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

  About then, Risebrough called. The men were acquaintances, having met several times, and they exchanged pleasantries, Len recalled later, before Len told Risebrough that Derek was abusing prescription drugs again. Len relayed what he had heard from Aaron—that Derek was taking painkillers, and he had sources on the street, maybe even in New York.

  Risebrough said he needed to think about how to proceed, Len later recalled.

  Len awaited a response. It came two days later, when Derek called. He told his father that Glen Sather, the general manager of the Rangers, had called him into his office and berated him.

  “He said, ‘Tell me what’s going on,’ ” Len recalled Derek saying. “ ‘And if you’re lying, I’ll trade you so fast.’ ”

  Derek also called Aaron and told him the same thing. He wondered if Aaron had told anyone about the incident at the airport, because Salcer asked about it, he said. Aaron denied telling anyone.

  Derek never realized that it was his father who had prompted the Rangers to question him. Len listened to Derek as if he had no clue. Lying about what? Len asked. Derek turned typically evasive. He never admitted he had an addiction problem, and he was not about to now, over the phone to his father. It did not matter. Len was happy and relieved. He had told the Rangers, and the Rangers were taking action. Derek would get help.

  What Len didn’t know was that Derek had been asking a Rangers trainer for Ambien and painkillers—requests that made their way to Lewis and Shaw of the substance-abuse program. According to their notes on Derek later obtained by Len, each warned Derek about his use of the drugs.

  Len also did not know that, within two weeks, a Rangers team dentist would give Derek the first of five prescriptions for hydrocodone.

  DEREK IMMEDIATELY MISSED the life he had left in Minnesota. He had parted with Aaron, headed to another minor-league assignment, on unsettled terms, divided over girlfriends and pills. Derek had left behind Erin, the ex-fiancée he still hoped to marry. He had left behind friends he had made over five years, including Jeremy Clark and the suburban gym that had become a second home. He had left behind his creature habits, from restaurants to gas stations to grocery stores to Sneaky Pete’s. He had left behind the familiar relationship he had with the media. He had left behind the goodwill of the charity work he had done and the legions of fans who spontaneously chanted his name, whether by the thousands at the Xcel Energy Center or by the handful at bars or on city sidewalks.

  But Derek never fully disconnected from Minnesota. He begged friends to visit and stay with him in New York. Early in the season, several of them did. Erin came and stayed with Derek several times, for up to a week at a time, spending many of the days shopping in Manhattan with a friend she knew in the city.

  On October 11, just as Len Boogaard learned about his son’s relapse into addiction, Derek welcomed some acquaintances from Minnesota—among them, Dillon Hafiz, his father, Stewart, and his uncle Peter. They attended the Rangers’ road game against the Islanders on Long Island that afternoon—Derek played one shift, and the Rangers lost—and then the Monday night football game in New Jersey between the Minnesota Vikings and New York Jets. They traveled in a limousine, and Derek paid the bill for $1,508. He supplied the tickets and bought No. 94 Rangers jerseys with BOOGAARD on the back. The men posed for pictures in front of the new football stadium at the Meadowlands.

  Rob Nelson, Derek’s financial advisor from Minnesota, brought on to help him manage his money and control his increasingly erratic spending habits, brought his girlfriend to visit Derek at the beginning of the season. Nelson had become another sort of big brother for Derek, someone to support him but also steer him straight. He did not know that Derek was abusing pills again, but found him nervous about the start of the season in New York and still unsettled about living there.

  It was awfully big, Derek told him. When they went out, walking the streets of Manhattan or having dinner in restaurants, no one recognized Derek—or at least did not say anything to him if they did. He was not a star, not the way he was in the Twin Cities. He was one person among eight million.

  Clark, too, came to visit, bringing his wife, Jennie. Derek and Clark were two small-town Canadian boys who appreciated the simple pleasures of life—a few friends, a couple of beers, a setting sun. Clark quickly decided that he did not like New York. He could not imagine Derek liking it, either, no matter how much of an optimistic spin Derek put on it.

