by Sean Avery
During practice before our third-to-last game, when we still had a mathematical shot at the post-season, I got into a “fuck you” match with Mark Hardy.
Honestly, I don’t even remember what happened, even though all the reports have said that I refused to participate in a drill, which is complete bullshit. Everyone was miserable and tension was high and everyone was stressed to the max, so I might have questioned the point of whatever drill Hardy thought we needed to do with three games left in the season, games that we had to win.
Hardy kicked me off the ice and the next morning told me that I wouldn’t play the final three games of the season. I wasn’t being suspended by the team or the league, I just wasn’t playing. I was scratched. Mark Hardy had found his scapegoat, and so I sat in the stands for the game we had to win against Phoenix. We rose to the occasion by losing 3–0. We were out of the playoffs.
The old boys’ club in the NHL is filled with yes men, and if you’re deemed an old boy it’s assumed you’re an upstanding citizen—no questions asked—until you say something that the old boys don’t like or you do something they can’t sweep under the rug.
The latter is what happened to Hardy. Years after our dustup he apparently got hammered in Washington, DC, where he was staying in a hotel with his family, and stumbled back to the hotel and crawled into bed with his twenty-one-year-old daughter. Then he did something that she obviously did not want to happen, so she called the police and had her father arrested. He was charged with sexually assaulting his daughter, although the charge was later dropped for “want of prosecution.”
And Mark Hardy has a better reputation than I do.
• • •
The Kings removed Dave Taylor as GM of the team in April, shortly after our death spiral, and, as pro hockey is so good at doing, reassigned him to another position within the organization. A bunch of scouts and player personnel were also fired or reassigned. I’m not going to stress about the new GM and who he’s going to hire as the new coach because I had a strong season and had statistically improved from the previous season.
Nevertheless, the new GM, Dean Lombardi, summons me to a meeting in his office in May. Lombardi played college hockey, then went to law school, became a player agent, and crossed the street into management when he joined Minnesota as an assistant GM in 1988. He went on to do some good things as GM in San Jose, and now he was here, looking at me like I’m an interesting experiment.
Dean is a straight-talking guy who respects his players. He understands that each one of them is different and that part of a great team are the personalities that make up its DNA. I like him. We talk about how I’m an effective player and how his expectations for my play this season build on what I’ve done so far on the ice. His concerns are all directed at my behavior off the ice—which he has not seen—but he thinks if I correct my “off-ice adventures,” then I’ll also be more controlled on the ice. He doesn’t cite anything specific, and I listen to him in surprise. I’ve never had a DUI, I’ve never been late for a game or practice, and when I did get arrested for playing music too loud the charges were dropped. Even so, people in the hockey world who’ve never met me think I’m a major problem once I’m let loose on the public.
Realizing that Dean thinks I might be a psycho-killer about to attack LA, I ask him to please do me a favor and check in with some of my friends—Matty Norström or Luc Robitaille or Jeremy Roenick—for a character reference. I know they’ll speak well of me (or at least fairly well) because they don’t feel threatened or have any jealousy toward me.
Dean listens and then tells me that I’m on a short leash (I always love it when my boss compares me to a dog) and that he won’t hesitate to trade me if I’m not fitting in with his team. And then, even though he’s a “man that stays out of the spotlight,” he decides to inform our friends in the media that he’s putting me on “double secret probation.” (You might recall another Dean—Dean Vernon Wormer in the film Animal House—talking about double secret probation, which is what he put the Delta Tau Chi fraternity on when regular probation didn’t cut it.)
Years later Dean Lombardi would have a player accused of smuggling drugs across the Canadian border, and a player accused of beating his wife, and another player caught trying to bring ecstasy and cocaine into a Vegas pool party. All three players would be charged or suspended or both within the year. Yet it was me who earned double secret probation. I guess it worked so well with me that he figured he never needed to do it again.
