“She wore blue Jeans and a Rosary, believed in God and believed in me”
—“Blue Jeans and a Rosary”
Kid Rock
Because of my image as a wild party guy, people will believe anything they hear about my life.
That allows Sheryl and I to have fun making my life seem wilder than it really was. We’ve been asked so many times how we met that we’ve started to make up shit for the sake of telling a good story.
People want to hear a crazy-ass tale that involves sex, drugs, violence, or rock ’n’ roll, so we give it to them.
When fans ask how we met, we take turns fabricating a story. I’m actually impressed about how creative our stories have become.
We have told people that Sheryl was a Las Vegas stripper and that I met her in a VIP room or during a raunchy pole dance. We have told people that she was a high-priced escort and she showed up one night at my door and it was love at first sight.
We’ve also told people that we met in a meet-and-greet line, or that I fell in love with her when I heard her sing karaoke. One of my favorites is that she was in a bar and coldcocked a drunken fan who was talking shit about me.
There is also a story about me being badly injured in a bar fight and Sheryl being the nurse that took care of me in the emergency room.
The truth is that Sheryl has never even been to Las Vegas, and the only accurate fact in all of our stories is that Sheryl is a registered nurse.
At the very least, the story about Sheryl pounding a guy in a bar fight has the potential to be true because she is tougher than I am. She also might confront someone who was spreading lies about me. My wife’s true background is that she worked at a law firm while attending college to earn a nursing degree and her many certifications. There is no stripper’s pole in her history.
We met in 2010 while I was in the midst of a fresh addiction: Golden Tee.
I had officially retired in 2009, and my life started to go down the sink-hole immediately. After contributing to a Stanley Cup victory in 2008, I’d hoped to play a more prominent role in 2008–09. But it never happened. I had more injuries, and ended up playing in only 13 games for the Red Wings that season.
Although the Red Wings made it back to the Stanley Cup Final, I didn’t play in the postseason.
Not surprising, I actually had more fun that season playing in the American League with Grand Rapids. In 19 games, I had five goals and 11 points. I played for coach Curt Fraser, a no-nonsense coach who liked to say guys were “playing soft as grapes.”
That is now among my favorite coaching lines.
After I quit, my life became a week-long party. At the time, I was living in a townhouse in Troy, Michigan. My neighbors didn’t much like me because my lifestyle wasn’t suitable for family viewing. They didn’t like the hours I kept.
I would be up at noon, then off to a shithole bar to play Golden Tee and get stinkin’ drunk. I would close down the bar at 2:00 am and then move the party back to my townhouse until I passed out with one of the five puck-whores I was seeing at the time. I referred to my collection of women as my “3:00 am girlfriends.”
Then I’d wake up the next day and do it all over again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. It was like I was living the movie, Groundhog Day. Only Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell weren’t in my version.
My posse was a sketchy group of low-life human beings that included a drug dealer that I knew from my days when I was heavy into using ecstasy. He and his wife hung out with me all of the time. I never quite understood what their relationship was all about. He and his wife were Red Wings fans and they did everything for me, including cleaning my house, doing my laundry, and keeping me well-stocked with drugs.
The woman would meet with my cocaine dealer to pick up my drugs. She would pick up my “3:00 am dates” and bring them to my house and then drove them home when I was done with them. She made sure that all of those women thought they were the only woman I was hanging out with, even though I didn’t care if they knew there were other women or not.
Eventually I began to trust the drug dealer’s woman like she was one of my best friends. I gave her my credit card and told her to pay my bills for me.
What I didn’t realize was that she was using my credit card to pay her bills and to go shopping. She robbed me blind.
But I was clueless because the three of us would sit up and do drugs all night. One of them was always with me, and not because I asked them to be. I was too stoned to notice that these two people were using me. My life was a mess, and I was about to meet a woman who would help me see that.
First, I had to meet a dude named Bart. We met because he liked to play Golden Tee after he got out of work.
