Ice Capades

by Sean Avery

  I promise that if you follow these steps and tweak them as need be to your town, you can open a successful bar anywhere from Albany, New York, to Zurich, Ontario.

  We’ve played five games since the return from the Olympic break, and I have a goal and two assists, but the team has a record of one win and four losses. So on March 12, I’m a healthy scratch from the lineup for a game against Atlanta. We lost the previous game to New Jersey 6–3, and my plus/minus was even and I didn’t take a penalty, but I guess I didn’t try hard enough for the little guy behind the bench in my 10:56 of ice time.

  It’s obvious to anyone who knows the Rangers that I’m in a lose-lose situation. If I play hard I usually take penalties, and that also usually becomes an advantage in the end. The problem is that the moment I get involved and play the game I want to play—my best game—is the moment the little guy behind the bench tells me to “check yourself!” as if I’m about to pee on the carpet or something.

  I’m back for the next game against Philly, and score two goals in our win. I am easily the best player on the ice, and I think this is the case because I’m playing for myself, and most of my teammates, and the fans of NYC. But not for the little guy behind the bench.

  Ten days later we beat New Jersey in a shootout. After I screen Marty Brodeur on a Brandon Dubinsky goal that ties the game, I delay one second before celebrating with my teammates so that I can remind Marty that he’s a “fucking home-wrecker” and should be ashamed of himself.

  When I get back to the bench, I get an earful from Tortorella about talking to Marty, which he makes clear I’m not allowed to do as long as he’s the coach. We are currently five points out of the last playoff spot, and chasing Philly. Most of the team is so nervous we can’t think clearly enough to make a creative play, let alone the right play. Anyone who’s not on a long-term contract and makes a mistake is told by Torts when they come back to the bench that if they fuck up again, they’re going to get run out of town. Who wouldn’t be squeezing the stick too tight if that’s your coaching model?

  I can’t listen to another word from Tortorella and turn around and tell him to shut the fuck up. I’ve reached my breaking point with this guy. He tries to yell some more and scare me but I’m seeing red, and I think he realizes that if he doesn’t back off something might go down.

  Oh, and by the way, my Corsi rating is great. Corsi measures the number of shots taken while a player is on the ice—for and against. A good Corsi number says that you have possession more often than not. And my Corsi is better than that of very good players on my team, such as Marián Gaborík, Brandon Dubinsky, Brian Boyle, and Chris Drury. Just saying.

  After that shootout win in New Jersey, we win five games, lose one in OT, one in a shootout, and one in regulation time, but we still don’t make the playoffs. We finish one point behind both Philly and Montreal, and they get the final two playoff spots in the East.

  I know the players are disappointed. The feeling in MSG in April is magic. The grind is fun, and it’s all even better in May if you’re lucky enough to still be playing.

  And yet there’s also a feeling of relief among my teammates that we’re done, even if those words are never uttered out loud. It doesn’t even have to be said. None of us can stand listening to the mental midget and his big goofy sidekick, Mike Sullivan.

  Tortorella is a power-hungry control freak but he’s not smart enough to hire a good cop, even one he could play like a violin. If Mike Sullivan had played the good cop he could still have turned around after meeting with a disgruntled player and told his puppet-master JT the details while giving the players some form of relief. Instead they’re only able to bitch and vent to each other. This creates an unhealthy locker room.

  In the meantime, I am going to enjoy Hilary and the summer. One of the things I love most about Hilary is her love of music, and although she is rarely not smiling, she gets even happier upon hearing a great song that she loves. And seeing her smile makes me smile, and I haven’t been doing a lot of that at work.

  We went to our first Phish concert at a venue on Long Island called Jones Beach. There was total pandemonium in the parking lot even before the show started and basic insanity the moment the first chord hit. I was hooked a few songs into the show, when massive funk-based freak-outs erupted among the 15,000 fans as they let go of any insecurities and danced any way they wanted. It’s what I needed after being told to “check” myself once too often.

