Ice Capades

by Sean Avery

  I’ve started training camp on the same line that I ended the previous season. Belly and Lappy still yell at each other in French, which I found funny last season and annoying now, because I really don’t know if they’re talking shit about me. Lappy isn’t a very good skater, but he’s fearless—except when it comes to me. He’s afraid I’m going to take his job, and it creates tension between us. We’re similar players but Lappy has six years on me, and along with that he has an old-school hockey mentality which emphasizes that young players should know their place and not bring much attention to themselves, which is obviously the opposite of everything I’m about. By the way, I did end up taking his job a couple of seasons later, so he had more of a problem with me than I did with him.

  So yeah, there was sometimes a bit of tension on that team. But tension is not necessarily a bad thing. Tension keeps a team on its toes and motivated. Tension holds us all accountable, and it’s an important ingredient in teams that win. This means that teams are not always one big happy family, because when you create team chemistry, you get chemical reactions.

  I think teams do need to police themselves, and if the leadership group thinks a player is a problem then they have every right to go to management and tell them about the problem. It has to be done by the leadership group and not by one guy, because then you can get jealousy and revenge as the motivators. Personally, I’d just air it out in the room. I like to win, I hate to lose, and I don’t like it when guys don’t work hard. I’m also impulsive and not great at thinking things through before I say them, which has landed me in trouble a few times. But that also means that I expect guys to say things to me if I’m not pulling my weight. That doesn’t happen much, though. The majority of professional hockey players leave it to the coaches, whereas I would call guys out myself. Again, not always the best idea, but it’s who I am.

  I’ve been called a bad teammate over the years. I didn’t hang out with the Kings a lot. I didn’t enjoy going to the same fucking hockey bar—Harry O’s in Manhattan Beach—after every game. I didn’t dislike the guys, and I don’t think they disliked me. I just didn’t want to hang out in the same bar every night.

  One rumor that came out of the “bad teammate” narrative is that I made fun of Dustin Brown’s lisp. But I never made fun of Dustin Brown’s lisp. I did make fun of Dustin Brown’s girlfriend (now wife), Nicole, and told him to maybe wait a bit before he committed his entire rich, successful life to his teenage girlfriend, considering that at the time he was a teenager playing for the LA Kings in the land of beautiful California girls. Maybe my delivery needed some work, but I swear my intentions were good, and isn’t that what teammates are for?

  • • •

  In September, the league sent the Kings to play a pre-season game in Las Vegas. The NHL had been flirting with putting a team there for a while now, and we are part of the flirtation.

  Vegas is probably the single worst place an NHL pre-season game could be played, and I should know. It’s not because the fans and players don’t love it—they do. It’s not because the atmosphere wasn’t awesome—it was. It’s because veteran NHL players don’t take pre-season games that seriously. A veteran NHL player under contract for the upcoming NHL season would take full advantage of three days in Las Vegas to attend to any secret desire he hadn’t yet fulfilled so that he could leave Las Vegas regretting something. That, I promise you, is true.

  I’d never been to Vegas, so I was curious to see if what they said about Sin City was true. We check in to the MGM Casino and Hotel and I see that they’ve doubled me up with a roomie, Brad Chartrand, a pretty strait-laced guy who wasn’t a fellow traveler in my pursuit of fun. I immediately go back to the front desk and explain to the woman that I’m here with “The Hockey Team” (the term we’d use in places that didn’t really know hockey) and I wanted my own room so that I could have some privacy during the next couple days.

  This lady knows exactly what I’m looking for, so after a quick conference with her manager she asks how I’d like to pay for my room, and I gladly hand over my American Express Green Card—something I’m very proud of because it means I’m a successful adult.

  We don’t have a practice until the next morning and we don’t have a team dinner or any other bonding BS, so tonight is a go for freelancing fun. I head to dinner with Matty Norström and Big Bad Brad Norton. Matty is a great guy who comes from the School of Cheli when it comes to partying: all in. He can sit down and drink a bottle dry, and then he’s the first guy on the ice the next day. Same with Brad Norton. Norty Norton is six-four and 240 pounds of pure muscle, and it was pretty much a guarantee that by midnight Norty would either have the bar or the party chanting his name and/or we’d be trying to defuse some DEFCON 1 situation. We have dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s. As we walk in, some nearly naked models—who’d be completely naked but for the rose petals they’re wearing—splash around in bathtubs. So far, Vegas is living up to the hype.

