My Last Fight

by Darren McCarty

  My hands are so swollen and disfigured that they don’t even look human.

  I can forecast the weather better than any meteorologist. When my hands bloat and ache more than usual, I know that it’s going to rain. I can feel the arthritis winning the battle in the joints.

  Doctors have told me I will need major surgery to maintain normal usage of my fingers within a few years.

  Each of the scars on my body is its own story. Each time I look at my pinky and ring finger I remember pulling two of Mark Tinordi’s teeth out of my fingers after a fight years ago. I severed an artery in that fight, which required surgery to fix.

  On most days, I don’t even notice the scars on my forehead and under my eyes, but on other days seeing them reminds me of the many battles I fought in an NHL sweater.

  My nose was broken seven times, and is crooked to the point of being cartoonish.

  When I’m teasing or harassing my wife, she often responds, “If you keep it up, I’ll straighten that nose for you.”

  My scarred chin and lips and false tooth tell a story of the days when hockey was more old school than it is today.

  The story of my false tooth actually began when I was nine years old and swimming in my grandparents’ pool in Woodslee. I jumped off the side railings and came down tooth-first on my aunt’s head. That front tooth went flying out of my mouth. Then, in 2000–01, St. Louis Blues defenseman Alexander Khavanov got a little nervous when I came in to hit him and he brought his stick up to protect himself, knocking out the replacement tooth.

  I needed dental surgery and had a temporary replacement put in. Soon after, the replacement tooth was knocked out. Then the replacement to that replacement got knocked out. When it happened a third time, I figured enough was enough. I wasn’t going back to the dentist a fourth time.

  Using pliers, I removed the posts from my mouth after Game 2 of the playoff series against Vancouver in 2002.

  “I’ll get this fucking tooth fixed after I’m done playing,” I announced to my teammates.

  That’s when I started viewing my missing tooth as a championship symbol like the Stanley Cup and the championship ring.

  People always tried to convince me to have it replaced, but I never wanted to do it because it would be like erasing a great memory.

  But my other teeth began causing problems, and my amazing dentist friend Demi Kazanis looked into my mouth and told me I needed major dental surgery or else I was going to start having serious problems.

  She also discovered that I had a genetic trait where my teeth are fused to the jaw bone, so I never really “lost” a tooth—they were broken off from my jaw. It took many months and several different tooth extractions, root canals, and finally a temporary bridge. My permanent bridge came and I had one final implant and boom—my teeth look great again! My dentist and my wife have become best friends; Sheryl says she’s my twin sister, the female version of me. And when we hang out together, it is very clear that Sheryl is right. Demi has such a huge heart for giving; she donates huge amounts of money to different charities every month. She did my teeth for free. She also donated to this book project. She believes in me and my story. We are so blessed to have her in our life. She has been through as much in her life as I have in mine. I’m very lucky to call her my friend.

  Still, I have no regrets about how I made my living. I enjoyed being an NHL player, and I liked the physical aspect of the game.

  People often ask me where I think I would be had I not been an NHL player. I think they believe I will say that I would be healthier or less broken down if I hadn’t played this sport.

  But what I really believe is that if I hadn’t played in the NHL I might be dead by now.

  It was being an NHL player that prevented me from being wilder than I was. There was too much money at stake for me to completely let myself go. I didn’t want to lose my job.

  Plus, I was playing on a team, and my teammates were always looking out for me, trying to convince me to slow down. As wild as I was, I still had boundaries. There were lines I wouldn’t cross.

  15. How I Met My Wife

  “She wore blue Jeans and a Rosary, believed in God and believed in me”

  —“Blue Jeans and a Rosary”

  Kid Rock

  Because of my image as a wild party guy, people will believe anything they hear about my life.

  That allows Sheryl and I to have fun making my life seem wilder than it really was. We’ve been asked so many times how we met that we’ve started to make up shit for the sake of telling a good story.

  People want to hear a crazy-ass tale that involves sex, drugs, violence, or rock ’n’ roll, so we give it to them.

  When fans ask how we met, we take turns fabricating a story. I’m actually impressed about how creative our stories have become.

  We have told people that Sheryl was a Las Vegas stripper and that I met her in a VIP room or during a raunchy pole dance. We have told people that she was a high-priced escort and she showed up one night at my door and it was love at first sight.

  We’ve also told people that we met in a meet-and-greet line, or that I fell in love with her when I heard her sing karaoke. One of my favorites is that she was in a bar and coldcocked a drunken fan who was talking shit about me.

  There is also a story about me being badly injured in a bar fight and Sheryl being the nurse that took care of me in the emergency room.

  The truth is that Sheryl has never even been to Las Vegas, and the only accurate fact in all of our stories is that Sheryl is a registered nurse.

  At the very least, the story about Sheryl pounding a guy in a bar fight has the potential to be true because she is tougher than I am. She also might confront someone who was spreading lies about me. My wife’s true background is that she worked at a law firm while attending college to earn a nursing degree and her many certifications. There is no stripper’s pole in her history.

  We met in 2010 while I was in the midst of a fresh addiction: Golden Tee.

