by Sean Avery
• • •
NHL teams actually have two training camps—a rookie camp first, followed by the main camp. Detroit’s rookie camp in 2001 was like none that either players or management had ever seen before. I played like it was the Stanley Cup. By the time the main camp starts, I’ve pretty much turned rookie camp upside down. I ran goalie Andrew Raycroft, which triggered a line brawl. It’s all on the edge of “out of control,” but this is part of my master plan. The big club needs to realize that they need what I bring to the game—an ability to jolt a team awake, or get an opponent so mad at me that they do stupid things that cost them.
The Red Wings don’t have a first-round pick that year, but they have a good crop of rookies, led by this Russian kid named Pavel Datsyuk. He’s insanely talented. I know he’s going to make the team, so I’m not too worried about him. But his gifts piss me off just enough to motivate me to go after the guys who think they can make it just because they’re there.
And it works. I’m off to the main camp.
The first thing that happens is that we get our envelopes with our training camp per diems—eighty-six dollars a day to keep you fed and watered. The envelopes are filled not only with money, but also with meaning. The first round of cuts is in four days. So if the contents of your per diem envelope are significantly higher than four-times-eighty-six dollars, then you know you’re not going anywhere. Team captain Steve Yzerman gets a per diem envelope for his entire time in camp.
My per diem envelope is four-times-eighty-six dollars.
This means that I have enough to get me to the first “Red and White” game, which is what the Wings call the intra-squad game, and which could be my last chance to show the management what this undrafted twenty-one-year-old kid can do for a team on the hunt for its third Stanley Cup in five years.
One thing I can show them is my work ethic. The NHL is becoming size-obsessed right about now, and because I’m not six-three and 220 pounds (I’m five-ten, 195), I had to try to compensate. Which is why I always aimed to be one of the five fittest guys at camp.
One of the conditioning things we do is the one-mile test, which means running four laps of a track as fast as you can. Usually the top goal scorer of any team I’ve been on was at the bottom of the pile with a pretty sorry time of seventeen minutes-plus. So I’d go out of my way to tell the guys I was competing against that I was feeling great—so very great that I was going to break eleven minutes. I wasn’t blowing smoke, either—my best time was eleven minutes, thirteen seconds.
Back in June, I’d puked on the track running quarter-miles with Kris Draper. I was dry-heaving on the last two laps of the run, and Drapes said he couldn’t stop laughing and that’s why I beat him. I was twenty-one and Drapes was twenty-nine and on his way to hitting his prime. I don’t think a hockey player hits his prime until around age thirty-one, because that is when body and mind are at their strongest point together, the key concept being “together.” If your mind works and your body doesn’t or vice versa, it’s game over. I vowed to myself that I would retire from the NHL before that happened. But I have to make the NHL before I can retire.
Our training camp roster is split into four teams. Two teams practice together, and then we go into our respective locker rooms. The rink guys do a clean of the ice, and we come out and play each other. My mind is totally switched on to go full tilt, and my intense summer workouts mean that I am in game shape as we play these intra-squad mini-games up until the Day of Reckoning, which is ninety-six hours from now.
It’s like my entire life has converged on this day. If I screw it up, if I get injured and need a long rehab, if I piss off the wrong person on the Wings’ management, my dream is done. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve been a hockey player for three-quarters of my life. What else am I going to do? So I tell myself that the only way I can fail is if they beat me at my game, and I will not let them beat me.
I’m glad the hotel has such a full breakfast menu because today I need the fuel. I have eggs, bacon, hash browns, and toast. I’m going to hit the ice at full speed, though I’m sure that a veteran guy like the Wings’ right-winger Darren McCarty rolled out of bed at maybe 7:45 A.M. to catch the 8 o’clock bus to the rink, and he probably downed a power bar for breakfast.
