Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

  Most players were not from Prince George, so they had few friends at Prince George Secondary School beyond their own teammates. The hockey team was its own clique, a group of ever-changing outsiders made momentarily famous by their spot on the team. They were, by turns, both revered and reviled, and sometimes those feelings ebbed with wins and losses.

  Most boys at the major-junior level had been the best players on their team for many years, stars at every level. Not Derek. He was an unproven entity, prized for his size but not his talent. He was shy, and could sometimes make people laugh with his quirky sense of humor, but those were not traits that endeared testosterone-filled teenagers to one another. To teammates, Derek was a one-dimensional player, brought in to perform a task he was failing to do well.

  In practice, coaches chided him for botching drills and worried that he would accidentally injure star players with a clumsy collision. One older teammate, in particular, routinely threatened to beat up Derek.

  He instead found friends in some of the fringes of high-school culture, not unlike the skateboarders and snowboarders Derek had come to know in Melfort.

  One of Derek’s best friends was Eric Hoarau, who had moved with his family from Nairobi at the age of seven. Eric was black, five foot seven, and did not play hockey, and his father ran an auto-repair shop on the edge of downtown called Simba Motors. Somehow, he was assigned to sit behind Derek, a foot taller, in English class. Derek spent hours at the shop and was a frequent guest at the Hoarau house. He peppered the family with questions about where they came from, why they moved to Canada, how they ended up in Prince George.

  Derek had a natural curiosity about others, and about their cultures, a healthy appetite to learn more that rarely translated to his schoolwork. He didn’t find his life all that interesting, and most hockey players came from a similar background. Strangers from different cultures, with stories Derek had never heard before, were far more intriguing to him. He asked more questions than he answered, mostly out of inquisitiveness, partly to deflect attention.

  Still, like most of his teammates, Derek drank, at school parties outside of town and, eventually, at bars in Prince George. Drinking was a long-standing rite of passage in junior hockey. The drinking age was 19, which meant about half of the roster was of legal age. But bars were lax, even for the underaged, especially when it came to Cougars players, who carried an air of celebrity.

  “There were no drugs, but there was booze,” said Lubiniecki, the veteran general manager. “I used to have a standard in the Western Hockey League: My rule will be that if a kid is worse than I was when I was when I grew up, then he’s out of here. And I never found a kid as bad as I was.”

  While in Prince George, Derek also became introduced to another enduring staple of junior hockey: the puck bunny.

  It was a term, used somewhat derisively and often abbreviated to “pucks,” for the young women who hung around the team hoping to attract the affection of a player. They were the sirens of junior hockey. They scouted from the stands, mingled near the locker rooms, and found their way to the bars where players congregated. Most relationships were as fleeting as a winter storm, but the NHL is filled with players married to pucks.

  Derek had never had a girlfriend. His lifelong shyness was magnified around girls. He could recite Eddie Murphy comedy routines in front of close friends, but he was painfully reticent around girls. But they were noticing him.

  Derek was miserable for much of his time in Prince George. He did not like the coach, Ed Dempsey, for the same reason he struggled with so many authority figures. Derek felt untrusted and underestimated. He did not like the assistant coach, Dallas Thompson, who was also in charge of coordinating the school and billet programs for the Cougars. Thompson had plenty of issues with Derek away from the ice.

  “He was a boy in a man’s body,” Thompson said of Derek. “Everything was in a hurry. He knew what he wanted to do: he wanted to play in the NHL. A lot of things, like school and growing up, got accelerated a bit, and I think it overwhelmed him at times.”

  THE COUGARS WERE a good team that season, on their way to reaching the league semifinals in the playoffs. And they were popular. Of the 18 teams in the Western Hockey League, Prince George was fourth in attendance, averaging 5,801 fans per home game, trailing only teams in the larger cities of Spokane, Portland, and Calgary.

  Six players from the 1999–2000 Prince George team ultimately reached the National Hockey League, at least for a few games. It was hard to imagine that Derek would be one of them. Twenty-seven players scored points for the Cougars, but Derek had no goals and no assists in 33 games. He led the Cougars in fights, with 16 (plus three with Regina before the trade), but the team had plenty of others who were willing to do the dirty work, too. In all, the Cougars had 107 game-stopping fights, a big increase from the season before, and 21 players engaged in at least one.

