by Sean Avery
• • •
The last month of the 2003–04 NHL season is easily the worst month of my life. To put it as starkly as I can:
STL 5–LA 3 . . .
SJS 5–LA 3 . . .
DET 5–LA 2 . . .
EDM 2–LA 1 . . .
VAN 1–LA 0 . . .
EDM 3–LA 1 . . .
CGY 3–LA 2 . . .
COL 2–LA 1 . . .
SJS 3–LA 0 . . .
CGY 3–LA 2 . . .
SJS 4–LA 3 . . .
I’m playing on a team that’s lost eleven games in a row. Our last eleven games of the season.
Our reason for this embarrassing and depressing slide into the ditch is that our team has given up on our coach, and we’re mailing it in to get him fired. Which doesn’t mean guys are purposely playing bad, it means they’ve lost their motivation. When a coach “loses the room” it means that guys will not go the extra mile to win it all. They’ll only do as much as they need to do. Not only did most guys dislike our coach, but they didn’t respect him, and when a team doesn’t respect their coach it’s a lost cause. He told us that if we didn’t play better he was going to get fired, which showed how out of touch he was. He wasn’t blaming us—he was trying to motivate us. What hockey players need is Mel Gibson in Braveheart, not the exasperated substitute teacher asking the class to settle down.
I think we can all relate to having a terrible boss, one whose total incompetence frustrates all the good things that you want to do for your organization and for yourself. I can tell you it’s just the same even when you’re a professional athlete. From the outside it looks like you’re enjoying a fabulous life, but from the inside, it was miserable.
And yet . . .
I put my head down and got on with playing my game. I was playing fifteen minutes a night during this stretch and I was playing hard. I wanted to send notice to my peers and coaches and general managers around the leagues, to fans and babes and every shithead who told me I was too small to play in the NHL when I was just a little kid, that the LA Kings were not losing because of me.
11
EVERYTHING IN ITS RIGHT PLACE
Two days after we put a bullet in the head of that terrible season, I drove to our practice rink in El Segundo to pack up my bags. This is the day when you grab sticks, tape, new skates, workout clothes, and anything else you need for your summer training wherever you plan to spend the off-season.
This year the guys roll into the room with mostly fake somber faces, bluffing their way through the day as if they really feel badly. But I know they’re glad to get away from this misery. They close the trunks of their sports cars and peel out of the parking lot for the open road, free for the next four months.
I drive off in pursuit of some culture. I head to Indio, California, to the Coachella Valley music festival run by AEG Live, the Los Angeles Kings’ owner Phil Anschutz’s entertainment company. I throw my bags into my Hummer. My wingman is Lawrence Longo. It’s a two-hour drive east, toward freedom.
As we blow out of LA on the I-5 and light up our first joint of the summer, I look in the rearview mirror and into my own eyes. I have no guilt. I played my ass off this year, and that’s all you can ask of a professional athlete. Now I’m going to play in a different arena.
Coachella is an excuse for every California girl who loves music or a big party or both to wear short shorts and bras and layers of jewelry, and to come forth and make music. I was single at this point, and although I liked to have a good time with the ladies I was always paranoid about getting a girl pregnant. So I wasn’t an uncontrolled sex machine at Coachella, though it was a great place to watch the lovely ladies pass by to the soundtrack of some great bands.
In LA, I had to learn to parse the ways of different women. There was the Actress, who is a chameleon and can be maddening; the LA Party Girl, always looking for fun here, with you, or over there, with the better offer; and the LA Model, who is usually a really hot girl not tall enough to be a New York model. I’d been hanging with an actress-model-and-mainly-party-girl named Nicole, and I met up with her and her friends when we landed at Coachella. She looks like the original California flower girl, and she’s smart and interesting and confident. She doesn’t expect anything from me, and that takes the pressure off. I have my all-access pass, I’m with an absolutely stunning girl and my best friend, my energy is at a high, and a photographer friend back in LA has given me something to try specifically for this festival. Inside a small folded piece of paper is pure MDMA. Otherwise known as ecstasy.
