by Sean Avery
One reality that is perhaps so obvious that people don’t really talk about it is the fact that hockey players do everything from the vantage point of a sharpened piece of steel about an eighth of an inch wide and a foot long. When you get a genius sharpener like Rico, you really appreciate it. I guarantee that no professional player from another sport could ever become an NHL player and I guarantee that a hockey player could, with enough practice, become a professional in another sport.
• • •
I use music before a game to get me focused and pumped up, and more than a few fellow hockey players thought I was weird for the music I chose, bands like Radiohead or Sigur Rós. That’s a pretty stark contrast to the usual thumping and wailing that you hear in the dressing room before a hockey game, songs like AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” which have played in hockey dressing rooms since I was twelve years old.
NHL hockey teams play music in the dressing room from 5 P.M. until you go out for warm-up about forty-five minutes before game time. They have a set playlist that usually stays the same for a few months too long, and after a while we’re sick of certain songs. When I say “we,” there’s a hierarchy. The goalie is at the top of the pole—if he doesn’t like a song, it gets pulled from the list. You hope like hell that your goalie not only likes music but has taste, because if he doesn’t you’ll be listening to the sound of black holes collapsing or chipmunks mating for the entire season.
After the goalie come the star players, then the more veteran players, and then the rest of us. Of course, we’re free to create playlists, but the team gets to decide, in the order I’ve described. My playlist never made the cut.
Warm-ups in Los Angeles are legendary because it’s Hollywood, baby, and you never know who’s watching. So you enjoy those twenty minutes of cruising around with the breeze in your hair. (Your helmet is on the bench so you can show off your freshly cut hair with just enough product in it to keep a nice hold, but not so much of the stuff that it will run into your eyes the moment you start sweating.) In the middle of a game, you’re not thinking about what you look like, but during warm-ups? For sure.
For some reason, every team warms up the same way. Cross-ice saucer passes and shots on net. But you’re not picking corners on your goalie. You want to put the puck in the goalie’s pillows (his pads). I’ve seen Dominik Hašek skate off the ice during warm-up in Detroit because guys tried to score on him. Saw it with Henrik Lundqvist in New York as well.
People also think that we have some elaborate superstitious ritual when we leave the ice after warm-up. We don’t. There’s just always one guy who likes the attention and who chooses to be the last man beside the goalie to head off to the locker room. In Detroit, Darren McCarty liked to whack Hašek’s pads as the last guy. In LA, it was Ian Laperrière.
I wasn’t really the pad-tapping type. My warm-up was more likely to include a bit of eye contact with the hot blonde eleven rows up. It’s like seeing her in a coffee shop, except that you’re on the ice surrounded by 20,000 people who have paid to see you. I know I’m a monster for saying this, but here’s the thing: these women may not be yelling down to the ice, “Hey big boy, want to fuck after the game?,” but her look can say it, and if you send that look back, well, you’re in for some sexy time in about three hours. It’s a pretty cool feeling even if I never went for it, but a lot of guys did.
The other thing that’s dead certain three hours or so after warm-up is a media scrum in the locker room. Win or lose. Think about any other job in the world where after work a bunch of total strangers come into your office to interview you about that day’s work—about the things you did right, but mostly about the things you did wrong. They also ask you to gaze into the future and predict what work will be like tomorrow, or at the end of the year. Will you win or lose?
Oh yes, there’s one more thing: you and your co-workers have taken all your work clothes off and so you do these interviews naked. Crazy, right?
That pretty much describes an NHL locker room when the beat reporters descend to get quotes for their reports and roundups. Grown men—some of them happy to display their anatomical gifts—being interviewed by attractive women. With the Kings, our locker room flasher was Éric Bélanger. French-Canadian guys were very pretty, and had a European style sense that was different from the rest of the country. Belly thought he was the slickest of them all, and he loved his body, so he loved to show it off. Most of the time during post-game interviews his towel was so low you could see his pubic hair. When there was a female reporter in the room—in LA there were women who worked for Fox Sports—then towels “accidentally” fell to the floor and Belly’s would certainly be the first.
This is something nobody speaks about, but there should be some sort of labor law that preserves the dignity of both parties. All you have to do is imagine this in your own workplace and you get my point.
Speaking of workplace etiquette, the LA Lakers practice at the same facility as the Kings in El Segundo, and I see Kobe Bryant on a regular basis walking into the building from one of the parking spaces designated for the athletes. When I walk by Kobe I get the feeling that he looks at us hockey players like we’re the help, not like fellow professional athletes who share the same oval inside the Staples Center. There’s no greeting or even a nod of professional courtesy. I asked him to sign a basketball for me once, and he didn’t even meet my eyes when he said “No.” It could be that he’s just an asshole, which some say that he is. In the hierarchy of professional sports, the tall guys who put the ball through the hoop—and who play a game whose last minute can be longer than an NHL period—often are.
Perhaps you’re thinking “Hold on, Sean Avery is calling someone out for being rude?” Fair enough. Sometimes it was the job to be rude. But that’s not who I am personally. Still, sometimes, the two intersect when I meet up with another player who I hate. It’s dangerous, because you want to keep control of your emotions in order to have maximum effect when you do what I do, but Scott Hartnell is a guy I can’t stand.
