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

  The sport’s history could be marked by violent milestones. At the end of Game 4 of the 1927 Stanley Cup final, Boston Bruins defenseman Billy Coutu, a vicious player known for wielding sharp elbows and a dangerous stick, attacked two referees, knocking one down with a punch and tackling the other. He received a lifetime ban from the game.

  About the same time, boxing promoter Tex Rickard’s new NHL franchise, the New York Rangers, parked ambulances outside Madison Square Garden. More ambulances brought more fans, apparently lured by the prospect of violence.

  The Rangers also used “Dead or Alive” posters, featuring the likes of notorious Boston brawler Eddie Shore, from Saskatchewan, to drum up business. In 1933, Shore chased and tripped Toronto’s Ace Bailey, who fell to the ice and was knocked unconscious with a brain hemorrhage. Shore was knocked out by one retaliatory punch from Toronto’s Red Horner.

  Bailey was read his last rites. Shore, reawakened, was told he would be charged with manslaughter if and when Bailey died. But Bailey made a surprise recovery, though he never resumed his hockey career. Shore did, and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1947.

  In March 1955, Montreal Canadiens star Maurice “Rocket” Richard was suspended for the rest of the season and the playoffs after punching a referee who was trying to prevent him from retaliating against a Boston player. The incident led to the “Richard Riot,” in which angry fans at the Montreal Forum threw debris at NHL president Clarence Campbell, forcing the forfeiture of a game against the Detroit Red Wings. The disturbance moved outside, where 60 were arrested during a night of vandalism and looting. The Canadiens, without the best scorer of the era, lost in the Stanley Cup final.

  In 1968, Philadelphia’s Larry Zeidel and Boston’s Eddie Shack pummeled one another with their sticks, taking long, deliberate swings. During the next preseason, St. Louis’s Wayne Maki clubbed Boston’s Ted Green, fracturing his skull. He was later acquitted of assault charges.

  The allowance of fighting as an outlet for aggression—or the thin five-minute penalty associated with it—did not deter those assaults. Such incidents merely slowed over the years as a reflection of society’s changing views toward violence. But fighting—a more controlled form of hockey violence—was on the rise. In 1960–61, the NHL averaged 0.2 fights per game, or one for every five contests. The rate rose rapidly until 1987–88, when the average game had 1.3 fights.

  That period included the rise of the Boston Bruins, who resurrected the art of intimidation and mixed it with uncommon skill, winning the Stanley Cup in 1970 and 1972. Led by future Hall of Famers Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito, the Bruins showed that grace and intimidation were not mutually exclusive. They led the league in penalty minutes in 1970 and were third in 1972.

  In 1970, the team with the most fights—as measured by fighting penalties—was the Philadelphia Flyers, with 37. An NHL expansion franchise in 1967, the Flyers quickly built a fan base and a championship team with muscle. The Broad Street Bullies, as they were called, won the Stanley Cup in 1974 and 1975.

  Dave “The Hammer” Schultz, from Saskatchewan, had 472 penalty minutes during the second championship season, a record that still stands. He helped give rise to the narrowly defined role of the enforcer in both hockey and popular culture.

  Fighting grew exponentially. When the Flyers won the Stanley Cup in 1975, they had 77 fights. By 1980, the top-fighting team, the Vancouver Canucks, had 92. In 1988, the Bruins led the NHL with 132. By then, some team owners in the NHL wondered aloud if it was too much. Their concerns had nothing to do with protecting the health of players. It had to do with marketing.

  In 1986, Sports Illustrated wrote extensively about fighting in hockey. “Oh, dear,” the story read. “Just when you thought it was safe to take the kids to an NHL game again—goon hockey is back.”

  “The NHL has got to decide,” the story concluded, “whether to continue presenting itself as a carnival show or to rejoin the ranks of major-league sport.”

  The NHL was increasingly ambivalent about the role of the enforcer. The league’s board of governors, composed of owners, took occasional stabs at reducing fights, but the push of anti-fighting pacifists was routinely checked by compromise.

  By 1992, a minority faction of team owners proposed that fighting players be ejected, the type of rule common not only in other sports, but in most hockey leagues around the world and in North American colleges, where fighting was rare. The idea was debated and dismissed in lieu of stricter rules targeting “instigators,” those deemed to have started the fight. “NHL Settles for a Jab in Confrontation with Goons,” read the headline in the New York Times.

