Ice Capades
Page 5
When the Wings would go to Chicago we’d always stay in the Drake Hotel. The lobby bar is full of groupies, who don’t take money for sex, and hookers, who do. I think sometimes guys would rather take the hooker for a ride because it’s easier, and safer. Groupies knew where we ate and drank and would show up in bars and restaurants to make their pitch, and I’ve never seen a guy get upset with a groupie. I’ve also never seen a player judge another guy because he goes off with a groupie. It’s not like the Hollywood cliché where the dumb jock has to chase the girl for two years to get her attention. Quite the opposite. And sometimes a groupie ends up marrying a player. Many an NHL superstar has wound up happily married to a groupie. And the more that I think about it, marrying a woman who loves the game is a bonus.
Marriage, no matter how you get there—high school sweetheart, groupie—is a job, and you need to work hard at it. I didn’t want to commit my twenty-two-year-old self to a job that stopped me from being free to do the job I wanted more, which was playing in the NHL. But it didn’t mean that I was a monk, either.
The other thing I really started to enjoy about this big new world I’d entered was the chance to travel to places I’d only dreamed of being able to afford, and I discovered that I was a pretty adventurous traveler. In February 2002 the Red Wings went on a road trip to Florida, and for some insane reason that still escapes me—maybe the guys let me run with the idea as a test, I don’t really know—I came up with the idea of organizing a road trip to Miami Beach for the night.
The Panthers played out of Sunrise, Florida, which is fifty-five miles up the road and a planet away from the sand, surf, and sexiness of Miami Beach. By 12:30 P.M. on the day of the game against the Panthers I already had seventeen guys committed to the adventure, and I was chartering a bus and booking hotel rooms at the Delano South Beach in the Art Deco district. I cold-called bars and clubs until I was connected to the manager, and I told them that the Red Wings would be in town and would like to visit. Surprisingly often, the person on the other end would be from Detroit or some other NHL city and would be a hockey fan, and so now I’m reserving our tables at clubs like Mansion. I was as far from Scarborough as I had ever been, and I realized that the success of this trip would further my status among the Hall of Fame crew in Detroit. Most of these guys would just go to some industrial chain hotel and then to a hockey bar. I wanted to show them the kind I life that I wanted to lead. And I wanted to belong.
Brendan Shanahan wouldn’t commit, though, and I was upset with him, because I wanted Shanny’s approval. I wanted to show him what I could do. However, I was just learning the subtle ways of Shanny.
After a big night out in Miami Beach and a long spell staring at my breakfast because I was too hungover to eat it, we settled by the iconic Delano poolside with its cool white cabanas. We were soaking up some restorative vitamin D before we got back on the grind, with our next game three days away in Pittsburgh. At first I thought it could have been a hangover hallucination, but through the blue Miami Beach haze I saw Shanny walking toward the pool. The Red Wings’ best-dressed guy was wearing the hotel’s room slippers and a bathing suit that was not a certified Prada along with a very un-Shanny T-shirt featuring the famous smiley face logo on the front and the words “don’t worry be happy” on the back.
It was no hallucination. Shanny told me that because he’d played well the night before he decided to hail a cab and make the run to South Beach. He hadn’t packed a bag, hence the generic bathing suit and awful T-shirt, bought in a gift shop because he didn’t think people would appreciate him strolling naked into the pool. Shanny always did things on the down low and was very cool about his execution. He had a dark, cynical side to him that he hid in this man-of-the-world suit, and it amused him greatly that people bought him as an urban sophisticate, because essentially he was a goofy suburban Canadian.
It was a great two days off, and as I didn’t even have a credit card, I never got stuck with the bill. Nick Lidström would often spring for it, and Lidström putting a $7,500 bill on his credit card when he was making about $400,000 every two weeks is the equivalent of a guy who makes $5,000 every two weeks spending $100. And since we only went to LA or had a two-day layover in Miami once a year, guys were more than up for it. I soon became the team’s Maestro of Fun because these rich hockey players trusted my taste and imagination. It was that kind of thing that made the veterans look upon me as something more than just a rookie, and it made me realize that I had a talent for life beyond the walls of the arena.
