Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

  “Are you kidding me?” Derek replied. “I couldn’t stand her. That girl was a total puck bunny.”

  The long-distance relationship between Derek and Janella grew for weeks, through instant messages and late-night talks. Since Janella had a job, she paid the phone bills—several hundred dollars those first months.

  Janella was intrigued by Derek. Hockey players usually struck her as brash, fueled by testosterone and a sense of entitlement. They worked hard and partied hard, she found. Pretty girls were an adornment that they came to expect. Derek, though, did not talk much about hockey, and never much about himself. He wanted to know about her. He made her feel important, but he also seemed nervous. Sincere. Fragile.

  Amid their phone and online conversations, Derek was headed again to the Wild’s summer camp at Breezy Point, Minnesota, held at a sprawling lakeside resort. Derek had seen other players sneak girlfriends in the year before. They hatched a plan. Derek arranged for Janella to fly to Minnesota. She agreed. She paid for it.

  He had no car, but he borrowed a friend’s Jeep and waited inside the tiny airport’s terminal. She got off the plane and ducked into a bathroom to check her appearance and take a deep breath.

  She saw him from a distance. He was huge. She pretended not to notice him and walked past.

  “Janella,” Derek finally called out. “You didn’t recognize me?”

  They laughed and hugged. He thought she was beautiful. She thought he was handsome. Derek never thought of himself that way. He would always say that Janella was too pretty for him.

  He carried her bag and they walked to the car.

  “Don’t drive me into the woods and chop me into little pieces,” Janella said.

  Derek’s room had two single beds, but they pushed them together to make one big one. They talked and took pictures. When Derek left for practice, Janella walked around the resort, bought things for him in the gift shop, went to the bar for a drink. When he returned, they took a boat ride on the lake.

  But after one workout, Derek returned with bad news. The team had found out, he said. Janella was moved to another room, and her return flight home was moved up a day. The secret tryst was over.

  If Derek got in trouble from the team, Janella never heard about it.

  MEDICINE HAT SITS in southeastern Alberta, about a 30-minute drive to the Saskatchewan border. A sunny prairie city of 60,000, supposedly named for the lost headdress of a Cree medicine man, Medicine Hat provided Derek a fresh start, closer to home, only a four-and-a-half-hour drive east on the Trans-Canada Highway to Regina.

  But the Minnesota Wild was worried about its seventh-round draft pick. Derek had gone ballistic in Calgary and been traded to the Tigers, a team on its way to a last-place finish in the Western Hockey League’s Central Division. Derek thought he should play more, considering his breakout season in Prince George and that he had been drafted by an NHL team.

  Medicine Hat coach Bob Loucks, however, had another 19-year-old enforcer, a smaller scrapper from Saskatoon named Ryan Olynyk, a holdover for the Tigers from the previous season. Derek and Olynyk fought once in Prince George, but it was not much of a bout. A few minutes after beating up one of Olynyk’s teammates, Derek had checked Olynyk hard with a clean hit. When Derek skated away, Olynyk attacked from behind. Derek drilled Olynyk with a right hand. The fight ended.

  Now they were teammates, but Olynyk handled most of the fighting. He led the WHL with 41 fights that season. Derek had 16. Derek dismissed Loucks as just another coach who underestimated him.

  Doris Sullivan saw it unfold from her unique vantage point as a billet mother. She and her husband, Kelly, had housed a dozen players over many years, and they had another Tigers player staying with them that season. Derek walked into their lives, trailing a teammate.

  As in Prince George, Derek found a home where he’d rather stay. Unlike in Prince George, there was little argument from the team. Derek moved in with the Sullivans after Christmas. They laughed at how he had to duck through doorways and how he rested his elbow on top of the refrigerator, and how he consumed entire batches of cookies at once, before they had cooled.

  It was no coincidence that the billets Derek clung to were those who wanted to spend time with Derek, and not just give him a place to live. When Derek sulked, the mood was usually tinged with disappointment, not anger. More often than not, somebody he trusted had disappointed him, or expressed disappointment in him. While Derek was adept at hiding his physical pain, he did a poor job of disguising hurt feelings. Size disguised fragility.

