Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

“It’s really warm,” Derek said. “You should get one of these.”

  O’Brien saw Derek several times, for an hour or so each time. And though he never received an explanation for the Christmas Eve brush-off, O’Brien never felt that anything was amiss with Derek.

  Derek stayed at the Hotel Ivy in downtown Minneapolis from January 26 to February 6. His bill came to more than $6,200. Laurie, the woman with whom Derek reconnected during his Christmastime trip to Minnesota, was a frequent companion. Unaware of Derek’s addiction problems, past or present, she saw pill bottles in the hotel room. On February 2, records showed, Derek picked up a prescription for 30 Ambien pills at a Minneapolis Walgreens, prescribed by Peterson, a Wild team doctor.

  “You having trouble sleeping?” she asked Derek.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But don’t tell anybody I’m taking them.”

  The two weeks in Minnesota were spent getting treatment and visiting familiar haunts. On his first night, Derek spent $648.42 at Manny’s Steakhouse. He returned twice more in the next three days. On another day, he spent $68.16 at McDonald’s. Sneaky Pete’s was a regular stop. Derek charged anywhere from $13 to more than $200 on his credit card there.

  There were shopping excursions—$646.50 at Nordstrom’s, for example—that were all part of Derek’s extended spending spree. He had always spent money loosely, but things had grown out of control in the past year, which is why he now had a financial advisor overseeing his budget. More and more in New York, Derek spent huge sums on spur-of-the-moment merchandise, from a big-screen television at Best Buy to $10,061 from a gun web site. In March, he spent nearly $1,000 to add to the growing collection of Buddhas that he displayed in his apartment. He spent hundreds of dollars on night-vision goggles.

  “Retail therapy,” Derek joked with old friends when they questioned his erratic buying behavior.

  Derek was feeling better, and it seemed that he was serious about working his way back to hockey. Family and friends reported that Derek seemed happier than he had been in months. On February 16, New York newspapers reported that he had resumed light workouts, mostly on stationary bikes. Internal reports from team trainers noted few problems.

  Salcer sent Len Boogaard e-mails on February 20.

  “I have been talking with Derek these past couple of weeks and have noted a marked change in his attitude/demeanor, all for the better,” Salcer wrote. “It is somewhat reminiscent of his former self.”

  He noted that Derek had been going to the rink every day and was “interacting with teammates. We are not out of the woods yet but certainly the signs are better.”

  Len and Joanne each noticed the same thing when they spoke to Derek on the phone. Again, maybe the worst was past.

  When Derek spoke to reporters in early March, he sounded optimistic about playing again before the playoffs. He told them the concussion he had suffered at the hands of Carkner was the first of his career, and that he was “symptom-free, for the most part.” He categorized his season as “very disappointing,” and “not the year I wanted to have,” especially in the first year of a contract.

  The day before, Derek had handed over a urine sample for drug testing. A few days later, about the time that the test came back positive for prescription painkillers, Derek was seen by a friend crushing Ambien pills and snorting them.

  ON MARCH 3, 2011, the New York Times published a story about the examination of Bob Probert’s exhumed brain. Probert had been an inspiration to many young hockey enforcers, including Derek, who chose No. 24 in Minnesota in Probert’s honor. Probert had 245 fights in 16 NHL seasons, from 1985 to 2002. A Hockey News poll in 2007 named him the greatest enforcer in history.

  Probert died of heart failure in the summer of 2010, at age 45. Shortly before his death, he and his wife, Dani, watched a news program about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease that scientists believed was caused by repeated blows to the head. CTE could only be diagnosed posthumously, through careful examination of brain tissue. But more than 20 former National Football League players had been diagnosed with it.

  “I remember joking with him, ‘Wouldn’t your brain make a nice specimen?’ ” Dani Probert told Times reporter Alan Schwarz. “He started questioning whether he would have it himself. He told me that he wanted to donate his brain to the research when he died.”

  Hockey players routinely received potentially damaging hits to the head, most almost instantly dismissed as inconsequential. They came from the shoulders and elbows of opponents, from collisions with the glass and boards that surrounded the rink, maybe the occasional smack of a puck or an inadvertent high stick. Most of those could not be avoided.

