Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

Whatever pain Derek was in did not prevent him from fighting. On his first shift of a November 4 game in Philadelphia, Derek got into a fight with veteran heavyweight enforcer Jody Shelley. The men had a twisted history, through years of bouts when Derek was with the Wild and Shelley was with the Columbus Blue Jackets and San Jose Sharks. Shelley had spent the previous season with the Rangers, but was cast off in favor of Derek. He now played for the Flyers, one of New York’s biggest rivals.

  The two circled one another near center ice. The public-address system heralded the raised fists with a bell, as if it were the start of a bout between Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed. Derek opened with two overhand rights, then jabbed with a left fist filled with Shelley’s jersey. Shelley never got comfortable and balanced enough to pose a knockout threat. Derek hit him in the back of the head a couple of times before Shelley slipped to a knee and officials intervened.

  Despite the momentum that a victorious fight is supposed to bring, the Rangers lost, 4–1.

  But Derek’s minutes on the ice began to climb. His career with the Rangers peaked on November 9, against Washington at Madison Square Garden. He was on the ice early in the second period of a 2–2 game. Washington defenseman Tyler Sloan missed the puck along the boards in the New York zone, and Derek chased it down in front of the team benches. There was no one in front of him besides the goalie.

  He heard teammate Brian Boyle shout a simple instruction: “Shoot!”

  Derek cocked his stick and released a slap shot from just above the face-off circle. Washington goalie Michal Neuvirth lunged with his stick and missed.

  The red lamp lit behind the net. The crowd lifted as one. Derek raised his arms and smiled—an emotional exhalation he never displayed when he beat someone up. He cruised behind the net and stopped against the boards in an embrace with teammate Erik Christensen. Others quickly swarmed him. Derek, his stick raised—the rare time he was cheered with a stick in his hand—returned to the bench as the arena still buzzed.

  It was Derek’s first NHL goal since his rookie season, five years earlier, a streak of 234 games. It fell 21 games short of the NHL record. Derek told reporters in the dressing room—a losing one, as the Rangers fell, 5–3—that it was his first goal on a slap shot since he was 20, playing in the East Coast Hockey League.

  Derek spent most of the night talking to friends on the phone and returning congratulatory text messages. They all had seen the highlight, across the sports channels of Canada and the United States, of big, bad Derek Boogaard lumbering down the far side of the ice, barely slowing to unleash a ferocious shot, raising his arms in triumph and surprise, then soaking in the affection of a suddenly adoring crowd.

  Unexpectedly, the biggest cheer he ever received in New York came on a goal.

  IN THE THIRD period of a Sunday afternoon game on November 14, Derek fought twice against Edmonton’s Steve MacIntyre.

  MacIntyre was from a small town in Saskatchewan, too. He was two years older than Derek, but they crossed paths as teenagers in the Western Hockey League. Mat Sommerfeld was Derek’s first-ever fight in the WHL; Steve MacIntyre was his second.

  Unlike Derek, MacIntyre was not drafted by an NHL team. After the WHL, his odyssey took him through eight franchises in seven minor leagues over seven seasons before he finally reached the NHL with the Edmonton Oilers. One of the six fights he had his rookie year was considered a draw against Derek.

  This one was Derek’s first fight at home for the Rangers. But the crowd at Madison Square Garden knew the protocol. Fans chanted “Boo-gey, Boo-gey” as Derek pummeled MacIntyre with nearly 20 right hands to the head, each eliciting an ooh from the crowd. It took most of the punches to knock MacIntyre’s helmet free, and the fight ended with MacIntyre looking as if he could absorb more.

  MacIntyre, fresh from the penalty box, wanted a rematch. It goes against the unspoken code for enforcers, and Derek had no reason to oblige. The Rangers were on their way to an 8–2 victory. Still, after MacIntyre sidled up to Derek during a face-off, he provoked him with a cross-check. Derek flipped the switch.

  They wasted no time shedding their gloves, instead just clutching and punching and trying to shake free their fists. They drifted against the Rangers bench, exhausting themselves with uppercuts and jabs from close range.

