Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

  Long a staple of junior and minor-league hockey, though increasingly rare in the NHL, line brawls were a peculiar sight. Sometimes staged to coincide with a face-off, sometimes sparked more spontaneously, the players paired off into one-on-one duels, like gangs in a dark alley. Even goalies sometimes skated to the middle of the rink to fight one another.

  “Right now, there is an abundance of toughness on this club,” Farrish said after the victory, happy to have Derek’s presence. “I think that will stop teams from being as aggressive as they were against us at the start of the season.”

  Derek wanted to build his reputation fast, and he was just getting started. In Louisiana’s next game, against the Jackson Bandits in Mississippi, he fought 5-foot, 11-inch Dave Stewart, a 28-year-old minor-league antagonist. The men grabbed each other and spun around. Stewart could not reach Derek with most of his punches. Derek landed one to the back of Stewart’s head, but missed wildly on others, a narrow victory.

  Derek fought twice two nights later in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Jason Norrie was a 25-year-old vagabond, a six-foot, three-inch bundle of bad intentions. In a 12-year career that began in the Western Hockey League and wound through the American minor leagues, he played for 18 franchises. Derek beat him up midway through the first period. Norrie wanted more, and the two fought off of a face-off late in the third period. Derek hit Norrie in the head with a couple of right hands. Norrie retaliated with fists filled with Derek’s own jersey. Amid the clutching, Derek managed to pull Norrie’s helmet loose and toss it aside. He embarked on what had become his preferred strategy—holding the opponent’s shoulder with the left hand and firing well-cocked punches with the right.

  Like a panicked moth caught in a spider’s web, the smaller man fluttered wildly to break free. Derek tried his full repertoire—an uppercut here, a roundhouse there, a quick jab with the clutching left hand. He and Norrie switched hands, quickly grabbing the other with their rights. Derek tried to punch with his left, his weaker arm, and connected twice. Two officials circled with no intention to break it up. One had his arms crossed, as if unimpressed by the spectacle. Finally, as the energy of the fight fizzled and the players nodded a silent signal, the officials stepped in. The fight lasted 90 seconds, the same as a heavyweight boxing round. Fans cheered the effort.

  Four games. Four fights. All victories.

  “He got into some pretty good scraps initially,” Farrish recalled of Derek later. “And word gets around fast.”

  THE AMERICAN DEEP SOUTH was hardly a hockey hotbed. But in the 1990s, the sport saw a vast opportunity for growth there. To the chagrin of Canadians, especially, hockey migrated south, fueled in large part by Canadian imports—teams and players.

  Derek was one of them. By the time he arrived in Louisiana, the roots planted in the Sunbelt were in full bloom, led by the NHL, which had placed expansion teams or moved existing franchises to places such as Dallas, Phoenix, Nashville, Raleigh, Tampa, and Miami.

  The East Coast Hockey League was founded in 1988. Among the five original teams, stretching from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Knoxville, Tennessee, were the Johnstown (Pennsylvania) Chiefs, named for the fictitious hard-fighting Chiefs of the movie Slap Shot. Much of the film had been shot in Johnstown’s Cambria County War Memorial Arena.

  The ECHL grew quickly. By the start of the 1995 season, there were 21 teams, including the Louisiana IceGators, planted in midsized cities not unlike those of the Western Hockey League. But the culture could not have been more different. Fans of the WHL followed their teams with religious fervor and tracked the progress of the teenaged players from years before they arrived until well into the pros. Most fans in the ECHL were simply looking for something to do on a Saturday night. Hockey was a curiosity, and hardly a passion. Plenty of potential fans had never seen ice other than the kind that filled a glass of sweet tea. The ECHL was “AA” professional hockey, two deep levels below the NHL, and the rosters were filled mostly with unknown players from Canada or the northern climes of the United States.

  A few players were on their way up. A few were on the way down. Most were in a holding pattern, stuck in their mid-20s in the middle level of pro hockey, unable to climb upward with any momentum, waiting for something—an injury, a relationship, an honest coach—to nudge them out of the game. Of the 33 teammates who played for the 2002–03 IceGators alongside Derek, only three ever played in the NHL—and for a grand total of 67 games. By comparison, seven teammates from the Medicine Hat team that Derek left behind in December went on to play in the NHL, combining for more than 1,400 career games.

