Derek dressed for his first day of hockey.
THE ICE WAS COVERED with five-year-old boys. The goalies were immobilized with padded equipment, weighted like firs under heavy snowfall. The others, like Derek, glided in slow-motion packs, cautiously and unsteadily following the puck.
Their sticks, nearly as tall as the boys, were handy to keep balance, either leaned upon like canes or held horizontally, like the balancing poles of tightrope walkers. They swung wildly when the children lost their balance and twirled to the ice, spilling like tops that had lost their momentum.
The little rink had the usual smatterings of family members, there to provide enthusiastic cheers and a quiet wave of recognition. Joanne Boogaard, pregnant with the family’s fourth child, had stuffed Derek into his first hockey uniform. He was not yet old enough to dress himself, but he was big and strong enough to make it hard to wrestle his limbs into their proper holes.
His mother slid the boy’s legs through the shorts and pulled the oversized blue-and-white jersey over his head. She tugged on the socks that stretched to his knees. She laced the hand-me-down skates that teetered under his weight. She buckled the helmet that protected his head.
Derek was always taller than the other kids, perennially found in the back row of the team picture. And as a young boy he was chubby, his round face crowned by dark, curly hair.
It was the winter bridging 1987 and 1988. Joanne, a tall woman with sad eyes, was married to Len Boogaard, a sturdy and stern policeman.
They had met at a Regina bar on New Year’s Day, 1981. Len was a cadet at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Depot Division, the training academy for the national police force, a well-manicured campus on the west side of town. He and some fellow cadets walked into Checkers, an English-style pub inside the nearby Landmark Inn. A tall 25-year-old brunette named Joanne Vrouwe was behind the bar.
Her parents, Theodorus and Anna, had three daughters when they left Amsterdam in 1953. None spoke English. They crossed the Atlantic in a ship and landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, then boarded a train headed west. Theodorus, who worked for an oil company in the Netherlands, had been sponsored by a farmer near Riverhurst, Saskatchewan. The train dropped the family of five in Regina, and Theodorus soon began work as a farmhand.
By 1955, the family had moved into town, assimilating with the help of a burgeoning Dutch community. Theodorus became known as Ted and worked for a Regina shipping company, and Anna gave birth to another daughter, whom they named Joanne.
The family lived in a tiny house on Ninth Avenue, on the far edge of town at the time. They soon moved a few blocks east to Scarth Street, north of downtown Regina, where the main crossroads, a nod to the British Commonwealth, was Albert Street and Victoria Avenue.
Ted found a job with Burns Foods, at a slaughterhouse and feed plant, and embarked on a long career as a butcher that lasted until the plant closed without warning. After working at the bus depot for a spell, he caught on with International Packers, another slaughterhouse in town.
Joanne was a pragmatic, hardworking sort, her singsong voice disguising a feisty toughness. She became pregnant while in high school, and gave birth to a baby boy in 1972, at age 17. She never told the baby’s father, and she immediately handed the boy over for adoption.
After high school, she worked days as a dental technician and nights and weekends as a bartender. Her father told Joanne she would make more money working at the packing plant. So she got a job there, quit as a dental technician and kept her bartending gig, saving enough money to buy herself a small house in Regina.
About a month after taking the new job, in 1979, Joanne’s 52-year-old mother died unexpectedly while visiting relatives in Holland. Part of the emotional fallout was the end of a long relationship Joanne had with a boyfriend. That was when a 26-year-old RCMP cadet and Dutch immigrant walked into her bar.
Born in 1954, Len was the oldest of four boys, the first two born in postwar Holland. In 1958, the Boogaards, like the Vrouwes, crossed the Atlantic for the uncertain potential of a better life. The Boogaards settled in Toronto, living in the basement of relatives. Len’s father, Pieter, had worked as a load coordinator for a shipping company in Holland. In Toronto, he got a job cleaning car dealerships, making 25 cents an hour. Len’s mother, Nieltje, had worked in a bakery in Holland, but stayed home in Canada to raise the boys. She took the name Nancy, because no one could pronounce her Dutch name. Pieter became Peter, and Peter became a school janitor, a job he held until 1991, quitting only after the death of his youngest son—Len’s brother—of bone cancer at age 20.
