Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

  But this one was different. Nudges turned to shoves, which turned into punches. It quickly got out of control, like a bar fight. The boys began pounding on one another, their sticks and gloves littering the ice in front of the goal. Officials were overmatched. Fans stood.

  “So I pulled a guy outta the pile and kicked the shit outta him,” Derek recalled years later.

  He pummeled one boy and was ready to take on others. Officials scrambled to restore order, but it was like helplessly stomping out a spreading brush fire. They peeled boys from the tempest, but there were more boys than officials. They were only a few years older and certainly smaller than Derek, at the center of the chaos.

  Eventually, the fire burned itself out, and officials pulled Derek away and escorted him toward the penalty box. An opposing player barked something from the bench that caught Derek’s attention and relit his fuse. He broke free of the clutches of officials and rushed the visitors’ bench. He clambered inside, his arms swinging wildly. Like spooked cats, players escaped over the wall and through the gates at each end of the bench. Even the opposing coach backed away from the one-man siege.

  “It felt like I had a force feild [sic] on me cause that team just scurried as far back as they could,” Derek remembered.

  In the stands, the scouts stood dumbstruck, jaws unhinged. Opposing parents shouted at the teenaged monster. A group of older boys from the high school cheered wildly. Joanne Boogaard, surrounded by her three younger children, sat in stunned silence. She had never seen Derek lash out so uncontrollably.

  Finally corralled again by officials and ejected from the game, Derek was guided toward the large open gate at the end of the ice. Awaiting him was a uniformed member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  “Oh my God, they called the cops,” Parker said. It was Derek’s father.

  Derek stomped past Len and into an empty locker room. He threw equipment bags and kicked benches with his skates. He sat until the adrenaline waned and reality sunk in. He showered and dressed in time to watch the end of the game.

  Derek silently sidled close to his father. Len said nothing to his son. Smoldering, he shot Derek a glance of disappointment and anger. The boy knew he was in trouble. He knew he had blown an opportunity.

  Len eventually nodded to the stands. He pointed out the scouts clustered on one side, wearing colorful shirts and jackets with logos that broadcast their affiliations.

  “Are you happy with what you did?” Len asked his son. It was a rhetorical question. Derek knew there was only one answer, and he did not have to say it.

  Neither deciphered the buzz of excitement from the scouts. None of them had come to see a boy named Boogaard, but they knew who he was now. They nonchalantly whispered to one another and tried to mask their giddiness from their competitors.

  Parker and Ripplinger nudged one another. They slipped out of the old rink and into the cold night. There was a long drive ahead of them, back to Regina. But first, they drove just a few blocks, to the Hi-Lo Motor Inn along the highway. They asked the clerk at the front desk to use the fax machine.

  On a piece of blank paper, they wrote, “Regina Pats would like to add D. Boogaard, Melfort.” In a small office 500 miles west, at the headquarters of the Western Hockey League in Calgary, the machine beeped and buzzed and printed out the message. It would be discovered early the next morning, but the time stamp would show that it was sent before midnight—the day before.

  Several teams sent similar notes to the league office the following morning, making their claims on Derek Boogaard. It was too late. Derek had already been added to the 50-man protected list of the Regina Pats. They had first rights on him. He would be invited to their training camp the following fall.

  Through the dark on the three-hour drive home, Parker and Ripplinger could not get over what they had seen. They talked about Derek all the way.

  “We just couldn’t get him out of our head,” Ripplinger recalled. “It was . . . you know what? If you like that kind of stuff, it was impressive, really impressive what he did, how strong he was. And you thought, ‘Maybe this guy could be an animal one day.’ ”

  They even conjured up a nickname. “The Boogeyman,” they called him.

  Ripplinger called the Boogaards with the news. He told Len and Joanne that their son had been added to their list, but warned that there were no guarantees he would remain on the roster. He could be dropped just as quickly as he was signed. Derek needed to keep doing what he was doing—intimidating the other boys, protecting his teammates, knocking bodies to the ice. Ripplinger said he would be back in Melfort in a few days to talk to the family about what it all meant and where it could all lead.

