Ice Capades

by Sean Avery

  The arbitration hearing was in Toronto, and by the end of the longest day of my life I was shaking and had sweat seeping through my suit jacket. While Glen sat silently and chomped on an unlit cigar, I had to listen to Cam Hope—the husband of Glen’s assistant, whom he’d made his assistant GM—trash-talk me.

  Sather was the boss and called all the shots, so why wouldn’t the secretary’s husband be AGM? But Cam Hope did all the dirty work in the arbitrations, and the thing that sent me through the roof was that he’d never played hockey. He was a lawyer from Edmonton who’d been involved in the Canadian Football League Players Association, so he knew something about athletes but he knew shit about hockey. And in the end he got a taste of his own medicine when he called Glen’s bluff in his own contract negotiation. When he said he’d walk if he didn’t get the cash, Glen said “Get a good pair of walking shoes.” He’s now GM of a junior hockey team in Victoria, but he was the asshole who told me that New York, despite what they’d said in public, now didn’t see me that way at all.

  I was devastated. It hurt to hear this, and it was also a bald-faced lie. Larry Brooks defended the truth in print: “Apparently forgotten were all the testimonials delivered to Avery from the Rangers’ hierarchy last spring when the winger was repeatedly lauded for the intangibles he brought to the team both on and off the ice upon his Feb. 5 acquisition from the Kings. Apparently forgotten as well were similar testimonials delivered by teammates including Jaromír Jágr, Brendan Shanahan and Henrik Lundqvist.”

  It’s a cruel aspect of the way the game—sorry, the business—works, but it seems to be very much in the spirit of the times. Factories close because the same stuff can be made cheaper in China, jobs-for-life get outsourced, promises are broken, people suffer, and yet the management keeps ticking along doing just fine, paying themselves fat bonuses for their skills at shaving layers off the bottom line.

  As a professional athlete, you’re trained to think of yourself as an individual who brings the best that he can to the team. Each player adds something special to the mix. That’s how teams are built. The Rangers could not find some dude in India to do my job, but they certainly made it sound as if it was truly painful to have to pay me to do what I did for them. As if I was conning them.

  The arbitrator awarded me a salary of $1.8 million for the upcoming season, so you could say that I won. Yes, that’s more than most of the world makes, but the NHL is not a charity. And I didn’t really win at all, because everyone loses in the bitter conflict of arbitration, and not many relationships come out the other side of it as solid as they were when they went in. I mean, it’s impossible. But that was the business I was in, and today, if I ever wound up being a GM, I’d probably think the same thing that Sather thought about it all. “It will toughen him up a bit” was his take on arbitration.

  Even so, it was worst day of my life to date.

  Still, I knew that I wasn’t planning on leaving New York, even if the Rangers, in a fit of revenge for my arbitrated salary increase, decided to trade me to hell. I knew I would still live here in the off-season, so I needed to buy an apartment. My first NYC apartment.

  I’m still a New York rookie and don’t really understand the lofts of Soho yet, so I look a little further north. When I walk into 444 West 19th Street I know that this is home (I’d also later discover that this was, so far, the furthest downtown any Ranger had ever lived. Now they all live in Tribeca). I also know that my aesthetic has changed and that I’m no longer into the Cali hippie Laurel Canyon vibe (a lot of which has to do with the fact that I’m not in Laurel Canyon). I’m into a full-blown American Psycho kind of existence and I have two months to renovate 19th Street so that it’s ready for me to take Manhattan when training camp opens in September.

  Let me be clear with the American Psycho reference. Patrick Bateman appeals to my sense of organization, and that’s it. For me, routine is everything. Consistency gives me the ability to focus on my job of hockey, and being organized also gives me the luxury of time—and of saving time so that I can always get rest.

