Ice Capades

by Sean Avery

  My life in New York was suddenly looking better again. Falling in love with the girl of your dreams is cool. That’s what’s happening with Hilary, and I am playing it all fast forward. I think that being a loving husband is very cool, and being a loving father is the coolest, but that’s down the road. Having a companion whom you’re committed to should not end the fun.

  I’ve had many relationships over the years, and in between them I would crank up my dating patterns and sometimes would crank them down, as I wanted to be alone. I certainly became much pickier as I got older, and the types of women I met changed when I moved to New York.

  Since the opening night of Warren 77, I couldn’t stop thinking about the girl from Chevy Chase, Maryland, and I finally realized why my friends and teammates made fools of themselves for women. And then I picked up the phone and told Hilary to grab a friend, and I’d have a plane waiting for her on the tarmac in Farmingdale on Long Island to fly them to Bonnaroo.

  Bonnaroo was a music festival outside Nashville that a couple of friends from NYC started in 2002. My friends and I would fly to Nashville and the bus would pick us up at the airport. We’d stop at Walmart and fill the bus with supplies (water, candy, lawn chairs, AstroTurf, and enough booze for a 100-person wedding), and our access was so VIP that we’d park the bus a few hundred feet from backstage.

  The first two years of Bonnaroo saw ten buses parked backstage but none of them prepared like we did, including the guys that started the festival. Over the years our bus had some famous acts cruise through for a drink: Jimmy Buffett, MGMT, Jim James, and, instead of coming in for a drink, Lily Allen, who grabbed a bottle of our Jägermeister and drove away on the back of a golf cart.

  I never imagined that I might get the chance to spend a weekend with my future wife at Bonnaroo, and even if you’d told me it would cost $22K, I wouldn’t have blinked. Hilary got on that plane, and as we danced together among 90,000 strangers, I had to catch myself from staring at her too much so that I wouldn’t freak her out. But more than look at her, I wanted to get to know this beautiful woman. What did she think? What did she hope? What did she want? I was going to find out everything I could about her—and hope the conversation lasted for a very long time.

  As the summer slid toward September, Hilary and I hung out less in groups of friends and started hanging out as a couple. Which we weren’t yet, and had not even been alone together until we sat at the table of our first proper date, Mr. Chow, in Tribeca. One night in August, when I drove her home to Astor Place from my apartment on West 19th, I kissed her before she got out of the car. She kissed me back. It had begun.

  • • •

  As I was heading into the 2009–10 season with the Rangers, I wanted summer to never end so that I could just enjoy life with Hilary, and yet I also wanted to get back on the ice and prove to myself that I was a better player than ever. I even believed that my relationship with John Tortorella could be saved, because I was coming back to play my best season yet.

  I’m also excited to have Hilary see me play. Obviously she knows that hockey is what brought me to New York, and that my success at it is what allows me to rent massively expensive airplanes and fly her to music festivals. It will be nice to have her see what all the fuss is about when we walk down the street and grown men come up to me, barely able to get the words out as they ask to shake my hand. And part of the reason I’ve connected so well with the fans is that New Yorkers have discovered that they never need to ask me if they can shake my hand. I consider myself a guest in their city, and hope to stay as long as I can.

  Even though Hilary was a varsity-level field hockey player in high school, she’s never seen an ice hockey game before. The first one she sees me play is against the Ducks in early October. I get an assist in our 3–0 shutout of Anaheim, and contrary to what Hilary thinks will happen, I do not get into a fight. I don’t even get a penalty. But I can see the pride in her eyes after the game when she tells me that hockey is the most exciting sport she’s ever seen. I think this is all going to work out. With Hilary, at least.

  With Tortorella, I’m having my doubts. Even after being one of the top three conditioned guys in the club at training camp, I feel like I’m fighting for a job. I knew something was up when we had our media day for the Rangers to film promo packages for home games and interviews with all the local outlets, and I was an afterthought. Not front and center before the fans who chanted my name at MSG, but kind of, “Oh, it’s OK, we have it covered . . .”

