by Sean Avery
The one thing that neither of us knew was just how deeply ingrained in NYC I had become. Dallas won me over with a four-year, $15.5 million offer, and for that, I was happy to move to the Lone Star State, though not in much of a rush, as I actually delayed the press conference introducing me as a Dallas Star for two days because I was apparently doing something more important in New York. So important I can’t even remember.
The congratulatory calls started to flood in, and although I was extremely happy that I’d finally been recognized by a hockey team which had made a pretty clear statement about how much they wanted me, I also knew that the team in the place I called home didn’t want me as badly.
I did the appropriate dance with the media and gave the standard bullshit lines about signing with a contender and Dallas being a great hockey town, but I knew that it wasn’t. Dallas is the land of the Cowboys, and even after the Mavericks’ maverick owner, Mark Cuban, brought an NBA championship to the city, it was still a football town and a Friday Night Lights state.
I remember telling my friends that I couldn’t wait to get a big house with lots of bedrooms for everyone to visit, but in truth, I was thinking about how many days I had left in NYC before I needed to pack up and head to Texas. When I finally made it to Dallas for the press conference, I planned on doing everything, including finding a place to live, in two days. I needed to get back to New York already.
After going to see a third rental property in Dallas, I couldn’t handle seeing another home filled with pink-themed children’s rooms and country-style kitchens. So I found a concrete building near the American Airlines Center that was filled with New York–style lofts. I can get a five-bedroom, 4,500-square-foot apartment with concrete polished floors for $3,000 a month, which is about $17,000 cheaper than I’d pay for it in downtown Manhattan. I sign the lease and head directly to the airport to fly back to New York. I’m not as happy as I thought I would be after this money dream come true.
NHL training camp for the 2008–09 season opens on September 15, which means players arrive in town the day after Labor Day. I’m having a hard time booking my flight and getting on the plane, but I finally do it on September 9, and I’m one of the last guys to arrive in Dallas, which doesn’t look good, especially after the large financial vote of confidence Hully has given me.
Everything is different in Dallas. New York is hot in the summer, and even has a neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen (so named because of ancient bigotry, but I like to think of it as being because of climate change), but here in the middle of September, Dallas feels like Hell’s Furnace. Everyone drives, everywhere, and Mexican is the food of choice. I love Mexican food, but not three times a day.
Dallas people love their guns and do not love gays. Dallas people love to drink booze and they take it a bit too far, and I’ve seen a lot of far, so am in a position to judge. The women of Dallas are also remarkable, redefining the notion of casual. A Dallas belle at a football game means fully done hair and makeup, but replace the high heel with a flat and the denim blouse with a Texas Tech sweatshirt. I can’t really tell what these ladies look like, because in public they have on more war paint than Mel Gibson’s troops in Braveheart. Putting on and taking off their makeup must add hours to their days, but Dallas, like LA, is about surfaces.
Brad Richards moved into my building near the AAC, and from time to time he’d catch me in my apartment with the lights turned down and some candles burning as I listened to the best thing I found in Dallas by a Texas mile: a 1972 Magnavox record player in mint condition. In the world of pro hockey, listening to music by yourself with the lights dimmed and candles burning is something only guys who are outside the herd do. And I’m doing it from the start.
I had fought the Stars’ captain Brenden Morrow a lot prior to being his new teammate. He didn’t like me before I walked into the dressing room, and he liked me even less after. He didn’t like the attention I was taking away from him when I signed. He’d married his former teammate Guy Carbonneau’s daughter in 2002, and because he was the team leader, that meant she was tasked with being the leader in the wives’ room, though fortunately she didn’t have to set the standard for her mother-in-law, as Carbonneau retired in 2000.
Mike Modano is the hockey king of Dallas, which is sort of like being third-string on the Dallas Community College football team in terms of public awareness. No one has chanted his name at MSG.
