Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

  But in 2005, evidence was spotty and sample sizes were small. The National Football League was denying the science and the impact that football had on the post-career lives of former players. And there was no link of CTE to the NHL. Not yet.

  It was certainly not a concern for the likes of Derek. It was the hands, the back, the shoulder, the nose that he and those around him worried about, if they worried at all. Not the head.

  THERE WAS NO way of knowing how many concussions Derek had had by the time he reached the NHL. The Wild knew of at least one, back in junior, and his family recalled several discombobulating blows that likely were concussions shrugged away. Surely there were more. What counts as a concussion, anyway?

  Fighting, after all, was a relatively small part of hockey, and even the top enforcers in the NHL fought only once every few games, on average. They wore helmets. They were balanced precariously on skates, so the blows were delivered without much leverage. Fights were short. Doctors were nearby. It was more of a show than a danger.

  That is what everyone thought.

  Enforcers never complained about their role, and players rarely admitted to concussions. Enforcers, especially, did not concede to anything that could be construed as a weakness or a lost edge. Such an admission raised doubts about an athlete’s commitment and toughness, the most important qualities for an enforcer. To admit to concussions was to commit career suicide.

  There was too much to lose. The fall to obscurity was not a long one.

  Trainers might have sympathy for a head injury, but most coaches and general managers did not. Either you could play or you could not. And while anyone could understand the seriousness of an injury when they saw a cast or learned about the rehabilitation time of a surgically repaired knee or shoulder, the debilitating effects of a concussion were not obvious to anyone but the injured.

  There was no protocol for handling possible concussions then—no baseline test against which to measure the effects of an obvious blow to the head, no requirement to leave the game or move to the training room for examination. For the most part, players were on their own, left to decide for themselves whether they wanted to draw attention to the fogginess or strange symptoms in their minds.

  There was a more immediate and practical matter. One thing that was understood about concussions was that one could easily lead to another, and then another. It seemed as if athletes who were knocked out once by a concussion often got knocked out again, and then again. Maybe that was a question of science. Or maybe it was because players known to be susceptible to concussions became targets for more blows to the head. Target an opponent’s weak spot, whether an ankle, a shoulder, or a head—it was an understood part of the strategy.

  In a sport where injuries were masked to laughable lengths—a broken toe in hockey might be described publicly only as a “lower body” injury—a known concussion was kept secret by teams, too. Such misdirection was common, meant to protect the player. But it had the effect of disguising a serious health issue afflicting all levels of hockey. No one kept track of the truth. Teams wanted to protect players from further injury. Players wanted to protect their jobs. It was a circular culture of concussion denial.

  Yet, by 2005, there was a growing body of worrisome evidence across the NHL. The careers of bankable stars were ending because of concussions. Enforcers? No one paid much attention to why they faded away. But as an increasing number of well-known players had their careers shortened by concussions in the years leading up to Derek’s arrival to the NHL, people began to notice.

  The most noted case was that of Eric Lindros, the No. 1–overall draft choice in 1991 and the NHL’s most valuable player in 1995. His potential was snuffed by a stream of concussions—eight of them, reportedly, beginning in 1998—that fanned the flames of criticism of his overall toughness. Some of the sharpest jabs came from his boss, Philadelphia Flyers general manager Bobby Clarke, a hard-nosed captain during the franchise’s Broad Street Bullies heyday and a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame.

  Brett Lindros, Eric’s brother, was also a first-round draft choice, by the Islanders in 1996. He quit the game at age 20 after three concussions, each with deepening effects. Pat LaFontaine had a 15-season Hall of Fame career, but it ended bleakly in 1998, at age 33, after the last of at least six major concussions. New York Rangers goalie Mike Richter suffered a fractured skull and a concussion from a puck one season, then took a knee to the head the next. He retired 10 months later, in 2003, before the symptoms subsided enough to allow him to play another game.