5
THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON
Of course, Detroit has possibly the greatest coach in the history of the game, and Scotty Bowman is not like anyone I have ever met. One day in mid-season I had a steam bath with him and Chris Chelios and boy, was that weird—I would have said you need to adjust your meds if you’d pitched that scenario to me a year ago. Cheli and I had stayed after practice to do some extra skating because Cheli didn’t lift weights during the season, he just skated and rode the bike. A lot of guys didn’t do weights—Shanny only went into the weight room if he was pissed off about something, and I don’t think he worked out much at all compared to other NHL players. He didn’t need to, really. But Cheli was a bike hound. He rode a hole into the ground.
The hockey body—and Chelios had a perfect one—is all about the legs. From the waist up it can range from a six-pack like Cheli has to the physique of a plumber. A hockey player’s going to have skinny calves, guaranteed, but if you want to play the game at a high level, you need thighs as big as tree trunks, and a superhuman ass. There’s no way a serious hockey player can fit that ass and quads into anything off the rack. I’ve seen guys jump five feet straight up in the air in the gym—that requires an unholy amount of power. Ziggy Pálffy had the worst body I’ve ever seen on a hockey player. His chest was almost indented, he had no muscle on it at all, it seemed, and he had skinny little arms. But from his knees to his torso, he had thighs like torpedoes.
So Cheli was pounding out a “desert storm ride” inside the sauna. A desert storm ride was when Cheli would wheel an exercise bike into the sauna and ride the shit out of it in order to sweat out every drop of the toxic fluids inside his body. Now it’s 108 degrees in there and sometimes it gets up to 115 and this fucking animal is pounding intervals on the bike. And then Scotty wanders into the sauna and has suddenly become a student of Sean Avery. He wants to know what my parents did for work (my mom works for the Canadian government, helping immigrants, and my dad teaches special education), and about where I grew up, and what I liked to do for fun. I couldn’t really come clean on that without sticking Cheli in it, though I’m pretty sure Bowman knew that his three-time Norris Trophy–winning defenseman was also a superstar at debauch. Cheli is single-handedly the most badass motherfucker I have met to date in my time on this planet. And I have met a lot of badass people.
There were times when I was in Cheli’s bar at 3:30 in the morning watching him count out the take after we’d already had a very full night. The guy would count shoe boxes full of cash and then load them into the trunk of his car (Cheli had a landline installed in the Wings’ sauna in case “Bulldog,” the manager of his Cheli Chili Bars, had to get hold of him urgently). He’d give this bar cash to his wife, to run the house and feed the kids. No matter how late, or how much we’d had to drink, Cheli would drive home, and if he was earlier than 4 A.M., we’d sit outside his house and wait. I asked him why and he said, “If I get home any earlier than four then Tracee will think I’m screwing around.” As I said, hockey players are creatures of habit, and so Cheli kept a regular time to his late nights, and would always be there the next day at practice, going foot-to-the-gas, or taking one of his four kids to their sports practices. He was always the first guy at the rink and the last guy to leave, and he never had a bad game because he was too hungover or too tired.
I thought Cheli was a god, and believe me, hero worship wears off quickly in t
he NHL when you spend six solid months with guys—and longer if you go deep in the playoffs. I was one of the only guys who could keep up with Cheli—who is thirty-nine years old at this point—partly because I was twenty-one and partly because I had the “go hard” gene. What I learned in Detroit was that part of being a pro is being able to go hard on and off the ice and never letting it get the best of you. Some guys can go hard at night and come back and play harder the next day, and some guys need ten hours’ sleep a night with five meals a day. Not me. And not Cheli.
