Ice Capades

by Sean Avery

  So please tell me where in the “Hockey Man” rule book it says that I can’t tell this guy he’s a fucking dirtbag every time I see him. It’s excessive, yes, but we really aren’t here to make friends. I want to win the Cup, and this guy—no matter what plane of hockey godship people think he lives on—is in my way.

  A few minutes into the second period I make a patient, and if I do say so, pretty damned skilled backhand pass to Scott Gomez, who is flying up the middle. He fires a hard pass to Shanahan on the right wing and vintage Shanny takes two steps and fires a laser that slides under Mrs. Brodeur’s ex-husband.

  It’s 1–0 and I skate by Marty to remind him that that’s my first assist of the series and I ask what section his fellow home-wrecker is sitting in so I can blow her a kiss. He leaves me guessing, the rogue.

  We’re up 2–1 in the third period when Gomez takes a puck over the Devils’ blue line and goes wide around both D-men but runs out of room because Brodeur comes out so far to challenge. At the last second Gomez looks over his right shoulder and sees me cutting down the middle of the slot. I’m in the sweetest of spots, alone in front of the gaping net, and he lays the puck in the crease for me to pound home. If there was any doubt, Marty knows my name.

  In Game 2, every time I come near Marty’s crease he taps the back of my legs and I lose balance, a few times dangerously close to falling on him. But I do not turn and whack him back. My discipline is spot-on during the playoffs and I really am like a different player. I’ve grown as a professional, and New York has made it happen. I can just play the game I love, and drive my opponent nuts by doing just that.

  Of course, my reputation precedes me, and I need to be careful not to let Marty suck me into a penalty, especially going into a game tied at zero in the third period. I’m thinking about how I can avoid Marty’s little tricks, and then I come up with the solution. Nearly five minutes into the third, and twenty seconds after Jágr puts one past Marty and gives us the lead, the puck finds its way to the tip of my blade as I’m standing in the slot. And with a one-timer I snap it just under the cross bar.

  The Devils score later in the third, but my goal stands as the game-winner. We’re going back to MSG up two games to zip, and I already have two goals in the series. I’m pretty sure Marty is rattled when he heads home to his sister-in-law . . . I mean wife.

  Game 3 is at MSG and it’s a madhouse. Our fans were loud in New Jersey, but in their home barn, they’re mighty. Shaking-the-joint mighty.

  We’re tied at one and it’s early in the second period when we wind up on a five-on-three power play. Jaromír Jágr is on the right point and Shanahan is on the left, with Gomez and Drury each on their respective back doors and me in front. I can’t take a penalty here, and I know that the refs would love to call one on us because five-on-three is a pretty serious advantage, especially in the playoffs.

  This means I need to improvise. Hockey is a game of instincts and vision, of being able to stay one step ahead. My job is to screen Brodeur, but he’s behind me.

  Then it hits me. I will simply turn around and face Marty. The moment I put my hands in Marty’s face I realize that this is incredibly smart. As in, a moment of genius.

  Standing the normal way to screen a goalie is ineffective because all the goalie needs to do is look around me, and I don’t have eyes in the back of my head to see which way he’s looking. I also can’t protect myself from his whacks to the back of my legs.

  So I stand facing Marty, and the crowd starts to go crazy. Marty puts his hands up and takes a swipe at my face with his glove hand, so I put all my weight on my heels and lean back to avoid the contact. One of the referees, Don Van Massenhoven, skates inches away from me and tells me to cut the shit or he’s going to give me two minutes. A ref skating to a guy standing in front of the net on a five-on-three and then talking to him while the play is still live is unheard of, and he wants to give me a penalty for this? I yell back at him “For what?”

  I’m staring into the whites of Mr. Martin Brodeur’s eyes, which are starting to turn as red as the Devils logo on his chest. Chris Drury skates over now to my left side and sort of whispers in my ear to stop because Van Massenhoven is going to give me two minutes, and I still don’t know why I would be getting this penalty. All the while I have two of the hardest shooters in the NHL taking slap shots that could shatter my spine or break my ribs or crack my tailbone and smash up any other bone in my back that I don’t know about, so that should put any dumb statements about me doing this for show to rest.