  Derek was welcomed at Madison Square Garden, but he was relatively anonymous everywhere else in New York, a city that shrugs at celebrity. Derek put more faith in his old friends from Minnesota than he did in his ability to make new friends in New York.

  Among the connections he kept were those with some of the Wild’s team doctors. Medical director Sheldon Burns gave Derek a final physical on July 13, after Derek signed with the Rangers, and completed both a medical form and one for an insurance company that covers professional athletes. Under the pre-printed category of head injuries (“including concussions”), Burns noted two: one in January 2007 (“headaches” and “missed 4–5 days,” he wrote) and another in September 2009 (“headaches,” “dizziness,” and “missed 2½ weeks”). There was no mention that the second absence was for substance abuse rehabilitation. Burns noted several past injuries, such as broken fingers, a “fractured nose this year,” a high ankle sprain several years earlier, and the bulging disk in Derek’s back, but gave Derek a clean bill of health. “I do not see anything that would be a long-term concern or threatening his career at this point,” he wrote.

  On August 11, Burns’s medical partner and fellow Wild team doctor Dan Peterson prescribed 30 Ambien pills to Derek, pharmacy records showed. Another prescription was dated September 5, the day Derek went to the airport to fly to New York.

  DEREK DID NOT make a good first impression with the Rangers. Once in New York, a week before training camp began, Derek went to dinner with Gaborik and Salcer, the players’ agent. After dinner, Gaborik and Derek agreed to meet at a corner coffee place at eight the next morning. They would go together to the practice rink where most of the veteran Rangers worked out together in preparation for the rigors of training camp. Attendance was not mandatory, but it was a sign of solidarity and commitment.

  Derek did not show up the next morning. Gaborik fumed.

  “Don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it,” Derek told Salcer later. “Training camp starts next week. I’ll be okay.”

  He was not. He was overweight, pushing 300 pounds, and the Rangers were not pleased with his condition. When the preseason games began, Derek received little playing time—enough to try to coax him into shape, but not enough for Derek to prove his worth on the ice.

  Preseason games in the NHL tended to have about twice as many fights as those in the regular season, as young players tried to fight their way onto rosters by demonstrating their scrappiness. With the Rangers, Derek did not fight.

  On September 29, the Wall Street Journal featured Derek in a story, noting that he had not scored a goal since January 7, 2006, a streak of 222 regular-season games, the longest among active players. The story raised the age-old question of whether there was a benefit to enforcers. It asked Derek’s new teammates. One of the unspoken axioms of the NHL was that no player degraded the position of enforcer, and no one argued for its demise.

  “It’s not just that he makes our guys comfortable,” Rangers captain Chris Drury told the paper. “It’s that he makes the other guys uncomfortable, and now maybe they make the wrong play, they turn it over and we score—that’s the sort of thing just his presence can mean.”

  Rangers coach John Tortorella offered a succinct answer to whether enforcers—the Wall Street Journal interchanged the term with “goon”—had a place in the NHL.

  “It’s still part of our game,” Tortorella said.

  Publicly, despite training camp reports about Derek’s poor conditioning, the season began with great promise for Derek.

  “I think Boogaard i
s going to be an absolute superstar in New York,” Darryl Wolski, who created the made-for-TV Battle of the Hockey Enforcers tournament in Prince George, told the New York Daily News. “I don’t think the Rangers have seen a guy like him in a long time, maybe back to the Tie Domi era.”

  Derek told the reporter that fans should not expect Domi’s notorious post-fight celebrations.

  “You have to have respect for the guy that you just fought,” he said. “I think it’s absolutely ridiculous when guys do the showboating and all that. What if the other guy gets hurt? Everyone wants to watch the fight, but it’s just a respect factor. I don’t like it. I don’t like to do it.”

  Tortorella told reporters that the Rangers expected Derek to be more than a fighter, someone who could play extended minutes as a power forward. It was a tease that Derek had heard most of his life.

  In his first regular-season game as a Ranger, a 6–3 victory at Buffalo, Derek played a tentative seven shifts, for 6:03 of ice time—more than his career average, but less than anyone else in the game. Two nights later, in a 6–4 loss at the Islanders, Derek played three shifts in the first period, one in the second (for 22 seconds), and none in the third. His ice time was 1:34.

