by John Branch
O’Brien wondered if he had missed his flight, because Derek had never missed an appointment and had made a special request to be seen on Christmas Eve. O’Brien called Derek and sent a text message. Derek did not respond. O’Brien was hurt and disappointed. Derek, of all people, he thought.
Derek was with a woman named Laurie whom he had met a couple of years earlier when he sat courtside at a Minnesota Timberwolves basketball game. He had asked a server to deliver his name and telephone number to her. Someone had to explain to Laurie who Derek Boogaard was. They went to Sneaky Pete’s after the game, where Laurie was smitten by Derek’s boyish kindness—a gentle man and a gentleman. But Derek was still involved with Erin, and Laurie moved out of state for work.
But after Derek moved to New York, he heard that Laurie was back in Minneapolis, and he called her before he came for Christmas. He landed at the airport, and the two met at the Mall of America. Laurie found Derek standing there, wearing a big grin and a Russian-style fur hat he had bought. Outside, it was below freezing, and the forecast for Christmas the next day called for a high temperature below 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
Derek checked in at the Hotel Ivy, a luxury hotel in downtown Minneapolis, and ate dinner at Seven, an upscale steakhouse and sushi bar, on Hennepin Avenue at Seventh Street. It was where he had eaten his last big meal before leaving for New York in September, nearly four months earlier, and had run up a $243.59 bill.
Derek spent Christmas Day at Sneaky Pete’s. He paid a tab—his own and that of many other people, apparently—of $840.
He returned to New York early on December 26. Before he left, though, Derek withdrew $500 from an ATM. Upon landing, he made more withdrawals.
The Rangers trainer made a note in the log that day—“Complained of headache today”—and wrote that Derek “continued rest/follow-up with Dr. Macaluso,” the New York neurologist who had been analyzing Derek since his concussion on December 9. On December 28, Macaluso’s thorough examination of Derek noted “post-concussive syndrome, mild but with persistent symptoms.” He also wrote that Derek had “persistently blurred vision from left eye” and a “nasal fracture.” He advised Derek to use Breathe Right nasal strips, Nasonex spray, and Simply Saline to aid the difficulty of breathing through his nose, and referred him to an ophthalmologist to assess Derek’s complaint about “blurred vision from the left eye.”
An ophthalmologist later noted “there is no evidence of any ocular trauma.”
On January 4, Derek made nine ATM withdrawals, for thousands of dollars. Five of them were in Manhattan. The other four were in and around Huntington, New York, the Long Island town where Derek often drove to exchange cash for prescription painkillers, returning to Manhattan with them in a Ziploc bag.
On January 6, Derek filled a prescription for five pills of Ambien from Weissman, the Rangers’ team doctor who, weeks earlier, had declined Derek’s request for Ambien after consulting with the league’s substance abuse program. Weissman prescribed Ambien to Derek at least seven more times, a total of 179 pills through early April, according to pharmacy records.
On January 7, the urine collector arrived at Derek’s apartment. Nearly a week later, the result from the screening laboratory of Quest Diagnostics in Santa Ana, California, was returned. Derek tested positive for oxymorphone, an opioid known under the brand name Opana. The result could not have been a surprise to Lewis and Shaw, the substance-abuse administrators. They were in regular contact with Derek, and Lewis wrote in his notes on January 10 that Derek had made an admission. “DB reports buying oxycodone from person in MN,” Lewis wrote. “Refused intervention or therapy. Refuse to fly to CA for treatment. Doesn’t want to leave apartment.”
Derek’s behavior was increasingly erratic, and his good-natured pleas for visitors became incessant. He called some friends 10 or more times a day. During the month of January, he exchanged about 10,000 text messages, and his cell-phone bill consumed 167 pages. And, to his closest friends—including the men, from Jeremy Clark in Minnesota to his half-brother, Curtis, in Alberta—Derek began signing off in a way he never had before: I love you.
