by Sean Avery
He’s giving me the death stare, but I can tell he’s let his guard down just a little, thinking our scrap is a few seconds in the future. So I flick off my gloves and my left hand goes for his jersey just under his chin. Now I’m anchored on. The trick is to make sure you pull the other guy toward you. If you just swing like a boxer, you’re as likely to topple over as he is. So you use him to give yourself leverage. I give Šmid a tug to pull him toward me, then shoot my right fist forward as hard as I can.
I timed it perfectly and hit him square on the chin. All six-four of him falls instantly and now the momentum takes me crashing down on top of him. After that, all hell breaks loose, as the Oilers want to kill me, and every guy on the ice gets into a tussle. I get tossed from the game, but we win, 8–2. Tortorella isn’t happy because anytime I do something well or get the crowd on my side, he plays me less. So that was my reward from this master of coaching strategy.
My biggest fear is not being able to live in New York, and it’s becoming more obvious to me that my days as a New York Ranger are slowly coming to an end. Even though I’m still producing, and had a goal and two assists in my last five games, I get the least amount of ice time of all the forwards on March 15 against the Islanders. After the game, I’m disgusted. But I still have optimism. I figure I can fix this.
I’ve had a few meetings with Glen Sather about it, but he didn’t really have much to say. It was a tough situation for both of us, because he knew I could bring more to the team but he wasn’t going to interfere with a coach’s decision. It’s what makes him a great GM, but then, GMs have no problem stepping in to fire the coach when the coach’s decisions lead to disaster, so the principle of letting coaches self-determine is more than a little flexible.
My agent, Pat Morris, wanted to move me, but I told him to hold off because I really believed—despite the evidence—that Tortorella would have some major revelation behind the bench and I would be back in business. And I believed this because I had always been able to turn around bad situations through will and hard work. I also couldn’t imagine leaving New York.
But until Tortorella sees the light, real life continues away from the rink—Hilary, and my thriving off-ice businesses.
Hilary makes me feel complete, and she says I do the same for her. I remember how when I went through the lockout with Rachel I was a mess. I was so insecure about my future that I think she grew weary trying to reassure me that it would—that I would—turn out OK. I mean, she never said that at the time, but now, from the vantage point of five years, I can see what I must have been like to live with. Tough sledding, as they say back in the old country.
I can see that I’m a better man with Hilary, because I’m not dragging her down with my problems at work. I’m talking to her about solutions, but also, about life beyond the arena. I’m not defined just by hockey anymore. It’s not a realization that smacks me in the face. It’s one that I can see now, looking back.
Warren 77 is a success. The thing I was learning about the bar business, though, was that buzz comes faster than profits, so you have to be prepared to hang on. At the moment, I was making about a teacher’s salary from the place, and I could have lived on it if I took in roommates.
Being a professional athlete has a short shelf life, but if you think about exiting the game while you’re still playing it, then you should be able to create opportunities off the ice for yourself. Then you can slide into them once you retire. And that’s what I was doing. Given that Warren 77 was going strong, I wanted to maximize that buzz, and so I was starting a new bar and restaurant called Tiny’s and the Bar Upstairs with some partners. John Tortorella got wind of it and called me into his office to ask me about Tiny’s, which was two months away from opening.
I knew right away that the reason for our meeting was to scare me, because Tortorella somehow knew that Henrik Lundqvist was an investor (my guess is that John Rosasco, the head of Rangers PR, told him). Hank was in his only slump since the beginning of the 2009 season, and Tortorella was blaming me and the business for distracting him. He told me that he didn’t want me opening this bar and that he didn’t want Henrik Lundqvist to be part of it.
I was stunned. A coach was telling me that he didn’t want me to do anything outside of his team. He was telling me not to have a personal life. He had no idea how much time I was spending on my private affairs, and if I wasn’t playing, practicing, or training, then it was none of his business. He had moved from interfering with our endorsements during the season to trying to take total control of our off-ice time.
I’ve never walked out of a meeting with my head coach, but if I didn’t leave the room I was going to end up in Rikers for choking this little shithead within an inch of his miserable life. If he really believed that Henrik was playing poorly because of Tiny’s, then he knew nothing about his star player. Lundqvist was not working at Tiny’s, he was investing in it. Players have slumps. Anyone who knows how to coach professional athletes would know how to deal with that.
I told Glen Sather about it, but he had nothing to say, really. He kept a poker face and wasn’t going to play his hand, but all he had to do was watch a game—he didn’t have to live through playing for a coach who responded to something he didn’t like on the ice by kicking water bottles or throwing shit on the bench or tugging on a player’s jersey and screaming at him and ripping him a new asshole.
I wasn’t telling Slats anything he didn’t already know. The question was: Who would go first? Me or Tortorella?
I got benched by Tortorella for five of our last twelve games as we fought for a playoff spot. One blogger who covers us said that I’d been thrown under the bus by Tortorella so often that I might as well buy the bus and drive it out of town. But of course, I couldn’t leave of my own accord.