  The Sullivans had hosted a dozen or more boys over the years, but Derek stood out—and not because of his size. He must have been burned somewhere along the line, to put up those guards at such a young age, Doris Sullivan thought.

  The Sullivans found Derek to be much as the Tobins in Prince George had found him. He was quiet and unassuming, content to let the conversations lull. What they all did together—watch television, play video games, go on errands—was not the important thing. He just wanted company, to be part of something, even if it felt to others like nothing at all.

  Derek considered Medicine Hat a stopover between the NHL draft and a professional career. He fought when opponents dared to fight him, and the home fans still showered him with “Boo-gey, Boo-gey” chants. He had 178 penalty minutes with Medicine Hat in 2001–02, and was suspended for a total of 14 games for various rough-play infractions. He scored once. It came in February, at Regina’s Agridome, against his original WHL team. In goal for the Pats was Josh Harding, a Regina native who would be selected by the Minnesota Wild in the second round of the NHL draft four months later.

  Derek’s family was in the crowd. When Derek took the ice, he scanned the stands and found their faces. And when he scored, his mother thought, once again, that maybe he could be more than an enforcer, if only someone would give him that chance.

  Why don’t you stand in front of the goal, where you have a better chance of scoring, she asked him again and again. She hated the fighting—all the blows that Derek took, but, too, all the ones he delivered with increasing ferocity and effect. She thought about the other boys’ mothers, too.

  “I’m not here to score goals,” Derek told the Regina newspaper, the Leader-Post. “I’m here to regulate, to enforce; don’t let other people push around our smaller players. It’s what I do.”

  A man called the Sullivan house. He introduced himself to Doris as Barry MacKenzie, recently hired as the coordinator of player development for the Wild. After a player got drafted, it was MacKenzie’s job to track his progress.

  Derek was his first assignment. MacKenzie had talked to other billets that Derek had been through in Prince George and Medicine Hat, and he wanted Doris Sullivan’s opinion. She gave Derek a glowing endorsement—fun to have, polite and helpful, never a problem.

  MacKenzie was surprised. Others told a different story, about an aloof young man who did not like to follow rules. Sullivan suggested that others probably had not taken the time to get to know Derek well.

  MacKenzie came to Medicine Hat. Before a game, he took Derek to Earls, part of an upscale restaurant chain. Derek ordered a steak.

  “The coach isn’t giving me a chance,” MacKenzie recalled Derek telling him. “I don’t think they like me here. I’m not getting enough ice time.”

  MacKenzie listened attentively and kept his thoughts to himself. He watched that night’s game, and then the next day’s practice. He was not impressed by Derek’s work ethic and enthusiasm. He thought Derek was going through the motions. He invited Derek out again. This time, he took him to McDonald’s.

  “With what I’ve seen in the last 24 hours,” MacKenzie told Derek, “you want to eat at Earls, but you’re going to have to get used to eating at McDonald’s.”

  THAT SUMMER, about the time that Derek met Janella, the Medicine Hat Tigers made a coaching change. Bob Loucks was gone. Medicine Hat hired a 45-year-old from tiny Climax, Saskatchewan, named Willie Desjardins.


  When training camp opened in 2002, the Tigers had some players, like Derek, who were born in 1982 and had already turned 20. They had other players born in late 1986, yet to turn 16. Derek was more than a foot taller than some boys, and almost twice their weight.

  Derek was a team leader, by virtue of his age, size, and NHL draft status, and Desjardins liked him from the start. He was surprised that Derek could skate so well for a player his size, and he noticed he had a powerful shot. Desjardins found Derek different than many young enforcers bent on building reputations with brash talk and punkish behavior. Derek was a surprisingly meek soul. Desjardins wondered if he was nasty enough to do his job.

  In November, late in a lopsided loss at Swift Current, Derek took part in a 10-player brawl. The fights began slowly, and Derek stood aside, casually talking to an opposing player as others paired off to fight. He slowly turned to another Swift Current player, Mitch Love. After a few words were exchanged, Derek shoved the six-foot Love in the chest.

