by John Branch
“He’d give the stuff to me and, according to how his back felt or his shoulders or his hands, you know, that’s how I’d give him what he kind of needed,” Aaron told the investigators. “So last summer around—it was probably the start of August—he, I mean we, worked our asses off up until that point, you know. He had to come in, big year for him, he just showed up at the house with 100 Oxys.”
The pills were gone in a couple of weeks, Aaron said, and then there were 100 more. Aaron explained Derek’s panicked episode at the airport on the way to New York, and Aaron’s refusal to later ship the pills to Derek there, and said that the pills had come from Dillon Hafiz at Sneaky Pete’s.
(Hafiz, subsequently questioned by investigators, denied being a drug source, but acknowledged that Derek sometimes came to him in search of them. “No, no, he knows, he hasn’t asked me in, in months,” Hafiz said, according to the police transcript of the interview. Later, asked why Derek came to him at all in search of prescription painkillers, Hafiz replied, “I mean, I know, I know a lot of people,” and “I pointed him in a direction a year or so ago,” but he denied being the supplier. “I know and Derek knows that I never—I never gave it to him,” he said.)
Four days later, on June 24, the NHL Entry Draft was held at the Xcel Energy Center. The Rangers asked Aaron to announce the team’s first choice. When he stepped to the podium, he received a standing ovation from the hometown crowd.
Four weeks later, on July 22, Aaron was in jail, the lone arrest in the case surrounding his brother’s death. There were two charges: a felony count for the “sale” of a controlled substance—in this case, officially, one pill of oxycodone that he’d given to Derek the night he died. Aaron “unlawfully sold, gave away, bartered, delivered, exchanged, distributed, disposed of to another, offered to sell, agreed to sell, manufactured or possessed with intent to sell one or more mixtures containing a narcotic drug, to-wit: Oxycodone,” the complaint read.
The other charge was for interfering with a scene of death, a gross misdemeanor. Aaron was jailed. Bail was set at $10,000.
“We’re being victimized a second time,” Len said, distraught. “What is this supposed to prove? Aaron’s sitting in the Hennepin whatever the hell it is, being detained, for doing what? Looking out for his brother?”
Aaron’s Canadian passport was revoked, leaving him in limbo—unable to cross the border, unable to renew his work visa in the United States. Under de facto house arrest, he stayed in the apartment that he and Derek intended to share all summer, where Derek died, using the complex’s gym to stay in shape. He was subject to random drug and alcohol tests. His hockey career was on hold.
The felony distribution charge was ultimately dropped, and Aaron pleaded guilty in October to the misdemeanor charge of interfering with a crime scene. He received probation and 80 hours of community service.
The lease on the apartment ended, and Aaron moved to Regina and lived with his mother. The Wild offered him a one-year contract and found him a spot with the Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees of the Central Hockey League, a second-level minor league with teams strewn from the Mexican border to South Dakota, from Arizona to Ohio.
Arriving after the season started, Aaron had 6 goals, 6 assists, and 13 fights in 56 games for Rio Grande Valley. He moved on to the Wichita Thunder in 2012, coached by Kevin McClelland, a pugnacious fighter for the Edmonton Oilers through much of the 1980s. Aaron led the team in penalty minutes. He had one goal and 13 fights.
Aaron had seen, more than anyone, the toll that fighting took on his older brother. But he showed none of the symptoms that Derek displayed—no worrisome signs of addiction, erratic behavior, or depression. Still, Joanne Boogaard fretted, wondering what it would take to keep Aaron from fighting in hockey. The game had killed one son, she thought, and her worst fear was that it would take another.
“What else can I do?” Aaron said.
THE SECOND-TOUGHEST call that Joanne Boogaard ever received came a day after Derek died. It was a stranger, a man from Boston, asking for her son’s brain.