Modano has certainly had a Hall of Fame career, and is very close with Brett Hull. I have an uneasy feeling when I think about Modano keeping things together in the dressing room, because this team is made up of a lot of guys who have that Texas “I’m No. 1” thing going on. Marty Turco, the goalie, is another Dallas big shot and he doesn’t like me either because of my taunting of Marty Brodeur, who as far as I can tell plays for a team 1,500 miles away.
I do not mix well with this group.
Except, to my surprise, Steve Ott. Steve is a similar player to me, and while he hasn’t had an impact on the league like I did during my time in New York, he’s still very good at what he does. Nothing is off-limits for Ott, and he’ll say almost anything to get a guy off his game. He’s the one guy I thought I definitely wouldn’t get along with. I like Brad Richards as well. So, two out of thirty-nine. If I was playing Texas Holdem with that hand, I’d fold.
It’s over 100 degrees in Texas and I’m hot all the time, and when I’m hot I sweat. So I dust off one of my short-pants suits for a trip to Los Angeles and head for my seat at the back of the team plane. I know it’s going to take everyone a minute to get used to the look, but maybe it will actually catch on with some of the guys in this cauldron of a place. The next thing I know, the other co-GM, Les Jackson, tells me I need to go home and change into something more manly, and that the plane will wait. Yes, the Dallas Stars couldn’t handle a guy in a suit with short pants, so they spent thousands of extra dollars in rental fees for an airplane while they waited for me to change. I’ve never seen this happen before, but then again, I’m the first to ever try it. Did I mention I looked great?
I think I arrived in Dallas to a very passive-aggressive reception because of my relationship with Brett Hull. Some of my new teammates felt like Brett had showed some favoritism that I didn’t merit. Well, that’s exactly what happened, and if I were running a team, I’d try to sign as many players I could who I had a previous relationship with and who I knew could step up and help the team. I’d want to know as much as I could about my players, and if I’d not only played with a guy but lived with him and we hadn’t killed each other, I’d sure as hell take a shot at getting him when he was available.
I didn’t do a good enough job mourning my break-up with New York. In sports you don’t get to take as much time as you need to get over a relationship with a team. You’re expected to forget about it in hours and get on with the next one as soon as you pull on the new jersey. Everyone knows that if you don’t take enough time after a tough break-up, and if you get into a rebound relationship, it never lasts. I think I’m in a rebound relationship with Dallas.
And fuck do I miss New York.
Going from MSG to the American Airlines Center is like the rock star playing sell-out crowds in the capital of the world one day, and then playing the state fair where fried butter is a delicacy the next. It’s like coming down off Adderall. I feel tired and depressed and anxious and irritable.
I hate it here.
I hated it from the first game.
I missed taking the subway to the arena before the game in my fresh-pressed Prada suit and my scuffed-up boots. I missed walking through the crowded restaurants, passing tables filled with people who were there because they were the best at what they did—from supermodels to fashion designers to actors to bankers to filmmakers, and even to the Teamsters who hauled our gear. I missed getting into a yellow cab and pulling up to the Beatrice Inn after a game. This was my life and now I’m in Dallas eating BBQ
ribs and watching a bunch of rich kids pretending to be cowboys throwing darts while tacky blondes drink martinis and talk about their upcoming trips. To New York.
On October 20, I played my first game back at MSG, and we’re in town for five whole days because we’re also playing the Devils and the Islanders. And it’s Fashion Week in New York, which means some fun stuff will be going on day and night, in addition to all the rest of the fun stuff. In case I needed reminding.
I decided I didn’t want to stay in the team hotel in Times Square, so I booked a room at the Mercer in Soho. The Mercer is my favorite hotel in New York, six stories of elegant Romanesque revival in the heart of one of the city’s most interesting neighborhoods. It’s the sister hotel to, ta-da, the Chateau Marmont in LA.
