Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

  Derek knew that NHL coaches and officials, idled by the lockout, were paying more attention to the AHL than usual. Some minor-league teams visited the big-league arenas to satiate the hunger of starving hockey fans. When the Aeros played a game at the Wild’s in Saint Paul, 12,204 saw Derek get an assist, one of four he had that season.

  The game against Utah on February 8, 2005, was held in the afternoon, a rare weekday matinee. The crowd at Houston’s Toyota Center was announced as 9,062. About 7,000 of those were school children, many watching their first hockey game as part of a team promotion sponsored by the Houston Chronicle called “Chronicle Education Field Trip Day.”

  The lasting memory of a 5–2 home-team victory was forged with 1:44 left in the third period. A Utah player clobbered one of the Aeros. All 10 players on the ice, including the goalies, converged in one corner of the rink and fought. Derek bloodied at least one opponent during a rambling scrum of fits and starts that delayed the game for 15 minutes.

  After the game, officials needed another hour to sort out the penalties. It was ruled that the teams combined for 164 penalty minutes. Derek established a team record with 44 of them.

  In a March game at Utah, Derek outwrestled an antagonist named Ryan Barnes, but skated away with a bloody nose. More memorably, Derek was granted a penalty shot after being hauled down from behind on a breakaway. Derek’s backhanded penalty shot was stopped by the goalie.

  “I thought it was good that I actually got a good shot off, instead of fumbling it off into the corner,” Derek, a master of self-deprecation, said after the game.

  His season’s personal highlight, though, came on March 27.

  “Aeros forward Derek Boogaard is cheered on a regular basis at Toyota Center,” the Houston Chronicle wrote. “The 6-7 fan favorite leads the team with 247 penalty minutes and is often on the winning side of his fights. But Sunday night, in one of the biggest games for the Aeros this AHL season, Boogaard was lauded for being more than just his usual intimidating self.”

  Derek scored the game-winning goal. He had captured a rebound and shoveled the puck into the net as he fell. It was his first goal in more than two years, stretching back to his lone season in the East Coast Hockey League. Derek was named the game’s No. 1 star. It was such an honor, such an unusual proclamation for him, that Derek saved a copy of the official score sheet.

  Still, it was hard to gauge Derek’s development over two seasons in Houston. He won fights and was a crowd favorite, but his contributions were rarely tangible. Improvement was not obvious to those who saw him every day.

  After the Aeros lost a playoff series to the Chicago Wolves, McLellan and Shaw, Houston’s head coach and assistant, met with Chicago coach John Anderson. Shaw and Anderson had known each other for years, and it was common for opposing coaches to chat casually about the series that just ended.

  “Boogaard was your best player,” Anderson said.

  “Seriously?” Shaw replied. Derek had played in all five games, scored no points, and had 38 penalty minutes.

  “Yeah, our team was so concerned, so frightened when he was on the ice, it changed their game,” Anderson said.

  That was when it hit McLellan and Shaw, two full seasons after Derek arrived with explicit instructions from Doug Risebrough to get him to the NHL.

  “Good God, maybe this guy is going to play,” Shaw thought to himself. “Maybe Doug was right.”

  DEREK’S NAME WAS on the list, and the list was inside Tom Lynn’s pocket. Derek was going to be cut from the training camp roster of the Minnesota Wild, again, and sent back to the minor leagues for another season.

  Lynn, the Wild’s assistant general manager, was responsible for carrying out the cuts—usually three rounds of them, spaced over a couple of weeks during training camp. It was a delicate process. Coaches and executives privately agreed on the names. Lynn secretly made travel arrangements. Players were discreetly retrieved from the dressing room, usually by an equipment manager or trainer to keep suspicions down. Players stopped talking and their backs stiffened whenever Lynn or someone else from management walked in.

  It was the first round of cuts in September 2005. The NHL, given a chance to remarket itself after the lockout, returned with a vow to reduce the stickiness of play and add a fan-friendly dose of fluidity. That led teams to believe that the game’s pace and scoring would increase. Speed would be prized over strength. Fighting would drop.