  The users of one web site determined Derek’s fighting record to be 6–9–1, with three bouts not judged. One victory came three nights after Derek’s Prince George debut brawl with Eric Godard. During a game with four fights, Derek drilled a player from the Kamloops Blazers named Jason Bone with two hard rights, knocking the boy to his knees and spilling blood on the ice.

  At home in November against Kelowna, Derek was matched again with Mitch Fritz, with his Donkey Kong punches and finger-wagging bravado. In an uncommonly short bout, Derek lunged with a right hand that missed, and Fritz responded with a flurry of right hands that tagged Derek several times in the face. Derek fell to the ice. Fritz headed to the penalty box. Derek left immediately for the dressing room—a humbled enforcer’s sign of injury and defeat.

  Fritz beat Derek again in January, surprising him with a quick barrage that knocked Derek down. In February, prompted by Derek’s beating of one of Fritz’s teammates earlier in the game, they met again during the first of a seven-game, 12-day road trip east. By now, Derek was well schooled in the choreography of hockey fights. Waiting for a face-off near one goal, Fritz asked Derek if he wanted to fight. Derek nodded casually. Once the puck dropped, the two swerved their way to the middle of the rink, shedding equipment and building anticipation.

  The crowd rose as the boys slid toward center ice, the circus’s center ring. Fritz skated toward Derek and struck him with his right fist as Derek moved backward. The blow dropped Derek to the ice, a signal for officials to intervene. But Derek quickly jumped to his feet. With an official draped on each boy, each player bigger than the men trying to contain them, Derek fired a right hand that knocked Fritz off balance.

  Fritz, angered, tried to duck and wrangle out of the official’s hold, but could not get close enough to continue the fight. The boys shouted at one another, like boxers held back by their handlers. The Kelowna crowd cheered.

  The Cougars headed to Swift Current. Mat Sommerfeld, Derek’s old nemesis, cracked Derek’s chin with a series of left-hand jabs. The boys fell to their knees and sprung up. Sommerfeld hit Derek with a right, knocking him to his knees momentarily again. Sommerfeld landed more punches until Derek wrestled his opponent to the ice in a pile.

  Derek called Len late that night. In the pile, he said, Sommerfeld bit him on the hand. In the hours since, it had swelled grotesquely and kept Derek awake with pain.

  Len drove two hours from Regina to Swift Current and took Derek to the hospital in the middle of the night. Doctors diagnosed an infection and gave Derek shots. Len, frustrated at being called to intervene in his son’s care, began to wonder whether teams had the best interests of the boys in mind.

  “Then came the night that was good and kind of a bad thing for me,” Derek wrote.

  It was March 3, 2000. The Cougars were home, in front of another sold-out crowd of 5,970, playing the Tri-City Americans. In the second period, Derek faced a 19-year-old named Mike Lee, a six-foot, 230-pounder from Alaska.

  The fight ended almost as soon as it started. Lee smacked Derek with a punch. The boys were escorted to the penalty box. Derek, wi
thout revealing that he was hurt, sat trying to coordinate his jaw and get it back into place.

  “I couldn’t close my mouth,” Derek wrote later. “My teeth wouldn’t line up.”

  His jaw was broken. X-rays at the hospital proved it, and doctors said the jaw required surgical repair. Derek awoke to find his mouth wired shut. Doctors placed him on a liquid diet. His season over, the Cougars sent him home to Regina.

  Derek had been missing teeth from previous fights and a stick he took to the mouth. Now, between the wires, he had a hole where he could insert a straw during the six weeks his jaw was wired shut. The hole in his teeth, he found, was the perfect size for French fries.

  DEREK TURNED 18 in June, and he privately wondered if he might get selected in that month’s National Hockey League draft. The notion was ridiculous enough that he kept it to himself.

  “I was still kinda hoping that somebody would take a chance on me,” he wrote as an adult.

