Sheryl did inform me that she was annoyed that I decided not to reveal my background when we initially met. This was my first notice about how much she reveres honesty and full disclosure in a relationship.
“You should have told me when you were holding me hostage in the bathroom,” she said.
“Well, now you know—and now you may understand what it means,” I said.
The bowling alley bar was overflowing with people from all over the state for the festival. Apparently, many of them were Red Wings fans. I walked in with my head held high, and soon I was in the midst of an autograph session. It was chaos as people came up to talk to me and to get me to sign whatever they had on them.
Sheryl looked mortified as she witnessed what it’s like to be me in a crowd of Detroit fans. I used the craziness to my advantage, telling Sheryl that she needed to stay close to me to help me escape if the crowd became too unruly. She was one of the few sober people in the place, and my request for her help fed into her protective instincts.
She wanted to run, but she couldn’t because she felt obligated to serve and protect. We hung out together until the bar closed, and then went back to the pool area at the hotel. We sat at a table until almost dawn.
At that point in my life, my normal game plan would have been to try to get her into my bed. But I knew there was no chance of that happening. After 12 hours of stalking and wooing her, I didn’t even have her phone number.
There were plenty of women at the festival that I could have had in my bed that night, but I paid no attention to any of them because I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
At 5:00 in the morning, Sheryl said she needed to get some sleep because she was going to be in the parade on a party bus. She had to be there at 8:00 am.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
‘Yeah, right,” she said.
She went to sleep at her sister’s house, and when she showed up to get on the bus for the parade, the first person she saw was me. I didn’t sleep all night because I was afraid I would miss my opportunity to hang out with her again. I made Bart hang out with me because I knew he could get me where I needed to be for the parade.
I didn’t know whether Sheryl was impressed or afraid that she had a lunatic on her hands when she saw me. But I didn’t care. I was there with her.
We handed out beads along the parade route, and when it was over Bart and his friends jumped off the bus to start an informal pub crawl. Sheryl said she was riding the bus back to the parade starting point because that was where her truck was parked.
After I jumped off the bus with the boys, I told Bart that I had forgotten my beer holder on the bus. It was a lie. I just wanted to get back on the bus with Sheryl. I told Bart I would meet him later in the bar.
I was actually worried that if I went off with Bart that I would never see Sheryl again. Every bar was packed shoulder-to-shoulder and I thought it was likely that I wouldn’t be able to find Sheryl if I allowed her to escape to her truck.
As I walked back to the bus with Sheryl, I pulled my beer holder out of my pocket to show her.
She just shook her head, knowing that it meant another day of having me glued to her. We hung out until 10:00 pm, and then she said she was tired and needed to go home. We had been together for about 43 hours, and I had spent most of them trying to secure her phone number. She would not provide it. She just laughed at my frequent requests.
She walked me back to my room and then let me kiss her. She laughed again at my final request for her number. Then she walked back and faded into the crowd. I went to bed alone and left Clare at 5:00 am, saddened by the possibility that I might never see her again.
I decided I was not going to allow that to happen.
When I got home I pulled out the computer and, with Bart’s help, I found her on Facebook.
“Hi, will you be my friend?” I asked simply.
“Of course, dork,” she replied. “Apparently, you didn’t find the phone number I stuck in your coat pocket.”
In the 42nd hour of our weekend, Sheryl had provided me with her phone number without me realizing what was happening.
I’ve worked hard to accomplish several goals in my life, but I never worked harder on any endeavor than I did in acquiring her phone number.
We talked daily, and she was interested in me, but she was clearly not interested in my lifestyle. At one point she told me that honesty is the most important standard of any relationship or friendship.
To Sheryl, everything is forgiven as long as someone is fully honest about what he or she has done. Sheryl believes if someone is honest with you than he or she is treating you like an important person in their life. If they are not being honest, then clearly they are not treating you like an important person in their life. Trust, love, and friendship blossom from pure honesty.
Sheryl can forgive the act, but not the lie. She believes that if a man cheats on his wife and comes home and lies about it, then he is saying that his wife is less important than the adultress. If he comes home and confesses the infidelity, then he’s saying that the wife is more important than the skank he bedded.
Trust me when I say that Sheryl lives by this standard. I’ve experienced her forgiveness on so many levels and her forgiveness took away my desire to be the unfaithful person I had always been.
I trusted Sheryl and felt at ease telling her everything about my personal life. She knew about the unsavory women I was bedding. She knew about my low-life friends. She knew about my partying. She knew about my drug problem. She didn’t judge me. Instead, she accepted me with my faults. When I told her I was weary of living this way and wanted to be healthy, she said she would help me. Sheryl agreed to be my friend, but repeated in a frank and honest way that she had no desire to be in any kind of a dating or romantic relationship with me.
I believed that I could convince her to date me. It was clear to me that it would mean making changes in my life.
“I need to cut down some trees,” I said to her one night. I think she knew what I meant. My life had become overgrown with issues and people who didn’t have my best interests at heart. I needed to create a clearing so I could see a future.
