by John Branch
Outsiders, and some teammates and coaches, never understood. They underestimated the toll, both physically and mentally. They saw a player who played the fewest minutes on the team and who got into a fight only once every few games. They saw it as a job with few responsibilities, rewarded by lots of admiration. And they saw the enforcers as fearless.
If a scorer missed a good shot on goal, it rarely haunted him. There would be other shots and more goals, perhaps as soon as the next shift. But a fighter was keenly aware that every fight could be his last. The opportunity might not come again, particularly against a specific foe. A lost fight might mean a trip to the minor leagues. One big punch might end a career.
“Toward the end of my career, when I had a really good reputation, I started getting less and less nervous because I knew how the other tough guys felt,” Laraque said. “I knew I had a mental advantage. Because if I was nervous, I knew the other guy was 10 times more nervous than me.”
Most misinterpreted the enforcer. Despite their rugged reputations, many lived with an inferiority complex. They wanted to be more like everyone else, not less. They wanted to be all-around players trusted in every phase of the game. Nearly every young fighter who reached the NHL told the same story that Derek told all along: I know my role as an enforcer, but I know I need to improve my other skills, too, so that the team can trust me in all of those other game situations. Most of them, like Derek, remained fighters, first and foremost. Rare was the young fighter who grew into something more.
In early July 2006, the Wild announced that it had re-signed two of its young players to new contracts. Marian Gaborik had played 65 games that season, the same number as Derek. He scored 38 goals and recorded 28 assists, a point total that ranked him 58th in the league. Gaborik received a three-year contract worth $19 million. Derek scored two goals and fought 16 times, third most in the league. He signed a one-year contract for $525,000.
The lower pay, and the constant realization that fame could be fleeting, may be part of the everyman charm of the enforcer. But it ate at many who played the role.
Enforcers never knew for sure what a particular game might bring. The team might start slowly and need a fight as a momentum changer. A blowout might force the losing team to start a fight to restore its honor. An unexpected hit might light the match and quickly turn into an unpredicted brawl. Shift by shift, enforcers had to be ready to fight at a moment’s notice.
Some games were almost guaranteed to have a fight. Those were the hard ones. Enforcers learned to look ahead at the schedule to see who and when they were likely to fight. Maybe there was a debt to be settled from last month or last year—retribution for a cheap shot that injured a teammate, payback owed for a beating during a fight. Maybe there was an up-and-coming enforcer who wanted to prove himself. Maybe there was a long history of acrimony between particular fighters.
The anticipation could be ignited by the media, showing highlights from the last time and debating what would happen this time. But, mostly, enforcers internalized the pressure. They masked it behind their rugged, unworried faces.
Fans never saw enforcers curled up in a ball on the hotel room floor. They didn’t see the food left on the plate during the pre-game meal. They didn’t know that the enforcer tried to take his mind off of the fight with an afternoon movie or a long walk, and later had no idea what he had seen or where he had been.
Don’t have the appetite to fight that night? Move aside. There are plenty of others who would love your job.
The role, and the pressures associated with it, could propel enforcers into a cycle of personal problems. Even as Derek arrived, the line of NHL enforcers was littered with broken lives. Alcohol and painkillers, especially, became the silent antidotes to the pain and pressure.
One of history’s great enforcers, an idol to many players of Derek’s generation, was Probert, who retired in 2002. He was a brutally effective fighter, a decent scorer, and a beloved teammate. He was also an alcoholic and a drug addict, he admitted in his autobiography, arrested at the United States-Canada border once for cocaine possession and suspended by the NHL for substance abuse multiple times. There were many other enforcers of the era who struggled through addiction, including Nilan and Brantt Myhres, whose career ended with a Laraque punch that broke his eye socket in the 2005 preseason, just as Derek arrived in the NHL.
Their problems, and those of many others that were not publicized, were dismissed as a side effect of their personalities, the kind of daredevil traits that led them to fight in the first place.