  I’m not a big strip club guy, but the strip clubs in Vegas are like shows on Broadway. So we climb into a white limo (as I said, that’s my ride . . .) and make the ten-minute journey from MGM to a legendary peeler palace.

  We walk up to the club and a six-foot-five bouncer—I know this because he’s about an inch taller than Brad Norton—tells us to step inside where the table hostess will seat us and to enjoy our time in paradise. By the time we sit down and thank the hostess, we’re all $80 lighter. I should have known trouble was coming.

  The waitress then sashays up and asks us for a credit card. For some reason that remains high in my Greatest Hits of Stupidity, I offer my prized green Amex to hold our tab for the night.

  Spoiler Alert: The lesson I learn tonight is the birth of a rule I live by still and have never broken. I will never, ever hand my card to a waitress in any club till the day I die, because that guy always gets stuck with the bill and he never gets paid back. Or worse.

  The waitress comes back with our drinks and a credit card authorization form for me to sign. This heavy-handed bit of bureaucracy is done by strip clubs so guys can’t say their card was stolen and that it was not them, no way, no how, who spent that $14,000 on lap dances in the champagne room.

  Because this is not a cool story I will speed it up.

  Twenty minutes after signing the form, I was face-down in a full-body sweat, puking out Mr. Puck’s culinary delicacies onto the floor of the strip club. Matty Norström had to carry me out of the club and then he got me back to the MGM. I could barely stand, let alone walk, so the hotel got me a wheelchair and wheeled me up to the room.

  The next morning I woke up in the sunken bathtub of my suite. I made it through practice by the skin of the bile in my empty stomach, and all I could think about doing after practice was getting into my bed for a major nap.

  Then I realized that my credit card was still with the waitress at the strip club.

  I called Amex to cancel my card and the whole ugly truth came clear. The waitress obviously drugged my drink because she knew I was the cardholder, and when I got carried out she hit my card with $6,800 in bogus charges. What can I say or do to prove I’m right, especially after everyone in the place saw me behaving as if I’d been drinking for days and then get hauled out on my shield? Nothing but learn a lesson. Strip club waitress 1, Sean Avery 0.

  The hockey world has an expression for what came next: playing guilty. The idea is, when you’re hungover and everyone knows you’re hungover, or when you’ve done something stupid and everyone knows it, you play better. Playing shitty when everyone knows you’re guilty would be too much to bear. So you find some otherwise unavailable store of energy. Everyone has it. And just about everyone in the NHL has played guilty, some of us many, many times. That night, it was fucking “game on.”

  On that steamy September evening, the NHL went the full Vegas route in the MGM Grand Arena, featuring a hot tub filled with strippers ostensibly promoting beer and giving
lucky male fans back washes during the game (I’m not kidding). Meanwhile, I gave the NHL a taste of the character I was becoming: Sean Avery, master of mayhem.

  I drive future Hall of Famer Peter Forsberg so nuts during this exhibition game that he finally drops his gloves and comes at me like the bull he is. Everyone talks about how classless Sean Avery is, how below the belt I go with my trash talk, but that gives me far too much credit. I used the oldest trick in the book to enrage Peter the Great, simply pointing out to him, on an endless loop, how slow he looked because of his bad ankle which was a result of . . . wait for it . . . old age.

  The deadliest thing an older sports superstar can ever hear are those two words, because your career is defined by how you can make your body do things other mortals cannot, and now Time has called time, as it were. No way around it.

