by Sean Avery
The X-rays came back looking good, and a doctor who worked for the Red Wings happened to be on call that afternoon in Detroit, so you could say that I was very lucky. Doctors who work for hockey teams are some of the best, and are usually as good with sutures as any plastic surgeon because they get a lot of practice. It took twenty-six stitches to sew my right index finger back together, and then the doctor applied a finger splint with a pretty substantial bandage wrapped around it. I was to go back to the doctor in a couple of days to see if I could have the stitches removed.
(Usually stitches should be removed three or four days after they sew you up, otherwise the skin will start to heal overtop the sutures. It’s very painful when you remove them too late because you basically need to cut the skin again so you can dig them out. You always want to take stitches out the day before you think they’re ready, when the skin is still pink and tender with a little bit of blood still oozing from the cut. Not pretty, but true.)
The deal we had with the Mechanics was that we would get paid per game, and Cheli didn’t think it was reasonable for me to expect to collect if I didn’t play. We were now winning most of our games, and this was going to be a $7,500 weekend if we won all three games. So I decided to play.
I was planning to keep my game to the perimeter and avoid scrums and chippy stuff, and I had to wrap my hand with a little more padding to make sure it was protected. The Mechanics’ equipment guy (I love equipment guys, they’re the best, everywhere) also figured out a way to make the finger on my glove a bit roomier so that I could fit the extra padding around my mangled finger. I played in all three games, and we won two, lost one. The $5,800 makes my finger feel much better.
My heart, though, is hurting. Rachel hasn’t come to Detroit while I’ve been playing here. Even though we haven’t been a couple all that long—less than a year—I can feel that the end is near. Part of me wants our relationship to end, but part of me wants it to last forever. This has been a tough time for me to be in a relationship, and it’s not going to get any easier. I decide to do the decent thing and tell her she should carry on with her life without me as her partner. The lockout is still on, but I know that it won’t last forever, and I need to focus on training and getting ready for the 2005–06 NHL season, if there is one. Rachel isn’t surprised by my offer, and she isn’t angry about it either. She feels the same way. She is very wise, and very nurturing, and very clear-eyed about where we are both going as people. I was the first person she’d been with since Rod, and she didn’t take that lightly, nor did I. We remained friends. Later I would wind up living one street away from Rachel and the kids, and I would go to see them regularly.
• • •
I keep playing in Detroit, and I keep watching Cheli and how he works—not on the ice, but off it. He’s really dedicated himself to the lockout negotiations, but his superhuman energy has not been engaged in negotiating with the league. Instead he has focused on trying to control all the back-door negotiations going on in our own union. Guys are holding separate “unofficial” talks with the NHL and the owners, and it’s weakening our cause.
I was beside Cheli while he was in the thick of things, and he told me everything. He uncovered a lot of information as he tried to police a group that had gone rogue—guys who were having secret talks that didn’t align with the membership. He hired lawyers at his own expense, he tried to subpoena NHLPA email records, and he flew all over the country to talk to guys. The beautiful thing about it was that this superstar was doing it all for the average player, and aside from the lawyers he hired, there was no one helping him. It was like a street fight, with Cheli on one side and the rogues on the other.
Trevor Linden was at the forefront of the rogues, and Trent Klatt, my teammate in LA, was somewhere in the middle, though he sided with Cheli in the end.
I implicitly trust Shanny, but it might have been that other guys in the room didn’t feel the same way. Was he smarter than all of us and just trying to bridge the gap between reality and hope by working both sides of the room—the NHL and the NHLPA? Maybe. I don’t know. But at the time Cheli perceived this group of players as being too friendly with the NHL and therefore damaging our bargaining unity. Whatever Shanny did hurt his friendship with Chelios beyond repair. They played hard whenever they were on the ice together, but off the ice they were estranged.
• • •
June 2005 comes and goes, and it’s the first time since 1919 that there has been no Stanley Cup Final. The league and the union still have not agreed on a deal, but I know that the players will cave if it comes down to us going back to work in September or not. The media has been full of “the sky is falling” reports that fans will be lost and that it will take years to restore our “brand,” but I don’t believe that. The lockout has made people realize that they follow the NHL because they love it. You always want the fans to love the game as much as you do.
But what people don’t realize is the toll the lockout takes on the players. Marriages and relationships start to crumble under the stress. A player’s whole domestic life has been built on the rhythm of him being away—at practice, at games, at home and on the road—and now the radical change in that rhythm has forced all kinds of adjustments that are a struggle for many. I don’t know anyone who got divorced right after the lockout, but I know that when we had these NHLPA meetings guys were clearly expressing their frustration: “My wife doesn’t know what to do with me. My wife is going to kill me. I don’t know what to do with me.” That kind of thing, from all over the league, and it became sort of a running joke, whenever it could be inserted in a conversation: “If this lockout doesn’t end soon, I’m going to wind up divorced.”
I know of a few players who had to go to a company in Florida which was loaning guys cash and using their guaranteed contracts as collateral—not guys making the NHL minimum, either, but guys who were making millions and living the high life. Talk about risky, because who knows what will happen to those contracts once we settle?