Household rules were strict. The family was part of the Dutch Christian Reformed Church, with twice-a-week catechism classes and two church services on Sundays. While neighborhood children played outside on Sundays, Len was kept indoors, dressed in his church best.
After hopscotching between the homes of relatives—from one family’s basement to another family’s farm—the Boogaards bought a small house in 1963. Money remained tight. Little was spent on Christmas gifts, and the area rug in the living room, brought from Holland and worn from use, was dyed by Len’s mother in a persistent attempt to preserve it.
The Boogaards spoke Dutch at home, and Len did not know English when he arrived for the first day of kindergarten. But he adapted quickly, becoming a good student, if a bit of a troublemaker, with a natural skepticism toward protocol and authority. He was granted dual citizenship when he was 13, an age when he suffered from the debilitating pain of scoliosis. When doctors thought Len had quit growing, at age 17, they performed back surgery. It kept him in a body cast for months, and left him wearing a back brace long after that.
An uncle helped get Len into college in the Netherlands. By then, though, Dutch was Len’s second language, and he struggled to read it well enough to keep up with his studies. He also learned that he would be required to serve in the Dutch military if he stayed. So he returned to Canada and graduated from St. Lawrence College in Cornwall, Ontario, with a mechanical engineering diploma. In 1978, Len’s brother Bill joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and was posted in suburban Vancouver. Len moved in with him and took a job in a mechanical engineering lab, doing research and development for oil-field machinery components. He spent his days in front of a drafting board.
It was a good job, but his brother had all the interesting stories, the ones about chasing bad guys and investigating crimes. His curiosity piqued, Len spent nights and weekends with the auxiliary RCMP. He could not carry a gun, but he could ride along on calls. It was enough of a taste to get Len excited about a career change. He applied to the RCMP and was accepted. He reported to Depot Division in November 1980 for 24 weeks of training, a military-style form of boot camp. On New Year’s Day, granted rare time off, he headed to Checkers.
Dark and handsome, with a furry mustache and a penchant for sarcasm and straight-faced jokes, Len made small talk with the young woman behind the bar. Joanne was coy. She told Len, as she told all the other RCMP members and recruits who wandered in armed with bravado and pickup lines, that she would never date a cop.
But she was taken by Len’s cool confidence, and they did have a lot in common, including their Dutch roots and strict upbringings. When Len returned another day, carrying flowers, Joanne could not resist.
Theirs was a shotgun romance, ignited by spark and the impending calendar. Len would be out of training by summer and handed a posting—probably in a tiny town far away. Maybe the RCMP would note that Joanne owned a house and had a job in Regina and keep the couple in the big city. They did not know. He could be assigned anywhere across the country.
Len graduated from training in May, and he and Joanne were married on June 27. The ceremony was held in the small, dark chapel at the RCMP Depot. The stained-glass windows behind the pulpit depicted two Mounties. One held a bugle; the other, a musket. Len was dressed in red serge, the formal uniform of the RCMP. Eight others in red serge, holding lances, comprised a color guard. Len’s brother Bill was best man, and their other brothers were groomsmen. Joanne was accompanied at the altar by her sisters. About 100 friends and family members sat in the wooden pews and happily congratulated the young couple as they burst into the warm sunshine out front.
Derek Leendert Boogaard was born less than a year later, on June 23, 1982, at Saskatoon City Hospital. The middle name honored his father. The boy was 9 pounds, 5½ ounces, the heftiest of the oncoming wave of Boogaard babies, and he stretched 21½ inches. The family dressed him in a Toronto Maple Leafs onesie, and within weeks, doctors recommended solid baby food from a jar to quell his insatiable hunger.
And here he was, a few years later, an oversized toddler gazing at the faces in the bleachers until his eyes locked on those of his parents. The habit never faded.
“I remember when I would sit in the bench, I would always look for my mom and dad in the stands,” Derek wrote 20 years later, in notes he recorded about his childhood.
“And of course I still do it in the NHL,” he added in parentheses.
As he grew older, recognition came with a subtle nod. But at five, it came with a giant grin and a wild wave, like someone flagging a passing car. The puck was at the other end of the ice, but it did not matter. Derek saw his father. He saw his mother, pregnant with a little girl, and his two younger brothers, Ryan and Aaron Nicholas, propped onto the bleachers in little bundles.
