by Sean Avery
“I think it indicates the state of our game, the lack of respect, especially in the pre-season,” Roenick said at the time. “It is uncalled for, it is ridiculous, it is one of the reasons our game isn’t as good as it once was.”
So, when I was on TSN, one of Canada’s sports networks, a couple of days later, I spoke up on behalf of my teammate. And I said this: “I think it was typical of most French guys in our league with a visor on, running around and playing tough and not back[ing] anything up.”
The problem was the word “French.” It was as if I’d insulted every single soul in the great province of Quebec, when all I really meant was that if you’re wearing a visor you’re sending a signal that you’re not ready to fight—which you’re going to be invited to do if you crush a star like Roenick. And back then it was mostly French Canadians and Europeans wearing visors. Maybe I could have put it better, but the NHL’s vice-president of hockey operations, Colin Campbell, called me up and said, “Listen, we know how some of these guys are, but you can’t say it, Sean. You can’t always say what you’re thinking.”
So I said sorry. But I still think that if you wear a visor, and don’t fight, then you don’t run guys.
A couple of months later I was in trouble again. We were playing in Phoenix, and I collided with a Coyote and went down. There was no penalty called on either of us, but a day later, the NHL fined me $1,000 for diving. Basically, someone in the league offices was calling me a liar and a faker. Now, guys will sometimes dive. But hockey players, and fans, take pride in our game’s difference from soccer. (The joke is, soccer players pretend they’re hurt, and hockey players pretend they’re not.) I’m pissed off if I get a penalty, but I’m even more pissed off if I get a penalty long after the game is over. And I let my feelings be known to an LA Times reporter. For that, Colin Campbell fined me another $1,000 for my “complete lack of respect for all those associated with our game.”
I was even more annoyed when I found out I couldn’t appeal this injustice, thanks to the work of our brain trust at the NHLPA in further eroding our rights in the new CBA.
It was clear to me that the NHL had a bull’s eye on my back, and would use this “lack of respect” argument to get me somehow, somewhere. What I didn’t respect was having someone watching me on a TV thousands of miles away tell me that I’d taken a dive. Things happen fast in hockey, and if a guy trips you or hooks you or elbows you in the head, it’s quite likely that you’ll go down. And sure, part of my game is to suck the other team into penalties, and so I have gone down a little quickly on occasion, but it’s such a subjective penalty, and this time I didn’t dive. For the league to get inside your head and say that no, you really embellished the offense is a classic “blame the victim” strategy.
• • •
I know that there are certain guys I have to fight in the NHL and that there are certain times when I have to fight them. It’s November 2, and we’re playing in Dallas, and I make another one of those calculated decisions to fight tonight. Steve Ott is a player similar to myself, a guy who came out of the OHL a couple of years after me, but the difference is that he was chosen twenty-fifth overall in the NHL Entry Draft. He can play and he can put the puck in the net, but he’s got a nasty streak, and I’d say he’s the third-most hated man in the NHL after Gary Bettman and me. Ott would take a baseball swing two-hander with the intent of breaking your wrist, for example.
I knew this fight would happen the moment I saw the schedule, and I also knew that this would be a strategic fight where I would try and get the first punch in. I start the game well, getting a goal early in the first. Halfway through the third, we’re up 6–2 when the puck goes over the glass and I give Stu Barnes a little shove after the whistle. Right on cue, Ott comes over and we’re off. We wrestle a bit to get loose, and I throw one. Ott throws one back and misses. We dance like this for a bit and my helmet comes off, and then I get Ott’s helmet off and land a couple more. Then the linesmen come in and break us up.
Hockey players try to get helmets off so we don’t hurt our hands punching a helmet. But I think punching a head hurts more than hitting a helmet.
The moment those gloves hit the ice everything goes quiet and everything slows down. You don’t think about anything else during those ten, twenty, thirty, forty seconds. Everything surrounding you and your opponent goes blurry and it’s completely silent until the moment you hit the ice.
