by Sean Avery
There were a lot of guys they could have brought up or traded for at that point in the season to a team with nine future Hall of Famers on it, and so the fact that they chose me told me that the Red Wings’ brain trust—and it was a brain trust, with Kenny Holland and Jimmy Devellano and Scotty Bowman three of the smartest guys I’ve ever met—thought I was one of those chemicals in the Red Wings potion that could keep the magic going.
Jimmy D also created a very strong support system for the big team. He would identify the young prospects, and then come down to Cincinnati a few times a year to see us. He also talked to us in training camp. He would take us out for breakfast before the morning skate, and the conversation would be aimed more at finding out what makes this kid tick than what kind of skates I liked. “What do you like to do away from the game?” he asked me. “Prepare for the next one,” is what I told him. There is really no point in being completely honest with management.
I think Devellano was ultimately the decision-maker on whether a certain player was going to fit into the organization’s big plan, whether the player was going to represent the team and fall into line with what they were doing. I would also learn, with gratitude, that while Jimmy D didn’t tolerate fools, he believed in second chances. The Red Wings would give me more than a few.
And now they were giving me my big chance. It wasn’t like they were desperate. We are at the top of the NHL at this point in the season, with sixty-five points, though on a bit of a slide. In the ten games before I’m called up, the Wings have three wins, two ties, and five losses.
You don’t get to be a dynasty with lazy thinking, and Scotty Bowman was not only a great thinker, but a great psychologist. He could read people and situations and use the data however he needed to use it. He must have felt a crash coming, and so he brought me up.
One of the best things about my first NHL game was that my parents, Al and Marlene, got to be there. For years they’d hauled me all over the country to pursue my hockey dreams, but we didn’t have any kind of Hallmark conversation about how great it was to be playing my first NHL game. I know that they were nervous, too, though. I mean, I’m still their little boy, who they suffered with when I was told I’d never make it and encouraged when I said that I would. Never, ever, did they doubt me. So they know how much this means. Nothing to be said, really, until it’s done.
I had seventeen shifts and ten minutes of ice time in that first game, which was just fine with me. I could have had one shift and I would have been happy. While I didn’t score—hell, I didn’t even get a shot on net— I knew when it was over that I could play in the NHL. And we beat Vancouver 4–1.
After the game, I met up with my parents, who definitely played it cool, even though I know they were pretty pumped up. They were feeling my mood, and my mood after the game was that I wanted to play another one. But I was concerned about whether I would get the chance. I could be sent down, depending on what plans the Wizard Bowman had up his sleeve.
But I was not sent down, and with me in the lineup, the Wings had seven wins, one tie, and one loss before we met Vancouver again. It was in this game that I think I showed the Red Wings just what I could do for the team in the run to the playoffs.
We were losing 3–0 to Vancouver before the first period was out, so with just over a minute left in the period, Scotty puts me out on the ice. Why does Bowman send out a guy like me? He doesn’t have to tell me. He just taps me on the shoulder. The Canucks’ captain, Trevor Linden, is also out there.
I had no plans to fight Linden before that game. I mean, I was way too nervous. Hockey fights may look like good clean fun, but trust me, picking a fight with an elite athlete is not for the faint of heart. Later in my career I would look at the schedule in September and know who I was going to be fighting in a game in February. But not that night. And no one really ever planned to fight Trevor Linden anyway.
I had followed him as a kid, and thought of him as Captain Canada, even though I didn’t model myself after him or his game. Chelly thought he was soft, but Linden had been chosen second overall in the 1988 NHL Entry Draft and had quickly become the darling of the Canucks and their fans. He was a great member of the Vancouver community, doing charity stuff and being nice to kids and old ladies and dogs. The guy even had dimples.
That was the perfect climate for me to strike. I must have rubbed every single player on Vancouver the wrong way during that first period. This is exactly the kind of thing I was good at in junior, and it was working here. I was a motormouth from the minute the game started. I was yapping at everybody, from the bench, on the ice. I definitely did research before the game—I mean, I was a fan of the NHL. I knew who I was playing against. For instance, the Canucks had Matt Cooke in their lineup, and I had played against him in junior. He was the same chickenshit player in the NHL as he was in junior and I was all over him.
“You have seriously bad shit running in your blood!” is what I kept yelling at Cooke, because I did think the guy was more than an agitator—I thought he was downright dirty. (See what I mean about unwritten rules? I have my own.) I remember the Canucks’ Ed Jovanovski laughing about me with Kirk Maltby after a whistle, as in “Where the fuck did you find this kid Avery?”
Most fans think that opposing NHLers are at war from the anthem to the final buzzer, and I guess it’s true that there’s pretty much no one you wouldn’t run over if you caught him with his head down. There’s a whole list of guys who’ve dropped the gloves with their own brothers. But the guys all know each other from junior or from playing together over the years. When we’re yapping at each other on the ice it’s not always trash-talking. I’ve heard everything on the ice from guys doing deals to buy boats off each other to asking if they could get the hot cousin’s phone number. Or planning to meet up for a drink after the game at a peeler bar if the visiting team’s travel sked allows.
