When you are playing at home and you are injured, your team physician shepherds you through the hospital process. You receive immediate care. In Dallas, I waited, by myself, in the emergency room. A half-hour passed, then an hour, and I still wasn’t seeing a doctor. Having grown impatient, I stood in the doorway, spitting blood into a cup just to remind everyone I was still waiting for the doctor. As I stood there, believing I wasn’t receiving enough attention, an ambulance came roaring in and paramedics brought in a teenager who had lost his leg in an automobile accident. The severed limb was on the gurney with him. As doctors and nurses scurried to treat him, I remember thinking, “This broken jaw isn’t that bad.” I returned to my seat.
Eventually, the doctor came in and recommended immediate surgery, after which I would need to spend two days in a Dallas hospital before I returned to Phoenix.
“Fuck that,” I said. “I’m getting my ass out of Dallas. I don’t want to be anywhere near Derian Hatcher. I don’t want to be near the Dallas Stars.”
The doctor seemed surprised that I didn’t want to have it taken care of immediately. But 10 minutes later, I was in a cab, X-rays in hand, heading back to the arena to rejoin my team. While I was taking a shower, the Coyotes trainers were making arrangements for me to have immediate surgery performed by noted Phoenix oral surgeon Reed Day. Since I was scheduled for surgery as soon as I could get to the hospital, I couldn’t take pain medication, nor could I have anything to eat or drink.
My memory of the charter trip back to Phoenix involves playing cards in the back of the plane. Throughout the game, I spit blood into a plastic cup. I filled up two cups. I was a mess.
When I walked off the team jet in Phoenix, I climbed into a limousine and headed directly to the hospital. I remember the doctor explaining to me around six in the morning that my mouth would be rubber-banded shut. The idea of not being able to open my mouth terrified me. I asked the doctor to take out a couple of bottom teeth so I could drink through a straw.
As hard as this may be to believe, I have never harboured a grudge toward Hatcher for fucking me up that night. Going into that game, I felt as if I had a bounty on my head. I was jacked up because I knew I was going to be targeted. I love that kind of shit. I loved entering games when there was a secondary storyline, a subplot, to raise the game’s drama. I loved the challenge of being able to determine how that storyline would play out. I knew the Stars were coming after me. I didn’t know who would attack me, or when it was going to happen, but I knew someone was going to try to hurt me. Obviously, I didn’t expect Hatcher to redesign the bone structure of my fucking face. But in hindsight, I view what happened as just another epic chapter of my NHL journey.
I certainly would have loved to break Hatcher’s fucking ankles that night. I would have loved to knock his fucking jaw into the back of his fucking throat. But I didn’t hate him for what he did to me. I respected Hatcher as an extremely competitive person and a winner. I had always admired the way he played. His intensity level was two levels higher than most players. In a weird, maybe perverse, way, I respected Hatcher for doing what he did to me, for avenging Modano.
The hit did change me. It added another layer of toughness that I didn’t know I had. It proved to me that I could walk through fire and play the next day.
Hatcher was suspended the final two regular-season games, plus five playoff games, for his hit. Given the extent of my injuries, the sentence seemed light. Hell, I’m sure people have received jail time for hurting someone less severely in an assault. But at that time, the five-playoff-game suspension represented the longest postseason suspension since Maurice “Rocket” Richard was suspended the final three regular-season games, plus the entire playoffs, for punching a linesman in 1955.
When the suspension was announced, I told the media: “I hate to say what’s fair or unfair. My opinion is I can’t play in the playoffs, so I don’t see why he should get to play in the playoffs. That’s why I hope they get knocked out in the first round.” Even without their captain, Hatcher, for five games, the Stars weren’t knocked out in the first round. They ended up winning the Stanley Cup. Hatcher sipped champagne out of Lord Stanley’s bowl that summer after I was sipping my meals through a straw that spring.