  After the Jones Beach show, we were hooked on Phish and decided to drive to Saratoga Springs to see them play again.

  I should also mention that most people at Phish shows are in a chemically altered state, and you could call it the secret ingredient. Because the Saratoga concert is inside a national forest, I decide it’s the perfect place to trip on acid for the first time, and twenty minutes before the show starts I pop a white Altoid with a drop of LSD on it into my mouth, and make the short walk from the hotel into the venue.

  Phish opened the show with a bang, the exuberant “Brother”—“Whoa! Somebody’s jumping in the tub with your brother”—and I waited and waited and waited until a hour into the show, and then the acid hit me.

  I’ve never felt or experienced anything like it in my life. It feels like you’re in a movie, watching yourself in these amazing primary colors, with everything alive around you—even things that aren’t alive. I can only compare it to a scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Johnny Depp, playing Hunter S. Thompson, arrives in a hotel lobby while he’s on an acid trip, and the carpet on which his character is standing comes to life . . . I must say he handles the experience much better than I did.

  Phish is known for throwing curveballs at their fans by playing unusual cover songs, and that night they played one of the weirdest and most intense cover songs I’ve ever heard: Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” Phish sent my acid trip into a whole new stratosphere, and by the middle of the song my face felt like it had melted off and my soul was exposed. My arms felt so heavy I could barely lift them to take a drag on my cigarette, and when I finally got my hand to my mouth the butt was moving like an ocean wave so that I couldn’t meet my mouth to pull a drag.

  The concert was outdoors, and I had to move around to shake off this beast that was hanging on me, so I made my way to the top row where the venue flattens out and looks down on the crowd and the stage. I sat and watched, trying to control my mind. Hilary, who did not drop acid, was next to me, being a good companion. To her, and everyone else, I looked like I was fine. Maybe my eyes were a little glassy, but I wasn’t going to take a flying leap onto the stage. I mean, I could barely move.

  People are always talking about finding themselves on acid, and I can tell you that the experience is not guaranteed to be a pleasant one. Acid is not a drug for people who are hard on themselves, and more specifically, a person like me who is motivated much of the time by fear. Yeah, I’m driven by fear that the guy beside me is working harder this off-season than I am. Right now, in the midst of this acid trip, it feels like every NHL player is definitely working harder than me. Fear and acid is not a combination I would recommend.

  And so the snowball effect begins, and for the next six hours I try to wrestle this roller coaster of emotions, and also try not to walk into oncoming traffic so the roller coaster stops. And then I finally fall asleep. Hilary is cool with it all. She knows that I live an intense life, and this walk on the edge was something I wanted to try, responsibly, but it’s not going to be a regular trip I make. She’s not dating a junkie. She’s dating a man who loves her even more each day.

  20

  THE LAST SEASON

  On July 1, the first day of free agent signings for the 2010–11 season, the Rangers sign Derek Boogaard. Derek is six-seven and 270 pounds and one of the most feared players in the NHL. I immediately get his cell phone number from the Rangers to text him congrats and welcome him to New York. I’m happy to have him
because he’s the kind of tough guy who will give us a lot more room on the ice, and he has the reputation of being a much better teammate than the departed Donald Brashear.

  We also signed my old friend from Los Angeles, Alex Frolov, and I wondered what new Russian beauty he was going to roll into town with. Frolov was a real ladies’ man, and though I never could understand the smooth words coming out of his mouth, there wasn’t a single, married, or separated Russian woman who Frolov couldn’t seduce in about forty-five minutes.

  And then there was Ruslan Fedotenko, who had played for John Tortorella in Tampa Bay and was so far up the coach’s ass you could see his toes dangling between Torts’s legs. Fedotenko was a rosy-cheeked Ukrainian who had come to play junior hockey for the Sioux City Musketeers, and as a nineteen-year-old, was billeted by a host family.

