by John Branch
Those stories of adventure—the pursuit of bad guys, the unpredictable bursts of action—made Derek think he might like to become a cop someday, too, as long as he could bypass all the tedious paperwork. That was too much like school.
As much as Len’s vocation threw up hurdles to acceptance for Derek, there was a measure of prestige in having a police officer as a father. Joanne was the prototypical hockey mom, and most of Derek’s friends had one like her, too—shuttling children to practices in the Ford Aerostar and making meals and providing heavy doses of hugs and understanding. But none of his friends had a cop for a dad.
Sometimes, Len came straight from work and drove the boys and their friends in a police cruiser, often all the way to Saskatoon, about two hours away, or any of the small towns that interrupted the landscape.
Len Boogaard with his sons: Aaron (in arms),
Ryan (center), and Derek (right).
“I don’t know how many times my dad got in trouble taking us to hockey in the cop cars but I [sic] was awesome and I [sic] so happy and thankful that he cared enough to get yelled at from his boss just to see his kids enjoying a sport,” Derek remembered.
When the car was full, Derek sat up front while his teammates sat in back. Usually, he crowded in back with the others. And when the boys grew too wild, Len would get their attention by pointing out something on the broad fields of nothingness.
“Look!” he screamed.
Wide-eyed faces spun forward. Len stomped on the brakes, smashing the smiles into the clear acrylic partition that divided the front seat from the back. The boys collapsed in laughter.
There were plenty of times, though, that it was just Len and Derek in the car. With towns spread across the countryside, quilted together by threads of two-lane roads, driving long distances was as much a part of childhood as family dinners and sibling spats. They stopped for after-school candy bars and Slurpees on the way out of town. They filled their bellies after the game with rink burgers, the cheap staple of Canadian hockey rinks.
“I would eat my food as fast as I could so I couldn’t feel the cold right when we got in the car,” Derek wrote.
Sometimes, watching from his usual vantage point, standing alone at the end of the rink, Len recognized that Derek needed a postgame boost. Derek had heard the teases of opposing players or fans, or he had received little ice time and been chided by coaches. Maybe Derek was injured or had had the rivets of another skate buckle and pop under his weight. On these occasions, Len would pull into an icy abandoned parking lot and spin the police car into a dizzying series of donuts. Or he would pull alongside a pasture and moo at the cows through the car’s loudspeaker.
There was never much talking, because neither Len nor Derek minded long silences, but there was comfort in close company. The radio on the way home would pick up the signal from some radio tower far over the horizon, relaying games of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Or it would be set to the station broadcasting the games of the Melfort Mustangs of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League. Inevitably, Derek would doze off to the sound of hockey and the hum of the highway. And he would awaken only when the car turned left into the driveway on Churchill Drive and the glowing light from the garage door opener shone brightly and the car’s windshield nudged the fuzzy tennis ball hanging from the ceiling, telling the Boogaards that they had arrived and that a warm house full of family waited inside.
IN MINOR HOCKEY, size mattered. Derek usually found himself on the top-level team. The smallest kids had to prove that they belonged. The biggest kids had to show that they did not.
Derek was never the most talented player on his minor hockey teams—if talent was defined by the usual metrics of goals and puck control, shiftiness and speed. While he could build speed with his long strides, he had none of the nimbleness needed in the quick-changing flow of hockey games. His knees sore from growth spurts, he was awkward, like a newborn foal. One coach called him a baby giraffe on skates. Opposing players avoided him because of his size, but opposing coaches often countered his presence with a speedy lineup that could exploit Derek’s slower pace.
Derek usually played defense, a big obstacle planted in front of the goal to gum up the opponents’ offense. When he was young, he rarely went out of his way to knock down other players on the ice. They usually just skated into him unintentionally and fell, losers in a physics equation.
There were always whispers. Len and Joanne saw the head shakes and the nudges. They overheard the after-practice conversations between concerned parents and youth coaches. They were adept in the art of deciphering what others thought of their son.