I have a move where I roll my head under my opponent’s right arm, which confuses him and gives me a different angle to throw my rights from. Hockey fights are as strategic as a chess match—each time you grab your opponent’s jersey you’re setting up the next punch. Of course, he’s trying to do the same thing, so I always try to limit my opponent’s ability to hit me by ducking and weaving and bobbing back as he throws haymakers. I wait for an opening and then I strike. You can win a hockey fight with one punch, and sometimes that punch doesn’t KO your opponent, but it knocks him off balance enough that you can throw the punch that knocks him to the ice and then you follow on top of him for the win.
A magical adrenaline rush fuels it all, and with 20,000 people cheering for you, it’s that roar that lifts you up to the rafters. And then you are slammed down by exhaustion. I’ve had some fights where it took an hour for my legs to stop shaking and my heart rate to return to something approaching normal. Although I was far from a heavyweight, I understand how hard that job is on those guys. When you look at the schedule in September and know that in November you have eight games where you’re going to fight another man and that he could end your career with one punch, that is the definition of stress. We have no idea how hard that job is, and I’ve chosen to do it from time to time, but still I stand in amazement at the guys who have to do it to stay in the league.
• • •
On December 5, 2005, the Kings land in Toronto. Elisha has arrived from Montreal where she’s been visiting her parents for a few days, and she’ll come to the Kings–Leafs game the next night. She snuck into the team hotel, though it wasn’t a stealth mission because it was freezing cold and she was bundled up, so no one recognized her. I’ve made sure to book a room of my own.
At this point in our relationship we’re under deep cover. Maybe just two of our mutual friends know what’s going on between us. We started as friends but now it’s obvious that we’re falling in love, and we probably have been for months, even though nothing physical went on between us until quite a while after she called off her engagement.
Before we descend to the freezing streets of Toronto where all the eyes of the city will be upon us—this is the hockey hotbed of the world, after all—I need to make a phone call to Trace. I need to tell him what’s going on before he sees it online. This is not an easy call to make, and although there is something very serious happening between myself and E, I do feel like my character is about to take a hit.
Trace has been my friend for more than a year and we’ve spent a lot of time together, both he and I as well as the three of us. I call Trace’s cell phone and he answers. He’s in Memphis. Trace and Elisha had split up two months earlier, so he’s gone home to spend some time with his family and his best friend, Justin Timberlake.
I tell Trace that I’m in Toronto with Elisha and that we’re together. I tell him I’ve broken the code between two men and try to justify it by saying it was something I couldn’t control. Part of this is true, but I’m a big boy and I can control pretty much every decision in my life. I just knew I wanted to be with Elisha.
Trace asks to speak with Elisha and tells her she’s broken his heart, and that he knew this was going to happen between her and me. Then he hangs up. I didn’t steal her away from him. She realized that Trace was not the man she wanted to marry, and I happened to be there. I was perspective, but I wanted to be much more than that, and she wanted me to be, too.
The heaviness of that call is numbed by the adrenaline we feel being w
ith each other, and we’re about to step out to show anyone who cares that we’re together. Elisha is a rarity in Canada—a successful working actress. She was on 24, one of the biggest shows in TV history, and I’m going to be on Hockey Night in Canada the next night. People will notice. And little did I know then how much they would care.
After our 2–1 win against the Leafs I’m doing the media scrum and for the first time the media ask me a question about my love life. So I give the “Hollywood Answer” and say, “Ah, guys you know I don’t talk about that.”
But when I meet E in a quiet corner near the team bus waiting to take me to the Kings’ 747, ready to whisk me home to LA for a few days’ rest between gigs, I feel like a fucking rock star.