  So his host mother, married with two kids a bit younger than him, fell in love with Fedotenko and left her husband for him. She hangs around the Rangers with the other wives and girlfriends, and this is by far the most uncomfortable situation I’ve ever been in with a team. She’s old enough to be the mother of some of the players’ girlfriends. She’s old enough to be his mother, too, and Steve Ott used to just light him up about it. We were all from junior towns and so we all knew the billet drill—they were your “other family” and not a dating pool. But Fedotenko is still with her, so it’s all part of love’s strange game.

  • • •

  It’s funny how fast my last full season in the NHL went. And yet, at the time, it seemed to crawl. In the season opener against Buffalo, Derek Stepan scores a hat trick in his first NHL game. I set up his third goal with a superstar type of pass, a quick backhander from behind the net to Stepan in the slot, and just like that it’s stretching the mesh behind Ryan Miller. It’s the kind of play not even Tortorella could miss.

  I finish the night with two assists, and usually when you start the season with a great game your coach gets excited and wants to ride you along with any other players coming out of the gates strong.

  I do get a little more ice time, and in the third game I pick up another two assists against Toronto, then another assist against the Devils, and a goal and an assist against Atlanta. We’re eight games in and I have seven points.

  All my work is down low below the hash marks, which has become my specialty over the years. I’ve become great at protecting the puck when I can use my big Paris Hilton–approved butt to shield the puck. It’s like holding a ball in your hands and keeping it from someone, twisting your body like a shield and anticipating your opponent’s move, rolling your body a millisecond earlier than the attacking player. Think about the rush you get when you’re the one keeping the ball away, then multiply that by a thousand and that’s how I feel when I have a great shift below the hash marks.

  Despite my own success on the ice, we’re only playing .500 hockey. I’m not happy playing for Tortorella because I’m not really playing for him. I definitely don’t want to keep hearing his yapping at us on the bench. I realize that if I’m going to make a move, then now is the time, because I have leverage with my play and points total. It’s the best time to ask Glen Sather to move me out of New York, but I’m torn, because I still believe—just a little bit—that Tortorella is going to give me the break I deserve. On the other hand, the more I produce, the less he seems to give me.

  But I’m definitely conflicted. I don’t want to leave. I’m head over heels in love with Hilary. New York City makes me happier than I’ve ever been, and we’ve started construction on a second restaurant. I have a thriving business and am about to open another. So I suck it up and play on. But even at this early point in the season, I have a bad feeling about what John Tortorella is doing to this team that Glen Sather has handed to him.

  I don’t think Glen asked John Tortorella about whom he should and shouldn’t sign or trade for. I believe Slats assembles the team he likes on paper and the guy he hires to coach them is supposed to figure out how to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. So when Derek Boogaard showed up forty pounds over his playing weight and stepped on the track for fitness testing at his first Rangers’ training camp and barely finished two laps, Tortorella was already trying to figure out how to use Boogaard as little as possible.

  He had almost no use for Boogaard as a player, and showed as little interest in him as a man. Boogaard had made it to the NHL because he could fight. We didn’t have anyone on the team who’d fought Boogaard before he joined the Rangers, so he came in as a kind of mythic character, “the Boogeyman.” In reality, his reputation as a fighter was so intimidating that he didn’t have to fight all that much by the time he became a Ranger.

  In his first NHL season, Boogey fought sixteen times, and in the season before he joined us, he fought nine. He’d cut his total almost in half just because guys knew what power he could unleash. Indeed, he was such a dominant fighter and had such a long reach that Georges Laraque, himself no slouch in the fight game, opted to retire from pro hockey rather than face the kind of punch that Boogaard had landed on Todd Fedoruk, shattering his cheekbone and requiring a rebuild of Fedoruk’s face.