Hilary is as supportive as she can be for someone who’s never really been in a situation like this before. And I’m doing a pretty good job of not letting it bother me when I come home, because I don’t want it to poison our relationship, but I’m also starting to get used to it. It will not control my life because it will make us both crazy. And Hilary is sane. She loves me, I love her more each day, and I will keep playing my game. It’s the one thing I can control on the ice.
We made it into the playoffs, with the lowest point total of any team that season—ninety-three. I was benched for Game 1 against Washington, which we lost in overtime, and then got back in for the final four. We won just one of them. It was going to be a long summer. Little did I know just how long.
• • •
In early May 2011, I became the first athlete in any of the four major league sports in North America to take a stand on a particular issue, and it was so radical that it surprised me by getting me attention everywhere, both good and bad. Brian Ellner, who was the senior strategist for the Human Rights Campaign’s successful effort to win marriage equality in New York, contacted me through a mutual friend with a request. And so I did a public service announcement for him, in my Rangers jersey, in support of marriage equality. What I said on camera was this: “Committed couples should be able to marry the person they love. Join me in supporting marriage equality.”
I did this because I was raised by Al and Marlene to treat everyone as I would like to be treated. I know, this was not always apparent on the ice, but as I said earlier, I was playing a villain in a kind of theater—I’m not actually a villain. It seemed a no-brainer that if I could marry whoever I wanted to marry, then everyone else should be able to do the same. At the time—and to this day—no NHL player has come out as gay, and I would stand next to that player as he told his teammates who he was, and help him should there be anyone who took issue with it.
In fact, no NHLer—nor anyone from any other sport—thanked me for doing it. No player said anything negative to me about it either, but fans certainly did. They would hold up signs in opposing rinks calling me a fag. The referees, and the NHL, ignored them
. The word “fag” is part of NHL culture, and used as common slang. If a guy came into the dressing room wearing a paisley tie, someone would say, “That’s a faggy tie.” You heard it all the time.
Even so, I was just stunned that not one New York professional athlete had stepped up. Who the hell do they think our fans are in any of the sports? Straight white men? Our fan bases are as diverse as our community, though that’s not something that really registers with hockey players. But shame on them for hiding in the ostrich culture of pro sports, and the idea that we’ll somehow be run out of town if we actually tell the fans that we have lives just like they do—gay, straight, both. How will this repel people? And if it does, well, here’s a chance to educate.
The Rangers were great about this. James Dolan, who takes major hits of criticism from the media, had been nothing but a stand-up guy to me all through my time with the Rangers. He had no hesitation in supporting me, and he let me wear the Rangers jersey in the ad. He signed off on it, and didn’t feel the need to make a big thing about it, or even speak to me about it. In putting the Rangers colors out there in support of the rainbow colors, I saw that Jim Dolan also doesn’t play by the old-boy rules laid out by NHL owners, and I was proud to be playing for him, however much longer that I lasted here.
• • •
On Saturday, May 14, 2011, at 2 P.M. I was at home with Hilary and my teammate Aaron Voros when my phone rang. It was the Rangers PR head John Rosasco calling, and he asked me if I was sitting down. My immediate thought was, “Where have I been traded?” Even with the dismal way our season and my season had ended, I wasn’t ready to go. I felt a surge of anxiety in my gut.
I was right to feel anxious. The news was worse than I thought. Derek Boogaard was dead. He had overdosed and died in his sleep the night before.
I hadn’t seen Derek in a while. At the end of February, he had just started skating to come back to join the team. One morning he showed up at the rink and was so loaded on Xanax and wine that he could barely stand, and yet there he was, out on the ice. I couldn’t believe he’d actually made the drive to our practice rink in Tarrytown, given the state he was in.
I stormed into Glen’s office and said, “Someone has to get him off the ice and send him to California.”
Jim Schoenfeld went out and got him off the ice, and a couple of days later Boogey was on his way to the Canyon.
The last conversation I had with the Boogeyman was fresh in my mind, as he’d called me to ask for an introduction to any Los Angeles boxing coaches I knew, along with a good trainer who could help him work on his foot speed.
He also wanted some advice on his next couple months of life in rehab. NHL players have great health care coverage, probably the best health care coverage on the planet. Derek was in the league’s substance abuse and behavioral health program, which was almost always required when a player had discipline issues or a problem not associated with hockey. The best part about the program is that everything is paid for—from your therapy, both mental and physical, to your yoga lessons, to any medical expenses, including rehab, which can cost up to $70,000 a week.
I told Derek to take full advantage of this, to stay out in sunny California for the entire off-season, to get healthy and train so that he’d be ready for camp in a few months. I think I was one of the few guys on the team he felt comfortable speaking with about his issues. I’d always told him never to hesitate in calling me anytime that he needed to talk, and I even gave him Hilary’s cell phone number just in case he couldn’t reach me.
I kept stressing how great an opportunity it was to be able to spend those months in California. I knew Derek had recently broken up with a girl he was dating and was trying to do the right thing and stay in Cali so that he could move on from a relationship that seemed a bit destructive. The combination of not playing the second half of the season, being cut loose from the team by Tortorella, and breaking up with his girlfriend put Derek in a bad place.