He sometimes told friends that his head hurt. Over several weeks, when Laurie and Derek spoke on the phone, Derek sometimes groaned and cried, saying his head hurt so badly. From a thousand miles away, she screamed at him, worried that he was having an aneurysm or something.
His behavior was considered symptomatic of the recent concussions. But there probably was some lingering effect of his breakup with Erin and the loneliness of New York, and the frustration that he was too hurt to play hockey. That’s what everyone thought—Derek is lonely and bored—but they had their own lives to attend to. They had come at the beginning of the season, to watch Derek play and see New York. He wasn’t playing now, and most couldn’t drop everything and come just to keep Derek company.
Derek will be all right, they thought. It’s Derek.
Rob Nelson, Derek’s financial advisor, and Tobin Wright, Derek’s manager in Minneapolis, each visited for a few days in January. They found Derek in his apartment, looking as if he had not showered in days, his hair matted and his face unshaven. Fast-food packages littered the apartment. Blinds were closed.
But Derek, typically, did not want to burden others with his problems. He never disclosed his ongoing reliance on pills, and few connected his issues to drugs. Derek merely wanted someone around. Nelson assumed Derek’s fragile emotional state stemmed from the latest concussions, plus his general unhappiness in New York. And when he left to return to Minnesota, Nelson felt that he had helped improve Derek’s mood and outlook. Wright, who had confronted Derek in Minneapolis on the eve of his trip to rehabilitation, was more skeptical. He placed calls to Salcer and to Derek’s parents. Something is not right, he said.
Len Boogaard had been on the receiving end of some of Derek’s calls. When Len was not home, Derek talked to Jody, his stepmother. Years before, Derek had been the first of the Boogaard children to accept their stepmother into their lives, and their relationship remained close. Derek told Jody he wished Len could come and visit. Just ask him, Jody told Derek. You know he would.
Derek got Len on the phone. Dad, he said, I want you to come stay with me. Can you?
LEN ARRIVED IN New York on January 11. His son looked horrible. The apartment was a mess. It was a surprise to Len, who had never seen the worst of Derek’s problems. When Derek had gone to rehabilitation 18 months earlier, it was during the Wild’s training camp; Len was far away. When Aaron called the previous fall to tell his father about Derek’s descent back into the drugs, it was weeks after the episode at the airport.
Now Derek was in the throes of something real, calling out for help but still trying to conceal the problems. He wanted his father there, but he never explained why. It wasn’t his style. And Len did not always push Derek to open up. Derek hated to be prodded with questions. It made him feel doubted or untrusted, and it often spun him into a mood of irritability and sulkiness. Len, like others close to Derek, knew what kinds of things upset him, and those things were best avoided.
But Len did not like what he saw. Derek was irritable and complacent. He talked badly about the Rangers and complained about bright lights. The mood was dark. Derek slept for long stretches of daylight hours. He never opened the blinds. He complained of headaches. A dried, dying Christmas tree still stood in the corner. Len offered to take it out of the apartment, but Derek insisted. It left a trail of brown needles. When Derek cleaned them up, he sweated profusely and stopped to throw up.
The concussion, Len thought.
But Derek also complained about the drug testing. It was a Tuesday, and Derek told his father that the urine collector was coming on Friday morning. Len realized that the drug tests were not “random.”
Len saw a prescription bottle on the bathroom counter. Weissman had prescribed 14 Ambien pills the day before, the label showed. There were 10 left.
Salcer, Derek’s agent, was in New York, too, where he had
been raised and where his mother still lived, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Marian Gaborik had called Salcer in California and told him that he was worried about Derek, that he seemed “out of it.” Salcer flew across the country. He and Len accompanied Derek to Madison Square Garden that night to watch the Rangers play Montreal.
When Derek stepped out of earshot, Len told Salcer about the Ambien on the bathroom counter. What’s that about? Derek’s not supposed to have Ambien; it had helped send Derek to rehabilitation in the first place. Salcer said he would report it to the substance abuse program.
