Ice Capades

by Sean Avery

  This tattoo was a reminder to use the mindfulness technique I had recently learned at the Canyon. It’s a lyric from my favorite Radiohead song, “15 Step.” So, thanks Gary Bettman. Rehab really did change me. Without it, I wouldn’t have this tattoo. Among other things.

  We agreed I would go to Hartford for two weeks and if the reports came back positive, then I would be back in a Ranger jersey. Holy shit, I’m going to pull this off.

  • • •

  To be honest, my two weeks in Hartford felt longer than my three weeks in rehab. Part of this is due to just how fast your body can get out of game shape when you’re not playing, and how much work it takes to get your legs and timing back, and part of this is the fact that the Hartford coach, Ken Gernander, is a total tool.

  Or maybe he thinks I am, and that’s why he treats me like he has to hold his nose around me. I can see how it must seem—I’m a pampered NHLer who ran afoul of the league, got sent to some posh rehab clinic, and am now finishing my clean-up here in Hartford, and he’s running a hockey team, not a clinic.

  But I know that, just like the Canyon, I’m not here forever, so I make it work. It wasn’t a situation where I’d beaten up my granny, so the players in Hartford and around the league were excited to play with me, or against me. Even so, I keep my head down in the dressing room and up on the ice. I play eight games, get two goals and an assist, and get sentenced to just eight minutes in the penalty box. Slats can see that I meant what I said.

  Ken Gernander calls me into his office after practice one cold morning at the top of March to tell me that Dallas is putting me on re-entry, and that New York is going to claim me. Tomorrow I’ll be back at MSG, so I’d better get going.

  I pack my bags and turn the engine on in my Audi S8, and the roar of the fastest sedan on planet Earth replicates the sound of my game the moment I step foot on the ice of MSG.

  On February 23, 2009, Slats fired coach Tom Renney. The Rangers had been on a losing skid—ten losses in twelve games—and as usually happens, the coach got the blame. Renney had a long run with the Rangers, and I liked him. He hadn’t been a player, but he started out as a junior hockey coach in Kamloops, British Columbia, and had been successful. He knew how to talk to players, and he could teach us stuff.

  Sather thinks the Rangers, who were in first place for a good chunk of the early season, need a kick in the ass, and that kick would be coming from John Tortorella, who piled on me for my “sloppy seconds” remark when he was working as a TV analyst after he got fired by Tampa.

  At the news conference announcing his hiring, Slats had to address the elephant in the room, which was me. “I think, over time, he [Tortorella] will learn to love him [me] like we do.”

  It’s nice of Slats to go out on a limb for me, but he isn’t, not really. He’s the boss, and he’s telling everyone—especially Tortorella—how it’s going to be. He thinks I can help the team, he’s happy with my price, and that’s it.

  Tortorella didn’t quite get Glen’s message. After my first meeting with Tortorella, I knew that he meant every word when he’d called me “an embarrassment” on TV. Our meeting was very one-sided, and he wanted me to know that this was his show and I was going to become a faceless piece of the puzzle if I was going to play on his team. It was like a Chihuahua barking at a German shepherd. The little dog wants to make the big dog know that he’s the boss. He wasn’t yelling, he was just in a position to reaffirm his manhood in a room where you couldn’t back-talk, and I would learn that he loved to do that.

  I have no problem being a team player, but let’s be honest: New York is a market where it’s impossible to have a team of anonymous soldiers. I have a history with this city and this team, and the fans weren’t chanting Tortorella’s name at MSG, they were chanting mine.

  I say all the right things during the meeting, and I’m willing to put the things that he said about me behind us because I understand he was an unemployed coach trying to make a living as a loudmouthed, abrasive TV analyst. Maybe we actually have some things in common. He says he’s going to make me a better player, and I’m happy to go along on that journey.

  I played my first game back with the Rangers on March 5, 2009. We beat the Islanders, then we beat Boston, lost to Carolina, and I got my first goal against Nashville in a 4–2 win for us.