• • •
That summer there was a new music festival happening in George, Washington (yes, that’s a real place, about 150 miles southeast of Seattle), so Elisha and I and Lawrence Longo rented a forty-four-foot RV—the largest you can rent with a regular driver’s license—and loaded it with supplies for the sixteen-hour drive to “the Gorge” in George. Lawrence’s girlfriend, Kim, came with us.
We pile into the RV and I put that baby in drive, and using old-school road maps which cover the front dashboard, we head down Sunset Boulevard to Highway 1 and then head north on the scenic route, which will take us along the Pacific coast and through the redwood forests into Washington State.
The landscape is stunning, with trees stretching into the heavens like nature’s skyscrapers and the blue Pacific surf crashing against the rocks below. I’ve never been to this part of the world before, and now I see why people who come from here are so hard to impress when they arrive in parts of the world less blessed by nature.
Yet while the forests of Oregon are indeed awesome to behold, the drive up a two-lane mountain road is not easy for a forty-four-foot RV to navigate, and the drive back down is even harder. But Elisha is game for anything, and when we stop she is the first one to get out of the motor home and fill it up with gas and pull out her own credit card. She’s proud of being self-sufficient, and I’m proud of her generous attitude toward everyone and everything. There’s nothing like traveling on winding narrow roads in a rented RV to put someone’s character into perspective, and I realize more than I have done just how fine a person Elisha is, and how lucky I am.
When Lawrence takes over his share of the driving, Elisha and I try to get some sleep in the back bedroom of the massive RV.
Now I haven’t talked about my real addiction, other than my sweet tooth. I’m addicted to cleaning. I clean my sneakers after I wear them outside. I change the laces in my skates before a hockey game. I wash the dishes before everyone is even done with dinner and I vacuum the apartment two or three times a day.
Lawrence, on the other hand, is a tornado, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake, so I have to give the RV a quick clean before I can possibly expect Elisha and myself to have any chance of falling asleep. Finally we lie down and we’re just drifting off when the RV swerves to the right and taps the guardrail. The roads are tight, so I let this slide. Then we tap another guardrail, but it’s a bit bigger tap this time.
Elisha gives me the look to go have a chat with Lawrence and make sure he’s concentrating. When I get to the front, Lawrence is in the driver’s seat, smoking a joint with a bottle of wine nearby while Kim is trying to give him a blow job. If he wasn’t already swerving all over the road and she could actually do the job at hand (pardon the pun) I’m afraid he would have taken that RV over the edge and it would have been goodbye to all of us.
But my intervention worked. We made it to George, Washington, in time to see the Tragically Hip, and we got really lucky at the incredible five-star hotel directly next door. E was tough and she could have roughed it, but we would have been crazy not to take this room. And I don’t think we could have lasted three minutes—let alone three days—bunking in an RV with Lawrence Longo.
14
FROM LA TO NEW YORK
As we start the 2006–07 season we get a new coach in Los Angeles, and it’s like getting a new boss anywhere: the first thing that comes to mind is the question “Are they going
to like me?” There’s always the chance that the new guy will want to clean house, and if he cleans me out, it won’t be because I didn’t give Marc Crawford my very best effort.
Everyone calls him “Crow.” He looks a bit like one, with intense eyes and perfectly gelled hair, and in profile he has a kind of cunning crow-like beak. He’s played for the Vancouver Canucks, he’s done a lot of time in the minors, and he won a Stanley Cup as head coach in Colorado, though given the all-star lineup on the bench I think Lawrence Longo could have coached that team to a Cup, even while he was in full RV relaxed mode.
Crow last coached the Vancouver Canucks, but got fired after the team never made it past the second round of the playoffs in his six seasons with them (in fact, they never made it past the first round three times, and never made the playoffs at all twice under Crow). In the world of pro sport recycling, it was Crawford’s lone Stanley Cup in 1996 that made him our bench boss a decade later.