But Salcer had information to relay to Len, too. He told Len about Derek not showing up for the pre–training camp workout with Gaborik back in September. He told him about the Rangers’ November game against the Wild in Saint Paul, when Derek received a warm ovation from the crowd and Brent Burns, one of Derek’s best friends on the Wild, asked him to come over to the dressing room after the game to meet a special guest from the military—the type of meeting that Derek had always enjoyed. Gaborik, Salcer said, came from the Rangers’ locker room, but Derek never showed up. He had left with friends for Sneaky Pete’s. Burns was upset.
And just the day before, Salcer told Len, he had invited Derek over to his mother’s apartment on East 72nd Street. Derek came, but Salcer noticed immediately that he wasn’t himself—slurring his words, acting loopy, far from his cheerful self. Salcer wondered if Derek was drunk, high, or something else.
Salcer escorted Derek on a walk through Central Park. Derek began to cry, talking about his loneliness and his depression, about the fits of fogginess that he could not shake from his head. Whatever spell Derek was under seemed to wear off with time, Salcer told Len, but not before he collapsed onto a park bench, weeping uncontrollably.
Once Derek had regained his composure, Salcer said, he told Derek he would have him talk to other clients of his who had battled concussions. Derek then talked about joining the military someday, maybe going to Afghanistan to root out bad guys. On Madison Avenue, Derek stopped at the boutique of Officine Panerai, famous for the stylish dive watches they made for the Italian navy in World War II. Many Panerai watches cost well more than $10,000. Derek wanted one.
“You can spend your money how you want, Derek,” Salcer said, “but I think you need to get yourself right first.”
Len absorbed what Salcer told him. The next morning, Len noted that six more Ambien pills were gone; there were four left.
Len and Salcer sat Derek down. They saw it as an intervention, and they told Derek they wanted to help. In the dimness of the apartment, New York’s afternoon light blocked by the blinds that Derek insisted stay closed, Derek slowly opened up.
He was lonely. He ached for Erin. He felt detached from the Rangers. He felt debilitated by the concussions and frustrated by the drug tests. He felt helpless. He spilled all his problems and bled all his emotions.
Len walked Derek through all that he had overcome to get where he was. He reminded his son of the grade-school teacher who stuck him in the closet. He told him about the parents that he overheard saying that they didn’t want Derek on the hockey team. He recalled the kids who picked on him and the coaches who never gave him a chance. They talked about Derek’s struggles in Prince George, and how hard he had worked to get drafted into the NHL, and how much he had devoted himself in the minor leagues to make the Wild. They talked about the admiration that Derek had earned from his teammates and legions of fans. They talked about how Derek had overcome his addictions in rehabilitation with his reputation intact and become a prized free agent, signed by one of the league’s premier franchises.
The Rangers want you, Len and Salcer told Derek. That is why they gave you a four-year contract worth millions of dollars. And that is why they are giving you the best care, to get you back on the ice so that you can keep doing what you do best. Salcer wanted Derek to understand just how bright his future was, if he was willing to commit himself to staying straight and focused. And Len wanted Derek to remember, always, how far he had come.
For Christmas, Joanne had compiled years’ worth of family photographs and created a video album that she gave to her children. The three men sat in Derek’s dim apartment, high above New York City, and watched Derek’s life unfold in warm images. The photographs showed Derek with his parents and his siblings, during all the happy stages of growing up and deep into the NHL.
Derek had been handed more than he could have imagined, and it was nothing like he had dreamed. And that was the first time that the toughest man in hockey clung hard to his father and sobbed uncontrollably in his arms.
10
EARLY ON THE JANUARY morning that Len was to fly home to Ottawa after three days in New York, he heard a knock at the door of Derek’s apartment. Len was still in bed, and Derek answered. Len heard some indecipherable small talk, and when he rose a short time later, he spotted a small cup and a stick in the garbage. It was the drug test, on schedule, just as Derek had said three days earlier.
Once home in Ottawa, Len received an e-mail message from Ron Salcer, Derek’s agent, who wrote that he had spoken to Brian Shaw, one of the co-founders of the NHL/NHLPA Substance Abuse Program. Dan Cronin, the program’s lead counselor, was spending the day in New York with Derek.