TODD FEDORUK, “THE FRIDGE,” wanted a piece of Derek. The puck had been sent to the other end of the ice, and as players chased it, Fedoruk tugged on the back of Derek’s jersey.
It was early in the second period of a game between the Anaheim Ducks and the Wild, in Saint Paul on October 27, 2006. In the first period, Derek had kneed Anaheim’s Chris Kunitz. Shane O’Brien came to Kunitz’s rescue to challenge Derek. Derek pummeled him to the ice.
Now came Fedoruk, seeking hockey’s convoluted brand of revenge. For several years, he had proved to be a willing and capable fighter in the NHL, with a bit of scoring punch. His grittiness had made him popular in Philadelphia, where he spent four seasons, and coveted by Anaheim, which traded a second-round draft choice to get him. Fedoruk was, in many ways, the type of all-around player Derek wanted to be—back when they were both in Regina, and here in the NHL.
Derek glanced over his shoulder and momentarily resisted the temptation. The whistle blew, and Fedoruk followed Derek into the corner. They grabbed one another, slipping their hands from their gloves as they glided toward the nearest face-off circle.
Derek popped Fedoruk in the face with a right hand. He had Fedoruk in his grip with his left hand, and Fedoruk ducked and squirmed to escape Derek’s reach. He tried to keep his head turned away, out of range. Derek’s next punch, cocked from his right hip, hit Fedoruk squarely on the right side of his face. Fedoruk dropped immediately. Derek skated away.
“Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho,” one television announcer said.
“Oh, boy,” the other replied over the din of the rollicking crowd.
Wild teammates banged the boards in front of their bench with their sticks, the ultimate ovation of appreciation for a fighter. Ducks players watched Fedoruk rise, one side of his face caved in, sickly demolished. Some turned away in horror.
Derek breaks Todd Fedoruk’s cheekbone.
As he stepped, expressionless, into the penalty box, Derek raised his left hand to acknowledge the crowd. It was a rare display for Derek. Len Boogaard called his son after the game. Do not ever do that again, he told him.
In the hallway outside the locker room, Derek spoke to friends with a pang of disbelief. His right hand was wrapped in ice inside a towel. It would throb for days.
“Oh, my God, I feel so bad for him,” Derek said. “I crushed his face. My hand is killing me.”
Derek bottled his astonishment and empathy in front of reporters.
“You never, ever wish that on somebody,” Derek told them. “But you’ve got to look at it in a different way, too. What happens if he had you in that position? Do you think he would let up? You know he wouldn’t.”
The one punch altered the arc of both men’s careers. For Derek, in his second season, it announced his coronation as the most feared fighter in the NHL. For Fedoruk, then 27, it irretrievably interrupted his career trajectory.
“I didn’t see it coming at all,” Fedoruk said of the punch, years later. “I was in a bad position and he hit me hard, hardest I’ve ever been hit. I instantly knew it was broken. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I went straight on the ice. And I felt where it was, and my hand didn’t rub my face normally. It was a little chunky and sharp in spots and there was a hole there about the size of a fist.”
6
LEN AND DEREK BOOGAARD stepped out of the movie theater in San Jose, California, and went searching for something to eat.
It was less than two we
eks after Derek’s reputation had ballooned with his face-crushing knockout of Todd Fedoruk. The Minnesota Wild had invited the fathers of players to join the team on a West Coast road trip, and 16 of them came. They met at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, ate a full buffet meal on the team’s charter jet and stayed at a high-end hotel in downtown San Jose. It impressed the fathers, but it was nothing different than the players typically enjoyed.
Len and Derek had spent all those years together, driving through the empty winter nights of Saskatchewan, warming themselves with rink burgers and the glow of the radio broadcasting faraway hockey. Len had visited Derek often in junior, where the buses drove a thousand miles at a time and only the oldest boys got a bunk. Derek and Janella and their bulldog, Trinity, had spent a couple of recent summers living with Len and his second wife, Jody, in Regina, where Len had added a room to the house.