  Devils defenseman Scott Stevens, known largely for dishing out vicious checks, sustained a concussion from a puck in 2003 and retired in January 2004. That same season, the burgeoning career of Steve Moore of the Colorado Avalanche ended when Todd Bertuzzi of the Vancouver Canucks, looking for retribution, punched Moore from behind and drove him face-first to the ice.

  Keith Primeau, one of the league’s top power forwards, retired early in the 2005 season, unable to recover during the lockout from a string of concussions two seasons earlier. And Moore’s Colorado teammate Adam Deadmarsh missed parts of two seasons because of concussions—the most debilitating one sustained in a fight—and retired in 2005.

  “It’s one of the most frustrating injuries I think you could possibly have from a sports aspect,” Deadmarsh told the Canadian Press. “Unless you have concussions, it’s kind of hard to explain to someone what it feels like. But you know it’s something that’s not supposed to be there.”

  Enforcers, too, were among those who left the game due to concussions. Dean Chynoweth, who bounced between the minor leagues and the NHL while fighting for the New York Islanders and Boston Bruins, retired in 1998 at age 29 after being diagnosed with 13 concussions. The better-known Stu Grimson, nicknamed “The Grim Reaper,” was involved in about 200 NHL fights. He was concussed for the last time in 2001 during a bout with Georges Laraque and never played again.

  That was the world of NHL hockey that Derek entered in 2005. Concussions were a growing concern, but not enough of one to alter the rules or greatly impact safety measures. They certainly were not enough of a concern to curtail fighting, the one part of the game where players intentionally tried to hurt one another with repeated blows to the head, while everyone else gave them room and watched.

  No one knew whether concussions were occurring more than they ever had, or if players were simply more aware of them—if a name had been given to what had long been euphemistically called “having your bell rung” or “getting dinged.” It was not a new problem, just an old one dressed in a more cautious, more scientific vernacular.

  There was no rhyme or reason to those inflicted, it seemed—goalies or slick forwards, hulking defensemen or lumbering brawlers. Concussions could happen to anybody. You just hoped it was not you—that you were not a victim of bad luck or an unwitting owner of a soft head.

  The least of the worries, if there were worries at all, was for the enforcers. They knew what they were getting into. They chose to fight, and they loved to fight. Why else would they do it?

  IN THE FIRST HALF of Derek’s rookie season, the role of the enforcer was considered a dying one, on its way to slow extinction. It had nothing to do with the danger of the role, or concussions, or even fighting’s sideshow characteristics that many purists felt detracted from the beauty of the game. The league did nothing to deter fighting from its long-held place in the sport. The NHL, returning from a canceled season, merely warned that rules for obstruction, hooking, and holding would be more strictly enforced. Teams interpreted that to mean that there would be a premium on speed, not brawn. There was no room for lumbering players in an increasingly fast game.

  Teams that typically reserved a roster spot for a single enforcer were going without. They needed players who could chew up minutes, not opponents. Many of the enforcers who led the league in fights two years earlier were relegated to the minor leagues.

  “When I think of a role of a guy that just can fight, i
t was gone for me years ago,” Risebrough told the StarTribune.

  Yet Risebrough had employed Matt Johnson, who had never tallied more than eight points in his four seasons, and replaced him with Derek, who had not scored more than one goal for a team in any season since he was 16.

  But the league’s fighting numbers were down. In 2003–04, before the lockout, there were 789 fights in the NHL, as measured by fighting penalties. In 2005–06, Derek’s rookie year, there were 466. About 38 percent of NHL games had a fight, the lowest rate since the late 1960s and about one-third the rate of the late 1980s.

  “I don’t know if you’ll ever take fighting out of the game or whether we really want to,” Canucks coach Marc Crawford told reporters in Vancouver, offering an echoed refrain. “When emotions spill over, it’s better to let it take care of itself right there than to have anything fester.”

  Derek fought 16 times during his rookie season, more than all but three other players. And, according to the online judges, Derek had the league’s second-highest winning percentage (61 percent), trailing only Georges Laraque (64 percent).