“I remember some parents complaining about the way I played,” Derek wrote years later. “They would complain about the penelties [sic] I took and said I should have never made any of the ‘AA’ teams. So it was a struggle mentally hearing that stuff.”
Derek idolized Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmour, who spent several seasons in the early 1990s as teammates with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Neither man was six feet tall or weighed 200 pounds, and both were dependable scorers. But they had reputations for fearlessness and—especially so in Clark’s case—a willingness to dole out big checks and fight in the name of defending teammates.
Clark grew up in Kelvington, Saskatchewan, a tiny town a couple of hours south of Melfort. He was a provincial hero, chosen by the Maple Leafs with the first-overall choice of the 1985 NHL draft. He spent 13 of his 15 NHL seasons in Toronto, serving as captain in the early 1990s. And while he scored 330 goals in 793 games, he was assessed 1,690 penalty minutes, many of them in five-minute increments for fighting.
Gilmour, from Kingston, Ontario, was drafted in 1982, in the seventh round, by the St. Louis Blues. In 1992–93, when Derek was 10, Gilmour played for Toronto and scored a career-high 127 points. He also had 100 penalty minutes that season, one of the highest totals on the team. For two summers, the Boogaards sent Derek to Toronto for a week to attend Gilmour’s youth hockey camp. Derek returned with stories about Gilmour—Doug Gilmour!—skating on the ice with the kids.
In eighth grade, Derek received an assignment asking students how they planned to make a living. He wrote that he wanted to play in the NHL with Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmour. The teacher asked Derek for a backup plan. “I don’t have a backup plan,” Derek remembered telling the teacher in the notes he later wrote. “And I’m going to play in the NHL one day!”
He spent three days in detention.
Derek had his immediate sights set on the Western Hockey League, the top-level junior hockey league for boys 16 and over, considered the ultimate destination for young players in western Canada. It was one of three major-junior leagues in Canada, along with the Ontario Hockey League and the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. They were considered the sturdiest stepping-stones to professional hockey, though most never make it that far.
Teams in the WHL could draft players the year that they turned 15. Derek was constantly reminded that size could not be taught, and he thought he might be selected if he had a good season. There might be a team willing to take a chance on a kid with size.
In the fall of 1996, Derek arrived for tryouts for Melfort’s bantam-level teams, for boys who turned 14 that year. For the first time, Derek did not make the top-level team. He was relegated to Melfort’s “A” team rather than the higher-caliber “AA” squad.
Derek was surprised and upset. He played on the second-tier team, but groused about playing time and complained about treatment from coaches. Interest in the sport ebbed. He was skateboarding and snowboarding and melding into a new circle of non-hockey-playing friends.
Suitably distracted, frustrated by his prospects, Derek quit hockey. His younger brothers, Ryan and Aaron, followed his lead. They, too, would have more free time, that cherished teenage commodity. No hockey practices, no games, no long drives after school and return drives late at night. For Derek, at 14, there was no greater pleasure than freedom from authority and hard work.
Len and Joanne did n
ot try to talk Derek into playing again. They knew hockey was a childhood diversion and would end sometime. There was zero expectation of it becoming a career. And if Derek wasn’t good enough to play on Melfort’s top team, then it was obvious that the end was coming sooner rather than later.
That spring, in 1997, the Western Hockey League’s 18 franchises, from Portland, Oregon, to Brandon, Manitoba, including the Saskatchewan cities of Moose Jaw, Regina, and Saskatoon, took turns stocking their future teams.
Predicting talent at such an early age is a fickle business. Of the 18 boys chosen in the first round, about half eventually played some level of professional hockey. Four reached the NHL. The first player chosen, a boy from Yorkton, Saskatchewan, named Jarrett Stoll, was selected by Edmonton. Five years later, he embarked on an NHL career as a center that would last more than a decade.
A boy from Melfort, Jason Armstrong, was chosen in the third round, 53rd overall. He never reached major-junior hockey and became a farmer.
There were 195 boys chosen in the draft. Derek was not one of them.
THE TIMING OF Floyd Halcro’s call was perfect. A small man with a baritone voice and a bushy mustache, Halcro was taking over the Melfort Bantam AA team that fall. He had a son on the team. And he was friends with Len.