“He is in experienced hands and we can only hope for the best,” Salcer wrote.
The next day, Derek had an appointment with Dr. Macaluso, the neurologist. He prescribed 30 pills of Ambien, records showed. A week later, Dr. Weissman of the Rangers prescribed more Ambien and more Xanax.
Yet the next three drug tests administered to Derek, through most of February, came back negative.
It was up to the administrators of the substance abuse program to determine which drugs should be tested for through the urine samples. For a long time, the test did not search for Ambien, although that was one of the drugs that Derek abused on his way to rehabilitation in 2009.
It was unclear whether Derek was cheating the drug testing system, but such attempts were not uncommon. Brantt Myhres had been in more than 50 NHL fights and violated the substance abuse policy so many times that he received a lifetime ban from the league. His addictions to alcohol and cocaine led him to spend eight months in rehabilitation in 2008.
Myhres said that he sometimes used hockey tickets to befriend specimen collectors, who would then not follow him to the bathroom or would report that he was not home. He stored clean urine and learned to heat it quickly under water to get it to the correct temperature before handing it over. One collector, Myhres said, confided that he only wanted to catch people whose drug use could prove lethal to others—pilots, drivers, and the like. Not athletes.
Derek not only seemed to know ahead of time when the collector was coming to retrieve a sample, but he often managed to avoid the tests for several days. Salcer received calls from the substance abuse program reporting that Derek was being evasive. And Derek told friends that he had learned how to beat the testing system from others in rehabilitation, like prisoners in jail who learn to be better criminals.
By midseason, Derek was a mere afterthought to the Rangers’ push toward the playoffs. The Rangers were frustrated and puzzled by his lethargy—concussions rarely kept players out of action for so many weeks—and public updates on his health were rare. When Derek was spotted by reporters at the rink, he referred questions about his health to team management, an unusual deflection from someone usually friendly toward the media.
On the January day that Len arrived in New York at Derek’s request, newspaper reports included a pessimistic and cryptic diagnosis for Derek from Coach Tortorella.
“We’re trying to stimulate him and trying to get him moving around,” Tortorella said. “But he still doesn’t feel well.”
Asked if Derek would be ready to play by the end of the season, Tortorella hesitated.
“I can’t . . . we’ll have to see what happens,” he replied. “It’s not close.”
The relationship between Derek and
the Rangers was distant. Derek came to home games, usually watching from the press box, but complained that the bright lights and dizzying movement and loud noises sometimes were too much to bear. He was excused from most practices, which were held a 30-minute drive north of the city in suburban Westchester County.
The remedy for concussions was time, and the Rangers wanted Derek to rest. They tracked him mostly through reports from doctor visits and trainers. (“Remaining at home—still complains of headaches,” one recorded on January 18.) Worried about his conditioning and diet, the Rangers delivered healthy food to the apartment. It piled up on the counter or went straight to the trash.
Derek asked if he could travel with the team on road trips, even though he was not playing. He was told no. He began to see it as an insult—the team telling him to keep his distance.
He still might have been better connected to life back in Minnesota. The weekend after Len left New York, before Derek spent the day with Cronin, another visitor arrived: a young woman named Ashley, whom Derek had met at Sneaky Pete’s. He bought her a last-minute flight to visit him for a couple of days.
The NHL All-Star Game was on January 30, 2011, in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Rangers played a home game on January 25, then had a week before their next game. Derek asked the Rangers if he could fly to Minnesota during the break, in part to get treatment from O’Brien, the chiropractor whom Derek had used extensively when with the Wild. The Rangers approved. The day before he left, Derek received the Xanax and Ambien prescriptions from Dr. Weissman, records showed. He also withdrew $1,700 in two ATM transactions.
Derek showed up to one appointment at O’Brien’s office wearing his Russian fur hat, with the tall front brim and floppy earflaps. O’Brien and his assistant thought it was hilarious.