The drug makes all my worries disappear. I’m not bashing myself for not working out hard enough, or running over scenarios where I’ll soon be sent to play minor-minor-minor pro in Dogfart, Flyover. I feel at total peace with myself and the world and wish it would last forever.
That night was about experiencing something most of my friends have been doing since high school—getting high at a concert. I’m playing catch-up in many areas of life. That night in the desert I experienced MDMA.
I know everyone’s probably going to hang me for my “experimentation” with drugs because it contradicts the idea, welded into our cultural DNA, that every athlete must be a role model. But what is a role model? If it means someone who is a good citizen, who believes in treating people decently, who works hard and honestly, well, that can be anyone. If it means someone who makes a lot of money because they play a game that kids play anyway, and they don’t get in trouble for doing stuff adults do, well then, no, that’s not something I’d want any kid to aspire to.
That said, the passion and discipline you need to become a professional athlete is at the heart of being a good role model, so if that’s what a kid takes away from it, great. But athletes live on the edge, and we crave intensity, and that tends to put you in some places you don’t want a kid to go. I’m not advocating recreational drug use. At least not until you’ve worked your ass off and accomplished your dreams. Then go for it if you want.
I never really worried about getting in trouble with the NHL because the league’s drug testing looks only for anabolic steroid use. NHL players can do coke, pot, acid, crack, or meth and not get suspended. I know of roughly fifty NHL guys who used recreational drugs at some point during the 2003–04 season as well as in the off-season.
Now, I didn’t party with all fifty at once, but I saw it in social situations and it adds up. I mean, we’d see players out on the town after road games. You play in a place like Chicago, and you might see some of the Hawks in the clubs afterward, and you might see certain well-known players indulging in substances both legal and not. If someone told me that no NHL player ever did a bump in the bathroom on the team airplane, I’d tell them they didn’t know what they were talking about. Same thing if someone said we didn’t fire up a joint on the drive from the arena to the airport after a home game. Happens all the time.
It’s not a criticism. By Game 60 of an NHL season even rookies feel like veterans. You feel the intensity each time you skate out on the ice sixty times over a three-month period, but there comes a game, say a dreary Sunday afternoon tilt in Nashville, when you just can’t get your head into it.
Someone will say it in the room: “How the fuck are we going to get up for this one?” Take more drugs is one answer, but I’ve also heard players—and myself—say, “Let’s play for the people who pay our salaries.” In the playoffs, guys say “Let’s play for the crest on the sweater,” and no one ever mocks that idea. But yeah, drugs work too.
The other astonishing thing about drugs and the NHL is just how easy it would have been to take them across the border. When you fly into Canada, the customs guys come on the plane and walk down the aisle, looking at our passports, and more often than not, asking a player to sign a couple of souvenirs they’ve brought along for the occasion. They never looked in our bags. I could have been an international cocaine smuggler the entire t
ime I was playing, and made a lot of money, and no one would ever know. It might even be happening now, in our age of so-called ultra border security.
The NHL has the most lenient drug testing of the four major league sports, and also has the lowest number of players arrested for crimes. Is that because NHL general managers hold players more accountable than in other sports? Or is it because most NHL players come from small towns in Canada or the U.S.A. or Finland or Sweden or Russia, and not from the crime- and drug-infested inner cities of North America? I don’t know. But it’s a question to ask when you’re trying to define just what you want a role model to be. If you don’t have one in the house you grow up in, then you have long odds to be one in life.
After what was a truly stimulating weekend in all senses of the word, we headed back to LA from Coachella. My friend Bobby Carlton tells us to swing by his friend Rachel’s home, which is perched on a hill above Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. I had begun the day with a four-mile run in the desert before Lawrence had woken up, so I was feeling presentable after the hard and absolutely brilliant two days we had just put our bodies and minds through.