  But one type of blow could be prevented, if the NHL and other hockey leagues deemed it enough of a safety issue to legislate it out of the game: the blow to the head from the fist of an opponent.

  “Hockey’s enduring tolerance for and celebration of fighting will almost certainly be tested anew now that Probert, more pugilist than playmaker, has become the first contemporary hockey player to show C.T.E. after death,” Schwarz wrote in the front-page story.

  Until Probert’s brain was examined, the only other hockey player known to have had CTE was Reggie Fleming. But he was a rough-and-tumble player from the 1960s, an era long before helmets were in wide use. His brain was examined after he died in 2009 at age 73.

  Probert’s litany of personal problems were acknowledged in the story—his long trouble with alcohol, his arrest for cocaine possession, his police record for bar fights and assaults on officers. But the story also listed the symptoms of CTE, usually seen only in the final years of life, understood only with postmortem hindsight: “drug abuse, impulse control and impaired memory.”

  Back home in Ottawa, Len Boogaard read the story, and it all hit him like a punch to the gut. Probert sounded a lot like Derek. Derek, too, was a hockey fighter who absorbed more blows than he remembered. He became addicted to drugs, including painkillers. He became impulsive and moody, facing bouts of depression. And his memory seemed to be short-circuiting.

  What could we have been thinking? Len wondered. It was not the hands, Len realized, that he should have worried about with Derek all those years. It was the head.

  AMONG THE 13,724 text messages that Derek sent and received from mid-February to mid-March, detailed in a monthly cell-phone bill that consumed 244 pages, were notes to Todd Fedoruk.

  Fedoruk was 32, recently retired from hockey, living with his family in the suburbs of Philadelphia, about 100 miles from New York. He and his wife, Theresa, figured that Derek was lonely, living in a strange city, and sitting out with an injury. Derek said in a text message that the team didn’t want him around. Fedoruk replied that he and Theresa would come to New York to see him.

  No, Derek said, I’ll come down there.

  He arrived one morning while Fedoruk was in the garage, doing some woodwork, a postretirement hobby. The garage door was open, and Fedoruk heard Derek arrive and saw him emerge from his Audi with a big Derek smile and a hug for the man whose career he had almost ended with one crushing right hand.

  Derek came inside and helped himself to slices of leftover pizza in the refrigerator. He played with the three Fedoruk children, aged seven, five, and just a few months. The oldest, Luke, remembered the Boogeyman from Minnesota—or, at least, the stories often told about his father’s giant friend. The older children climbed on Derek as if he were a piece of playground equipment, and Derek laughed his heh-heh-heh laugh.

  Derek spent hours in the basement, where he and Luke played Guitar Hero on the video-game console. Fedoruk recorded them with his phone. On the toy electric guitar, Derek tried to keep pace with classic rock songs. He had to get this game, he said. His brothers would love it.

  Time ticked through the late afternoon, and Derek was in no hurry to return to New York. It occurred to the Fedoruks just what it was that Derek wanted: time out of the city, away from the concrete and the crowds, in the vast expanses
of countryside and subdivisions. He wanted to be in a home filled with voices and laughter.

  Derek had always felt comfortable around Fedoruk. Maybe it was their similar childhoods and lives as junior hockey players in Regina and western Canada. Maybe it was the way that Fedoruk so easily forgave Derek for shattering his face in the NHL. Maybe it was the late-night conversations on the road as teammates. Or maybe it was that Fedoruk understood the pain as much as anyone else. Probably all of those.

  Fedoruk had played his last NHL game less than a year earlier, with the Tampa Bay Lightning, on the last day of the 2009–10 season. Two nights earlier, in a home game against the Ottawa Senators, Fedoruk had briefly fought Matt Carkner—the same man who then beat Derek in December, sending him off with a concussion and a separated shoulder. Carkner was much bigger than Fedoruk, but they exchanged a few punches as the play moved up the ice without them. By the time the whistles blew and the cameras captured them, the two had wrestled each other down.

  Fedoruk drank excessively the next night. He said he spent the early-morning hours in a stupor, wandering the streets of Tampa and the sidewalk of Bayshore Boulevard, sometimes called the world’s longest continuous sidewalk, stretching nearly five uninterrupted miles.

