by Sean Avery
The crowds waiting for us are calling out for the attention of a trio of Rangers: the hometown hero, Marián Gaborík, King Henrik Lundqvist, and No. 16, which would be me. Although I was still very humbled by and appreciative of my fans, I had also grown numb to it because their cheering seemed to be pointing out the disaster that Tortorella was making of my career.
This time around I love it because the coaches will exit the bus last, so I get to walk by Tortorella and into a throng of screaming fans who want a piece of the team’s two superstars and their now fifth-liner. It’s gratifying to me because there’s little else that’s gratifying in my professional hockey life, and I’ve always been a fan of irony.
After beating Sparta in Prague, we move on to Sweden to play against Frolunda, Henrik Lundqvist’s old club. I play very well on the fourth line (wow, a promotion!) with my centerman Kris Newbury, a career minor-leaguer who was a tough, hard-working player and who did the best with the skills he had.
I scored a goal in that game and also lost the bottom half of my two front teeth, courtesy of a cross-check to the face from a Swedish defenseman who definitely shit himself after I told him I was going to hit him into the next world before the game was over. By this point in my career, every hockey-playing pro knows that I mean it when I say that—you don’t know how or when, but the hit will come.
I decided on a sneak attack, which started with a cross-body two-handed slash to this bug-eyed Swede’s right knee, and quickly followed that with a left-handed open slap to the left side of his face—with my glove on, because I’m not a dirty player.
I got bounced, and as I skated to the dressing room for my early shower I noticed something that only someone who’s done this more than 100 times before could notice: some of the fans were standing on their feet cheering, excited to see the Sean Avery shitshow in real life.
On the flight home to New York, not long before we landed, Jim Ramsay, the trainer for the Rangers, came back to my seat and said Coach Tortorella would like to speak with me. As I walked to the front of the plane, I really didn’t believe I was about to be cut from the Rangers and sent to the AHL team in Hartford, but halfway through Tortorella telling me this piece of astonishing news, I started to laugh out loud. Then I stood up and just walked back to my seat.
In fact, Tortorella had shown his hand in Sweden when he said to the media, class guy that he is, “I think we have better players than Sean Avery, plain and simple.”
I knew at that moment I wasn’t going to quit because I was owed the last $4 million of my contract, and if I walked, I’d lose money. I also knew that I was going to turn their farm team into a disaster, and I was going to do it by not saying a single word.
Which wasn’t strictly true, because when I arrived in Hartford I told the assistant coach I had an injured shoulder and couldn’t play until the team doctor examined me. It turned into a two-week holiday, rehabbing my injury. It also gave me time to get to work setting up life after hockey, which was coming sooner than I expected. But then, as I suspected, it always does.
David Lipman had recently confirmed me as the talent for the upcoming advertising campaign for Hickey Freeman clothiers, for which he’d been hired to be the creative force. David is a famous New York advertising guru whose family has been in the business since the 1920s. He’s somebody who I connected with on my New York circuit and who understands sports, fashion, and the arts as well as anybody. Working with David is like working with family crossed with working for a very smart guy who gets pop culture.
A week before I was sent down to Hartford, the Hickey Freeman shoot finally happened. This was my first real major advertising campaign, and not since Phil Esposito, Anders Hedberg, and Dave Maloney appeared in the Sasson jeans campaign in 1979–80 had an NHL hockey player graced the pages of Vanity Fair and GQ in a fashion campaign with a stylish brand.
All the marketing dollars the NHL throws at Sid the Kid and Alexander the Great couldn’t land them an endorsement deal like this, and David Lipman had a great idea. He would get someone to follow me around for three or four days and shoot me reportage style. He knew an Italian photographer, Francesco Carrozzini, who happened to be the son of the editor of Vogue Italia and who would become like a brother to me. He shot me in the Hickey Freeman clothes as I went to the game, or to practice, or out to Warren 77. It was totally original compared to what I had done before in photo shoots, and a lot of fun.
My Life After Hockey had begun, even though I was still supposedly playing for Hartford.
At the end of every season, professional athletes have two realities: we’re either celebrating a championship or we’re saying, “Wait until next season.” But eventually there comes a third reality called “Transition Season.” You hang up your skates, and call it a day. There won’t be another season. There’s just the rest of your life. Even if you retire with $20 million in your bank account (and hardly anyone but a major-superstar-endorsement-deal-king does that), you still have to reckon with the fact that when next season starts, you’ll be watching from the stands. Or on TV. Or in the worst-case scenario, closing your eyes and covering your ears, pretending that it’s not happening without you.
But it is, and it will. So the question is: How do you make the transition from the game that defined your life to a life that will keep you moving forward and not wallowing in nostalgia for who you used to be?
I’d been thinking about this for a long time, and with my internship at Vogue, and my bars, I’d built up a range of experience in a variety of work situations, and now I needed to apply it.
For the next six months, I spent every spare moment I had beyond my life with Hilary beside David Lipman. I would drive back to New York after my mandatory time in Hartford right to David’s office in the Meatpacking District just below 14th Street on the far west side of Manhattan and learn as much as I could about creating brands and selling them. I knew that it wasn’t going to be long before I was heading to his office straight from home, and not from Hartford.