Derek smiled. He waved. His parents waved back, returning the enthusiasm exponentially, then shooing the boy to turn the other way and chase the puck.
They were all there when Derek scored his first goal, sweeping the puck with his long stick past the goalie burdened by padding. It hardly mattered that the goal came against Derek’s own team. The family cheered and laughed.
Hockey was something to do, something that nearly all the little boys and a growing number of little girls did, and Derek, in that respect, was no different than the rest. He was just like everyone else. That is why Derek liked it.
ON A MAP, Saskatchewan is a vertical rectangle, about twice as tall as it is wide, the shape a child might make when asked to draw a big building. It stretches about 750 miles north from the American border and is narrower near the top, along the 60th parallel, because the curve of the Earth bends the longitudinal lines together as they extend toward the poles.
If Saskatchewan were part of the United States, it would be the third-largest state—smaller than Texas, bigger than California. But Saskatchewan’s million residents represent only about one thirty-eighth of California’s population. The northern half of the province is a wrinkled carpet of forests and large lakes. Its towns are mostly outposts, and paved roads are few. So are people. The center of gravity lies in the southern half, where Saskatoon and Regina, the provincial capital, each have a population around 200,000. The surrounding landscape is smoothed improbably flat by long-receded glaciers and left sprinkled with shallow lakes. In the short summers, dry land is consumed mostly by grain-covered fields—canary-yellow stripes of canola, ocean-blue swatches of flax. Mostly, though, there is wheat.
“The Lord said, ‘Let there be wheat,’ and Saskatchewan was born,” Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock wrote nearly a century ago.
Saskatchewan’s southern half is not unlike the Great Plains states of the American Midwest, dotted with small towns connected by two-lane roads that frame, in straight lines, endless stretches of farms and ranches. The difference with Saskatchewan, though, is its scale, as if it were smoothed and stretched with a rolling pin. On a clear day, a familiar joke goes in Saskatchewan, you can see the back of your own head.
The elastic geography is mirrored by a quiet tolerance of extremes. The hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada was in Saskatchewan, yet temperatures throughout the province in winter can be stuck below freezing for weeks at a time. Tornadoes are a summertime concern, and the cold wind blowing eastward off the Canadian Rockies in Alberta, with nothing to slow it for thousands of miles, is a wintertime torment.
Most corners feel like the edge of nowhere. By some accounts, a town has made it when it gets a stoplight or, perhaps more usefully, a Tim Hortons, the ubiquitous coffee-and-donut chain started by and named for a hockey player who died in a car crash during his 24th season in the National Hockey League.
By sheer numbers, Saskatchewan does not produce the most NHL players. That is Ontario, by a large margin. By style, Saskatchewan does not produce the most talented playmakers, the smoothest skaters, or the biggest stars. But it does, with little argument, produce the toughest players—if not more than any other province, certainly the most per capita. Nearly any credible list of the fiercest, scrappiest players in hockey history will include a broad sample of Saskatchewan natives, from Eddie Shore to Dave “The Hammer” Schultz, Clark Gillies to Dave “Tiger” Williams, Joey Kocur to Wendel Clark, Theo Fleury to Dave Manson.
None of them played professionally in Saskatchewan, because the province has never had an NHL team. The closest are hundreds of miles away—in Winnipeg to the east and Calgary and Edmonton to the west. But that does not mean that Saskatchewan culture does not revolve largely around hockey. It simply means that culture revolves largely around children playing hockey—”minor hockey,” in Canadian parlance.
That is why Len and Joanne placed young Derek into hockey programs, why they spent countless hours in chilly rinks sitting on wooden benches or standing on concrete floors, why they spent their money on hand-me-down equipment and registration fees, and why they spent their vacation budgets on long driving trips to attend hockey tournaments. They did everything they could to acclimate their children into the local culture—especially Derek.
“We just wanted him to be happy,” Joanne said.
Like youth and high-school football in Texas or Nebraska, minor hockey in Saskatchewan sets the rhythm of the seasons as much as the planting and harvesting of the fields. Civic life in Saskatchewan, as in much of Canada, is not centered on schools or shopping malls, but the local rink. Hockey allows small communities and extended families to convene on pale, cold weekend days and dark, frozen weekday nights.