  Not long afterward, Len called Ripplinger. Derek was too shy to make the call himself, but Len handed the phone to him.

  “Do you think you might be able to bring some hockey shorts with you when you come?” the boy asked sheepishly.

  Derek had outgrown his.

  2

  THE FIRST REPORT OF organized hockey played indoors came in 1875, according to the Society for International Hockey Research. That game was noted in two Montreal papers, and took place between two teams of nine players each at the Victoria Skating Rink.

  It concluded with a fight.

  “The game is generally played with a large rubber ball, each side striving to knock it through the bounds of the other’s field,” the Montreal Daily Witness reported on page 2 of its March 4, 1875, edition. “In order to spare the heads and nerves of the spectators, last evening, a flat piece of board was used instead of a ball; it slid about between the players with great velocity; the result being that the Creighton team won two games to one for the Torrance. Owing to some boys skating about during the play, an unfortunate disagreement arose; one little boy was struck across the head, and the man who did so was afterwards called to account, a regular fight taking place in which a bench was broken and other damage caused. It was the intention of the players to have another game, but this disgraceful affair put a stopper on it.”

  There was no mention of a referee, and the sport’s self-policing origins gave root to fighting as a means of justice. Early games were often sticky affairs with little passing, turning rushes toward the goal into a clog of clutches, holds, punches, and stick whacks. Without strong rules to forbid such nefarious impediments, players often settled disputes by punching or swinging back.

  In 1905, Allan Loney, an amateur player in Ontario, became the first hockey player charged with murder for an on-ice attack. Alcide Laurin died on the ice after Loney clubbed him with a stick. Charges against Loney were reduced to manslaughter and he was ultimately acquitted, the jury apparently persuaded that Loney acted in self-defense.

  In March 1907, Owen “Bud” McCourt, star player for Cornwall of the Federal Amateur Hockey League, died hours after being hit in the head with a stick by Charles Masson of the Ottawa Victorias.

  “The game was becoming rather rough and full of cross checking, tripping and slashing as a result of the referee’s leniency,” the lead story of the Evening Citizen in Ottawa reported the day after the fight.

  McCourt had traded blows with a Victorias player named Arthur Throop when Masson surged forward, raised his stick, and hit McCourt over the head. Retaliation was immediate; Throop was dropped with a five-inch gash on his head by one of McCourt’s teammates. He and McCourt were helped off the ice by doctors.

  McCourt returned to the game, but later fell unconscious in the locker room and was found to have a cracked skull. He died hours later. By morning, Masson was charged with manslaughter. “I’m very sorry,” he said upon learning of the death.

  Masson was found not guilty. There was not enough evidence to demonstrate that, amid all the violence, Masson delivered the fatal blow.

  The referee that night was a man named Emmett Quinn. From 1910 to 1916, Quinn was president of the National Hockey Association, which reorganized and became the foundation of the new National Hockey League in 1917.

>   The NHL was heavy with vigilante justice in its early years. The blue lines, roughly dividing the ice into thirds, were introduced in 1918. Forward passing was allowed only in the middle section of the rink, the “neutral” zone, meaning any player rushing toward the net with the puck was ambushed by defenders. Elbows turned to fists, and game-stopping fights became part of the show.

  Owners were quick to recognize the excitement such violence stirred in hockey crowds. But knowing that on-ice deaths could threaten the sport’s future—scores of fatalities in American football in the early 1900s nearly led to the sport’s banishment, fueled in part by President Theodore Roosevelt’s frustration with its unmitigated violence—they worked to find a balance amid the orchestrated chaos. The ultimate result was Rule 56, instituted in 1922. It said that fighting was against the rules. But the penalty assessed—five minutes in the penalty box—was hardly a deterrent. It not-so-delicately forced players and coaches to determine whether overly rough play was worth the threat of getting beat up, or whether beating someone up was worth the price of a five-minute penalty.

