Punched Out

‘I didn't see it coming at all. I was in a bad position and he hit me hard, hardest I’ve ever been hit. I instantly knew it was broken. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I went straight on the ice. And I felt where it was, and my hand didn’t rub my face normally. It was a little chunky and sharp in spots and there was a hole there about the size of a fist.” — Todd Fedoruk, former N.H.L. enforcer

The fist belonged to Derek Boogaard. Whenever he opened his right hand, the fingers were bent and the knuckles were fat and bloody with scar tissue, as if rescued a moment too late from a meat grinder. That hand was, until the end, what the family worried about most with Boogaard. How would he write when he got old?

When Boogaard closed his right hand, though, it was a weapon, the most feared in the N.H.L. The thought of Boogaard’s right fist kept rival enforcers awake at night. It made them alter their strategy and doubt their fighting acumen. And, in the case of Todd Fedoruk, that fist shattered his face and dropped him to the ice, all while officials and teammates watched, an arena full of hockey fans cheered and Boogaard’s Minnesota Wild teammates banged their sticks against the boards in appreciation.

No single punch announced the arrival of a heavyweight enforcer the way it did on Oct. 27, 2006. Fedoruk, 6 feet 2 and 235 pounds, had built a career as a nuisance and willing combatant. Trying to avenge a hit that the 6-8 Boogaard had laid on an Anaheim Ducks teammate, Fedoruk chased Boogaard down the ice. He baited him with tugs on his jersey.

Seven seconds after their gloves dropped, the damage was done. Surgeons inserted metal plates and a swath of mesh to rebuild the right side of Fedoruk’s face. His career was never the same.

Message sent. Players around the league took notice of the Boogeyman.

“I knew sooner or later he would get the better of me,” said Georges Laraque, long considered the toughest man in hockey. “And I just — I like my face, and I just didn’t want to have it broken.”

Boogaard was 24, in his second N.H.L. season. He was already established as a fan favorite in Minnesota and a man to avoid everywhere else in the dangerous, colorful and sometimes unhinged world of hockey enforcers.

“I never fought mad. Because it’s a job, right? I never took it personally. Lot of times when guys fight, you just ask the other guy politely. Because the job is hard enough. Why make it harder by having to insult anyone? We know what the job is.” — Georges Laraque, former N.H.L. enforcer

There has been fighting in hockey for about as long as there have been pucks. Early games, on frozen ponds and outdoor rinks, were often scrumlike affairs with little passing. Without strong rules, scores were settled with swinging sticks and flying fists.

The N.H.L., formed in 1917, considered a ban on fighting. It ultimately mandated that fighters be assessed a five-minute penalty. That interpretation of justice, now Rule 46.14, still stands. It has never been much of a deterrent.

The best way to protect top players from violent onslaughts, teams have long believed, is the threat of more violence, like having a missile in a silo. Teams employ on-ice bruisers, the equivalent of playground bodyguards. Hurt one of us, and we will send out someone bigger, tougher to exact revenge.

“Having another player in the bench that is willing to come over and willing to punch you is a good deterrent for other violence on the ice — as crazy as that sounds,” said Matt Shaw, an assistant coach for the N.H.L.’s San Jose Sharks.

Teams did not hesitate to promote the prospect of a ruckus. Fighting was not just necessary, they believed, but also part of hockey’s allure. Nearly half of N.H.L. games, 600 or more in a typical season, pause for a two-man brawl.

“I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out,” the comedian Rodney Dangerfield used to say. Everyone still gets the joke.

Imagine in football, if a linebacker hit a quarterback with what the quarterback’s team believed was too much force. The equivalent to hockey’s peculiar brand of justice would be if those teams each sent a player from the sideline — someone hardly valued for his skill as a player, perhaps rarely used — and had them interrupt the game to fight while teammates and officials stood back and watched.

In football, as in most sports, such conduct would end in ejections, fines and suspensions.

In hockey, it usually means five minutes in the penalty box and a spot in the postgame highlights.

Fighting is not tolerated in most hockey leagues around the world. It is not part of college hockey in the United States and Canada, nor international tournaments like the Olympics.