  Without a haymaker blow, few realized that one of the shots broke Derek’s nose and probably gave him a concussion. The Rangers’ medical notes made no mention of the injury. But a few hours after the game, at 6:21 P.M., Derek sent a text message to the cell phone of Sheldon Burns, the Wild’s medical director back in Minnesota. He exchanged seven texts with Dan Peterson, Burns’s partner and Wild team doctor, over nearly three hours. In one six-minute span in the middle of that, Derek traded six texts with Esposito, the Rangers’ dentist.

  By Tuesday, Derek had a prescription from Esposito for 12 more hydrocodone pills. He also had a prescription from another Rangers team doctor, an orthopedic surgeon, for 40 pills of tramadol, a narcotic-like pain reliever. The two prescriptions were picked up from two different Manhattan pharmacies—both on 57th Street, close to Derek’s apartment.

  He missed the next night’s game in Pittsburgh, but took time to photograph his right hand and send it to a few friends. It showed the knuckles and fingers grotesquely swollen and scabbed from the repeated bashing against MacIntyre’s helmet.

  The injuries continued. On November 24, in Tampa, Derek fell hard on his left shoulder, an injury that surfaced in internal medical reports for a couple of weeks. Derek missed three games. When he returned to the lineup, Derek was injected with Toradol.

  On December 2, he deconstructed Trevor Gillies of the Islanders in a long-lasting fight instigated during pregame warmups. The next night, also against the Islanders, Derek was inadvertently struck in the face with a stick. During the intermission after the second period, a team doctor used three nylon sutures to close the cut. No anesthetic was used, the doctor noted.

  Derek, as he had been the season before in Minnesota, after his trip to rehabilitation, was randomly drug tested. The latest one showed positive results for two types of decongestants, plus Xanax—despite no known prescriptions of Xanax from team doctors. Later in the day of that drug test, Derek was prescribed hydrocodone by Esposito, the dentist, for the fifth and final time.

  Another drug test came on December 8—results would be reported as “negative” six days later. The test was taken on the same day that Dr. Ronald Weissman, a team doctor, gave Derek two prescriptions that Derek had filled at a pharmacy not far from the Rangers’ suburban practice facility. One was for six pills of azithromycin, an antibiotic. The other was for 30 pills of trazodone, an antidepressant.

  The timing was peculiar. Erin had been in New York. She had come several times through the fall, staying for most of a week here and there. She shopped, spent time with an old girlfriend, and stayed with Derek. Most of Derek’s family and close friends did not know. Derek rarely talked to them, and he knew what they would have said, anyway.

  Erin could tell all fall that he was lonely, by the calls and text messages he sent to her and others, asking for visits. And he seemed happy when she was around. But she came to realize, just as she had more than a year earlier, that there was no future with Derek. She could not picture the two of them raising a family and growing old together. Part of it was that they were so different; something Derek’s family recognized but Derek either did not or never minded. And part of it was that Derek was different than he used to be. Erin struggled to explain it. He was more distant, more forgetful, more . . . something. It was hard for most people to notice in short bursts of time with Derek, because he was adept at disguising his shifting moods. But those who came to stay with him, especially, began to see that something was not right.

  Erin accused Derek of taking drugs—more than he was supposed to, at least—but he always pointed out that he was being prescribed them by team doctors and passing his drug tests. He complained constantly about the tests, about having s
omeone come to his apartment periodically to collect a urine sample, and Erin never understood why it was such a big deal—it was merely the cost of having a past addiction problem, she thought.

  There was more than that for Erin. Derek was increasingly hurt, and he seemed to be lazier than he used to be, and his mind seemed to be slipping, and his family did not like her, and none of this felt like the makings of a lifetime together. Finally, in New York in part to celebrate her friend’s birthday in early December, Erin did it again: she told Derek it was over. This time, she said, it was for good. This time, she left New York and did not come back.

  She never could have known that Derek’s next hockey game would be his last.

  THE FIGHT BEGAN with little of the customary pageantry. Derek and Matt Carkner were still skating down the ice in Ottawa, Derek gliding backward, when they threw the first punches.

  There were about two minutes left in the first period. The score was 1–1. Derek had plowed into Ottawa’s Jesse Winchester, a low-line center, and knocked him down with a late, hard check. Carkner, looking for retribution, chased Derek down.