Now, I think swagger is both good and bad and needs to be controlled, but the reality is I was a little out of control when I was twenty-one. There was too much drinking, too much sitting in bars until 5 A.M., too much chasing women, and then trying to go to practice and play at an NHL level. But you know, all of that “out of control” stuff made me ornery on the ice, and so I’m sure that living like that actually helped me. I took after Cheli and made sure that nobody knew I was hungover or hurting (though they knew at times, I’m sure). The Sean Avery you think you know was a character I started to play right about now, and he was born from my desire to succeed in this league, and also from the fact that I frequently felt like shit.
• • •
I am beginning to find some chemistry on a line with Boyd Devereaux and Tomas Holmström. Homer is very similar to Nick Lidström, but a grittier “meat and spuds” version. They are best friends, and while some people might think that athletes have professional friendships because we wear the same jersey, it’s much more than that. You go through wins and losses and injuries and late nights and early mornings with these guys, and you do become a band of brothers. Sure, sometimes one of those brothers is annoying as hell, and sometimes I was that guy. But the friendships were real.
Holmström is a fun, happy guy—a great teammate, everybody likes him, and he’s a superb player. Homer uses a straight stick, which I have never seen anyone use before. I actually think his stick is curved a little bit in the opposite direction, which would make sense for his astonishing ability to tip pucks. And he can stickhandle faster than anybody I’d ever seen. He sweeps the puck toward the net, because he couldn’t snap it or it would just slide off his stick. Homer scored 243 goals in the regular season and another forty-six in the playoffs. He played fifteen seasons.
Boyd is a very interesting guy, a center who comes from a small town in Ontario, about a two-hour drive west of Toronto. He’s one of the most diehard music fans I have ever met, he goes to as many concerts a week as he can, and he especially loves Leonard Cohen. Boyd Devereaux, a straight arrow and great guy, would have a puff on a Bob Marley to enhance his musical experience.
Boyd is truly one of the nicest guys I have ever met. He has a beautiful wife, Leah, who doesn’t try to fit into the very narrow NHL wife box. She could come across as grumpy, but looking back now, I think she was quite a bit smarter than most NHL wives and didn’t have as much interest in playing “the game,” which really just means not doing or saying or even thinking anything that will embarrass your husband and his team. It’s kind of like being a political wife, though your husband can get tossed out of office not by the voters but by management.
Boyd is teaching me about music and has got me into this band called Dashboard Confessional and another called Sparta, a Texas band whose members used to play at the Drive-In. I went to see Sparta at State Theatre in Detroit, and I was amazed when I saw the crappy van in which they were traveling around the country. You really have no idea how lucky you are to be a professional athlete in one of the four major professional sports leagues. Most rock stars do not get treated as well as an NHL player does.
I’ve also met a group of girls that plays soccer at a local college and I’ve gone to some parties on campus and in the dorms, which I like, even though I feel self-conscious about not quite having finished high school. Not that I feel stupid or anything, but just that I missed out on an important part of life. It’s why I’m so keen to learn things, and why I ask so many questions.
I wasn’t thinking about going to university or anything like that, but I was curious about their world at Oakland College. I met them all at a bar in Royal Oak, a district of Detroit where a lot of college students hang out, and they invited me back to their dorm. It was a chance to hang out with girls and guys my own age, and they’d ask me about the NHL and I’d ask them about college, and we’d just be normal twenty-one-year-olds together.
One of the girls bartends at a Rick’s in Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan Wolverines. The Big Blue are a religion in this state (unless you went to Michigan State, the other college-ball religion). So I drove down to Ann Arbor to watch a college football game with the mighty Chris Chelios and the subtle future superstar Henrik Zetterberg—you know, teach the Swede some American culture—and shall we say that it was a very long day? Cheli, as I mentioned, can run social marathons on just a short nap, so after the game—and fuck me, there were a lot of people at that football game, more than 100,000—we go to Rick’s and do shots of tequila from this amazing ice sculpture that looked like that castle in Beauty and the Beast (I still can’t figure out how they built it), and then we go to a party at a sorority house, and then suddenly it’s 6 A.M. That feels like a long time ago, but I seem to remember that when you’re twenty-one, there aren’t a lot of things more fun than being a professional athlete in a sorority house.