My wife, Tracy, tried to make it as normal as possible for me, even blending up filet mignon and pasta. One of my favourite dining dishes is osso bucco, which is veal shanks braised with vegetables, white wine and broth. Tracy even put that in a blender in an effort to help keep me from losing too much weight. I still dropped 17 pounds. But I didn’t lose my desire to be back in the lineup as soon as possible. We had a 3–1 series lead against the St. Louis Blues in the first round, and then we allowed the Blues to come back to tie the series and force game seven. Nineteen days after my surgery, I told the Coyotes I was going to play in that game seven. I was outfitted with a special helmet that looked like a cross between a goalie mask and football helmet. I looked like an imperial stormtrooper from the Star Wars movies.
Dr. Day addressed the media, saying: “Jeremy understands the risks. If he was a regular patient, six to eight weeks would have been required. Certainly, he could break his jaw again. . . . He has accepted the risk that if he breaks his jaw again, we will repair it.”
I felt like I could make a difference, and I took a regular shift, including playing on the power play and killing penalties. We lost a 1–0 game in overtime on Pierre Turgeon’s goal. I played more than 26 minutes in that game. It was one of the most disheartening losses of my career.
Schoenfeld was fired after that season and replaced with Bob Francis. It certainly wasn’t Schoenfeld’s fault that we were knocked out in the first round. I believe that if Hatcher hadn’t broken my jaw, we would have won that first-round series.
My one regret about my five years in Phoenix was that we couldn’t advance beyond the first round. My honest assessment of why that never happened is that we had bad luck. In 1997, we had a 3–2 lead against Anaheim in the first round, and I blew out my knee and we lost that series. In 1998, we took a 2–1 series lead against the defending Stanley Cup champions, the Detroit Red Wings, and then Keith Tkachuk and Nikolai Khabibulin got hurt. In my fourth year, we were steamrolled in five games by a Colorado team that lost to Dallas in seven games in the Western Conference final. I tried to stir up our passions in that series, calling the Denver media “morons” because they said before the series that we had no chance to win.
Raymond Bourque had been acquired to be Colorado’s spiritual leader, and after game two, I mocked him by saying: “Ray Bourque is the messiah. You can’t touch him.”
Hey, you do what you can to get your team involved in the series. Remember what Keenan said: negative energy is still energy. And if Colorado is chasing after me for a game, maybe they forget what their mission is. That turned out not to be the case, but it was worth a try.
9. Not All Rainbows and Butterflies
While this book was being written, my daughter, Brandi, was 17. At the time, her boyfriend was 18.
“Do you know her boyfriend is the same age you were when you played your first season in the NHL?” Tracy said to me one day.
It takes the wisdom of age to appreciate how immature we truly were when we were teenagers.
When Tracy told her parents we had something to tell them when I was 18, I remember her mom’s reaction was, “Oh my God, you aren’t pregnant?”
No, but I was leaving Boston College to play pro hockey, and that might have seemed just as irresponsible to Tracy’s parents. Given the career I had in the NHL, it was the correct decision. I loved every minute I had wearing an NHL jersey. But that doesn’t mean there were no negative consequences to my decision to turn pro when I was 18.
I was a teenager with a six-figure income in 1988. I was a popular Chicago celebrity by age 20, a 40-goal scorer by 21, a 50-goal superstar at 22, and a million-dollar athlete by the time I was 23.
By the time I was traded to the Coyotes, I was 26, but I was
still trying to find the proper balance between my job, my family and my fame.
If you don’t believe that that level of popularity, or money, can fuck up your thinking a bit, then you either haven’t been around many young adults, or you don’t pay attention to celebrity news. The sports and entertainment landscape is littered with pop icons who have made unwise decisions when they were young and rich.
When I received my second Blackhawks deal, paying me more than a million dollars a season, I remember showing the contract to Tracy’s father and saying, “Do I earn enough now to take care of your daughter?”
Of course, by then, her late father had revised history by saying he knew all along that I was going to be a star player.