  No one did. But several of Derek’s teammates and opponents were drafted. Sommerfeld, Derek’s rival, was selected in the eighth round, 253rd overall, by the Florida Panthers. (He played two more seasons of junior hockey before leaving the game with complications from concussions, and became a farmer near his hometown.)

  The broken jaw and wired mouth gave Derek plenty of time to ponder where he wanted his life to go. He was not going to graduate from high school. He likely was headed toward a career of labor, working the oil fields or in a manufacturing plant somewhere, and if he did not play hockey, that future would start sooner rather than later. His family was little solace.

  The house in Regina was remodeled and ready, and the Boogaards moved in at about the time Derek completed his first season in Prince George. A month later, the day after Mother’s Day, Joanne returned home to find that Len had moved out. Their marriage, approaching its 20th anniversary, was headed for divorce.

  Derek escaped by burying himself in his hockey pursuits. Another season like the last, and opportunity would expire. He spent much of the summer at a gym called Level 10 Fitness, with a trainer named Dan Farthing. Derek now had a leanness that was evident everywhere from his thinning cheeks to his broadening chest and flattening stomach.

  He boxed. He ran. He spent hours with his brother Ryan, reviewing videos of his fights and scouting his opponents. Derek never felt more prepared and more anxious to start a season. Yet he nearly quit before it began.

  Derek wanted to choose his billet family, but the Cougars were not going to let Derek dictate his living arrangements. Derek had not been unhappy with his primary first-year billets, but he had made a connection with another family. Mike and Caren Tobin owned a jewelry store in a well-tended strip mall in Prince George, and they lived in a neatly landscaped, remodeled two-story house on a quiet street outside of town. They had toddler-aged twin daughters. They had been billets for a few years and were hosting one of Derek’s teammates. The boy told the Tobins about Derek.

  “Mike, you should see this guy,” the boy said. “He’s so big, he won’t even fit in my car.”

  The Tobins said to invite him over.

  “Here’s this giant, pimple-faced galoot walking in the door,” Mike Tobin recalled. “And he was shy. Oh, my God, was he shy.”

  Derek sat quietly on the couch, watching television. Caren asked if he wanted something to drink. No, thank you, Derek mumbled. Something to eat? No, thank you, he said.

  “He kept to himself,” Caren Tobin said. “But once he became your friend, he would always be there for you.”

  Mike Tobin had had a difficult childhood and quit school after the eighth grade. A family connection led to an apprenticeship as a goldsmith, which led to his own jewelry business, built into a success. Mike had just purchased a Porsche, and the Tobin residence might have been the nicest home Derek had ever been inside.

  Derek soon fell for Caren’s roast beef, and Mike was soon taking him to movies and sparking an interest in high-performance cars. Derek opened up. At a time when Derek’s own family was breaking apart, the Tobins offered reliable comfort. Mike became the sort of big-brother figure that Derek had not had—part friend, part role model.

  It was part of a lifelong pattern for Derek. He usually painted adults, particularly those with some authority over his life, in one of two stark shades. Either you were for Derek or against him; there was little in between. He did not like most of his teachers, who put demands on him that he never fully understood. He adored about half of the coaches he had and detested the others. Whether authority figures fell on one side or the other was usually a reflection of the amount of faith they showed in Derek—or, conversely, the amount of pressure and discipline they exerted on him.

  More than anyone, Mike Tobin boosted Derek’s confidence, listened to his problems, and offered a worry-free place to unwind. There was no harping about hockey or school or anything else. A neighbor of the Tobins worked at the high school. She warned them that Derek was not worth the trouble—a bad student, a bad kid. The Tobins never saw it.

  There were several hockey players living with billets in the neighborhood, and the Tobin home became a hub. When the boys gathered, either to watch television on the big screen in the basement or to have a big dinner, the Tobins usually told them to bring Derek.

  But the Cougars denied Derek’s request to live with the Tobins. When Derek arrived at the airport for his second season in Prince George, he was driven to the home of another family. Nice people, Derek recalled, but they were smokers, and Derek wanted no part of that. He sulked. He moved through another billet family before settling with still another. Derek liked them, but the husband was a statistician for the Cougars. Derek felt as if he was being monitored by the team.