  I don’t get a penalty, and about fifteen seconds later Gomez makes a quick pass to my waiting stick and I bury it between the legs of Mrs. Brodeur’s ex-husband. MSG goes absolutely insane: nobody has ever seen anything like this—including the NHL.

  And so the next day they officially amended the NHL rule book—without consulting the owners, or the NHLPA, or anyone, they just did it—so that I could never do this again, even though nowhere in the rule book was it illegal. But now it was. I was actually flattered that they called this rule book rejig “The Avery Rule.”

  Colin Campbell, the NHL’s director of hockey operations, announced it to the waiting world. “An unsportsmanlike conduct minor penalty will be interpreted and applied, effective immediately, to a situation when an offensive player positions himself facing the opposition goaltender and engages in actions such as waving his arms or stick in front of the goaltender’s face, for the purpose of improperly interfering with and/or distracting the goaltender as opposed to positioning himself to try to make a play.”

  We ended up beating New Jersey in five games, and in the traditional handshake line at the end of the series Marty pulled his hand away as I stuck mine out. The unsportsmanlike gesture just proved what I had been saying about him, when I wasn’t scoring goals on him. Not a class act, on the ice or off it.

  We felt very confident going into the semifinals against the Penguins. We’d played them eight times during the season, and had a 5–3 record against them. So we felt more than able to win four games against them now.

  And then we go and lose the first two. We need to win the next one at home, or else it’s going to be a very steep climb out of the hole. I mean, at this point in NHL history, only two teams have come back from being down three games to zip in the Stanley Cup playoffs. The Leafs did it against Detroit in 1942, and the Islanders did it in 1975. Against Pittsburgh. Maybe it’s an omen.

  We play Game 3 at MSG, and as ever, our fans are giving us a boost. I’m skating full speed on the offensive zone forecheck and have my target locked in: it’s Hal Gill, the Penguins’ six-seven, 250-pound D-man. He actually sees me coming and braces himself, so he steps into the check and we hit each other straight on, full blast.

  The wind gets blown out of my chest and it feels as if I’ve just torn my abdominals. In the first intermission I walk into the trainer’s room and ask Jim Ramsay and our team doctor, Andy Feldman, to give me the good stuff—more Toradol.

  I play the rest of the game and get an assist in the second period, but we can’t beat the Penguins and now we’re down 3–0. After the game I’m exhausted. I can hardly pick my head up and all I can think about is getting into the cold tub. About a minute into my cold tub session it feels as if someone just came up behind me and stabbed me in the shoulder. I call Dr. Feldman over and tell him what’s going on and he immediately tells me to get dressed. We’re going to the hospital.

  I feel so weak walking into St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village that they immediately run a CT scan and MRI. While we’re waiting for the doctors to read the tests, the pain gets really bad so they hit me with Dilaudid, which is a morphine derivative that treats moderate to severe pain. It doesn’t sit well, so I start projectile vomiting.

  This was a blessing in disguise because now I’m puking blood and the room looks like I’ve just committed mass murder. I’m covered in blood, too, and the doctors now know I’m ble
eding internally. It turned out that my collision with Hal Gill had lacerated my spleen, and I spent the next five days in a room in the basement of St. Vincent’s. The only way they can find the laceration is by hoping that it pops its head out and sprays my insides with blood while they have the scope inside me, and after a few tries they finally found it. I would live to fight another day, but my season was done.

  The next morning, James Dolan, the owner of the Rangers, and Glen Sather, the GM, came to see me. My close friend Lauren Flynn was asleep on a chair in the corner of the room, and Lauren had brought our mutual friend May Andersen along. May is Danish, and a world-famous model. I was in a ton of pain during the night and the ladies took turns giving me ice chips because I’d never been so thirsty in my life but every time I drank something I’d throw it up, which in turn would make me even thirstier.