Len thought he knew Derek’s habits and creature comforts as well as anyone. Derek was easy to please and unpretentious. His tastes were simple. Len liked that about him.
“Pita Pit?” Len said, spotting a fast-food place across the street.
“No, I don’t want that,” Derek said. “We can just go back to the hotel and order room service.”
Len was not the room-service type, so the two parted. Len bought a pita and a drink for six dollars and carried it back to the room.
Derek was there, waiting for his dinner. He joked about the frugality of some of his teammates, especially the ones with wives and children, who scrimped with the likes of Subway, Chipotle, and Pita Pit so that they could squirrel away most of the $125 per diem that players received.
Derek had ordered steak, some vegetables, and a bottle of Coca-Cola. It came to the room. Derek signed the tab. It was $90.
Len protested. Ninety dollars? For dinner?
“Don’t worry about it, Dad,” Derek said, raising a dismissive hand. “It’s the lifestyle.”
SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE, the four-year relationship between Derek and Janella had ended.
When Derek first made the Wild’s season-opening roster in the fall of 2005, Janella was still in Houston, living in the apartment they had shared. She quit her job at a bank and pulled together the loose ends of their lives. She arrived in Minneapolis in November for his rookie year.
She already knew that Derek had cheated on her. She began to snoop through pockets and phone records, their relationship spiraling into distrust, and learned that he had done it again. Near Valentine’s Day, while the Wild were on a road trip, she intercepted a letter intended for Derek at their Minnesota apartment. Inside was a note to him, from some girl writing about working things out. It mentioned Trinity and the truck.
Wow, Janella thought. This isn’t just a fling. Somebody has seen our dog and been in our truck.
The card included a ticket stub from the night that Derek scored his first NHL goal, earlier that season. Janella had been stuck in Houston. The mystery woman had been at the arena.
Janella confronted Derek when he returned, and he begged her to stay and give him another chance. She did. But Janella knew that the NHL had changed Derek. He no longer went out in public without his false teeth. He bought designer glasses to replace the ones he had worn since middle school. He cared about where he got his hair cut. He upgraded his wardrobe to trendy brands.
He just wanted to fit in and look like he belonged. Janella understood that. She also understood how different Derek’s world was from the time she met him, and she was willing to let that be an excuse for his behavior. He went from anonymous and poor to famous and rich. He went from having few close friends to having to fend off strangers desperate to get close to him.
Like many professional athletes, Derek did not have to grow up. He had never had a real job, anything besides being a hockey player. Teams told him what to do and where to be. His mother, or his billets, or Janella took care of things at home. Derek was just an oversized boy. And he behaved like one.
“We’d go to bars,” Aaron Boogaard said, “and if you’re there and the place is packed, and you can’t get near the bar to get a drink, he’d shout, ‘Submarine!’ And he’d put his hands up over his head and duck down, going through the crowd. He’d be bumping into people, knocking drinks, pissing people off. Then he’d get to the bar and stand up and wave us over. We’d follow that path. He made me laugh, so, so hard.”
There were times that Derek and Aaron, four years and about six inches apart, pretended to be twins. Derek loved it. “Who do you think is older?” he asked young women. And if they said Derek, he would feign disappointment and point to Aaron’s retreating hairline.
At an outdoor concert one summer, Aaron found himself away from Derek, striking up a conversation with a couple of young women. Aaron pretended to be his brother, the cool enforcer of the Minnesota Wild. Later, as the same women approached, Aaron hid out of sight.
“Oh, you look so much taller with your glasses on,” one of the women cooed to Derek.
He was confused. “Who are you?” Derek asked.
The boys must have told that story a hundred times.
Derek never denied anyone an autograph or a chance to take a picture with him. People bought him drinks, and Derek went along with it, accepting them and clinking glasses. Minneapolis, especially, was filled with young people who thought they were good friends with Derek Boogaard.
