Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

  PART I

  SASKATCHEWAN

  1

  THE ICE WAS COVERED with five-year-old boys. The goalies were immobilized with padded equipment, weighted like firs under heavy snowfall. The others, like Derek, glided in slow-motion packs, cautiously and unsteadily following the puck.

  Their sticks, nearly as tall as the boys, were handy to keep balance, either leaned upon like canes or held horizontally, like the balancing poles of tightrope walkers. They swung wildly when the children lost their balance and twirled to the ice, spilling like tops that had lost their momentum.

  The little rink had the usual smatterings of family members, there to provide enthusiastic cheers and a quiet wave of recognition. Joanne Boogaard, pregnant with the family’s fourth child, had stuffed Derek into his first hockey uniform. He was not yet old enough to dress himself, but he was big and strong enough to make it hard to wrestle his limbs into their proper holes.

  His mother slid the boy’s legs through the shorts and pulled the oversized blue-and-white jersey over his head. She tugged on the socks that stretched to his knees. She laced the hand-me-down skates that teetered under his weight. She buckled the helmet that protected his head.

  Derek was always taller than the other kids, perennially found in the back row of the team picture. And as a young boy he was chubby, his round face crowned by dark, curly hair.

  Derek dressed for his first day of hockey.

  It was the winter bridging 1987 and 1988. Joanne, a tall woman with sad eyes, was married to Len Boogaard, a sturdy and stern policeman.

  They had met at a Regina bar on New Year’s Day, 1981. Len was a cadet at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Depot Division, the training academy for the national police force, a well-manicured campus on the west side of town. He and some fellow cadets walked into Checkers, an English-style pub inside the nearby Landmark Inn. A tall 25-year-old brunette named Joanne Vrouwe was behind the bar.

  Her parents, Theodorus and Anna, had three daughters when they left Amsterdam in 1953. None spoke English. They crossed the Atlantic in a ship and landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, then boarded a train headed west. Theodorus, who worked for an oil company in the Netherlands, had been sponsored by a farmer near Riverhurst, Saskatchewan. The train dropped the family of five in Regina, and Theodorus soon began work as a farmhand.

  By 1955, the family had moved into town, assimilating with the help of a burgeoning Dutch community. Theodorus became known as Ted and worked for a Regina shipping company, and Anna gave birth to another daughter, whom they named Joanne.

  The family lived in a tiny house on Ninth Avenue, on the far edge of town at the time. They soon moved a few blocks east to Scarth Street, north of downtown Regina, where the main crossroads, a nod to the British Commonwealth, was Albert Street and Victoria Avenue.

  Ted found a job with Burns Foods, at a slaughterhouse and feed plant, and embarked on a long career as a butcher that lasted until the plant closed without warning. After working at the bus depot for a spell, he caught on with International Packers, another slaughterhouse in town.

  Joanne was a pragmatic, hardworking sort, her singsong voice disguising a feisty toughness. She became pregnant while in high school, and gave birth to a baby boy in 1972, at age 17. She never told the baby’s father, and she immediately handed the boy over for adoption.

  After high school, she worked days as a dental technician and nights and weekends as a bartender. Her father told Joanne she would make more money working at the packing plant. So she got a job there, quit as a dental technician and kept her bartending gig, saving enough money to buy herself a small house in Regina.

  About a month after taking the new job, in 1979, Joanne’s 52-year-old mother died unexpectedly while visiting relatives in Holland. Part of the emotional fallout was the end of a long relationship Joanne had with a boyfriend. That was when a 26-year-old RCMP cadet and Dutch immigrant walked into her bar.

  Born in 1954, Len was the oldest of four boys, the first two born in postwar Holland. In 1958, the Boogaards, like the Vrouwes, crossed the Atlantic for the uncertain potential of a better life. The Boogaards settled in Toronto, living in the basement of relatives. Len’s father, Pieter, had worked as a load coordinator for a shipping company in Holland. In Toronto, he got a job cleaning car dealerships, making 25 cents an hour. Len’s mother, Nieltje, had worked in a bakery in Holland, but stayed home in Canada to raise the boys. She took the name Nancy, because no one could pronounce her Dutch name. Pieter became Peter, and Peter became a school janitor, a job he held until 1991, quitting only after the death of his youngest son—Len’s brother—of bone cancer at age 20.