As I was gaining money and fame, it never occurred to me that I was losing who I really was. No one wants to hear a professional athlete bitch about his, or her, life, because many people would gladly trade places with them. But the truth is most people can’t comprehend the difficulty and pressure that come with being a pro athlete. In addition to the aches and pains that come from training and competition, there is the pressure of living up to expectations. You are trying to win for your city and your team, and your effort is constantly being scrutinized by the media and fans. Always, there is someone coming up that wants to knock you off your high horse. People believe the life of an athlete is all glamour, but it is far from it.
I have so much respect for players like Mike Modano, Joe Sakic, Steve Yzerman, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and others who reached the top, handled the pressure and were able to stay on top. My issue wasn’t about dealing with the pressure. My issue was letting the stardom change who I was. For a period of time when I was in my 20s, I lost my way. My priorities became fucked up.
You don’t realize what’s happening to you, because you just start to accept your abnormal life as being a normal existence. You miss family weddings, birthdays, holidays, etc., because you have a game, practice or road trip. I believe I missed my first seven Thanksgivings after I joined the Blackhawks because of the team’s schedule. It’s always about putting the team first. Imagine how a normal bride-to-be would feel if the groom came home and said, “We have to change the wedding day because I’m going to have to work later into the summer.” That’s what happened to us when the Blackhawks made their long playoff run in 1992. But that was my fourth year in the NHL, and by then Tracy knew how this all worked.
To be the wife of an NHL player is a thankless role, because the player hears the applause and the wife inherits the problems that accompany stardom. When a player is traded, he heads off to his new city immediately, while his wife stays behind to sort through the ruins of their life. It’s like a player has two families: one at home, and one in the dressing room. And sometimes, it’s the family at home that ends up taking the back seat. Nothing sums up that reality better than when you see a professional athlete stopping to sign an autograph at a restaurant, while his wife is standing a few feet away, waiting for him to finish.
Once, when I was playing for the Blackhawks, I took Tracy to Chicago’s renowned Pump Room restaurant for Valentine’s Day. We were sitting there in the famous number one booth, maybe the best table in the city. It had a rose and candlelight. We were settling in for a romantic dinner when a Blackhawks fan stopped by our table and began to chat with me. Within minutes, he had sat down at our table. One night, we had to leave Maggiano’s restaurant in Chicago because fans were lining up at my table, making it difficult for the waitstaff to navigate around the dining room.
Believe it or not, when I joined the Blackhawks, they had a rule that players couldn’t live in the city, probably because they feared that we could get caught up in the nightlife.
When I played, I believed it was important for me to give back to fans, and I still believe that today. But when I look back at my years in Chicago, I realize I was naive about what was happening to me. I was probably too trusting of too many people. Tracy tried to warn me. In my dealings with people, she often ended up playing the heavy. By the time we were married, Tracy had her college degree and she had other life experiences as a dressage competitor. She kept trying to tell me that I needed to understand the difference between my true friends and those who wanted to be with me because I was an NHL star. I wasn’t listening to her back then.
At that young age, I had a hard time saying “no” to anyone. I always blamed Tracy for everything. She saw my personality changing and my family life unravelling long before I realized it was true. Now that I’m older, I realize I was unfair to her in those early years. I had no life experiences when I signed my NHL contract, and then suddenly I was a star in the Chicago social scene. I didn’t handle that situation particularly well.
No one understands better than me that fame can fuck up your home life. As an NHL athlete, I had a schedule that couldn’t be changed. Tracy accepted that that was our life. The tension was caused by decisions I was making about how to spend my free time. At that point in my life, Tracy says, there were only four people around me who were willing to be brutally honest with me about what was happening: Tracy; her dad, Richard Vazza; my agent, Neil Abbott; and Mike Keenan. The other people in my life were telling me every day how great I was.
Keenan was hard on me, and he would piss me off. But Tracy always loved Keenan because she felt that he was hard on me because he was trying to help me become a better player. When people shit on Keenan because he was a hard-ass, Tracy always defends him: “When you peel back the layers of that onion, you find a big heart.” She wishes that Keenan would have been my coach longer, because she believes he would have spotted the warning signs that my real life was spiralling away from me.