Crow has a reputation as being a bit of a crazy man. He was the coach for Vancouver when Todd Bertuzzi sucker-punched Steve Moore—allegedly at Crawford’s command. And as I get to know Crow, I can absolutely believe he told Bertuzzi to go take Moore’s head off as payback for Moore’s hit on the Canucks captain Markus Näslund a few games earlier. So Bertuzzi attacks Moore in a game in March 2004, and winds up ending Moore’s career. (Moore sued Bertuzzi for $68 million in damages. The suit was settled in 2014.)
Crawford’s Vancouver reputation doesn’t do him justice. He really is nuts: he loses his shit on the bench like no other coach I have ever seen. He kicks guys in the back when they’re on the bench and he’s unhappy with them, and he grabs guys’ jerseys and pulls them inches from his face while he’s screaming with ferocity. I mean, the veins are popping out of his neck.
This is new to most of us. Anytime Andy Murray tried to yell like that you’d be tapping the leg of the guy beside you in a “hey don’t miss this pussy trying to actually scare us” kind of way. Andy Murray was a joke when it came to the intimidation department. Marc Crawford scares the shit out of me at times.
We’re six games into my new season with Marc Crawford and things are going great. I have one goal and three assists and I’m playing more than fifteen minutes a night. Before tonight’s game against Detroit I spend some time sitting on our bench at the Staples Center looking at the fresh ice and the empty stands and I have Steve Yzerman’s words running through my head about just shutting up and playing hockey. In every game I’ve played against Detroit since I was traded to LA, I’ve been too pumped up and not focused on the little things. I was more focused on taking a run at Cheli or beating Draper in face-offs. Tonight, though, I settle in and play a focused game. We lose, 3–1, but I score our only goal.
As the season wore on, we lost more than we won. Crow’s constant screaming at us created a different kind of toxic environment from the one Andy Murray had created. Murray was the high school math teacher trying to bombard us with information he didn’t understand while Crawford was the wild-eyed gym teacher who’d once heard the roar of the crowd, and figured if he roared loud enough at us, then we’d respond.
There was one time I left him speechless, though, and that was during a practice. Halfway through he’s screaming at us about this drill we’d fucked up. I’m not paying attention to his “explanation” because I can’t listen to him anymore.
We were doing a break-out drill where you go into the opposing zone at speed and then come back out a few times, and on the last break-out you dump the puck in. I had the puck and because I hadn’t been listening I dumped it in too early, right into the corner of the rink where Crawford was standing, watching the drill.
He didn’t see the puck coming and I watched it heading toward him in slow motion. It smacked him right on the forehead. It didn’t knock him out but it knocked him down. His stick and gloves went flying, and there was blood flowing from his head onto the ice. He knew it was me because the last thing he saw was the puck on my stick. He couldn’t kick me off the ice because the medics were hauling him off it, to sew him up. But he gave me the death stare as he skated off, and I knew that one way or another, I wasn’t going to be here long.
I’m also getting tired of Los Angeles. I mean, there are only so many days at the beach. Yes, I did love the city, but as that season wore on I wasn’t excited by its possibilities. I was bored by the routine of the place, the endless sunshine, the same talk in the locker room of grabbing beers at Harry O’s after the game or buying a new boat for the cottage in Muskoka or the latest thing the wife/girlfriend/mistress did with your money that is both a boast and a gripe and is always tedious.
Still, by the All-Star break at the end of January 2007, everything is going well with my season. I’m playing more than fifteen minutes a night under the lash of Marc Crawford, and he pretty much leaves me alone. The team, though, is awful. We’ve won sixteen games so far, and lost thirty-four. We’re in twenty-ninth place out of thirty teams, and last in the Western Division. Fuck me, Andy Murray had us playing better than Stanley Cup–winning genius Marc Crawford. It’s depressing to be playing well and losing so much.
Brendan Shanahan has signed with the New York Rangers and loves it. The team and city have been a rebirth for him. After nineteen years in the NHL he says he feels alive playing before a true hockey crowd at Madison Square Garden. And, of course, there’s New York City awaiting you after the game.