“The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons,” reads a portion of Roch Carrier’s short story “The Hockey Sweater,” an excerpt of which was included on the back of the Canadian five-dollar bill for many years. “We lived in three places—the school, the church and the skating rink—but our real life was on the skating rink.”
It was at one of those rinks, when Derek was five, that Len, his family new to the area, found himself seated in the bleachers behind a few other parents. Two women talked about the team roster and pointed out their sons. One pointed to the unknown boy with the big frame, taller than the rest.
“He’s the worst player on the team,” she said.
Len’s mind, like that of any good cop, captured details and filed them in a mental vault. He never forgot the way the mother said it and the way she pointed at Derek. He always wondered: Whatever happened to her little boy? Whatever happened to all the other little boys on the ice that day?
Hockey was a unit of measurement in Canada, and few grew as big as Derek.
THE FIRST RCMP assignment was in Hanley, a blip of a farming town bypassed by time and Provincial Highway 11, just to the east. Few cars that traveled the 160 miles between Regina and Saskatoon found time or reason to exit. The Canadian National Railway still made routine stops, though, and empty cars were loaded with wheat and other grains harvested from the surrounding prairie.
The detachment, with six officers, was responsible for a vast area measuring roughly 1,000 square miles. It was the first place that Len saw tumbleweeds, which he thought existed only in John Wayne movies. The patrol cars had no air conditioning, so the summer was spent speeding along the two-lane roads with the windows down—something said to cause hearing loss in the left ears of rural RCMP members.
During his first winter there, Len found the town had no snowplow, instead using an open-cab tractor that dragged three large tires behind it. Working an overnight shift, Len parked his patrol car along the highway. Nearly an hour went by before he saw another car. Finally, the crystals in the freezing air, like a million tiny, floating mirrors, reflected the headlights of a car still on the far side of the horizon. Len waited. The crystals sparkled. Eventually, the car emerged over the edge of the earth and moved almost imperceptibly toward Len. It took several more minutes before it reached him and passed, trailing only darkness.
My god, Len thought, this place is flat.
His first major investigation centered on the death of a university professor. A stolen car had broken down along Highway 11. The thieves used a teenaged girl in their group as a hitchhiking lure for another. The professor picked her up and was jumped by the others. They drove his car into a field, threw him out, and ran him over.
Len was called to the scene to investigate the homicide. He attended the autopsy and was responsible for the court exhibits. All in the group were convicted. Len was hooked.
Len and Joanne lived in a second-floor apartment above the bank in downtown Hanley. When Joanne went into labor, they rushed to Saskatoon City Hospital.
And on those days and nights when Derek would not stop crying, and an exhausted Joanne was at her wit’s end trying to keep him quiet, Len took the infant seat from the family car and strapped it into his police cruiser. He drove up and down the lonesome highway. It never failed to soothe Derek, at any age.
THE ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE was a sprawling government agency, headquartered in Ottawa. It had roughly 30,000 employees across the country, from street cops to white-collar bureaucrats. Its duties included protecting the country from large-scale threats linked to terrorism, organized crime, drugs, and counterfeiting. But the RCMP also was a national police force that provided policing to all of the provinces except Ontario and Quebec, three territories, 200 Aboriginal communities, and all but the largest cities.
Small towns in places like Saskatchewan did not have their own police departments. They had an outpost of ever-changing RCMP members. To Canadians, they were ordinary cops blended into the background of daily life. Americans were more likely to call them “Mounties,” and picture them atop horses and looking like Dudley Do-Right, the befuddled and cheerful cartoon character.
Do-Right was usually drawn wearing the RCMP dress uniform, the “red serge,” including the heavy wool red coat, knickers-length pants with a yellow vertical stripe, black leather riding boots, and brown, flat-brimmed hat that Americans might compare to one worn by a national-park ranger. That was the ceremonial uniform, and what Len wore to his wedding. RCMP members on duty typically looked more like a standard police officer seen in other countries—hard-brimmed cap, light-blue shirt, shiny black shoes, and the telling yellow-striped pants.
Recruits, after being vetted through an application process (and, beginning in 1974, including women), were assigned to a 32-person troop and spent 24 weeks in basic training at Depot Division. Their rigorous schedule included physical training, classroom study, field exercises, and, at noon every day, marching on the parade ground in front of the chapel.
