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

  Trying to make an impression, Derek fought 12 times in the first four scrimmages.

  “Derek Boogaard, a 17-year-old man-child, was in four or five fights, depending on who is doing the counting, during one scrimmage at the Regina Pats’ training camp yesterday,” the Leader-Post, Regina’s daily newspaper, reported on September 1, 1999.

  The headline read “Beware of the Boogeyman.” The article said that the first fight, on the first shift, ended with Derek “bodyslamming” Churchman to the ice. Another fight with Churchman ended the same way, and the two then stood up and boxed.

  “This one was pretty much a sawoff,” the story said.

  Derek was big, but his fighting skills were unrefined. He tried to knock every opponent out with one punch. He had no strategy, no moves. He fell down easily.

  Aside from the fighting, Derek had little usefulness on the ice. He could build up good speed but had little agility. He was not a great puck handler. He did not have innate hockey sense, the ability to see plays forming before they happened, to know where the puck needed to go without pausing for consideration. He was clumsy. He often botched drills in practices, interrupting the flow and frustrating coaches.

  Mainly, he was raw, and there was no time for raw at this level. Coaches were paid to win and to fill seats. Derek, as enticing a prospect as he was, was not good enough to do either.

  The Pats won four of their first five games. Derek barely played. But in the one loss, a 3–0 defeat at Swift Current on September 29, Derek got into his first regular-season major-junior hockey fight.

  Mat Sommerfeld was not a big kid, but he was a sturdy one, a farm boy willing to dish it out and take it in equal doses. He grew up in Shellbrook, Saskatchewan, a town not unlike Melfort and about 90 minutes away. A few years earlier, as 14-year-olds on competing teams, Derek and Sommerfeld tussled during a game in Shellbrook. Afterward, Sommerfeld was in the arena lobby with friends when Boogaard approached. He introduced himself and thanked Sommerfeld for the fight. They shook hands.

  But now they were 17, and the stakes were far higher. Late in the second period, awaiting a face-off, the boys began to scuffle. The referee told them to wait for the puck to drop. They did. Then they flipped their gloves off and flung their sticks to the side. They casually removed their helmets and tossed them aside as they circled clockwise. Derek closed the gap and jousted with his right hand. He grabbed Sommerfeld with his left hand, and Sommerfeld grabbed back, slipping to his knees momentarily. They wrangled and tried to punch one another. Sommerfeld pulled the back of Derek’s jersey onto Derek’s head. They fell in a heap and continued to jab and pull. Two officials jumped on top to separate the boys.

  Sommerfeld rose first, holding Derek’s uniform nameplate—BOOGAARD—in his hands. As he skated to the penalty box, he held the fabric trophy overhead, like a boxer displaying a championship belt. The crowd on its feet, Sommerfeld tossed it dismissively aside.

  On October 11, at Red Deer, Derek fought again, this time against Steve MacIntyre, a burly, six-foot, six-inch 19-year-old from a blip of a Saskatchewan town called Brock. MacIntyre won with little effort, but Derek was rewarded with another chance two nights later, at home against the Kelowna Rockets.

  Ryan Boogaard had scouted the Rockets. Ryan, two years younger than Derek, played hockey, too. He was not built like an enforcer the way Derek was. And he was not as smooth with the puck as Aaron, the third of the Boogaard boys. But Ryan followed the WHL closely. He scoured statistics and tracked the online bulletin boards for information on players. Before the Pats hosted the Rockets at Regina’s Agridome, Ryan told Derek about Mitch Fritz. He was two years older than Derek and stood six foot seven. Ryan told his brother that Fritz had a strange style, an overhand, club-like punch that he compared to Donkey Kong, the video-game villain.

  “I was never nervous before my fights,” Derek wrote. “I think I just excepted [sic] the fact that I could get hurt.”

  Fritz took the ice during Derek’s first shift and asked for a fight. The boys dropped their gloves and removed their helmets. Derek swung a wild right hand that punctured only air. Fritz used his own long reach to pull Derek in close. Fritz tied Derek in knots and pounded him with a series of jabs and overhand “Donkey Kong punches,” Derek wrote, until officials interrupted.