  I had an idea this was coming because Tortorella told me when camp started that I was to stop being the center of attention on this team. I wasn’t trying anything of the sort. I’d brought my personality to the team, we had won with me in the lineup, and I had connected with the fans here more than in any place I’d ever played. But the NHL discourages individuality because they like to control things, and Tortorella was cut from that controlling cloth.

  He did everything in his power to deter guys from meeting their pre-Torts endorsement obligations as well as signing new endorsements. He would even put in bans on when we could do personal autograph sessions.

  The reason I know this is that ESPN The Magazine wanted to do a feature on me, and Torts said no. I would never have known had I not gone to the ESPYs in LA and run into the editor who’d made the ask, and who told me about it. I was furious, but I had my revenge. I told Tortorella that I was going to do media that I’d already booked, and I did. As long as my media gigs didn’t conflict with a game or practice, then it was my business and not theirs. It was another bull’s eye on me as far as Tortorella was concerned.

  And so began my daily battle of trying not to be run out of town by a little man who was scared of the power I held with the Rangers. He’d be on me for everything—he even tried to get me to stop fighting because he was so afraid of momentum that he didn’t want to risk upsetting the other team and motivating them.

  Tortorella was a guy who coached to tie, and hoped that Hank would be the difference in goal. We all hated it, and even a guy like Ryan Callahan, who flourished under Tortorella, hated it, because his body was falling apart under Tortorella’s regime. He’d make guys block twenty shots a game, and then do it again the next night. There are days now when I look back and think I should have walked into Glen Sather’s office and said, “Let’s get me out of here and save us a lot of headaches,” because I could see the future, but I also had this hope that I could change Tortorella’s game.

  I missed the first four games of the season with a knee injury and had one assist in my first game back against Anaheim, which we won 3–0. I also had 10:42 of ice time.

  In the next game, against Toronto, I scored two goals in our 7–2 win and had 10:38 of ice time. Under Tom Renney, I was playing nearly twenty minutes a night. I’ve always been realistic when it comes to assessing myself, and I know what’s going on here—Tortorella is sending me a message. I also know I should be getting more ice time than my new teammates, Chris Higgins and Aleš Kotalík and Enver Lisin, to name a few.

  Every season you have new teammates who present an opportunity to form relationships that sometimes become strong bonds away from the rink long after the game has finished, but my best ones are my old ones. Shanny’s now playing across the river in New Jersey and so I see him a lot, and while Norty’s not in the league anymore, we stay in touch. Whenever Cheli comes into town we hang out. He likes to go to the Russian baths in the East Village, which is straight out of the film Eastern Promises. There are lots of scary Russian guys with Mafia tats everywhere, but no one tries to knife us in the steam room. It’s probably Cheli’s favorite place to go, other than his chili bar in Detroit.

  And sometimes you get a teammate whose only lasting impression is something you would rather forget.

  This is the case with Donald Brashear, who came in to replace Colton Orr as our tough guy. Everyone loved Colton, who had signed as a free agent with Toronto, an
d he was especially missed by the fans who didn’t like Brashear from the start, as Brash had imprinted himself in their memories as a tough guy with archenemy Philadelphia, and most recently, Washington.

  Our problem with him was simpler: Donald Brashear had halitosis, the medical term for bad breath. Brash could clear a room out with his breath, and if you were the unlucky guy sitting beside him on the bench you would immediately call for the Rangers trainer Jim Ramsay so that he could apply some Vicks VapoRub under your nose to mask the death rays coming from Brashear.

  On every team I’ve played on there have been dog lovers, but Brashear took this to a new level. I was in the weight room when Billy, an ex-NYPD horse cop who took care of our practice rink, rushed in. He had a very dry, biting sense of humor, and he’d seen everything. He now had the kind of look on his face that suggested he hadn’t see this—like maybe aliens had landed in the shower. He told me I had to see it too, so I hurried off, expecting to clock which teammate was shaving his line-mate’s ass or back—which is a regular act of kindness, but nonetheless, always shocking.

  This time it was much different.

