by Sean Avery
I do know some players who actually enjoy the feeling of getting punched in the face by a man who has superhuman strength, though I am not one of them. Colton Orr used to say that he liked getting hit early because it woke him up. I can assure you that even with all the adrenaline pumping through you as you do the war dance, it feels like you are getting hit with a baseball that you did not see coming.
And when a fight ends on the ice it’s really just the beginning for the fighter. An hour after the game is done is when you really start to feel the fight, and the pain of taking a right cross to the jaw or grappling for a full minute with your opponent until it feels like you’re underwater, wearing sand bags instead of skates. When you wake up in the middle of the night to piss and your pillow is covered in blood, and getting on your feet feels like you’re taking the last steps before you reach the top of Everest, you have to ask yourself if you ever want to do this again. Then you say yes.
Eighty percent of the time you don’t hate the person you’re fighting. I was trying to swing momentum when I fought, so I would have to make myself mad at a guy to get ready for a fight. You have to keep it all balanced. Anytime I was fighting out of real anger I didn’t do as well as when I had controlled, or manufactured, anger. Sometimes you wind up fighting friends. I fought Rob DiMaio, and we used to train together and I would hang out with him and his wife. He was a tough guy and we split the fight down the middle. We would laugh about it afterward, and in fact, we still do, every time I see him.
My strategy is to be tactical and to not actually get hit, but to show patience until BOOM you can catch your opponent with a solid punch after he’s thrown four or five wild ones and is starting to get tired. Then I roll my head under his arm and come over the top and BOOM! and another. I throw a quick left to surprise him, then tie him up.
As long as you can keep a fight going for twenty seconds—which is a fucking eternity when you’re actually in one—and you can land on top of the other guy when you both go down to the ice, then you’ve won the fight and maybe saved your life from being a clouded fog of shit when you hang up your skates. I used to laugh to myself when I’d watch two guys stand there and feed each other punches to the face until they couldn’t see straight. It was such a waste.
But while I believe fighting can bring as much to a team as a goal, and while I brought everything to the Red Wings that I had in my hockey tool kit, the one thing I did not want to do was fight Bob Probert. There was no way I was going to win against him. He was six-three and 225 pounds and one of the most fearsome physical specimens that I’ve ever seen, while I was the kid who was supposedly too small to even play the game. Also, it was my job to draw penalties, and it was his job to take them. But for guys like that, time in the penalty box is an investment. Everyone on the other team felt a little bit smaller after Probert had rag-dolled their toughest guy. This doesn’t show up in any stat line, because you can’t measure it. But the Proberts of the world make their teams better just by existing. No one actually says “Don’t touch the goalie, because Probert’s in the lineup,” but if you’re crashing the net, you might find a reason to veer off at the last moment. And while no hockey player would admit to being afraid to hit Probert, I guarantee most guys would take a little off their bodychecks on him.
Which is, of course, why I took a run at him at the end of the second period in a game in Chicago in late December 2001. And when the scrum got going after the whistle, I went over the top of the pile of players and sucker-punched him in the side of his head with my glove still on.
I knew he’d be pissed off, of course. You don’t punch a hockey player in the face unless you’re prepared to tangle. But there is such a thing as biting off more than you can chew when you’re young and stupid, and Probert was arguably the scariest guy ever to wear skates. There were enough bodies between us that he couldn’t lay a hand on me, which only pissed him off more. He’s yelling to Scotty Bowman that Bowman better not put me on the ice again or he’s going to kill me. Everyone who heard it believed it. I certainly did.
It was the only time I’ve ever been truly afraid to go out onto the ice. Scotty Bowman saved my life that night by benching me for the third period. I’ll never be able to thank Scotty enough for that gesture and realized then that he must have liked me just a little bit. We also won 5–0.
4
MONEY, SEX, AND FUN IN THE SUN
I signed my first professional contract in 1999. It was for three years, worth $1.275 million, and included a $125,000 signing bonus. I was rich.
In truth, I was anything but rich. Now don’t get me wrong—it was a lot of money, but the NHL doesn’t just hand it out because they like the shine on your shoes, so I figured that they figured I was going to be worth it. Or what was left of it.
I learned that my big $125K bonus shrank awfully fast (the Feds took their taste first, so that I saw $50,000 of the signing bonus go pffft! into the pockets of Uncle Sam). My agent took another three percent for getting me the bonus. That left me with $71,250. The wildly irresponsible thing to do would have been to go out and buy a GMC Denali—everyone was buying those stud-sized, fully loaded SUVs that would set a guy back $70,000 (and leave me without enough money to insure the damn thing).
No, I was not that guy. I bought a Ford Bronco for $28,000. Did I need a Ford Bronco that wiped out more than a third of my remaining bonus? No, I did not. I should have bought a used Ford Bronco for half that price, but what did I know? There was no one around to tell me what to do, and I probably wouldn’t have listened anyway. The NHL does not give guys money advice, and neither does my agent. He just takes his cut.
After getting my bonus and my Bronco I played in the minors in Cincinnati for two years before I finally made it permanently to the NHL with Detroit. My first NHL paycheck was for $14,500. And what did I do with that? I bought a Jeep Cherokee.