  When you open my bathroom vanity and you see triple of everything—toiletries, towels—you think, hmm, American Psycho. When you open my closet and see ten black T-shirts that are exactly the same you think, hmm, American Psycho. It’s the same thing with shoes, leather jackets, and trousers—this machine is being built to maximize time. There’s no question that a few ladies have walked into my apartment and taken a deep breath, probably thinking “What have I got myself into?” until I quickly explain my theory of efficiency, which makes me sound even more like Patrick Bateman. Jesus, maybe I am Patrick Bateman. Except for the homicidal maniac bit.

  Over the summer the Rangers signed Chris Drury, Scott Gomez, and Wade Redden to monster contracts. All this, of course, while the guy who’d done quite a bit in a short time to help make the Rangers a team that you wanted to play for was still stinging from a pummeling at arbitration.

  Gomez signed a seven-year deal with the Rangers worth $51.5 million. Drury was cheaper, getting a five-year contract for $35.25 million. Redden signed for six years and $39 million.

  And I had to sit in a stifling room in Toronto and hear how I wasn’t worth an extra $600,000 from the team that had just blasted $125.75 million into the hockey salary universe.

  I started the 2007–08 season determined to show the guys in the suits that I was one of the most valuable players on this team. Everything that I’d accomplished in my short season with the Rangers was going to pale in comparison to what I could do for them over eighty-two games in the red, white, and blue jersey.

  We opened with a 5–2 win against Florida, and while I didn’t register any points, I played more than eighteen minutes and helped us win. In our second game of the season against Ottawa, we were less than eight minutes into the first period when I was circling out of our zone with the puck. I’d already had a skirmish with Ottawa’s tough guy Chris Neil less than a minute into the game, and we both got two minutes for roughing.

  I was protecting the puck so I didn’t see Neil coming, and he nailed me with a shoulder-to-shoulder hit. The pain shot through me as if he’d plunged a knife six inches into my ribs from behind. And that’s it for me.

  I have a Grade 3 sprain of my acromioclavicular joint, or AC joint, which is the joint at the top of the shoulder. In other words, it’s a bad shoulder separation and the pain is like someone is drilling into my shoulder bones.

  I beg our trainer Jim Ramsay for a bottle of Vicodin, and he gives me two tablets. I look at him in disbelief. That’s not even going to get me out of the building. Through my nagging—and I mean a lot of nagging—he eventually doled out some more. Years later the issue of subscription overdoses has become a hot topic because the number of deaths happening to former players has increased tremendously, and that’s because so many guys have become addicted to opioids. I think it’s because the players are all much bigger, faster, and stronger as a result of superior nutrition, superior genetics, and the supplements and training programs we use. This is topped off by the protective gear we wear, which is like a weapon in itself when you’re moving at speed. I mean, getting the hard plastic of an elbow pad in the face can easily knock you out.

  And yet our brains are still the same size, and the organs inside our bodies are the same size as they were in 1875, when hockey first started to be played indoors. The difference is that the impact and force trauma in today’s game is exponentially greater.

  In the old days, a player could drink a bottle of Jim Beam to numb the pain, but not now. You need drugs, and the more you need the more tolerance to them you develop, and the worse the injuries become.

  So all of this adds up to why the rate of serious injury to athletes has risen. And the only way you can fix this problem is to change the rules of the game, which have to evolve with technology. Otherwise technology is going to kill sports.

  But instead we blame the tr
ainers. How is a trainer supposed to say no to my request for pain pills when I’m lying on the floor of a dirty locker room dry-heaving because my shoulder hurts so much? So the trainer gives the player the drugs he’s asking for so that he can get through the game and go back out to sacrifice his body for himself, his family, and the fans of the city he loves.

  I missed eighteen games with that shoulder injury, which is my longest NHL injury to date. Being injured puts you in a very lonely place as a professional athlete. You see the injured players at practice, watching the guys play the game they cannot play for the time being, and sometimes they come on road trips, though they usually stay behind. Sometimes the healthy players start to resent them. “This fucking guy doesn’t miss a paycheck and gets to enjoy his family time while I play sixteen games in thirty days.” It’s a natural feeling for players to have and it gets really bad if the injured player’s teammates don’t think he’s working as hard at rehab as he should.