The house was filled with teak and had a major Moroccan vibe going on. Bobby was sitting out back near the pool with this beautiful blond woman. Now, we’re in SoCal and beautiful blond women are wherever you look, but this woman rose above them all, and I immediately recognized her. I was glad that I hadn’t made the trek back to LA unwashed and hungover.
Rachel Hunter was thirty-four years old and had lived a lifetime compared to me. She’d been married to Rod Stewart at the height of his fame (or one of the peaks, as the dude has been on top for a long time), and she was a supermodel during the 1990s. Rachel had seen the entire world ten times over.
The sparkle in her amazing emerald eyes told me she wasn’t just being polite but was genuinely interested in me. I think she was attracted to the fact that I was an outsider in Hollywood. She’d been living here for ten years under a very bright light, and she was getting tired of the LA bullshit.
We hung out for a few hours that Sunday afternoon, and on the drive home I asked Bobby for her phone number. That night I sent her a text message, asking if she wanted to cook me dinner one night that week.
There’s some calculation on my part behind the ask. I’m sure Rachel gets asked out to paparazzi-heavy hot spots like Ago or Koi all the time, so her dates can open Star magazine and see pictures of themselves with a celebrity. So I purposely made a point of asking to see her in the privacy of her home. I don’t want to be the guy who needs to have everyone know I took “Stacy’s Mom” out on a date. (If you don’t know the song, check out the music video and you’ll see Rachel in action, and I dare you not to fall in love with her, too. Let’s just say that she was cast to be about as hot as a mom can be.)
I also think famous women probably like a man being a little bossy with them, especially when the motives are good and they’re tired of everyone kissing their ass all the time. We decided on Wednesday night.
Rachel had been sober for a few years, so I stop and grab some Arizona Ice Tea. I’m more excited than nervous because this is much more real than anyone I’ve met so far in terms of potential romance.
Dinner goes great. Rachel makes roast chicken with peas and mashed potatoes, which shows both her talent as a cook and her sense of humor—such simple fare couldn’t offend the palates of two colonials from Canada and New Zealand. We spend most of the night talking about what we do and where we come from. Rachel is the mother of two children (Rod Stewart is their dad) and she had them young. Her son, Liam, is ten years old and actually plays hockey for the Junior LA Kings, while her daughter, Renee, is twelve.
We talk until I’m fighting to keep my eyes open and I still have to drive from West Hollywood to Manhattan Beach, which even at 2 A.M. will take me twenty-five minutes. I think about the evening I’ve just had with this lovely woman on the drive home, and I get way ahead of myself by making assumptions that the two of us will still enjoy each other’s company after the second or third date. Is the age difference too much? What if it’s true love and she doesn’t want any more kids? What if the famous ex-husband—make that extremely famous ex-husband who hasn’t officially divorced her yet—comes back into the mix? I guess the questions mean I like her. All I can do is ask her for a second date. She says yes. It’s the beginning of my first adult relationship with a woman.
It got serious pretty quickly—in fact, we talked marriage. It was not heavy-duty serious talk, but we did explore what our marriage would look like, and if it was realistic based on our age gap. Looking back on it, our age gap was nothing.
So now here I am, dating the woman of my dreams. Rachel had gone to the rainforest to save gorillas, she’d been married to a guy considered one of the sexiest rock stars ever, she’d lived in castles, she’d met the Queen. I was never going to impress her with flashy things. She was more interested in the relationship that I had with her son. I’d never been a dad, but my friendship with her son turned her on more than me showing up in a Ferrari to whisk her to my private plane (I don’t have a Ferrari or a private plane).
I was still painfully aware of all the things I’d missed by devoting myself to hockey. I was getting pretty good at pretending to fit in (I often had no idea what was happening around me), but I still felt nervous and insecure off the ice. But that was overridden by my desire to learn. And I wanted to learn about art.
My first real introduction to the art world was during a day spent cruising the art galleries of Beverly Hills with Bobby Carlton. To me, art galleries were as intimidating in real life as they are in the movies. They seem like secret societies, whose members will laugh you out of the room if you don’t say the right thing.
