Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

  In the fall of 2003, though, the life that Derek and Janella constructed in Louisiana simply moved west to suburban Houston, to an apartment complex in Stafford with the aspirational name of The Preserve at Colony Lakes. Unlike most players, who filled their apartments with little more than the necessities of a bed, a couch, and a large television, Derek wanted a home. He and Janella filled it with rented furniture they chose together.

  In little more than two years, Derek had gone from a throwaway goon to an NHL draft pick, from the Western Hockey League to the top step of the minor leagues. If Janella had seen in Derek a chance to latch onto a future hockey star, as some “puck bunnies” were known to do, she had both incredible foresight and a willingness to detach herself from her own ambitions. She followed Derek from Medicine Hat to Lafayette to Houston, trading part-time jobs and placing college plans on hold. She paid at least as many bills as he did. When he totaled her car in an accident, they shared Derek’s new truck. She humored Derek’s idiosyncrasies, his quixotic quests, and his constant daydreaming. He went through a phase when he thought he would open a fast-food franchise when his hockey career ended. During one spell, he went to Chipotle, day after day, watching the employees and studying the process of efficiently making burritos and tacos to order.

  His fixations ranged from trucks (he scoured car lots until he bought the one from Mike Tobin) to hammocks, which he wanted for the porch of the apartment. He went through a phase when he searched for chopper-style motorcycles. He collected movie DVDs by the hundreds. Later, he collected high-end liquor bottles (the contents of which he did not drink), then Buddha statues of all shapes and sizes.

  But his greatest infatuation was with bulldogs. In Louisiana, he and Janella found a breeder out in the country. They visited often, looking at dogs, frolicking with the puppies. It was one of their favorite ways to spend an afternoon. They returned again and again, waiting for the right dog at the right time. Finally, after moving to Houston, they returned to the breeder and bought one. Its name was Trinity, with a white coat splotched with charcoal gray, a scrunched-up face, and a protruding lower jaw.

  Derek was only 21, but he had re-created some semblance of family. He had a home, a car, a job, a girlfriend, and a dog. Janella, who was 23, wanted more security. Like a lot of girlfriends of young hockey players, she worried about her lack of health insurance and being single without steady employment. They spoke to Derek’s agent. He gave them a form that lots of other players used. It provided Janella benefits through Derek’s hockey. It implied, but never stated, that the two were married. They filed taxes as a married couple, but never described themselves as such to friends and family.

  It was an innocent time. On Janella’s birthday, Derek made a birthday card, three feet tall, and filled the living room with balloons. Late one night after a long rain, Derek took Janella to a vacant field next to a strip mall. In the Denali, they zoomed and slid and spun, Derek showing Janella the way his father used to spin donuts in icy Canadian parking lots.

  On their way to dry pavement, the truck got stuck. A teammate was summoned to provide a tow. Once rescued, Derek found that one tire had been stripped from the rim. He spent an hour pulling it off and replacing it with the spare tire. Janella took pictures. Derek smiled from ear to ear.

  Among the friends that Derek and Janella made in Houston, none were as close as Rick and Heather Bronwell. Rick was an equipment manager for the Aeros. It was Bronwell who assigned Derek the oversized goalie’s jersey. It was Bronwell who repaired and replaced Derek’s skates when they broke under his weight, the rivets of the blade pulling apart from the boot, time and time again.

  But it was Bronwell who saw the quiet side of Derek, too. When the Bronwells had a baby, Derek was there—the first non-family member to hold it, comfortably nuzzling the tiny infant softly in his enormous, bruised hands.

  WHEN DEREK’S FIGHTS were shown on the video replay board at the Toyota Center, the downtown arena where the Aeros played their games, they were framed with a title, initially misspelled: BOOGYMAN CAM. Midway through Derek’s second season, the Aeros honored him by handing out 3,000 of his likenesses on “Derek Boogaard Bobblehead Night.” Not only did his head bobble, but his fists did, too.

  Derek fought more for the Houston Aeros than he did during any two-year stretch of his career. When he fought, as was the custom through much of the minor leagues, spotlights shone on him and his opponent. In some cases, music over the arena’s sound system—the theme from Rocky, for example—provided a soundtrack to the bout. Sometimes a bell rang, as if marking the start of a boxing match. He became one of the team’s most popular players, despite not scoring a goal for Houston until his 106th game.