But it is a mainstay of North American professional leagues, stretching from the N.H.L. to small-town minor and junior leagues. Proponents believe the sport is so fast and so prone to contact that it needs players to police the shadowy areas between legal hits and dirty play.

With a mix of menace and muscle, enforcers settle grievances and slights between teams, be they real, imagined or concocted as an excuse for disorder. Sometimes fights are spontaneous combustions, a punch thrown to avenge a perceived cheap shot. Others are premeditated affairs, to settle simmering disputes — whether from last period or last season. Some are intended to reverse the momentum of a lopsided game. Some are a restless player’s way of proving himself to his team.

But there is generally order to the chaos, unwritten rules of engagement, commonly called “the code.”

It covers everything from how a fight originates (both players must agree, and they usually do because of a fraternal bond of responsibility) to how it ends (with a modest glide to the penalty box).

No sticks. Hands must be bare. Face-protecting visors are not worn by most enforcers to indicate that their face is open for business.

The fight ends when a player falls or the action slows to a stall, like popcorn after all but the last kernels are popped. Officials slide between the men and steer them away. Teammates cheer their own, regardless of the outcome.

“There’s no better feeling when the boys get a rise from you showing up, putting yourself out there,” Fedoruk said. “I’m getting chills right now just from talking about it.”

When his cheek was crushed by Boogaard in 2006, Fedoruk’s first thought was to “save face” and skate off the ice. He did.

“Their bench was cheering like you do when your teammate gets a guy,” Fedoruk said. “I remember skating by their bench.

“Their faces kind of lost expression because I think they seen — you could see it. You could see the damage that was done because the cheekbone, it wasn’t there anymore.”

“Derek would take two or three punches to land one good one. He wasn’t a defensive fighter. I remember he said: ‘I hate guys that hide. When I fight, I’m going to throw, and I’m going to throw hard. I don’t have an off switch.’ Anytime a fight didn’t go his way — a draw or maybe he thought he lost — that would eat at him.” — John Scott, N.H.L. enforcer

D. J. King has watched the video dozens of times. He still pauses the fight on the part where the Minnesota Wild’s Derek Boogaard, a second after getting his nose broken, slugged King on the head and sent his helmet flying.

King has tried to count the number of revolutions his helmet made before it hit the ice behind him. He thinks it was 12.

“The punch flung it about five feet in the air, I think,” King said, with a tinge of awe.

It was March 14, 2010. The game between the Wild and the St. Louis Blues was minutes old. King and Boogaard, both from rural Saskatchewan, knew each other from the Western Hockey League, when they were teenagers and their ambitions were similarly reliant on their fists.

They barked in the casual language of enforcers: You wanna go? Let’s go. Each man dropped his stick from his right hand. They shook their gloves, worn loose for such occasions, to the ice. They pushed up their sleeves. It was just another fight — yet memorable and telling.

King drifted to center ice, caught up by the spectacle. Boogaard stopped halfway there, leaving the men comically far apart. Boogaard stood firm, a matador awaiting the bull. King, 6-3 and 230 pounds, drifted toward him, as if pulled by Boogaard’s gravity.

“The referee just looked at them and said, ‘O.K., boys, let’s get it going here,’ ” one television announcer said.

“This is a super-heavyweight bout,” his broadcast partner said, his voice rising with excitement.

Boogaard liked to grab opponents by the collar with his left hand and lock his arm. From that distance, opponents could not reach Boogaard’s face with a swing. But he could shake them off balance or torture them with jabs of a left fist full of jersey until he found a chance to uncoil his cocked right arm.

“I want to get in tight,” King said, analyzing video of the fight. “I want to come and switch up, throw some lefts right away and then go back and throw rights. All I want to do is be tight and throw as much as possible.”

Boogaard stood in place, turning slowly. King orbited. He batted at air, gauging distance and reach. Finally, King stabbed with his left hand and, head down, swung at the bigger man with his right.

Boogaard blocked it. He grabbed King with a left arm bent at the elbow. King delivered two left-hand punches to Boogaard’s face “just to get him thinking,” King said.

The announcer’s voice rose to a shout.