I know the increased attention that I’m getting both on and off the ice bothers my teammates. I know some of my teammates wonder why this guy who wasn’t drafted and hasn’t scored twenty goals is getting so much love. No one says this to my face, but Luc Robitaille gently lets it be known when he’s checking in with me, which he’s done since I first joined the team. When I got traded to LA he was one of the first guys to call me and tell me how much I was going to enjoy the city. He liked to send me texts, and he’d call me up to make sure I was OK. Now he was telling me that I had to manage my growing celebrity so that it wasn’t too much, too soon. He’d been teammates with our GM, Dave Taylor, and said that Taylor didn’t like it when you went after attention aggressively. You had to be “slow” about it.
I listen to Luc—he’s friendly and supportive—but behind his words I hear the voices of my teammates saying, “I’m a better player than this guy Avery, so why the fuck is he getting this attention?” I never once walked into a dressing room carrying a magazine with my picture in it, or flaunting some magazine that had my girlfriend on the cover. But if the guys are jealous of the attention I’m getting, what am I supposed to do? Not date Elisha? I play my game on the ice just like I always have, but the temperature of the room has changed, and I know that it’s going to get even colder.
Elisha was proud of me, though, and she was the warmth countering the chill that was blowing my way because of our relationship. She was very funny and she could take a joke, and she also preferred the company of guys to women. Elisha was like one of the guys in many ways. She could sit down and polish off a bottle of Jack Daniels on her own. There were times when I got up to go to practice and Elisha was still up and hanging out with our friends whom I’d said goodnight to a few hours earlier. She was a female Cheli, in a way. I loved it. She also understood hockey because she was a fan. After a tough game when I might not have played my best, she’d say to me, “I’ll see you at home.” She knew that I didn’t want to talk about it in the car.
When I started dating Elisha she’d recently made a decision to focus on her movie career and to put television—which had catapulted her into a much higher level of fame than she’d ever known—on the back burner. I wish I’d talked to her more about acting. I would do line readings with her but I didn’t understand any of it. I was so focused on my own work that I didn’t pay enough attention to hers.
Elisha had an amazing work ethic. When she was doing 24 she was up at 4:30 A.M. She was always prepared for auditions, and always worked on being an actor and getting better at it. I remember going to the 24 Christmas party and meeting Kiefer Sutherland. He played hockey in an old-timers league and was a fan, but he was the type of guy who didn’t want to bother me by talking about work, in the same way he didn’t want me asking him about Jack Bauer. When he buckled up to have a good time, that’s what he wanted to do. And he was good at it.
Usually my friend Lawrence Longo and Elisha would go to games together. He’d pick her up and drive her since she liked to have a drink before the game. She’d start to get nervous in the afternoon, a few hours before puck drop. At this point in my career my nerves are more excitement than fear, because we haven’t really done anything in LA so there’s not a lot of pressure on us.
There were so many times when I’d come out after a game and Elisha would be pissed off, and I’d ask Lawrence what happened and he’d tell me she got into it with an opposing fan. They had to leave a game in Anaheim once after she got into it with some Ducks fans. She was defending me and the team, and after she’d had a couple of beers she was six feet tall with the mouth of a trucker, and Lawrence decided for their mutual well-being they should escape. I have to say, any woman who is willing to stand up for Sean Avery in a hockey rink has more backbone than most guys I’ve played with.
By the end of the season—and it’s a better season than the previous one—we’re still in the playoff hunt, but on a skid. It’s March 24, 2006, and we’ve lost four of our last five games. Vancouver, Edmonton, and Colorado are all swimming around the same playoff spot, and we were shut out by Colorado 5–0 in our last game. The tension in our dressing room is high, but tension like this in an NHL dressing room is sometimes the best remedy for a slump.
This combination of a slump and the looming playoffs means it’s the one time in the year where teammates fight in practice. This is what always happens, and the team goes on to win the next game. But even though guys fight and we’re on our way to working things out, our coach, Andy Murray, decides to impose a new motivational tool in practice, so when I screw up a drill he decides that the way to rally me and the Los Angeles Kings is to make us do some push-ups. I am stunned. Has Andy been taking coaching lessons from some B-movie about motivating a slacker high school football team?