  On January 1, 2004, months into the first of Derek’s two seasons in Houston, a weekly newspaper called the Houston Press devoted a lengthy story to Derek and teammate Chris Bala. Titled “Harvard and the Boogeyman,” it offset two seemingly opposite prospects, pondering which had the brighter long-range future, “the brawler or the brainiac.”

  “He’s disconcertingly mellow off the ice, and his most eloquent defense of his play seldom goes beyond a shrug of the shoulders and an acceptance that outsiders will never understand,” reporter Richard Connelly wrote of Derek.

  “Boogaard lives with his girlfriend, likes watching a lot of movies and The Simpsons, but he loooves hockey,” Connelly explained. “He hopes to coach after his playing days.”

  Derek made no proclamations about his abilities.

  “It’s no big secret that I’m not a big goal scorer,” he said in the piece. “I just love to hit guys. Some guys have it and some don’t.”

  The story noted that Derek was the only minor-league player regularly featured on the web site WildEnforcers.com, which chronicled the actions of Minnesota’s pugilistic players. But it also quoted a skeptic: Kevin Oklobzija of the Hockey News, “who’s covered the AHL for 19 years.”

  “I don’t think he’s a prospect,” Oklobzija said. “He’s just a guy to fight and to protect the team’s other players on this level.”

  Reaching the NHL was far from a certainty. Derek’s 22 regular-season fights in 2003–04 ranked him only 12th in the AHL. Brandon Sugden of the Syracuse Crunch led the league with 41—including six against Rochester’s Sean McMorrow. Sugden was far more of a self-promoting brute than Derek. He made no secret that his primary mission was to lead the league in fighting majors. He explained one rivalry with pride.

  “I knocked him out cold this year,” Sugden said in a 2004 story widely distributed by the Canadian Press. “First game this year, we knew we would fight each other, we nearly went in warmup. But we went during the game and I caught him with a nice right hand to the jaw. He dropped like a sack of potatoes. It took him 10 seconds to get up and then he skated to the wrong box.”

  The minor leagues were filled with young men like Sugden—older than Derek, a bundle of braggadocio wrapped in menace. He was drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs in the fifth round of the 1996 draft, but never reached the NHL. In 13 professional seasons, including several early ones in which he later admitted struggling with alcohol and drug use, and despite a lifetime ban from the East Coast Hockey League (later rescinded) for throwing a stick that struck a fan, Sugden played for 12 teams in eight minor leagues. The only time he fought Derek, early in the 2004–05 season, Derek beat him. It was considered Sugden’s only loss in more than 30 fights that season.

  But things in Houston started slowly for Derek. His first American Hockey League fight was on October 17, 2003, against Milwaukee’s Raitis Ivanans, a six-foot-four Latvian who had worked his way up from the lowest levels of minor-league hockey. For Derek, it was, at best, a draw. The two traded blows before Derek fell and Ivanans landed on top of him.

  It got worse. In Utah three weeks later, Derek lost twice to the Grizzlies’ Mike Sgroi. The first came early in the game, a bout at center ice with an extended preamble of tough talk. Sgroi slipped when throwing a punch, but he recovered to
throw another, knocking Derek off balance and to the ice. Sgroi landed three more lefts to Derek’s head before skating away to the cheers of the crowd.

  The men later traded ankle-high slashes and agreed to a rematch. With efficiency and a high percentage of successful punches, the two took turns with momentum—Sgroi first, Derek second, Sgroi third. Just as Derek hit Sgroi in the head, Sgroi latched on to Derek’s helmet and dragged the scrum to the ice.

  Sgroi, six foot five and 230 pounds, was 25 that season. He had played in the ECHL and the AHL, just like Derek, and won most of his fights. He even scored a few goals every season, occasionally reaching double digits. But he was not drafted by any NHL teams and never made an NHL regular-season roster. He was a minor-league vagabond who, in the decade after beating up Derek twice in one night, played for nearly 20 teams.