  “After the fight, he was waving his finger in the air like he was the champ,” Derek wrote. “I never did like that when guys showboated. It just pissed me off even more, and in junior hockey, you saw a lot of it.”

  Fritz saw reason to gloat. On a hockey fight web site, someone reported that Fritz landed 10 of his 26 punches. Derek threw five punches and did not land any of them.

  The Regina Pats had seen enough. Before Derek played again, he was traded. There is little in hockey more useless than an enforcer who loses fights.

  3

  PRINCE GEORGE, BRITISH COLUMBIA, was a mill town. Spreading mostly west from the confluence of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers, it sprawled over a pine-covered landscape shaped like a rumpled blanket. It began as a fur-trading post two centuries ago and became a vital stop on the way to other places—the Yukon or the coast or the latest gold rush. It was connected to the national railroad in the early 1900s, and by the middle of the 20th century its lumber business was booming. Paper mills followed.

  By the time Derek arrived in a trade, Prince George was a photogenic city of 70,000 people, seemingly quarantined from the country’s major population centers. But the Western Hockey League moved the Victoria Cougars to Prince George in 1994, attracted by the promise of a 6,000-seat arena, called the Multiplex, that opened in 1995.

  Derek said goodbye to his dad, his mom, his sister and brothers, a family breaking apart. When he stepped off the plane and onto the tarmac at the airport in Prince George in late October 1999, he was 17 and far from home for the first time.

  A man wearing a black Prince George Cougars jacket greeted him. It was Ed Dempsey, the team’s head coach. He drove Derek the 20 minutes through the curvy, tree-lined roads from the airport into town.

  “I wasn’t feeling too good because I wasn’t used to the trees and the hills,” Derek wrote years later. “I was always used to the flat feilds [sic] of SK.”

  He had to get used to it. WHL teams traveled by bus, and franchises were flung as far as 1,000 miles apart. Prince George was about nine hours west of Edmonton and 10 hours north of Vancouver. No place on the schedule was more remote. The nearest road game was in Kamloops, a six-hour drive.

  A few times a season, the Cougars embarked on multi-game road trips that lasted a week or more, swinging as far south as Portland, Oregon, and as far east as Brandon, Manitoba. It was not unusual for the team bus to roll back into Prince George in broad daylight, 12 hours or more after playing a game far away.

  The bus traveled about 40,000 miles each winter. While Derek was in Prince George, the Cougars replaced a three-year-old bus that had been purchased for $400,000 with a new one costing $530,000. The buses were specially designed with 12 bunks in the back and reclining seats in the front. The veteran players, ranked by games played, got to sleep in bunks on long trips. Players like Derek, when he first arrived, were relegated to sleeping while sitting.

  The buses often drove through the middle of the night. To the east, the roads were often icy and windswept as they crossed great, dark prairies. In the west, many roads curled around and over snow-covered mountains. Tragedy was just one impassable sheet of ice away, and junior hockey was haunted by the memory and worry of fatal accidents.

  The Pats had traded Derek to Prince George for a 17-year-old forward named Jonathan Parker. Two years earlier, Parker had been the fifth-overall choice in the WHL Bantam Draft, a swift prospect from Winnipeg expected to be a high scorer for Prince George. In his first season, Parker scored only four goals. Derek, by contrast, had not been among the 195 boys chosen in that same bantam draft, just an invitee to training camp. If nothing else, their trade was a stark reminder of the fickleness of potential and
the short amount of time the boys were given to realize it.

  The Cougars were a middling team with a fervent following and what might seem a geographic disadvantage. But teams had to travel all the way to Prince George to play, too, and the Cougars were always a tough opponent at home. They wanted to get tougher. The season before Derek arrived, Prince George had the fewest fights of any team in the 18-team WHL—84 in 72 games. Regina, which had signed Derek but demoted him in favor of other enforcers, led the league with 164.