The only thing that I think players would fight for until the end of time is to keep guaranteed contracts. Your career can be over in a flash because of the kind of work you’ve been hired to do. It’s immoral and certainly should be illegal to cut a guy loose from his contract because he was too injured to continue, or because a labor dispute changed the game.
But from where I sit in June of 2005, I know more than ever that players will never beat the owners in a work stoppage. It would be the worst bet to take in the history of gambling.
13
A NEW LIFE IN PARADISE
There’s no time like being out of work and filled with doubts to end a relationship and move, but now that Rachel and I had parted company, I had to move out of her house. I didn’t have much stuff—I can fit my life into a bag. Rachel was away in New Zealand with the kids for a work-vacation, so the place was empty. It hit me hard, because I loved her, and I didn’t know if I was making the right decision. We didn’t break up because we had lost that love, we broke up because of circumstance. I needed to bear down and get even more focused for the future. I had just lost a year of my career, and the average length of a pro hockey career is five or six seasons. So possibly a fifth of my career. If you work for forty years in a profession, it’s like saying goodbye to eight of them. I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself at all, but I had a pretty damn strong sense of urgency to get back to the thing that gave me meaning: my game.
I rented a room in the Sunset Marquis in Hollywood, which is a rock ’n’ roll hotel with a very different LA style from the Chateau Marmont. It was a temporary stop until I found a house to buy.
I know—I’ve just said how tight money is and how worried I am about the future, but I had made the decision I was going to buy a house because I had to do something to give myself some stability. And there are now noises that we’ll be getting a settlement before the summer is out. The NHL can’t afford to blow two seasons. No one c
an. And owning property is an investment.
I have a budget of $800,000 and I’ve asked my broker to show me some homes in Laurel Canyon in the shimmering hills of West Hollywood. Laurel Canyon was made famous by the music scene of the 1970s with the Doors and Joni Mitchell and CSNY and Bob Dylan and all those who wanted to be just like them calling the place home. Laurel Canyon has its own trippy energy, perfumed by the incense burning from all the cool little cottages that dot the neighborhood.
What I got was a Spanish-style casa hanging over the Canyon, with a giant deck that overlooked the City of Angels. I loved it. I had already decided I was going to do the forty-minute drive to the Kings’ practice rink in El Segundo and the twenty-minute drive to Staples Center where we played our games. I mean, you have to drive everywhere in LA anyway, right? Luc Robitaille was the only other King who lived outside Manhattan Beach, and no King has ever lived in the hills of Laurel Canyon. I had a feeling my teammates would think I was trying to make some kind of statement—they lived within a six-block radius of each other. I was wrong about that. The Kings were very happy to have me there because they now had a place to crash after a late night in town. Who wants to drive to Manhattan Beach when you can stay with me? I guess I have a chip on my shoulder even when it comes to real estate.
Once I moved to Laurel Canyon I started to hang out with a new group of friends who lived there, or nearby. I was becoming particularly close with a young couple, Elisha Cuthbert and Trace Ayala. I was introduced to them by my friend Cody Leibel, who was living the kind of life of excess that you read about in lifestyle magazines or LA novels. Cody had become known around town as a “whale.” A whale is a guy who rolls into a club or restaurant or casino and drops big cash—I mean, big as in $100,000—in a few hours. If you think money can’t buy friends, you’ve never met a whale.
But Cody is not your typical whale. That is, he’s not a self-absorbed, entitled jackass. He’s a very personable guy, and because of his whale wattage, he’s become friends with a number of celebrities, including Trace and Elisha, and Trace’s best friend Justin Timberlake, who also lived at the top of Mulholland Drive.
Trace had been dating Elisha for a few years, and they were now engaged. They lived together a few streets away from me, just behind the Chateau Marmont. I spent a lot of time hanging out with them, cooking BBQ at their house or mine, watching Justin record at the studio, and hitting the nightclubs—the kind of passing-the-time-LA-stuff that you do when you’re all in your mid-twenties and life has not yet let you know how fast time actually passes.
The house party is also an LA social event, and I went to one at Paris Hilton’s house that summer which turned out to be memorable, and expensive.
Paris lived in a 1920s Spanish-style casa, perched just above the Sunset Strip on North Kings Road and decorated in “Haute Paris” style—photos of her everywhere, a stripper pole in the living room, and, of course, a swimming pool out back.
When we arrived and were introduced, Paris couldn’t believe how perfect my ass was (yes, this is the alternate universe that LA can quickly become). She wanted to know how a man could have such a perfect ass without the aid of some sort of butt implant, which was then starting to gain popularity in LA. And yes, I was wearing clothes.
So in the spirit of scientific inquiry, Paris wanted her assistant to slap my ass to see if it was real. I told her, sure, no problem, but in return, I would get to slap the female assistant’s ass as well. It was a deal.
So I let the assistant slap my ass and before she could conclude that it was indeed as nature made it, I pulled my hand back, and instead of slapping the assistant’s ass, I gave a healthy, firm, and flirtatious slap to Paris’s ass.
I didn’t realize how fragile she was, and the slap—trust me, it was not anything close to an NHL love tap—kind of stunned her, and her eyes started to well up with tears.
