Ice Capades

by Sean Avery

  We’re shooting at a beach club on Long Island which looks like it hasn’t had a coat of fresh paint in half a century. Raquel Zimmermann, a Brazilian goddess, is the supermodel of the day, and I study her up close. She’s a perfectly proportioned five-ten, with long sculpted legs and perfect breasts and shoulders like a world-class swimmer and long curly blond hair. She’s perfection when it comes to beauty, and she becomes even more beautiful when seen through the eye of a lens.

  Claire Danes is also in the shoot. She’s a complicated soul which makes her a true talent on screen and stage, and while she does not have the body of a supermodel, she still captures the camera’s fickle eye with her pouty, intense, intelligent seduction.

  I try to stay focused and perform the odd jobs I’m assigned, such as helping the catering crew find a table to set up lunch and picking up garbage to keep the set tidy. Everyone from Claire to Raquel to the stylists is confused by my presence. I’m wearing black shorts, a black T-shirt, and black desert boots, and I have a $25K Rolex on my wrist and look like I should be playing hockey. But I’m an intern at Vogue.

  I soon made a fashion statement of my own. Because the heat and humidity make NYC a hot and swampy mess in spring and summer, I had my tailor turn the pants of my suit into shorts, and I wear them along with the suit jacket over a white dress shirt. I beat the heat and still look great doing it. As I walk into 4 Times Square, almost every single person who passes by me does a double-take, and by lunchtime the cafeteria is buzzing with talk of my suit. I had men from all the different magazines coming up and complimenting me on my idea and asking if I think they can pull it off. You can pull off anything if you’re confident, except maybe a checked shirt and patterned tie. (Actually, my most embarrassing moment at Vogue came in the cafeteria, too. As I walked toward the checkout with two plates of beef Stroganoff, salad, bottles of water, and Jell-o for dessert, I noticed Hamish Bowles out of the corner of my eye. Hamish is an extremely dandy fashion man and one of the most powerful people at Vogue. While noticing him I didn’t realize that the “wet floor” sign was right below my feet, but when I did, my natural instinct was to avoid it, and I slipped. And so I watched in the slowest of slow motion my tray of food land a foot in front of me and ranch dressing paint the front of my black T-shirt and vest. The worst part was that when I stood up and gave a bow—which would usually be followed by a round of applause at MSG—I was met by a very deafening silence.)

  Vogue editors are in charge of overseeing the stories that fill the pages of each month’s issue. They are often women from affluent families who went to private schools in Connecticut and then to Ivy League colleges. A lot of them have husbands in private equity, and they summer in the Hamptons. They run themselves ragged and are truly slaves to fashion, and sustain themselves with Marlboro Reds and green juice. They’re very talented, but they must please the Queen herself, Anna Wintour, whom some underlings have called Nuclear Wintour due to her icy personality.

  The Devil Wears Prada was a very successful novel and movie based on the life of an Anna Wintour assistant who was tasked with impossible jobs, like securing an advance copy of the latest Harry Potter. These assistants aspired to become Vogue editors someday as well, and one of the unbelievable perks that came with an internship was sitting in on editorial meetings where all the editors would update Anna on new ideas for next month’s issue and review pictures from the most recent shoots.

  Everyone was nervous in these meetings in which Anna would sit at the head of the table with her sunglasses on and a cup of Starbucks in her hand. One of her two assistants would be taking notes, and I’d sit in a chair off to the side, trying to control my sweating so it wasn’t obvious how nervous I was.

  I can’t remember anything specific that was reviewed during my time there because all I could think about was whether Anna was sizing me up behind her shades. When she didn’t like a picture or idea she would sit in silence, and the editor presenting it would disappear through a hole in the floor. Not really, but they probably wanted to, and then Anna would immediately move on to the next idea. It was a tense room, but it was very effective in getting the edition sorted out. There was no debating back and forth—you just kept moving forward until the boss was satisfied because hers was the only opinion that mattered.