  It was a strange contradiction in a place like Prince George.

  “Prince George is not a place where you’re going to get a majority to vote on getting hockey to stop the fighting,” said Jim Swanson, the sports editor of the Prince George Citizen for 14 years. “It’s not going to happen. It’s not a rough town, but it’s an honest town, and it’s a town that likes its hard-nosed players.”

  Derek’s first meeting was with the equipment manager. Nothing fit. A ring of cloth was sewn to the bottom of the largest jersey to make it longer. Two smaller rings were added to the cuffs to lengthen Derek’s sleeves. Larger shin pads and hockey pants were ordered.

  Derek stood out from the beginning. At his first practice, less than 24 hours after arriving from Regina, coaches were pleased with his loping skating stride. His skills were better than they imagined.

  Reporters gawked at his height. The newspaper featured Derek in a Halloween-inspired layout, introducing him as “The Boogeyman.”

  The Cougars wanted muscle. They wanted someone to get fans excited. Derek’s confidence soared.

  After that first practice, Derek was called into the office of general manager Daryl Lubiniecki.

  “If you win a few fights in this town,” Lubiniecki told Derek, “you could run for mayor.”

  THE FIRST PUNCH that 17-year-old Derek threw for the Cougars came on November 3, 1999. It was an overhand right that struck Eric Godard of the Lethbridge Hurricanes in the jaw.

  There were 5,552 fans in the arena that night. It was late in the third period. A tight game had been broken open with two quick goals, giving Prince George a 4–1 lead. So the Lethbridge coach sent Godard onto the ice. Godard was 19, stood six foot four, and weighed 215 pounds. He had been in 15 fights in the season’s first 15 games, on his way to leading the Western Hockey League in fights and penalty minutes that season.

  Dempsey, the Prince George coach, responded by tapping Derek’s shoulder. Fans cheered as the boys began the familiar ritual. Derek landed the first punch. Godard hit back with a couple of quick jabs to the face, and Derek moved in closer. The boys clutched each other by the jerseys and got their arms tangled, as if caught in the same straitjacket. They scooted one another around the ice. Three officials circled and watched, casually tossing obstacles out of the way—sticks, helmets, and gloves that the boys had dropped to the ice before the fight.

  The duel passed in front of the Prince George bench, then the Lethbridge one. Teammates of both boys watched the fight with expressionless faces. But the fans wanted to see their new enforcer take down one of the league’s top fighters. They stood.

  Godard was able to free himself just enough to hit Derek with a few short punches. After a minute of stand-up wrestling and fighting, the officials stepped between the exhausted boys and pulled them apart.

  Both boys, given the requisite five-minute matching penalties, headed to the dressing rooms because there were only 72 seconds left in the game. But it was not the end of the fighting. With two seconds remaining, six players—three from each side—fought, too. Such was the WHL, where teenaged boxing matches were a routine part of the hockey entertainment.

  For Derek, it was not a memorable debut. It blended into what became a miserable season.

  “I don’t remember my first fight in P.G. actually,” he later wrote. “But they never turned out good for me. I was getting beat up a lot. My confidence was shot to shit. I was fighting with the coaches, and I would hear the snickers from the guys that I was a pussy and I didn’t know how to fight. It was a very long year for me. I struggled with everything it seemed like. No matter what I did.”

  As much as anything, he was homesick. Letting Derek move 1,000 miles away was the hardest thing the Boogaards did. Joanne, especially, could not fathom sending him alone into this strange, unknown world to play a game in which he had so little future. The risks seemed to far outweigh the rewards. And Derek had been handed over to another family, strangers, at what might be the most trying point in his life.

  In the tumultuous world of junior hockey, billet families were meant to provide stability—a home away from home, a sanctuary from the pressures and anxieties of playing top-level hockey, going to new schools, and simply growing up. Each team cultivated a list of trusted billets. Some were couples with no children, or couples whose children had grown and moved on. Others were large families who welcomed an older-brother figure, or two or three, into their lives for most of the school year. The families received game tickets and a monthly stipend of a few hundred dollars to cover the extra groceries and the cost of time and gas ferrying the boys to practices and games.