When they graduated, they were assigned to someplace, anyplace, in the country. Typically, they began in a small, rural town and worked their way toward the cities. Postings were temporary, and the RCMP tried to shuffle members every three to five years. The fear was both burnout and familiarity. Too much time in a small town allowed members and their families to grow close to residents. Relationships might taint a critical sense of objectivity and fairness. The side effect was that police officers were perpetual outsiders, especially in the smallest towns, seen as agents of government with little appreciation for the machination of a town’s unique structure, rhythm, and values. They were a necessary part of civic life, their oversight appreciated by most, but rarely did RCMP members weave themselves deeply into a community’s social fabric.
It could make investigations difficult, as Len found when witnesses stonewalled to protect people they knew. Simple traffic stops could be spun into coffee-shop gossip. Conversations sometimes stopped when Len walked in.
Finding close friends proved difficult for the Boogaards, even with a growing brood of children who might otherwise serve as conduits to lasting relationships. Some parents simply did not want their children hanging around the family of the town police officer, whether because they knew that the Boogaards would soon be on the move again or for reasons having to do with distrust and small-town politics.
Len and Joanne quickly recognized the trickle-down effects of nomadic police work. Len liked his job, but did not love what it was doing for his family. And he was never crazy about Saskatchewan, which he considered rural and unrefined compared to places like Toronto and Vancouver.
So before Len could be reassigned to his next posting, and now with two young boys, he again followed the lead of his brother Bill, leaving the RCMP for the York Regional Police in Ontario, north of Toronto. It was close to Len’s parents, and one of Joanne’s sisters lived in the vicinity, too. Ontario was where Aaron was born in August 1986 and Krysten was born in February 1988. It was where five-year-old Derek played hockey for the first time.
But the move did not bring the Boogaards the serenity they anticipated. Len’s 12-hour shifts and hour-long commute in each direction kept him from home. The suburbs of Toronto were more expensive than what the family was used to in Saskatchewan, and Joanne, with four children under the age of six, had no time to work.
Len reconsidered his career after three years in Ontario. He missed the relative independence of the RCMP—the freedom to structure shifts the way he wanted, to investigate cases from start to finish. With the York police department, he felt confined by the regimen. There were uniform inspections. He had to log every action and record all the miles he drove in the car, making note of any scratch to its paint. He was told what area to patrol, which streets not to cross. Even if he was the first responder to a crime, he usually handed his notes to an investigator who took on the case. He felt suffocated by the bureaucracy. The RCMP gave you a car, they gave you a gun, and they trusted you with them.
Besides, Joanne missed home on the prairie. The Boogaards convinced themselves that their children would be better off growing up in western Canada, after all.
Len rejoined the RCMP in the summer of 1988. And just as his oldest child, Derek, was to start first grade, Len’s first posting in his second tour was in another tiny town on the plains of southern Saskatchewan.
THE TRANS-CANADA HIGHWAY spans nearly 5,000 miles from St. John’s, Newfoundland, in the east to Victoria, British Columbia, in the west, making it the longest national highway in the world. The barren 500-mile stretch across the prairie in southern Saskatchewan and Alberta, between Regina and Calgary, is among the most desolate of all. The windblown road strings together a series of midsized hubs, most more than 100 miles from the next, whose compounded names are synonymous with tough-minded, no-nonsense junior hockey: Moose Jaw; Swift Current; Medicine Hat.
Herbert, Saskatchewan, population 700, sat at a rare bend in the road, on the north side of the highway and across the railroad tracks that loosely paralleled it. Its rectangular grid measured about 10 blocks in one direction and five blocks in the other. There were a few stores, a post office, and a school. On the north side, on a plateau above a string of small lakes, there was a white, aluminum-sided hockey rink, where Derek played for the Herbert Hawks, clad in maroon.
Like many small towns dotting the prairie, Herbert was founded after the Canadian government, in 1903, opened up much of its land to settlement, calling southern Saskatchewan the “World’s Choicest Wheat Lands.” Many of those who rushed into the Herbert area early in the 20th century were Mennonites, particularly Russian-German Mennonites who had homesteaded first in Manitoba or the northern United States. Decades later, when the Boogaards arrived, Mennonite roots in Herbert were thinned but deep.