  Because statistics are the barometer to measure how an NHL player gets paid, it’s human nature for players to work the system. Let’s say a guy has a great first half of the season—in forty games he scores sixteen goals, and adds thirty-four assists for a nice fifty-point total at a time of the season when it’s always easier to come by points because you’re not banged up or worn down.

  But then, from games 41 to 69, his production drops, and when he gets hurt in Game 70 his stat is 1.4 points per game. He would be smart to milk his injury to the end of the season so that he’ll finish with the higher points per game total—that way, when contract negotiations start in the off-season, his agent has better bargaining power. You would be surprised how often this happens, and although athletes are not usually great with math, we understand the angles you need in negotiations. We call the players who milk their injuries “Band-Aids.”

  It’s the end of November and Shanny takes a slap shot and hits me in the left hand in a game against Dallas and I’m out again. I’m acting like a real baby because I feel like Shanny should have scored on some passes I’ve given him the last five games, and I’ve told him so. The guy has fifteen years on me in the NHL and he knows the long-term rhythm of the game much better than I do, but even so I share my opinion that he should be working harder. Then I don’t speak to him for a week.

  Even though Shanny is not pissed at me, this bad bounce has now led to me being injured. It was an honest mistake and hockey players would never blame another teammate for a bad bounce. But still, I’m annoyed by it all.

  I’ve also had problems with this left wrist ever since I had a fight with Darcy Tucker earlier in November, and to be honest, it bothered me last year, so maybe Shanny has done me a favor. They tell me I won’t be out long, and, as I don’t want to do any more damage, I decide to go for the surgery.

  Because of all the credit I received after the trade last year for turning the team around, and because this season the Rangers are 9-4-1 with me in the lineup and 4-5-1 without me, that evil little thing called human nature pokes his head out again. When a player is out of the lineup he wants the team to win sixty percent of the time and lose forty percent of the time. Nobody has the balls to say this except me, but it’s true, and it’s because when a hockey player is injured his self-worth is low. He doesn’t feel wanted or needed because a team’s mentality is “we need to push ahead with whatever we have.” The only thing that keeps the injured player from going insane is to have his team lose so that he feels wanted. It’s just human nature. Even so, good teammates who are out because of injury want their team to win more than they want to see it lose.

  These thoughts don’t consume me since I’m working my ass off to get back into the lineup because my drug is the jersey. My drug is MSG. My drug is New York.

  The day after Christmas we’re playing against Carolina and I get a bogus call for interference in front of the net when I tap a Carolina D-man’s stick out of the way so that it doesn’t deflect a puck into my face. There’s a scrum, someone takes a punch at me, and then Andrew Ladd is after me. But the linesmen have him, and they have me, too. Even so, I get a good right hand in (I’m being careful with my left) and break the orbital bone in his left eye. You never want to injure another player, but that’s what’s going to happen until they change the rules. I get tossed from the game, but we win 5–2.

  • • •

  I loved loved-loved-loved getting in on a hard forecheck. I would time my arrival to hit the defenseman just as he’s about to touch the puck to try to get it the hell out of his zone while I’m careering in at him full speed and looking to tattoo him into the end boards.

  I also love to taunt defensemen on face-offs, so they know that no matter how quickly they think they can play the puck out of their zone, I’m still going to hit them hard. It’s similar to defensive linemen talking to the quarterback before every snap in football, announcing their imminent plans to make him part of the turf.

  Tonight it’s March 10 and we’re in Buffalo. Once again, as the playoffs loom, it’s a tight squeeze in the standings among a bunch of clubs. We’re comfortably in the middle of the playoff-bound teams at the moment, with eighty-one points, but the Sabres have seventy-four and are, at this moment, out of a playoff spot.