  The boys were soon swinging fists, and two of the four on-ice officials rushed in to break them apart. Derek shook them off and hammered Love with a few right-hand uppercuts. The officials kept tugging, and the four-person scrum slid from one face-off circle to the front of the net. Derek threw haymakers until Love and one official fell to the ice. When Derek jabbed his fallen opponent with his left fist, the other official jumped and slid off Derek’s back.

  Finally, the boys were escorted to the penalty box, Derek pointing at Love, while four other players continued to fight. The crowd cheered and whistled.

  Desjardins had his answer. Derek—big, gentle Derek—showed he could flip the switch. He did not have to be mean. He just had to show he could be, when it mattered.

  In October, just weeks into the season, Western Hockey League teams had to rid their rosters of all but three 20-year-olds. Two boys were released. Derek stayed.

  It was a strange but happy fall for Derek. He lived with the Sullivans. He had a girlfriend. He felt grown up, respected, and upwardly mobile, and it showed. A former teammate from Melfort, Brett Condy, once saw Derek in a Medicine Hat bar, dancing with a “really good-looking girl,” Condy said. “You never saw that in Melfort.”

  On October 20, Medicine Hat played in Calgary, at the Saddledome. For the first and only time, Derek played against his 16-year-old brother Aaron, a first-year right wing with the Calgary Hitmen. He had been drafted 15th overall in the bantam draft 18 months earlier.

  “People had the perception that he was going to be the same player as me,” Derek wrote years later.

  But Aaron was a smaller, quicker version of Derek. He showed no predisposition to fighting. He would do it if asked, however, and already had, in a game about a week earlier.

  “Leave Nick alone,” Joanne Boogaard told Derek before their game, calling Aaron by his middle name, as family and close friends did. “Don’t you dare go after him.”

  It was Aaron who tried to goad Derek, slashing him across the legs with his stick. Derek, never one to back down in the basement in Melfort or anywhere else his brothers prodded him, would not retaliate. He would not flip the switch.

  The hometown Hitmen won easily, 4–1. Medicine Hat’s lone goal was scored by Derek. He ended Calgary’s shutout bid in the game’s final minutes, poking the puck past goalie Brent Krahn. It would stand as the second and final goal in Derek’s 73-game career in Medicine Hat.

  Among those who cheered from the stands were Len and Joanne. Between them sat 18-year-old Ryan and 13-year-old Krysten. Also there, next to Joanne, was Curtis Heide, Derek’s half-brother, now a married man of 30 who had recently set out to find his birth mother.

  Over the past year, Curtis had come to know the rest of the family. He had come to Regina and met Ryan, Aaron, and Krysten. Everyone liked Curtis. He had introduced his wife, Gladys, and Gladys’s five-year-old son, Curtis’s stepson.

  Now it was Derek’s turn. He was nervous about meeting Curtis, but not as nervous as Curtis was to meet him. When the game ended, the Boogaards and Curtis moved to the front row of the Saddle-dome in Calgary. Derek and Curtis met. The group posed for photographs—Derek in his Medicine Hat jersey, Aaron in his Calgary Hitmen jersey, everyone wearing a brave smile. It was hard to imagine that night, but Curtis and Derek, with little more than size and a birth mother in common, were on their way to a budding relationship.

  In late November, Medicine Hat embarked on a long road trip to the American Northwest. Janella met Derek in Seattle, and then introduced him to her family before the next game in Portland. She had given him a ring on an earlier trip to Medicine Hat. The guys in the locker room teased him, unaware that she was his first serious girlfriend.

  Derek’s world was upended before the road trip was over. The Tigers released him.

  There was irony in the shuffle. Medicine Hat dropped Derek because it wanted to shore up its defense and had signed defenseman Ryan Stempfle to take his place.

  Stempfle had been released by his team, the Saskatoon Blades, when they called up Denny Johnston from a lower level. Derek and Johnston had been traded for one another just over a year earlier.

  “It came as a surprise,” Boogaard told the local newspaper. “I’m disappointed, but the team needs a defenseman and you can’t do anything about the situation.”

  His Western Hockey League career was over.

  The final tally: three-plus seasons, three teams, three goals.

  And 670 penalty minutes, mostly from his 70 fights.

  4

  DEREK WAS SUDDENLY WITHOUT a team, and the Wild searched for a place to put him. They opted for their affiliate in the East Coast Hockey League: the Louisiana IceGators of Lafayette, Louisiana.

