Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

  Through the spring, Derek privately rooted for the Rangers to lose. The team spent much of the season outside the eighth and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference, and Derek thought that if the Rangers missed the postseason, they might fire the coach, John Tortorella. That is what he hoped. He was optimistic that a new season, with a new coach, would bring him a new start.

  Derek tracked all the playoff scenarios, figuring out how many wins and losses, combined with wins and losses of other teams, would keep the Rangers from the playoffs or allow them in. Hopes were dashed when the Rangers went on a hot streak in the middle of March, going 8–1–1 in one 10-game stretch.

  Derek flew Laurie in from Minneapolis on March 18. They had spent time together at Christmas, and again during his two weeks in Minneapolis over the All-Star break, and Derek had tried to persuade her to move to New York with him. She demurred, but was falling for Derek’s kind, gentle, giving ways.

  She barely recognized him this time. The first signal arrived before she did, when she worried about her medication for a respiratory infection. Derek wanted Laurie to bring nothing but a carry-on bag, but she worried that her liquid cough medicine with codeine would be confiscated. He told her to leave it behind.

  “I can get you whatever you need,” he wrote in a text message. “Whatever you need I can get from the trainers.”

  When she arrived, he gave her a small Ziploc bag with six or eight oval pills in them. Derek told her that they were Vicodin, a painkiller that no Rangers team doctor had prescribed, according to medical records. Laurie took one that night.

  The next day, Derek napped through the afternoon in the dark apartment. He woke up screaming, then jumped to his feet, shaking. Laurie could not tell if he was awake or asleep.

  “I’m scared,” he said. “Scared about what they’ll make me do.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “The trainers,” Derek replied.

  He fell back to sleep. But Laurie was shaken. She wondered how a grown man, a man that size, could wake up screaming in terror.

  They went out that night with Devin Wilson and another woman. Derek paid the $575.24 bill at Quality Meats, a steakhouse on 58th Street, a block south of Central Park. At bedtime that night, Laurie took a second Vicodin. When she awoke, she spotted the baggie on the kitchen counter. Most of the pills were still there. A bit later in the morning, the baggie was in the bathroom and the last pills were gone.

  Breakfast at a nearby restaurant was washed down with Bloody Marys and mimosas, followed by stops at several bars in midtown Manhattan.

  Laurie headed home to Minnesota, confused by the weekend. Derek had always been so happy, so bubbly, so outgoing, she thought. Now he was none of those. He was erratic.

  The results from Derek’s next test came back positive for hydrocodone and hydromorphone. The next day, he withdrew $4,000 from ATMs. His next drug test revealed hydromorphone. Another test, five days later, showed positive for hydromorphone, morphine, oxycodone, and oxymorphone. On April 2, Derek was screened again. The results took six days to return, and showed a positive test for oxymorphone. By that time, the evidence was too much to ignore.

  DEREK NEVER EXPECTED to be told that Mark Messier wanted to talk to him.

  Messier might have been the most revered Ranger in history. While he spent most of his career with the Edmonton Oilers, part of a high-scoring dynasty alongside Wayne Gretzky, Messier established permanent residency as a New York sports icon in 1994. He was the 33-year-old captain of the Rangers, a man with his named etched on the Stanley Cup five times from his days with his hometown Oilers. The Rangers had lost Game 5 of the Eastern Conference final to the cross-river rival New Jersey Devils, and Messier was damned if the Rangers would lose again.

  “We’re going to go in and win Game 6,” he said. The New York tabloids splashed his guarantee across their covers, making it the city’s most famous victory pledge since New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath promised a win in Super Bowl III.

  “I’ve put my five Stanley Cup rings, my reputation and my neck on the chopping block, boys,” Messier said he told his teammates. “Now save me.”

  The Rangers won Game 6, by a score of 4–1. Messier, nicknamed “Captain Courageous,” had three goals, perhaps the boldest hat trick in league history. And the Rangers won Game 7, too, back in Madison Square Garden, in double overtime. And then they beat the Vancouver Canucks in the Stanley Cup final, the Rangers’ first championship since 1940.

