Ice Capades

by Sean Avery

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Sean Avery

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  Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

  ISBN 9780399575754

  Ebook ISBN 9780399575761

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

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  To the sixth-grade kid who hates sitting still, to the high school junior bored to death by class, to the new intern on Broadway:

  “Every now and then, say, ‘What the fuck.’ ‘What the fuck’ gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future. . . . ‘What the fuck.’ If you can’t say it, you can’t do it.”

  —Miles Dalby, Risky Business, 1983

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1. Last Chance

  2. Cincinnati Kid

  3. Showtime

  4. Money, Sex, and Fun in the Sun

  5. That Championship Season

  6. Stanley Cup Summer

  7. Two Is the Most Dangerous Lead in Hockey

  8. Becoming a King

  9. Summer Schooling

  10. The King of LA

  11. Everything in Its Right Place

  12. Locked out of My Life

  13. A New Life in Paradise

  14. From LA to New York

  15. I Look Good in Blue

  16. The Avery Rule

  17. The Summer of Vogue

  18. Sean Does Dallas

  19. Down and Out and Back Again

  20. The Last Season

  Acknowledgments

  Photos

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  I loved playing hockey. More than anything, really, from the age of five, when I first saw Hockey Night in Canada on TV. I knew at that moment that I wanted to wear an NHL jersey and have thousands of fans cheer for me. But if you’re here for stories of me growing up under starry winter skies playing hockey on frozen ponds with a hot chocolate chaser, you’re in the wrong place.

  I was an NHL player for thirteen seasons, and I played to win. I wanted to be great. I mean, why do anything if you don’t want to be great? But I didn’t lie awake at night tossing and turning, hoping that one day I’d be in the Hall of Fame. I just wanted to get everything I could out of the game. Sure, I was playing for the money, just like everyone else. But I was also playing for the opportunities. A lot of doors open for millionaire pro athletes, though most guys never look to see what’s behind them. Don’t get me wrong, I also played for fun. No one can say that a Gordie Howe Hat Trick (goal, assist, fight) doesn’t put you in a great mood. One of the few improvements I can think of is the Sean Avery Hat Trick: playing a great game, going to a club afterward and getting wasted, then taking a supermodel home for a nightcap that lasts till sunrise.

  That doesn’t sound so terrible, does it?

  People have offered up some pretty strong opinions about me over the years. It’s hard for me to say whether they’re fair or not—and no one is going to care about my self-justifications anyway. I’m certainly not going to claim to be perfect. I’m not even going to claim to be a good guy. It’s not my business to tell anyone what to think of me. I will say this, though. The guy you may have seen on the ice? The hate-filled wrecking ball? That’s not exactly who I am. It’s probably ridiculous to think we can know anyone from the way they play a game on TV. And in my case I played to the camera, and the crowd, and the press box. I made sure everyone was watching. That wasn’t me being myself. That was me being who everyone thought I was.

  I loved having the bull’s eye on my back. Anyone who thought they were hurting my feelings by talking about me had me all wrong. So did every guy who got red in the face and tried to take my head off. If someone was writing about me or taking runs at me I was winning. I was making my team better, yes (that was my job), but I was also making myself richer and more famous. Name me a more famous third-liner in NHL history.

  Not that it was all an act. Scoring a goal in Madison Square Garden is a feeling I think anyone would enjoy. I have to say, though, I enjoyed kicking the shit out of Mike Richards at center ice at Madison Square Garden even more. That may sound awful, but trust me, it was fun. I also did quite a lot of other things, and if I had the chance to do them all again, I’d take it.

  And yes, I miss the game since I walked away from it. I miss the roar of the crowd. I miss the sheer speed of life. There are some days when I feel like nothing will ever be that good again, but those days are fewer and farther between now. So don’t expect me to get nostalgic about how I miss hanging out with the guys in the dressing room. I met some great guys over the years, but I also wasted a lot of time on planes and buses with some truly boring people, and even more time playing by other people’s rules. I don’t miss that at all.

  I’m not 100 percent sure what motivated me—and you need plenty of motivation to be one of the fittest guys in one of the toughest leagues in the world. I do know one thing, though. If you tell me I can’t do something, I can pretty much guarantee I’ll do it. So thanks, by the way, to all the people who told me I’d never make it. Without you, it’s entirely possible I might never have put in the hours of work it took to play in the NHL.

  Maybe you thought I didn’t play the game the right way. But try to imagine having 20,000 people chanting your name after you’ve scored a goal, won a fight, or taken down the best guy on the other team, and then tell me you’d act any differently. On the other hand, I’d be almost as happy having 20,000 people absolutely hating me (hello, Philadelphia). I’d much rather be hated than ignored.

  Sometimes getting a rise out of the crowd was a way to entertain myself. The NHL season is long, and there are some nights when it’s hard to skate like nothing else matters. Because other things start to matter, and you can’t win all eighty-two games. So sometimes I went out and turned the world upside down just to get through the game. Other guys took drugs.

