Ice Capades

by Sean Avery

  Of course, I also have to drive down to Detroit to pick up my stuff from Brett Hull’s place. And while I’m back in town it wouldn’t be right not to throw one last rager in that house.

  By the time I get to Detroit, Hull has packed up to head home to Dallas for the summer. The Red Wings ended up losing in the first round of the playoffs after the deadline deal which sent me to LA. To make my party one to remember, I round up some old friends and a couple of strangers at a bar. It was closing time, so I asked if anyone wanted to party at Brett Hull’s place. “Yes” was the answer.

  Around 4 A.M. we’d reached that terrible abyss feared by all ragers—we’d run out of booze. Or almost run out. There was that magnum of champagne sitting on proud display on top of the Jukebox bar. After we polished that off and the cabs had arrived to take away the last guests, I retired upstairs with a friend who taught some of the Red Wings’ kids at the local private school. Being old enough to hook up with the hot high school teacher but young enough to still pinch myself about it was the kind of cosmic synergy that made the night perfect.

  But not quite.

  That magnum of champagne was the only thing Brett had that was signed by the entire 2002 Stanley Cup champion Detroit Red Wings. Now the seal had been broken and the bubbly consumed by his twenty-three-year-old former roommate who’d lived above the garage, along with his merry band of guests, some of whom he didn’t quite know.

  There was only one thing to do. I filled the magnum with 1.5 liters of water and pushed the cork back inside, which is no easy feat, I can tell you that. I still have no idea if Brett knows, though now I guess he will.

  I go back to Detroit twice more over the summer of 2003, and each trip has an incident that makes my departure from Motown a little ugly.

  The first began as a golf tournament in Sarnia, Ontario, which is about an hour from Detroit. I stay at Kris Draper’s home on Friday night and we get up early on Saturday morning to drive to Sarnia to play in this charity tournament, which has a bunch of Detroit Red Wings alumni playing. I specifically ask Drapes to find out if Bob Probert is attending because of that sucker punch I hit him with a year earlier in Chicago—I don’t really feel like getting my face caved in on the nineteenth hole. Good news: Probert isn’t attending.

  After the golf tourney there’s a banquet, and then the bar opens and the real party begins. Local talent in the form of a group of divorced women in their early thirties arrive, and these gals are hungry. Hockey players refer to women who make it very clear that they want to sleep with a hockey player (or with any man for that matter) as “hungry.”

  Toward the end of the night I’m in a white stretch limo (at this point in my career I only travel in white limos . . .) with some of these hungry ladies, and we’re getting ready to head back to the hotel we’re staying at when suddenly former Red Wing Dino Ciccarelli sticks his head inside the limo and asks to speak with me. I say “no problem” and step outside. Dino Ciccarelli has always been one of my heroes, and Sarnia is his hometown. Maybe he wants me to come back to a party at his place.

  No, he does not. In a matter of seconds we’re in an argument about whether the ladies in the limo want to go back to the party I’m throwing at my hotel or not. They do. Dino wants them to come back inside the banquet, and after he calls me a “rookie” I file how much I loved Dino as a player in a safe place in my head and get ready to defend myself.

  Dino now takes a step toward me with a hand up like he’s going to grab my shirt and then push me back—which is a classic hockey fight move—or pull me closer to give me an ear full of well-lubricated advice. Either outcome is not what I want, so with one quick move with my right hand I slap his incoming hand down, and see the blood rush to his head. Then we both push each other at the exact same moment, which moves us both back a step away from each other.

  Fuck it, here we go, outside a stretch limo in beautiful downtown Sarnia. We both have our hands up and we square off to fight when thankfully my real-life guardian angel Kris Draper comes to the rescue to break it up, and saves both of us the painful Sunday morning embarrassment that would have followed.

  The next and pretty much final weekend I’ve ever spent in Detroit began on the Fourth of July, 2003. I went to a Tigers game with Cheli, Kid Rock, and John Cusack, along with some legendary guys from Cheli’s Chicago crew. After the game we piled into a rented tour bus and headed to Cheli’s Chili Bar in Dearborn for a surprise Kid Rock concert. This is what made Cheli and Rock such fucking legends.