Brad Richards also wanted to have some freelance fun and joined me downtown with a room of his own. Technically this was not allowed, but as long as you show up to the rink on time it really doesn’t matter.
I know Richie has made his mind up that he’s getting out of Dallas when his contract runs out with the Stars, and he has his sights set on signing with the Rangers, so he wanted to see what the city was really like. It was the perfect opportunity to show him around a bit, and not at the tourist spots that you’d see when you came as a visitor.
Usually you land in a city and spend most of your time in the hotel when you’re not at the rink, and then before you know it, you’re sitting on the plane getting ready to land in the next city. Life on the road is not that glamorous, but that doesn’t count when you’re in NYC.
We beat the Rangers 2–1 at MSG. I’m a pro so I did what I’m supposed to do. I put on my Sean Avery character face, and went out of my way to get into goalie Henrik Lundqvist’s space, and talked shit to the talented young Brandon Dubinsky in warm-up. I wasn’t happy. Beating the team that I still wanted to play for was not a great feeling.
Richie is a good guy, a smart guy, and he was a total professional. He’d been focused on being a great NHLer for a long time and now he was starting to enjoy himself a little bit more. Still, he was naive about what fame as a professional athlete could bring you. After the game, Richie and I took two dates to dinner at the Waverly Inn, and when we got back to the Mercer I lit a fire in the wood-burning fireplace in my room and we all went down to the lobby for a drink. Fifteen minutes later the fire alarm goes off, and as hotel guests start filing into the lobby the hotel manager approaches me and says, “Mr. Avery, you lit a fire in your room but forgot to open the flue.” I wanted to set New York on fire again, but not literally.
Being back in town gave me the chance to check in with Matt Abramcyk and our new sports bar in Tribeca called Warren 77, which was coming along nicely. One of the reasons we ended up in Tribeca was that the rent was still manageable, and a restaurant’s lease is what makes or breaks it. We’d have soft lighting with dark colors like hunter green, and the banquettes would be the classic red pleather with some pretty special art on the walls—some Diane Arbus, and a Warhol of Gretzky that I loaned the bar. I was really excited about this world I was creating outside hockey, and was confident that it would yield some security for when I hung up the skates. I knew I would be living back here in New York no matter what.
But on I went with Dallas. I think the first real turning point that marked the beginning of my end with the Stars came on November 1, 2008, in Boston. I’ve never seen two players turn an arena upside down like Steve Ott and I did that night; it was just one of those games that’s nasty from the start. There were 146 minutes of penalties in that game—I had twenty-one, Ott had eighteen—and the Bruins tried to get us suspended. They said the timekeepers who sit in the penalty box have never heard such disgusting language or obscene talk in thirty-five years of NHL hockey.
Being an effective agitator is about being original, so I took that as a compliment. They forgot to mention the two train wrecks of girls who somehow got down to the penalty box area and started calling us faggots and asking us if it felt good to fuck each other’s assholes.
We felt obliged to respond.
I always found it interesting when women wore jerseys with player names on the back to the game, as these ladies had done in Boston. We asked them: “How does your boyfriend feel knowing that his girlfriend would blow Phil Kessel after the game in his fucking car?” One of the girls’ boyfriends came down to try talking shit back to us. So we asked him if she was allowed to blow Kessel so long as she brings home an autographed stick. He lasted about seventeen seconds then bailed ten rows back up to his seat. He knew what we said was, if not literally true, then at least her fantasy, and he didn’t want to go there.
It was a nasty game from the get-go, with chippy play and questionable hits and just a miserable kind of vibe in the barn in Boston. We lost 5–1, and I scored our only goal.
After the game, Mike Modano actually said that we’d created a circus and he had no interest in playing in a game that was as rough and testy an environment as the one caused by Avery and Ott.