By summer, Derek’s latest growth spurt pushed the 15-year-old to six feet, four inches and 210 pounds. The tedium of the long days, the thoughts of another school year of struggle, made Derek consider what he wanted to do with his life. With a 65 average in ninth grade, he knew he would not go to college. Maybe he would become a cop, like his father. Maybe join the military. Maybe work the oil fields across the prairie. There was good money in that, Derek had heard.
Halcro, though, thought Derek had long-range hockey potential, given the combination of his size and skating stride. He saw that hockey became more physical the older the boys got, and that someone like Derek might be handy as an on-ice bodyguard. Besides, he liked Derek and knew that the Boogaards worried for him.
Halcro told Derek he could audition for the AA team. He told him that he thought his size was a benefit, not a curse, and that his other skills were underestimated. Derek was rejuvenated with confidence and direction.
Halcro, Len, and Brian Folden, Evan’s father, took turns shuttling their sons to Saskatoon for “acceleration” workouts several times a week. At a gym, the boys used treadmill-like machines to improve their leg strength and skating strides.
But Len knew what Derek’s role would be on the ice. Almost every teenager in hockey would find himself in a fight, sooner or later. And Derek’s size meant he would be expected to do so, to step in to protect his teammates. It also meant that other teams would test his toughness. And if Derek was going to fight, Len was going to be sure he was prepared for it. He found a gym in Saskatoon and registered Derek for boxing lessons, too.
It was a cramped place on the upper floor of an old warehouse near downtown. The trainer was a weathered old man with gold chains around his neck and gold rings on his fingers. He told Derek he could turn him into a boxer.
“I’m not here to be a boxer,” Derek said. “I just wanna learn how to punch on skates.”
There was more money in boxing than in hockey, the man said.
“I want to try the hockey thing first,” Derek told him.
Between skating workouts and boxing lessons, the 100-mile trips to and from Saskatoon became a metronome to daily life. Derek lifted weights. He ran down gravel roads outside Melfort while Len trailed behind him in the car. Some days, Derek rode his bike alone toward Saskatoon. Len gave him a 30-minute head start to see how far Derek got.
“My dad was pretty much my trainer that summer,” Derek wrote.
Like taffy, Derek grew taller and thinner, and the chubbiness that he carried with him as a child melted away. In pictures, his head still popped high above those of classmates and teammates, but the roundness of his face was gone.
After training camp, Halcro put Derek on the season roster. He dismissed the calls from other parents saying that Derek, that son of a cop, did not deserve a spot on the town’s top team, that he was not only a danger to others but an obstacle to the success and promising future of boys of their own.
“I’ll take who I want on the team,” Halcro told the naysayers. “If somebody is going to go somewhere, this kid will do it.”
Until boys reached junior at age 16, fighting was met with stiff penalties, usually suspensions. But body-to-body checking was part of the game at the bantam level, and Derek could serve as a deterrent to opponents wanting to charge the star players. Checks escalated into skirmishes. Teams, imitating those from major junior on up to the professional ranks, stocked themselves with a bruiser or two.
Derek’s size often worked against him. When boys collided, the bigger one was usually whistled, and opponents learned to coax Derek into penalties to gain a man advantage. Halcro heard the taunts from other players, coaches, and fans. He heard the laughs when Derek fell clumsily. He heard the jeers when Derek knocked someone down. If only they knew the boy, he thought to himself. A meek, quiet boy, without a malicious bone in his body. A boy who wanted to protect his friends, not hurt others, who liked to fend off trouble before it started.
Derek occasionally came to Halcro with confidential news: some teammates were drinking or using drugs. Halcro, wanting both to keep his team intact and steer the teenaged boys from trouble, intervened. He never revealed that Derek was his source.
During a game at a tournament in Prince Albert, Halcro became upset with officials, and his caustic tongue got him ejected. He was still steaming when the tournament ended late that night and he, his son, Len, and Derek headed to the rink parking lot for the drive home. Halcro started the engine and began clearing snow from his red four-door Ford truck. Nearby, two officials, lacking a brush, cleaned the snow off their car with their hands. Halcro offered his brush. The officials sensed sarcasm, and an argument ensued over the best place to stick the brush.