I have my eye on McCarty because he’s the kind of player I want to model my game after. Mac was a guy who walked with the swagger of a 1970s drug dealer from one of those old TV cop shows, like Starsky & Hutch. And he dressed like it was the ’70s as well, with bling and plaid and more noise than style. Sure, he was a second-round pick who’s been a Red Wing since 1993, but he plays what they call a “gritty game” (he hits, he fights, he can score), and so do I. My strategy was to go sandpaper-to-sandpaper against Mac. And he’s in my practice group, so I have a feeling I’ll get to show the bosses how I stack up.
As a veteran, McCarty was here just to get through camp and get on with the season. He’s got nothing to prove. Also, remember all those unwritten rules? One of them stipulates that rookies (and especially undrafted rookies) don’t mess with veterans in camp. Now, I don’t want to say that I took a run at Darren McCarty in that first scrimmage, but I definitely finished my check on him. He didn’t go down (he’s bigger than me, six-one and 215 pounds), but he certainly noticed. No one had hit him like that in training camp in years.
I was making a statement that I would and could play with anyone. No one was off-limits. Mac came back at me with some pushing and shoving. I know now that he wouldn’t have fought me. The real danger was that he would have just smashed his stick over my head. He was smart enough to send a rookie a message without breaking his hand.
So McCarty figured out who I was pretty early because I knocked on his door, so to speak. I remember after the scrimmage that my pal Kris Draper talked to me about it in the locker room. He was very close to Mac, and played on the Grind Line with him and Kirk Maltby. On any other team, they’d have been the top line. Now Drapes was chuckling—with me, and at me. “You really picked the right guy to go after. You’re going to wake up the sleeping bear and you better be ready.”
I was ready. I wasn’t so stupid and reckless to think that if I went after a guy like Mac I wouldn’t need to keep my head up. And I wasn’t going after him because I thought he’d never have any interest in mixing it up with me. I was just trying to get a job in the NHL.
Mac wasn’t going to let that go and got me back. He’d make me fill up his water bottle with Gatorade during practice, or ask me to go start his car after it. At training camp the following season, he took a run at me. I understood why he was doing it, and it never affected me. It was all part of the game. And if Darren McCarty held a grudge against me for the next ten years because of the way I played against him that day back in September 2001, I don’t blame him. But I wouldn’t change a thing. Because it worked.
2
CINCINNATI KID
On October 12, 2001, I was sent back to Cincinnati. I think now that the Red Wings initially had no plans for me to be on their team, but I changed that at training camp, and now they had to do the math and work me in. So getting sent down was part of the numbers game that is professional sports. There are more than a few guys who “coulda, shoulda” made it, but the math just didn’t work out.
I went back to the Cincinnati Mighty Ducks full of confidence. I’d proven that I could play in the NHL, and I’d also made $40,000, which was almost as much as I’d make all year in the AHL, where my salary was $48,500. Usually it was the assistant GM who delivered the news that a guy was going down, but Kenny Holland, the Wings GM, did it himself because he wanted to assure me that this Cincinnati assignment was temporary. I would be back with the big club soon, he said, and I believed him.
The Cincinnati Mighty Ducks are an oddity: half the guys on it are Anaheim prospects, hence the team name. The other half are Detroit guys. Not a lot of teams were splitting farm teams in those days, and it d
efinitely affected chemistry. If a guy scored and he was in the Anaheim organization and you were a Red Wing, it didn’t fire you up as much as if he was a Detroit player. You could also see the difference in the directions of the teams. Anaheim had a lot of Russians in Cincinnati, while Detroit left their Europeans at home and put the North American kids on the farm team. Detroit was smarter than everyone else and didn’t buy into the theory that Europeans had to learn the grittier NHL game in the minors.
There are twenty-three guys on the team, and twenty of us are under the age of twenty-two. We all live in the same apartment complex, and my roommate is John Wikström, from Lulea, Sweden. He’s a giant—a six-foot-five defenseman who can actually skate. He’s also a great guy: he can party like a Hall of Famer, and he’s single, so he likes talking to the ladies, and they like talking to him.
Our routine is hard, hard living. You wake up, you practice, you work out, and by noon you’ve banged out four or five hours of work. Then you eat, nap, and go out and pretty much be a college kid, even though I had never been to college—except as the guest of some hockey-loving college girl.