  The battle was between traditionalists and progressives, and, to some extent, Canadians and non-Canadians. European players had begun to flood the NHL, and the league was expanding deep into the United States. Traditionalists wanted to cling tightly to the game’s roots, to protect the physical brand of hockey made in Canada. Progressives saw fighting as an obstacle to the mainstream growth of the sport.

  “I think fighting will suffer an evolutionary death,” Pittsburgh Penguins owner Howard Baldwin said at the time. “But it will be helped by mortal stab wounds like this.”

  Gary Bettman became NHL commissioner in 1993. He often cited statistics indicating fighting’s slowly shrinking role in the league during his tenure. That raised uncomfortable questions about why the league was averse to nudging it further from the game. If less fighting was good, wouldn’t no fighting be better?

  DEREK BARELY PLAYED most of the preseason for the Regina Pats, despite his knockout debut at training camp. The Pats moved him from defenseman to left wing, mostly because a fourth-line forward plays far fewer minutes than a defenseman, limiting Derek’s time on the ice. Beyond fighting, Derek was a liability.

  But coach Parry Shockey told Derek one day that he would play the next night against the Moose Jaw Warriors. Derek called his parents and told them.

  Moose Jaw was an hour’s drive west of Regina down the Trans-Canada Highway, and the Warriors and Pats were bitter rivals. Around the Western Hockey League, teams often did not warm up on the ice at the same time because pregame fights were common, and that was particularly true in Moose Jaw. The Moose Jaw Civic Centre, the squat, 3,000-seat arena nicknamed the “Crushed Can,” was packed.

  The Pats did their warmups first. Derek scanned the faces in the crowd as he circled the ice. He found his mom and dad, as well as Ryan, Aaron, and Krysten. He smiled and gave them a nod.

  After last-minute preparations and speeches in the locker room, the Pats headed back to the ice for introductions.

  “The place was really loud, and it felt as if the fans were on top of you,” Derek wrote. “You obviously got the boos as we were walking threw [sic] the tunnel. I think that’s the worst I have ever heard people yelling and screaming at the tunnel.”

  Fourteen-year-old Ryan took on the role of Derek’s advance scout for fighting. He scanned web sites and online bulletin boards for information on players Derek might face. Against Moose Jaw, one potential foe was a 20-year-old named Kevin Lapp. He was six foot seven and 250 pounds, and was the league’s No. 2-rated fighter, according to at least one site, behind Regina’s Kyle Freadrich.

  Derek was the last of the Regina players to get a shift. “You’re up,” Shockey finally said. Derek clambered over the boards.

  “Not even 5 seconds on the ice I get a tug,” Derek wrote. “So I turn around and there was Kevin Lapp. Just standing there waiting for the gloves to drop. He said, ‘Ready to go?’ I said, ‘Yep.’ ”

  The fight was nothing more than a quick flurry of punches. “He absolutely destroyed me,” Derek wrote.

  The Boogaards had come to watch Derek play and saw only a few seconds of him getting beat up. He went to the dressing room to check his wounds. After the game, after spending a few minutes with his family, he boarded the bus and sat near the front.

  “The vets were obviously in the back of the bus,” Derek wrote. “But I knew t
hose guys were making fun of me.”

  Shockey called Derek into his office the next day. The Pats were demoting Derek, sending him to the Regina Pat Canadians, the city’s top midget team, a classification for 16- and 17-year-olds, a big step down from the WHL.

  Len waited for his son outside the Agridome, the Pats’ arena in Regina.

  “He didn’t have much to say,” Derek wrote. “But later on in the car ride he said he was proud of me making it this far, when all the people in Melfort said that I wasn’t any good. He said I shoved it up there [sic] asses already.”

  THE PEAK OF FIGHTING in the late 1980s gave way to another NHL trend: that of the one-trick enforcer, a player who provided little value to the team beyond the threat of revenge and the occasional use of it. It coincided with a league-wide scoring boom, propelled by the likes of Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers.