The first night we met he sang Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” and it was the best karaoke rendition I had ever heard. It was awesome. We became instant friends.
The interesting aspect of our friendship is that Bart didn’t follow sports. He knew nothing about sports in general, or the NHL specifically. He didn’t know Darren McCarty as a member of the Grind Line and he didn’t care about the Detroit Red Wings.
He’s a businessman. He had no agenda other than he liked being my friend. There was no hidden agenda. We were just friends with some common interests. One of his interests that became one of my interests was the huge Irish festival in his hometown of Clare, Michigan. I was excited to get out of the Troy area for the weekend, so on March 12, 2010, Bart and me and his two friends, both named Mark, all jumped in my beat-up minivan and headed north on a two-hour trip to Clare.
After we arrived, I walked into the big old hotel in the center of the city and the first person I saw was a very tall, slim woman walking through the back lobby with a guy who looked like he could be her brother. She had long, dark, almost black hair and huge dark brown eyes.
She didn’t even look our way, or so I thought.
“Bart, who the fuck is that woman?” I asked.
“You mean Sheryl?” he said. “That’s my wife.”
My jaw dropped, leaving me standing there with my mouth hanging open.
Bart is maybe 5'5" on his tallest day, and Sheryl is 6' without shoes on. Within a few seconds, my instincts told me there was no fucking way that Bart and Sheryl were a couple.
“You wish she was your wife,” I said, laughing. “In your dreams, maybe, she is your wife.”
He confessed immediately that they were not married, but that they were friends. Because of their dramatic height difference, it had become a running joke in the town that they were married.
“She’s actually no one’s wife,” Bart offered. “She hates men. She’s unattainable. Don’t even try it.”
He pointed out that the mammoth man next to her was her best friend.
“He’s as crazy as you are, so don’t try anything,” Bart said.
Telling me that Sheryl was “unattainable” was like placing a high-tech safe in a safe cracker’s living room and telling him not to try to open it.
“Challenge accepted,” I told Bart.
He just laughed, not truly believing I was going to make much of an effort.
I pressed Bart for more details, and he told me that Sheryl had been divorced for 11 years and that she had five crazy older brothers, one of whom was nicknamed “Dig Your Grave Dave.”
Her best friend was known as the town’s fighter. From the stories I was told, he was clearly a bad ass.
“You guys are very much alike,” Bart said.
The more I heard about Sheryl, the more intrigued I became.
Bart approached Sheryl and they hugged. Then Bart suggested that everyone come up to our hotel room to “get away from the crowd.”
Much later, I learned that Sheryl had noticed me when I came in the door. Apparently, there aren’t many men over 6' in town. Plus, I weighed 235 pounds.
According to Sheryl, she asked her giant man-friend who the guy was with Bart.
“Do you mean the guy with the missing tooth?” the friend said. “How the hell should I know? And since when do you care who some guy is?”
A little while later, Sheryl and her friend showed up at our room. The two Marks also had invited some friends, and before long our hotel room looked like the Post Bar on a Saturday night.
Sheryl sat stone sober in a chair on one side of the room, watching everyone getting liquored up. I sat on the opposite side of the room, studying her.
She was gorgeous. On one hand, she looked like a prissy woman dressed in her extra-long, blinged-out, expensive jeans and her black, trendy, super-high heels. She wore no rings on her fingers and wore only small diamond earrings. She also wore a big rosary around her neck, and the beads lay perfectly on her chest.
As I watched her interact with her friends, she had smart, witty responses. She was funny, and didn’t take shit from anyone.
She never moved off her chair, and yet she felt like the center of the party. Everyone came over to talk to her. She was never alone for a single moment. I was fascinated by her. I was ridiculously attracted to her. I had to meet her. I watched her for more than an hour. When someone from hotel security knocked on the door, I saw my chance to meet her.