  One of the legendary editors at Vogue was André Leon Talley, who had worked under Anna Wintour since 1983 and was one of the few gay African-American men in such an influential position.

  After I had written my letter to Anna Wintour I invited him to come to see us in a playoff game against Pittsburgh, and he agreed; I was to arrange everything with his assistant. I was shocked when the assistant informed me that I’d need to send a car to Talley’s home in Westchester, which would drive him to the game, take him to dinner after the game, and then drive him home. This was years before Uber existed, and I knew this adventure would easily set me back $1,000.

  After our warm-up, the Rangers media man Jason Vogel grabbed me outside the locker room with a look of panic in his eyes. “We have a problem,” he said, “your friend André can’t fit in the seat.”

  André was six-six, and though Anna Wintour had initiated an intervention about the man’s weight in 2005, three years later he was still pretty substantial. I wondered if we’d have to seat him in the penalty box, because there was certainly room for him there. Jason was one step ahead of me, though, and had already put André in a plush fold-out chair in the handicapped section of MSG, which was actually one of the best seats in the house.

  The sight of this gigantic black man in a full-length fur coat sitting alone in majestic splendor was not hard to miss from the ice level, and it had the guys laughing every time they looked up into that section. It was as if some exotic African royalty had come to MSG to bestow his blessing upon the Blueshirts, but he seemed to be enjoying the spectacle of which he was part.

  After the game, we’d made plans to go to dinner at the Waverly Inn, which was the hottest restaurant in NYC. I didn’t dare make André wait around while I did media and showered, and had the car take him to the restaurant immediately after the final buzzer.

  When I walked into the Waverly, Karl Lagerfeld, the most famous fashion designer in the world, was at our table. It’s always hard to stop sweating after a game even when you’ve showered and changed, and once I saw Karl, dressed, as always, as if he was mashing up an 18th-century tableau with a vampire movie (high collars and sunglasses), my nerves went into high gear and I was dripping away.

  I didn’t say much and listened hard, but Karl’s thick German-French accent and the speed with which he spoke made it almost impossible for me to understand him when meeting for the first time.

  During that dinner I saw a lot of people whom I knew socially, and the cool ones just gave me a nod and kept walking. There were a few who wanted to stop to talk, and so to avoid disrupting my dinner companions, I’d get up from the table to speak to them.

  I had no idea that this is apparently hitting the absolute bottom in table manners, and the next morning I get word that André is beyond furious with me and can’t believe I would get up from the table while he was there. Apparently I was supposed to ignore everyone who tried to say hello to me because who could be more interesting or powerful than the people at the table? So, ignoring your other friends is considered polite in the fashion world.

  One day during my internship I was asked to go to LA to help an editor named Katherine McNeil with a few different shoots she had, and this task filled me with pleasure and a little worry, as I was flying back to the city I’d loved once and then left, in my new incarnation as a New York Ranger fashionisto.

  The Black Eyed Peas are one of the biggest pop bands in the world and Vogue was shooting them. They were using an LA-based crew and stylist assistants, and I didn’t know anyone on set, but I could feel that everyone was confused by my presence. It’s not like everyone stops and introduces themselves at
the beginning—just like they didn’t on every NHL team I played for except the Rangers—and there are a lot of fast-moving parts.

  Everything was running smoothly until will.i.am started to give Katherine a hard time about the clothes options. He didn’t want to wear anything that Vogue wanted him to wear, and insisted on wearing his own clothes. He was being diff.i.cult as they did a light test, and eventually walked off the set with his publicist, leaving Katherine in tears.

  As he walked toward me I rose out of the shadows and stepped in front of him. “You don’t know me,” I began, “but my advice would be to think twice about walking out of a Vogue shoot that has you starring in it. And you can also break the news to Fergie that her Vogue shoot won’t be happening.”

  He didn’t say anything, he just looked confused, and his publicist tried to move them along. I wasn’t budging, and will.i.am could see that.