  “We’ve got a guy to send you who has been treated as kind of a circus act in juniors,” Tom Lynn, the assistant general manager of the Wild, told IceGators coach Dave Farrish.

  Derek made his professional debut with the IceGators on December 20, 2002, in a game in Biloxi, Mississippi. He was 20 and had a contract to pay him $35,000 for the season. There was no mistaking Derek when he took the ice, wearing number 30—an oversized jersey usually reserved for goalies and their bulky pads, but the only one the IceGators had that was big enough to fit.

  The IceGators were completing a 6–2 victory over the Mississippi Sea Wolves, and much of the announced crowd of 2,565 had headed out of the Mississippi Coast Coliseum. Derek fired a wrist shot that looked to be headed into the net, only to have it gloved by the goalie at the last moment. In the waning seconds, Derek approached a Mississippi enforcer, testing his appetite for a fight. The other player skated away.

  Farrish took great satisfaction in that. The coach had seen Derek in two rookie camps in Minnesota with the Wild, and knew what he could mean to a game.

  “People know he’s out there, because if he ever hits you you’re going to be Wile E. Coyote on the asphalt,” Farrish told the Lafayette newspaper, the Advertiser, after the game. “It’s great to have him on the ice. As you’ve seen tonight, nobody took any physical liberties towards us, and I think that was another big factor in the game.”

  But Derek would have to prove himself to be more than a theoretical intimidator the next night, in his home debut. It was a Saturday, and the Cajundome in Lafayette was filled with 5,090 fans. Surprisingly, Derek picked up his first professional point—an assist—before he got into his first professional fight.

  The IceGators were on their way to another 6–2 victory, this one over the Arkansas RiverBlades. Early in the third period, Derek awaited a face-off next to Arkansas’s Mark Scott, a six-foot-four, 215-pound enforcer from Manitoba. The gloves dropped in sync with the puck. Scott, 25 years old, landed the first punch, a right-hand jab to Derek’s chin. Derek swung wildly with his right hand and missed. Scott hit Derek squarely with a right hand, then managed to wrestle Derek’s jersey over his head. Holding tight, Scott hit Derek with a left hand before Derek freed himself from the constraints of his opponent and his own jersey.


  Derek swung his dangerous right hand and struck Scott in the back of the head, on the helmet. Unlike in the Western Hockey League, the professional players kept their helmets on. That meant many bare-knuckled punches struck a hard shell of plastic, not the relative squishiness of a human skull or jaw.

  Derek was growing accustomed to the annual damage. Early each season, after a couple of fights, Derek’s hands were grossly misshapen and swollen. The backs of them looked inflated and were marked by red and blue smudges, and sometimes the tooth marks of opponents. The fingers were thick, like sausages, and so crooked that Derek had trouble extending them. The knuckles, taking the brunt of each blow they delivered, rarely had time to scab and heal until the off-season. If the next fight came within a week or two—and they usually did—the skin of the knuckles would flap open again, pouring blood or oozing pus. First aid came in the form of towels and a bucket of icy water in the penalty box.

  “The thing that worried me wasn’t the concussions,” Len Boogaard said years later. “It never really was an issue. It was never brought to the forefront. It was never deemed to be problematic. You got your bell rung? Well, here’s a Tylenol or whatever. The only thing that bothered me was his hands. He would fight and his knuckles would be pushed back into the wrist. And then he’d have to have it manipulated and have his knuckles put back in place. His hands were a mess. My concern was always, okay, he’s going to suffer with this later on in life, in terms of arthritis. It was his hands that I was more worried about.”

  Derek bashed his fist against Scott’s helmet once. Twice. Three times. Four times. Scott finally fell to the ice. The intoxicated crowd blared its endorsement.

  The night’s work was not over. With about three minutes left in the game, Louisiana firmly in control, Derek checked a much smaller opponent named Damon Whitten into the boards. Derek flung off his gloves and punched Whitten in the head with a right hand. A linesman quickly jumped between the two players. Derek pushed past the official and hit Whitten again. Around them, the eight other skaters on the ice dropped their gloves, too.