Chris Nowinski was a former college football player from Harvard who became a professional wrestler. For two years, he performed in the ring as a villain for World Wrestling Entertainment, a muscular blond with a throwback mullet. Much of the wrestling was merely a show. But the folding chairs to the back of the head were real. So were many of the flying elbows and rehearsed pratfalls.
Post-concussion syndrome, the lingering fogginess that Derek encountered and that had prematurely ended the careers or haunted the retirements of many hockey players—Pat LaFontaine, Eric Lindros, Scott Stevens, Keith Primeau, and Chris Pronger among them—forced Nowinski to retire from wrestling in 2004. Looking for answers for his condition, he met Robert Cantu, a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Boston University’s School of Medicine. Realizing the lack of awareness and understanding toward concussions in sports, they started the Sports Legacy Institute, dedicated to what they called the “sports concussion crisis.”
The two men later partnered with two other doctors at Boston University, Ann McKee, a professor of neurology and pathology, and Robert Stern, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery, to form the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.
Few had heard of the disease they highlighted—chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE—but it was not new. Long called “dementia pugilistica,” and colloquially referred to as being “punch drunk,” it had been identified in boxers dating to the 1920s. They had become a caricatured stereotype: the aging ex-boxer who had lost his mind, having been struck in the head too many times. The symptoms were obvious, even if the cause was not: a loss of memory, emotional instability, problems with impulse control, irritability.
Other sports that include persistent blows to the head were beginning to see victims with similar symptoms as they aged, including the early onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Research showed that CTE was caused by repeated hits to the head. The blows did not have to be severe enough to cause a concussion. Some who were diagnosed with CTE, in fact, had never been officially diagnosed with a concussion. But the repeated blows added up. They seemed to be the root cause.
The team at Boston University had diagnosed CTE in more than 20 former NFL players, even an 18-year-old high school football player. It had been found in dozens of former boxers. And in the previous couple of years, it had been found in two former hockey players: Bob Probert and Reggie Fleming. Months after Derek’s death, Rick Martin would represent another.
There was one catch to its discovery: CTE could only be diagnosed by examining the brain after death.
Nowinski had made the delicate pitch dozens of times before. He explained to Joanne Boogaard who he was. He explained the research into CTE, and how it could improve or save the lives of others. And he asked if the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy could have Derek’s brain.
“This is my child we’re talking about,” Joanne said.
Nowinski made the same pitch to Len Boogaard in Ottawa. Len did not know much about CTE until he read the stories about Probert a couple of months earlier. But the symptoms, the addictions, the mood swings in the final years of Probert’s life, making him someone different than loved ones recognized, hit close to home for Len. He had expected Nowinski’s call.
Len and Joanne discussed the matter. There was little debate. Yes, the Boogaards told Nowinski. You may have Derek’s brain. Please help explain what happened to our boy.
AS THE BOOGAARDS awaited the results, two other NHL enforcers had died under mysterious circumstances. If their brains were exhumed and examined, the results were not made public.
Rick Rypien grew up in the small town of Coleman, Alberta, in the foothills of the mountains a couple of hours south of Calgary. His father was a boxer, and his older brother, Wes, was a hockey enforcer who, in 2001–02, was second in the Western Hockey League with 32 fights—including two against Derek. Wes Rypien and Aaron
Boogaard both played for the Calgary Hitmen the next season.
Rick Rypien was smaller and more skilled, but he still fought often. He scored 47 goals and racked up 493 penalty minutes over three seasons with the Regina Pats. While there, his girlfriend was killed in a car crash.
Rypien reached the NHL with the Vancouver Canucks during the 2005–06 season, Derek’s rookie year. He scored on the first shift of his first game, but injuries took their toll over the years as he settled into a role as a hardscrabble fourth-line center. A leave of absence from the team for most of the 2008–09 season was not fully explained. It was only later that it was acknowledged that Rypien had been diagnosed with depression.