  “Uh-oh,” one of the television announcers said, interrupting his partner. “Boogaard and Carkner. Two big men have dropped the gloves.”

  Carkner was a six-foot, four-inch, 237-pound tower of muscle from Winchester, Ontario. Two years older than Derek, he played junior in the Ontario Hockey League and, built like a model power forward of the era—a bit like Eric Lindros or Keith Tkachuk—was drafted by Montreal in the second round of the 1999 NHL draft. He and Derek first met in 2004, in an unmemorable fight in the American Hockey League, when Derek played for the Houston Aeros and Carkner for the Cleveland Barons. Unlike Derek, though, Carkner did not break into the NHL in a meaningful way for 10 years after he was drafted, a rookie enforcer for the Senators at age 28. He had something to prove.

  The entire episode lasted 20 seconds. Carkner had given Derek a shove at mid-ice. By the time their momentum carried them to the top of the face-off circle, they were swinging wildly. Derek landed a strong right hand, but Carkner immediately responded with a punch to Derek’s face just as Derek was swinging again.

  Derek’s nose was broken again. He turned his face away, his spirit shattered. Carkner hit Derek with a series of short left-hand jabs. The men clenched near the boards, grappling for dominance, pawing at one another’s face. The crowd in Ottawa cheered.

  Carkner had one arm around Derek’s neck, the other under his left arm. He tried to lift Derek up, but it was like trying to uproot a sequoia. He took a quick breath and tried again. Two officials swirled within a few feet, helpless and unwilling to interrupt due to the unwritten codes of tradition. Carkner pulled Derek to one side, until all of Derek’s body was off the ice. He rotated him over his hip. Derek landed hard on his right shoulder. The fans cheered his fall.

  Carkner landed on top of Derek and was slow to get off of him. The two officials tried to pry them apart. Carkner knew Derek was hurt. On his way off the ice, he gestured to the Rangers’ bench—some Rangers said he flicked blood at them—and was penalized with an extra 10-minute misconduct penalty.

  Derek and Matt Carkner exchange blows in the last fight of Derek’s career.

  Derek clambered uneasily to his feet, hunched over in pain. The fight had occurred near the gate at the end of the Rangers’ bench, and Derek quickly stepped through it, past backup goalie Martin Biron, and shuffled toward the dressing room.

  “He landed a quick punch and I got lucky to land one real good one, as well,” Carkner said the next morning. “I didn’t really know I hit him flush like that. I noticed he kind of stopped fighting and I took him down and landed on top. Obviously, if you land a punch on a guy like that, it feels good. It feels good to take down a big man like that. But he’s definitely one of the toughest guys in the league, and I’m fortunate to get the upper hand in that one.”

  The game took place at Ottawa’s Scotiabank Place, about 20 minutes from where Len and Jody Boogaard lived. But they were not at the game. Len had driven down to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to watch Krysten play basketball for the University of Kansas. He spoke to Derek after the game on the phone. Derek told him his nose was still broken from the MacIntyre fight a few weeks before, and doctors had just set it again a few days earlier. The punch damaged it again.

  And Derek had landed on his perpetually aching right shoulder, the one that had been surgically repaired about 18 months earlier. He also landed on the back of his head, though camera angles made it hard to see.

  Derek was out indefinitely, the Rangers reported publicly, due to a shoulder injury.

  “His shoulder’s pretty sore,” Tortorella told reporters several days after the game. “He won’t even be in the building. It’s not a day-to-day thing, it’s recurring.”

  The issue was not Derek’s shoulder. The Rangers had privately sent Derek to see a neurologist the day after the game.

  “Mr. Boogaard suffered moderate blunt facial/head trauma without loss of consciousness,” New York neurologist Dr. Claude Macaluso wrote after an examination of Derek that included a magnetic-resonance exam. “The constellation of symptoms following the injury, even in the absence of loss of alteration of consciousness, qualify as a cerebral concussion.”

  The report noted that Derek “suffered nasal fractures on several occasions, the last time as recently as three weeks ago,” a reference to the broken nose at the hands of MacIntyre.

  Derek soon told a story to friends about a doctor asking him his history of concussions. Derek had no idea how many he has suffered. A few, probably. The doctor framed the question differently. How many times, would you say, have you been struck in the head, and everything went dark, if only for a moment? Five? Ten?

