Ice Capades

by Sean Avery

  Matt had been to a few games since my arrival in New York and he knew exactly who I was. He walked me into the Beatrice and it was like being backstage at a Victoria’s Secret show, as that’s the only other venue where I’ve ever seen so many models in one place. The front part of the room housed the bar and six different seating areas, and the Pink Room was a very small—maybe six-by-six-foot—room which opened onto the bar so that you could order drinks without having to leave the room. This was handy if you were the new celebrity couple trying to be undercover on the couch in the corner (just to be clear, the Beatrice was the worst place you could go to be undercover).

  It was open every night of the week, and a little after 11 P.M. the place would fill with models and young celebrities and fashion designers and downtown hipsters. It seems like a contradiction, but the Beatrice was the type of place that drew celebrities who didn’t like to go to splashy clubs. Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett and Sophia Coppola all liked the Beatrice. It was a safe space for young “New York Hollywood.”

  The back room was a five-step walk-up with banquette seating built around the perimeter of the entire room. On busy nights you couldn’t see the other side of the room because the cigarette smoke was so thick. That’s where the music happened. Chloë Sevigny’s brother, Paul, was the DJ. She was there a lot, too.

  Usually when you meet the people who own clubs, it’s simply a business relationship: you spend money and they take care of you. The relationships that I found with Matt at the Beatrice and Amy at the Bungalow were special. I was connecting with people on this small but mighty island, and it was connecting with me.

  And I was having a fabulous time. Sure, I was on a Stanley Cup–winning team my first year in the NHL, but I didn’t get to play in the playoffs because I was injured. I know it’s a cliché to say that you should never take the post-season for granted because you never know if you’ll get there again, but it’s true. It feels like I have been in the league for ages since that championship run with the Red Wings, and that five seasons later I’m in my first true playoff series. And I’m getting part of the credit for that, since the Rangers have been 17–12 since I arrived from LA, and have moved up from twenty-first place in the NHL into the Stanley Cup playoffs.

  I’ve always played well under pressure, and it invigorates me, but the feeling as we fly to Atlanta is much different from what I’m used to because usually the pressure comes from something that I said. Or from something that I did to a team we’re about to play again, and it’s the forty-second game of the regular season.

  This pressure is what a guy’s career is made of, and how you respond to it is what leads to glory and praise and more zeros before the decimal sign on your paycheck. All the guys on the plane are aware that how we perform in the playoffs is what management will use to determine a player’s value. If you have a bad playoffs, or “disappear” in the tighter, harder game that the post-season dictates, it’s not the end of the world. But the only way you can stick around in the league if you have a crap playoff run is by scoring a lot in the regular season, because regular season goals still hold a lot of value. And there are some guys who always just shine in the playoffs, like Shanny or Stevie Y.

  I look around, and this plane ride to Atlanta is exactly the same as every other plane ride I’ve made in the NHL. There are guys around the card table losing money to each other, guys watching movies on their computers, guys catching up on texts to their mistresses (you can use your phone on the team plane), and the training staff are all passed out in deep sleep, catching some hours before the grind begins the moment the plane touches down in Atlanta.

  The flight is long enough that guys change out of their suits into sweatpants and kick back with wads of chewing tobacco tucked inside their lips. I never understood why guys are allowed to chew tobacco before a game or in between periods to take the edge off, and yet I’m not allowed to light up a cigarette. (I would do it in the shower so the smoke didn’t bother the guys.) Guy Lafleur used to smoke a pack a day, and Scotty Bowman said Lafleur would smoke a cigarette or two between periods. I’m not saying I’m Guy Lafleur, but seriously, sometimes the double standards of the NHL get to me.

  But I’m not going to let them do that now. I’m going to chase the best ashtray ever invented. The Stanley Cup.

  I’m really fucking nervous before Game 1. The run that I helped the Rangers go on to make the playoffs is not enough—it got us here, but it’s now history. We need to win four here, and then move on to the next twelve wins needed to hoist the Jug.

  Ilya Kovalchuk is Atlanta’s best player and I’m going to play against his line during the series. He has no idea how much he’s going to hate me when this is over. Kovalchuk is one of the most gifted scorers the league has seen in the last twenty years. He’s also one of the first Russians who has a nasty edge to him. He doesn’t like to get hit and he’s wicked with his stick. He’s a big guy—six-three and 230 pounds—and he has to fight for space because players are getting bigger and the rink is not, and so the game is getting tougher to play. Kovalchuk is a superstar and he’s a hothead, and he brings a lot of emotion to his game. And that gives me a huge opening to do what I do.

  During my first shift I slash him hard in the back of the legs—where there’s no padding, and where it hurts. I do it each time I’m on the ice with him. He’s in shock because nobody has ever done this to him. After each whistle I skate beside him telling him that he’s a soft fucking Russian who will never win because it’s too hard. I mess with him, adding that losing the series is OK with all the money that he has.

  We win the first game 4–3 and I lead the team with seven shots on goal.