The Canucks re-signed him, and Rypien fought a career-high 16 times. In a game at the Xcel Energy Center in October 2010, after Derek had left the Wild for New York, Rypien was restrained before getting into his second fight and he pushed an official. On the way to the locker room, he reached into the crowd and grabbed a Minnesota fan who had taunted him. Rypien was suspended for six games. In late November, he was granted another personal leave of absence, fueling speculation about his mental state.
Rypien returned in the spring and was assigned to the Manitoba Moose, a minor-league affiliate. On July 1, 2011, he signed a $700,000 contract with the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets.
On August 15, he was found dead in his home in Crowsnest Pass, Alberta. He had committed suicide. The family insisted it had nothing to do with fighting or brain trauma.
Wade Belak died on August 31. He was 35 and recently retired when he was found in a Toronto apartment, having hung himself.
Belak was born in Saskatoon, like Derek, and grew into a six-foot, five-inch, 225-pound defenseman and a first-round NHL draft choice. Belak was that rare combination—a sturdy, minute-gobbling top-line defenseman who fought more than 100 times in the NHL.
His opponents included Derek. It was Belak who, in October 2008 while playing for the Florida Panthers, knocked a tooth out of Derek’s mouth with a punch, leading to the first in a stream of prescriptions for narcotic painkillers.
Few knew that Belak increasingly battled depression. He kept it disguised with an effervescent smile and a reputation as a happy-go-lucky prankster. He was married and had two daughters. From the outside, everything seemed fine with Belak.
Waived by the Predators, he retired from hockey in March 2011. He had started a career in broadcasting and, at the time of his death, was preparing for the Canadian reality-television series Battle of the Blades, in which hockey players took part in a figure skating competition. While his mother said that Belak was relieved not to have to fight anymore, the family did not publicly link his role in hockey to his depression.
Like that of Rick Rypien, Wade Belak’s brain was not examined after his death.
The self-inflicted deaths of three hockey enforcers in less than four months prompted a heated debate over the role of fighting. Tradition collided with tragedy. Columnists and commentators who had long questioned the rationale for hockey fights and wondered aloud about the damage to those who took part suddenly sounded less extreme than those adamantly in favor of the status quo.
“While the circumstances of each case are unique, these tragic events cannot be ignored,” the NHL’s commissioner, Gary Bettman, and the NHL Players Association’s executive director, Don Fehr, wrote in a joint statement following Belak’s death. “We are committed to examining, in detail, the factors that may have contributed to these events, and to determining whether concrete steps can be taken to enhance player welfare and minimize the likelihood of such events taking place.”
It was more than two years later, in December 2013, that NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly gave an update on the findings. No changes to the program were noted. “We commissioned jointly with the Players’ Association and cooperated with them on an independent review of our program and I reported on the results of that review today,” Daly said following a meeting with the league’s board of governors. “The bottom line is the report was good, that the program is doing what it is intended to do, it is helping players and former players in times of need.”
Three years after Derek’s death, David Lewis and Brian Shaw still oversee the substance abuse program. And the team doctors who treated Derek during his years with the Wild and season with the Rangers, and who prescribed him medicine leading to his two trips to rehabilitation, remain employed by the teams.
In late November 2011, in an interview with the New York Times, Bettman was asked whether he thought that enforcers were more prone to addiction or off-ice problems.
“I’ve never seen any evidence to that effect,” he said.
He said that fighting served as a “thermostat” to prevent worse forms of violence on the ice, and noted that statistics showed that fighting was declining in the NHL. But the league, he said, had little interest in driving the enforcer out of hockey.
“We don’t allow fighting,” he said. “Fighting’s punished, penalized. The issue is whether or not you increase the penalties further, but the game’s at a point where people who aren’t inclined to fight, don’t fight, and don’t have to.
“The issue is do we increase the penalty because it is penalized now. And there doesn’t seem to be an overwhelming appetite or desire to go in that direction at this point in time.”
Much as the National Football League did for years before the data became too overwhelming to ignore, Bettman dismissed the brain research into CTE.