“Boogaard fighting back!” he said, as Boogaard, half a foot taller, thundered a couple of right hands on top of King’s head. The helmet absorbed most of the beating. King felt it only after the adrenaline faded.

“It’s the hardest bone in the body and it’s not going to daze you as much as getting hit, especially, like, in the temple area or the chin area,” King said.

King blindly threw three right hands that punched the air. A fourth bashed Boogaard in the nose and broke it.

More than anything, Boogaard hated getting hit on the nose. It had been surgically repaired less than a year before.

“Oh! And King stuns Boogaard,” the announcer shouted. And just as he said it, Boogaard threw a right hand that struck King on the forehead. King’s white helmet flew from his head.

The crowd roared.

The players had been swinging at each other for only eight seconds. Boogaard hit King on top of his bare head. King tagged Boogaard in the face again. A “Tale of the Tape” graphic, showing heights and weights of the fighters, popped onto the screen of the television broadcast.

King steered Boogaard toward the boards. Boogaard took a few more swings, but King was content to cling tight. Finally, as they came to rest behind the goal, officials slipped between them. Boogaard’s nose was bleeding, and blood was smeared across his forehead.

The fight lasted about a minute.

“That was a dandy!” the announcer said, and his partner laughed.

Replays were shown. Rink workers repaired the gouges in the ice and used shavings to cover the blood.

King went to the penalty box and wrapped an icy towel around his bloodied hands.

“The scar tissue in the hands builds up so much that when you get hit it just comes off in chunks now,” King said.

Boogaard headed to the locker room. He missed the next five games.

“When a team scores, the fans of the team that scored will get on their feet. But when there’s a fight, everyone gets on their feet.” — Georges Laraque

Among the hundreds of Boogaard hockey clips catalogued across the Internet, almost all of them fights, one is a favorite of family and friends. It is from the final minutes of a Wild playoff game against the visiting Anaheim Ducks on April 17, 2007.

The teams stirred a dislike for each other during a series of hits and taunts. Bickering continued through a timeout. The Wild led, and Boogaard stood and jeered — or chirped, in hockey parlance — from the bench. The Ducks chirped back.

Tension built. The crowd chanted Boogaard’s name. Finally, Coach Jacques Lemaire gave the signal. Boogaard slid onto the ice and skated casual arcs near the benches. He looked at the Ducks, smirked and shrugged.

“If the roof wasn’t screwed down, it would have flew off,” said Joanne Boogaard, Derek’s mother.

Never had Boogaard felt such love. And it was not because he had smashed someone’s face. It was because he could have.

“He didn’t have to fight, he didn’t have to get hurt, he didn’t have to hurt anybody,” Joanne Boogaard said. “That was the best. He could just go out there and skate around.”

Boogaard had size and determination, but not much else, when the Wild chose him in the seventh round of the 2001 N.H.L. draft. He trained with a Russian figure skater. He continued lessons to bolster his boxing. He was sent for seasoning in the minor leagues, where Wild officials told the coaches to mold Boogaard into an N.H.L. enforcer.

His minor league coaches did not have such vivid imaginations.

“We didn’t give him a chance, and we were the guys trying to help him,” said Matt Shaw, who coached Boogaard in the minor leagues and the N.H.L. “Give him credit. This guy willed his way to the N.H.L.”

At his first camp after being drafted, Boogaard aimed his body at an opponent, who ducked at the last moment. Boogaard hit the glass and shattered it. His body tumbled out of the rink.

At 20, Boogaard was assigned to the Louisiana IceGators of the East Coast Hockey League. Within a year, he battered his way to the Houston Aeros of the American Hockey League, one rung below the N.H.L.

Hard work endeared him to coaches. In the summer heat of Houston, Boogaard tirelessly ran up hills near the practice rink. He stayed late after practice, awaiting further instruction. Alone, he skated, shot and practiced the basics, hoping coaches would trust him enough to put him in the game.

Most important, Boogaard won fights. The Aeros replayed bouts on the video board and called it “Boogeyman Cam.” They had a Boogaard bobblehead promotion, and the fists bobbled, too.