  May fell asleep in the fetal position at the bottom of my bed and the night nurse had put blankets over her, so at first glance you couldn’t even tell she was there. The look on the faces of Slats and Mr. Dolan when they walked into the room and May popped her head out from under the sheets was legendary. I mean, you couldn’t have staged it better. And now I realized it also really hurt to laugh.

  17

  THE SUMMER OF VOGUE

  While sitting in my hotel room between Games 3 and 4 against New Jersey, I wrote a letter to the woman I’d called Mrs. Bloomberg when I first met her at the Met Ball, asking the celebrated Anna Wintour of Vogue if I could be an intern during my upcoming off-season.

  I had started reading Vogue in LA, and dove deeper into the fashion world after I moved to New York City, just really by paying attention to all the amazing ways people put themselves together in this city. And I still read Vogue, and GQ, and anything, really, that would help me understand what I was seeing.

  My personal style had always been important to me, starting with my first pair of Nike sneakers, which I got on my ninth birthday. I’d coveted those shoes as soon as I’d first seen them, and looking back at how important they were I regret not keeping them as a memento: Air Pegasus 1989.

  I remember my first T-shirt from Chip and Pepper, and I also remember the first time I met Pepper at a house party in LA, after I’d given his wife a cigarette and started to inappropriately vibe with her, not knowing she was married and certainly not to my favorite clothing designer and maker.

  I started to read Vogue for a few reasons. I was actually into the storytelling, as the magazine isn’t just pages of glossy paper with pictures of pretty women in expensive clothes. I realized this when I opened a story shot by Annie Leibovitz, and although I didn’t read books that often as a child, flipping through the pages of this story engaged me, and I wanted to know what happened next. It was a magical story being told with clothes and a supermodel. It was visual art.

  I also used Vogue as a kind of social media tool. I was tired of the conversations that had surrounded me for the last eight years in NHL locker rooms, ones that would usually consist of cars-pussy-food-drugs-money-watches and more money, so I carried my monthly copy of Vogue onto the team plane tucked under my arm, with the cover very visible, as a sort of subtle “fuck you” to my immediate society.

  The circles in which I was socializing in New York were much different from the ones in Los Angeles. In New York, people talk about interesting things, and in those conversations, because I didn’t feel as worldly, I needed something to separate me even more.

  What better way to do that than to learn everything I could about fashion? I could walk into a party and tell a woman exactly who made her bag and what season it was first shown in. I was blowing people away—especially the gay guys. And as soon as you get the gay vote you have a shot at any woman in the room. Which is not why I was doing it, but it didn’t hurt.

  And yes, meeting babes was also part of the reason for sending my letter to Anna Wintour, though my love of fashion was the prime mover. I heard back from her through the proper channels, and once I’d recovered from my lacerated spleen I was to go through Vogue’s version of training camp—a series of meetings with different people at the magazine to see if I was worthy, and why I wanted to do this. I didn’t blame them for wanting to test me, and because I was the first athlete to try to do this, everyone needed to make sure that I was sincere.

  I met Laurie Jones in her office at 4 Times Square. Laurie was Vogue’s managing editor, and had also spent twenty years at New York magazine. She’s this tough Texan with an acute bullshit meter. I explained to her that I really loved fashion and wanted to understand it more and to learn about the business from the inside. I promised that I’d do all the same stuff as the regular interns, showing up on time Monday through Friday and working as long as I had to in order to do whatever they wanted. I would make minimum wage, and check in with her each week to tell her what I’d done.

  Ms. Jones seemed satisfied by what I had to say, and so she picked up the phone and called Sally Singer, who was a senior editor, and asked if she was ready for me.

  Sally was softer than Laurie, and my intimidation was quashed the moment I walked into her office. She explained that she wanted me to shadow specific editors. We agreed that I’d have a thirty-day internship and that it would start on Monday at 9 A.M. I was as excited as if I’d just made the team after a tough camp, the difference being that the team would give me a uniform. Now I had to figure out what I was going to wear on wear at my first day at Vogue.