  Messier left the Rangers after an acrimonious contract dispute in 1997, but team president and general manager Glen Sather brought him back in 2000. Messier played his final four seasons with the Rangers, and the team retired Messier’s No. 11 in 2006. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2007.

  In 2009, Messier joined the Rangers as a “special assistant” to Sather, who had built and coached those Oilers championship teams in the 1980s.

  It was a vague title and an unclear role. Messier spent part of one season as general manager of Canada’s world-championship team. During the first half of Derek’s first season in New York, Messier coached a low-level Canadian national team in a pair of European tournaments. Messier was barely seen or heard in New York. He seldom spoke to the media. The rare times he spoke publicly were usually when he promoted the “Messier Project,” with a mission “to address the issue of concussions, which has become an epidemic in hockey, through product development and a public-awareness campaign.”

  In tandem with his sister, Mary-Kay, Messier worked to develop helmets with better protection and to educate players on the need to wear them properly, with the chin strap cinched.

  “The NHL still continues to be our greatest challenge,” Mary-Kay Messier told the Gazette of Montreal in early March of 2011. “One of the things we’re really working on is changing the culture of hockey so that head protection becomes a priority.”

  Mark Messier, never quoted about the state of the Rangers, was willing to talk about the importance of protecting the heads of players. Helmets, he said, “were designed to stop catastrophic injuries and have done a great job of that. But our game has evolved where now concussions are part of our game, so we have to design our helmets not only to stop catastrophic injuries, but also to help reduce the risk of concussions.”

  And now, a couple of weeks later, Messier wanted to talk to Derek. Derek was incredulous. Mark Messier wants to talk to me?

  It was a pep talk, not unlike those that Messier surely used to inspire teammates to rally for the good of the team. The Rangers had put a lot of faith in Derek, giving him a four-year contract and a lot of money to be the enforcer that he had shown he could be. But Derek had been injured since December, out with a concussion for several months, and it was fair to wonder why his recovery was taking so long. Even some of Derek’s friends wondered whether he was milking the injury, in no hurry to return to a middling team with a coach he did not like. Messier’s intent was to motivate Derek, to scare him into taking responsibility, to push him into becoming the player the Rangers thought they were getting and hoped they would get for the next three seasons.

  At the team’s suburban practice rink a day or two later, Derek skated with several other teammates who were out of the lineup, too hurt to play but healthy enough to exercise. Derek had been skating with the team for several weeks, but he was still in bad shape—overweight, slow, and unmotivated.

  Assistant coach Jim Schoenfeld oversaw the workout. He was 58, a former captain of the Buffalo Sabres during a 13-year NHL career as a sturdy defenseman. He might have been best known, however, for his postgame outburst as coach of the New Jersey Devils in 1988. “Have another donut!” he screamed at referee Don Koharski in the tunnel after a playoff loss.

  Schoenfeld had taken a keen interest in Derek. He had coaxed him into low-impact workouts, including yoga. But Derek complained that Schoenfeld forced him to skate hard in two-minute intervals. He didn’t see the sense in it. His shifts never lasted two minutes.

/>   It did not take long for Schoenfeld to see that something was different with Derek this time. Derek fell. He tried to stand up, and then fell again. He had no coordination. Like a newborn colt trying to gain footing, Derek could not keep his feet underneath him. It was obvious that Derek was drunk or on drugs. Other teammates watched as Schoenfeld ordered Derek off the ice.

  Derek, back on his feet, stormed through the gate of the rink and stumbled into the dressing room. He threw a tantrum, throwing his equipment to the ground. He sat on a bench and stewed. He clenched his fists in frustration, a rare display of anger.

  Schoenfeld left to call other team officials. In front of team trainers, Derek went through the range of emotions again, unable to recapture his composure.

  “People think I’m a pill head,” he screamed, again and again. And he started to cry.

  Within hours, plans were made to send Derek to rehabilitation.