Boogaard skated well for a big man, but he turned like a locomotive. When he aimed his body at players and missed, the rattling boards echoed an intimidating message. One coach told the Aeros staff that Boogaard was their most valuable player, because his team was frightened by his mere presence.

“That’s when it hit me,” Shaw said. “I went: ‘Good God. This guy’s going to play.’ ”

Still raw, Boogaard went to the Wild’s training camp in 2005. He beat up an enforcer from Buffalo, then one from Chicago in preseason games. Lemaire, the Wild coach, saw the impact Boogaard had on other teams. He never played in the minors again.

In his first regular-season fight, on Oct. 16, 2005, against Anaheim, he pounded Kip Brennan before dropping him with a big right hand. Boogaard won again, then again. With each fallen opponent, the rookie’s popularity grew.

Such adoration is not unusual. The enforcer, sometimes mocked as a goon or euphemized as a tough guy, may be hockey’s favorite archetype. Enforcers are seen as working-class superheroes — understated types with an alter ego willing to do the sport’s most dangerous work to protect others. And they are underdogs, men who otherwise might have no business in the game.

Boogaard went nearly five years between N.H.L. goals and scored three times in 277 games. He spent 1,411 minutes on the ice and 589 minutes in the penalty box.

But he was quick to do an interview or sign on for charity work. He was huge and imposing, yet laughed easily and always knelt to talk to children. His personality was an understated counterweight to his outsize reputation as a fighter. His No. 24 became a top-selling replica jersey.

“It was the fierceness of his brand and the gentleness of his character,” explained Tom Lynn, a former Wild executive.

Lynn was among those who noticed lifestyle changes as years passed. Boogaard signed his first contract with the Wild in 2003 and spent most of the $50,000 bonus on a GMC Denali. He liked the status it signaled in the players’ parking lot.

“Before he got to the N.H.L., Derek would walk around with his two teeth out, because he was missing those two front teeth,” said Janella D’Amore, Boogaard’s girlfriend through several years in the minor leagues and his first season with the Wild. “His hair would be a mess, he would wear the same T-shirt. He didn’t care. He was just happy. Then he got to the N.H.L., and it was about having to wear the designer clothes and having the perfect haircut and the perfect designer glasses. I think he felt he had to fit the part.”

Len Boogaard accompanied his son on a three-game trip to the West Coast in November 2006. Hungry after a movie in San Jose, Calif., Len recommended a fast-food place across the street. Derek wanted room service.

“So I got a pita for six bucks, and a Coke, and went back to the hotel room,” Len Boogaard said. “Room service finally showed up, and he had a steak, very small, some veggies on the side and a Coke. And it was 95 bucks. I said, ‘What?’ And that’s when he put up his hand and said: ‘Don’t worry about it, Dad. It’s the lifestyle.’ ”

In juniors, Boogaard usually received about $50 a week for spending money. In his final year in the minors, he made $45,000.

Now his salary was $525,000. It was a long way from the dark drives across the icy prairie of western Canada, fueled by rink burgers and the sound of the radio.

“Anytime I would question what he was doing, the hand would come up, waving,” Len Boogaard said. “ ‘Don’t worry about it, Dad. It’s the lifestyle.’ ”

“My back wakes me up. I get on the floor every morning. My left hand has been smashed and broken so many times I’m missing a knuckle. From the concussions, my memory — I have a lapse with my memory at times. It’s just little things, and important things. If you look at the fights I’ve had since I was 16, I’ve had about 300. These aren’t boxing gloves. These are fists. There has to be an impact.”— Brantt Myhres, former N.H.L. enforcer

The worry was always about the hands. Like those of most enforcers, Derek Boogaard’s giant hands were mangled — especially the right one. But that was the most obvious cost of his work. The rest of the damage, physical and mental, he liked to hide.

His sore right shoulder had ached since he broke his collarbone at 13. His nose, crushed too many times to count, was bent, like that of a cartoon character who smells something delicious in that direction. In the minor leagues, his back was so perpetually sore that he once could not stand up after lacing his skates.

“Being the guy he was, he couldn’t show that pain and stuff like that, so he was kind of sucking it up a lot,” said Todd Fedoruk, who was signed by the Wild about a year after absorbing the face-crushing blow from Boogaard in 2006.