  When I walked into the office that Monday morning in May at 9 A.M. sharp with a tea in one hand and the New York Post in the other, I could feel all eyes on me and everyone asking the same question: what the hell is this New York Ranger doing at Vogue? There was confusion and interest and excitement rippling through the halls at 4 Times Square, and I felt it too, like you do when you join a new team. Will I fit in? Will I be able to pull this off? But the added twist is that while I know how to play hockey, I’ve never played on a world-class fashion team.

  One thing that I’d have to pull off better was my own fashion sense—for my first day at Vogue I wore slacks, a checked shirt, and a patterned tie. I mean, the checks and pattern did not go together, and all the Vogue people knew that and soon enough I would, too.

  My first mission is to take care of “the Closet,” which does not look like the one in the movies, but its function is the same. It’s the fashion nerve center of the place, a small office with minimal shelving crammed with garment racks of clothes, and shoes everywhere. I’m helping to organize it with two other interns known as Voguettes.

  Voguettes are the interns tasked with carrying clothes across the city and around the globe so that the well-traveled editors have all the tools to create stories and images that will command millions in advertising dollars. Voguettes are usually from wealthy families, but they’re hard-working and cute—never hot, but always cute. They’re well-read and have great manners, and have chosen to sacrifice their social lives, love lives, and family lives so that they can be a part of the magazine they’ve dreamed of working for since they were teenagers. I found it fascinating to see the dedication the staffers at Vogue have. These women work for low wages and they put in grueling seventy-hour weeks. Let me tell you, most men could not finish one week at 4 Times Square.

  The gossip buzzed through the building on my first day, with people wondering if I was leaving pro hockey for fashion, or if I was part of some elaborate reality TV prank. At lunch I further confused everyone by heading to the cafeteria and filling my plate with a mountain of food, which stood in stark contrast to the meager salads consumed by the girls of Glamour–Teen Vogue–Men’s Vogue–Self (other magazines in the building).

  I couldn’t have been happier. Back home in Pickering, my mother, Marlene, was proud of my detour from the predictable pro-hockey player summer path, though my father, Al, was a little surprised by it. He took a ribbing from his golf buddies about me, the tough NHL agitator now swishing through
the corridors of fashion. Though he’s a man of few words with me, he did ask me if I was trying to tell him I was gay. I laughed and told him it was exactly the opposite: I’d found a summer gig doing something I loved in a workplace filled with beautiful women where I was the only straight guy. He smiled. He got it.

  • • •

  A black Town Car picked me up one morning at 6 o’clock from my place on West 19th Street, and forty-five minutes later I was on the set of my first Vogue shoot. The only time I’d been on the set of a photo shoot before was when I was playing in LA. I was the subject, and the great Bruce Weber shot me for Vanity Fair.

  For my Vanity Fair shoot I flew to Florida and we did some shots in a hockey rink in suburban Miami, and then we went back to Bruce’s home on Ocean Boulevard in Hollywood, Florida, which is easily the coolest house I’ve ever seen. It’s a one-story modern masterpiece with a glass wall that opens up to connect the inside of the house to the white sand beaches outside.

  Bruce had me eating out of the palm of his hand, posing in my tighty whities on the beach and in the pool, surrounded by more golden retrievers than people. It hit me that all his photo assistants looked like college football quarterbacks, sculpted from granite, tanned, and not wearing all that much.

  I leaned in to my publicist Nicole and said, “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” By the size of the smile on her face I guessed that she did. I mean, I’ve been in locker rooms with twenty naked guys watching two naked guys wrestle and nobody for a minute thought it was gay. Because your life as a pro athlete means that you’re always surrounded by athletic guys in various states of undress, the Bruce Weber shoot just seemed like a locker room. Until the moment I realized that I might be the only straight guy on set. No one hit on me or anything, but it was a funny realization because sometimes, if you’re not looking, you can’t see the obvious.

  Today’s photo shoot for Vogue has nothing to do with me in my underwear and everything to do with Narciso Rodriguez, a veteran designer favored by A-list celebrities and more importantly, by the editors of Vogue.