And if I needed any more irony in my life, it was Hartford. My alarm would go off at 5:30 A.M. in Manhattan and I would be in the car cruising up the West Side Highway by 6. I’d pull into the arena parking lot in Connecticut by 8 A.M., and then I’d sleep for half an hour before heading inside to hit my morning workout.
The interesting thing was that I was getting text messages from people who were watching the Rangers at home and could hear the crowd at MSG chanting my name. I’ve only heard a few players’ names chanted like this, and now it was happening and I wasn’t even in the building.
I played a couple of games for Hartford, finally, after basically telling them to blow me for two weeks because I knew the call from Glen was coming. I know, not great, but I was pissed off. I’d play hard in the first period until I scored or got an assist, and then I’d find a way to get kicked out of the game—jump someone, take a whack—and the team would need to kill a five-minute penalty. I wasn’t trying to be a bad teammate, but rather to show how hurt and angry I was at being treated like this by a team I’d given everything to, a team I’d nearly died for. And yet here I was in Hartford, taking the place of some guy who really should have been in the AHL, all because John Tortorella didn’t like me.
It’s safe to say that I was probably the happiest guy on the planet when I got the call that I was going back up to New York; to make it even better, the Montreal Canadiens were at MSG the next night to give my return a real sense of occasion. I pulled my bag off the Hartford team bus and said goodbye to the assistant trainer who was standing beside Coach Ken. I told the trainer that I hoped I wouldn’t ever again see this shit-dump city (he knew exactly what I was doing and didn’t take it personally), and then I spent six hours driving back to New York in probably the biggest and worst snowstorm I’ve ever seen. I was going home to stay.
I played fifteen games for the Rangers that season, and we went 11–4 with me back in
the lineup. On December 1, 2011, I scored my third goal in ten games, the winner in our 5–3 victory at Carolina. Usually after scoring a goal in an NHL game, no matter who it’s against and regardless of whether you win or lose, you feel good (OK, it doesn’t feel as good after a loss), and if your goal is the game winner, then you feel great.
Tonight I hit the showers in a hurry and send Hilary a text telling her that I’d be upstairs in the green room in five minutes and we could get back out into real life. I know the end is close because I know that Tortorella feels me picking up momentum and that he’ll do everything he can to slow that down. At this pace I would have scored twenty goals, which would have made me the first player in NHL history to score twenty goals while averaging seven minutes of ice time a game. Which makes this all the more obvious.
And so it is. That was my last goal in the NHL, even though I didn’t know it at the time.
I unofficially retired from the NHL on my friend Andy Cohen’s Bravo TV show Watch What Happens Live on March 13. I’d been sent back to Hartford at the end of December because the thing Tortorella feared the most was me playing well, and I went because I wanted to get paid the rest of the money the team owed me, but I was done. I told Andy that I’d thrown my skates in the Hudson River (not quite true—too environmentally unfriendly, so I literally just hung them up). And the other truth was that the Rangers told me I didn’t have to play anymore in Hartford once the March 1 trade deadline had passed.
I’d had a few conversations with my agent, Pat Morris, about a trade, and he made the usual agent noises about finding something out there. But I didn’t have the energy to hold my own press conference close to the trade deadline in March so that I could explain the situation I was in and try to solicit my own trade. If I had faced the media, I would have said “I have lots left in the tank and I’m still the best in the world at what I do. But to continue my NHL career I need to be playing somewhere that John Tortorella is not the so-called coach.”
I knew that New York wasn’t going to trade me because they didn’t want me to come back and play against them. Well, that’s not quite true, because after I was sent down in training camp, I’d shut down a trade to Calgary that Pat had rustled up, believing that when I got called back to the Rangers I’d play so well that they wouldn’t be able to send me down. I got the call and I came back and I scored more goals per game than in any stretch of my career. And now it was time to go.
I had, of course, prepared for this moment for quite a while, from learning various jobs to changing the way I traveled. When I went on vacation, I’d fly in economy class to harden myself for the real world. There was that time I flew twenty hours to New Zealand in coach, even though my salary was millions of dollars a year (though, as I’ve explained before, NHL players only take home a fraction of that).
Sure, people would say “Hey, look, Sean Avery is flying coach!,” with some of them wanting to talk hockey and some just mocking me. But the thing many players fail to realize when they leave the game is that they’ve been living in a world that’s only possible if you’re fabulously wealthy. All the private jets, the five-star hotels, the catered gourmet meals, and the freebies in bars and restaurants, plus the crazy money for playing a game, can make you forget that you’re really a guy from suburban Ontario and your parents are teachers. Flying twenty hours in coach sucks. But you need to remember that you’re a normal human being before it’s too late. It’s not just about the money. It’s about keeping your expectations in check.
So now I was ready to leave the game that had given me so much (and vice versa, I think) to become a husband and a businessman. Sure, I could have waited until the following September came along and handpicked the team I wanted to step on the ice for, to start over in what would have been the prime of my career, but I was done with this shit. And no one tried to talk me out of it.