But I was not inviting Linden out for a beer. I took a run at him and whacked him a few times. Linden, as captain, decides to put me in my place. Now this is almost unheard of, the team captain fighting a rookie like me. Veterans actually consider it a favor to the younger guy to do him the honor of punching him in the face. I’m serious. But the captain sets the tone for the team. I guess Linden thought the Canucks had heard enough from me, but I was actually surprised when he dropped the gloves. He caught me off guard at first and I had to scramble to get traction in this tilt.
Linden may seem to be a bit of a choirboy, but he’s six-four and when he gets a fistful of my sweater and starts in on me, I know I’m in a real fight. We went back and forth pretty good, and then when he missed with a right, his momentum pitched him forward and I yanked him down and threw another right for good measure. The fight ended with Linden on the ice and me being hauled away by the linesman and the Detroit fans in the Joe Louis Arena cheering as if I was the Brown Bomber himself. The Fox Sports guys calling the game said this was exactly what the Wings needed, and that “Sean Avery knew that.”
They were right, because my fight with Linden woke us all up. Chelios, Shanahan, Hull, and Yzerman are all slapping me on the back and yelling at the team to follow my lead and take it up a level, and we won that game 4–3 in overtime. I didn’t put the puck in the net but I have no doubt that my six minutes and eleven seconds of ice time made a difference. I could only hope that Scotty Bowman and Ken Holland were saying that this kid has something that most don’t.
• • •
I stayed with the Wings for a month, but I had been called up because of injuries to other guys. A dirty little secret of professional sports is that guys in the minors don’t mind when guys on the big team get hurt because it means we get a chance. And then kaboom, I got sent down again to Cincinnati because Igor Larionov and Darren McCarty came back and there wasn’t much I could do about that. To be honest, I wouldn’t have been unhappy if McCarty had been hurt for the entire season—not to wish him ill, but so I could have cemented my
spot on the Grind Line with Drapes and Maltby. You do your best, and you’re even good enough to stay up with the big club, but the math and the medics get in your way when a guy comes back from injury.
It was a punch in the gut to get sent down, but I returned to the Wings for the last three months of the 2001–02 season and, by the way, we won the Stanley Cup.
I would not be sent down again. By March 2002, I’ve been with the team for three months and am getting comfortable with the rhythms of the big time—everything taken care of, from the best coaching and equipment to player maintenance, to pre-game and post-game meals, to luxurious charter flights and swank hotels. I am still this kid from Scarborough, Ontario, who has to pinch himself to make sure it’s not a dream.
On any given day you would walk into the dressing room and a Red Wing legend like Ted Lindsay would be working out. I’d ride the bike beside Lindsay for half an hour, and then spot him on the bench press. He had to have been seventy-five years old then, but he was in great shape.
The traditional rules that were part of other organizations—rules saying that nobody could hang around the team at any point and that the dressing room was off-limits—were not in play in Hockeytown. Detroit was an organization that understood what it really took to win.
Scotty Bowman and Steve Yzerman weren’t concerned on any level that Terrible Ted Lindsay was in the weight room on the day of a game. It wasn’t even a question, because they knew it wasn’t going to make a difference in how we played. As a player, I was starting to understand what the league was about, as taught to me by the Red Wings. When you’ve played in Detroit and you move on to other places you have to bury your knowledge deep, because when you see the bullshit these other organizations pretend to worry about and how petty it becomes, you know a good team doesn’t care about stuff like that. Because you’ve been on one and seen it work.
On March 2, 2002, a Saturday afternoon game in Pittsburgh that was being beamed out to millions on NBC, we were leading 2–1 with five minutes on the clock. In a situation like that, every bounce seems to go to the other team. But this one went my way. The Penguins were trying to carry the puck out of their zone when we came in hard on the forecheck—three of us on two Penguins—and Tomas Holmström digs the puck out from a scrum.
It pops onto my stick just about even with the dot in the face-off circle to the goalie’s right, and I take a couple of strides, but my shooting angle is one for magicians—because now I’m on the goal line. Even so, the mantra that “you can’t score if you don’t shoot” has been drilled into my head since I was a little kid, so I shoot, from the goal line, about fifteen feet to the right of the Penguins’ goalie, Jean-Sébastian Aubin. And amazingly, he’s drifting away to his left, assuming that I’m going to pass, and the puck hits him and bounces in the net.
I have my first NHL goal. I celebrate it like I’m eight years old, because I’ve imagined this moment since I was eight years old and played my first hockey game. It’s not a meaningless goal, either, as it puts the game into the safe zone for us, and it gives me street cred with fans in Canada and the U.S.A. who are watching and who maybe now think that yes, Sean Avery can play in the NHL.
And yes, we pay attention to fans. Not only in the arena, but those watching on TV. On that Saturday afternoon in March there is no Google yet, no livestreaming of games on Twitter, no watching on demand. We were definitely aware when a game was going to be aired across the country on TV, and we’d let our friends and family know. I’d called my grandmother in Florida and told her to tune in to see her grandson do what he always told her he would, and when I score, I think of her, cheering at her television, cheering for me. I know how proud she is, and that’s even better than the goal.