  Franchises needed to find ways to get fans to pay money to watch these strangers play this strange game. The key to success was getting people to fall quickly for the sport, like a crush. To do that, teams used a full arsenal of flirtations. ECHL hockey meant cheap tickets. It meant colorful nicknames. (The league was part of a trend toward nonsensical, unique team names. In 1995, the IceGators became the third team with “Ice” in its name, as if to remind people what sport they played. Their competition included teams called the Lizard Kings, RiverFrogs, and Mysticks.) It meant goofy promotions and contests during games. It meant costumed mascots and community outreach, particularly toward children.

  And it meant fighting.

  The Louisiana IceGators had 101 fights in 72 games in 2002–03, substantially higher than the league average. Fans willing to buy tickets knew that at least one fight was likely. A line brawl was possible. And when the opponent was the rival Mississippi Sea Wolves, violence was practically assured.

  A season-high 7,726 fans were at the Cajundome on March 22, 2003, as the IceGators and Sea Wolves chased a division title. Louisiana’s 5–3 victory was punctuated by a game-ending bench-clearing brawl. It took a posse of coaches, officials, and the Lafayette sheriff’s department to clear the rink of 36 players. As the players fought, the arena cast the players in bright spotlights, like performers on a stage. Derek grabbed Jeff Hutchins, a 24-year-old forward who never shied from a fight, and pounded him with several blows to the head.

  Breaking both the unwritten code of fighting and the written rule making it illegal to join a fight, a Mississippi goalie arrived to try to save Hutchins from Derek. He clumsily knocked the two fighters down, but they continued to punch one another. A linesman arrived to intervene, but the combatants stood and shrugged him off, sending the official looking for an easier fight to stop. Another Mississippi player charged Derek, suddenly a matador avoiding charging bulls. Derek was tackled from behind, and Hutchins climbed on top. The fight died. Others started.

  Derek was one of five players suspended, but he received the harshest penalty: six games. He missed the last four regular-season games, and played in only two playoff games as the IceGators were upset in the second round.

  Derek finished his first professional season with one goal and 240 penalty minutes, almost identical to the 245 penalty minutes he had in Prince George during his breakout season two years before. But he did it in roughly half as many games—33, compared with 61 in Prince George. Most important for Derek’s career: according to online judges, he won all 13 of his fights.

  His family tried to track his progress from afar, but the ECHL elicited little coverage. All the Boogaards knew was that when Derek returned to Regina for the summer, he had a girlfriend and a fist full of swollen knuckles.

  BEFORE HE WAS SENT to Louisiana, Derek had wanted to surprise Janella at Christmas by visiting her at home in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland. He wrote a Christmas card to her mother, asking if she would pick him up at the airport and keep his plan a secret.

  “So make sure her other boyfriend isn’t over there!” he wrote. “(It’s a joke.) Just bug her about it.

  “I want to tell you how much your daughter has made such an impact on my life, in such a short period of time that we have been together,” Derek continued. “She keeps me outta so much trouble this year and most guys wouldn’t like that. She is helping
get to where I want to go one day, and that is the National Hockey League. I am going to play there, but now I am going to get there faster because of her.”

  Near the end of his handwritten note, neatly scrawled on the inside flap of the card, Derek wrote: “Everybody that I know have come up to me and have asked me this year what has happened to me? It’s great. I love it that people have come up to me, and I’ve told them that it is your daughter that’s changed me.”

  The surprise Christmas trip never happened, because Derek was sent to play in Louisiana. But Janella soon joined him, and they lived together in a Lafayette apartment with rented furniture. They had a little bit of money and a lot of spare time. They spent it at a nearby alligator farm. They found a breeder of bulldogs, and spent afternoons playing with the puppies, daydreaming of someday raising their own. They went to amusement parks, such as Six Flags New Orleans. On roller coasters, Derek, terrified, held the bar in front of him with clenched fists.