For several years, Tracy believed I was gambling too much and picking the wrong friends. I placed too much emphasis on the next big party and not enough on what was happening in my family life. When I was playing for the Coyotes, she often confronted me.
“You are 28 and living like a rock star,” she told me. “What are you going to do for money when you are 60?” To her, it was clear that I was so busy trying to be “J.R. the superstar” that I forgot who Jeremy was.
Tracy’s frustration finally boiled over on October 9, 1999. My Phoenix Coyotes were in Chicago to play the Blackhawks. Tracy came to Chicago. Fed up with my unwillingness to confront the problem, she confronted me at the Coyotes’ dressing room, between the second and third periods of a game at the United Center. I am sure Tracy established a new league standard that night by becoming the first NHL player’s wife to scream through an open dressing-room door that her husband was an asshole. The pressure had been building for a long time, and Tracy couldn’t keep it bottled up any longer. She went nuclear on my ass in the dressing-room doorway as my teammates looked on.
When I tried to calm her down, it got worse, not better. Our heated argument extended beyond the start of the third period. Whatever words I used in that situation were not the right words.
“I’m out of here,” she screamed, before stalking off.
I was enraged. By the time I arrived on the bench, I was an angry bull, and someone was going to pay a price for my anger. It turned out to be my best friend for many years. Although no one believes me, I would swear on the bible that I just slashed the first person who came near me, and it was Tony Amonte.
I don’t know where my mind was, but it wasn’t on the game, or Tony, when that event happened. The one regret I have about my career is going on the ice that night with that level of fury in my heart. But I will go to the grave swearing that I didn’t know it was Tony when I slashed him in the face, opening up a gaping wound. Whether Tony and his family believe that, I am not sure. All I can say is that I was in a blind rage when I stepped on the ice.
Although I apologized for my actions, Tony and I didn’t speak for a year and a half after what I did. We didn’t truly reunite until we were roommates at the 2002 U.S. Olympic orientation camp. He eventually forgave me. He later said: “I consider us friends. He’s like a
brother. People ask me, ‘How can you not hold a grudge?’ I ask, ‘How can I? Life is too short.’”
I still consider him one of my best friends. We get along, and we have a blast when we are together. But to be honest, we really haven’t been quite the same since that day when I went crazy on the ice. I received a match penalty for that slash, and the NHL suspended me five games, and I lost over $100,000 in pay. But the biggest price I paid is knowing that a good friend believed I tried to hurt him.
Even though this was the pre-Twitter NHL, there were plenty of hurtful rumours that circulated around the hockey world about what had caused the blow-up that night. The truth about what happened that evening was that Tracy was trying to convince me to bring back the man she had married. The one who had been lost in my climb to stardom and replaced by someone she didn’t recognize.
“You need to get your shit together,” she said to me that night.
When the emotions gave way to honest dialogue about what was happening in our life, I knew Tracy was right. She said I had lost my gratitude. She was right. By nature, I’m sentimental. I don’t want to be the guy who takes his family for granted. I had lost my focus, not only about my life, but also my career. Tracy told me that she believed I had never recovered from the hurt I felt when the Blackhawks said I wasn’t worth the money I was demanding in my final negotiation with them. I started working with sports psychologist Gary Mack, and both of us went to see him to work through the issue of how to regain my focus on my career and family.
“I want to go to find out how this sweet kid I fell in love with became a devil,” she said.
The psychologist helped me find my way back home. Maybe I became more Jeremy and less J.R.
Mack’s counselling helped me reprioritize my life, with a greater emphasis on Tracy and my family. Although I had a gambling problem, what I really had was an ego problem. I didn’t believe anyone could tell me what I was doing wrong. I didn’t believe I needed to be fixed. If there was an issue, I didn’t want to deal with it. I didn’t want to talk about it. I felt that if you didn’t acknowledge a problem, it would go away.
J.R.: My Life as the Most Outspoken, Fearless, and Hard-Hitting Man in Hockey Page 12