  Donald Brashear was in the shower, butt naked, and washing his Great Dane’s balls along with everything else on that massive beast. Brashear was in a full lather and so was the dog. I asked Billy if this was the same as a father having a bath with his almost-teenage son. I know, it’s an extreme comparison, but this was one of the weirdest things I had ever seen in a dressing room, and I have seen some things.

  Every day during my drive to our practice facility in Tarrytown, I’m thinking about what it would mean to leave New York again, especially now that I’ve fallen in love with Hilary.

  I’ve seen many teammates in long-distance relationships, and they don’t work. In most cases, someone cheats, and usually it’s the guy, and sometimes his girlfriend stays around but she harbors so much anger that by the time they are together and get married, they hate each other.

  And because they are finally together, that probably means he’s done playing. This is a recipe for disaster. You stay with this person because you’re afraid of being alone, but you’re not actually together in a way that lets you understand them—every ounce of their body, every mood they are in—and gives you the emotional knowledge to live together in harmony. If you’re at this point, and you add the dilemma of having to find new meaning in your life when your career ends and you can no longer do the only thing you’ve been successful at since you were eight years old, then I can almost guarantee the marriage won’t last.

  And then what?

  In most cases it winds up in divorce, and suddenly you have half the money you had when you retired, which is probably not enough to live on for the rest of your life, unless you move to the backwaters of Mississippi. Then it gets really dark, just before it goes completely black.

  The more I fall in love with Hilary, the more I think about how much I don’t want to leave her, no matter how badly hockey is going. This love is the real deal.

  So is the love I get from Rangers fans. Baseball’s Joe Torre put it perfectly when he explained the relationship between the New York fans and El Duque, the great Yankees pitcher Orlando Hernández: “New York fans are not easy to win over but they connected with him from day one.”

  That pretty much describes my experience here, one that even now can bring tears to my eyes. The energy that New York fans gave me from the very first moment was like a lifeline, keeping me close to them and urging me to do even better on the ice. It’s the greatest professional gift that I’ve ever been given.

  It’s also the reason I didn’t walk into Glen Sather’s office and sit down, man to mentor, to ask for a trade. I had two years left on my contract after this season, but it was the addiction that I had to Rangers fans and the city and now Hilary that was too hard to break. They could send me back to the Canyon for months and that addiction would still be deep inside me. I kept thinking, “It’s going to be OK, this coach is going to realize I’m a Ranger to my core and want to do my very best, and if he doesn’t then it is what it is and I’ll figure it out once the ride is over.” But I didn’t want the ride in New York to ever end.

  We’ve won eight and lost thirteen since New Year’s, and everyone is miserable under the Reign of Terror that is Torts. Our last game before the Olympic break is on Valentine’s Day, and I give Hilary—and the Rangers fans—my own unique Valentine, because tonight is the only time I’ve ever scored on an NHL penalty shot, which I was given after being hooked while in the slot with a clear scoring chance.

  The one thing that you’re most nervous about with the penalty shot is that you’re going to miss it—the puck’s going to roll off your stick and you’re not going to get any shot off. That’s the fear. This is in addition to the fact that you’re alone at center ice with the puck and with 20,000 people watching you—hoping you’ll fail if it’s an away game and that you’ll score if you’re at home. It’s the most nerve-racking moment you can have. I mean, if you get a breakaway and score or miss, it all happens so fast you don’t even think about it.

  On a penalty shot, you get about a minute to think about it, and the guys from the other team are shouting trash at me like “hands of stone/you’re fucking awful/faggot” and trying to rattle you. At this point in the NHL, the tie-breaking shootout hasn’t yet started, so penalty shots are rare and they’re a big deal.

  The ref blows the whistle and I skate in fast on Tampa’s goalie Mike Smith, fake him to the right, then swing wide to my left and he sprawls to recover. I outwait him and roof the puck over him into the net. It’s the sweetest feeling you can imagine because you’ve scored this one all by yourself.

  The fact that I scored it against Tortorella’s old team, the Tampa Bay Lightning, and the fact that it was the first of our five straight goals that would give us a much-needed win, made me feel a little better, but not much.