  In 2005, he was runner-up in a pay-per-view event called Battle of the Hockey Enforcers. The premise was simple: pit hockey enforcers against one another in an on-ice, on-skates boxing tournament—hockey fights without the interruption of an actual hockey game. The event made national news and elicited widespread commentary on the state of hockey, fans, and violence.

  Only one city would agree to host the event: Prince George. About 2,000 fans showed up in the 6,000-seat arena. The winner, Dean Mayrand, reportedly made $62,000, more than the going rate for a full season in the AHL.

  Mayrand, too, never reached the NHL. He spent years in the Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey, a low-level professional circuit in Quebec where the typical game in the mid-2000s had four fights—about six times the rate of fighting in the NHL.

  Derek didn’t need the constant reminders, but they were there, almost every fight. For every enforcer like Derek within reach of the NHL, there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of others enticed to punch their way to hockey stardom, with almost no chance of getting there.

  DEREK FOUND THE schedule of a professional hockey player to be both erratic and mundane. Flares of activity—early-morning skates, afternoon practices, evening games—were divided by hours of mandated lethargy. Games ended late at night, and adrenaline prevented sleep until hours later.

  Travel disrupted attempts at normalcy. Games sometimes fell on back-to-back nights in distant cities across different time zones. Stretches like the one that Derek and the Aeros had early in his first season in Houston were not unusual: at Grand Rapids one night, at Milwaukee the next, home for a game in Houston two nights later, a game the next night in San Antonio, a game in Syracuse three nights later, one the next night in Hartford, home for a game, then at Utah two nights later. Planes and buses might depart at midnight or 5 A.M., and arrive at dawn or noon. Checkout times in hotels could be 6 A.M. or 5 P.M.

  In the hours before games, players rested in their rooms, which they shared with a teammate, watching television or playing video games. Sometimes they wandered a nearby mall or sat through a movie, killing hours until pre-game meals and bus rides to the arena.

  Rare were long stretches of idle time in the dark of night. Rest came in the odd corners of the schedule—on the plane, in the afternoon, maybe a rare day off. Combine the inconsistent schedule with the consistency of pain, which all players endured with little complaint, and sleep was a luxury not always afforded.

  By then, Derek had been introduced to Ambien, also known by its generic name, zolpidem. It was never hard to get in professional hockey. It was a prescription sleeping pill, a short-term antidote to insomnia, but it was rarely prescribed; it was merely handed out in training rooms and locker rooms, and often traded among players, like aspirin or Tic Tacs. There were few paper trails of prescriptions or formal dosages tracked. There was little worry of overdoses or abuse, no matter what the fine print on the label might say. If a player thought he needed help sleeping, he received sleeping pills—often Ambien.

  It certainly helped Derek sleep, through the pain and in the odd hours, but he did not like the way it made him feel—groggy and off-kilter during the morning skates. With Janella’s help, he searched for other sleep aids. He occasionally took melatonin supplements and over-the-counter medicines that made him drowsy. But Ambien was easy to get. All he had to do was ask around.

  It was in Derek’s first season in Houston that injuries started to mount. In January 2004, having just missed a couple of games because of a sore hip, Derek sprained his wrist during a fight with Cincinnati’s Sheldon Brookbank. In the course of a minute, Derek hit Brookbank more than 20 times with his right hand, another five or so with the left. He pulled Brookbanks’s helmet off and pounded him with blows to his ribs. Derek’s wrist was not examined until the period ended, and he sat on the bench the entire third period. An x-ray taken the next day was negative. It was a sprain.

  Ten days later, Derek cut his right hand open with a knockdown blow against the helmet of Chicago’s Libor Ustrnul. The team injury report said that Derek “opened up an old laceration on his hand that had been very minor but is now opened up a lot more. Had hand treated at period break—continued play OK.”

  It was signed JM, for Aeros trainer Jerry Meins. He wrote that the injury would be monitored “for infection and healing.”

  Derek reopened the wound in a fight a week later. A week after that, on February 21, Derek beat up Chicago’s Brendan Yarema with several shots to head. When Yarema dropped, Derek helped pull him to his feet and hit him more. As the officials closed in, Derek jabbed Yarema with a left hand. Persuaded the fight was still going, the officials backed away to watch the conclusion of one of Derek’s most dominating and violent victories.

