Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

  Someone wondered aloud if there should be a similar camp for another hockey skill: fighting. Ripplinger called Derek, who was spending parts of his summers in Regina. Derek and his brother Aaron, the former draft pick of the Wild who had recently signed with the Pittsburgh Penguins, were glad to do it.

  About 30 boys, aged 12 to 18, came to the first of several camps that summer. They paid $50 each. They watched a 25-minute video of Derek’s best fights, including his knockout of Fedoruk, compiled by Ryan Boogaard. They learned examples of following “the code”—fighting’s unwritten rules. Know when to start a fight. Know what is allowed and fair. Know how to win with grace and lose with dignity.

  The boys were taught some keys to fighting. Get a strong stance. Grab the jersey. Tuck the chin. Each boy partnered with another boy, roughly the same size and age, and practiced the lessons—with their gloves on.

  They were given a T-shirt that read “Boogaard Fighting Camp”; what looked like red drops of blood dribbled from the letters. Their parents wielded cameras and autograph pens.

  “The kids love it,” Derek told the StarTribune. “It’s fun to see how excited they are and how pumped up the parents get.”

  He explained that nearly every young hockey player would find himself in a fight eventually, maybe just a spur-of-the-moment scrap with one of the sport’s countless agitators—“rats,” as Derek called them. It was prudent to learn how to protect yourself. The camp was not about beating up opponents, but preventing them from beating up you, Derek said.

  “The people who say this is a bad thing—because it’s going to happen—just tell them to cool it, relax, sit back and watch,” Derek told the Regina Leader-Post. “It’s not a bad example. A bad example is letting a kid go out there and fight and get himself hurt. This is to protect the kids, bottom line.”

  But some called it “goon school,” and the camp made national news. It was debated and widely panned across the Internet, on talk shows, even in newspaper editorials. Derek appeared on news channels to defend himself. He did his best to dismiss the critics, but the backlash took its toll.

  Enthusiasm for the camps waned. Derek declined to do them again. He did not like to be the bad guy, at least beyond the rink. His job was to protect, not to hurt. He had wanted to show people that he was not a thug—that there was an art to his craft, a method and meaning to the madness.

  AMONG THOSE WHO lent the fight camps credibility was a boxing instructor named Frank Fiacco. Derek spent several summers working at Fiacco’s gym in Regina, learning and rehearsing the nuances of the sport. It was Fiacco who worked with Derek to develop the body blows that he used on D. J. King. It was Fiacco who helped develop Derek’s uppercut, not unlike the one he used to knock out Fedoruk.

  Fiacco was a small, tightly wound man—“a short Italian,” he called himself—whose day job was as a building coordinator for the city of Regina. His brother was Regina’s mayor.

  But Fiacco was also an international boxing referee and judge. His Lonsdale Boxing Club was in a cavernous building on a grim industrial street beyond the north edge of downtown, not far from Derek’s condominium. The ceiling hummed with fluorescent lights, and the walls were covered in mirrors. The large room had mats on the floor and heavy bags suspended from above. A regulation-sized boxing ring was in one corner.

  On any given evening or weekend, the ring would host a revolving cast of boxers—men and women, adults and children—learning how to use their padded fists. Many of the participants were hockey players. Teenagers from the local teams, like the Pats and the Pat Canadians, sometimes brought in groups for team-mandated training sessions.

  Derek arrived wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and glasses. People did not always recognize him.

  “You look like a schoolteacher instead of a hockey player,” Fiacco said to him.

  When younger hockey players approached, Derek knelt down to talk to them eye to eye. He was soft-spoken and quick to smile. Fiacco could tell his good-naturedness was genuine, and he appreciated how Derek spoke so kindly and gently to his young daughters.

  But he felt for Derek, whose fame grew in Regina in step with his fame in Minnesota. He struck Fiacco as a shy young man who now always had to be “on.” He had to be in a good mood and he had to be social. He had to make being hockey’s most-feared man look easy. It had to appear that there were no drawbacks. Who would ever feel sorry for a rich, famous professional hockey player, especially in the gritty outposts of Saskatchewan?