  Household rules were strict. The family was part of the Dutch Christian Reformed Church, with twice-a-week catechism classes and two church services on Sundays. While neighborhood children played outside on Sundays, Len was kept indoors, dressed in his church best.

  After hopscotching between the homes of relatives—from one family’s basement to another family’s farm—the Boogaards bought a small house in 1963. Money remained tight. Little was spent on Christmas gifts, and the area rug in the living room, brought from Holland and worn from use, was dyed by Len’s mother in a persistent attempt to preserve it.

  The Boogaards spoke Dutch at home, and Len did not know English when he arrived for the first day of kindergarten. But he adapted quickly, becoming a good student, if a bit of a troublemaker, with a natural skepticism toward protocol and authority. He was granted dual citizenship when he was 13, an age when he suffered from the debilitating pain of scoliosis. When doctors thought Len had quit growing, at age 17, they performed back surgery. It kept him in a body cast for months, and left him wearing a back brace long after that.

  An uncle helped get Len into college in the Netherlands. By then, though, Dutch was Len’s second language, and he struggled to read it well enough to keep up with his studies. He also learned that he would be required to serve in the Dutch military if he stayed. So he returned to Canada and graduated from St. Lawrence College in Cornwall, Ontario, with a mechanical engineering diploma. In 1978, Len’s brother Bill joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and was posted in suburban Vancouver. Len moved in with him and took a job in a mechanical engineering lab, doing research and development for oil-field machinery components. He spent his days in front of a drafting board.

  It was a good job, but his brother had all the interesting stories, the ones about chasing bad guys and investigating crimes. His curiosity piqued, Len spent nights and weekends with the auxiliary RCMP. He could not carry a gun, but he could ride along on calls. It was enough of a taste to get Len excited about a career change. He applied to the RCMP and was accepted. He reported to Depot Division in November 1980 for 24 weeks of training, a military-style form of boot camp. On New Year’s Day, granted rare time off, he headed to Checkers.

  Dark and handsome, with a furry mustache and a penchant for sarcasm and straight-faced jokes, Len made small talk with the young woman behind the bar. Joanne was coy. She told Len, as she told all the other RCMP members and recruits who wandered in armed with bravado and pickup lines, that she would never date a cop.

  But she was taken by Len’s cool confidence, and they did have a lot in common, including their Dutch roots and strict upbringings. When Len returned another day, carrying flowers, Joanne could not resist.

  Theirs was a shotgun romance, ignited by spark and the impending calendar. Len would be out of training by summer and handed a posting—probably in a tiny town far away. Maybe the RCMP would note that Joanne owned a house and had a job in Regina and keep the couple in the big city. They did not know. He could be assigned anywhere across the country.

  Len graduated from training in May, and he and Joanne were married on June 27. The ceremony was held in the small, dark chapel at the RCMP Depot. The stained-glass windows behind the pulpit depicted two Mounties. One held a bugle; the other, a musket. Len was dressed in red serge, the formal uniform of the RCMP. Eight other
s in red serge, holding lances, comprised a color guard. Len’s brother Bill was best man, and their other brothers were groomsmen. Joanne was accompanied at the altar by her sisters. About 100 friends and family members sat in the wooden pews and happily congratulated the young couple as they burst into the warm sunshine out front.

  Derek Leendert Boogaard was born less than a year later, on June 23, 1982, at Saskatoon City Hospital. The middle name honored his father. The boy was 9 pounds, 5½ ounces, the heftiest of the oncoming wave of Boogaard babies, and he stretched 21½ inches. The family dressed him in a Toronto Maple Leafs onesie, and within weeks, doctors recommended solid baby food from a jar to quell his insatiable hunger.

  And here he was, a few years later, an oversized toddler gazing at the faces in the bleachers until his eyes locked on those of his parents. The habit never faded.