I have a girlfriend back in Canada. Her name is Sarah Schill, and she’s a tall, athletic beauty from Kitchener, Ontario. Her brother Jonathan was my line-mate in Kingston, a very talented player who just didn’t have the desire to make the NHL. While I’m in the U.S.A., Sarah is living with my parents, Al and Marlene, in Toronto. She’s doing a physio degree at Ryerson, and with my schedule here—we practice all day, every day, except Monday, we’re on the bus Thursday for a road trip, then we’re back Sunday—I don’t get to see her much at all. We talk on the phone—remember kids, no FaceTime or Skype yet—and I miss her, but I can’t do anything about that except quit and go home, and that’s not in the cards.
Sarah was my first love, really. But I’d never seen anything of the world, and I knew that I wanted to experience as much as I could and that the NHL was my best shot at doing that. I was a guy from suburban Ontario who was good at hockey, who met a nice girl from a good family, and I was with her until the moment my life started to change. By that I mean that my aspirations started to change. I no longer just wanted to be a good NHL player. I wanted to live the good life. I wanted to take advantage of the world that being a professional athlete offered.
And I don’t mean by going on some kind of sexual rampage. I mean, the distance from Sarah made me understand the DNA of a relationship, and as I was going forward as a pro I realized that I wasn’t the kind of guy to get married at twenty-one and settle down. My priority is to have the best NHL career I possibly can, and Sarah knew it, too.
Cincinnati is a rough town, a hard-drinking place with a pretty stark racial divide. It’s right on the Kentucky border, so it’s where the South begins. We’d go to the casinos in the Bluegrass State and I’d see that segregation was alive and well in the U.S.A., with black people and white people living on opposite sides of an invisible line. Cincinnati is a football town, not a hockey town, and we’d be lucky to seat 2,500 fans in our arena which could hold 11,000—hard-core Slapshot type fans. There were nice booster-club ladies making us Rice Krispie squares for road trips. The college girls in Cincinnati didn’t know who we were, but we were young white guys who had some money, and so they gave us the time of day (or night). I didn’t enjoy my stay there as much as some guys did, because I was focused on getting back to Detroit. The guys who enjoyed it too much remained AHL Mighty Ducks a lot longer than they would have liked.
Chris O’Sullivan was one of those AHL lifers. He had elite-level skill and could have easily been an NHL defenseman if he had wanted to be one. I mean, he played some in the NHL, but he was pulling down $250,000 a year in the minors playing hockey and having a good time. Not exactly a life of misery. Chris was a great guy, and good for him, but that wasn’t the life for me.
There is one very good thing about Cincinnati and that is our coach, Mike Babcock. No one knew then that he would go on to be a superstar in his own right, winning Stanley Cups and World Cups and Olympic gold medals. We just knew he was a no-nonsense Saskatchewan boy who could play the game well enough to know his way around the minors. Babcock is not a giant—six feet, about 220 pounds—but he has a gigantic presence, and during my time in Cincinnati he was like a lunatic compared to what any of us had been used to. I had never seen a coach like him before, had never seen players respond to or fear a coach like they did Babs. We were mesmerized by him as a group, because while his professional hockey résumé wasn’t anything to humble us, his coaching ascent was incredible. I don’t think anyone has risen so fast to the top as Babs did, and that’s because he knew what he wanted and he had the talent to get it out of his players. He was focused on bringing it every single day, and he was as hard as he wanted to be on us, because he was just as hard on himself. He was being judged not just on his coaching but on his development of us, on making sure that the big club’s investment in us would pay off. I really liked him, and saw my time in Cincinnati as a kind of blessing.
Mike Babcock was a great teacher. We listened to him, even if we didn’t always understand him. He’d speak of “tracking through the middle,” and we’d be scratching our heads. Then he’d explain. “Think of yourselves as a laser beaming in on the puck—you attack it and steal it back, like a thief.” The possession game was his baby, and he made you see it in your mind’s eye so you could do it on the ice. He wasn’t trying to teach us to be like Gretzky; he was trying to teach us to see the game like Gretzky saw it. He walked us through visualizing the whole game before we played it. He was brilliant.