  On October 15, the day after Len Boogaard spoke to Doug Risebrough about Derek’s latest pill problems, the Rangers played their first regular-season game at Madison Square Garden. The Toronto Maple Leafs, an Original Six rival and a team off to a hot start, were in town. Most expected a duel between Derek and enforcer Colton Orr, the former Ranger, now in Toronto thanks to a four-year, $4 million contract.

  The Rangers lost in overtime, 4–3, and Derek recorded a third-period assist, the 13th of his NHL career. But that was overshadowed by how the Rangers lost. The Maple Leafs knocked Gaborik out of the game with a separated shoulder; he would miss four weeks. They charged and knocked down goalie Henrik Lundqvist.

  Derek played eight short shifts. His lone contribution was the assist—not the kind of physical contribution he was paid to make. It was undersized sparkplug Brandon Prust who fought for the Rangers, and agitator Sean Avery who tried to ignite the team with combative hits and penalties for roughing and slashing.

  Derek faced criticism like he had not had before.

  “This isn’t really about Derek Boogaard even though it is,” longtime New York Post hockey writer Larry Brooks wrote, “but if Friday’s calamitous night at the Garden doesn’t expose the fatal flaw in the concept of hiring the biggest, toughest, most feared puncher pound for pound in the NHL to act as a deterrent, then nothing does and nothing will.”

  Brooks used the game as an example of how the notion of an enforcer had changed over the years, until it had become something cheapened, with little value.

  “The idea a fourth-line player—who gets a mere handful of fourth-line shifts a night and who is essentially in the lineup to punch it out with the opposition’s fourth-line heavyweight—can be a deterrent is flawed,” he wrote. “The idea this presence will create more skating room for his team’s stars is misguided.

  “The heavyweight as a deterrent is an anachronism, proven so for the latest time before our very eyes Friday night,” Brooks concluded. “Unfortunately, the Rangers have invested $1.625M in cap space to be lost in time.”

  IT WAS THE day after the Toronto game that Derek phoned his father, complaining about Sather. Derek saw it as a slight, proof that the Rangers did not believe in him. Derek’s playing time plunged the following game.

  Derek looked for a scapegoat, and found one in Tortorella, the coach. The positive reinforcement from coaches—from Floyd Halcro in Melfort to Jacques Lemaire in Minnesota—that Derek thrived upon over the years never materialized in New York. Tortorella was not unlike the coaches that Derek detested as a teenager, the ones Derek believed treated him without faith and respect. Derek came to joke with friends about the rare days that Tortorella exchanged a greeting when they passed. Quietly, among friends, he called Tortorella “Little Hitler.”

  He complained to Salcer and others about Tortorella’s treatment. They don’t like me here, Derek said. They aren’t playing me, and they don’t even want me. The retort was simple and obvious: The Rangers wouldn’t have signed you to a four-year contract worth $6.5 million, Derek, if they did not believe in you.

  Salcer, though, called Sather for an assessment. He found the general manager’s words as haunting as they were surprising. Derek is in the worst condition of anyone on the team, Sather said, according to Salcer. He’s in no condition to be playing in games. He’s lucky to be playing at all. We’re just trying to get him into shape.

  Quite frankly, Salcer remembered Sather telling him, I’m really worried about Derek. There are a lot of big guys in this league, a lot of guys in really great shape. And I’m afraid someone’s going to hit Derek and end his career.

  Derek’s first fight for the Rangers came in the rematch with the Toronto Maple Leafs on October 21. That morning, the Globe and Mail, the nationally distributed Canadian newspaper based in Toronto, contained a column by hockey writer Roy MacGregor. He had grown weary of the latest debates over the role of fighting in hockey.

  “Surely the time has come to make fighting a penalty,” MacGregor wrote. “It is not a penalty, no matter what the rulebook pretends. Two players fight—usually as staged as the intermission T-shirt giveaway—and the game comes to a grinding halt.