  “Once word gets out that you bailed, you will have more than problems from Vogue, and in my humble opinion, I don’t think that’s something you want.”

  I wasn’t trash-talking him, but I used the same sense of authority that I used when getting into someone’s head on the ice, and now he looked worried. I stepped out of the way and he and his publicist walked past, with the publicist giving me the death stare.

  It was an interesting lesson for me. When a celebrity acts like they’re a celebrity, all of a sudden they lose that power of seduction. It was certainly the first time a Vogue intern had stepped into an NHL enforcer’s role on a photo shoot, but it worked. will.i.am came back to Earth from his lofty perch in the stars, and we made it through. After that, I could do no wrong in Katherine’s eyes.

  As I said earlier, part of the reason I did this internship was to meet some babes, and ideally, one of the ladies being shot for the magazine. Walking through the halls of Vogue was always an adventure, and because I was one of the few straight men in the office, I think I was the object of the odd crush. I liked this attention, and would go out of my way to do little things, like buying the girls lunch in the cafeteria or ordering a Town Car for them when I overheard a summons to head downtown with those dreaded black garment bags. Anytime you see a pretty girl carrying a black garment bag in NYC, you know she’s an intern for a fashion magazine.

  I really tried to behave myself while I worked one month as an intern, since I was representing not only Vogue while on set or in the studio, but also the New York Rangers.

  The one big difference between the NHL and the fashion world is the lack of rules. When it came to sex/drugs/music/opinions, the fashion world really didn’t have any rules, as long as what you were doing or saying had style. I loved it.

  Steven Klein is one of the most famous fashion photographers in the world and today he is shooting a story for Vogue. I’m on set not because I’m needed there but because I want to see the great Steven Klein work, and this is another perk when you’re a famous intern.

  As they fixed a light during the third look of the day, Steven Klein suddenly stopped in the middle of a conversation he was having with two models and just stared at me. He stared for quite a while, and then leaned into the girls and whispered something to them.

  Four hours later, I was behind the wheel of my Audi waiting for the incredibly sexy model who’d been at Steven Klein’s side for most of the day. After Steven whispered whatever he said about me to her, she, too, suddenly couldn’t stop staring at me, and after lunch, while we were both sneaking a cigarette, we agreed to an early Friday evening dinner at the Mercer after the shoot wrapped.

  By Sunday morning, I was finally back home after a weekend with her, one which took a turn for the better around 1 P.M. on a Friday, all because of a whisper and a look. Someday I’m going to open a small café in Soho and call it “A Whisper and A Look.” It will definitely sell copies of Vogue.

  • • •

  July 1 is about a week away, and that’s the day I become an unrestricted free agent, which means that if I don’t sign with the Rangers before then, I can sign with any team in the league. Nothing is going on with New York, who have put a lowball offer on the table, and the mix of my emotions is intense. At one moment, I’m angry at the offer from the Rangers. I almost died for this team just a few months ago, and the arena chants my name on a regular basis, and the damn team has won with me in the lineup and lost when I’m not there. I also had the stats over the last two years to get paid more than the $2.5 million a year that the Rangers want to pay me.

  Pat Morris, my agent, said he was going to get me the most money that he could, and then I could decide on my next NHL jersey. Pat felt Glen made that below-market offer because he didn’t believe that I would leave. Was he right?

  Running through me is a cocktail of excitement and dread, because I’m about to make more money than I ever dreamed of making, but I know that it’s going to be somewhere other than New York. It would mean leaving the one place I finally felt was home, the place where all my hard work was finally being respected and rewarded. Or was it?

  One night during the negotiations, my close friend Matt Abramcyk, at that time the owner of the Beatrice, came by my apartment and said he wanted to go for a ride to Tribeca, so we jumped in his Range Rover and headed downtown. You can feel the energy shift when you cross over Canal Street into Tribeca (the Triangle Below Canal). It has cobblestone streets and beautiful lofts, but it’s still pretty empty in Tribeca in the summer of 2008. We pull up in front of 77 Warren, a Vietnamese restaurant that’s now gone out of business and where, rather sadly, the tables are still set. It was a total surprise because Matt had said nothing about going to check out a potential restaurant.