The guys on the team are very happy for me, and when we land back in Detroit they have a special treat for me: we’re going to the Flight Club.
The Flight Club is a self-described gentleman’s club on Michigan Avenue, about a fifteen-minute drive from the airport. It’s huge—10,000 square feet on two levels, with a purple 1967 Corvette that drops out of the ceiling (that would be the flight part of the club . . .) when any one of the 300 dancers is onstage getting into her birthday suit.
So me and my first NHL goal puck and the Red Wings are frolicking about in this massive peeler bar and I’m on the stage with three naked ladies blowing bubbles out of a bubble gun and singing along to “Celebration” by Madonna (perfect, right?) when Joey Kocur tells me to follow him as fast as I can move. So I do, and we run smack into the district attorney, who has come into the Flight Club to get us the hell out of there before the cops raid it.
We make it out, and it’s all over the news the next day that twenty-two people were arrested by Wayne County sheriff’s deputies who “found the club in violation of state liquor laws and a judicial order that prohibited lap dancing and other sex acts.” But there’s not a word about the Red Wings being on the premises.
• • •
A week later, on Saturday, March 9, we’re on ABC for another afternoon game, this one at the Scottrade Center in St. Louis. People are saying that the 2002 Detroit Red Wings could be the most talented team since the 1984 Oilers—the team that iced Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Grant Fuhr, and Paul Coffey, and were coached by Glen Sather—or even the 1972 Canadiens—who had Ken Dryden, Guy Lafleur, Jacques Lemaire, and Larry Robinson, and were coached by Scotty Bowman. Both of those coaches would have a huge influence on me and my career.
There’s a reason an undrafted twenty-one-year-old kid is on this team of superstars. I worked harder than anyone to get here, and my job is to keep the seasoned vets on their toes when an eighty-two-game season gets boring and they need a little energy. Which is exactly what is called for when we find ourselves in a 2–2 tie early in the second period and somehow Sean Avery and Tyson Nash are lining up against each other at center ice.
Nash has become the most hated player in the NHL because he’s good at what he does, which is getting under the skin of his opponents, who then retaliate and wind up in the penalty box. You can’t do that job if people don’t hate you. Nash ends up in the box too, but he’s shrewd about it and usually brings someone whose ice presence is more valuable than his is into the box with him. But there’s a new kid in town, and I am about to introduce myself to the NHL’s reigning agitator.
I want to fight this guy. Yapping at him isn’t enough. I would lose credibility if I didn’t fight him in that game. So I say hello to Mr. Nash, and we drop our gloves.
I have my right hand tied up so I drop my chin into my right shoulder, unleash a six-pack of quick lefts, and down goes Nash. When Hull and Chelios and Shanahan and Federov and Maltby and Draper and Hašek and six other superstars tell me “Great fight!” at the end of the game it makes me feel like I’m getting closer to being a true NHLer.
I can’t remember my first hockey fight. There have been quite a few of them. It was certainly when I was a kid, and we swiped at each other’s face masks until we eventually figured out how to pry them off. And it just went on from there. You play hard and fast, you collide, you have weapons in your hands, things happen. And sometimes in a game, you need a tilt to make things happen.
When I think about fighting in hockey, I think about the five-division world boxing champion Floyd Mayweather. By no means am I comparing myself to “Money” Mayweather, even though we’re about the same size and weight, but I always agreed with his fighting approach and tried to run my hockey fights the same way. I made the decision early on that I wasn’t going to stand there and get punched. In the best-case scenario, I was going to win without ever having to throw or take a punch by getting inside their heads. But if you have to hit, then hit first, hit hard, and don’t fight battles you have zero chance of winning.
Why do hockey players fight? Well, partly because you see the pros do it when you’re a kid, and partly because sometimes you get hit so hard or a guy says something so f
oul that you just want to smack him. Your adrenaline is on overdrive, and it unleashes its power through your fists.
And why is hockey the only sport that allows players to fight without kicking them out of the arena? Fair question. I’ve never seen a fan leave the rink in the middle of a fight, so that’s probably the answer. Fans love it, so owners love it, and I can tell you that players love it. There are plenty of good arguments against fighting, and I’m not saying they’re wrong. But players will do anything to get a bit of jump in their game. You see guys on the bench take smelling salts to wake them up and clear their heads. Watching your teammate put it all on the line is an even more powerful rush than that. Fighting is like a drug.
Scotty Bowman pulled me aside one day in practice and said, “Don’t ever fight when we’re winning games. That’s the moment you put yourself at risk of hurting us.” I had never really heard that idea before and I readily agreed. I don’t know a time that I ever fought when we were winning a game. As an agitator, being in the lead gave me leverage, because guys on the other team would want to fight and I would say no, then give them a poke with my stick and try to draw them into taking a penalty. Fighting is all about feel—the physical feel of anticipation and delivery, and the feel of deciding when and who to fight. In theory, you can’t lose a fight if you fight a bigger guy, but theory is no good when you’re on the receiving end of a thumping. You don’t get applause from the crowd for getting the shit beat out of you by a guy that’s bigger. I always picked guys that I knew I could beat.