  When the Lightning took the ice that night in the season finale against Florida, Fedoruk still felt unsteady. On one play, he slipped behind the net and slid into the boards. He was not hurt, but he pretended to be, giving him an excuse to leave the game and not return. He later checked himself into rehabilitation—not to save his hockey career, but to save his marriage and his family, he said.

  And now here he was, surrounded by the warmth of his wife and their three children, living inside the glow of a gleaming home. For Derek, it must have seemed perfect.

  Fedoruk knew about Derek’s first time in rehabilitation, at the start of the season before, Derek’s last with the Wild. Derek had told him about it, and Fedoruk was struck at the time with one impression: He’ll be back. He could tell by how Derek responded to Fedoruk’s question about how it went.

  “Pfft,” Derek said. “I’ve got nothing in common with those people.”

  Eighteen months later, Fedoruk searched for signs of trouble. He studied Derek’s eyes, looking for pupils the size of pinholes or lids that hung at mismatched levels. He listened to Derek’s speech and searched for the hidden meaning behind the words he used.

  Throughout the day, Fedoruk detected loneliness, and he knew that Derek was in chronic pain, but no other flags were raised in the recesses of Fedoruk’s mind. Derek seemed like his usual self—happy and chatty, not medicated, eager to be part of a group.

  Todd and Theresa had plans for dinner in Philadelphia, and they asked Derek if he wanted to come, too. He did. They drove from their neighborhood of big brick houses and large lawns, across the Delaware River and into the city. Derek ordered a Jack Daniels and Coke and had chocolate cake for dessert.

  While waiting for the valet to bring the car after dinner, out of earshot of Fedoruk, Derek turned to Theresa and told her how much he missed his friend and former teammate. He apologized for the punch that changed everything more than four years earlier. She made Derek make a promise: If Todd comes back to hockey, Derek, you will not fight him.

  Derek promised.

  The Fedoruks asked if Derek wanted to spend the night, but he declined, saying he was just starting to work out with the Rangers again and had to get back for training in the morning. It was after Derek left, driving back up the New Jersey Turnpike on the 90-minute trip to Manhattan, that Theresa turned to her husband.

  Something’s not right with Derek, she said. Something’s off.

  DEREK DROVE FAST, his GPS counting down the minutes to his arrival. Devin Wilson, sitting in the passenger seat of the Audi as it sped through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and onto the Long Island Expressway, begged him to slow down.

  They had spent the weekend at Derek’s apartment, Derek’s mood shifting like a pendulum. One minute, he complained about headaches and wanted to do nothing but sit on the couch, in the dark. For months, Wilson had been a regular visitor at Derek’s apartment, and he had never seen the blinds open. Then Derek would be up, wanting to go to a Duane Reade drugstore for candy or to Best Buy to shop. He was like a kid again, big and energetic and silly, just like the teenager Wilson remembered as a teammate with the Prince George Cougars a decade earlier: kind, non-threatening, quick to laugh. The moods often swung with the painkillers that Derek consumed, and Wilson saw Derek swallow them by the handful.

  Like Derek, Wilson was from Regina. He spent four seasons with Prince George, a steady defenseman with a penchant for parties. His hockey career faded after a few minor-league seasons, and he drifted between jobs. In the fall of 2010, he arrived in New York, just as Derek did, with a sales position with the New York Islanders.

  Derek and Wilson had not been great friends. They had occasionally crossed paths in Regina during summers after their days in Prince George. But they reconnected at a Rangers game against the Islanders in the fall, and their relationship grew through the winter. By spring, no one spent more time with Derek than Wilson. They planned to move into a different apartment together in Manhattan during the summer.

  During the season, though, Wilson still lived on the south shore of Long Island, in Long Beach, a few streets on a narrow, low-lying barrier island. Derek liked it there. He liked going to the beach bars, which reminded him of some of the places he went during the summers in Los Angeles. People came to know who Derek was, and they welcomed him without smothering him. Derek had not had that since he left Minneapolis—the affection of strangers glad to have his company.

  Usually, though, Wilson came to Manhattan to stay with Derek. Derek implored him to come, playfully telling him to “bring girls,” and Wilson would arrive to find Derek sitting in the dark. More times than not, they stayed in the apartment, playing video games and filling the long silences with bursts of conversation.