  His frustration boiled over following a run-in with Thompson, the assistant coach and the one in charge of billeting. Thompson, persistently frustrated by Derek on and off the ice, was not happy with the way Derek casually greeted Thompson’s wife, the daughter of the owner. Thompson berated Derek for the disrespectful slight.

  That was it. Derek decided to quit. He bought a plane ticket to Regina and called his father to say he was coming home. He went into the dressing room and told teammates he was leaving. A couple of them tried to talk him out of it.

  Derek went to tell Mike Tobin.

  “Don’t be a quitter,” Tobin said. “That’s what they want you to do.”

  Tobin had seen firsthand how players were treated as disposable goods. He had come home from work several times over the years to find boys in tears, packing their bags, told they had been shipped somewhere else.

  Derek said he would demand a trade. Tobin laughed. He knew Derek had no standing to make demands. He didn’t even have enough standing to request billets. They would dismiss him as a cancer and sit him. They’ve got you, Derek, Tobin told him. You can sulk or prove them wrong.

  Derek met with the Prince George coaches the next day. As if his mouth were still wired shut, he mostly stayed quiet, swallowing his frustration. He never used the plane ticket.

  DEREK FOUGHT 31 TIMES in 2000–01, more than any other season of his life. The first was on September 27, at home against the Kootenay Ice. He beat up Trevor Johnson, who was nine inches shorter and more than 50 pounds lighter than Derek, who weighed himself daily and usually hovered between 240 and 250 pounds.

  On October 8 against Regina, Derek and David Kaczowka fought twice, giving Derek a chance to show his former team what it had traded away a year before. Kaczowka was on his way to a league-high 50 fights that season. But Derek stood strong, edging him in the first fight with a quick rash of punches thrown despite having his jersey pulled over his head. The second fight, part of a five-on-five line brawl, was quickly strangled by officials.

  The next night, Prince George hosted the Tri-City Americans. Derek was nervous. It was time to repay Mike Lee, the fighter who had broken Derek’s jaw seven months earlier. The coaches put their pugilists out on the ice early in the first period.

  Derek sidle
d up to Lee. “Wanna go?” he asked.

  Derek wasted little time in delivering several big blows, exacting his revenge.

  Later in the game, the Americans sent another player out to fight Derek. He dispatched him, too.

  The Boogeyman’s payback tour was in full force. On October 11, Prince George played at Swift Current. Midway through the second period, Derek found himself on the ice with Sommerfeld, his nemesis, recently drafted. Derek surprised Sommerfeld with a left hand, then followed with a right. Another right hand smashed into Sommerfeld’s face, bloodying his nose.

  Suddenly, during home games in Prince George, the Multiplex would fill with the sound of Derek’s name, a call and answer that echoed through the sold-out arena. One side shouted, “Boo!” The other responded, “Gaard!”

  The coaches found that Derek, finally, could do what the best fighters could do: strike fear into opposing teams, change the way they treated the star players, shift the momentum with a crowd-pleasing beating. Other WHL teams began inquiring about trades for him.

  It was all about the fighting. Derek didn’t register a point until his 54th WHL game, an assist again Kamloops.

  “It’s nice to have something other than penalty minutes beside my name,” Boogaard told the Prince George Citizen that night. “When I get a goal, I’ll grab the puck myself and no one will stop me.”

  It happened on January 3, 2001. Derek, now playing meaningful shifts alongside top players, found a puck in the slot and jammed it through the legs of the Kamloops goalie. He never saw it go in, but the reaction of the crowd told him. A chant bounced through the arena—Boo-gey, Boo-gey, Boo-gey . . .

  Derek wanted to be famous for the glory of goals, not the fury of his fists. Now, at 18, he dreamed of being an all-around player, someone like Bob Probert or his boyhood hero, Wendel Clark—men with scoring punch to go with their punches, respected players who could be trusted to be on the ice while the clock was ticking, not just when it stopped for a fight.