I pointed at Sheryl and yelled, “Bart, you and her, get into the bathroom. I don’t want security to see me here. I don’t need the drama of everyone knowing I’m here.”
Sheryl rarely drinks, is always sober, and is known as someone who protects her crazy friends. She rolled her eyes at the insistence that we needed to hide, but she went along with the request.
She ended up sitting on the shower seat and I parked on the toilet as Bart leaned on the sink.
We sat in there and talked for hours. But the minute I started flirting, she poured cold water on my advances.
“Let’s make something clear right off the bat,” she said. “I have no intention of dating you or anyone else. I don’t want to be married. It’s not my desire to be any man’s wife, and I don’t want to have any more children.”
She believed her speech would send me running to the hills. Instead, I fell in love. She was my kind of woman.
I stopped my obvious flirting and started listening. In our bathroom conversation I found out that she was raised spending her summers working on the family’s quarter-horse farm. She has five brothers and five sisters and they’d race the horses every summer. She’s an avid bow hunter. She outshoots the boys. She educated me about bows and hunting equipment and “peep sites” and “releases” and other hunting stuff. I asked her questions just to watch her answer them. She is definitely one of the guys. I learned that her father is a down-home Southern boy from Georgia who speaks with a drawl and her Italian mother was raised in the hills of Tennessee. She loves country music and rock ’n’ roll. I studied her—the bathroom was filled with the smell of her perfume, which I later learned was appropriately named “Beautiful.” I remember thinking that it was the most amazing smell I’d ever smelled on the most amazing woman I’d ever met. You’d never believe looking at her that she is a country girl, with her long, expensive pleated jeans and high heels. I never knew country girls looked like her. She told me that her mother is an evangelist, and Sheryl had to attend bible studies once a week in her home and went to Church three times a week.
The home had one television with three channels, and Sheryl knew absolutely nothing about hockey.
She’d been married before, and had two children, but she’d been divorced for 11 years.
She had no idea who I was, and I could tell right away that she wouldn’t give a shit even if she did. I made no mention of my NHL background. I put away my “smooth talking game” and was just myself, minus any reference to hockey.
I didn’t want to bring up hockey because our connection seemed pure and real. I felt like I did when I was growing up in Leamington, before I became No. 25.
Sheryl seemed different than most women I’d known. I didn’t want to leave the bathroom. I was afraid that the minute we walked out of the bathroom she was going to disappear into the night.
A plan was hatched to head to a bowling alley bar, and we exited the bathroom against my better judgment. I grabbed her hand and rushed out into the crowd.
“Don’t let go of my hand,” I said. “Don’t lose me.”
I meant that long-term as well as short-term. I was smitten like a schoolboy.
Unfortunately, some Red Wings fans recognized me and yelled my name.
We arrived at the car, and Sheryl was the only sober person available to drive. It looked like a clown car as we packed in.
“What’s that about?” Sheryl asked.
“What was what about?” I said, even though I knew what she was talking about.
A voice emerged from the piles of humanity in the car, and it was Bart telling me it was time to come clean about my Red Wings past.
When we piled out of her Hummer, I told her that I had been an NHL player.
She laughed, and said, “That’s cool, can we go in the bar now?”
It is fair to say her reaction was not the kind of reaction that I usually get when someone finds out I was a professional athlete. To her, it was the same as if I had told her I’d been a banker or a construction worker.
I asked her whether she had heard of either Steve Yzerman or Wayne Gretzky, and she said she had heard of Yzerman and the Red Wings. But she had no other information about professional hockey. None. Zero. I told her I played in the same league with those guys, and somehow we even uncovered the truth that she shared the same birthday as Wayne Gretzky.
She seemed to have no interest in my hockey past or my NHL accomplishments. She didn’t care about No. 25. But she seemed to be interested in Darren McCarty. This turned me on.
Sheryl did inform me that she was annoyed that I decided not to reveal my background when we initially met. This was my first notice about how much she reveres honesty and full disclosure in a relationship.