What she didn’t realize was that what I really needed to do was cut down an entire fucking forest.
Sheryl didn’t ask me to change. Not once. But she was the first woman that made me want to change. In the lowest time of my life, she was a friend.
Our relationship grew gradually. I would drive up north to see her, and she started to come down to Troy to hang out.
Early in our friendship, I begged her to have a committed relationship.
“Darren, you’re not ready for that yet,” she would say very sweetly.
She worked in a hospital, but she would chisel out some time to come down to the Troy area to hang out with me. I’d head up to Clare and Saginaw to see Sheryl on her off days. It was like I was courting her, the way it was done years ago.
Meanwhile, I was trying to knock down the trees that were blocking my growth as a person. On many days, it felt like I was hacking through a rainforest.
It wasn’t as if I became a choir boy overnight. I have an addictive personality, and changing my lifestyle wasn’t as simple as just telling everyone in my life to go away.
I still partied at the same bars and I saw all the same women. They were persistent, and I wasn’t always strong. My heart was with Sheryl, but my cock sometimes had a different agenda.
Had I known that years later these people would stalk and harass Sheryl, I may have given them the Claude Lemieux treatment.
In September 2010, there was an NHL alumni trip to Aspen, Colorado. I wanted to go and I wanted to bring Sheryl with me. By then, we had been “friends” for six months. Sheryl still hadn’t decided whether I was ready to take our relationship to a higher level.
There was much begging on m
y part for her to accompany me on this trip and there was much canceling on her part.
Sheryl went back-and-forth on whether or not she should attend the gathering.
The day before we were to fly to Aspen, Sheryl called her ex-husband to tell him that he didn’t have to watch their children that weekend because she had decided not to make the trip.
Her ex-husband, Rob, changed my life because he told Sheryl to give me a chance.
“You have to stop hating men and let one get close to you,” he told her. “You deserve to broaden your horizons and have some fun.”
She listened to him and reluctantly decided to go on the alumni trip. It was the turning point in our relationship. We say we fell in love on that trip, even though it was love-at-first-sight for me when we met in Clare.
Sheryl says now that when she boarded the plane and saw all of the other former players’ wives with their bleach blonde hair, Louis Vuitton luggage, and huge diamond rings, she wanted to “run [her] county bumpkin ass right off the plane and back to the horse barn.”
What she couldn’t see, and still doesn’t today, is that she looks as glamorous as any of them. No one would have known she was a small-town girl if she hadn’t told them.
Of course, as soon as Sheryl met everyone, she fit in perfectly. Sheryl and BettyAnne Ogrodnick, the wife of former Red Wing John Ogrodnick, became instant friends. They’re like sisters today. BettyAnne stands by Sheryl and mentors her through all of the craziness my “hockey life” brings us. In my opinion, there is no one better to mentor her—the wives and players actually refer to her as “Queen B.” We love her and Johnny O very much. I’m honored to wear the same number he wore on his sweater.
By the way, I’m also now friends with Sheryl’s ex-husband, the man who helped finally convince Sheryl that she had to take a chance to find some happiness. I will never be able to thank Rob and Bart enough for helping me connect with Sheryl.
My relationship with Sheryl worked because she never sought to control me or change me. She sought to help me. She has marched to hell and back with me, and she showed me how my life could be better if I made safer and smarter choices.
She stands next to me as I face this demon monster of addiction, never judging and always accepting me.
After we were in a committed relationship, she arrived at my house after working a 13-hour shift and found one of my sketchy friends at my table with a plate of cocaine in front of him.
“Hi,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”
I grabbed her and begged her not to leave. “I’ve counted down the hours until you got here,” I said.
I knew I needed her. I knew she was the best friend I had. I didn’t want to fuck up this relationship. I wanted her to know how hard I was trying.
“Darren,” she said, “I will never tell what you can or cannot do, I will never tell you who can or cannot be in your life, but I can tell you who and what I won’t be around. This is your choice.”
As she walked out the door, one member of my entourage raced past her at 100 miles an hour. He was never in my life again.
Sheryl was more upset about the loser being in my house than the drugs. I chose her over everything else in my life. She helped me redefine a new normal in my life. She helped me leave the world of whores, drugs, and poor choices. She helped eradicate the maggot population in my life that was sucking the life out of me.
She helped gain control over the No. 25 beast. He had become a monster to the point that his important friends didn’t always recognize him.
In the heat of the moment I used a hockey stick to clear the human trash from my house—Sheryl didn’t flinch. When the explosive moment was over, she removed the hockey stick from my hand and told me to go lie down.
While I napped to find some peace, she cleaned my house. All of the rubbish was removed from my life. She helped eliminate the mess I created.
Sheryl stood by me at a time when others might have run away. She saw me turn over my pool table with one hand. She saw me throw a beer glass through a 55-inch television. When she was stalked and harassed by the people I was trying to remove from my life, she never backed down. When she became the target of their rage and anger she showed no fear.