  On my sixth shift of Game 2 I get to the blue line and dump the puck into Atlanta’s end, but it takes a funny bounce off the glass and moves ninety degrees into the empty net. Atlanta goalie Johan Hedberg is standing behind the net where he was anticipating my dump-in, and now he has the kind of look on his face that you might see if you’d told him he was being sent down to play in a Swedish beer league. We have that critical first goal, and I remember how such a fluky goal totally destroyed the confidence of the Vancouver Canucks when I was playing with Detroit. We swept them four straight after we scored from center ice.

  But my assignment, Kovalchuk, scores to tie the game early in the third period, and it stays that way until there’s just over four minutes left in regulation. I get a bouncing puck on my stick inside the middle of the right circle in Atlanta’s end, and I can see Marty Straka heading for the back door. I’m going to fire the puck to him.

  It’s amazing to think about how fast we process information on the ice. We even see things before they happen based on patterns—it’s real-life NASA space-perception testing right here in an NHL game.

  In the last possible millisecond I see Shanny skating to my left, and so I fake a snap shot and pass across my body right onto his blade and he fires it across the line for a goal.

  We’re going back home to MSG up 2–0 in the best of seven series.

  I’d be lying if I didn’t feel good about this latest “fuck you” to everyone who says I can’t play.

  I didn’t think the atmosphere at MSG could be any more electric until Michael Nylander scores our first goal thirty-two seconds into Game 3. It’s like the roof is going to blow off. Nylander also scores our last at 15:54 of the third period to give himself a hat trick and cement our win—7–0 over the Atlanta Thrashers, who are pretty much done. I mean, they had to win this game and we smoked them. The cherry on top is that Ilya Kovalchuk finally blows his lid at my continual stealth attacks on him and he drops his gloves. Before I know what’s happening he throws a heavy Russian right hand square off my nose. My eyes fill with water, and as I skate to the penalty box wiping blood from a broken nose, I smile because I’ve taken one of the best “pure skill” players in NHL history off his game and rendered him useless. The guy who scored forty-two goals in
the regular season has only scored one so far. I promise him that he won’t have another goal in the series.

  Before Game 4, John Amirante, who has sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” at MSG since around the year I was born (1980), is coming down the home stretch—“Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave/O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?”—and I think I’m having an out-of-body experience because it seems as if the whole arena is moving. I mean, the people, the walls, the rafters—everything is swaying with the anthem.

  I know—when the camera pans the guys on the ice and the benches during the national anthem, it looks like they’re doing the “I gotta pee really bad” shuffle from skate to skate, or are deep in some Zen-like trance, or are actually praying. It’s all true, but there’s no way you can tune out the anthem, and I love hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as it rises to its conclusion: the land of the free and the home of the brave. How can you beat that?

  You feel the surge of emotion from the fans after the anthem and it carries you onto the ice, assuming the ice doesn’t crumble like some CGI glacier and we all fall through and splatter on the tracks of Penn Station below us. I swear this building is moving.

  The Thrashers strike first, but we tie it a minute later. They score again midway through the second, but with a little more than two minutes left in the period, I dish to Shanny and he scores and Atlanta is done. We add two more in the third and we’ve swept Atlanta. We’re feeling as confident as a team can feel.

  Of course, the beauty of the NHL playoffs is that you need to win sixteen games to win the Cup, so no team wins the greatest trophy in sports because their opponent had a bad Sunday afternoon. You can go from high to low as the playoffs progress, and we went from the high of our sweep of Atlanta to considerably lower a couple of weeks later as we went into Game 6 against Buffalo. We were down 3–2 in the series against the Sabres, and preparing for our must-win Game 6, when Shanny received a life-changing email. We were sitting in a hotel suite that the Rangers had reserved for the players to receive treatment, watch games, play cards, snack, and talk shit the way most teams do while they kill time between playoff games. “To prevent distractions” is what they call it.

  Shanny’s email was, for me, a major distraction. He was being invited to the Met Ball—which is the fashion world’s Oscars—by Vogue’s famous editor Anna Wintour. A Vogue editor’s kids went to school with Shanny’s kids, and his school drop-offs became a chance for the Upper East Side moms to swoon at the Clark Kent lookalike. Even so, Shanny showed me the email and asked me who she was.

  I think in 2007 that I was one of the few—if not the only—professional athlete who knew who Anna Wintour was because I had been reading Vogue since my days with the Kings. I was in shock. Why the hell did Shanny get this email and not his fashion fanatic teammate? Sure, he looked great in a tux, but so did I.

  I begged him to email Vogue back and ask if it would breach the fashion world etiquette to bring his teammate Sean Avery as his date. They wrote back that usually a date is not permitted, but this time, they would allow it. I was ecstatic.

  Of course, the Met Ball was scheduled for the same night as Game 7 against Buffalo.

  Before Game 6, I was nervous. The entire team was on edge, and you could have heard a hair from Jágr’s mullet drop in our dressing room. My body was banged up, and because this was my first playoff grind on top of the eighty-four-game regular season (due to the trade, I played two more than the usual eighty-two), I was tired mentally and physically.

  By no means did I want to lose Game 6 so that we could attend the Met Ball, but I used it as a crutch, something that would soothe the sting of defeat that I believe we all felt was coming our way. Buffalo was simply a better team.