It was as if the upstart peasant had just struck the queen of France.
Her assistant open-hand slapped me across the face. I laughed this off, and apologized to Paris, when suddenly, in mid-apology, I get slapped again by the guy she was dating at the time, who must have realized that he looked like a complete pussy and was drunk enough to have the balls to swat me.
I remember laughing and thinking to myself that this had really gotten out of hand very quickly all because of my hockey ass, then suddenly I hear a thump. Trace had jumped to my defense and thrown a right hand off the side of Paris’s boyfriend’s head and was now grimacing in pain. I knew where this was going next.
So, seventeen hours later, I’m sitting in the hospital emergency room with Elisha when the doctor emerged to explain to us that the surgery on Trace’s hand had gone well, and that the cast would need to be on for six weeks to let the screw in his thumb set properly.
I really think that the $12,000 Elisha had to spend on Trace’s surgery was the beginning of the end of their relationship. I think it scared her to realize how all the financial responsibility was probably going to land on her, and that eventually being Justin Timberlake’s best friend did not pay the bills. And that she wanted a guy who was more than the best pal of a celebrity.
This is when Elisha and I started to fall in love without even really knowing it.
Even so, I head to Memphis to hang out with Trace and his family on the Fourth of July weekend. To see the heart of America on the most patriotic weekend of the year was a beautiful thing. As a professional athlete you’re sheltered from the middle class, even though almost all of us are from the middle class. We stop camping and become snobs—I mean, anything less than four stars in a hotel constitutes camping. Our reality becomes foggy from the fast ride we’re on and we don’t remind ourselves where we came from, or that we could be back there pretty damn soon if things don’t work out.
So a weekend like this was a welcome change from my high-speed LA life. We spent some time at Justin Timberlake’s family home, and seeing one of the biggest stars in the world being so comfortable in his small town, dancing around a fire and eating BBQ with his family and best friend, is something I’ll never forget. He lived on planet Earth, and his family is the reason why.
But it does bother me to think about Trace opening up his family and friends to me knowing in my heart what was coming next. Part of the reason why Elisha and I were coming together—aside from our strong physical attraction—was that we came from the same place. It’s funny. I used to avoid Canadian women, and now here I am in LA, all excited that my girlfriend knows about the Tragically Hip and Coffee Crisp. It was kind of like having a secret language. And the fact that she was beautiful and smart and had a great sense of humor and loved hockey didn’t hurt either.
Elisha broke off her engagement to Trace soon after the punch at Paris Hilton’s house, and he moved out, but nothing physical had happened between us. I was stopping by her house more than usual, though, and we had a group of friends who would hang out, have dinner, watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on TV, or go see a movie. I enjoyed the group, but I wanted to be alone with Elisha, and it was obvious to both of us what was going on. We had our first kiss on the walkway in front of her house, and when we looked at each other after the kiss, she laughed and said, “They’re going to have a field day with this.” We both knew that. But forward was the only direction that we both wanted to go.
• • •
On July 22, 2005, the NHL lockout officially ended after we voted, pretty much overwhelmingly, to accept what the league was going to give us. I voted to end it, because at that point we were all just waiting for the league to make us an offer so we could get back to work. But it had all come at a cost.
The lockout itself cost the league about $2 billion in lost revenue. Players who were under multi-year contracts before the lockout had their salaries rolled back twenty-four percent, which was a major hurt. NHL teams could each spend $21 million to $39 million on players the following season, which made
the NHLPA’s rejection in February of the league’s offer of a $42.5 million salary cap—an offer that would have saved the season—even more painful.
Our new contract also guaranteed that we would receive fifty-four percent of the league’s revenue, but in the past we got closer to seventy-five percent. I remember reading about the settlement, and a quote from a labor lawyer in New York, who’d worked for the NFL and NBA unions, stuck with me. He called our deal “the largest setback for players that I’ve seen in collective bargaining.”
It had been a hard time not just for us, but for people who worked in arenas at our games, both off and on the ice. Referee Bill McCreary, who’d put me in the penalty box a few times, installed kitchen cabinets to pay the bills during the lockout. Stéphane Provost, a linesman who’d officiated more than 700 NHL games, was painting houses for $10 an hour during the months when we should have been playing for the Stanley Cup.
And as I predicted, there were older guys who would hang them up, and some of them were Hall of Famers. Scott Stevens, Ron Francis, Al MacInnis, Mark Messier, Adam Oates, Igor Larionov, Steve Thomas, and Felix Potvin all retired, not in a blaze of glory as they should have done, but in a ditch of greed dug by the owners, and by the NHL, and by some of us. As for Cheli, he worked even harder to expose all the backroom dealing that had gone on during the lockout. He was tireless. The rest of us were just tired.
• • •
Before the regular season even started I was already in trouble. We were playing an exhibition game against Phoenix at the Staples Center, and it’s early in the second period. My teammate Jeremy Roenick takes a pass from Alex Frolov when the Coyotes’ Denis Gauthier slams Roenick into the boards so hard he has to leave the game with a concussion. It was at least the tenth concussion that Roenick has suffered, and we all know the problems that head injuries can cause you down the road.