  “And here I must apologize, as I suggested higher up that fighting had no effect on the momentum of a game. It does. It kills momentum.

  “Whistles blow, gloves are picked up, the long WWE grand march to the penalty box is held and, presto, the game begins again as if nothing has happened.

  “Not only is neither team penalized in any imaginable capacity, but the two fighters count their majors as the skilled players count goals and assists. The fighters use their number of majors to argue in favour of a salary increase the next time their contract comes up.

  “Fighting, therefore, has been deemed a reward by the league that would have you believe it is actually a penalty.

  “So let us all strike a deal here. We agree to accept that fighting is part of the game. So long as the NHL accepts the same. And makes fighting a real penalty with real consequence.”

  Colton Orr was a former Ranger who, in 2007, knocked Todd Fedoruk unconscious at Madison Square Garden. He also was a foe of Derek’s from the Western Hockey League and a good friend in Saskatchewan of Mat Sommerfeld, Derek’s boyhood rival. Derek and Orr had fought twice in a month nearly a decade earlier, when Derek played for Prince George and Orr for Kamloops.

  The game between New York and Toronto at the Air Canada Centre was scoreless and only two minutes old. As the puck and the rest of the players headed down the ice, Orr pestered Derek, asking for a fight in front of the team benches. He did not wait for an answer, throwing a punch before Derek removed his gloves. Derek demurred before engaging. He soon popped Orr in the face with his right fist, loosening Orr’s helmet, then hit him again in the side of the head. Holding Orr around the collar with his left hand, Derek finally shook his right glove free. Orr got in a firm shot of his own, raising the volume of the crowd, then managed to fling Derek onto his back and to the ice. The noise rose to a crescendo. Players on both teams banged their sticks.

  Len was in the arena that night. Like friends and family of Derek who watched on television, he could see that something was not right. Derek should have been eager to make amends for the disappointment of his first matchup with Toronto. Instead, he fought with uncustomary nonchalance and an expression that exuded more than its usual poker-faced tautness. There was a reluctance to engage, and then a fight without fury.

  They came to know something that most witnesses did not: one of Orr’s punches dislodged a three-tooth bridge in Derek’s mouth.

  Two nights later, Derek fought Boston’s Shawn Thornton, a fearless pit bull. The game was still in the first period, the visiting Rangers leading 2–0, when Thornton wrapped up Derek in front of t
he Boston net just as the Rangers were firing shots on goal. Whistles blew. Players stepped back. Fans stood.

  The predictable “Tale of the Tape” graphic appeared on television screens before the first punch was thrown. It showed that Derek had an advantage of five inches and 48 pounds—a conservative estimate, really, thanks to Derek being listed, graciously, at 265 pounds.

  The two stayed knotted as Thornton steered the encounter into one corner. Thornton grabbed Derek’s outstretched right arm and jabbed him in the face with a couple of punches. Derek finally freed his right hand and delivered several shots to Thornton’s ribs. Officials pulled the men apart unusually early.

  After the game, Derek was diagnosed by a team doctor with a cut on his right index finger. The wound became infected, and the injury was serious enough to be cited in at least eight subsequent internal injury reports.

  On October 26, three days after cutting his hand on Thornton and five days after having his bridge damaged by Orr, Derek was prescribed 20 hydrocodone pills by Rangers team dentist Joseph Esposito. The dentist’s notes that day described Derek’s mouth injury, including a “nerve exposed,” as an “EMERG.”

  That same day, at 3:08 P.M., Derek received a text message from Dan Cronin, the director of counseling for the NHL/NHLPA substance abuse program. It was, according to Derek’s cell-phone records, their first phone interaction since June 24. The two exchanged five more text messages that afternoon, the last at 5:35 P.M.

  Derek also exchanged six text messages with Dr. Esposito, between 4:38 and 4:57 P.M. And between 6:26 and 6:33, Derek called Cronin six times. If Cronin answered at all, the conversation never lasted more than a minute, cell-phone records showed.

  Derek received a second prescription of hydrocodone from Esposito on November 13, plus three more through early December—a total of 64 pills, records show.