  After the Islanders game, which was on Long Island, and where the fans welcomed me back by booing me all night, a reporter from the Daily News asked me if I’d been nervous before the game.

  “If there was any nerves coming in, I certainly got rid of them quick,” I told him.

  After the Nashville win, a reporter asked me how it felt to be scoring again. “Great,” I said. One of the secrets of the locker room is that we want to tell the beat reporters, who we love and see as teammates, the kind of stuff they can’t really print. So my fantasy answer would have gone like this:

  Beat writer: Sean, you really came out of the gates flying in that first period. Can you tell us why?

  Me: It’s funny, because when I got to the rink tonight, I felt like shit, and when I came out for warm-up, I saw this super-hot Russian model with big, heavy C-cups standing two rows behind our bench with her agent Craig who’s a personal friend and all of a sudden my legs felt like rocket launchers and I played possessed. When the puck bounced off my ass and into the net I felt like I had a real shot at her.

  Beat writer: Do you think you can carry it over to tomorrow’s game?

  Me: Honestly, all I care about right now is getting all these stupid interviews done with and putting on my $3,000 Tom Ford suit and taking Anna with the heavy C-cups to Mr. Chow and then hopefully be done fucking her brains out by 1:30 A.M. so I can watch Homeland on DVR and get a few hours’ sleep before morning skate.

  I’ve always wanted to give that interview, but if I’d done it when I was playing I would have been sent to the Canyon permanently.

  I finished the season playing nineteen games for the Rangers and my new coach, John Tortorella. I scored five goals, added seven assists, and served only thirty minutes in the penalty box, which is a hell of a run considering the circumstances I came back from. Tortorella put me up on the first line, and I worked as hard as I’ve ever worked, and we made the playoffs.

  When I said I was excited to play for John Tortorella and thought he was going to make me a better player, I believed it because he said he would, and while I thought he was many things, “liar” was not one of them. Going into the first-round series against Washington, though, I was scratching my head. This coach really doesn’t like me, because the better I play the less he plays me, and I’ve always believed my gut doesn’t lie. I know what’s going on here. When the team isn’t playing well, he promotes me to the first line, and when they do, he buries me on the fourth. It’s part of his strategy to show me in the worst possible light so that when he says to Slats, “This Avery isn’t working out,” it will look like he’s telling the truth.

  My game has lost something under Tortorella’s regime. I feel tentative. We’re expected to dump and chase, and the creativity has been sucked out of the Rangers game. Scott Gomez is the only player allowed to make a creative play with the risk that if he blows it, it could end up on a Washington stick. The rest of the team plays with our assholes so tight we whistle as we skate. We sit in our stalls more exhausted from the constant negativity coming from the coaches over our shoulders than from the war we’re fighting on ice.

  We win the first two games on the road, lose the next one at home, and then win Game 4. We’re up 3–1 on Washington, and all we have to do is win one more and we’re through to the next round.

  Then Tortorella benches me for Game 5. It’s punishment for taking two penalties in the third period in our 2–1 win in Game 4. He tells the media that I crossed an emotional line and put the team in trouble, so he’s sitting one of his most effective guys to make him learn the lesson to play like a
zombie.

  I watch that game from the box and the Rangers lose 4–0. Washington scored less than five minutes in, and that was all they needed.

  I’m back in the lineup for Game 6 at MSG—and Tortorella is suspended. While I was in the press box in Game 5, he completely lost his mind and squirted water at fans in Washington, then threw a water bottle that hit a lady in the head, and for a while, brandished a hockey stick until Jim Schoenfeld, an assistant coach, restrained him. That’s right, that Jim Schoenfeld, the one who triggered a referees’ strike by getting into it with ref Don Koharski and telling him to “have another doughnut, you fat fucking pig.” If you’re keeping track, the assistant coach who had been suspended for losing his cool had to restrain the head coach who was suspended for losing his cool. And I was the one sent to rehab for anger issues. But at least Schoenfeld put me back in the lineup and I get an assist on our first goal, which ties the game at one, and I stay out of the box for sixty minutes. We lose 5–3.