“You should have told me when you were holding me hostage in the bathroom,” she said.
“Well, now you know—and now you may understand what it means,” I said.
The bowling alley bar was overflowing with people from all over the state for the festival. Apparently, many of them were Red Wings fans. I walked in with my head held high, and soon I was in the midst of an autograph session. It was chaos as people came up to talk to me and to get me to sign whatever they had on them.
Sheryl looked mortified as she witnessed what it’s like to be me in a crowd of Detroit fans. I used the craziness to my advantage, telling Sheryl that she needed to stay close to me to help me escape if the crowd became too unruly. She was one of the few sober people in the place, and my request for her help fed into her protective instincts.
She wanted to run, but she couldn’t because she felt obligated to serve and protect. We hung out together until the bar closed, and then went back to the pool area at the hotel. We sat at a table until almost dawn.
At that point in my life, my normal game plan would have been to try to get her into my bed. But I knew there was no chance of that happening. After 12 hours of stalking and wooing her, I didn’t even have her phone number.
There were plenty of women at the festival that I could have had in my bed that night, but I paid no attention to any of them because I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
At 5:00 in the morning, Sheryl said she needed to get some sleep because she was going to be in the parade on a party bus. She had to be there at 8:00 am.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
‘Yeah, right,” she said.
She went to sleep at her sister’s house, and when she showed up to get on the bus for the parade, the first person she saw was me. I didn’t sleep all night because I was afraid I would miss my opportunity to hang out with her again. I made Bart hang out with me because I knew he could get me where I needed to be for the parade.
I didn’t know whether Sheryl was impressed or afraid that she had a lunatic on her hands when she saw me. But I didn’t care. I was there with her.
We handed out beads along the parade route, and when it was over Bart and his friends jumped off the bus to start an informal pub crawl. Sheryl said she was riding the bus back to the parade starting point because that was where her truck was parked.
After I jumped off the bus with the boys, I told Bart that I had forgotten my beer holder on the bus. It was a lie. I just wanted to get back on the bus with Sheryl. I told Bart I would meet him later in the bar.
I was actually worried that if I went off with Bart that I would never see Sheryl again. Every bar was packed shoulder-to-shoulder and I thought it was likely that I wouldn’t be able to find Sheryl if I allowed her to escape to her truck.
As I walked back to the bus with Sheryl, I pulled my beer holder out of my pocket to show her.
She just shook her head, knowing that it meant another day of having me glued to her. We hung out until 10:00 pm, and then she said she was tired and needed to go home. We had been together for about 43 hours, and I had spent most of them trying to secure her phone number. She would not provide it. She just laughed at my frequent requests.
She walked me back to my room and then let me kiss her. She laughed again at my final request for her number. Then she walked back and faded into the crowd. I went to bed alone and left Clare at 5:00 am, saddened by the possibility that I might never see her again.
I decided I was not going to allow that to happen.
When I got home I pulled out the computer and, with Bart’s help, I found her on Facebook.
“Hi, will you be my friend?” I asked simply.
“Of course, dork,” she replied. “Apparently, you didn’t find the phone number I stuck in your coat pocket.”
In the 42nd hour of our weekend, Sheryl had provided me with her phone number without me realizing what was happening.
I’ve worked hard to accomplish several goals in my life, but I never worked harder on any endeavor than I did in acquiring her phone number.
We talked daily, and she was interested in me, but she was clearly not interested in my lifestyle. At one point she told me that honesty is the most important standard of any relationship or friendship.
To Sheryl, everything is forgiven as long as someone is fully honest about what he or she has done. Sheryl believes if someone is honest with you than he or she is treating you like an important person in their life. If they are not being honest, then clearly they are not treating you like an important person in their life. Trust, love, and friendship blossom from pure honesty.