  They filled their nights at beer joints and with quiet dinners at home. Derek collected cookbooks and experimented with barbecue recipes. He created extravagant dinners at the holidays, even when it was just two of them eating. They once got into a food fight, flinging food and squirting ketchup, mustard, and chocolate syrup across the kitchen. They ended up in the shower, fully dressed.

  Derek’s height stalled just short of six foot eight, and weight became a consistent issue. He sometimes ballooned to 300 pounds in the off-season, and then spent the season slowly shedding it. At the end of the season in Louisiana, he stepped onto a coin-operated scale at a store and weighed 269 pounds—12 more than his listed weight. To help shed pounds, Derek and Janella together went on a cabbage-soup diet.

  Derek wore glasses, jeans, and whatever clean T-shirt was in the drawer. But he spent money on shoes. It was important to have a good pair of shoes. Someone had told him that once.

  ECHL players were rarely stars, beyond the small communities of fans who bought season tickets and showed up at promotional events. Derek was less of a star than others—a midseason addition, much younger than most of his teammates, a player who created occasional and quick bursts of adrenaline but did not dazzle with any semblance of an all-around game.

  Still, among hockey executives, his was the future with the most promise.

  In May, the Wild offered Derek his first NHL contract. He had shown enough for a minimal payout, and the Wild gave Derek a three-year deal that would pay him an annual NHL salary of $350,000, if and when he reached the top rung of professional hockey. If he continued to play in the ECHL, he would earn $35,000. If he played in the American Hockey League, one level below the NHL and one above the ECHL, he would be paid $45,000.

  Derek signed his name to it, in a space next to the signature of Wild general manager Doug Risebrough.

  The contract came with a $50,000 signing bonus, worth about $66,500 Canadian at the time. The day before he deposited the check into his Regina account, he had $29.94 in the bank.

  One of his first purchases, on his 21st birthday, was for $47.21 at a liquor store. But most of his bonus check went toward a truck: Mike Tobin’s black 2002 GMC Sierra Denali, which Derek had driven when it was brand new in Prince George.

  Len Boogaard asked his son why he couldn’t buy something cheaper, maybe an older truck without all the expensive, flashy options.

  “How would that look at the rink?” Derek said.

  Derek was headed to the Houston Aeros of the American Hockey League, the top minor-league affiliate of the Wild. He knew that a number of their players had bounced between the NHL and the AHL. A look in the players’ parking lot usually could tell you which ones. Derek wanted to belong.

  TURN HIM INTO an NHL player. That was the order. Get Derek Boogaard to the Minnesota Wild.

  Doug Risebrough had been hired by the Wild in 1999 to build its newly granted expansion franchise. He was an Ontario native, a first-round draft pick of the Montreal Canadiens in 1974, an all-purpose forward who helped them win four consecutive Stanley Cups from 1976 to 1979.

  Traded to Calgary in 1982, Risebrough played five seasons for the Flames. He was a pugnacious sort, an upright bed of nails, unafraid to pester bigger players out of their comfort zone. While he scored 185 goals and had 286 assists in 13 NHL seasons, he also had 1,542 penalty minutes. He was only 5 foot 11 and about 180 pounds, but he fought roughly 60 times, including 14 times as a rookie.

  Most famously, on January 2, 1986, in Calgary, Risebrough took on Edmonton enforcer Marty McSorley, the longtime protector of Wayne Gretzky and the Oilers’ other high-scoring forwards. Their fight sparked an extended, full-scale brawl between the hated rivals, and McSorley, not surprisingly, pounded the much-smaller Risebrough until the two were separated and steered toward the penalty box.

  Somehow, though, Risebrough had McSorley’s Edmonton jersey. And while other fights continued on the ice, Risebrough sat in the penalty box and used his sharp skates to slice the jersey into shreds. He tossed the tattered remains of McSorley’s jersey onto the ice, eliciting a lusty cheer from the home crowd. The sweater was retrieved and returned to the Oilers. Glen Sather, the coach, hung it in the team’s dressing room as a reminder of Edmonton’s nastiest rivalry.