  Once the workouts began, Fiacco donned thick mittens called “focus” pads. He held his hands up, as if under arrest, providing targets for Derek and Aaron to punch. The Boogaards would throw 10-pound medicine balls from their chests to strengthen the motion of a punch. They would shadowbox in front of the mirrors to practice technique and pound on the heavy bags to improve stamina.

  “He had fast hands,” Fiacco said of Derek. “Really, really, really, really fast hands. And power. Without really having to unload.”

  Then the boys would climb into the ring together, wearing boxing gloves. It was a formalized extension of their not-so-brotherly battles in the basement and the yard at the house in Melfort.

  “Don’t hit my nose,” Derek said. “Don’t hit me in the—”

  Bam! Aaron hit Derek in the nose.

  “I swear to God, Nick, if you hit me if the nose again, I’m going to kill you.”

  Bam! Another shot. Aaron always knew how to make Derek mad.

  Nearly every NHL enforcer had had his nose broken too many times to count. Most had surgery at least once to rebuild the breathing passages.

  Derek hated getting hit in the nose. He rarely complained of injuries and pain, but the nose was an exception. He’d had it broken at least six times, probably double that. After getting his nose broken once during a game in Minnesota, a friend of Derek’s found him lying on his back in the training room. A trainer was straddled on top of Derek, pulling and twisting his nose back into position with all his might.

  Bam!

  The fights descended from workouts to brawls. Derek chased his brother around the ring. People in the gym stopped what they were doing to watch. Boogaard family members, sometimes accompanying the boys to the gym, had seen it all before. Joanne winced through the punches, but was happy that they at least had gloves on.

  Fiacco tried to break Derek of his early habit of swinging wildly for the knockout. Don’t just grab with the left. Hit with it, too. And don’t waste movement. Don’t go wide with the right. Shorter distances. Keep yourself protected. And learn new moves.

  “If you plateau, everyone else is catching up,” Fiacco told Derek.

  If Fiacco were ever to instruct an opponent on how to fight Derek, he would advise them to go after Derek’s body—something most fighters did not think to do, wanting to hit him quickly with a big blow to knock him off balance. But Fiacco thought the body blows would force Derek to drop his left hand down, exposing his head. That was what Aaron did.

  Opponents, especially smaller ones, usually tried to get in tight with Derek, to prevent him from holding his opponent at arm’s length and pounding him with his near-lethal right fist. But Derek was strong enough to wrestle many of them away. Once he grabbed the collar of the other man’s jersey, he could thrash them side to side or sway them rhythmically until he timed his fist with their face.

  But larger enforcers, men like Laraque, could not be throttled. Laraque would muscle in close to Derek, wait for Derek to try to shove him away, and punch as Derek’s hands were out of position. Aaron, smaller than Derek but more technical, did that, too.

  Laraque, like most others, hated to fight Derek. Just the thought of an upcoming duel caused restless nights and bouts of anxiety. He knew that he was one punch away from the end of his career. And if anyone would land that punch, it would be Derek.

  “There’s not that many guys that did that to me, but because of his punching power, and his height, his size, and the fact that he liked fighting,” Laraque said. �
��You know, he broke Fedoruk’s face, and he’s fucking tough. And the scariest thing for me was the pressure. People expected us to fight. I knew sooner or later he would get the better of me, and I just—I like my face, and I just didn’t want to have it broken.”

  TODD FEDORUK CAME back too soon. After being crushed by Derek, Fedoruk’s face was surgically rebuilt with small metal plates and a swatch of mesh.

  “The angle that I was hit at and stuff like that, the cheekbone came all the way over to my nose and crumpled up,” Fedoruk said. “The orbital—that’s the shell behind your eye—was completely blown out. The doc said, ‘I’ve fixed a lot of faces from car accidents that weren’t as bad as this.’ And he was trying to tell my wife to prepare her for it, and he said, ‘I really don’t know if he’s going to be able to play again.’ I was like, ‘No, no, I’ll be fine. I can still see.’ ”

  About two weeks later, Fedoruk was traded back to the Philadelphia Flyers, where his NHL career had begun, for a future fourth-round draft choice. Five weeks after the punch, he was in the Philadelphia lineup.