  Gretzky, from Brantford, Ontario, may be the world’s most famous Canadian. A suave, swift, and slight six-foot, 185-pound center, he won seven straight scoring titles in the 1980s and ultimately shattered NHL career records for goals and assists. The high-scoring Oilers dazzled fans on their way to five Stanley Cup championships in seven seasons, starting in 1984.

  Gretzky gave much of the credit to players who scored little—on-ice bodyguards like Dave Semenko, Kevin McClelland, and Marty McSorley, each of whom had nearly 10 times as many penalty minutes as points during their NHL careers. McSorley followed Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings in 1988 to serve as his personal protector.

  Teams imitated the strategy. High-scoring, highly paid stars needed security. The golden age of the hockey enforcer was born, stretching through McSorley and Bob Probert, Tie Domi, Georges Laraque, Rob Ray, and Donald Brashear. They increasingly settled their teammates’ scores by fighting each other. Imagine in American football, if a linebacker hit a quarterback with what the quarterback’s team believed was too much force. Or if a baseball pitcher plunked a star batter with a ball, or a basketball player committed a hard foul on a top scorer. The equivalent to hockey’s brand of justice would find those teams sending a specific player from their bench—someone hardly valued for his skill as a player, perhaps rarely used—and having them fight one another.

  Their bouts combined the brutality of boxing and the showmanship of professional wrestling. The men sometimes fought for no purpose other than to satisfy the expectation of fans or the chance to be relevant. Coaches used them to stem the opposing team’s momentum or change the tenor of the game—maybe “send a message” for the next time the teams played. It felt like a sideshow. But the punches were real.

  When the enforcers fought, the game clock stopped. Other players, restricted by stricter rules barring entry into a fight, backed away and watched. Fans, invariably, stood and cheered, often more vociferously than when a goal was scored.

  Television cameras zoomed in, and a graphic providing each fighter’s height and weight often appeared on the screen. Play-by-play men took on the role of boxing announcers, their hyper-charged voices rising and falling with every blow. Punches produced a reflexive chorus of oooohs from the crowd. The volume ratcheted with the sight of blood, flying equipment, maybe a dislodged tooth. The fight ended only when one of the players fell to the ice or when the violence slowed, like the dwindling energy of popcorn when nearly every kernel has popped. That was the sign to officials to step in and nudge the combatants toward the penalty box.

  Sometimes fights ended unceremoniously with a clumsy slip and fall. Sometimes they ended with two men, like exhausted heavyweights, clinging to one another. A knockout punch by the hometown enforcer usually brought the loudest cheer of the night.

  When officials declared an end to the combat, fans gave standing ovations. Teammates banged their sticks on the boards in appreciation. Replays of the fight, usually in slow motion, filled the giant video screens in the arenas and the television screens at home. Fights were staples of the nightly sports highlight packages.

  In the mid-1990s, a hockey fan from Long Island, New York, named David Singer began to archive fights in the NHL and, eventually, leagues around the world, including the major-junior leagues of Canada and the minor leagues of the United States. What began as an unheralded blog turned into HockeyFights.com, a full-fledged, up-to-date repository, in 1999. It had links to video clips of recent fights. Users voted on winners, and some described the blow-by-blow action in detailed accounts.

  The site, like its growing posse of imitators, had pages for each enforcer that included career fight logs dating to junior hockey. It had statistical analysis, showing trends in fighting, and tracked fights from about a dozen leagues around the world. Enforcers themselves used it to replay their own fights and scout opponents for the next, some of the tens of millions of page views the site received each NHL season.

  Without sites like HockeyFights.com and DropYourGloves.com, it might be difficult to find that the Medicine Hat Tigers led the WHL in 1997–98 with 211 fights—far more than teams in the NHL. Or that the Regina Pats had 183, or that Kyle Freadrich and Barret Jackman, each on his way to the NHL, would lead the team with 25 each. Or that Travis Churchman had 14.

  Each of those boys had ambitions for professional hockey, and the NHL of the late 1990s still had plenty of appetite for enforcers. Most would prefer to have reached the NHL on the merit of their other hockey skills, but were glad to have found a well-traveled back entrance to a world where they were respected by teammates and revered by fans.

  Into this era entered a gangly 16-year-old named Derek.