  We’re almost halfway through the second period with the game tied at one when I’m racing for the puck with Buffalo D-man Nathan Paetsch. It’s been dumped around the end boards from left to right and I hit him with perfect timing and he flies from the goal line to the back boards and I think he’s dead. The puck goes bang, bang off the boards, and ends up on my stick behind the net. I put a perfect backhand pass onto the stick of No. 68 and Jaromír Jágr buries it in the back of the net.

  It was the best bodycheck of my career. We won 3–2 in a shootout

  On March 29, 2008, I was feeling pretty great. My body had healed from injury and surgery, and we were in a much better place in the standings than we had been this time last year. I was looking forward to the playoffs.

  We had a practice that morning, and when I stepped out of the elevator and saw the look on the face of my doorman, I knew something was wrong. Usually if I was on Page Six of the New York Post he would say, “Don’t worry, big guy, Page Six just showing you love this morning,” in his heavy Queens accent. But today he just handed me the Daily News and I almost shit my pants. My knees gave out and I had to lean up against the desk in the front lobby of my 19th Street apartment building, for there was my picture in a Rangers uniform under the headline “THE RANGER and THE MADAM.”

  “Rangers hockey star Sean Avery’s name and private cell phone number are in the little black book of Manhattan madam Kristin Davis,” the Daily News crowed.

  “Avery, 27, a trash-talking enforcer who has dated a string of models and actresses, is listed as a $500 client of brothel Maison de L’Amour.”

  Now, if there’s one thing that I didn’t need to pay for it was sex. Or let me qualify that: every man pays for sex somehow—some with vacations, shoes, dresses, emotional vulnerability. It’s called being in a relationship, and those forms of payment are what we all do, one way or another. But paying for a hooker is not my thing.

  I was shaking for the entire hour and change that it took to drive to the practice rink, and as soon as I arrived I walked into Glen Sather’s office to apologize and to explain very clearly that I had nothing to do with this.

  Glen had his feet up on his desk and was chomping on his customary cigar. He told me, with a twinkle in his eye, to weather the media storm and it would go away, for there was nothing the New York media liked better that to prove each other wrong.

  After practice, the reporters and photographers were waiting for me, and I just laughed and said to the cameras, “I can promise you that if I ventured into one of these establishments I wouldn’t use my own name.”

  A couple of days later, my pals at the New York Post came to the rescue.

  “Busty accus
ed madam Kristin Davis is icing a report that New York Ranger star Sean Avery was a customer of her high-end escort service.

  “‘I personally spoke to her, and she confirmed that she has never had any contact with Sean Avery in any shape or form, Davis’ lawyer, Mark Jay Heller, told The Post yesterday.”

  The Post took delight in saying that I was going to sue the Daily News for hundreds of millions of dollars as I had free agency coming up, but really, I found the fact that I’d wound up and then not wound up in the little black book of a celebrated New York madam to reveal just how much I’d gotten into the imagination of the city.

  We make the 2008 Stanley Cup Playoffs with ease, and our first-round opponent is across the Hudson River in New Jersey, which is almost as good as a Subway Series. It means that I get to sleep in my own bed (and not the one at the brothel . . .) for the entire series, which we’d like to end as quickly as we can.

  Our record against the Devils this season has been fantastic. We played them eight times and won seven, with one loss in OT, which was our last game against them. While that’s not exactly the way you want to go into a playoff series where ties are decided in full overtime periods, we like our chances.

  The atmosphere in the Prudential Center, this cavern of a new rink in Newark, is hostile, but that’s because half the crowd are Devils fans and the other half are Rangers fans. In the last game of the regular season I was all over Marty Brodeur. This time my speech to him was easy, and true: I was standing on top of the crease telling him what a disgrace he is for falling in love with his sister-in-law.

  Just so everyone is clear here, he started to fuck around with his wife’s brother’s wife, and eventually left his wife for her sister-in-law. Consider that for just a second. You leave your wife, the mother of your kids, for her brother’s wife? That’s so twisted on so many levels that it makes you dizzy trying to unravel the layers of betrayal.