  Halfway through Rock’s set I go out to the bus with two girlfriends I’ve rolled with for a few years in Detroit (and who are truly just friends) to smoke a joint. Yes, it’s true, though I hardly drink these days I like to burn a joint and listen to the music. The bus is deluxe—a multimillion-dollar Prevost that rock stars tour in. I once smoked a joint inside Willie Nelson’s Prevost, which actually has a gigantic portrait of Willie smoking a joint painted on the entire back portion of the bus. Cheli is already on the bus, taking a breather.

  Then this guy walks on the bus and sits down beside one of Kid Rock’s buddies.

  The buddy politely asks the kid to leave, but the kid—he’s maybe a bit younger than me, but not much—doesn’t budge. So I stand up from the kitchen table and tell him it’s a private bus and he needs to get off right now, but this guy tells us he’s going to stay and hang out and asks if we’re going to smoke a joint. I can’t believe it.

  The guy then stands up like he’s going to walk to the back of the bus, so I move toward the front. We’re just about face-to-face when the guy drops his shoulder, which means a punch is coming. Before he can get one off, my right hand goes from hanging beside my waist to the dead center of his face and instantly I can feel a sharp pain shoot up my forearm.

  The guy is flat on his back, sucking air through his mouth loudly, deeply, and fast, but he’s definitely out cold. It was the longest thirty seconds of my life before he came to and we got him off the bus and had one of the doormen put him in a cab with a fifty-dollar bill in his pocket.

  I woke up the next morning before my drive back to Toronto and read a text from Cheli saying that his actor buddy John “Platoon–Wall Street” McGinley had found the guy’s front tooth, root and all. I hit that guy as hard and as perfectly as possible, and it was the most expensive punch of my life because although the cops wouldn’t charge me, the kid sued me in civil court—my first lawsuit, by the way. We settled on a $26,000 lump-sum payment. But I was so pissed off by the whole incident that I made the guy wait—$200 a month until he tried to garnish my wages. Then I cut the guy a check.

  I know from experience how expensive dental bills can be, so hopefully replacing his front teeth didn’t leave much for him to take a vacation to Myrtle Beach. Anyway, lesson learned: when you have money, the bull’s eye on your back is real and you need to be careful.

  • • •

  Imagine this. You’re living in your parents’ basement in a Toronto suburb and Brad Norton—NHL heavyweight, master of sarcasm, barroom charmer, and all-round fucking savage—invites you to LA to go to the ESPYs. By the way, he’s your roommate. You go, right? Brad is my kind of guy.

  The thing is, though, it means you’re living in two very different worlds. This is probably true for most athletes. Most of us come from small towns, or poor neighborhoods, or poorer countries. Then we end up in chartered planes and luxury hotels and clothing stores where pants cost $750. Every big-league athlete goes through it. But big-league athletes who end up in LA experience culture shock of a different order of magnitude.

  I mean, when I head back to LA from my parents’ basement, I stay at the Chateau Marmont. The place looks like a Bavarian castle sitting on a hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard. From its Gothic cloisters to its poolside bungalows, it’s a magical spot where celebrities live out all the excesses they desire. When I open the patio door of my room, I look out on a garden restaurant where
it’s almost impossible to secure a reservation because from 8 A.M. to 2 A.M. it’s filled with every major director/movie star/producer/agent/musician in town, meeting to discuss upcoming projects.

  In those days they let you smoke at the fucking table. Actually, they sold cigarettes like a side dish on the menu. Joaquin Phoenix is sitting poolside drinking a Diet Coke and chain-smoking while reading what I assume is a script.