He came into the NHL around the same time as I did. He’s from western Canada, he played for Canada in the 2006 World Championships (they came fourth), and he’s considered a true “Hockey Man” even though his style is chippy and ornery. It’s weird. A lot of the same people who think I don’t fit in with the league love Scott Hartnell, but he’s not that different from me. So we were probably destined to hate each other. That hate began November 19, 2003.
I score on my third shift of the game. It’s my second goal of the season and it puts us ahead of Nashville 1–0.
First goals of the game are always big goals, and when you score early in a game it changes everything. All of a sudden your legs don’t have that heavy feeling. You’re light on your feet and gliding from goal line to goal line. You skate with your head up as soon as the puck hits your stick because everything feels easier.
On my fifth shift I move fast toward Hartnell as he moves toward a puck going hard around the boards. He has to skip a beat to control the puck, and to a guy like me that’s the green light for a big hit. A guy thinking about the puck at his feet isn’t thinking about the guy moving in to crush him. Just for a split second, but a split second is usually all it takes to line a guy up. But Hartnell knows what he’s doing. He knows he’s got a target on his back. He hits everything that moves, so he knows no one is going to pass up an opportunity to take a run at him. He can feel me moving in, and turns slightly at the last moment.
I can’t adjust. My shoulder-to-shoulder check is now heading straight into his numbers. Like all great agitators he crumbles like a game of Jenga. Everyone in the building thinks I’ve killed him.
Players like Hartnell and me learn how to sacrifice our body for the penalty. We know how to position ourselves so that somebody coming full steam at us will look like they’ve destroyed us, but because of the way we place our feet and square our bodies, we hardly even feel it. It’s li
ke taking a fall when you’re a stuntman. Do it right and you only look hurt.
After I’ve sent Hartnell into oblivion (not), the whistle blows and there’s a lot of chirping. The Predators are yelling that they’re going to go after our star, Ziggy Pálffy, which is hardly a fair trade and which they don’t do. Pálffy ends up with twenty-one minutes ice time and an assist. Nevertheless, it’s the end of my game. I’ve played fewer than five minutes, and I’ve been docked with a five-minute major penalty for boarding and two ten-minute misconducts for the language I used to point out the referee’s utter stupidity in falling for Hartnell’s trick.
In any case, Scott Hartnell recovered enough from my attempted murder to play more than eighteen minutes that night, and while we beat Nashville 3–0, that fact rubbed salt into my self-inflicted wound. I vow to pay Hartnell back for this.
I had to wait a couple of seasons to get my next shot at him, but I was patient.
Hartnell was going through a divorce at the time and that gave me my chance for revenge the first time I lined up beside him. I asked him what it was like to be a star player making millions of dollars a year. He looked at me confused, as if I’d popped a trick question, but he answered it like a true Hockey Man. “It feels pretty good,” he said, and then I delivered my punch line. I asked what it felt like to be the only star NHL player making millions a year to actually get dumped by his wife while in his prime.
That is how trash talk works, and why I was so good at it. You pick your moments and your material, something that will go straight to the heart of the matter. Just swearing at a guy does nothing, but finding his Achilles’ heel is as good as scoring a goal.
• • •
Now that I am a full-fledged NHLer, I start developing routines. I’m eating the same pre-game meal every game day—garden salad with Parmesan cheese and French dressing, half a dish of spaghetti Bolognese, and two grilled chicken breasts. I’m napping from 2 to 4 P.M. daily, which is a job requirement, but sometimes it’s hard to fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon when it’s eighty degrees and flawless outside.
I’m having the same problem at night, so I start taking a single Ambien after games to help me sleep. Yes, I’ve read about the side effects—drowsiness, dizziness, weakness, lightheadedness, “drugged” feeling, tiredness, loss of coordination, stuffy nose, dry mouth, sore throat, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, stomach upset, headache, and muscle pain. But after a game when you’re wired from winning, or replaying all the “coulda shouldas” if you lost, you need to sleep if you’re going to be of any use to anyone the next day.
I’m also doing the same exact routine during pre-game warm-up. I take the same number of laps in a certain direction, I take my shots in the same order, and I pick the exact same corners in shooting drills. Why? It’s not superstition with me, though it is for many guys who believe that there’s some cosmic hockey wizard making sure we stick to hockey habits. I guess I do it because it’s one less thing that I have to think about.
The daily routine becomes the rock of a long career—I mean, it’s the one thing that you can control, and it’s one of the reasons athletes have such a hard time after retiring from the game. You’re going from a glamorous, high-octane life with dozens of demands made on you every day to a life of “nothing happening,” just like that. It’s one hell of a shock to most athletes. I’m thinking about my transition even now, and I promise myself that the “nothing happening” won’t happen to me. But still, I worry that it might not be my promise to keep.