  It proved the perfect middle ground. Like the initial dictum of placing a basketball hoop 10 feet off the ground, or of setting baseball bases 90 feet apart, five minutes for fighting was an early guideline that endured. The NHL guideline was virtually unchanged nearly a century later, labeled as Rule 46.14.

  “A major penalty shall be imposed on any player who fights,” the rulebook read. A “major penalty,” compared to a “minor penalty,” was deemed worthy of extended time in the penalty box.

  “For the first major penalty in any one game, the offender, except the goalkeeper, shall be ruled off the ice for five (5) minutes during which time no substitute shall be permitted,” the rule said.

  Of course, a fight involves at least two participants, meaning that each team typically lost a man to the penalty box. Such offsetting penalties left teams at equal strength, diluting the punitive notion of the penalty itself.

  All that made hockey unique among major team sports. In soccer, football, basketball, and baseball, for example, simply swinging a fist at an opponent was usually grounds for immediate expulsion from the game. Subsequent fines and suspensions were common for any such momentary lapses of self-control. Adding to hockey’s peculiarity, it was typically not the aggrieved parties who sought retribution. When a star player was perceived to have been mistreated or handled too roughly by an opponent—to be the victim of a player “taking liberties,” in the euphemistic parlance of the game—the team might turn to the enforcer.

  The term “enforcer” was a bit of a euphemism, too, an obtuse and honorable title of respect that grew alongside the role itself. Enforcer was not an official position on the team, but a title unofficially applied to those whose jobs as fighters overshadowed their play. Referees enforced the black-and-white rules. Enforcers, as if deputized, operated in the gray areas. In the glossiest version of the job description, enforcers kept the peace.

  When the NHL adopted the fighting rule in 1922, there was a sense, one that persisted and percolated through the highest levels of hockey leadership through the league’s first century, that fighting acted as a safety valve—a “thermostat,” in the words of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman—against more dangerous, spontaneous violence. Allow two willing combatants to fight, the theory went, and the frequency of cheap shots, from elbows to sticks over the head, would dissipate.

  In other words, fighting was necessary to control violence.

  The philosophy became a sporting version of nuclear armament: the best way to protect players from violent onslaughts was the threat of more violence, even if the missiles were kept in the silo.

  But, in hockey, they never were.

  DEREK KNEW NO ONE when he arrived for the Regina Pats’ training camp in 1998. The other boys, some as old as 20, eyed the tall, quiet 16-year-old with a mix of derision and anxiety. Some knew that they would be fighting him, and that their roster spot in the Western Hockey League might depend on whether they could beat him up.

  Derek was given practice gear in the team’s red, white, and blue colors. He got to choose a Sher-Wood stick, the nicest he had ever held. But he really wanted to know about the competition. He asked the trainer: Who do I need to watch out for?

  Todd Fedoruk, the trainer said. “The Fridge.” He was a 19-year-old from Redwater, Alberta, fearless and sharp-tongued, a seventh-round draft choice of the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers the year before. He was a WHL veteran, having played parts of three seasons for the Kelowna Rockets before being traded to the Pats. The season before, he had seven goals, eight assists, and 200 penalty minutes, many of them in exchange for 17 fights. At six foot two and 230 pounds, he was built like a kitchen appliance.

  Also, steer clear of Kyle Freadrich, the trainer said. Derek had noticed Freadrich on the roster. Nearly 20, he was listed at six feet, six inches and 254 pounds. In 112 games for the Pats the previous two seasons, he had just seven goals and eight assists, but 411 penalty minutes. He had had a team-high 25 fights the season before.

  On-ice workouts did not begin until the next morning, but Len wanted Derek to absorb the atmosphere. Len and Derek, now several inches taller than his father, stood in the lobby of the arena. Boys came and went.

  “I kept asking Dad if we could go but he said, ‘No, just wait,’ ” Derek wrote years later. “I think he did it to see how I would react.”