  Risebrough embarked on a coaching career that eventually led him to become general manager of the Flames, then vice president of hockey operations for the Oilers. Both franchises made perennial trips to the playoffs under his direction. Risebrough’s career spanned the arc of the enforcer, from the goon’s rise in popular culture in the 1970s to fighting’s apex in the late 1980s to the one-dimensional behemoth who took hold in the 1990s.

  The early Wild teams had a six-foot, five-inch, 230-pound enforcer named Matt Johnson. He was a perfunctory fighter on a team without much talent to protect. At the end of the 2000–01 season, the Wild’s first in the NHL, Risebrough spent a seventh-round draft pick on an even larger player: 19-year-old Derek Boogaard.

  Risebrough encouraged Derek to continue boxing lessons, but also sent him to private lessons with a professional figure skater to improve Derek’s movement. Risebrough knew the Wild would transition to a new enforcer, from Johnson to Boogaard. In the summer of 2003, he made the mandate clear to the coaches of the Houston Aeros: turn Derek Boogaard, from last season’s Louisiana IceGators, into an NHL enforcer.

  To Todd McLellan and Matt Shaw, it was a test of imagination. The head coach and assistant coach of the Aeros knew what NHL players looked like. Derek was not one. But it was not their decision. Derek had been foisted upon them.

  “Under no uncertain terms, he was going to be in Houston,” Shaw, the assistant coach, said of the edict. “And he was going to play.”

  Derek showed up weeks early for the Aeros’ training camp. For a time, amid the heat and humidity of Houston in August, he was the only player there. Derek worked out fiendishly in the weight room and did solo drills on the ice, practicing his skating, shooting, and puck handling. And when he finished, he enthusiastically returned to Shaw, like a puppy playing fetch, to ask what else he could do.

  Why don’t you go run those hills out there, Shaw suggested, not sure what else to say. The practice facility in suburban Sugar Land, Texas, near a large high-school football stadium, was surrounded by grassy berms. Derek ran up and down the hills. He ran up and down the stadium steps. When he was exhausted, he did it some more. Shaw could not wear him out.

  During the season, when practices ended and teammates scattered to the dressing room, Derek was usually the last one to leave the ice. He stood at the coaches’ sides, wide-eyed and ready, wondering what he could do next.

  The contract Derek signed in May made him see, in stark terms, the difference between a minor-league player and an NHL one: 10 times the salary. Elevated from the ECHL to the AHL, one step removed from the Wild, Derek recognized his upward momentum and did not want to squander it. He was motivated by Risebrough’s unbending belief in him, Janella’s unwavering support, and the naysayers back in place
s like Melfort and Regina and Prince George who never imagined Derek Boogaard reaching the NHL.

  The Aeros coaches liked Derek. He was eager to do as instructed and had a gentle way about him. McLellan’s two young sons adored Derek, and McLellan appreciated how he always knelt down to the height of children and spoke softly to them.

  McLellan, too, had been raised in small-town eastern Saskatchewan and played in the Western Hockey League, for the Saskatoon Blades. He was a late-round draft choice, by the New York Islanders in 1986, and played five career NHL games. And he’d coached in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, part of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League that included Melfort.

  “Once he entered the program in Houston and you could start to see the heart that this guy had, and the work he was committed to putting in, then there was hope,” McLellan said. “And every day the hope grew greater and greater. We became almost father figures to him. Every month he’d take steps and you’d be proud of him, and we’d give him a little bit of a report card. It wasn’t about his ability to fight. That was always there. It was about his work ethic and his commitment level to all the other skills that would eventually make him an NHLer that was most impressive to me.”

  Derek’s hit-and-miss relationships with coaches found a sweet spot in Houston. He could sense how close he was to the NHL. He had coaches who believed in him, and who saw that he not only belonged, but that he could outgrow them. Few had viewed Derek that way before—as a player with potential for something bigger than what he already had.

  DEREK DREAMED OF building a house one day. He bought software with blueprints and floor plans and read architectural and design magazines. He visited open houses to gather ideas. He searched for land in Kelowna, British Columbia, envisioning a time when he would build several houses—one for him and Janella, surrounded by smaller homes built for his mother, his father, his brothers, and his sister. They would all live close together.