On the night before New Year’s Eve, the New York Rangers are in town to play us at the Staples Center. I talk shit to Eric Lindros all night. Every time he skates by the bench I’m yelling, “Pick up the pace, Bonnie, you fat fuck.” Bonnie is Eric Lindros’s mother and she was notorious for being involved in his career. I tell him repeatedly that he’s never going to win and that will be his legacy. It bothers him. He must be thinking, “Who the fuck is this kid saying this shit to me?” His teammate Matthew Barnaby wants to kill me. Barnaby is the bad boy of the NHL at this point, and he’s intimidating, and I’m a little bit starstruck.
Barnaby was insane. He’s the only guy I’ve ever seen who talked more than me on the ice, but what he said was gibberish. It was like a crying baby on the airplane, except this baby was screaming out “Cocksucker! Faggot! Motherfucker!” non-stop. More dangerously, Barnaby was one of those rare guys who you couldn’t hurt. You could hit him with a sledgehammer on the head and he wouldn’t stop smiling. He liked to get hit, and he liked to fight, and he liked those high-pressure, game-changing moments, so it was a very risky thing to get into a fight with Barnaby. I knew what he was capable of.
But my game wasn’t so different, and I guess our coaches wanted to keep us apart. We didn’t get on the ice against each other more than a few times, and, as it was a close scoring game, he didn’t come after me in case I sucked him into taking a penalty. I could send a team into complete chaos before the morning skate was over. I believe that I’m probably the most talked-about third-line player in NHL history when it came to coaches giving their pre-game speeches and warning their guys to be careful around me. Getting me inside their heads before they even saw me. I’m not bragging about this; I’m just telling you how it went down.
Part of the reason I got away with taking so many penalties was that I drew so many penalties, and better still, I had the ability to do it when our team needed a power play. The downside of this aspect of my game was that I’d also be given penalties for things that eighty percent of players would never get punished for, simply because the refs had to keep the game somewhat close and wouldn’t call it. Unless it was against me. On some nights I should have drawn ten penalties against my opponent, which is not that many when you consider sixteen of the twenty-three guys on the other team wanted to kill me.
The one guy in all my time in the NHL who really pissed me off was Darcy Hordichuk. I don’t know what he was on, but he was so out of his mind that he was just a dumb agitator. He would repeatedly call me a “faggot” and “chickenshit” and say that he was going to eat me and eat my children and spit them out. I was like “Dude, I don’t even have children. Shut up. You’re an idiot.”
He also knew that he was tougher than me. He was a heavyweight in the NHL. He would have killed me in a fight and I knew that, so he was just stating the obvious. Yawn.
When I came to play in my hometown of Toronto I made sure to let the media know that Toronto was the last place on earth that I wanted to play. Not because of the media scrutiny, but because I’m starting to get an identity as a character in Canada, and if I played in Canada there would be no escape from this character. In LA, I can explore other things in life—I can even go to a cocktail party and no one will talk to me about hockey. In Toronto, it would be 24-7 hockey, and I don’t want it.
Then there was also the Toronto problem of Don Cherry, host of “Coach’s Corner,” who hated me. I saw him in the corridor at the Air Canada Centre and I asked him if he realized that all the players thought he knew nothing about the game. He muttered something under his breath and one of his handlers took him away. If I’d played in Toronto I would have been his whipping boy. I was no one’s whipping boy. I now had a real edge in the NHL and it made the game fun for me because I liked playing the bad guy. I liked the way it felt when I could see my opponents’ eyes filled with anger, an anger that hurt how effectively they played and gave an advantage to my team.
But make no mistake, I was playing a character. I’d put the bad guy mask on before I hit the rink and I’d take it off when I got home. It was a role I played in an arena, just like an actor would play it on stage. I enjoyed it, but I also enjoyed being able to turn it off. You can’ t live with that kind of intensity twenty-four hours a day.
That said, the on-ice guy had to come from somewhere, and of course, my long struggle to make the NHL despite being told I never would was a deep injustice I f
elt off the ice, and it spurred me on to prove the doubters wrong. The on-ice Sean would make an appearance in the real world from time to time. It was not always a good thing.
For example, I was having a dinner party with ten friends in my house in Los Angeles. I was helping cook dinner, listening to Joni Mitchell, relaxing. A new neighbor called the cops because apparently my pre-dinner conviviality was more than he or she felt appropriate. The cops show up and immediately start in with attitude—the kind you’d get from an opponent on ice trying to intimidate you. So I gave it back, but in a controlled way. I asked them, How loud was too loud? Did they have a sound meter reading that I had violated? I can be very literal, and of course, the cops got angrier because they couldn’t answer my questions. I told them I was not turning the music down because it was not too loud, and my neighbor didn’t get to dictate total silence to the neighborhood.
The cops went away, the neighbor called again, and the cops came back, looking for a win. They charged into the house and tried to turn the music down themselves, and I wouldn’t let them in the same way I wouldn’t let an opponent disrespect a teammate. I trash-talked them, I blocked them, and they responded the way cops do. They hauled me off to jail for slamming the door on them. I got out on $20K bail, they dropped the bogus charges, and that was that.
So this character of Sean Avery was a double-edged thing, but I really enjoyed playing him.