  He felt internal pressure to get back on the ice. He was 27, supposedly in his prime, but embarrassed to have been on the losing end of a brutal highlight and afraid of being forgotten entirely. In late February, he fought Chris Simon of the Islanders.

  “Simon recracked some stuff in here,” Fedoruk said, touching his cheek. “And I didn’t tell anybody, because I’m still young, I’ve got my best years in front of me, and I just had a good year in Anaheim. I shouldn’t have been fighting. But I wanted to get back on the horse.”

  In March, he fought Colton Orr of the New York Rangers. An Orr punch drilled Fedoruk in the face. He sank to the ice, unconscious. A stretcher carried him off the Madison Square Garden rink.

  Fedoruk was damaged goods. He signed with the Dallas Stars that summer, but barely played early in the season. He tried to make an impression, getting into a fight in the season opener and then battling George Parros in an October game against Anaheim. He was soon demoted to the minor leagues, a willing fighter but a broken enforcer.

  That was when the Wild called. Minnesota, looking for a wider range of toughness through its roster, wanted to sign him. Fedoruk called his wife, Theresa.

  “Don’t they have Boogaard?” she said. “Now you won’t have to fight him anymore.”

  “I wasn’t going to fight him again, anyway,” Fedoruk said.

  Fedoruk welcomed the Wild offer, but envisioned the awkward reintroduction: “Hey, buddy, remember me, the guy whose career you almost ended last year? See this dent in my face? Want to be roomies?”

  Derek hoped that the video board at the Xcel Energy Center would finally stop playing replays of the punch.

  “They show it before the game, during the game, after the game,” Derek said.

  The Wild did not want any discomfort to simmer. The team assigned Fedoruk a dressing-room stall next to the corner one that Derek used. The tension was palpable when Fedoruk arrived.

  After a few moments, Fedoruk broke the silence with a joke.

  “Do you want to switch sides?” he said to Derek, loud enough for others to hear. “Because this is the side you hit, and I don’t feel comfortable with you on that side of me.”

  Derek laughed his familiar laugh, a deep, guttural heh-heh-heh chortle. Teammates laughed in relief.

  Derek apologized for the damage he had caused. Fedoruk told him not to. That is part of the enforcer’s code, never having to say you’re sorry.

  “I would have done the same thing to you if I could have,” Fedoruk said.

  DEREK’S SEASON, his third in the NHL, began strongly. He had six fights in the first 20 games, and his place in the ranks of enforcers—on the top tier—was secure.

  But that sixth fight, against Jody Shelley of the Columbus Blue Jackets, the night that Fedoruk first played for the Wild, was the last Derek would fight for nearly four months.

  Derek’s back problems flared up again. He missed all but two of Minnesota’s next 24 games. Even before that, medical reports later showed, Wild doctors diagnosed him with facial lacerations, a bruised foot, and cuts to his hand.

  Derek already had received more prescription drugs from team doctors than he had in his first two seasons combined, according to medical and pharmacy records later obtained by Len Boogaard. Ambien, 30 of them at a time, came with regularity. There were muscle relaxants and anti-inflammatories. There were regular dosages of Tylenol with codeine, then Endocet, a mix of acetaminophen and oxycodone.

  By the middle of winter, in January of 2008, Derek was receiving prescriptions from Wild medical director Sheldon Burns for hydrocodone, sold under the brand name of Vicodin, a powerfully addictive narcotic pain reliever mixed with acetaminophen, the active ingredient in pain relievers such as Tylenol. Generally consumed on an as-needed basis, Derek received 20 one week by prescription, then 20 the next, according to pharmacy records.

  And for the first time, records showed, a Wild doctor prescribed oxycodone, usually marketed under the brand name OxyContin, another highly addictive opioid (narcotic) used as a round-the-clock treatment for moderate to severe pain.