  11

  FROM THE OUTSIDE, Authentic Recovery Center was a well-tended two-story Spanish-style house, made of pale adobe and topped with a red-tile roof. It sat on the edge of an elegant neighborhood, surrounded by a high wall and tall hedges on a busy corner of a West Los Angeles intersection.

  Derek did not want to be in Malibu again. He hated the isolation. So when he was told he was entering rehabilitation for the second time, he pleaded for something different. The tony recesses of Beverly Hills and Westwood were a mile or two to the north. The glassy office towers and hotels of Century City were a short walk to the east. Trendy Santa Monica was just on the other side of the 405 freeway, the beach a straight shot a few miles to the west.

  Derek arrived on Tuesday, April 5, 2011, and filled out paperwork with a counselor. There was a “health questionnaire,” and the third question was whether he had “ever had a head injury that resulted in a period of loss of consciousness.” Derek checked “no.” Another question asked about “back problems, bone injuries, muscle injuries, or joint injuries.” Another asked whether he took any prescription medications. Derek replied “no” to both. Asked to list what type of drugs or alcohol that he had consumed in the past seven days, Derek wrote “3 Ambien.” Asked what he had taken in the past year, he wrote “Ambien” and “drank.”

  The only question to which he replied “yes” was No. 29: “Are you pregnant?”

  Since October, when Len told the Rangers that Derek was abusing pills again, a year after he was in drug rehabilitation for abusing Ambien and narcotic painkillers, Derek had been under the watch of the NHL’s substance abuse program. He had received at least 12 prescriptions for Ambien, for 274 pills, from team doctors of the Rangers and the Wild, records later revealed. Early in the season, he had received five prescriptions for 64 pills of hydrocodone, or Vicodin. He had been subjected to roughly 20 drug tests, and tested positive in most of them, including for powerful painkillers months after he had been prescribed them. All that was kept private. None of it was enough to send Derek to rehabilitation or get him suspended.

  It was a fall on the ice, at a Rangers workout in front of teammates and coaches, that could not be ignored.

  In the short time between the episode at practice and being sent to rehabilitation, Derek called his father. Derek told Len that he had fallen several times on the ice and gotten in trouble at practice for slamming a rink gate shut. When pressed, Derek would not say what it was that made him fall. He was cryptic and annoyed.

  Len called Ron Salcer to learn what he could. Salcer said that Derek’s recent drug tests had been “not good,” but he did not elaborate. News that Derek was headed to rehabilitation again came as a surprise to the Boogaards, who had presumed that he was getting better, not worse.

  A counselor at the treatment center wrote that Derek’s main problem was “opioid abuse” and noted that Derek “continued use despite adverse consequences, illegal procuring of substance.” A “biopsychosocial assessment” went into greater detail. The counselor asked Derek a long series of questions and wrote the responses. “Pain meds” were Derek’s “main problem,” and the cause was “physical pain.”

  Derek was coy, but began to open up. He admitted to a recent use of Valium—used for flying, he said—but said no to Xanax. He said he first used Percocet after surgeries in 2009, followed by OxyContin, and had recently taken hydrocodone and Ambien. He said he occasionally passed out while drinking and admitted to drinking in the morning, when he was in pain. He said he sometimes felt “guilt” or “shame,” and was sometimes depressed, and he wondered aloud if it pertained to his last concussion.

  Derek was asked how his chemical dependency affected those close to him.

  “Mom gets worried,” the counselor wrote as Derek’s response. “It’s the reason why my fiancée and I split up. My Dad gets pissed.”

  Derek said he moved eight times as a child and that home life was “crazy, 4 kids, chaos, but not in a bad way, busy, sports.” His difficulties in school were attributed to “isolation—dad shunned from the community.”

  Derek was asked about his relationship with his father.

  “Good. I don’t lie to him, we’re close,” the counselor recorded.

  In what ways are you like your father?

  “Stubborn, independent, loving.”

  He said he had a good relationship with his mother, too, and that they shared traits of being “independent, strong-willed, caring.”