Shanny is meant to play for the Rangers. He looks so good in the red, white, and blue jersey—Clark Kent with a little more edge. Shanny is like the woman who walks into a room and instantly gets everyone’s attention. He drinks the best wine and wears the best suits and can cross his legs in a way that makes him look even smarter and richer than he is.
After our final game before the All-Star break—a 3–2 loss to Phoenix—I hustle to LAX for my red-eye flight to New York. I’m going to visit Elisha, who is in New York shooting a movie called My Sassy Girl, but I’m also going to see Shanny. The Rangers aren’t playing well this year either, and because of the season I’m having, I know Shanny is confident in planting a seed with Glen Sather about making a trade for me.
Elisha was tired from long days of shooting, so on my first night in town I met up with Shanny for dinner at Dos Caminos in the West Village. He was with a few guys from the team, and it was awkward, as it almost felt like an audition. My reputation with the rest of the league at the time was not very good, so even though the legend that is Shanahan is vouching for me it’s almost like I still need to be vetted by the mob.
“Just keep it simple, Sean,” Shanny told me. “Drink a beer or two, talk about nothing, laugh at the right time, and the guys will be able to say you’re normal. That’s all we want.” Shanny’s strategy was to softly introduce me to some of the players on the team so that when he broached the topic with Sather or with coach Tom Renney he could say, “Some of the guys met him the other night and thought he was a good guy.”
In truth, the guys weren’t tough on me at all. There were a few young players there, like Jed Ortmeyer and Ryan Hollweg, along with Matt Cullen and the Rangers PR guy, John Rosasco, who was an important voice when it came to talking to the Rangers management. JR had a lot of influence on Glen Sather and he and Shanny were buddies. Shanny coached me with his eyes from across the table to make sure I said the right things.
I would have said just about anything to stay in New York. The energy of the great city’s streets was exactly what I was craving. Initially the glitter of Hollywood had attracted my attention, but now the bullshit scene of fake friends and “what can you do for me?” attitude was wearing thin. Now I wanted some of New York’s grit. I wanted to walk down Broadway through the hordes of tourists and say that I lived here.
Elisha is working fifteen-hour days, and I’m not seeing much of her. When you date someone who works and travels as hard as we do, you understand the sacrifice. We went to dinner once while I was t
here.
I talked about how much I loved it here, and she listened. At no point did she say, “Well, that wouldn’t be good for us.” She was aspirational like me, and she said she’d love to work in New York, and do a play on Broadway, but her schedule was locked for the next year. Mine, as a pro athlete, was not, in that I could be traded in the time it took to make a phone call. She definitely felt that it wouldn’t be easy if I got traded to New York, because long distance is never easy. But we were both confident that if I did move east, we could make it work. We certainly wanted to make it work.
I flew back to LA focused on playing well. And hoping that by doing that, I’d get the call to come to the center of the world and become a New York Ranger.
• • •
It didn’t take long. On February 5, 2007, I’m in a Macy’s department store in a mall in Tampa, Florida, with my mother and my grandmother, who lives sixty miles down the road in Sarasota. Mom has flown here from Toronto to spend some time with me because it’s easier than getting out to Los Angeles, and maybe she’s here because of mother’s intuition. Shanny has told me that he’s had conversations with Glen Sather about making the deal happen.
Tomorrow we play Tampa Bay, but when I packed my bags for this road trip I put a little extra gear into the mix—two extra suits, extra underwear, my lace-up boots, and my leather jacket, in case I was going somewhere colder.
While we’re hanging out in the mall, my cell phone rings and on the other end of the line is Dean Lombardi. Usually this is the worst phone call a pro athlete can receive because it means your life is about to be turned upside down, but I’m ready for it. We’re programmed to say goodbye to our friends and teammates at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been with them for six years or two weeks—you live always ready to be on the move. The news is always a blow, and you feel a surge of emotion at having to leave. But this time the call is different.