Part of him wanted to stay hidden behind the facade. Most of him could not resist the temptation. Aaron always thought Derek was like Shrek. Derek wanted people to know him as the big guy who could beat up anyone. That got him respect. But he really wanted to be liked, and he quickly established a reputation for being an approachable star. Even serious conversations in quiet corners of restaurants were routinely interrupted by someone asking for something from him.
Women, mature versions of the junior-league puck bunnies, wanted to know if the new Wild star was single. Men wanted to befriend Derek. Some wanted to drink with him, and some begged to be hit by him, to see if they could take one of his punches. Others, usually emboldened by alcohol, wanted to fight him, just to brag to friends. They usually settled for a fist bump and a cell-phone photograph of themselves with the Boogeyman, their fists raised in mock anger.
Weeks before training camp opened in 2006, Derek’s second season with the Wild, he was at a Regina bar called the Pump Roadhouse. He was with his brothers, Ryan and Aaron, there to celebrate Aaron’s birthday. In the late hours, long after anything good ever happens, Ryan turned away and lost track of the others. He walked outside to find Derek and Aaron in the middle of a scrum. Days later, Derek was charged with assault causing bodily harm, and the story soon echoed across the news wires. Derek declined to talk about the case publicly once he arrived at training camp, and not only to protect the upcoming legal proceedings. It was because he had been too drunk to remember what happened. Aaron, too.
The case, delayed until the following spring, was a soiled backdrop to Derek’s everyman image for months. It was at Christmastime that Ryan ran into an old friend in Regina.
“I can’t believe what happened at Pump Roadhouse, when Derek got punched by that guy,” the friend said.
“Wait, you were there?” Ryan said. “You saw it?”
“Yeah, your brother got suckered,” the friend said. He agreed to come forward as a witness. Charges were soon dropped.
Janella had grown used to the occasional shenanigans. When you have a thousand girls throwing themselves at you, she figured, eventually a man will break. When you have men wanting to cling to you, you might find yourself in unpleasant company. Derek was never good at saying no to people who wanted to get close to him. He was not adept at dissecting motivations.
Janella thought she could be the steadying influence for Derek, a sort of protector from the outside lures of money and fame. But weeks before the alleged assault in the summer of 2006, Derek cheated again, and she decided to teach him a lesson.
Derek had bought a loft-style condominium in
Regina, just north of downtown, on a nondescript side street not far from a popular stretch of bars. He and Janella spent months designing it. It had exposed-brick walls and steel beams and high ceilings. There was a huge kitchen counter that opened to a big room. A large-screen television built into a wall could spin, flipping between the bedroom and the family room, with its monster-sized leather sofa. There was a den with a Murphy bed tucked into the wall and a large desk designed specifically for Ryan, to watch four NHL games at once so he could scout Derek’s fighting rivals.
Derek wanted the loft to be for everyone, and he envisioned it filled with family and friends, maybe a precursor to the houses he dreamed of building in the mountains. He called the contractor continuously to check on the most minute of details. Finally, it was ready to move into.
Janella’s mother had moved from the Portland suburbs to the Denver area, and Janella spent several weeks in Colorado early that off-season. She had plane tickets to return to Regina, but Derek called three days before her trip. He was upset. He had cheated again.
It broke Janella. That’s it, she told Derek. She canceled her flight.
ON JUNE 26, after a few weeks apart and following a long and tearful phone call, Derek wrote the first in a string of rambling love letters to Janella, mostly on hotel stationery while spending time traveling Minnesota for off-season public appearances with the Wild.
“I am writing you this letter because I want you to know that I love you more than you think and that I do love you more than you love or loved me,” one letter began.
The letters were written mostly in the late-night and early-morning hours. Derek misspelled some words and apologized for his grammar. Sometimes, he admitted to being drunk.