I was done with not being able to grow into the man I longed to be, a good man who prospered in all areas of my life. I wanted to listen to my music without being cast as a weirdo. I wanted to wear a dress shirt buttoned to the top with no tie. I wanted to be my own person and not a fucking robot answering to the whims of someone else I couldn’t respect.
I was relieved, to be honest. I didn’t have to deal with the bullshit anymore because now I didn’t think doing so would change anything. Everyone from my parents to Hilary was fine with it. I mean, they realized that I was happy with my choice, and no one said I should go and play somewhere else. Partly because I don’t think my friends, like Shanny or Cheli or Hully, really thought that I’d retired. I didn’t have an official media event, and I didn’t even fill out the paperwork. To be honest, I don’t even know if I’m officially retired. Which pretty much sums it all up.
After my last season with the Rangers, we had a guys’ trip to Miami—me, Mike Satsky (who owns the club Provocateur in the Meatpacking District), Aaron Voros, and Andy Cohen. I’d met Andy a few years earlier when I first went on his talk show. We’d met at a Christmas party, and it was the first time I had a connection with a gay man in a “bro” type of way and not a fashion type of way. Andy’s from St. Louis, and he loves baseball, especially the Cardinals. And he’s very manly. Most of his friends are straight. He’s a straight man living in a gay man’s body. He’d come to Rangers games and we’d hang out.
So on the Miami trip he’d hang with us at the pool by day, we’d go to dinner, and then we’d go to clubs and he’d go to gay bars. People started to see us together on social media, and then, later that summer, I went over to his house in Sag Harbor on the Fourth of July, and we took that picture of both of us with our shirts off, draped in the Stars and Stripes. We’re both very comfortable with our sexuality and we find it funny that people think there’s something going on between us. From that picture, some credible news source wrote that we were engaged, and it took off from there. No one ever called me to check it out. We played it up a bit. Our sarcasm on the topic was supposed to be our statement of clarity but it actually legitimized the story even more. It went away because I did the smartest thing I have ever done and I asked Hilary to marry me. Which, of course, is not why I did it. I wanted her to be my wife for better or worse, but I was going to make damn sure the “worse” would be negligible. We would have an epic and long life together.
We were going to go to Los Angeles for a week, and I had bought her a ring but was worried that I was going to lose it on the trip. So late at night, when we were getting ready for bed, I got down on one knee in the bathroom (I know, romantic spot) and asked her if she would make me the happiest man on earth by marrying me.
She said yes.
• • •
It was October 10, 2015, and one of those New York autumn days that they write songs about, with a flawless blue sky and as warm as late summer. But what made it completely perfect was the fact that it was my wedding day. Hilary and I were getting married at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, which is just up the road from Southampton, on Long Island. Hilary has a house there, and the gallery has been a home for art to this community for more than a century.
We make our vows in the new gallery, and then afterward, we have our dinner and dance with 100 friends and family members—with space heaters strategically positioned to ward off the October nighttime chill.
The paparazzi turned out, of course, parked a few hundred yards away and leaning on the fence separating a field from the Montauk Highway. Once the sun went down, they were out of luck.
Hilary wore a gorgeous white Carolina Herrera gown and diamond earrings. She could have worn workout sweats and still been the most beautiful woman in the room.
As I said my vows to love her, for better or worse, I knew that we’d already seen so much that was good, and together had stickhandled through the bad stuff with the Rangers. But it wasn’t bad, really, as hockey had brought me to New York, and my hockey success and interest in the world beyond the rink had compe
lled me to open that bar that Hilary walked into. And the rest would be our history one day.
I wasn’t nervous as the minister pronounced us “man and wife.” I was emotional. In fact, I was experiencing the most intense feeling of happiness I had ever known. This was easily the best day of my life.
But there is more to come. I didn’t convince Hilary to leave her life as a supermodel in New York and move with me to suburban Ontario, to a condo on a golf course, where I would spend my days meandering toward the nineteenth hole. No, I told her that I was going to be a Shakespearean actor on Broadway.
Seriously. This came about because my friend Peter Berg, who I first met all those years ago at my first Cheli Malibu beach party, put me in a movie he was directing, Patriots Day. It’s about the Boston Marathon bombing, and I had a small role as a cop.
As soon as the cameras rolled, the clock turned back to when I was a kid, when I first knew that I wanted to keep replicating this feeling of exhilaration that came from hockey. I had found it again, and it was called acting. So I started taking acting lessons, and I’ve fallen in love with Shakespeare.
I never really studied him in school, because I wasn’t in school all that much. I was trying to make the NHL. Now I’m making up for lost time. Shakespeare’s great mind can get inside the heads of everyone from kings to killers, and that speaks to me. He even does trash talk. I mean, his line “Thou art the son and heir of a mongrel bitch” is something I could have used on Tortorella. “Thou art as fat as butter” was made for Marty Brodeur.
I was trying to get inside people’s heads too, though in a much different way. Not saying I’m Shakespeare here, I’m just saying that he speaks to a world that includes me, and now I want to speak his words back to the world.