  The moment I walked inside I saw exactly what Matt saw: with its brick walls and battered hardwood floors we could turn this place into a non-sports-bar sports bar, the Rangers locker room, circa 1968.

  Matt and I had kicked around the idea of opening up a bar or eatery together during some of our late nights at the Beatrice, and because of the uncertainty of my NHL future I am looking for ways to anchor myself in this city I love. And seeing this place made me realize that the time had come: I was about to get into the hospitality business.

  Around the same time, I’d also started to hang out with this beautiful model, whom I’d noticed during the off-season a few years back while we were both working out at Equinox West Hollywood, which is full of buff and tanned LA girls. You would never see a look like this woman had, which was a mix of natural beauty and grunge. When we met again in New York, Noot Seear and I had a connection that had been brewing for years.

  Noot was from Squamish, British Columbia. On July 25, I landed in Vancouver with Noot and we headed up the majestic Sea to Sky Highway, past her hometown and onward to the ski resort of Whistler. We were going to attend the first-ever Pemberton Music Festival.

  To get there, we took a helicopter from Whistler to Pemberton (it’s about a seventeen-minute flight), and flying over those snow-capped Coast Mountains, emerald lakes, and incredibly dense and powerful forests made me feel humbled. It was the perfect place to be at that moment, suspended above paradise just as I was suspended between NHL teams, awaiting my professional fate.

  The festival was held around the base of Mount Currie, elevation 8,500 feet, and as we descended in the chopper we could see the festival below, with cars on the narrow highway backed up for hours, trying to get in. We landed in the backyard of a ski chalet across the street from the festival, which had been set up as a party house for the bands to hang out in, so it was stocked with drinks and food and spots to relax in splendor.

  I was now used to first-class treatment at festivals, partly because I’d started attending them at the beginning of the push, with Bonnaroo and Coachella. But now I was here with a supermodel and we were in our home country of Canada and I was starting to become very well known in the land that gave the world hockey.

  This weekend was another piece in the creat
ion of my character in the NHL. The legend of Sean Avery was becoming stronger in a league that very much discouraged individuality. At Pemberton, I’m surrounded by 20,000 drunk Canadians, and half of them seem to have an opinion of me, the common take being something like, “There’s that crazy fucker Sean Avery.” Soon enough they’d be calling me a motherfucker.

  The music was excellent—the Tragically Hip were there, along with about fifty other bands—and I ended up having an incredible weekend, watching Noot dance like the true hippie she is, and watching a barefoot Jordin Tootoo drink more beer than I thought was humanly possible. Tootoo was there with his former Nashville teammate Scottie Upshall. This was the first time I’d ever met either of them off the ice, and they were great guys. I became friends with Scottie because of our mutual love of music. Tootoo vanished from the party scene once he got sober, and I’m glad he came out OK on the other side.

  And then the festival was over, and I was flying back to New York. I had this feeling on the plane that I couldn’t shake: that I’d soon be on another plane taking me away from the city I loved.

  18

  SEAN DOES DALLAS

  I knew I was going to be moving when a call came in from Pat Morris. The Chicago Blackhawks and Dallas Stars were the front-runners for my services, now that the Rangers no longer seemed to think I brought value. Or at least, less value than they were willing to pay for. As I said, they had a strange attitude toward money and me, happily shelling out for guys who brought much less to the team than I did and yet always grinding me. I still don’t understand why.

  My pal Brett Hull is the co-GM in Dallas, and we have a relationship that goes back to Detroit—I mean, I lived in his house and drove him to practice and my friends nearly killed him with their dope cookies. Brett knows how effective I can be on the ice and off it. He tells me that Dallas is committed to winning, and is going to spend some money to do that. Hully told me that I would like Dallas—good people, fun town, which is all true. It just wouldn’t end up being my type of fun.