  Once upon a time the great Steve Yzerman told me that I should think about shutting up and just playing hockey. He said I had the talent, and that was good enough, and who wouldn’t be flattered by having a Hall of Famer like Stevie Y tell you that?

  I didn’t take Steve’s advice because talent wasn’t enough for me. I needed the adrenaline that constant conflict—and sometimes chaos—gave me. I went on a thirteen-season tear by playing the game by my own rules and learning more and more about who I was. Along the way I met so many interesting people and forged so many life-changing relationships that I think I might have had more fun than any guy who ever played in the NHL.

  1

  LAST CHANCE

  I’ve wanted this since I was five years old. I’m now twenty-one, and time is running out.

  Of course, looking back I realize I had lots of time, but in September 2001, all I knew was that playing the game I loved more than anything in the NHL was the onl
y option. There was no Plan B.

  • • •

  My heart is pounding. I am here to earn a spot on the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League. The fact that people are already talking about this as one of the best teams in history isn’t going to make things any easier. I am going to have to take a job away from someone the Red Wings actually want on the roster. And they’ve already told me in several ways that they don’t want me. This is my third crack at making the NHL—I’ve already played two seasons in the minors. Every year, a new bunch of rookies shows up, diminishing my odds. When I look around at the guys in camp, or when lying awake in bed last night, I have to ask whether I am good enough. I’m not an idiot. I know most people would say no. The Red Wings already said no.

  I had been good enough once. As a kid, I played for an All-Ontario rep team. (By the way, that’s a big deal.) In my last year of junior hockey, I had twenty-eight goals and fifty-six assists for eighty-five points in fifty-five games. To put it in perspective, my fellow OHL player, Jason Spezza, had thirty-six goals and fifty assists and eighty-six points for the Windsor Spitfires in his best junior season. Spezza was chosen second overall in the first round of the 2001 NHL Entry Draft. He was beaten out by Ilya Kovalchuk, who was drafted first, and tore up the NHL for a while before walking away from $77 million and twelve years on his contract with New Jersey to play in Russia. Being drafted by the NHL doesn’t guarantee anything.

  I know this too well as I wasn’t drafted at all. On draft day in 2001, part of me believed that there was at least one NHL general manager out there who would see what I could bring to a team, and another part of me believed that getting drafted was too good to be true. I wasn’t going to sit by the phone—I spent draft day at a pool party. When I came home, neither of my parents even mentioned the draft, and I didn’t ask if anyone had called. It was as if we had all moved on to the next plan of attack. I’d go to training camp as a free agent.

  But still, it hurt. No one wanted me. Nearly 300 guys were taken, and not one GM wanted to use a ninth-round pick on me.

  Well, I know why. The knock on me was that I was a “bad teammate.” Did this mean that I stole other players’ girlfriends? That I was an arrogant puck hog? That I put Tiger Balm in guys’ jockstraps and thought it was the funniest thing ever when they tried to extinguish the three-alarm fire burning up the family jewels?

  No, none of the above. What it meant was that I played to win on every shift, and some other players don’t see the game that way. So I would let them know that they could do better. Since no one likes to be called out for dogging it, the rap landed on me that I was “bad in the room,” which in hockey-speak means you’re not one of the guys. Maybe it’s the same in other sports, but in hockey being one of the guys goes a long way. What it won’t do, though, is win you a puck battle in the corner. And it’s certainly not going to win you a fight.

  So if I wasn’t going to make it as everyone’s best friend and all-round good guy, well, I’d have to make it as the opposite.

  • • •

  I did have one friend in Detroit, though. I knew Kris Draper from growing up in the same town that he did, Scarborough, Ontario, which is part of Toronto but so far from the city center that it’s known as “Scarberia.” In 1997–98, when Draper was then in his fifth season with the Red Wings (the one in which he’d win the second of his four Stanley Cups), we worked out at the same gym. I was playing for the Ontario under-17 team, which fell under the umbrella of the Canadian national hockey program, so as “elite players” we trained at the same facility as pros like Drapes.

  He had success, money, and a lovely wife, he was a good husband, and he took care of everyone around him. He was close with his dad, he had friends, and when he let loose he could put any frat boy to shame. He was the best guy. Drapes also had the Red Wing workout gear, which was sponsored by Nike and which was very foreign to a Canadian kid—we had Bauer and that was it. Draper would show up in this gear and hand it out to guys like me. I saw how organized and disciplined and dedicated he was, and at that moment, I was the most in awe of anyone that I had ever been.

  Draper was physically a specimen. He was not big, and that was important because neither was I. He was five-nine—and some days when he was feeling supreme he was five-ten—and 180 pounds of lean, cut muscle. He was one of the first guys to make being in top shape a cool thing. Spend any time in the gym with a guy like Drapes, and all you want is to be as chiseled as he is.