Babs was also a kind of pioneer, since he was at the beginning of the wave of young coaches coming from the American League to the NHL. Before that, NHL teams who had fired their coach and needed another one would just recycle some old crony they’d played with back in the days of black-and-white TVs.
And the reason players feared Babs was that he coached us all on level ice. By that I mean he didn’t care if you were a first-round pick or not drafted at all. What he cared about was how serious you were about being the best that you could be, and if you dogged it, he’d bury you deep in the minors. He was coaching to win.
I think Babcock took his AHL responsibilities more seriously than any other AHL coach did. He was thinking big things. Of course, I wasn’t thinking that he’d be a great NHL coach someday because I didn’t know what a great NHL coach was at that point. But I was going to learn soon enough. One day after a practice in Cincinnati, as I’m heading off the ice sweaty and exhausted, Mike Babcock pulls me aside. “You’re going back to Detroit, Aves,” he says, as if this is a regular thing. I found Babs’s timing hilarious, as he ground me through an AHL practice first, when clearly he already knew I was going up to the NHL. He was putting his stamp on the product that he was sending up to the big leagues. He was trying to make me a better player, and also, to protect his own reputation. That’s classic Babs.
All I knew at that moment was that I was going back up to where I believed I belonged and was never planning on coming back to Cincinnati.
3
SHOWTIME
It’s December 19, 2001, when I make my NHL debut. Sixteen years after I first decided I would be an NHL player I am pulling on Detroit’s famous jersey and skating out as part of the team for a home game against Vancouver.
So you might think that I’m floating on the pure joy of having made my goal. Well, yes and no. I felt excitement, to be sure, but I would describe it as “controlled nerves.” I knew I didn’t need to put all my hopes and dreams into the first game, because that was way too much pressure. I needed to stay focused, to do something that made sure Detroit wouldn’t send me back to Cincinnati. I think most guys embrace that first NHL game as if it’s the end of the journey—a “now I can die happy” kind of thing. I didn’t have that mentality because I had no plans to die, and to be honest I don’t even know that any accomplishment would have kept me happy fo
r long.
The lights were brighter because the game was on TV, the rink was immaculate, and the jerseys and our gear were perfectly laid out as though we were in some kind of magic temple. It was like arriving in hockey utopia.
I needed to throw everything out there, no feeling it out, no playing a little bit nervous, no staring awestruck into the stands thinking, “Hey there, Detroit fans, you who have seen more Hall of Famers than I have seen years, look at me—I am an NHLer!” Nope. I played my first game in the NHL just like I played my 200th. OK, maybe once in the warm-up I let myself think how cool this is that I’m finally here, but then it was back to the job at hand: now that I’m here, I’m staying.
My NHL debut is also made, not so much easier, but more comfortable because I know many of the guys on the team from my previous training camps with the Wings. Hull, Yzerman, Chelios, and Shanahan are like my wicked uncles and start grinding on me right away. They joked that Scotty Bowman talked me up before I arrived, saying, “We’ve got this guy who scored thirty goals in peewee and he’s going to add something to the lineup.” And I laughed, too. I would have laughed at anything. Because Brett Hull was my teammate. I was sitting in the dressing room with a guy who I’d previously only seen on a poster on my bedroom wall.
Of course, Scotty never said a word to me before my first game. But the fact that all these Hall of Famers were hearing about me before my debut seemed like a pretty good sign. I would come to learn that Scotty would talk crazy like that, but it was never because he liked to hear himself speak. Scotty, who’d fractured his skull when he got whacked in the head while playing junior (it ended his hockey career), always looked as if he were communing with invisible forces, his gaze shifting from you to the superior intelligence of the aliens he was exploring hockey strategies with. Part of it was the head injury, part of it was the radio waves from the Mothership.