  Benefits were largely intangible—an inside relationship with the local team (and the prestige that came with it), plus the satisfaction of steering boys through a time in life that can be difficult enough without the unique pressures of junior hockey. The costs were mostly intangible, too. There were meals to make, clothes to wash, school assignments to monitor. For top-level hockey players in their late teens, the problems magnified. There were concerns over curfews, drinking, and girls.

  During Derek’s second season with the Cougars, an extensive story by Swanson in the Prince George Citizen highlighted Derek’s difficulties—the marital problems of his parents, the teasing of teammates, the carousel of four billet families that he rotated through in his first year.

  “Mr. Swanson has no right bringing these boys’ personal lives into the attention of the public eye,” one woman wrote in a letter to the editor published by the newspaper. “These fellows are continually looked at under a microscope by the Cougars administration, agents, scouts, and other hockey officials. These teenagers are a long way from their real homes. We billet families do the best we can to pick up the pieces when our boys come home from a bad game. We don’t always know what to say or do, but a hearty attempt is made to get them to grin at least once before they go to sleep.”

  There were countless reasons why a relationship between the player and his billet family did not work. They ranged from simple personality clashes to religious differences to sexual relationships that developed between players and family members, including the billet mothers.

  Derek usually found billet families unbearably constricting. In turn, they found him unusually aloof. He had a habit of unintentional discourtesies, ranging from quiet brooding to post-curfew calls for a ride home. His shyness could be construed by strangers as rudeness. Struggles at school built pressure on billet families, and Derek’s size and style of play only fostered stereotypes of the doltish goon. He was not part of the clique of popular hockey players with whom families wanted to associate themselves. Most were willing to pass him along to another family.

  Gone were the comforts of home, far removed by time and distance. By the time Derek had been traded from Regina to Prince George, the Cougars had already taken a road swing through Saskatchewan. The Cougars did not return until mid-February. For the first time, when Derek scanned the crowd for familiar faces, he did not see any. The distance to Prince George made it a difficult and expensive place for his family to visit. Even talking to his parents was difficult, in the days before Skype and cell-phone texting, Facebook and constant e-mail access.

  But Derek’s parents would listen to radio broadcasts streamed live through their computers. Sometimes, they would call the station and ask to be placed on hold so that they could listen to the Cougars’ games. Derek did not play many minutes, and his arrival on the ice often prefaced a fight. His parents would
hear the blow-by-blow of the excited play-by-play announcer—the gloves coming off, the boys swinging their fists, the groans and cheers of the crowd. Then they would hear that Derek had gone to the penalty box or, sometimes, to the dressing room. And that might be the last they heard until the phone rang hours later.

  Derek fights for the Prince George Cougars.

  “Mom, I’m okay,” Derek would say. “What did it sound like?”

  TO APPEASE PARENTS, the Western Hockey League billed itself as a place where education was a priority. It touted a program in which each season spent in the league earned a full-year college scholarship, covering tuition, books, and fees. Dozens of players took advantage every year, and Canadian college teams were filled with former WHL players whose professional prospects had dimmed.

  But for those with no college ambitions, attending high school was little more than an annoyance, a daily obstacle on the way to afternoon practice. The older boys, aged 19 and 20, were usually the stars of the team, and they had finished high school or were too old to be required to attend. The younger boys simply needed to stay enrolled to be eligible to play. The only educational expectation the Cougars placed on their players was to maintain grades in line with those they had when they arrived.

  Derek played three-plus seasons in the WHL, and left at age 20 without completing the 10th grade. Once he was too old to be required to attend high school—but was more than welcome to continue playing junior hockey—Derek called home to say that he was taking a law class at a community college. His parents were excited. When asked a few weeks later how the class was going, Derek hesitantly admitted that he had dropped the class, trading it for one that taught country-and-western line dancing. A teammate was taking the course, Derek said, and it was filled with lots of cute girls.