My teammates are stunned as well. I mean, push-ups? When we’re trying to make the playoffs? How about helping us understand the drill we screwed up? But as I said earlier, Andy didn’t play hockey, so how could he really coach it? I was not happy about this stunt he’d just pulled, and I knew I wasn’t alone. The guys had given up on Andy.
Our game the next day is against Nashville, who are one of the best teams in the NHL this season, and who are definitely going to make the playoffs. I’m pissed off from the moment I wake up and want to shove it up Andy’s ass in tonight’s game. Just how would I do this, though?
It’s late in the third period and we’re leading Nashville 5–4. It’s been a wild game. I start out with the puck in our end and gather speed through the middle. I go wide on the D-man and at the top of the circle I take a shot that somehow ends up back on my stick, and I’m now below the goal line. I unleash a hard snapshot at Tomáš Vokoun, the Nashville goalie, just trying to hit him in the off chance I can bank it in behind him. And it works.
I skate to the corner and Mike Cammalleri skates over to give me the celebratory hug, but he must sense that I’m going to do something different because he backs off. In one swift motion, I’m down on the ice, banging out three push-ups.
Nobody in the Staples Center knows why I’m doing this except the guys who’d been at practice the day before. They know it was a huge “fuck you” to Andy. And Andy knows it too. But I never learn what he thinks of it. Because the next day he gets fired.
• • •
Although I didn’t love Andy Murray, and had precious little respect for his coaching ability, I was in the awkward position of also appreciating his assessment of me. He must think I’m valuable to the team because he has me in the lineup, and all you can ask as a player is to get a shot. Then you have no excuses.
I mean, how would I coach me? If I had a guy who worked hard all the time and expected his teammates to do the same and called them out when they didn’t, and also got in trouble with the league for shit he said and did, would I try to change him? I like to think I’d channel what was best about his game into a force that would help the team. And I would do it with a light touch, because guys like me are always hardest on ourselves, and don’t need a coach to keep pointing it out. Guys like me need a coach who will teach us stuff that makes us better players, and Andy Murray was not that guy.
So while I’m confident in my ability to keep b
ringing value to my team, I’m also nervous that the new guy may not like me. But then, everyone is feeling this, because who fires a coach this late in the season when you have a shot at the playoffs? I mean, you might think I’m always blaming the coaches, but this time management went even further. I know now that LA’s ownership must have told Dave Taylor he could fire Andy but only if he hired an “interim” coach and didn’t sign him beyond the end of this season. Because if the Kings didn’t make the playoffs there would be a house-cleaning in management, and maybe in the dressing room, too.
Dave Taylor obviously didn’t have many options, then, because what kind of coach would take an eleven-game tryout, on a team that had plunged so far, without a contract for the following year? A coach with no job and no leverage, that’s who.
John Torchetti was from Boston, and to be fair to the man, he’d played in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League and toughed out a few seasons as a winger in the minor pros. He’d also been behind an NHL bench, as an assistant coach with Tampa Bay and Florida, and two seasons earlier he was a mid-season (or late season—just twenty-seven games left) head coach replacement in Florida. They did not make the playoffs.
He had been behind the taxi wheel during the lockout, yet another example of what guys had to do to get by. He was hungry, and he was likely very inexpensive, and he also had NHL experience. He was the perfect sacrificial lamb for the Kings’ brain trust. We’d be a Disney movie if Torchetti’s inspired leadership had us raising the Stanley Cup.
I liked John. I mean, he was doing his best considering the circumstances, and even though we were all relieved by the fact that he was an interim coach and unlikely to come down hard on us, or mess with the lineup, we also knew that we could be an interim team if we didn’t step up and give the playoffs our best shot. Torchetti had to inherit Andy Murray’s assistant coaches, Mark Hardy and John Van Boxmeer, and it turned out that it would be the assistants who would be the trouble.