  But the Wild had bought out the contract over the summer of its veteran enforcer, Matt Johnson. He had struggled with lingering injuries, including concussions. The 28-year-old said he planned to take some time off, get to feeling better and return to the game. He never did.

  Lynn carried five names in his pocket to a meeting to confirm the cuts with other team officials before he notified the players. He read the names aloud. Everyone in the room, from general manager Doug Risebrough to head coach Jacques Lemaire, nodded their approval.

  Lynn broke the lingering silence. He did not want Derek Boogaard to go without discussion.

  “Do we have to let him go on the first cut?” he said. “He’s worked so hard. He’s been through a couple of summers, he’s been a good guy. Maybe we should keep him around. Not to make the team, maybe, but for a few more days, to reward him for his hard work.”

  Assistant coach Mike Ramsey spoke up.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” he said. “Boogey’s worked hard, he can skate, he’s not holding us up in practice or anything. Let’s keep him around.”

  Derek’s name was crossed off the list. Someone else was cut instead.

  The next night, Derek played against the Buffalo Sabres in a preseason game at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul. In the game’s first few minutes, he got into a fight with Andrew Peters, a six-foot-four, 240-pound behemoth, one of the NHL’s top enforcers. He had fought 23 times the season before the lockout, more than all but three others in the league.

  With the Minnesota crowd on its feet, cheering for the unfamiliar giant wearing the unfamiliar No. 46, Derek absorbed a couple of small shots to his head before the men clasped onto one another’s shoulders. Derek squirmed loose and belted Peters with an overhand right fist, sending Peters’s helmet flying and dropping his body to the ice.

  Two days later, the Wild cut 10 more players. Derek stayed.

  At home against the Chicago Blackhawks, he fought Shawn Thornton, an emerging scrapper. Derek lost his helmet, but bombed Thornton with three right hands to the head before tugging Thornton’s helmet off. It was a narrow victory for Derek, but he was rewarded with a standing ovation.

  “The token appearances are over for Derek Boogaard, the hulking Clydesdale who has become the dark horse of Wild training camp,” the Saint Paul Pioneer Press reported.

  Lynn told the newspaper that Derek was the hardest-working player he had ever seen. Teammates agreed.

  “Few expected Boogaard, whom the Wild drafted in the seventh round (202nd overall) in 2001, to survive long with Houston of the American Hockey League let alone compete for an NHL job,” the story said.

  Lemaire was convinced that Derek changed games—not just through fighting, but by intimidation. When Derek was on the ice, Lemaire could sense the discomfort of opponents, worried about a crushing hit. When Derek was on the bench, they knew a cheap shot could mean his deployment.

  “I saw him last year, I never thought he could be at this point,” Lemaire told reporters. “And I saw him quite a few times. But he grew through the camp and did things that made me say, ‘Hey, maybe he’s got a chance to play.’ We worked with him on positioning. He seems to understand the game. He’s improved his skating. Now it’s up to him to keep improving.”

  Derek made the final team. He got to choose his number. He picked No. 24, in honor of Bob Probert, the longtime enforcer of the Detroit Red Wings and Chicago Blackhawks, widely considered the best of all time.

  “A lot of people thought I would never make it, but I always had confidence in myself that if
I went out and practiced hard, I’d eventually make it,” Derek told the StarTribune on the morning of the season opener. “And today’s the day. Hopefully I don’t get hurt in warmup.”

  Derek had phoned his parents a couple of days earlier to share the news that he had made the NHL. Joanne was surprised and excited, still wary that her son was a fighter.

  “Mom, it’s what I do now,” Derek told her.

  PART II

  MINNESOTA

  5

  DEREK BOOGAARD’S FIRST NHL fight ended with a knockout and a roar of approval.

  It was October 16, 2005, the Wild hosting the Anaheim Ducks, the game still in the first period. First-year Ducks coach Randy Carlyle sent Kip Brennan to the ice for a face-off. The Wild tapped Derek. The two had fought five times the season before in the American Hockey League. Brennan had gouged Derek in the eye back in April, enough to temporarily blur his vision, and Derek wanted revenge.