“I think it’s been very preliminary,” he said. “There isn’t a lot of data and the experts who we talked to who consult with us think that it’s way premature to be drawing any conclusions at this point because we’re not sure that any, based on the data we have available, is valid.”
Early the next season, the Wild honored Derek with a pregame tribute. The team sold No. 24 Boogaard jerseys and autographed memorabilia that it had stored from two seasons earlier. Len and Joanne and all of Derek’s siblings—Ryan, Aaron, Krysten, and Curtis—were escorted onto the ice at the Xcel Energy Center. They were presented with flowers, a painting of Derek, and a framed game-worn Wild jersey of his. Fans serenaded Derek’s family with a standing ovation.
In 277 regular-season NHL games, all but 22 with the Wild, Derek had scored three goals and 13 assists. He accrued 589 penalty minutes and fought at least 61 times. Before reaching the NHL, starting at age 16, he fought well more than 100 times. He never scored more than twice in a season.
The arena was darkened. A 4-minute, 45-second tribute to Derek was shown on the arena’s giant video boards. Fans watched in silence as the tribute showed Derek barging into opponents, smiling with fans, and talking to children. It showed each of the three NHL goals he scored.
It did not show a single punch.
DR. ANN MCKEE sat at her computer at the Bedford Veterans Administration Medical Center in Massachusetts, clicking through digital photographs of Derek’s brain.
A professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University, she worked independently of the other doctors studying Derek, like Dr. Robert Stern, who was building a file of Derek’s history through interviews with his parents and medical reports from doctors. Independence was crucial. The findings of one doctor would not somehow influence the findings of another.
McKee knew nothing of the person she was examining, other than that he was a 28-year-old hockey player.
In the photographs, the thin slices of brain tissue looked a bit like two-dimensional cross sections of cauliflower, off-white and ragged around the edges. Unlike some of the brains she had examined, Derek’s tissue was not shriveled or darkened. Reddish-brown dots and splotches, telltale signs of brain damage, were few, not sprinkled thickly around the edges the way they were on many brains she had seen. The evidence was not obvious to anyone but McKee. But to her, the signs were clear and shocking: Derek had CTE, classified as Stage 2 of the four stages of the progressive disease, more severe than McKee had seen before in a person that young. A “wo
w” moment, she called it.
The biggest spots were in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls organization, planning skills, and inhibition. When she saw the damage, she wondered if this particular hockey player was prone to impulsiveness and nonchalance.
The medial temporal lobe, the part of the brain behind the ears, also showed extensive damage. There was damage to the hippocampus, where memory is formed and stored. McKee presumed that memory had become a growing issue for this particular specimen.
“This is all going bad,” McKee said as she pointed out the damage, difficult for the untrained eye to ascertain. “You just don’t expect that much in a 28-year-old. It is already showing substantial destruction.”
It was impossible to know how much the damage would spread, if at all, but that was how CTE was thought to work. Damage to the brain could be hidden for years, maybe decades, until it manifested itself in the form of symptoms: memory loss, impulsiveness, mood swings, disorientation, even addiction.
“The association between Boogaard’s brain pathology and his clinical symptoms, specifically the behavioral changes and memory problems he experienced in his last two years, is unclear,” the researchers wrote in a news release. “For example, his clinical symptoms occurred during the same time period he was exhibiting narcotic abuse. CTE has been found in other deceased athletes who have died from overdoses or who had problems with substance abuse. It is unknown if that substance abuse is caused by the impulse control problems associated with CTE or if they are unrelated.”
As Stern later put it: “What’s the chicken, and what’s the egg?”
The release quoted the co-directors of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.
“It is important not to over-interpret the finding of CTE in Derek Boogaard,” Cantu wrote. “However, based on the small sample size of enforcers we have studied, it does appear that frequently engaging in fistfights as a hockey player may put one at risk for this degenerative brain disease.”