  No one had ever defined a concussion that way to Derek. He laughed.

  “Try hundreds,” he said.

  THE SYMPTOMS IN his head not only persisted, they worsened. Within days, Derek displayed all the signs of post-concussion syndrome. He complained about bright lights and loud noises. He kept the blinds in his apartment closed, obscuring the million-dollar views. He wore sunglasses when he left the apartment, even at night. He could not ride in cars or taxis, because the motion made him queasy. At times, he struggled to form coherent thoughts and speak in sensible sentences.

  Still, the Rangers listed Derek out “indefinitely” with a shoulder injury. It was nearly two weeks before the Rangers publicly acknowledged that Derek had sustained a concussion and was feeling its aftereffects. Tortorella said Derek’s problems “started off” with his shoulder injury, and Derek now had “some problems” “with headaches and stuff like that.” The news of a concussion became a short notebook item in news reports.

  “With Derek Boogaard continuing to experience headaches that started during his rehab from a shoulder injury suffered in a fight with Ottawa’s Matt Carkner on Dec. 9, the Rangers are sending the enforcer to see a neurologist,” the New York Daily News reported on December 23—13 days after he had been fully diagnosed by a neurologist.

  But even the Rangers did not know what else had happened on December 10, the day Derek returned to New York from Ottawa for further examination. Derek received a phone call from a man on Long Island. The two exchanged dozens of text messages. The man told Derek that he could get him prescription painkillers. And on December 12, Derek did something he rarely ever did: he withdrew $700 from an ATM. It was telling, if only anyone had known. Derek rarely carried cash, and was known among his friends for his flippant use of his credit card. He would buy a bag of chips at a convenience store and put the $2 sum on his American Express gold card.

  Then Derek went to another ATM and withdrew $700 more. Then he did it again. Over the next several months, it became a pattern—ATM withdrawals on his Wells Fargo bank account timed with charges for tolls for bridges, tunnels, and roads between Manhattan and Long Island. Sometimes he stopped to grab something to eat or fill his car with gas. The withdrawals and charges created a secret financ
ial footprint that indicated when Derek bought drugs.

  The Rangers and the substance abuse program remained focused on Derek’s acquisition of pills from prescriptions written by team doctors. Weissman contacted Derek on December 14, five days after his injury, to check on him. Derek complained of “chronic insomnia,” the doctor wrote in his notes.

  “At a previous conversation with Dr. Lewis from the NHL substance abuse program we suggested use of trazadone 25 mh h.s. the patient had a prior history of abuse Ambien CR,” Weissman noted. The Rangers had not given Derek Ambien all season, and program doctors were careful not to recommend it now.

  Derek instead would be given Restoril, a different sedative. “Limited quantities will be given to the player and it will be dispensed directly from the team trainer,” Weissman wrote.

  He also noted another request from Derek: Xanax. Derek asked to have some for when he traveled on airplanes. Weissman wrote in his notes that he discussed the request with the team trainer and with Dr. David Lewis of the league’s substance abuse program. Derek had tested positive for Xanax twice already in December, despite there being no record of it being prescribed by team doctors. If Lewis or Weissman had seen Derek’s positive drug tests for Xanax, it did not stop them from prescribing it to Derek now. Weissman wrote a prescription for 20 pills.

  Derek was out of the lineup indefinitely. He was told by the Rangers to hibernate, essentially, the recommended method for recovery from post-concussive symptoms. But the symptoms came and went more than Derek let on. At 6 in the morning on December 24, he flew to Minnesota for Christmas, arriving shortly after 8. At 9:46 A.M., his cell phone records showed, he sent the first of four text messages to Dan Peterson, a doctor for Derek’s former team, the Wild.

  Later that day, Derek picked up a prescription at a Minneapolis Walgreens for 30 zolpidem—Ambien. Peterson was listed as the prescribing doctor.

  IT WAS CHRISTMAS EVE, and Derek had a 5 o’clock appointment scheduled with Pat O’Brien, the Minneapolis chiropractor who had done work on him when he played for the Wild. Nobody made Derek feel better than Dr. Pat, as he was known. But Derek did not show up.