I grew up in a house with lots of love, but not with many books and no art. I listened as people at parties in LA talked about artists, and I read about them in magazines. I was aware that not only could art be beautiful, it could also be a business. A piece of art that caught my imagination could also one day be worth much more than I’d paid for it. So art spoke to me on two levels.
At this point, I didn’t own anything you could put in a frame and hang on the wall partly because I did not own any walls. The first gallery that we visit has many paintings—Picasso, Ruscha, Twombly, Warhol, and de Kooning. It also has work by photographers, one named Helmut Newton and the other a very attractive woman named Taryn Simon.
I asked Bobby if photographs are considered art, because the one thing I promised myself was that even though I knew nothing, the only way to learn was to ask questions. Learning is about taking in new information and connecting it to your mainframe of knowledge. Whenever someone would say something negative about my ignorance on some topic, I’d always point out to them that from the time I was four years old I’d been practicing to become one of the best hockey players in the world, and in that journey I learned many things that they hadn’t. That would always put them on their heels a bit. But yes, Bobby tells me, photography can be art.
Of course, there is also a type of photography that is definitely not art, and it’s practiced by that gang known as paparazzi. The first time I ever had paparazzi take a photo of me was with Rachel. We were now dating and we were getting lunch in Beverly Park, which is an even richer area than Beverly Hills, and just above it as you head up the hill to Mulholland Drive. We were halfway through lunch when Rachel started to stare off into the distance as if she had just seen an old enemy and was willing them to disappear. I asked her if she was OK and jokingly asked whether “Rod the Bod” was coming to sort me out. At this point I hadn’t met “Maggie May”’s creator, but certainly had some insecurities about dating his ex, even though Rod was thirty-five years older than me.
Rachel chuckled and then, under her breath, whispered “Paps.” “What are Paps?” I asked her, thinking it sounded like some kind of virus. And so they were, as I came to learn about the paparaz
zi, who think it’s completely normal to photograph you while you’re eating your lunch and not doing anything celebrity-ish at all. That’s “normal” life for a celebrity, but it’s never normal for the person with them, and that makes it more uncomfortable for everyone.
In truth, I had nothing to worry about from Rod Stewart, as Rachel had a great relationship with him. I never heard her once complain about him. She loved him. I’d been a huge fan of his, especially when he was with Faces, so I was nervous when we first met at his mansion in Beverly Park. I was nervous because he was Rachel’s ex, and because he was Liam’s dad, and because I was starstruck.
He lives in a private gated community on top of the hill that is the most exclusive neighborhood in the U.S. Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington, and Sylvester Stallone all live there. Major money. When I went to Kid Rock’s house in Detroit you blew an air horn at the end of the driveway and Kid Rock would roll out to let you in. When I went to Rod Stewart’s house you had to go through two security checkpoints to get into the inner sanctum, so I was already a little intimidated. And then I saw his house.
It was a true rock star palace. After you go through a gate announcing “God Bless Celtic”—Rod is a huge fan of the Glasgow soccer team—there’s a big fountain with statues blowing water into the air, a fleet of Ferraris in the driveway, and 28,000 square feet of a sprawling house, with vines growing up the side and Pre-Raphaelite paintings decorating the stairway wall in the entrance hallway. There was a 200-year-old French crystal chandelier hanging in the living room, a huge swimming pool, a tennis court, a five-aside soccer pitch, and serving staff in uniforms. Now I was really intimidated.
Rod, however, was very down-to-earth. He was in his early sixties, but looked a lot younger, and dressed in English gentleman casual—the country squire on the weekend. He put me at ease by talking to me about hockey. Specifically, his son, Liam’s, hockey career. Then he asked me to explain the offside rule. It’s always the one that confuses people who are new to the game. Rod had been a pretty good soccer player in his youth, so I just told him it was kind of like offside in soccer. You can’t cross the blue line ahead of the puck, in the same way that you can’t go past the defenders ahead of the ball in soccer. He got it.