Sheryl can forgive the act, but not the lie. She believes that if a man cheats on his wife and comes home and lies about it, then he is saying that his wife is less important than the adultress. If he comes home and confesses the infidelity, then he’s saying that the wife is more important than the skank he bedded.
Trust me when I say that Sheryl lives by this standard. I’ve experienced her forgiveness on so many levels and her forgiveness took away my desire to be the unfaithful person I had always been.
I trusted Sheryl and felt at ease telling her everything about my personal life. She knew about the unsavory women I was bedding. She knew about my low-life friends. She knew about my partying. She knew about my drug problem. She didn’t judge me. Instead, she accepted me with my faults. When I told her I was weary of living this way and wanted to be healthy, she said she would help me. Sheryl agreed to be my friend, but repeated in a frank and honest way that she had no desire to be in any kind of a dating or romantic relationship with me.
I believed that I could convince her to date me. It was clear to me that it would mean making changes in my life.
“I need to cut down some trees,” I said to her one night. I think she knew what I meant. My life had become overgrown with issues and people who didn’t have my best interests at heart. I needed to create a clearing so I could see a future.
What she didn’t realize was that what I really needed to do was cut down an entire fucking forest.
Sheryl didn’t ask me to change. Not once. But she was the first woman that made me want to change. In the lowest time of my life, she was a friend.
Our relationship grew gradually. I would drive up north to see her, and she started to come down to Troy to hang out.
Early in our friendship, I begged her to have a committed relationship.
“Darren, you’re not ready for that yet,” she would say very sweetly.
She worked in a hospital, but she would chisel out some time to come down to the Troy area to hang out with me. I’d head up to Clare and Saginaw to see Sheryl on her off days. It was like I was courting her, the way it was done years ago.
Meanwhile, I was trying to knock down the trees that were blocking my growth as a person. On many days, it felt like I was hacking through a rainforest.
It wasn’t as if I became a choir boy overnight. I have an addictive personality, and changing my lifestyle wasn’t as simple as just telling everyone in my life to go away.
I still partied at the same bars and I saw all the same women. They were persistent, and I wasn’t always strong. My heart was with Sheryl, but my cock sometimes had a different agenda.
Had I known that years later these people would stalk and harass Sheryl, I may have given them the Claude Lemieux treatment.
In September 2010, there was an NHL alumni trip to Aspen, Colorado. I wanted to go and I wanted to bring Sheryl with me. By then, we had been “friends” for six months. Sheryl still hadn’t decided whether I was ready to take our relationship to a higher level.
There was much begging on my part for her to accompany me on this trip and there was much canceling on her part.
Sheryl went back-and-forth on whether or not she should attend the gathering.
The day before we were to fly to Aspen, Sheryl called her ex-husband to tell him that he didn’t have to watch their children that weekend because she had decided not to make the trip.
Her ex-husband, Rob, changed my life because he told Sheryl to give me a chance.
“You have to stop hating men and let one get close to you,” he told her. “You deserve to broaden your horizons and have some fun.”
She listened to him and reluctantly decided to go on the alumni trip. It was the turning point in our relationship. We say we fell in love on that trip, even though it was love-at-first-sight for me when we met in Clare.
Sheryl says now that when she boarded the plane and saw all of the other former players’ wives with their bleach blonde hair, Louis Vuitton luggage, and huge diamond rings, she wanted to “run [her] county bumpkin ass right off the plane and back to the horse barn.”
What she couldn’t see, and still doesn’t today, is that she looks as glamorous as any of them. No one would have known she was a small-town girl if she hadn’t told them.
Of course, as soon as Sheryl met everyone, she fit in perfectly. Sheryl and BettyAnne Ogrodnick, the wife of former Red Wing John Ogrodnick, became instant friends. They’re like sisters today. BettyAnne stands by Sheryl and mentors her through all of the craziness my “hockey life” brings us. In my opinion, there is no one better to mentor her—the wives and players actually refer to her as “Queen B.” We love her and Johnny O very much. I’m honored to wear the same number he wore on his sweater.