  Now, I obviously called him a whiny bitch and all the other classics, but what got him going was the truth. That’s the key to chirping at someone. It doesn’t hurt if it’s not true. My yapping took this game-changing player completely off his game. And we ended up in a line brawl. The fans from LA and Colorado went crazy in a way I’d never seen at a pre-season game. MGM Arena was rocking. It was like the playoffs. And for those people in Vegas who’d wandered into their first hockey game, all I can say is you must have been hooked for life. Meanwhile, I scored an assist, took forty-two minutes in penalties, and we won, 3–1. Forsberg got twenty-one minutes in penalties, and not a single point. I’d beaten one of the best players in the world.

  Anyway, good luck to the visiting teams coming to play the Las Vegas Golden Knights. After a night in Sin City, they’ll be skating uphill before the puck drops. I don’t gamble but I understand why other guys do.

  Also, I’ve never been back to a strip club.

  • • •

  The first game of my first full regular season with my new team is in . . . Detroit. Against the Red Wings. I mean, in case I didn’t miss the guys or the city enough, the NHL hockey gods obliged by starting me off with my new team back where it all began. I was excited about playing in Detroit, and about seeing the guys, and even about going back to Roma Café for my pre-game meal.

  How can I not be nervous? Detroit is the team that gave me my shot in the NHL, and I still have a lot of lifelong friends there. Detroit supported me as I learned the ropes as a rookie, but what Ken Holland said after he traded me still stuck in my head because I was also learning about loyalty in this business. Holland said he’d traded me because of my “lack of respect for the game and for the people of the game.”

  If I didn’t respect the game, why have I played it and practiced since I was five years old? Why have I dedicated painful summer hours to train harder than ninety-five percent of players in his organization and put my long-term health on the line if I didn’t respect the game?

  Fuck you, Ken Holland.

  He said I don’t respect people in the game. Is he referring to me trash-talking superstars in the league while I played for his Red Wings? If so, why didn’t he pull the jersey off my back and send my ass down to the minors instead of letting me play thirty-six games the year his team won a Cup?

  Fuck you, Ken Holland.

  I played a strong game against Detroit and finished with an assist, but I was on the ice with twenty seconds left in a 2–2 tie when Steve Yzerman beat Éric Bélanger up the ice and took a pass from Ray Whitney that got by a weak-defending Ian Laperrière. The great Stevie Y took the pass on his forehand and before you could blink he took a low, hard slap shot that beat the reliable (cough, cough) Roman Čechmánek for the game-winning goal.

  I shower after the game and think to myself that if I’d taken a better angle on the forecheck I could have stopped the outlet pass and maybe I would have earned a shift in overtime, and who knows what can happen then? But the reality is that we have eighty-one more games to play, and so you move on to get ready for the next one. And you hope that you have a group of guys who pay attention to all the little things in the game because it’s those little things that make the difference over an eight-month season. Everything in life is about taking care of the little things. Or so I think. But I won’t be playing our next game in Pittsburgh because of a Very Big Thing. And if wishes could make it undone, then it would be undone a million times. But they can’t.

  • • •

  On October 5, 2003, before the first game of the season, I’d received a call from my best friend, Adam Campbell, who was my teammate when we were sixteen-year-old rookies in the Ontario Hockey League, which is the highest level of hockey any sixteen- to nineteen-year-old can play. Adam asked me if I was sitting down, which is something I’d never been asked before.

  Adam told me that Dan Snyder, my former roommate and captain, was dead. Dan was the passenger in his Atlanta Thrashers teammate Dany Heatley’s Ferrari, which Heatley had wrapped around a tree while speeding in Atlanta a few days earlier. Dan had suffered massive head injuries in the crash, and the medics put him a coma to try to help his brain heal. His vital signs had been good, and there was hope that Dan would wake up and live a long life, but that didn’t happen. And now he was dead, at age twenty-five.

  The first time that Dan threw me his keys to start the car before we drove to school one winter morning in Owen Sound, Ontario, population 22,500, I walked out to the car in my team tracksuit and Sorels, jumped in, and turned the key. The car lurched forward and drove through the garage door. I could see Dan in the rearview mirror. He was standing there, shirtless, with his hands on his hips and smoke coming out of his ears.

  I’d never driven a manual transmission car before, and certainly didn’t know that Dan had left the stick shift in first gear. Dan chalked it up to something a captain needs to accept and he didn’t lay a beating on me that morning. He was a good guy.