  On November 2, just as NHL followers started analyzing the diminished role of fighting in the game through the early weeks of the season, Derek pounded Vancouver’s Wade Brookbank, a 28-year-old from Lanigan, Saskatchewan, not far from Melfort. With his left arm, Derek held Brookbank—who, along with his brother Sheldon, had been adversaries of Derek’s in the minor leagues—and assailed him with a flurry of punches to the head. One of them broke Brookbank’s helmet free. Another dropped his body to the ice.

  Four nights later, in Anaheim, six-foot, three-inch, 230-pound Trevor Gillies made his NHL debut for the Ducks. Derek had already beaten Kip Brennan and dueled Todd Fedoruk in an earlier game with Anaheim. With Brennan nursing a shoulder injury, Gillies was promoted from the American Hockey League for the singular purpose of standing up to Derek.

  Midway through the first period, the two began a fight near the boards. The crowd stood. Derek clutched Gillies’s jersey on the shoulder and hit him several times with his right fist. Thirty seconds into the fight, the two twirled in front of the Anaheim bench. Derek pulled Gillies closer and clocked him in the face with a right-hand uppercut.

  Derek knew immediately. Like a heavyweight moving to his corner knowing he had scored a knockout, he turned to skate toward the penalty box at about the time Gillies crumpled to the ice. The crowd responded with a mournful ohhh.

  Gillies was helped to the dressing room. Sent back to the minor leagues when he recovered, he did not reach the NHL again for four more years.

  “This kid is a monster, Boogaard,” the television announcer said.

  THE WILD BASKED in popularity, still in a honeymoon phase in the Twin Cities. Minnesota had been home to the North Stars from 1967 to 1993, when they moved to Dallas in hockey’s southern migration. In 2000, the Wild began play as an expansion team, a franchise smothered warmly with newfound appreciation. The Wild made the playoffs in its third season, reaching the conference final. There was momentum in Minnesota. Derek both rode it and pushed it.

  Fans latched on to something more complicated than Derek’s ability to punish opponents. He was cheered for his fists, beloved for his humility. He was, in the kindest sense of the term, a beloved goon.

  His on-ice manner was cool and humble. He carried none of the histrionics of some other top enforcers, who might blow on their knuckles after a knockout or make a pugnacious show of retreating to the penalty box. Derek seemed, somehow, more reluctant, more clinical. His face rarely showed anger. Even during ferocious fights, Derek looked like a man exerting himself, not one lost in a rage.

  “But you get in his face, and the minute you do, it’s on,” his brother Aaron said years later. “And there’s nothing you can do about it. He just took personal offense to people challenging him like that. I don’t think he ever wanted to be bullied.”

  As in his fight with Gillies, Derek did not gloat over his knockouts. He was readily available to reporters in the dressing room and had a knack for self-effacing, humorous quotes. When the public-relations department needed players to attend off-ice events, from on-location radio spots to hospital visits, Derek volunteered. He was not covered in tattoos, he did not have facial hair, and did not cut or color his hair in some self-aware way, like many of his foes who felt a need to create or adhere to an image. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, like the kind he had worn since middle school, which gave him an unintentionally bookish, Clark Kent persona.

  He was well liked by teammates, too. As he had as an outcast in high school, Derek gathered a misfit assortment of friends from all corners of the roster. He quickly became close to Slovakian Marian Gaborik, the rising 23-year-old star, a fleet scorer whom Derek was expected to protect. On buses and during meals, Derek often sat with teammates from foreign countries, peppering them with questions about their homelands, playfully trying to learn words from their language. He had several friends from his playing days in Houston, such as goalie Josh Harding, from Regina, and defenseman Brent Burns.

  Derek entertains young Wild fans during a summertime team event in Saint Paul.

  But Derek knew that his roots in the NHL were not deep. Minutes were scarce and chances were few. A couple of losing fights might send him to the minors. An injury might lead to his replacement. A punch might change everything.