  Now the Caps have tied the series, and Game 7 is winner take all.

  We score first, and I get another assist. Washington ties it. And then, with less than five minutes left in the third period, I watch Sergei Federov raising his arms after making Wade Redden look like the worst free agent signing in the last twenty years. We lose 2–1.

  We lost the series where we’d been up 3–1. That doesn’t happen to good teams, especially when you have a goalie like Lundqvist in your net. Nice work, Torts.

  Tortorella has a reputation as a hard-ass, but not if you know him as a player. We used to laugh at him all the time. There was always someone in the dressing room who wanted to take their skate and decapitate him or take their stick and whack him over the head with it. Marián Gáborik despised him with every bone in his body. Even Hank Lundqvist, an even-keeled Swede who was usually in his own world, thought Tortorella was a terrible manager of pro athletes.

  And he can’t skate and stickhandle a puck at the same time, and he doesn’t realize we really don’t take him seriously because of that.

  I thought Tortorella was a clown, but he was hardly the first coach I didn’t respect. But there were two things he did that season that made me think he was a danger to the team.

  First, he referred to our fans at MSG as “idiots.” He said it with hate. I wanted to stand up and bitch-slap him. What does this midget who can’t even skate know about the MSG fans? How hard they’ve cheered for us ever since I’ve worn this jersey, and how hard they cheered for us the last two years in the playoffs? How they make us feel special when we walk down the street in a big city like New York? I can guarantee that I wouldn’t ever bump into Tortorella on the street because he didn’t even live in New York City.

  And then he called our local beat writers “fucking idiots.” The hockey beat writers are always there, writing about our team no matter what, win or lose. Our writers give us presence and identity in a city crowded with pro sports teams, and as players, we need it.

  The confidence you get from a headline that has your name in it and an article that praises you is almost as valuable as the kick in the butt you get from an article that calls you out for not playing well and makes you realize you really need to pick up your game ASAP. And now our coach is degrading these writers as idiots. He thought these big-city writers whose profession was to follow our team and the game we played didn’t have a clue about hockey. The funny thing is that Tortorella can skate just about as well as some of our beat writers.

  Over the summer prior to the 2009–10 Rangers’ training camp, Tortorella kept in touch with me by phone, and the calls were very weird. I actually like the idea of coaches speaking to their players during the off-season, but these calls felt more like he was pretending to give a shit about what I was doing when, really, he was spying on me.

  He’d ask me whether I was working hard and getting ready for camp. He could have asked any staffer on the Rangers—trainers, conditioners, or Glen—if conditioning had ever been an issue, but no. And he also seemed to be very interested in where I was. Might I be in Paris? South of France? Croatia? He might as well have asked me for GPS coordinates. It was like he was building a dossier to prove that I was in all the places where every other serious hockey player wasn’t. And nor was I. Tortorella was just trying to get evidence to make me look like a loser to Slats, when the real loser was the guy that Torts saw in the mirror.

  • • •

  In May 2009, I walked into the first precinct of the NYPD in Tribeca and asked to speak with the station chief. Yankees, Rangers, Jets, Mets, Giants, and Knicks are like gods with the Boys in Blue, because cops love sports and they love their local teams. It’s in their DNA. I introduced myself to everyone and explained that I had a sports bar opening that night around the corner and that they were very welcome to come around and say hello.

  Now, the first rule for pro athletes and everyone else is DO NOT GET INTO THE BAR BUSINESS. Of course, as a breaker of rules, I decided to give it a try, because, after all, I had Matt Abramcyk as my partner and we were going to be different. Indeed, as we designed the layout on a napkin that first time we walked the space together, we were designing a sports bar that would be the first of its kind anywhere in the world: a sports bar so chic that on opening night we had people spilling out onto Warren Street.

  The crowd was a mix of fashion heavy hitters along with Yankees-Knicks-Jets-Rangers fans and a lot of downtown cool kids. Henrik Lundqvist played guitar with his band, John McEnroe was in the house, and then someone special walked in.

