summer slide and the pills he wanted shipped to New York. Len had presumed that Derek’s addiction had been resolved a year earlier, in rehabilitation, and had trusted that his son was being closely monitored by the substance abuse program. He sent a note to Salcer, Derek’s agent, but when he did not receive an immediate response, he went straight to the Rangers.

  Len knew that Risebrough had a close relationship with Derek, dating all the way back to when Risebrough drafted the 19-year-old for the Minnesota Wild. Risebrough knew about Derek’s troubled past.

  Len’s e-mail message was forwarded from the website manager at Madison Square Garden to an assistant in the Rangers’ front office. In a reply on the afternoon of October 14, two games into the season and the day before the Rangers’ home opener at the Garden, she assured Len that the message had been sent on to Risebrough.