  Derek’s moods swung with little notice, though, and Wilson’s suggestions for things to do would be dismissed because Derek did not feel well, only to be happily overridden by a sudden idea. And, sometimes with little warning, Derek would tell Wilson he needed to leave at that moment to take him back home to Long Island. And they would get in the Audi and speed east across Manhattan and the East River and into Queens, usually stopping at several ATMs along the way. Derek needed cash, and he usually withdrew between $3,000 and $4,000, pulling out the maximum amount the machine would allow before moving on to another.

  Once, when a machine denied his withdrawal, Derek entered the bank and made an uncomfortable scene, unable to understand why tellers could not accept his credit card to withdraw cash from his account. Wilson pulled him out of the bank.

  Wilson assumed that Derek was getting some pills from team doctors. But he knew that Derek was spending several thousands of dollars a month on prescription drugs bought off the street from at least one supplier.

  Derek called the man “The Dude,” Wilson said, and he was a sharp-dressed man about their age. Sometimes Derek would drop off Wilson at home and go on his own, but Wilson accompanied Derek now and again. They met the man in a parking lot in Huntington, a sprawling Long Island suburb. At least once, they went to a house. In exchange for the cash he had withdrawn, Derek was handed a Ziploc bag filled with colorful pills. He took them back to his apartment and spent hours organizing them by type and dosage. He placed them in pill organizers and empty bottles from old prescriptions.

  And as Easter approached, Derek began a little ritual: he sorted the pills in pastel-colored plastic eggs, the kind used to hold candy or coins for children. He often carried one in a pocket when he left home for a few hours, a dose for when he needed it, no matter where he might be. And he hid the others around the apartment, a one-man game of hide and seek.

  ON MONDAY, FEBRUARY 28, the Rangers’ trainer noted that Derek had called late on Saturday night, complaining of “severe pain behind his eye
s and vomiting.” Derek had done some skating and light work with weights on Friday and Saturday without any reported problems. On Sunday, when the Rangers had an afternoon game at Madison Square Garden, records showed that Derek picked up 30 Ambien, prescribed by Weissman, the Rangers’ team doctor. He also drove to Long Island, withdrawing $1,600 in cash at two ATMs on the way.

  On Tuesday, March 2, Derek provided a urine sample for a drug test. It came back a week later showing a positive result for hydromorphone—a narcotic pain reliever often sold under the brand name Dilaudid. Among its purported effects was a sense of euphoria and stress relief.

  Jeremy Clark, Derek’s good friend and trainer from Minnesota, arrived on March 3.

  The Rangers were on the road that day, without Derek, and the two friends wandered around Manhattan, shopping and eating. Derek charged $237.61 at Caviar Russe, a restaurant on Madison Avenue. He spent $504.16 at Davidoff of Geneva, a high-end cigar store. At some point, he also retrieved $2,700 from his bank account through ATMs.

  Derek and Clark went to a movie that afternoon. And they stopped at a Walgreens drugstore on 57th Street, on the same block as Derek’s apartment. There was confusion about a prescription, and after a discussion with the pharmacist, Derek made several calls on his cell phone to Weissman, records showed. Derek left with 30 pills of Ambien.

  Clark did not think it was strange. He had close ties to many hockey players, and he knew that Ambien was commonly used. And in this case, it was being prescribed by a team doctor. It was only strange when Clark found that Derek crushed the pills and snorted them.

  Most thought that Derek was on the mend. On March 15, the day after another trip to Long Island that followed the withdrawal of $3,200, Derek skated with teammates for the first time since the concussion in December. A few days later, Michael Russo of the StarTribune in Minneapolis wrote an item about Derek for the newspaper.

  “Former Wild enforcer Derek Boogaard was so sensitive to sunlight during the early portion of the concussion that still keeps him out of the Rangers lineup, that he stayed in his Manhattan apartment for three weeks at one point,” Russo wrote. “He started to get depressed, go stir crazy. ‘That’s why when [Marian Gaborik] got his concussion this year, I’d call him every day and say, ‘I want you to call me and we’ll go for lunch and we’ll do something for at least an hour just so you get out of your apartment,’ Boogaard said.”