  Asked how his parents got along, Derek replied: “Near the end it was crazy. They were fighting.”

  He described Erin as his “fiancée” for three and a half years. He was asked if chemical dependency played a part in the failure of the relationship.

  “Yes,” the counselor recorded Derek as saying. “She was suspicious about pain meds and other women.” He admitted to “random sex sometimes.”

  Derek was asked his strengths. He said he was strong-willed and confident. His sole weakness, he said, was pain.

  PATIENTS AT THE rehabilitation center were detoxified immediately, and typical treatment mandated at least three drug tests a week.

  Its rules required patients to stay in the center—with private, well-appointed rooms, meeting spaces, and offices, and peaceful courtyards to pass the time—for the first three weeks of treatment. The only excuses to leave, the center said, would be emergencies, bereavement, or a work requirement. In all cases, according to the center, patients were required to be accompanied off-premises by a staff member.

  Derek appeared to live by a different set of rules. He left the center on most days, sometimes signed out by Salcer, who lived nearby. He went to a local gym to work out and box. His bank records showed that he made nearly daily purchases at nearby stores and restaurants.

  On April 7, his third day in rehabilitation, Derek paid for dinner—$93.83 at a restaurant called the Lobster, overlooking the Santa Monica Pier. Within his first week, Derek spent more than $3,800 online at Astor & Black, an upscale clothier in New York. He spent more than $1,000 at Brookstone, the gift company. And he placed a $12,000 deposit on an apartment in Minneapolis that he and Aaron would share over the summer, in the same building in the Warehouse District, near downtown Minneapolis, where he had lived a couple of seasons earlier.

  He used his cell phone constantly, calling friends and saying that he was training in Los Angeles. Even some of his closest friends did not know he was in rehabilitation. The media did not know, either, reporting only that Derek’s concussion symptoms had kept him from finishing the season. While Derek was in rehabilitation, the Rangers lost their opening-round playoff series to the Washington Capitals, four games to one. He did not care.

  Derek sent text messages to close friends and family to tell them what a joke the program was. During counseling sessions, he quoted obscure lines from movies and television shows, inside jokes to amuse himself and laugh about later.

  “Client appears to be resistant to treatment protocol,” a counselor wrote in the “progress notes” on Derek’s second day. “Client is largely non-participatory in
treatment curriculum/activities. However, client is compliant in session and views treatment episode as something he must do to comply with NHL.”

  “Client’s referent”—a reference to Dan Cronin, the primary counselor from the NHL substance abuse team—“working closely with program administrator on individualized treatment plan,” a counselor wrote on April 14. Derek had been there more than a week. The counselor noted that Derek “demonstrates limited insight into addictive pathology.” The same note ended with a cryptic revelation: “Client does report significant closeness to family.”

  Derek and other patients were encouraged to admit, at the start, that they had substance abuse problems. The center’s philosophy shared the first three steps of the familiar 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program.

  On April 20, after about two weeks in the program, Derek was still a reluctant participant. But he seemed to be revealing himself to counselors.

  “Client appears to be in positive mood today, but discussed upcoming visits from NHL reps and used time in session to vent about their lack of understanding his physical pain,” the day’s progress note read. “Therapist notes the conflict/contradiction to client, as client acknowledges abusing pain medication. However, client maintains that pain is excessive and few alternatives have worked.”

  Again, the notes ended with an unrelated tidbit about Derek’s relationships: “Client additionally spoke of ex-fiancée, whom he no longer trusts.”

  The treatment appeared to be snagged in Derek’s own denial.

  “Client talked in session today about not needing to be in treatment and his resentment at some of the individuals that facilitated his entrance into treatment,” his progress notes read on April 22. “Client maintains that his admission into treatment is ‘ridiculous’ and that it’s ‘red-tape.’ Client exhibits guardedness when therapist asks clinical questions by smiling, and responding with simple answers and asking therapist ‘so what else is up with you?’ Client appears to be aware that this question is out of place w/ goal of therapy, but laughs in acknowledgement of it.”