  The game had the same feeling as most games do before a break during the season, but a bit more so because we were going to be off ice longer with the Olympics. Guys’ heads are more focused on making their flights to Miami or Vegas or Cabo.

  Every four years the NHL sends players to the Winter Olympics, and the rest of us get a long siesta.

  This Olympic break, I was going to spend time with Hilary. We went to a resort in Jamaica with my friend Lawrence Longo and my teammate Aaron Voros and their girlfriends. The place was called the Caves, and it had been founded by Chris Blackwell, the guy who started Island Records. The resort is on the north coast of Jamaica, and has these luxury cabins built on top of cliffs. It’s very different from the traditional “white sand beach” Jamaica. So what’s an NHLer to do during the break but a little cliff diving from twenty-five feet up?

  Hilary was game for it, too, and that trip really made me see how, despite her supermodel gorgeousness, she had the soul of an outdoors girl, and loved joining into the spirit of the moment—snorkeling, cliff jumping, cave exploring, hanging in the rum bar and sampling the local beverage.

  I was soon going to be thirty years old, and from that vantage point, it was my opinion that there was no reason why any professional athlete should be married before his twenty-fifth birthday. If you noticed I said “my opinion,” it’s because I was really getting tired of taking heat for having an “opinion,” which is especially discouraged in the world of pro hockey.

  I was told by everyone from the goal light judge to my agent that I should limit my “opinions,” and when I’d hear this I would sometimes laugh it off and sometimes get angry and occasionally I would try to understand why nobody would ask me why I said these things. I think they didn’t ask because they didn’t want to hear my reasoning, just in case they agreed with me.

  But Hilary wanted to know my opinion and I wanted to know hers, and that was the best thing going by far in a season that was looking increasingly bleak. She would ask me about the team after games, an
d always looked for the positive. When I told her that Tortorella was killing the Rangers, she accepted that as unacceptable, and asked me how I could stop him. I told her I was trying to be the best player I could be, but that he didn’t seem to understand. She reassured me that even though she was biased she could see what I brought to the team, and that hearing the fans chant my name at MSG lit her up with joy. And that made me happy, too. My entire life wasn’t a disaster, I was just having a rough time at work. On a very public stage. As a public figure herself, Hilary knew the pressure. But her wisdom, and her ready smile, made me believe that good would triumph.

  There are some good things in my life in addition to Hilary. My sports bar, Warren 77, is considered a complete success. After games, whether we win, lose, or draw, I pull up out front and reenact the famous scene from Goodfellas where Ray Liotta walks to his table (all one camera shot) at the front of some hot NYC supper club and inside it’s filled with diehard fans and beautiful women and high-rolling Wall Streeters and everything else in between. It makes me forget the guy behind the bench.

  The food is the best bar food I’ve ever had and the drinks are cold and the bar is always open as long as I’m inside. And best of all, it’s free for me, as we write it off as a marketing expense. We’re on our way to making our initial investment back in the first year. I’ve shown that I can make a living off the ice once my NHL career is done.

  Along the way, I’ve learned things about how to run a bar. Find an honest man, make him your manager, pay him handsomely, and give him a piece of equity in the bar. Cover the top of your basement cooler in glass so the Goldman Sachs guys (or whoever the rich boys are in your town) have a private place to do big lines of blow in privacy. Waitresses need to be hot single chicks who make the clients feel as if anything is possible (sometimes it is)—it’s that feeling that keeps drinks and food flowing. Play a lot of Rolling Stones. Let Eddie Vedder drink straight from an $800 bottle of wine after he single-handedly destroys 20,000 people at MSG two hours earlier. Never charge a model for anything. Never charge the NYPD for anything. Play a lot of Pearl Jam. Fry your French fries in duck fat. Have Warhol paintings and Diane Arbus photos on the walls. Make sure John McEnroe comes to opening night and Page Six reports it the next day. Never charge “the Wolf,” aka Harvey Keitel, and indeed, never charge ANYONE famous. Put Molson Canadian on tap. Pay your sales tax on time.