  Derek pointed out Fedoruk. I have to watch out for that guy, he said. Then Freadrich walked by.

  “He looked like the Grim Reaper,” Derek wrote. “His eyes pushed back in his head. His forehead hung over his eyes, so you could almost not see his eyes. His nose was a bit crooked and he had no front teeth.”

  Derek knew he was being sized up, too.

  “My body wasn’t showing any signs of fear but I was definetly [sic] scared in my head,” he wrote.

  Len secured rooms at the RCMP Depot barracks, a few miles away. They ate fast food, getting five Arby’s sandwiches for five dollars.

  “That night it felt like I only slept 20 minutes,” Derek wrote. “I was anxious, excited, scared and I wanted to hit anything that touched the puck.”

  Derek arrived two hours early for the 10 o’clock start. He quietly got himself dressed and walked into the hallway. He saw another player, as tall as Derek, with “some weird Elvis-looking hair,” putting tape on his hockey sticks.

  “He walks up to me,” Derek recalled in his notes, “gets in my face and says, ‘You’re fucking dead! I’m going to fucking kill you and you will regret coming here!’ ”

  His name was Travis Churchman. An 18-year-old from Calgary, with a doo-wop haircut and a steel-wool patch of a beard on his chin, he was six foot four and 235 pounds. And when Derek took the ice that morning, Churchman was there, repeating the threats he had made in the hallway. The two were placed on opposite teams.

  The scrimmage began. Derek was tapped by the coach to take a shift. He chased opposing players and tried to crush them with checks. He felt a tug on the back of his jersey.

  “I turn around and Churchy is there, squared up and ready to go,” Derek wrote.

  Derek had never been in a “staged” hockey fight, the kind that did not come from a spontaneous combustion of emotion during the course of intense play. They were fights without spark, meant to attract attention or send messages. Derek had seen them countless times on highlight reels and during National Hockey League games. He knew what to do. He flicked his gloves from his hands and took off his helmet—part of the protocol at the time, meant to reduce the pain absorbed by hands pounding plastic. He raised his fists and glided slowly in time with Churchman. Derek swung with a looping arm. His right fist crashed against Churchman’s face.

  It was over. Churchman skulked away, holding his hands to his face. His nose was broken. Derek left the ice exhausted, relieved, and happy. Pats coaches and scouts laughed and congratulated him, patting him on the back for doing a good job on his first day.


  IN THE 1970s, comedian Rodney Dangerfield famously said that he went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out, a joke that needed no explanation to a mainstream audience. Paul Newman starred in Slap Shot, a 1977 film about a struggling minor-league team that used over-the-top violence, mostly at the hands of a motley threesome called the Hanson Brothers, to attract crowds in a dying town. For decades, clips from that movie remained a staple of NHL arenas, an effort to get the fans excited during lulls in the action.

  A caricatured archetype of the hockey enforcer took hold—a big, dumb, lovable lug, a “goon,” portrayed with a black eye, a knot on his skull, a bandage on his chin, and a smile of missing teeth. They were underdogs, of a sort—men who might otherwise have no business being in the NHL, men who clung to the bottom edge of the roster, whose next fight might be their last. Some barely played and rarely scored. But they were seen as a sort of outed superhero—blue-collar, understated types with selfless alter egos and a devotion to helping those in need. It was work that most of their own teammates would not consider themselves.

  “I hate the word ‘goon,’ ” Fedoruk, who went on from Regina to become an NHL enforcer, said after his playing career. “It should almost be changed to ‘the guardian.’ There’s no better feeling then when you’re in the penalty box after a good tilt, both teams are jacked up. You get to rest, you’re resting for five minutes, and there’s no better feeling than when the boys get a rise from you showing up, putting yourself out there. I’m getting chills right now from talking about it.

  “We want to play that game so bad, and we’re willing to do that part of it to play,” Fedoruk added. “The appreciation we get from our teammates is everything to us.”

  Fans, too, saw something noble and human in the enforcer—a good-guy counterweight to some of hockey’s darkest episodes.