I wonder to myself on the car ride back to the Joe if anyone is going to notice that I have the same clothes on that I wore yesterday, and I also wonder why I have more money in my pocket now than I did when we left yesterday. I can’t remember going to a bank machine; maybe I won a bet. I certainly didn’t win the tequila shooters contest. Cheli won that. To this day, I have no idea how that cash got there. Or how I made it through practice, but somehow I did.
It feels like I am unstoppable.
Less than a week after I turned twenty-two, we finished the season as the best team in the NHL and received the Presidents’ Trophy following our final game, a 5–3 loss to St. Louis at the Joe. With our 116 points, we finished eighteen points better than the Blues, and fifteen better than the next best team, Boston.
The Presidents’ Trophy has been handed out to the NHL’s best team—i.e., the one with the most points at the end of the regular season—since 1985–86, and if you don’t go on to win the Stanley Cup after winning the league, the Presidents’ Trophy is no consolation prize whatsoever. Some guys say it’s a curse, as only eight teams that have won it have gone on to win Lord Stanley’s jug. Twenty-three have not.
Winning the Presidents’ Trophy just means we have even more pressure on us as we get ready to chase those sixteen post-season Ws that allow you to hold the one trophy that you really want to raise to the hockey gods in thanksgiving, the Stanley Cup.
We’re at the end of practice and we’re working on our front net tips. This usually consists of a defenseman taking shots from the blue line while a guy stands in front of the net attempting to screen the goalie while you tip the puck. You need all kinds of jam to do this at all, let alone do it well. The puck is traveling at nearly 100 miles an hour, so you have a split second to connect with it in just the right way so that it deflects past the goalie, who you can’t see because he’s behind you, while the opposing defensemen are pounding on you.
This is one of the hardest things to do in sport and probably takes the most balls. Imagine trying to hit a fastball with a hockey stick while an MMA fighter pummels you in the back, and you get the idea. Thomas Holmström is the master of deflecting pucks. Holmström would take a beating as he fought to remain on the arch of the crease, screening the goalie until he could slice pucks out of the air like a chef dicing tomatoes into the stew pot. Get it wrong, though, and you end up with a puck in the face, which you only realize when you wake up on the ice choking on a mouthful of blood and broken teeth.
(I know the feeling firsthand, because it’s h
appened to me twice. When the puck hits you in the face it’s more of a shock than a blast of pain. The pain comes later when they put in the stitches, which have left me with two of what I now consider my most distinguished scars. It looks like I was bitten by a pit bull and he took part of my face with him to snack on later. Still, if given the choice today to be hit or not to be hit, I would say go ahead and take your best shot because it’s a very effective way of telling people that I’ve paid some dues in my professional life. And to be honest, the ladies have always liked it. So did People magazine, which named me Sexiest Scar of 2007.)
So today at practice, I’m in front of the net trying to tip pucks when Mathieu Dandeneault tees up a slap shot that catches me off guard. It hits the bone just above my skate boot and just below my shin pads. The one place where there is absolutely zero padding.
I know the moment it hits me that I’m fucked and I immediately start hobbling toward the bench. For the first time in my career I shriek in pain, a kind of wounded animal howl which gets everyone’s attention. The buzz-saw of pain is now followed by a terrible wave of nausea. Three seconds after impact an entire season flashes through my head as I puke all over the ice in front of the door that leads from the ice to the team bench. I continue vomiting as I hobble down the hallway and into the dressing room.
It was a few days before an X-ray revealed a hairline fracture of the non-weight-bearing bone in my fibula, which means I can walk without pain but it feels like a red-hot knife is skewering my leg when any pressure is applied.
I actually practiced for two days after my leg was broken. I was pretending that nothing was wrong, because I wanted to be in the lineup heading into the playoffs. How do you go from pain so intense you’re puking to pain manageable enough that you can fake your way through an NHL practice? Part of it is mental (I’m hardly the first guy to play on a broken leg). But a big part of it is pharmaceutical.