  Yet Derek, the clear winner, missed the next two games. Upon his return, he immediately opened the wound again in a fight. Medical reports showed that it was swollen for another week and that Derek was prescribed pain relievers. When he played again, he got into a fight against Grand Rapids. He quickly pulled off the opponent’s helmet, then pounded him with jackhammer right hands. The trainer later reported that Derek’s hand experienced “no increased swelling.”

  A more debilitating injury came a week later, on March 12, 2004, before the game started. Derek was stretching on the ice when he felt a pop in his back. He was given Vioxx, a widely used anti-inflammatory and pain reliever that was barred in the United States months later because of growing concerns that it could cause cardiovascular problems, such as heart attacks and strokes. For days, Derek received other prescriptions, too, including various muscle relaxants and pain relievers. Finally, tests revealed the extent of the injury: a ruptured disk. On March 17, in an injury log that Derek was asked to keep to monitor his own rehabilitation, he wrote: “Jerry said my hockey season is done for this year and I need surgery. Also said the rupture is 8mm. Doctor told Jerry that doctors start talking surgery when people rupture their discs 4 mm. Said we have to wait and see what doctors in Minnesota have to say about surgery.”

  He did not skate again for 10 days and missed the rest of the regular season. In his log, Derek wrote that, when the Aeros were on the road, he stayed home and was treated by “Janella D’Amore girlfriend.” He managed to play two games in the playoffs as the Aeros were dispatched in the first round.

  Back surgery never took place. In a postseason physical exam performed by team doctor Eddie Matsu on April 15, several of Derek’s ailments were listed. It was noted that Derek—the doctor’s form called him “Eric”—had a bulging disk in his back. It also said he had sustained, during the season, a “fractured” right hand, which was completely healed, an apparent reference to the January sprain. It noted a broken collarbone that Derek sustained as a 13-year-old. It made no mention of concussions, other head injuries, his sore shoulder, or anything else.

  “Is presently playing and may continue to play ice hockey,” Matsu wrote in his conclusion.

  DEREK PLAYED 53 of 80 regular-season games in his first season in Houston. He had no goals, four assists, and 207 penalty minutes. He added an assist and 16 penalty minutes in two playoff games. It was all considered a stirring success. Derek�
�s two-loss night to Sgroi early in the season became a faded memory. He did not lose a fight once the calendar turned to January.

  In June, the Wild doubled the number of Boogaards in the organization. Risebrough, the general manager, drafted Aaron Boogaard, four years younger than Derek, in the sixth round, 175th overall, of the NHL Entry Draft. That was one round—27 elections—earlier than the Wild had picked Derek three years before. It was a surprise. Aaron had been steered into an enforcer’s role in the Western Hockey League by the Calgary Hitmen, who, disappointed in his progress, traded him to the Tri-City Americans in Washington. In 23 games, Aaron fought just once and scored three times. But the selection of a second Boogaard by the Wild set in motion a unique, tightening bond between Derek and Aaron, linking them on parallel career paths. Suddenly, Derek and Aaron had the same goal: to reach the NHL. That shared ambition was strengthened by the possibility of doing it with the same team. They spent the summer together, working out in Regina, building their strength through long workouts and improving their boxing skills against one another in the ring.

  But Derek’s competition was about to get tougher. The NHL owners, trying to wrangle a more favorable salary structure with players after the expiration of the collective bargaining agreement, locked out the players. Negotiations stalled. The entire NHL season was canceled. Players scattered to other leagues, looking for a paycheck and a place to play. More than anywhere, the migration beefed up the American Hockey League. Of the 25 regular-season fights that Derek had in his second season in Houston, 16 came against men with NHL experience. Another three were against players who would make the NHL someday, too.

  Kip Brennan was Derek’s primary nemesis. He played most of the previous season in the NHL, with the Los Angeles Kings and Atlanta Thrashers. Now representing the AHL’s Chicago Wolves, Brennan was 24, stood six foot four, and weighed 220 pounds. He and Derek fought in Houston’s third game of the season. Brennan ended an otherwise even fight with a big right hand to the side of Derek’s head and a wrestling-style takedown. They fought again in late January, then on back-to-back nights in February. And they ended the season, in the playoffs, fighting again. After the first fight, Derek fought Brennan to a draw or beat him every time.