  DEREK THOUGHT HE was too good to play for the Pat Canadians. He had been playing with and fighting 20-year-old boys working toward the NHL. Now he was on a second-tier team with boys his own age. And he was not getting much playing time.

  “I was playing cocky and thought I didn’t deserve to be there,” Derek wrote. “I look back on it now and I do regret acting like that.”

  Coach Leo MacDonald played Derek a few shifts a game. Derek used his infrequent ice time to show how he could intimidate with his energy and hammer opposing players with big checks. MacDonald was not impressed. The Pat Canadians were winning—on their way, in fact, to capturing the Air Canada Cup, awarded to the national midget-level champions. They did not need Derek’s brand of hockey.

  In December, the Pat Canadians headed to the Mac’s tournament in Calgary, a prestigious event for top midget teams from across Canada. Game after game, Derek sat on the bench. He was embarrassed and annoyed. As he watched his teammates take turns on the ice, Derek stewed. He finally turned to MacDonald during the middle of the game.

  “I’m good. I can play,” Derek said. “I’m right here in front of you.”

  MacDonald told Derek to keep quiet. Derek exploded in anger. On the way to the dressing room, he corralled the coach in the hallway.

  “I lit into him again and we got into the room and I said he was an awful coach and didn’t know how to coach,” Derek wrote later.

  Derek carried his belongings into the hallway and found a pay phone. He called his mother. Joanne was in Swift Current, visiting family, and drove five hours to Calgary to retrieve Derek.

  For much of the way back across the flat Saskatchewan prairie, he cried.

  JUST WHEN DEREK’S hockey aspirations had stalled, Todd Ripplinger was there again. The Regina Pats’ head scout had had a feeling Derek would clash with MacDonald, the coach of the Pat Canadians. He was not surprised to learn that Derek was no longer on the team. By then, Ripplinger had already called another Regina coach named Don Pankewich.

  The Regina Capitals were a Junior B team—a group of 16- to 20-year-olds a couple of cuts below the Western Hockey League. It was hardly a stepping-stone to a hockey career, but it was a timely teenage diversion.

  Derek’s parents were having marital problems, sparked by Len’s relationship with Jody Vail, the newest RCMP member assigned to Melfort. She was blond and petite, about 10 years younger than Len. A friend of Derek’s told him that Len’s car wa
s constantly parked at her house. Derek kept the revelation to himself, but Joanne soon caught on. One argument between his parents ended with a phone being pulled from a wall and Derek playing peacemaker.

  The Boogaards had been in Melfort about five years, and it was about time for the RCMP to move the family again. Len negotiated a transfer to Regina, well timed for Derek’s move there for hockey. Joanne hoped that the move to Regina, her hometown, could keep the family together.

  Len, Derek, and Ryan settled in Regina first, into an apartment. Joanne stayed in Melfort with Aaron and Krysten, the two younger children, to sell the house. The Boogaards found a tri-level home on the north side of Regina, on a shady section of Woodward Avenue. They renovated the house before they moved in, with three bedrooms upstairs and a couple more on the lowest level, so that there were bedrooms for each of the children.

  The house was near Archbishop O’Neill High, a Catholic school that Pats players attended. But Derek found few friends. He had been cut from the 1998–99 Pats team, and he had been kicked off the Pat Canadians, too.

  Derek immediately fit in with the Capitals. He liked the coach. He made several good friends. The pressure in the South Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League was several degrees below that of the WHL, and the Capitals were one of the better teams, making it to that season’s final. Derek’s love for hockey, so often ignited and extinguished, was ignited again.

  The Pats were still intrigued by Derek’s size, and invited him to skate with them on days when the Capitals did not practice. They stoked his ambition. He stoked their interest with a growth spurt. If he made the Pats, he might be the biggest player in the WHL.

  Derek turned 17 in June and spent the summer lifting weights, preparing for his second training camp with the Pats. The older Pats whom Derek had found intimidating—boys like Todd Fedoruk and Kyle Freadrich—were gone to professional training camps. But other willing fighters remained, including Travis Churchman and future NHL defenseman Barret Jackman. They found a burgeoning rival whom they barely recognized from a year before. Derek had grown three inches, to six foot seven, and the camp roster listed him at 255 pounds, 45 more than he had weighed a year earlier.