  At one end of the pool are a couple of guys who play in a band hanging out with LA party girls. One of the ladies orders her Diet Coke with three lemons and smokes a pack of American Spirit yellows. Over there, a middle-aged balding man who has a stack of scripts on the table talks on the phone the entire day so loudly that everyone within a 200-foot radius can hear his bullshit. (He’s the same guy you always see in the boarding area at airports who treats the entire captive audience to his stupefying speeches to some poor minion on the other end of the line.) There’s a supermodel drinking bottled water and also smoking a pack of cigarettes, this time Marlboro Lights. And there’s an English or Australian couple who are in dire need of a few days’ sun and can’t stop staring at everyone and wondering if they’re “someone.”

  So, yeah, LA is not like anything life has prepared me for. In Detroit I’d hear people talking about Michigan football and jobs in the auto industry. I may not care about football, or have anything to do with auto unions, but I got it. They were talking about the same world I grew up in. In LA, they’re talking about themselves, about their summer plans and their winter vacations, and about how to burnish their image. I definitely have some insecurities when I hear people talking about places like Paris and New York and Aspen, but I’ve decided that the best way to deal with this sort of thing is to be honest and ask questions when I need to. I lived in West Hollywood, which is well stocked with men and women of the world who have resources and style, and I ran up against it all the time. I won’t pretend to be something that I’m not, which at this point is a globe-trotting hotshot who’s been around the world several times. I’ve only flown in first class once, to model tuxedos on Good Morning America, and while that’s not the measurement of success, it just goes to show you how wide-eyed I am.

  Still, I’m starting to feel very comfortable in my life beyond the rink. Day in and day out I meet a lot of agents from alphabet-soup agencies like CAA and UTA and WME. I meet a lot of “floaters,” which is a term describing a celebrity’s or star athlete’s “friend,” someone who somehow has a schedule allowing them to be by their famous friend’s side at most social events. It’s a very LA species, and a floater sticks out like, well, a floater in the toilet. The thing is, there’s so much money sloshing around that there’s a whole ecosystem of losers who thrive just by hanging around and living off handouts. Let’s just say I didn’t meet a lot of floaters where I grew up.

  But then, I didn’t want to stay where I grew up, did I? I love this place more than any place I’ve ever been in my obviously boring life to date.

  • • •

  Back to the ESPYs for a second. Remember who won Best Athlete that year? I’ll give you a clue: he was later outed as an epic steroid user (along with a cocktail of other performance-enhancing drugs). Yes, it was Lance Armstrong. It was roughly around this time that people started wondering whether NHL players were on steroids, and figured they should test us. But they shouldn’t have bothered. Steroids work for sports where you need bulk and muscle, not for the ones where you need speed and agility. No hockey player I know has any interest in steroids.

  When you look at pro hockey players stripped of their gear, it’s surprising to many people how lithe we are. Hockey players need to be able to skate. When some TV analyst says that a player isn’t a strong skater, it’s all relative. A guy isn’t going to make the NHL if he’s not an elite skater. That’s as much about agility and balance as it is about performing one movement more powerfully than the next guy. Carrying around a few extra pounds of beef, or being able to bench some ridiculous amount, is only going to slow you down and make you a worse hockey player. So, no, there’s no steroid problem in the NHL.

  But life in LA is not just smoking cigarettes by the pool or walking the red carpet with Lance Armstrong. Before I go to the ESPYs with Norty, I head to Runyon Canyon Park, which is 160 acres of lush and rugged parkland between Hollywood Boulevard and Mulholland Drive, to run “vertical sprints”—a fancy term for running up a hill.

  The first three steps you take from a dead stop to surging forward during a hockey game are the most important. Having a bomb like Shea Weber or being able to stickhandle like Connor McDavid would be nice, but that’s not what makes you a good hockey player. Lots of guys have great careers with those weapons. But no one sticks around if he can’t control the most important thing: how far away you are from the other guy. If he’s got the puck, you need to close the gap fast. If you’ve got it, you need to pull away before he closes the gap. If you can’t do that, you’re not in the NHL. Because if you can’t do that, you don’t have time to do anything out there. I bet most guys would trade just about anything for an explosive three strides.