  The players lined up along the outer edges of the circle, and Derek nuzzled close. Brennan tapped him on the foot with his stick, a silent invitation. The puck dropped. Brennan backed up, and Derek chased him with two long strides, both men flicking their gloves away.

  Brennan quickly managed to remove Derek’s helmet as they clutched for position. Derek jabbed with a couple of rights, then a couple of lefts, then held Brennan’s jersey by the shoulder with his left hand. Brennan’s helmet slipped back on his head, straining the chin strap.

  Boom.

  Derek hit him flush in the face with his closed right hand. Brennan’s legs gave way and he fell to the ice.

  “Wow,” the television announcer said.

  “That’s what you call ‘decisive,’ ” his partner added. “You know what? That kind of fight keeps you on the team.”

  The announcers shared a hearty laugh. The crowd cheered.

  Later in the period, after Derek had served his five-minute penalty and been given another shift, he fought again. This time, it was Anaheim’s Todd Fedoruk, a six-foot, two-inch puncher from Redwater, Alberta, who had played parts of four seasons with the Philadelphia Flyers. Derek had first come across him at training camp for the Regina Pats, seven years earlier, when Derek was 16 and he’d spied “The Fridge” nervously in the lobby of the Agridome.

  “I wasn’t surprised when I heard the name ‘Boogaard,’ ” Fedoruk said several years later. “It’s kind of a name that sticks out, anyways—‘The Boogeyman.’ They were talking about him in the NHL when he was still in juniors. ‘They got this guy down in western Canada, the Boogeyman, they call him. A name like that, he’s gotta definitely have our type of role. We’ll be waiting for him when he gets here.’ It wasn’t a surprise: Boogaard’s in the NHL.”

  Now Fedoruk crouched with his fists up, a left-hander leading with his right shoulder. Derek, five inches taller and 40 pounds heavier, managed two fully cocked punches to the head. The second dislodged Fedoruk’s helmet. But Fedoruk grabbed hold of Derek’s right sleeve, managing to tangle Derek inside his own jersey—the move of a wily veteran. Derek pulled his right arm out, leaving the empty sleeve dangling. With half of Derek’s upper body bare and his head caught awkwardly in his jersey, Fedoruk pounded Derek with punches until both men leaned, exhausted, into the side boards. They coasted off the ice, serenaded with a standing ovation.

  Three nights later, in his fifth NHL game, Derek charged to the front of the net, a bull in a china shop, and poked the puck past San Jose Sharks goalie Evgeni Nabokov to give the Wild a 2–1 lead in the third period. Minnesota erupted for four more goals and a 6–1 victory. But the ovation Derek got for scoring a goal was smaller than the one he had received earlier, when he beat up San Jose’s Rob Davison. With the puck stopped, Davison rushed in to collide with Derek. Derek responded by coolly battering Davison to the ice. He slid casually toward the penalty box with the ease and expression of a man walking a dog.

  In his first five NHL games, all at home, Derek had a goal, an assist, and three fights. Replicas of his No. 24 Boogaard jersey were rushed to stores. Newspaper stories were written about how much Derek had improved his all-around skill to reach the NHL, how he was much more than the goon he had been presumed to be in junior hockey.

  “An absolute gimmick,” was how Risebrough described Derek’s role in junior to the StarTribune. “Like he wasn’t even a human being.”

  Within weeks, Derek’s jersey became the fastest-selling of all the players on the Wild. Two months and seven fights into the season, the Pioneer Press carried a column titled “Wild Realize It’s Finally Boogey Time.” Derek was a rookie, making more money than he imagined but far less than most of his teammates, and he had shown himself to be a sincere, self-deprecating presence off the ice and an energy-inducing hulk on it. The Wild could not have expected more. Risebrough’s draft-day bet from four years earlier had paid off.

  Len Boogaard expressed a mix of pride and worry over Derek’s future.