  I had officially retired in 2009, and my life started to go down the sink-hole immediately. After contributing to a Stanley Cup victory in 2008, I’d hoped to play a more prominent role in 2008–09. But it never happened. I had more injuries, and ended up playing in only 13 games for the Red Wings that season.

  Although the Red Wings made it back to the Stanley Cup Final, I didn’t play in the postseason.

  Not surprising, I actually had more fun that season playing in the American League with Grand Rapids. In 19 games, I had five goals and 11 points. I played for coach Curt Fraser, a no-nonsense coach who liked to say guys were “playing soft as grapes.”

  That is now among my favorite coaching lines.

  After I quit, my life became a week-long party. At the time, I was living in a townhouse in Troy, Michigan. My neighbors didn’t much like me because my lifestyle wasn’t suitable for family viewing. They didn’t like the hours I kept.

  I would be up at noon, then off to a shithole bar to play Golden Tee and get stinkin’ drunk. I would close down the bar at 2:00 am and then move the party back to my townhouse until I passed out with one of the five puck-whores I was seeing at the time. I referred to my collection of women as my “3:00 am girlfriends.”

  Then I’d wake up the next day and do it all over again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. It was like I was living the movie, Groundhog Day. Only Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell weren’t in my version.

  My posse was a sketchy group of low-life human beings that included a drug dealer that I knew from my days when I was heavy into using ecstasy. He and his wife hung out with me all of the time. I never quite understood what their relationship was all about. He and his wife were Red Wings fans and they did everything for me, including cleaning my house, doing my laundry, and keeping me well-stocked with drugs.

  The woman would meet with my cocaine dealer to pick up my drugs. She
would pick up my “3:00 am dates” and bring them to my house and then drove them home when I was done with them. She made sure that all of those women thought they were the only woman I was hanging out with, even though I didn’t care if they knew there were other women or not.

  Eventually I began to trust the drug dealer’s woman like she was one of my best friends. I gave her my credit card and told her to pay my bills for me.

  What I didn’t realize was that she was using my credit card to pay her bills and to go shopping. She robbed me blind.

  But I was clueless because the three of us would sit up and do drugs all night. One of them was always with me, and not because I asked them to be. I was too stoned to notice that these two people were using me. My life was a mess, and I was about to meet a woman who would help me see that.

  First, I had to meet a dude named Bart. We met because he liked to play Golden Tee after he got out of work.

  The first night we met he sang Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” and it was the best karaoke rendition I had ever heard. It was awesome. We became instant friends.

  The interesting aspect of our friendship is that Bart didn’t follow sports. He knew nothing about sports in general, or the NHL specifically. He didn’t know Darren McCarty as a member of the Grind Line and he didn’t care about the Detroit Red Wings.

  He’s a businessman. He had no agenda other than he liked being my friend. There was no hidden agenda. We were just friends with some common interests. One of his interests that became one of my interests was the huge Irish festival in his hometown of Clare, Michigan. I was excited to get out of the Troy area for the weekend, so on March 12, 2010, Bart and me and his two friends, both named Mark, all jumped in my beat-up minivan and headed north on a two-hour trip to Clare.

  After we arrived, I walked into the big old hotel in the center of the city and the first person I saw was a very tall, slim woman walking through the back lobby with a guy who looked like he could be her brother. She had long, dark, almost black hair and huge dark brown eyes.

  She didn’t even look our way, or so I thought.

  “Bart, who the fuck is that woman?” I asked.

  “You mean Sheryl?” he said. “That’s my wife.”

  My jaw dropped, leaving me standing there with my mouth hanging open.

  Bart is maybe 5'5" on his tallest day, and Sheryl is 6' without shoes on. Within a few seconds, my instincts told me there was no fucking way that Bart and Sheryl were a couple.

  “You wish she was your wife,” I said, laughing. “In your dreams, maybe, she is your wife.”

  He confessed immediately that they were not married, but that they were friends. Because of their dramatic height difference, it had become a running joke in the town that they were married.

  “She’s actually no one’s wife,” Bart offered. “She hates men. She’s unattainable. Don’t even try it.”

  He pointed out that the mammoth man next to her was her best friend.

  “He’s as crazy as you are, so don’t try anything,” Bart said.

  Telling me that Sheryl was “unattainable” was like placing a high-tech safe in a safe cracker’s living room and telling him not to try to open it.

  “Challenge accepted,” I told Bart.

  He just laughed, not truly believing I was going to make much of an effort.

  I pressed Bart for more details, and he told me that Sheryl had been divorced for 11 years and that she had five crazy older brothers, one of whom was nicknamed “Dig Your Grave Dave.”

  Her best friend was known as the town’s fighter. From the stories I was told, he was clearly a bad ass.

  “You guys are very much alike,” Bart said.

  The more I heard about Sheryl, the more intrigued I became.

  Bart approached Sheryl and they hugged. Then Bart suggested that everyone come up to our hotel room to “get away from the crowd.”

  Much later, I learned that Sheryl had noticed me when I came in the door. Apparently, there aren’t many men over 6' in town. Plus, I weighed 235 pounds.