  It’s all about that gap. The moment that you know the pass is coming until the moment it hits your stick is less than two seconds. You’ve got a few fractions of a second to make an important decision. By the way, you’re also skating at full speed, aware that if you’re looking at the puck, there’s a guy who hates you just out of your field of vision making a decision of his own: can he run you over before you’ve got control of the puck? So you have to decide whether you stay wide on the defenseman or need to cut in the moment the puck hits your stick.

  Let’s say I’m staying wide. I’m going to protect the puck by getting my inside shoulder in front of the D-man who himself has pivoted from backwards to forwards and is now skating beside me, trying to get his stick in front of the shot I’m about to take. That shot is probably less than two seconds away. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out where to put the puck. My eyes are up, looking to see whether the goalie is guessing that I’m going to cut across, whether he’s tight to the post, or whether he’s hedging his bets and opening up his legs to be ready either way.

  The game’s great goal scorers can make it look slow and easy when they drop their shoulder at the goalie to freeze him, then calmly put the puck wherever he’s not. But trust me, it’s neither of those things. If you can’t explode into open ice to take that pass, maybe you don’t have the body position you need to get the shot off. Or if you arrive a fraction of a second later, maybe that defenseman has stepped up and smoked you. The difference between a guy who almost made it and a star who makes millions and hangs out in LA art galleries is a fraction of a second.

  This is why I run fifteen five-second, then twelve ten-second, and then ten fifteen-second sprints up a serious hill at 5:45 P.M. on a Friday in the heat of LA in July. I also do it because if I don’t push myself up that hill then what should be the best weekend of my life will now be a three-day guilt trip with me unable to dodge the shadow of shame for not putting in the work. But if I survive the run, I get to head to a party at the Mondrian hotel with Norty.

  10

  THE KING OF LA

  I truly believe what kicked off my 2003–04 season was getting into it with Laird Hamilton at Cheli’s place in Malibu in July. Just a couple of years earlier when I first saw him standing on the beach with his wife, Gabby Reese, I was in awe of their majesty. But I’d gained a lot more confidence in those two years, and now I was finding Laird’s swagger to be a little much.

  Me and Cheli and Laird and a few other guys had worked out, and we were having beers on the beach. Laird was always the alpha of the pack, and had to make sure that any guy in his vicinity knew it. I’d heard enough so I just started laying into him like I’d do if we were on the ice. “Your wife is way more famous than you,” I said. “She’s way more successful. She makes tons more money.” And so on. It drove him fucking nuts, and beca
use he couldn’t trash-talk me back, he wanted to wrestle me.

  So we had a wrestling match and I put him on his ass. He underestimated me. He was a strong guy, but come on, he’s a surfer. He’s not a brawler. Even when I beat him he said he’d lost because I was sweating so much that he couldn’t get a proper grip on me. Cheli just smiled.

  I felt that tussle on the beach with a guy whom I’d hero-worshiped was another milepost. The hero had become a hot-air balloon, and so I punctured it. Because I was now feeling like an equal.

  I took that feeling into the Kings’ 2003–04 training camp, and I’m once again at the top of the fitness class along with Matty Norström, who understood fitness and took it seriously, and Kip Brennan, our resident tough guy, who looked like he’d been pulled from the pages of a fitness magazine. (God help Laird Hamilton if he were ever to have a disagreement with Kip on a beach somewhere.) On the other hand, Luc Robitaille wasn’t in great shape, but that’s not what he did. He got by on talent. But younger guys were starting to figure out that if they wanted a long ride at the top of their game, then they had to look after the machine they were riding.

  At this point in my career I will still fight in training camp, which is a rarity among proven NHL players, but I feel that I’m not a proven player yet. In the 2003 camp I don’t remember who I fought, but it would have been some no-name East Coast Hockey League player who was trying to play like me. At the time, this guy wasn’t modeling his game after me—he was just trying to do what I did. As my career went on and more guys played like me, I didn’t have to fight in training camp because they’d modeled their games on mine, and they didn’t want to mess with me.