The men became friends, not divided by their bout but tied together by their roles. They roomed together on road trips in 2007-8. It was only there that Boogaard asked for help: Todd, can you put a couple of pillows under my feet?

“I was kind of a nurse for him in the room, because around the rink he wanted to play,” Fedoruk said.

A couple of years ago, a friend in the Wild locker room watched as a trainer sat on Boogaard’s chest, tugging and twisting Boogaard’s nose after a fight.

In the fall of 2009, a doctor asked Boogaard to name every word he could think of that began with the letter R. He could not come up with any.

Last winter, a friend said, a neurologist asked Boogaard to estimate how many times his mind went dark and he needed a moment to regain his bearings after being hit on the head, probable signs of a concussion. Four? Five? Boogaard laughed. Try hundreds, he said.

Any boy’s dream of the N.H.L. intersects with the reality of skill, usually in the teens. For a few, fading hope depends on a willingness and ability to give and absorb beatings.

“If you’re playing pond hockey, 6 or 7 years old, and somebody said, ‘Hey Brantt, the only way you’re going to make it to the N.H.L. is fighting your way there,’ you think I would have done it?” the former N.H.L. enforcer Brantt Myhres said. “No way. I would have done something else.”

There is pain, of course. But fear, too.

“Imagine you go pick a guy that’s 6-4, 220 pounds, and say, ‘Why don’t we meet here on the street in two days, and we’ll slug it out and see how it goes?’ ” Myhres said. “I guarantee you’ll be a mess.”

Add the pressure of thousands of fans in the arena and countless more watching on television and judging on the Internet, of teammates and coaches, roster spots and contracts, and of knowing that any fight could be the end of a career.

More than most players, enforcers gaze ahead on the schedule. They know that the game in Calgary will entail a rematch of a fight lost last time. That game against Edmonton will need an answer for the cheap shot laid on a star player.

“I’ve had times where, going into a game, I know I’m going to get into a fight,” the Chicago Blackhawks enforcer John Scott said. “Just the thought of getting into a fight, I just lay there, awake. ‘O.K., what am I going to do?’ I’m nervous. I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. I’ll probably get one hour of sleep. It’s exciting, nerve-racking and terrifying all at the same time.”

There is no incentive to display weakness. Most enforcers do not acknowledge concussions, at least until they retire. Teams, worried that opponents will focus on sore body parts, usually disguise concussions on injury reports as something else. In Boogaard’s case, it was often “shoulder” or “back,” two chronic ailments, even when his helmet did not fit because of the knots on his head.

“I hid my concussions,” said Ryan VandenBussche, 38, a former enforcer who estimates he had at least a dozen concussions, none of them diagnosed. “I masked them with other injuries. I’m not a huge guy, by no means, but I fought all the big guys. And I certainly didn’t want to be known as being concussion prone, especially early in my career, because general managers are pretty smart and your life span in the N.H.L. wouldn’t be very long.”

Myhres said he had concussions diagnosed twice but estimated he had more than 10 in his career. Now 37, he feels his memory slipping.

Mat Sommerfeld toppled Boogaard the first time they fought in the Western Hockey League. He was only 6-2 and 200 pounds, but was drafted by the Florida Panthers to be an enforcer.

Concussions ended his career. In his first rookie camp, his face was so swollen after a fight that he had to sleep sitting up for a few days. There were times he took the ice still woozy from a blow, only to be leveled again.

Now married with young children, working the family farm in Saskatchewan, Sommerfeld has had bouts of depression serious enough to warrant professional help.

“I don’t know if it’s worth it,” he said. “It wasn’t for me.”

On Jan. 9, 2007, in Calgary, Boogaard fought Eric Godard, a longtime rival called up from the minor leagues specifically as a counterweight to Boogaard. Godard landed a series of punches to the left side of Boogaard’s head. Boogaard twice fell to one knee. Dazed, he skated to the wrong penalty box.

He was placed on injured reserve with a head injury. He returned in time to fight Godard again 17 days later. The men knocked each other’s helmet off and traded punches to the face.

Boogaard likely had dozens of concussions before his death in May. No one knows.