  I was standing at the end of the bar smoking a cigarette after Hank had finished his set (we let VIPs smoke upstairs, and as co-owner, I rated . . .) when she walked in. I’d never seen a more beautiful woman in my life, and my eyes have landed on a lot of beauty. She had long legs, and a lean, toned body, and her face was perfection that God does not create very often.

  I leaned over to Juan, our manager, and said, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.” He didn’t laugh.

  Her name is Hilary Rhoda, she’s twenty-two, and she’s from Chevy Chase, Maryland. She’s the face of one of the biggest cosmetic brands in the world, Estée Lauder, and a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. She is a creature I have only seen before in the movies.

  I never put the “moves” on a woman whom I find attractive when I first meet her. I always wait until our energy brings us together for a second time, and I always play it cool, that’s my move. But tonight Hilary walked into Warren 77 with a mutual friend, Christina, who I suddenly became very interested in talking to, and shut out the rest of the party happening around us. Christina can see how mesmerized I am by Hilary, and like a good friend, she breaks away to give me a chance to hang with my future wife. At the end of the night, I shake Hilary’s hand and tell her it was really nice to meet her. And that I cannot wait to see her again.

  Later that night I send her a text—Christina gave me her number—to tell her how pretty I thought her dress was, perfect for the summer. Or the rest of our lives. I did not tell her that. But she texted me back, and said it would be great to see me again. I smiled. My life in New York was suddenly looking better again.

  I hadn’t been dating anyone since my return to New York, and certainly wasn’t sampling from the parade of puck bunnies who circle teams from junior hockey onward. Hockey has its own slang that captures the spirit of the game—“playing heavy,” which means not cutting corners in your game, “foot on the gas,” which means going full tilt on the ice, and “puck bunnies,” which is a kinder term for “jock sniffers,” and both of which refer to groupies.

  Groupies are part of any sports or entertainment culture, and in hockey they start in junior, especially if you’re playing in Canada. That’s when they’re called “puck bunnies” and it’s not really a term of endearment. You don’t want your sister to be called one.

  The puck bunnies go to places where players hang out, like hockey rinks,
and hockey bars, which in small-town Canada is pretty much any bar in town. Some bunnies would even go to team meet-and-greets in malls. Some would go to the “get to know the season-ticket holder” party, where you’d skate with the season-ticket holders and then host a luncheon and they’d ask you questions. The hard-core bunnies would go to those events.

  The higher-end puck bunnies were strategic about it. They’d suntan next to the spot where the Kings liked to play summer volleyball in Manhattan Beach, for example, and get invited to player parties.

  In a small town like Own Sound, Ontario, the puck bunny wasn’t as good-looking as the puck bunny in LA or New York. But then, when you hit the pros they’re not puck bunnies anymore. They’re just groupies.

  I do not get turned on when I look into a woman’s eyes and see that she is a fan, because having a fan surrender to me sexually doesn’t get me going.

  I like the challenge of seduction. I like planning the approach, the introduction, the small talk that I try to turn into a conversation based on the energy of mutual attraction. This is where she starts laughing because I’m funny and not because she wore my jersey as a kid.

  I believe that lack of confidence is one of the main reasons athletes love jock sniffers. Before social media gave everyone instant intel on where you were and who you were with, hockey players would hang out at the same bars so that the ladies in the stands would know where to find them after games. Once I got traded to New York, I stopped going out on the road because it’s all downhill after you have partied in New York and the road became the only place I could get some sleep.

  Well, that’s not quite true. One time when I was with the Kings we were in a Montreal bar, and the bartender, who was this gorgeous black-haired French-Canadian lady, decided we’d get more privacy in the ice box. So we waltz into the cooler aiming to heat it up a bit, and another teammate of mine was in there already, enjoying the hospitality of one of the waitresses. It was a big cooler, so the bartender just pulled me into a corner far from my busy teammate and we got busy ourselves.