From day one of my time on Dallas, Modano was pissed off that they were paying me that much money, and he was pissed off that he wasn’t making more. He was also coming to the end of his career and didn’t like people who didn’t roll out the red carpet for him as they once had. He was one of those supremely talented players who didn’t work hard in practice and didn’t backcheck and was as soft as a baby’s ass. He didn’t lay his body on the line for the team. He was also very close to Brett Hull, and since Hully and I were also close, I think he was a bit jealous.
I knew my Dallas days were numbered.
• • •
“Hockey’s Evil Genius.” That’s what the Hockey News called me when they put me on their May 13, 2008, cover with devil’s horns and a mustache and goatee drawn with a Sharpie over my face. So before we landed in Calgary on December 1, 2008, the Canadian media had been hyping this big game against Calgary because of my growing reputation in the NHL, combined with the fact that Elisha Cuthbert, my ex-girlfriend of a year and a half, had started dating Dion Phaneuf, the “star” player of the Calgary Flames.
I had certainly been in love with Elisha, but the fact that she’d moved on with her life after we split—as I had done—and was dating Phaneuf was not the least bit upsetting. What bothered me was that the Canadian media not only thought that this was actually an interesting story line, but that they also thought it was an acceptable story.
As well, there was a perfect storm brewing because I was miserable in Dallas—except for a brief surge of happiness every second Friday when we got paid and my paycheck was even bigger than I’d imagined because Texas has no state income tax. But the pleasure of the paycheck was fleeting.
I wasn’t having fun.
Cameras—print, TV, cell phone—were waiting in front of our hotel before we left for morning skate. I walked out to get one of the best things Canada has to offer, a coffee and doughnut (or two) from Tim Hortons. The media horde immediately started asking me about Dion. I am astonished that the news day is so slow that this is the story they want to follow: how another NHLer is dating a woman I used to date. They really want to make this seem like some kind of bitter rivalry between me and Phaneuf, so I’m thinking, OK, maybe there’s a way to play this so I get inside his head before the game. But it’s just a vague thought.
Cameras were inside the arena and following my every movement in our morning skate, and now I’m annoyed. There are things going on in the world that are way more important than this—I mean a million times more important—and I’m kind of embarrassed for these guys that this is what they wake up in the morning to do.
I get off the ice and the media is standing in the dressing room in a huddle, just waiting for me to invite them over. I walk into the trainer’s room and the guys are all laughing about how I have become The Biggest Story in Calgary, and then it happens: I say, “I just want to comment on how it’s become like a common thing
in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my sloppy seconds.”
I have no idea why I used that term other than it’s the most relevant slang I could think of for the situation, and my aim was to poke Dion Phaneuf before the game and get him mad at me. Brad Richards had said, “You won’t do it . . .” Excuse me, but was that a challenge? So I walked out of the trainer’s room and into the dressing room and spoke to the media and the rest is history.
Of course, it didn’t seem that way at first. I got dressed and could feel that my teammates were playing it off like it was just another sound bite in an eighty-two-game schedule. I got on the team bus to go back to the hotel for our lunch and pre-game nap, and then it started . . .
Guys’ phones are buzzing and pinging and when I walk into the lunchroom, all eyes are on me. Everyone already knows, including the coaches sitting at a table eating and looking at me like I’ve just ruined Christmas.
I can hardly eat. I can’t stop thinking about what I just said, and what the suits at the NHL are going to bring down on me now. It was trash talk before a game, and what’s the worst that can happen? The NHL will fine me and that’s the end of it.
I walk into my hotel room and turn on the TV and I’m on every channel. And just like in the movies, the phone rings and on the other end is my friend and my boss, Brett Hull, who says, “Holy shit, you really did it this time.” The great thing about Hully is that he always said what he thought, and by now, I was thinking the same thing.
We knew each other well enough that when he said, “Get out of this shitstorm ASAP—just pack up and fly to New York and we will figure this out,” we both knew my time in Dallas was over. He hadn’t suspended me or anything like that. He was trying to protect me from what we both knew was about to happen. Though it was worse than we imagined.