  The funeral is in Dan’s hometown of Elmira, Ontario, about an hour’s drive west of Toronto. Five hundred minor hockey league players of all ages lined Snyder Avenue—Dan’s family has a long history in this town—and they tap their sticks on the pavement in a hockey salute as Dan’s family and his Atlanta Thrashers teammates walk into the Mennonite church.

  This is the first time that I’ve been touched by death up close, but I don’t cry at Dan’s funeral, and I wonder why. Would Dan have cried if he was at my funeral? I don’t think so, but how can I really know?

  I was more upset at seeing his mom and dad and sister and brother try to get through this day. Because it’s so painful to me, and I can’t imagine how they can bear it.

  I guess maybe they did the way we always do, by remembering the great things about the person who has died. And Dan’s heart—his desire—was the greatest thing. I know he would have been in the NHL for a long time, because he made it there against all odds. He was drafted to the OHL in the last round as an overage twenty-year-old and came into the league at five-nine-and-a-half and 170 pounds soaking wet. He was again picked in the last round of the NHL draft, and a few years later this skinny kid was an NHL player, because he was always the hardest working guy on the ice. It’s not just the kind of bullshit teachers and parents tell you. You really can make it. Nobody liked to burn the candle at both ends more than Dan Snyder, but he always showed up to play hard.

  Dany Heatley is at the funeral as well, with his leg in a cast. He looks like death, and he’s going to be charged with vehicular homicide, though we all know that the last thing he wanted was to hurt his friend. And then something amazing happens, something that makes every little problem I think I have just seem so small and worthless.

  After the memorial service, Dan’s mom and dad, Graham and LuAnn, read a statement to a news conference in the arena where Dan had first played hockey. And this is what they said:

  “We want you to know that we do not lay blame on Dany Heatley for the accident that took our son from us. Dany is a good person and no one feels more sorry for what happened than he does. Forgiveness is a
lso a part of being human and we know there is nothing to gain from harboring resentment or anger towards others. We are here to support him through this difficult time and know that he, too, is hurting so much.”

  • • •

  The house that Brad Norton and I have rented is one block away from the Pacific Ocean and belongs to Steve Shields, a goalie for the Chicago Blackhawks. We pay $6,000 a month which we split down the middle, and it’s a very reasonable amount to pay to be able to live a block from the beach.

  We play rock-paper-scissors to see who gets the master bedroom, which sits on the top floor and has its own deck overlooking the ocean. Norty wins. He didn’t cheat.

  This house becomes a regular spot for many after-parties that spring up after some beers at Harry O’s, the local hockey bar in Manhattan Beach which a retired hockey player named Billy Harris owned at one point, and which I do not frequent. Guys from the team would drop in to our place, along with the occasional floater, maybe a few hockey groupies, plus some Hollywood actresses or local surfer girls.

  I wonder sometimes whether living out here in something resembling paradise is making me soft. One thing for sure—it makes the ice soft at the Staples Center. But the Kings’ assistant equipment manager has it figured out. For arenas that were hot, like LA or Anaheim, Rico would give me a duller blade to skate on, because the ice would be softer and you don’t want it to dig in. For hard ice, he’d make them sharper, to give me maximum power. The idea behind skate sharpening is basically balancing control and speed. The sharpener creates a valley—or a hollow—in your skate blade. The deeper the hollow, the sharper the edges of your blades for turning fast and stopping hard, and the shallower that valley is, the more the blades touch the ice, so that you get more glide. Too much of either is bad.

  Every NHL player likes his skates sharpened a different way. Jaromír Jágr used to have his skates sharpened four times during a game when I played with him in New York, and some guys would have their wheels (which is what we called our skates) sharpened only on game days, because they wanted to keep their blades for as long as they could without having to break in a new pair. Some guys would just replace their blades and keep the boot, though I liked to get new skates because it made me feel like I was literally getting a power reboot. As a skate breaks down it gets softer, which means that it absorbs the power of the stride rather than transferring it to the ice.