By the way, I’m also now friends with Sheryl’s ex-husband, the man who helped finally convince Sheryl that she had to take a chance to find some happiness. I will never be able to thank Rob and Bart enough for helping me connect with Sheryl.
My relationship with Sheryl worked because she never sought to control me or change me. She sought to help me. She has marched to hell and back with me, and she showed me how my life could be better if I made safer and smarter choices.
She stands next to me as I face this demon monster of addiction, never judging and always accepting me.
After we were in a committed relationship, she arrived at my house after working a 13-hour shift and found one of my sketchy friends at my table with a plate of cocaine in front of him.
“Hi,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”
I grabbed her and begged her not to leave. “I’ve counted down the hours until you got here,” I said.
I knew I needed her. I knew she was the best friend I had. I didn’t want to fuck up this relationship. I wanted her to know how hard I was trying.
“Darren,” she said, “I will never tell what you can or cannot do, I will never tell you who can or cannot be in your life, but I can tell you who and what I won’t be around. This is your choice.”
As she walked out the door, one member of my entourage raced past her at 100 miles an hour. He was never in my life again.
Sheryl was more upset about the loser being in my house than the drugs. I chose her over everything else in my life. She helped me redefine a new normal in my life. She helped me leave the world of whores, drugs, and poor choices. She helped eradicate the maggot population in my life that was sucking the life out of me.
She helped gain control over the No. 25 beast. He had become a monster to the point that his important friends didn’t always recognize him.
In the heat of the moment I used a hockey stick to clear the human trash from my house—Sheryl didn’t flinch. When the explosive moment was over, she removed the hockey stick from my hand and told me to go lie down.
While I napped to find some peace, she cleaned my house. All of the rubbish was removed from my life. She helped eliminate the mess I created.
Sheryl stood by me at a time when others might have run away. She saw me turn over my pool table with one hand. She saw me throw a beer glass through a 55-inch television. When she was stalked and harassed by the people I was trying to remove from my life, she never backed down. When she became the target of their rage and anger she showed no fear.
She has helped me navigate back toward a more normal life. I’d ignored life’s chores for a few years. When she met me, I wasn’t even officially divorced from Anna because I hadn’t signed the divorce papers. I had no idea that I was still married. My driver’s license had expired and my immigration filings were out-of-date. The paperwork of my life was a mess.
Sheryl pulled me back from a dark place. She does the job in real life that I did in the NHL—she is my protector. Sheryl understands that alcoholism is a disease and she stands by me and fights it head on. I often ask her how she can love me so much. I asked her once why she doesn’t judge me like everyone in my past has. She answered, “Would I judge how you handle your pain if you had cancer? No way, I’d be there through the suffering of that disease, too, and we’d kick cancer’s ass the same way we’re beating this alcohol monster.” Thank God we’re both fighters.
She’s a strong person, and she’s the one person I wouldn’t want to go toe-to-toe with. Her Italian mother taught her strength and loyalty, and now I’m the beneficiary of those traits. She’s my nurse, my ally, my lover, and my best friend.
She loves me as Darren—not as former NHL player Darren McCarty. She doesn’t even know me as the hockey player.
“I wish you were just a retired General Motors worker,” she always says.
Sheryl may never get used to strangers walking up to me and starting conversations about the Red Wings glory days. To me, it’s mostly fun. I loved being a player and I loved relating to the fans. And over time she’s started to have some fun with it, too. There’s no point in running from it.
Sheryl and I were married in 2012 at sunset at Clearwater Beach, Florida, the day after my 40th birthday. It was the best birthday gift that I ever received.
“Both my broken wings, every single piece of everything I am, yeah she knows the man I ain’t, she forgives me when I can’t, the devil man, no, he don’t stand a chance cause she loves me like Jesus does”
—“Like Jesus Does”
Eric Church