Derek had been given permission to leave rehab and fly home to Minnesota for his sister’s college graduation. He relapsed into a night of drinking with his friends and brothers, and finished it off with some Percocet. He never woke up. He was a week away from his twenty-ninth birthday.
We got word the next day that the funeral would be held on the following Saturday in Regina, Saskatchewan. The Rangers were sending the team plane. I was not the captain of the Rangers, but I was privy to the same type of information that the team leaders would receive because John Rosasco, the Rangers PR guy, told me when I was asking him about travel arrangements and who was going to go pay their respects to Boogey. By Wednesday, I noticed that the head count of Ranger players attending Derek’s funeral was at six.
Six? I sat on the patio of Tiny’s, shocked and angry. I lit a cigarette and hit Slats on my speed dial list. The boss answered with his signature “Hellllllll-Low?” I told Glen that I was upset because as of right now we had six Rangers confirmed to attend the funeral, and if this was how it shook out, it would be the most shameful thing to happen to the Ranger organization. He told me to call “Dru” (Chris Drury) and tell him that every Ranger player living in North America should be at that funeral on Saturday. Nobody stepped out of line with Slats, and if they did then he would simply make a few calls and you were ancient history.
The moment I realized Hilary would always be more important than hockey was a few minutes after the Rangers’ PR man John Rosasco told me that John Tortorella wasn’t going to attend Derek Boogaard’s funeral. I was sick to my stomach, and she was there to console me and give me support, which helped stop me from doing something that could have landed me in prison. I have never felt more hatred toward someone in my life than I felt toward Tortorella at that moment. It was more of a shock than when I heard Derek had died. And it made me wonder: Who is going to be there at the end? There might be no one, and I didn’t want that. I wanted it to be the woman standing beside me now, and onward through the flames ahead, because nothing mattered but love.
Tortorella’s stated reason for missing the funeral was an inability to fly because of recent hip surgery. I can promise you right now that if I had been Tortorella and the doctors had told me not to fly, I would have taken a bus (which Mr. Dolan would have surely paid for) with whatever physiotherapist needed to make the trip to Regina—a thirty-hour drive from New York City. A coach not attending his player’s funeral is unheard of. But maybe it’s just as well he wasn’t there, since in my opinion the appalling manner in which he’d treated Derek after he was injured had been a factor in Derek’s decline and death.
The night before we flew to Saskatchewan, a bunch of Rangers came back to town, and we all went out to Roseland Ballroom. Not to drown our sorrows, but because there was a DJ playing, Armin van Buuren, who the guys liked and wanted to see. The next morning on the team plane some of the Rangers were still high on ecstasy. I didn’t care. At least they were going to say goodbye to their teammate and if this is what it took, well, so be it.
There were forty Ranger players and personnel at Derek’s funeral, but I know there would have been much fewer had I not called Slats and told him what was about to happen.
The day after Boogey died, Aaron Voros and I went and cleaned out his Manhattan apartment on 58th Street and 9th Avenue, which he had sublet from Voros. There were empty pill and wine bottles all over the place; it looked like a warehouse of booze and drugs. I was surprised when Voros told me the police had never talked to him.
Derek’s parents donated his brain to science, and tests came back saying Boogaard had CTE—chronic traumatic encephalopathy—that was so bad his brain was in worse shape than that of Bob Probert, who had recently died at age forty-five. If Boogey had lived to middle age he would have had dementia. His parents also launched a lawsuit against the NHL, saying the league and its drug policies and its celebration of “enforcer” culture led to their son’s death. The suit was dismissed in 2017, but Der
ek was still dead, far too young. The damage could not be undone.
• • •
The Rangers’ training camp for the 2011–12 season was very different for me than the one ten years earlier, when I made the Red Wings and the NHL. This time I came into camp in the best shape of my life, and I was faster, too. I had taken up tennis over the summer as part of my training regime, and I found that I loved the game. It has a lot of similarities to hockey, in that you have to anticipate where the tennis ball is going to land in the court just like you have to anticipate where the puck is going to go on the ice.
Playing tennis in your head is like playing a virtual chess match, where every move you make is about the next move coming, and the beauty of it all is that you need to make the decision as you’re moving, and growing tired. So you have to play smart, and the more you play the more you start to see patterns. Playing tennis is like solving one big geometry problem.
But I have another problem to solve, and it looks like it’s beyond my control. I’ve never been concerned about starting training camp on the fourth line, but when camp starts and I’m on the fifth line, I know I’m done. Slowly but surely Tortorella has done to me what he’s done to so many of my teammates—chipped away all meaning from me and my game.
But I get a chance at redemption. Or revenge. Or a bit of both. This year we’re going to play our second half of training camp in Europe. We land in Prague, and after a quick drive to the team hotel, all the players are exiting the buses to a horde of fans wanting autographs and pictures. There are groupies there, too, who after taking a photo with you, hand you an envelope with a note inside about what exactly they’d like to do with you in bed. It’s pretty brazen.