  “I remember when I would sit in the bench, I would always look for my mom and dad in the stands,” Derek wrote 20 years later, in notes he recorded about his childhood.

  Derek, age two.

  “And of course I still do it in the NHL,” he added in parentheses.

  As he grew older, recognition came with a subtle nod. But at five, it came with a giant grin and a wild wave, like someone flagging a passing car. The puck was at the other end of the ice, but it did not matter. Derek saw his father. He saw his mother, pregnant with a little girl, and his two younger brothers, Ryan and Aaron Nicholas, propped onto the bleachers in little bundles.

  Derek smiled. He waved. His parents waved back, returning the enthusiasm exponentially, then shooing the boy to turn the other way and chase the puck.

  They were all there when Derek scored his first goal, sweeping the puck with his long stick past the goalie burdened by padding. It hardly mattered that the goal came against Derek’s own team. The family cheered and laughed.

  Hockey was something to do, something that nearly all the little boys and a growing number of little girls did, and Derek, in that respect, was no different than the rest. He was just like everyone else. That is why Derek liked it.

  ON A MAP, Saskatchewan is a vertical rectangle, about twice as tall as it is wide, the shape a child might make when asked to draw a big building. It stretches about 750 miles north from the American border and is narrower near the top, along the 60th parallel, because the curve of the Earth bends the longitudinal lines together as they extend toward the poles.

  If Saskatchewan were part of the United States, it would be the third-largest state—smaller than Texas, bigger than California. But Saskatchewan’s million residents represent only about one thirty-eighth of California’s population. The northern half of the province is a wrinkled carpet of forests and large lakes. Its towns are mostly outposts, and paved roads are few. So are people. The center of gravity lies in the southern half, where Saskatoon and Regina, the provincial capital, each have a population around 200,000. The surrounding landscape is smoothed improbably flat by long-receded glaciers and left sprinkled with shallow lakes. In the short summers, dry land is consumed mostly by grain-covered fields—canary-yellow stripes of canola, ocean-blue swatches of flax. Mostly, though, there is wheat.

  “The Lord said, ‘Let there be wheat,’ and Saskatchewan was born,” Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock wrote nearly a century ago.

  Saskatchewan’s southern half is not unlike the Great Plains states of the American Midwest, dotted with small towns connected by two-lane roads that frame, in straight lines, endless stretches of farms and ranches. The difference with Saskatchewan, though, is its scale, as if it were smoothed and stretched with a rolling pin. On a clear day, a familiar joke goes in Saskatchewan, you can see the back of your own head.

  The elastic geography is mirrored by a quiet tolerance of extremes. The hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada was in Saskatchewan, yet temperatures throughout the province in winter can be stuck below freezing for weeks at a time. Tornadoes are a summertime concern, and the cold wind blowing eastward off the Canadian Rockies in Alberta, with nothing to slow it for thousands of miles, is a wintertime torment.

  Most corners feel like the edge of nowhere. By some accounts, a town has made it when it gets a stoplight or, perhaps more usefully, a Tim Hortons, the ubiquitous coffee-and-donut chain started by and named for a hockey player who died in a car crash during his 24th season in the National Hockey League.

  By sheer numbers, Saskatchewan does not produce the most NHL players. That is Ontario, by a large margin. By style, Saskatchewan does not produce the most talented playmakers, the smoothest skaters, or the biggest stars. But it does, with little argument, produce the toughest players—if not more than any other province, certainly the most per capita. Nearly any credible list of the fiercest, scrappiest players in hockey history will include a broad sample of Saskatchewan natives, from Eddie Shore to Dave “The Hammer” Schultz, Clark Gillies to Dave “Tiger” Williams, Joey Kocur to Wendel Clark, Theo Fleury to Dave Manson.

  None of them played professionally in Saskatchewan, because the province has never had an NHL team. The closest are hundreds of miles away—in Winnipeg to the east and Calgary and Edmonton to the west. But that does not mean that Saskatchewan culture does not revolve largely around hockey. It simply means that culture revolves largely around children playing hockey—“minor hockey,” in Canadian parlance.