No, I leased it, because I couldn’t afford to buy a Jeep Cherokee. I might not be playing in the NHL the following week, but I figured that I couldn’t park my Bronco next to the rides of the twelve future Hall of Famers on my NHL team. I know now that they would have liked it because it would have said humility, and hard work, and honesty, and all those things that are good in the world. But all I knew at the time was that I was now an NHL hockey player, even if I didn’t really know how to be one.
On my first road trip to Chicago I went with my teammates to this men’s fashion joint called Zegna (pronounced Zeh-nyah). I found a pair of pants I wanted to buy, and the nice saleslady told me I owed $750. I thought she meant seventy-five dollars, but no, she did not, and this was not the kind of place where you bargained. I was too choked to ask the guys if we could go to Banana Republic so I could buy what I could afford, and more importantly, what I wanted.
So I paid more than five percent of my first NHL paycheck on a pair of pants.
My fashion sense was, shall we say, getting an expensive education. I was certainly interested in how money would allow me to express my personal style, but the guys around me were like almost all hockey players—running with the herd when it came to clothes. I could learn how to spend money on clothes that I didn’t want from them, but I wasn’t going to learn how to dress. That was going to be a lesson I would pick up from seeing as much of the world as I could.
I was paid $2,500 to go to a shopping mall in suburban Detroit to sign autographs for one hour. That’s easily the best hourly wage I’ve ever earned, and I felt a little bit shocked. Getting paid well to play hockey—and make money for the owners and the league while doing so—is one thing, but getting a fat chunk of cash for signing my name is quite another. I would have paid more attention to perfecting my signature if I’d known it was going to be a money spinner. Even so, I sat at a table and signed pictures for people who’d paid probably fifty dollars a picture (I was paid twenty dollars per photo so you see the type of margins), and before and after this event a player would sign a minimum of
fifty to 100 pucks and another 100 pictures that would be sold online. You weren’t able to raise your rate or have another signing until the majority of the inventory had been sold.
It was a supply-and-demand type of industry and the demand was completely in your hands—play well, get a following, then you get demand. At this point in my baby NHL career I’m starting to have my own little following of fans in Hockeytown, and it’s giving me a little bit of swagger. I’d been signing autographs since junior in Kingston, when people would come up to guys on the team in restaurants and bars and have us sign anything they had on them (though I did not sign body parts, despite being asked). I always signed for fans in the NHL, too, though backed off the professional autograph seekers. They could pay for it, since they were going to sell my signature anyway.
After I made the NHL and saw someone wearing a jersey with my name on the back, it made me feel like I was a superstar. I went out of my way to give those people a stick or a puck, and let them know how happy I was that they were on my team.
Meanwhile I lived downtown, in the Marriott Hotel at the Renaissance Center. A hotel room, even if it’s a nice one, is still a hotel room, and even though room service is tasty, you get tired of pizza and burgers and it’s all a bit lonely. Whenever I have time I get in the car and drive to Windsor, back in Canada, to have dinner at some of my favorite Canadian restaurant chains, like the Keg, which sits on Riverside and overlooks the Detroit River and the city’s skyline. Sometimes I would drive across just for a Harvey’s hamburger.
The tallest building in view across the river is the one I live in at the Ren Center, so I can eat dinner and look at the place I’m escaping from. I have made the NHL, but I’m looking at it from a distance. On my own. Thinking of the future, and where I wanted to be in ten years. Still playing in the NHL was always the answer because now that I had a taste of the big time, I was like a glutton at an all-you-can-eat joint. Keep going for as long as you can.
On game days we would eat at Roma Café, which is about a ten-minute drive from the Joe Louis Arena. The place is on the site of the original restaurant that opened in 1890, and it’s a family business that looks like it could have been the location for some bad action in Goodfellas. We always ate in a back room, and the oil-and-vinegar salad they serve is hands-down the best salad I’ve ever had, and you’d eat it along with your broiled chicken and spaghetti Bolognese.
The team gives you an eighty-dollar per diem when you are a call-up and living out of a hotel. The dry-cleaning and room service bills become a bit high but it’s all now relative as my take-home pay is around $14,000 every two weeks, which still surprises me each time I see my name and the amount on the check. I start to put $8,500 from each paycheck into my savings account because I have no idea what I could spend this money on. Not yet, anyway, but that will soon change.
One of the perks of being an NHLer in a real hockey city like Detroit is that you have a kind of golden key to the place. And yet the Red Wings, true to their fans and their own sense of cool, liked to hang out at the Post Bar. The place was a legendary hockey watering hole in Detroit that was like the city itself—not glamorous, but a ton of fun. It was right next to the Joe, and both players and fans went there after a game. It was so crazy with Red Wings fans that the players would stand behind the bar all night, and we’d even wind up serving drinks to fans. The bar didn’t count how many drinks went out—they would just tally the till at the end of the night and if it all tallied up, then great. If not, then great.
The Wings did not pay for any drinks of course, and I would marvel at guys like goalie Manny Legace downing a case of Bud Light like it was apple juice. Joey Kocur wouldn’t even smile until he’d downed a six-pack. “Where’s my fucking beer?” he’d holler and beer would appear.