  There may have been no fighter who gave Derek more problems than Georges Laraque. Bulging with muscles, six foot three and 240 pounds, Laraque was widely considered the league’s toughest enforcer. Derek, brimming with confidence after his first few fights, wanted to measure himself against the best. His first chance came on November 23, 2005, in Edmonton. Laraque was 30, but he remembered his early years, when he tried to prove himself against the likes of Bob Probert, Tony Twist, and Tie Domi. He was receptive to accepting a challenge from a young, legitimate fighting talent.

  Barely two minutes into the game, Derek and Laraque were side by side for a face-off. The puck and the gloves dropped. Fans stood. Flashes from cameras lit the arena like strobe lights. Laraque threw the first big punch, a right fist that came up short, but his fingers caught Derek’s jersey by the collar. Derek lunged with a left hand that missed. Laraque swung a left that landed. Derek, still clutched by the collar, was off balance, his head down, trying to shake free from the man considered the strongest in the game. Laraque did not let go. He pulled Derek closer and hit him with another left. Derek slipped to the ice, Laraque fell on top of him, and fans cheered the reigning champion.

  “It’s not very often I feel like a midget,” Laraque told the Edmonton Sun afterward. “He had to be 10 feet tall.”

  It did little to tarnish Derek’s reputation. Veterans, as Derek came to know, tended to dismiss challenges from up-and-coming fighters, knowing that they had little to gain in a fight with an unknown player. That Laraque so willingly took Derek on only validated Derek’s rising stature.

  A couple of weeks later, Derek fought Donald Brashear, another of the vaunted heavyweights. Again, his opponent’s raw strength kept Derek off balance. Brashear was eager to throw punches again and again before falling on top of Derek.

  Those were hiccups, considered worthy bouts of experience, amid an otherwise impressive assortment of punch-out victories. Derek’s standing grew in accordance with his string of fallen victims. There was Ottawa’s six-foot, five-inch, Brian McGrattan, a fellow rookie and the league leader in fights. The two traded right-hand blows for 45 seconds before Derek landed one on McGrattan’s jaw that felled him. There was a similar beating of Chicago’s Jim Vandermeer, then a mauling of Columbus’s Jody Shelley and a one-punch knockdown of Phoenix’s Matthew Spiller. There were two more bouts with Laraque, more evenly fought than the first.

  “TO TELL YOU the truth, I never really loved fighting,” Chris Nilan, a noted fighter of the Boston Bruins and Montreal Canadiens, told Sports Illustrated in 1986. “You get sore hands. There have been nights when I’ve sat in the dressing ro
om between periods with my hands in buckets of ice. Who in their right mind likes to do that? But to be honest with you, I don’t think I’d ever have gotten the chance to play up here if I hadn’t fought.”

  For generations, enforcers liked what the fighting brought them—respect and a career—but not the hidden costs. Their popularity grew exponentially when they battered another enforcer, but it was a small fraternity. There was no room for grudges. Unlike any other player in the sport, their success came at the expense of someone else’s health, reputation, even livelihood. But the alternative was worse. Derek recognized that quickly.

  “Derek was so big and powerful, he knew what he could do to people,” Todd Fedoruk said. “And when it happened, in some cases he felt bad about it. But I always told him, ‘You’ve got to understand, man, I would do the same thing. I would love it if I had your size.’ But he had that strength and that power and that ability to really beat guys, and he didn’t like it. He enjoyed it when he needed it, but some of it weighed on him.”

  All enforcers shouldered the weight of expectations, worry and unpredictability. The pressure was enormous.

  “The thing about that job is that it’s mental,” Laraque said. “The fact that at any given time, you might fight somebody. Even if you’re tired or something happens, even if the other tough guy doesn’t play much, if the score of the game is out of proportion, you’ve got to go out and show up and fight, and show that you’re there for your team. You always have to be ready at any time. And depending on who it is and what team you play, your level of nervousness might be higher from one game to another. You might not be able to sleep during your afternoon nap, or you might not be able to eat. You go to the movies, you might not be able to get into the movie because you know the next day you’re playing this guy. You’re worried. So many things that can happen, and it’s mostly in the head. Because once you start fighting, it’s different. It’s okay. The adrenaline kicks in and you don’t feel anything.”