  The Rangers had signed the Boogeyman for $6.5 million over four years, which is excellent money for a guy who could fight better than he could play. When Boogaard got to New York, we all knew that there was going to be a problem with him fitting in beyond his role as a fighter, because he wasn’t the most skilled hockey player. There were times when he would trip over himself in practice just trying to make a standard pass. But we were sympathetic to him, because he was trying so hard.

  But he did get in shape, and in a game against Washington at MSG on November 9, 2010, it paid off. The puck bounced over the Capitals’ D-man at our blue line, and Boogey took it up the left wing and ripped a slap shot from the top of the circle. The puck blew past goalie Michal Neuvirth and it was Boogey’s first goal since his NHL rookie season. In fact, it ended the longest goalless streak in the NHL, at 235 games. We celebrated on the bench like he’d won the Stanley Cup in Game 7 overtime. It was the happiest I’ve ever seen a team get for a guy scoring a regular season goal.

  Exactly one month later, Matt Carkner hit Derek with a lucky punch right on the button in a game against Ottawa. Boogey landed a couple of punches of his own, but when he finished the fight he went straight to the dressing room and we knew that punch must have done damage. Indeed it had, as Derek had a concussion. He also had an aggravated shoulder injury from when he broke his collarbone in junior.

  Derek also had an addiction to painkillers. The NHL knew about it, and Tortorella probably knew, too. If he did, he sure didn’t seem to care. As soon as Derek was injured, a new rule came into effect that decreed that injured players who came to the rink had to finish all their medical treatments and conditioning before the healthy players arrived. In other words, Derek was effectively banished from the team.

  When this rule came in, everyone was scratching their heads thinking, “What the fuck is happening here? This isn’t fair.” I’d never seen anything like this rule, ever. It was unheard of.

  We felt terrible, and talked amongst ourselves about whether we should say something to management. We would see Boogey leaving the rink in the morning as we rolled in for practice and you could see the pain and the loneliness on his face.

  This was another punch to the head for Derek, who already felt extremely abandoned before the injury (which was confirmed by the thousands of text messages he would send monthly—more than 13,000 in February 2011). Being separated from the team that was his life only isolated him even more, and with someone struggling like he was with various issues such as alcohol, drugs, depression, and his injury, it sent a very clear message that he wasn’t wanted. I talked to him as much as I could. He knew he could pick up the phone and call or text me whenever. And he did. He was a very proud man, and I could tell that being away from the team was killing him, but he couldn’t come out and say it. He
had to be up at 5 A.M. to get to the rink ahead of us, in addition to trying to recover from his injury. It seemed to me that Tortorella was trying to make life as difficult as he could for Boogey.

  Tortorella could give two shits about players who can’t help him win, whereas great coaches protect their players as long as their names are on his team’s roster.

  I reached my breaking point with how Tortorella was treating Boogaard, and spoke to many people about it, including the Rangers assistant GM and assistant coach Jim Schoenfeld. I told Schoenfeld that it wasn’t fair what they were doing to this guy, and that he couldn’t handle being away from the team. The look on Schoenfeld’s face said “as a former player I know you’re right,” but what came out of his mouth was what he was supposed to say: Tortorella called the shots. And so it continued. We hated it, and felt guilty that we could not stop the torment of Boogaard, but we played on, more for ourselves than for that lunatic running the show.

  On November 14, the Edmonton Oilers were at MSG, now under the guidance of my old coach Tom Renney, who had always been decent to me. Even so, the Oilers had been taking runs at me all night. When I hit Curt Fraser with a hard, clean hit, we both went down, and when I got back up, the Oilers’ Ladislav Šmid—six-four, 210 pounds—was tapping me on the shin pads, wanting to go. We were up 5–2 in the third and had the game in hand, so I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that, but Šmid wouldn’t give up. He kept following me around on the ice, tapping me with his stick, hooking my arms, and saying, “Let’s fight.” Since I have come to believe that, as the great war philosopher Sun Tzu said, “all warfare is based on deception,” I tell Šmid to hold on until we get the puck back, and then we can fight.