You would see Kocur playing pool with the crazy guy who danced in the stands at the Joe. Steve Yzerman would come in occasionally and have a beer in the staff office. When he popped out to use the bathroom, fans would say, “Hey Steve, great game,” because what else could they say to Yzerman? But everybody respected his space. If they didn’t, he wouldn’t have gone there.
I’ve never seen a bar like the Post anywhere, and on a Monday night in Detroit, when it and the casinos were the only things open, it always seemed like we had just won the Stanley Cup.
I never understood why Stevie Y only came to the Post once in a while until years later when I realized that eventually that sort of fan admiration wears thin. As I got older, the ugly-sweater team parties were not my thing, nor was the Halloween party where the guys got smashed and would stare at the wives who dressed in the kind of Halloween costumes you would not want any kid to see, costumes designed to show off the kind of body you can get when you take five Pilates classes, four spin classes, and a few private weight training sessions every week because you are a stay-at-home mom with a live-in nanny. At age twenty-two.
I give these women their due, though, because it’s a full-time job trying to keep your twenty-three-year-old husband’s eye focused on you and only you when there are so many distractions on the road. On most bus rides over the course of my career I’d hear some guy on the phone trying to put out a fire with his wife. You have twenty-three guys and certainly not twenty-three angels, and someone was always being careless and sloppy, or was married to a detective for a wife. I played with many guys who fell in love with a wide range of women from the beer cart girl at the golf course to the flight attendant on the team plane to the nanny. Some of them had happy endings.
But temptation is everywhere. On every team I played on in the NHL, the flight attendants from our charters would get drunk with the coaching staff at hotel bars on the road. And their memorable perfume would waft over us in practice. Just another hockey rink smell.
I have been growing further apart from my first real girlfriend, Sarah, and she is from me as I have been away. I think I saw her all of three times last year, and our phone conversations are marked by longer periods of silence. Some guys’ girlfriends make them call them when they go out on the town and when they get home, but not Sarah. She is her own person, which is why I fell for her, but it’s also why we’re falling away. She doesn’t define herself through me, which is what I loved, and I don’t define myself through her, and now that we’re in different places, doing different things, the distance emphasizes this reality of our relationship. After getting called up to Detroit, to be honest, I wanted to see more of the world I was in, and so I think less and less about a life back in Canada, married to Sarah, raising kids in the suburbs. I was still a kid myself, and best of all, I knew that. Sarah had left my parents’ place and was commuting to college from Kitchener, so it all just kind of came undone naturally. When we formally broke up in December of 2001 it had been over for some time.
NHL rookies’ relationships go one of two ways. Most often, the player moves his teenage girlfriend to whatever shitty AHL city he’s playing in. Then the guy buys her a dog for company because he’s away playing hockey all the time and she doesn’t know a soul. Or he pays for online university courses and takes her shopping a few times a month and buys her a gym membership and leaves her in an apartment complex with eight other girls who have identical résumés to hers. Then when he gets called up to the NHL he either takes her with him or sends her back to whatever small town in Canada she’s from, and gives her enough money to pay for school and live for a year, which probably costs him one two-week NHL paycheck.
It can be painful all around because some of these girls have put all their eggs in one basket. She feels so much pressure to make the relationship work that both she and the player wind up living a life of misery when they should be having the time of their lives, being together on their own and raising a dog.
What she really should say is, “You had better start putting in more time at the rink because if I’m going to subject myself to this misery you better become really rich so I can start having babi
es and eventually send nude photos to your former teammate while I’m taking half your fortune in the divorce.”
The usual way hockey relationships roll is that the player tells his girlfriend to pack up the truck because “we” have been called up, and just like that “she” has also made it. All the people back home who told her it was dangerous to commit to a fickle hockey player will be eating their words now because next summer, these kids will be house hunting for some new digs and hosting the family birthdays and Canada Day or Fourth of July parties. I would love to see a statistic on the percentage of NHL players under the age of twenty-five who have two kids.
The reason these guys marry Jen from Owen Sound is that they can’t handle the lonely nights that come with being a professional athlete—all those Friday nights when you need to be in bed by 10:30 P.M. because you have a game or a practice or an early flight, or those nights when you’re ordering room service in a hotel room on New Year’s Eve after being minus-two in a 3–2 loss.
Hockey players have huge emotional swings on a daily basis. In Tuesday’s game you are on the second line, and you score the first goal of the game, but by the end of the second period in Wednesday’s game you are minus-one and on the fourth line. Having someone you can come home to or call after that game who tells you the dog had a great day at the park and she just finished having some wine with the girls and she thought you had a great game and the defense played like shit is why guys don’t go at it alone. It’s why they don’t wait to get married until toward the end of their career when they have grown up into men and are over the groupies and jock sniffers.
The groupies are a constant presence, from junior hockey onward. Athletes, and hockey players in particular, are creatures of habit. It’s what we learn from an early age—repetition creates perfection. Or something close. And so that carries over into our personal lives, and makes the groupies’ job much easier.