  All our gung-ho momentum from winning four straight over the Thrashers crashed into the reality that was the Buffalo Sabres. They had won the Presidents’ Trophy with 113 points—nineteen better than us—and had dispatched the Islanders in the first round of the playoffs four games to one.

  They finished us off in six. Aside from the first game, which they won 5–2, the others were all one-goal games, with a couple going to overtime.

  I take this loss personally. I think we went out because I didn’t know how to block shots. No one had ever taught me, which is not surprising when you consider that most of the assistant coaches I had—the guys responsible for teaching shot-blocking—had never played pro. I wasn’t afraid of blocking shots, but because I didn’t have the technique, I looked timid. I didn’t know how to properly position myself in the shooting lanes to take down some shots, and that ended up being the difference.

  I’d played the best hockey of my life since arriving in New York, and the victory against Atlanta had been the kind of professional experience that makes you think you can do anything. And even after we lost Game 6 to Buffalo, at home, 5–4, our fans gave us a standing ovation, because they believed we’d done our best. And yet part of me knew that I could have played better. I realized now, after this devastating loss to Buffalo, that I still had a lot to learn. But I took to heart a piece that appeared in the New York Times, in which our coach, Tom Renney, said about me: “Pound for pound, I don’t know if there is a tougher, more engaging player in the game than that guy right there.”

  I knew the Met Ball would be filled with every famous actress and model in the world, and I also knew that two New York Rangers would stick out like a sore thumb—but a very well-dressed and interesting sore thumb.

  I pulled out the black Prada tux that I bought two weeks after arriving in New York because I’d expected to be attending many black-tie affairs in the city that never sleeps, though this was my first. Our black Town Car pulled up to the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and all I could see at the top of the stairs were flashbulbs.

  Now, I’m used to media attention at this point in my career, but walking up those stairs felt like taking the last 100 steps to a summit that I’d only dreamt of, and when I got to the top and saw that the wall of photographers was literally two stories high, I nearly fell back down the steps. Which would not have been the elegant entrance that I had dreamed of making into this world to which I desperately wanted access.

  My legs started to shake. I’m telling you, hearing 20,000 screaming fans inside MSG with my career just one bad bounce from ending had nothing on the nerves running through my body as we approached Anna Wintour and Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, who were greeting each guest as they entered Cinderella’s ball.

  I extend my hand and try to keep it from shaking as I move to pump the hand of the editor-in-chief of Vogue (just like in the movies, she had an assistant whispering each approaching person’s name into her ear), and I make my first impression unforgettable by saying, “Pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Bloomberg,” and then shaking the mayor’s hand and saying, “Honor to meet you, Mr. Wintour.”

  I can’t believe I just did that. It’s like I was watching myself say the wrong lines in a play.

  Shanny, as always, steps in to fix it. He apologizes to Anna Wintour and the mayor of New York City and says, “Sorry about my friend . . . he was very nervous to meet you both.”

  They laugh.

  The Met Ball is also called the East Coast Oscars, and it was filled with movie stars like Cate Blanchett and Renée Zellweger and Cameron Diaz. Rihanna was there, and so was Alicia Keys, and so were Melania and Ivanka Trump, though back then they were just part of the wall of famous faces who drifted by. There were supermodels galore, including Gisele Bündchen and Christy Turlington and Hilary Rhoda, the woman whom I would one day marry. We didn’t meet that night, as I was so in awe of it all; I was watching a movie—one that I happened to be in.

  I shook my head in wonder. In a few months my life had changed. Now New Yorkers were chanting my name at MSG and yelling it out from car windows as they drove past me on the street, and here I was at the toughest
ticket event in New York City—by invitation. Well, invitation once removed, but I was through the magic door. And now that I’d seen life on the other side, this fantasy world of creativity and beauty and success, I wanted to see more. I had to figure out how I could stay a while longer.

  16

  THE AVERY RULE

  At the end of July, after my success with the Rangers, I was feeling good about the future. My salary the previous year had been $1.1 million, and after the way I’d landed in New York and inspired the Rangers (and myself), I was looking for a long-term deal that would give me a nice cash bump and reward me for what I’d contributed to the team.

  If they didn’t agree, then we’d have to go to arbitration, which is not what anyone wants because it means that there’s going to be a lot of mud thrown in your general direction.

  But the Rangers wouldn’t budge, so we had to go to arbitration.

  The day before my arbitration hearing, I did one of the dumbest things I could possibly do. I sent my new friend Larry Brooks, hockey beat maestro of the New York Post, a copy of the Rangers’ position arguing why they thought I should only be entitled to a $200,000 raise.

  Larry wrote: “For in seeking to give Avery just a $200,000 raise over the $1.1 million he earned last season, the Blueshirts simply hammered away at one of their most important players in an astonishingly short-sighted, penny-saved-pound-foolish attack.”

  Leaking this confidential document was certainly against the rules, and our team’s boss, Glen Sather, probably had a feeling I was the one who leaked it. Glen had seen it all but I’m sure this was a first for him. Some of the things he liked about me—my intensity, my fierce hate for the opponent, my “not give a fuck” attitude—were also some of the things that would get me in trouble.