  Drapes liked me because I pushed him hard and wanted to beat him at everything. So every day he showed up at the gym he had a hungry dog on his ass who reminded him that I wanted to take his job. He later told me that I added years onto his career, but at that point I was just working as hard as I could to keep up with him.

  One of Detroit’s scouts, Joe McDonnell, helped me, too. McDonnell had been a minor-league defenseman who played a few games in the NHL for Vancouver and Pittsburgh. He’d moved on to coaching in the Ontario Hockey League, and he knew I could play. Mac was not a suit-and-tie guy, he was a players’ guy, a real hockey man—he loved the game and wasn’t interested in playing politics, so when he said that I had a shot in Detroit, I believed him. He wasn’t the kind of guy to flatter a no-hoper. I had a reputation as bad as they come and Mac’s job was to have good judgment. In my mind, he’d put his job on the line by taking a chance on me, and I wouldn’t let him down.

  But even with Drapes and McDonnell in my corner at that training camp in September 2001, I needed to do more than just play. Everyone in camp could play hockey at an elite level, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. And they all know me, because I’d played against most of them in junior. There will be times later in my career when I will most definitely wish I could take a break from my reputation, but now it’s the thing that makes me stand out and I am going to use it to my advantage. I’m here to get noticed, and a bad reputation makes that a lot easier.

  I’ve pretty much been working on this problem of finding advantage since I was twelve years old. That was when everyone around me seemed to have a growth spurt, and I did not, and the “you’re too small” stuff really got aimed at me. That dismissal, combined with the onset of puberty, was a pretty potent motivator. So while all the other players were getting bigger, I was getting smarter. I had to find a way to stay competitive until the day when I was their size. By the way, that day never came.

  Hockey is a game of unwritten rules so complicated and subjective that no two people can agree on what they are. Some people call these rules the “code”; other people deny that there is a code. But everybody thinks there is a “right” way to play hockey (especially Canadians, who feel they should be able to tell everyone what the right way is). Who you’re allowed to hit and how hard, depending on the score and how much time is left on the clock and how many games are left in the season—everyone thinks they have the algorithm to answer these questions, and they take it very seriously. They also know exactly how much you’re allowed to celebrate, and even how you should dress. Personally, I don’t care. But these things are important to me because they’re important to other people. Break these rules and people will lose their minds. And when they lose their minds, a guy like me wins.

  I’m no different. If another player gets under my skin, I want to punch his face in. But if I’m chasing him around trying to hurt him, I’m not doing my job. Better to get him chasing me, and then he’s not doing his job. That makes me an agitator.

  My template for success had three parts: identifying my opponent’s best player, their tough guy, and their agitator.

  The best player was easy to pick out because of the way he wore his uniform, or his hair. Remember Gretzky with his jersey tucked into his pants? Or Tony Amonte’s flowing locks? The best player would put white tape on his stick blades or roll his sleeves up so you could see a bit of skin between his gloves and jersey. It was all designed to say “Look at me, I’m different because I
’m better.” Hockey players are trained to stick up for the guys with the soft hands. If you want to sucker the other team into a penalty, at some point you’re going to have to target their leading scorer.

  You don’t have to be a scout to spot the tough guy. A true tough guy has a kind of aura about him. Watch a bunch of dogs in the park. They all know which one not to mess with, even if he’s just trotting along with his tail in the air. The thing is, teams love their tough guys. Fans love their tough guys. If you disrespect a tough guy and get away with it, the whole hockey world is off its axis. He can be counted on to take a stupid penalty. It’s money in the bank.

  And the agitators, my species, are the most fun. You can smell their need to prove themselves. They’re always small and they always have more energy than everyone else. You could see it in warm-up, when the agitators would go harder, just excited to be there. And often they would have a black eye or stitches, from bugging the wrong guy at the wrong time. Pissing off hockey players can be a dangerous line of work.

  Anyway, I’d identify my three targets and systematically go after them in different ways. I’d run the best player, or take a cheap shot at him during the play. A glove in the face, or a whack to the ankles, for instance. My way of saying hello. Now he’s unhappy, and his whole team is unhappy. (You know how hockey players are always talking about going out there and having fun? Not when I’m on the ice.)

  As for the tough guy, I’d take a wicked two-hander against the back of his legs after a whistle (no pads, right?), and what could he do? Drop the gloves? Sure, if he really wanted to take a penalty when I leave mine on. Remember, my job is to piss people off. And nothing pisses off a hockey player more than a guy who turns down an invitation to dance. In other words, it was often my job not to fight.

  And as for the agitator, my advantage was that I was pretty much always a better player than he was, so I would get power play time which was useful in calling out the other guy’s total meathead uselessness. I would score a goal, or set one up, and then let the other agitator know that he could do that too if he had the hockey goods to be out on the ice at critical times in the game. If you can agitate the agitator, you’re doing all right.