  The Wild was desperate to get Derek back onto the ice. When it became clear that he might miss much of the season, the Wild went looking for reinforcements. In February, at the NHL trading deadline, the Wild added a surprising bit of punch: the notorious veteran enforcer Chris Simon.

  In the previous 12 months, Simon had received a 25-game suspension for slashing the New York Rangers’ Ryan Hollweg and a 30-game suspension for stepping on Pittsburgh’s Jarkko Ruutu, two of the longest suspensions ever doled out by the NHL. The Islanders had given Simon a personal leave of absence earlier in the season, and Simon—with a known bout with alcohol addiction as a junior player in Canada—entered the league’s Substance Abuse and Behavioral Health Program. After a league vice president said that Simon was receiving drug-and-alcohol treatment, the league backpedaled. A spokesman pointed out that the program also addressed other behavioral issues and cited the league’s privacy policy.

  The Islanders no longer wanted the 36-year-old and were glad to get a sixth-round draft choice out of the deal with the Wild. Simon would play 10 regular-season games and two playoff games for the Wild and end his NHL career before playing a few more seasons as a bruiser in Russia.

  But at the time, the Wild’s additions of Fedoruk and Simon boosted the team’s air of toughness and provided security in case Derek’s injuries, particularly his balky back, kept him out of the lineup.

  “There’s no doubt we’re bigger and stronger, and that was a factor last season in maybe not being No. 1 in our division or advancing in the playoffs,” Doug Risebrough, the general manager, told reporters after the trade was announced. “We needed to make sure we could compete physically, and these changes we’ve made, I think they’re a positive.”

  They did one other thing that the Wild never fully considered: they provided Derek with personal examples to follow. Both Simon and Fedoruk were intimately familiar with the strange life of an NHL enforcer, and the private demons that could undermine a career.

  Derek’s usual roommate on the road was defenseman Brent Burns. After Fedoruk’s arrival, though, players shuffled themselves, and Fedoruk and Derek, traveling sporadically because of his injuries, shared hotel rooms.

  “I don’t know if he was my friend more because he felt sorry for what he did to me, or he just liked my jokes,” Fedoruk said later. “But I think there’s a level of respect that he had for me for not trying to hold anything over him for doing what he did.”

  They quickly became close friends and confidants. Fedoruk saw how strangers reacted to Derek—usually by commenting on his size, which made Derek uncomfortable. Young men often raised their fists and dared Derek to punch them. When Derek asked why, they said, “So I can say I took a punch from the Boogeyman.”

  Fedoruk experienced firsthand the disconnect between Derek’s persona and personality.

/>   “He got along with my kids better than he did with some adults,” Fedoruk said. “Luke was four in Minnesota, and Derek really enjoyed Luke, because Luke always sat between me and him when he was at the rink. Luke was always scared and shyer when he was at the rink, and I think Boogey liked that shyness about him. He liked that he felt real safe beside the Boogeyman.”

  When Fedoruk’s son was scared of the dark, Fedoruk told him not to fear the Boogeyman. “You know the Boogeyman,” he’d say.

  “And Boogs liked that. I think you can really judge a person’s character by how they are around kids who’ve got that innocence and unsafe feeling.”

  Derek played just two games in December and three games in January, nursing his injuries. He was desperate to return to the lineup, not wanting to disappoint the Wild or give the team a reason to replace him. He tried to conceal the pain from teammates and coaches, but was receiving medication from team doctors.

  “He couldn’t sit on the bench,” Fedoruk said. “He was in a lot of pain—a lot of pain. He couldn’t walk around being the guy he was. He couldn’t show that pain.”

  With each man eager to hide their problems from others, Derek and Fedoruk grew closer. Their bond reached all the way back to their similar boyhoods in western Canada and their brief overlap as members of the Regina Pats, to the misunderstood role that they played in hockey and the one punch that had altered the arcs of their careers.

  In the time-killing tedium of hotel rooms in unfamiliar cities, Derek leaned on Fedoruk for advice. Derek knew that Fedoruk understood him more than most teammates ever could. He felt he could trust him. Derek was naturally curious, and now, on this day, he was curious about prescription pills.