  According to Sheryl, she asked her giant man-friend who the guy was with Bart.

  “Do you mean the guy with the missing tooth?” the friend said. “How the hell should I know? And since when do you care who some guy is?”

  A little while later, Sheryl and her friend showed up at our room. The two Marks also had invited some friends, and before long our hotel room looked like the Post Bar on a Saturday night.

  Sheryl sat stone sober in a chair on one side of the room, watching everyone getting liquored up. I sat on the opposite side of the room, studying her.

  She was gorgeous. On one hand, she looked like a prissy woman dressed in her extra-long, blinged-out, expensive jeans and her black, trendy, super-high heels. She wore no rings on her fingers and wore only small diamond earrings. She also wore a big rosary around her neck, and the beads lay perfectly on her chest.

  As I watched her interact with her friends, she had smart, witty responses. She was funny, and didn’t take shit from anyone.

  She never moved off her chair, and yet she felt like the center of the party. Everyone came over to talk to her. She was never alone for a single moment. I was fascinated by her. I was ridiculously attracted to her. I had to meet her. I watched her for more than an hour. When someone from hotel security knocked on the door, I saw my chance to meet her.

  I pointed at Sheryl and yelled, “Bart, you and her, get into the bathroom. I don’t want security to see me here. I don’t need the drama of everyone knowing I’m here.”

  Sheryl rarely drinks, is always sober, and is known as someone who protects her crazy friends. She rolled her eyes at the insistence that we needed to hide, but she went along with the request.

  She ended up sitting on the shower seat and I parked on the toilet as Bart leaned on the sink.

  We sat in there and talked for hours. But the minute I started flirting, she poured cold water on my advances.

  “Let’s make something clear right off the bat,” she said. “I have no intention of dating you or anyone else. I don’t want to be married. It’s not my desire to be any man’s wife, and I don’t want to have any more children.”

  She believed her speech would send me running to the hills. Instead, I fell in love. She was my kind of woman.

  I stopped my obvious flirting and started listening. In our bathroom conversation I found out that she was raised spending her summers working on the family’s quarter-horse farm. She has five brothers and five sisters and they’d race the horses every summer. She’s an avid bow hunter. She outshoots the boys. She educated me about bows and hunting equipment and “peep sites” and “releases” and other hunting stuff. I asked her questions just to watch her answer them. She is definitely one of the guys. I learned that her father is a down-home Southern boy from Georgia who speaks with a drawl and her Italian mother was raised in the hills of Tennessee. She loves country music and rock ’n’ roll. I studied her—the bathroom was filled with the smell of her perfume, which I later learned was appropriately named “Beautiful.” I remember thinking that it was the most amazing smell I’d ever smelled on the most amazing woman I’d ever met. You’d never believe looking at her that she is a country girl, with her long, expensive pleated jeans and high heels. I never knew country girls looked like her. She told me that her mother is an evangelist, and Sheryl had to attend bible studies once a week in her home and went to Church three times a week.

  The home had one television with three channels, and Sheryl knew absolutely nothing about hockey.

  She’d been married before, and had two children, but she’d been divorced for 11 years.

  She had no idea who I was, and I could tell right away that she wouldn’t give a shit even if she did. I made no mention of my NHL background. I put away my “smooth talking game” and was just myself, minus any refere
nce to hockey.

  I didn’t want to bring up hockey because our connection seemed pure and real. I felt like I did when I was growing up in Leamington, before I became No. 25.

  Sheryl seemed different than most women I’d known. I didn’t want to leave the bathroom. I was afraid that the minute we walked out of the bathroom she was going to disappear into the night.

  A plan was hatched to head to a bowling alley bar, and we exited the bathroom against my better judgment. I grabbed her hand and rushed out into the crowd.

  “Don’t let go of my hand,” I said. “Don’t lose me.”

  I meant that long-term as well as short-term. I was smitten like a schoolboy.

  Unfortunately, some Red Wings fans recognized me and yelled my name.

  We arrived at the car, and Sheryl was the only sober person available to drive. It looked like a clown car as we packed in.

  “What’s that about?” Sheryl asked.

  “What was what about?” I said, even though I knew what she was talking about.

  A voice emerged from the piles of humanity in the car, and it was Bart telling me it was time to come clean about my Red Wings past.

  When we piled out of her Hummer, I told her that I had been an NHL player.

  She laughed, and said, “That’s cool, can we go in the bar now?”

  It is fair to say her reaction was not the kind of reaction that I usually get when someone finds out I was a professional athlete. To her, it was the same as if I had told her I’d been a banker or a construction worker.

  I asked her whether she had heard of either Steve Yzerman or Wayne Gretzky, and she said she had heard of Yzerman and the Red Wings. But she had no other information about professional hockey. None. Zero. I told her I played in the same league with those guys, and somehow we even uncovered the truth that she shared the same birthday as Wayne Gretzky.

  She seemed to have no interest in my hockey past or my NHL accomplishments. She didn’t care about No. 25. But she seemed to be interested in Darren McCarty. This turned me on.