  That is why Len and Joanne placed young Derek into hockey programs, why they spent countless hours in chilly rinks sitting on wooden benches or standing on concrete floors, why they spent their money on hand-me-down equipment and registration fees, and why they spent their vacation budgets on long driving trips to attend hockey tournaments. They did everything they could to acclimate their children into the local culture—especially Derek.

  “We just wanted him to be happy,” Joanne said.

  Like youth and high-school football in Texas or Nebraska, minor hockey in Saskatchewan sets the rhythm of the seasons as much as the planting and harvesting of the fields. Civic life in Saskatchewan, as in much of Canada, is not centered on schools or shopping malls, but the local rink. Hockey allows small communities and extended families to convene on pale, cold weekend days and dark, frozen weekday nights.

  “The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons,” reads a portion of Roch Carrier’s short story “The Hockey Sweater,” an excerpt of which was included on the back of the Canadian five-dollar bill for many years. “We lived in three places—the school, the church and the skating rink—but our real life was on the skating rink.”

  It was at one of those rinks, when Derek was five, that Len, his family new to the area, found himself seated in the bleachers behind a few other parents. Two women talked about the team roster and pointed out their sons. One pointed to the unknown boy with the big frame, taller than the rest.

  “He’s the worst player on the team,” she said.

  Len’s mind, like that of any good cop, captured details and filed them in a mental vault. He never forgot the way the mother said it and the way she pointed at Derek. He always wondered: Whatever happened to her little boy? Whatever happened to all the other little boys on the ice that day?

  Hockey was a unit of measurement in Canada, and few grew as big as Derek.

  THE FIRST RCMP assignment was in Hanley, a blip of a farming town bypassed by time and Provincial Highway 11, just to the east. Few cars that traveled the 160 miles between Regina and Saskatoon found time or reason to exit. The Canadian National Railway still made routine stops, though, and empty cars were loaded with wheat and other grains harvested from the surrounding prairie.

  The detachment, with six officers, was responsible for a vast area measuring roughly 1,000 square miles. It was the first place that Len saw tumbleweeds, which he thought existed only in John Wayne movies. The patrol cars had no air conditioning, so the summer was spent speeding along the two-lane roads with the windows down—something said to cause hearing loss in the left ears of rural RCMP members.

  During his first winter th
ere, Len found the town had no snowplow, instead using an open-cab tractor that dragged three large tires behind it. Working an overnight shift, Len parked his patrol car along the highway. Nearly an hour went by before he saw another car. Finally, the crystals in the freezing air, like a million tiny, floating mirrors, reflected the headlights of a car still on the far side of the horizon. Len waited. The crystals sparkled. Eventually, the car emerged over the edge of the earth and moved almost imperceptibly toward Len. It took several more minutes before it reached him and passed, trailing only darkness.

  My god, Len thought, this place is flat.

  His first major investigation centered on the death of a university professor. A stolen car had broken down along Highway 11. The thieves used a teenaged girl in their group as a hitchhiking lure for another. The professor picked her up and was jumped by the others. They drove his car into a field, threw him out, and ran him over.

  Len was called to the scene to investigate the homicide. He attended the autopsy and was responsible for the court exhibits. All in the group were convicted. Len was hooked.

  Len and Joanne lived in a second-floor apartment above the bank in downtown Hanley. When Joanne went into labor, they rushed to Saskatoon City Hospital.

  And on those days and nights when Derek would not stop crying, and an exhausted Joanne was at her wit’s end trying to keep him quiet, Len took the infant seat from the family car and strapped it into his police cruiser. He drove up and down the lonesome highway. It never failed to soothe Derek, at any age.

  THE ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE was a sprawling government agency, headquartered in Ottawa. It had roughly 30,000 employees across the country, from street cops to white-collar bureaucrats. Its duties included protecting the country from large-scale threats linked to terrorism, organized crime, drugs, and counterfeiting. But the RCMP also was a national police force that provided policing to all of the provinces except Ontario and Quebec, three territories, 200 Aboriginal communities, and all but the largest cities.