Len stepped out of the truck and stopped one of the officials headed toward Halcro. Halcro was willing to take on the other. But Derek unfolded himself from the back seat and emerged to slide between them.
“Floyd, he’s not worth it,” Derek said as he tugged Halcro back to the car.
AMONG THE ARMY of scouts who crossed the prairies in the dead of winter, looking for teenaged hockey talent in forlorn rinks in small towns linked by snow-swept highways, Melfort was never a favorite stop. There were only a couple of passable restaurants, one of them the Italian place in the strip mall. There wasn’t even a Tim Hortons back then. The Travelodge, where the CanAm Highway from Regina makes a hard left on its way to Prince Albert, was the only decent place to stay.
Old Main Arena was an outdated barn, not a great place to see a game. The ceiling, about 20 feet up, was lined by fluorescent lights. Electric heaters, with coils that turned a fiery orange when hot, hung from the ceiling and pointed toward the three rows of wooden bleachers. There was a small foyer where people milled about or bought hot cocoa from the snack stand. The dressing rooms were nothing but painted concrete-block walls embedded with steel hooks to hang gear.
By then, Main Arena was Melfort’s secondary rink. The Northern Lights Palace, with seating for 1,800 and an indoor swimming pool, with individual stalls in the dressing rooms and seat backs in the stands, had been built a block away, on the other side of Melfort’s curling club.
The new arena was home to the Melfort Mustangs, part of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League, a tier below the major-junior Western Hockey League. The Mustangs had won the league championship in 1992 and 1996. They sometimes played in front of more than 1,000 fans. Their games were broadcast on the local radio station, its signal uninterrupted for miles and miles across the plains.
Derek’s team, the bantam-level Mustangs, sometimes practiced and played at Northern Lights. But on this particular night, an especially cold one in southern Saskatchewan, the team was at Main Arena. The
heaters glowed orange. A few dozen people huddled beneath them. Len, in his police uniform, stood alone behind the boards at one end of the rink.
About a dozen WHL scouts sat in a loose cluster on one side. Among them were two men representing the Regina Pats: Brent Parker and Todd Ripplinger.
Parker was the team’s general manager, a measured man who had grown up around minor-league sports. Parker’s father had owned and operated teams for years, including a AAA baseball team in Calgary and a minor-league hockey team in Kansas City. When the Regina Pats, founded in 1917 and considered the oldest major-junior team in the world, were for sale in 1995, the WHL asked the Parkers to buy them. Brent was named general manager.
Ripplinger was the director of scouting. A Regina native, he had been a WHL scout for years for the Kamloops Blazers before Parker hired him to stock the hometown team. Ripplinger—“Ripper”—was a bundle of fast-talking energy who spent winters cruising the vast frozen spaces of the Prairie provinces chasing rumors of teenaged hockey players among the dim rinks in desolate towns. No matter the season, his ruddy complexion gave Ripplinger the look of someone who had just come in from the cold.
Parker and Ripplinger had been at a tournament in Prince Albert, about 90 minutes away. Ripplinger wanted to detour through Melfort to see a couple of young players on his list. The other scouts, he could be sure, were there to watch the same boys. None of them were there to watch Derek.
Things did not go well for the home team. North Battleford built a 7–2 lead in the third period, and the game’s tenor straddled the faint line between aggressive and cheap.
Parker, Ripplinger, and the other scouts could not help but notice a tall, gangly defenseman on the Melfort team. His hockey shorts were noticeably short and his arms seemed to hang to his knees. He spent shifts knocking down opposing players with his combination of momentum and menace.
At one point, the Melfort goalie, Brett Condy, dropped and controlled a loose puck. A North Battleford player poked under Condy with his stick. The whistle blew. Derek, coming to Condy’s defense, roughly grabbed the opponent and shoved him hard. Other players converged in a familiar post-whistle hockey scrum of grabs and insults.