She has helped me navigate back toward a more normal life. I’d ignored life’s chores for a few years. When she met me, I wasn’t even officially divorced from Anna because I hadn’t signed the divorce papers. I had no idea that I was still married. My driver’s license had expired and my immigration filings were out-of-date. The paperwork of my life was a mess.
Sheryl pulled me back from a dark place. She does the job in real life that I did in the NHL—she is my protector. Sheryl understands that alcoholism is a disease and she stands by me and fights it head on. I often ask her how she can love me so much. I asked her once why she doesn’t judge me like everyone in my past has. She answered, “Would I judge how you handle your pain if you had cancer? No way, I’d be there through the suffering of that disease, too, and we’d kick cancer’s ass the same way we’re beating this alcohol monster.” Thank God we’re both fighters.
She’s a strong person, and she’s the one person I wouldn’t want to go toe-to-toe with. Her Italian mother taught her strength and loyalty, and now I’m the beneficiary of those traits. She’s my nurse, my ally, my lover, and my best friend.
She loves me as Darren—not as former NHL player Darren McCarty. She doesn’t even know me as the hockey player.
“I wish you were just a retired General Motors worker,” she always says.
Sheryl may never get used to strangers walking up to me and starting conversations about the Red Wings glory days. To me, it’s mostly fun. I loved being a player and I loved relating to the fans. And over time she’s started to have some fun with it, too. There’s no point in running from it.
Sheryl and I were married in 2012 at sunset at Clearwater Beach, Florida, the day after my 40th birthday. It was the best birthday gift that I ever received.
“Both my broken wings, every single piece of everything I am, yeah she knows the man I ain’t, she forgives me when I can’t, the devil man, no, he don’t stand a chance cause she loves me like Jesus does”
—“Like Jesus Does”
Eric Church
16. The Y Chromosome (Here you go, Jimbo)
“Girls, Girls, Girls”
—“Girls, Girls, Girls” Mötley Crüe
For a normal man, remaining monogamous is a chore. But for a pro athlete with an addictive personality, it’s impossible.
That’s not me offering an excuse for my behavior throughout my NHL career. It’s just me being honest. This is me trying to understand why I did the things I did. I don’t like to live with regret, but I’ve found a lot of it in the way I’ve treated women, particularly the women who were close to me.
In researching this chapter, I came upon these quotes:
“Monogamy was created for human morality—it isn’t ‘natural’ for us as humans, it goes against our genetics, but society and religion steer us away from nature. With age comes maturity, boys turn to men, but the hunt never stops.” —former NFL player Chad Johnson
“I made my share of mistakes. People can look at that as what not to do, and if they chose to make fun of it, that’s fine, I can’t control that, I can control myself. And at that point in my life, I wasn’t even able to do that.” —golfer Tiger Woods
“I was going through a pretty rebellious period where it didn’t matter what [my wife] Karin said, I was going to do the opposite. I was really self-absorbed. You keep getting temptation thrown in your face and eventually you’re going to slip up.” —former MLB player Chipper Jones
“I was a guy with too many options. Choosing to be with some of those women, well, that’s on me. In my mind, I never did it disrespectfully, but obviously I shouldn’t have done it all.”—former NBA player S
haquille O’Neal
When I read those quotes and review my own life, I have a heavy heart. I offer this chapter with a loud sigh because this is not an easy topic to discuss. But since I have been providing everyone the unvarnished truth about my life, it would be an injustice to not include a chapter about my infidelity. Unfortunately, womanizing is part of the story of my life. My journey has included frequent bad decision making.
When I started playing in the NHL, my first observation about women was that some of them were crazy for their pursuit of pro athletes. I am speaking only about my personal experiences here, but over the years I’ve interacted with other professional athletes and it’s my opinion that NHL players are the most monogamous of professional athletes. I don’t know why. It’s an observation, not a scientific study. I base some of it on what I read in the media about divorcing athletes and athletes paying child support for children they fathered.
Also, I believe today’s athletes are more faithful to their wives. Maybe they learned from the mistakes the athletes of my generation made. Because my problems have sometimes played out in the newspaper, everyone has had front-row seats to my soap opera life. Maybe some athletes have learned by looking at the price I’ve paid for my infidelity and bad decisions. I hope that’s true. It would offer some consolation if some good has come out of the mess I made of my life.
I think today’s athletes are marrying smarter. They’re getting married later. I know players today who won’t date a woman who doesn’t have some career of her own. Today, athletes all discuss pre-nuptial agreements and they aren’t afraid of asking their fiancée to sign one.
It’s a different world now. I think athletes are more careful trying to find the right woman. It took me three times to get it right. I learned. Others have learned as well. There seems to be more longevity in athletes’ marriages today.
I’m certainly not saying that today’s athletes are all perfect, nor am I saying that all athletes from my era were running around on their wives. That would not be true. Even in my era, the majority of men were good, decent, faithful family men. But I wasn’t in that group of faithful family men.
My Last Fight Page 17