But the hands? All it took was one look. Even the medical examiner who performed Boogaard’s autopsy noted the scars.

“He would fight and his knuckles would be pushed back into the wrist,” Len Boogaard said. “And then he’d have to have it manipulated and have his knuckles put back in place. His hands were a mess. My concern was always, O.K., he’s going to suffer with this later on in life, in terms of arthritis. It was his hands that I was more worried about.”

“Obviously, I’ve used painkillers, with injuries and stuff. Get your shoulder rebuilt, get your knee scoped. It’s hard to go out that next night and fight that world-class guy with broken knuckles. I’ve gotten into the drugs. Not going to lie. I’m sure people think, ‘Oh, he’s making $1.5 million, how bad can it be?’ But they’ve never been in his shoes.” — Mitch Fritz, former N.H.L. enforcer

It was the middle of the 2007-8 season, and Boogaard knew that Fedoruk was in the midst of a decade-long battle with alcohol and drugs. Boogaard was taking prescribed pain medicine for his aching back.

“He’s like, ‘Man, these things work really good,’ ” Fedoruk recalled.

Boogaard and Fedoruk met as boys at camp for the Regina Pats in 1998. Almost a decade later, Fedoruk, three years older, was a teammate, mentor and confidant. And Boogaard wanted to know about painkillers.

“Him knowing my history, I think he knew he could trust me,” Fedoruk said. “He could open up to me and maybe try and find out some things about that. He was asking questions like, ‘You’re taking because you like it?’ Stuff like that.”

Fedoruk said his advice was simple: Be careful.

Two years later, Boogaard was in substance-abuse rehabilitation. Fedoruk would follow, for the second time in his career.

That kind of arc gnaws at Tom Lynn. He spent eight seasons as a Wild executive and is now a player agent.

“I started to notice, as I got to know the players in these roles, that some of them came in in a much more gentle way — some of them came in as different people than they were later on,” Lynn said. “After fighting for a while, they seemed to have susceptibility to personality issues such as depression or anxiety and addictions.”

As a teenager, Boogaard was a bingeing beer drinker, but it never seemed unusual in the culture of Canadian junior hockey.

In the minor leagues, he began taking Ambien, a prescription sleeping pill. It has long been doled out in training rooms to players struggling to cope with chronic aches and the demands of the schedule.

“I’ve been on teams where it’s pretty out in the open, and guys will say: ‘I have Ambien. Need an Ambien?’ ” said Mitch Fritz, a teenage rival of Boogaard’s who has played mostly in the minor leagues.

On April 14, 2009, Boogaard had nose surgery. Seven days later, he had surgery on his right shoulder. He was prescribed Percocet, a combination of acetaminophen and oxycodone.

“He’s such a big guy,” Boogaard’s brother Aaron said. “The doctor told him it took about twice as much medicine to knock him out as for most people. He’d go through 30 pills in a couple of days. He’d need 8 to 10 at a time to feel O.K.”

John Scott, a 6-8 teammate of Boogaard’s now playing for Chicago, was prescribed oxycodone after nose and knee operations.

“It just dulls you right out,” he said. “Totally numbs everything. You don’t feel anything. You’re in no pain, but you’re not yourself. There’s no senses. Nothing. My wife was like: ‘This is creeping me out, man. You’ve got to stop taking those.’ And so I stopped.”

Boogaard did not. One September afternoon during the Wild’s preseason, disoriented while driving around Minneapolis, Boogaard was rescued by a police officer he knew. Boogaard slept on the officer’s couch.

Late one night soon after, at home with his fiancée, Erin Russell, Boogaard said he took four Ambien. She knew it was something more.

“I was scared,” Russell said. “I had never seen him that drugged up — falling all over the place and running into walls.”

A few phone calls and a day later, Boogaard was on a plane to California, headed to a substance-abuse program in Malibu.

“He just left,” Scott said. “He never told anybody he was leaving. I remember talking to him and everything was fine and then all of a sudden he was just gone. They told us he was getting surgery, or it was a concussion or something. They made up some excuse and they never told us what happened. But we all kind of figured it out. It’s not that hard to see.”

 

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