  “He’s encountered a number of injuries with his hands, and he’s going to have repercussions years down the road,” Len told reporter Michael Russo of the StarTribune early in Derek’s rookie season. “But what he’s accomplished to get here, the obstacles and hurdles he’s overcome, I’m very proud. I’m mostly proud that he has a different persona off the ice than what you see on the ice.”

  WHENEVER HE WAS asked if he liked to fight, Derek would say some version of the same thing: It has always been part of hockey, and it always will be. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t do it.

  But he was not fearless.

  “If I think about it, I get nervous sometimes,” Derek said in early December of his rookie season. “There are guys here who can put fists through your face.”

  The worry was always that an opponent would get a clean shot, a one-punch knockout that removed more than a couple of teeth or did more damage than merely crushing the air passages inside the nose. The fear was of the one punch that indelibly rearranged a face, and maybe a career. There was little attention paid to the flurry of blows that the men absorbed, or to the cumulative effect of soon-forgotten punches that blurred together through fights and games. If nothing got broken, and nothing bled, then there was little reason for concern.

  Derek bloodied after a fight for the Wild.

  Most players had only vague notions of what a concussion was. Their frames of reference probably began with childhood cartoons, the victims portrayed comically with stars in the eyes and a tweeting bird circling overhead. They might have felt one, or a dozen, and tried to “shake it off,” tried to “clear the cobwebs,” as if it were no different than slamming a finger in a door.

  Concussions occur when the brain bounces against the inside walls of the skull. The damage can include bruising of the brain tissue and tearing of blood vessels and nerve fibers. Microscopic cell damage is possible, which can impact cognitive processing, even motor skills. Severe bruising can lead to swelling, which can cut off oxygen and glucose to the brain, leading to strokes or permanent disabilities.

  Concussions do not always involve blows directly to the head. In car accidents, for example, the skull may go untouched, but a sudden stop forces the brain, floating inside in fluid, to bang against it. In sports, however, most concussions come from direct impact—everything from helmet-to-helmet collisions in football to a headfirst fall in skiing, heading the ball in soccer, or fists in boxing or hockey.

  Concussions can cause a loss of consciousness, but most do not. Symptoms vary widely, but can include immediate dizziness, confusion, headaches, vision problems, memory loss, even a diminished sense of smell and taste. The treatment usually involves rest, until the symptoms subside. Sometimes, they never fully do. In the case of professional athletes, including countless hockey players, post-concussion syndrome can force early retirements.

  Occasionally, the likelihood of a concussion was obvious—a big mid-ice collision, or replays showing a player falling and smacking his head on the ice. But that was not how most concussions happened. They happened du
ring seemingly benign checks against the boards, the accidental stick to the jaw or knee to the head, the short uppercut in a hockey fight that was overshadowed by the flailing, jaw-cracking haymaker.

  In 2005, scientists were slowly, quietly learning about the effects of such blows among athletes. They were learning about a disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, eventually to become known simply as CTE. It was not caused by major blows to the head, necessarily, but by repeated blows, even small, forgettable blows, the subconcussive hits barely noted—the kind of hits that occurred across the sports landscape, from the youngest ages.

  It was an affliction long recognized in boxers, dating back nearly 100 years, sometimes referred to as “dementia pugilistica.” Aging boxers, often dismissively referred to as “punch drunk,” were actually victims of a degenerative brain disease. By 2005, Derek’s rookie year in the NHL, there was growing evidence that CTE was inflicting athletes beyond boxing. The focus had turned to football. Hall of Fame center Mike Webster died in 2002 after years of battling drug addiction, depression, and dementia. He was 50. And when his brain was examined after his death, he was found to have had CTE. A steady stream of other deceased football players, whose families donated their brains in a desperate search for clues to their late-life demise, were discovered to have had the disease, too.

  Scientists found that repeated brain trauma could cause the buildup of tau, an abnormal protein that can lead to neurofibrillary tangles that interfere with brain functioning. The results of such degeneration could include memory loss and impaired judgment, aggression and impulse-control problems. Depression was a common symptom. In the long run, CTE—a scientific cousin to Alzheimer’s disease—could lead to the early onset of dementia, scientists said.