The Boogaards bought a house in the middle of a block on the south side of town. Neighbors took a fondness to Joanne, with her sweet manner and her hands full with four rambunctious children. They did not know what to make of Len, with his brusque temperament. Whether by design or disposition, he rarely socialized, and when neighbors saw him outside of his police work, it was often at the rink, standing silently alone and occasionally shouting orders at his children.
Len soon found something amiss in Herbert. A couple members of the Mennonite congregation came to the police, concerned about a youth minister’s relationships with young boys. As the RCMP investigated, immigration officials found that the man was a former American Marine convicted and discharged in a child-molestation case. Immigration officials issued a warrant. Len made the arrest.
Some disbelieving church members objected. A few filed complaints against Len in an attempt to discredit him, saying they had spotted him in his police car not wearing his seat belt or that he illegally towed his kids behind a snowmobile. The RCMP dismissed those complaints. But the harassment extended beyond Len. As the Boogaard children got older, they regularly learned at school that their father had arrested or cited someone in a classmate’s family, or had embarked on an investigation that threatened reputations and the local social order. The aggrieved could not reasonably take out their frustration on Len. It was the Boogaard children, particularly Derek, who most often felt the brunt of resentment, manifested in slights from both children and adults.
“It was kind of tough growing up for our family because we moved around, and it was hard I think because my dad was a police officer,” Derek wrote as an adult, his notes sprinkled with misspelled words. “Not so much as from the ages of 6–12 because us kids didn’t see it yet. Make a long story short, the first year my dad got on a case when we were in Herbert SK. It is a very religious town. Found out something about the prist [sic] and had to deport him back to wherever he came from. The town kinda resented us and this was the first year we were there.”
Among the four Boogaard children, assimilation problems were starkest for Derek. He stood out for his size, the biggest student in class. People mistook him for a much older boy, and expected that he act like one, too. But he was easily distracted and occasionally disruptive, and when trouble arose in the classroom or the playground, children were quick to point to big, clumsy Derek, who had few friends to back his side of the story.
Joanne, knowing Derek had few friends, invited every child in Derek’s class to his summertime birthday parties, hoping at least some of them would come. The first-grade party had a dinosaur theme and only a couple of children.
Many teachers considered Derek to be a bully, and they were not surprised. His father, after all, was the gruff new RCMP member.
“Do you know who my father is?” a defiant Derek asked his teacher on at least one occasion.
In fourth grade, he was relegated to a closet in the back of the classroom, the walls acting as blinders to keep him focused straight ahead.
Derek’s report cards were filled with low grades and comments from teachers who gingerly informed the Boogaards of his classroom troubles. One grade-school teacher called Derek “challenging” and said he “is capable of doing much better.” But Derek “is very hard on himself and gives up very quickly.”
At times, the teacher wrote, Derek could be a good team player. But “when things don’t go well, he can display poor team spirit and sportsmanship.”
The Boogaards got Derek a tutor and had him repeat a year in grade school. While it helped Derek catch up academically, it further stigmatized him. His size stood out even more among his younger classmates.
The Boogaards compensated by encouraging Derek to play hockey and join the swim team, where friendships could be formed away from the confining caste system of school.
“My team was called the Herbert Hawks,” Derek wrote. “We had maroon jerseys & socks with white lettering saying Herbert across them. I’m pretty sure I started out with the number 42 in Herbert.”
Joanne provided an escape by taking the children to a sister’s cabin on a lake, where Derek swam and an uncle taught him to hunt. Len took Derek away by letting the boy ride along in the patrol car.
Soon, though, the RCMP said it was time to move again. And the Boogaards, with four children between the ages of five and 11, were happy to go.
IT WAS 1993, the summer that Derek turned 11, that the Boogaards moved 300 miles northeast to a town called Melfort. With about 5,000 residents, it was a metropolis compared to the earlier places that Len was assigned.
The family house was at 316 Churchill Drive, a U-shaped lane off Brunswick Street. It faced south, into the low winter sun, and its blond-brick facade was framed by two tall spruce trees. Len planted a basketball hoop into concrete on one side of the driveway.
The Boogaards filled the space inside with numbers and volume. As the children grew, the square footage of the home seemed to shrink, and the kitchen table got smaller when surrounded by six Boogaards. The basement was a refuge, filled with boys playing video games or wrestling on the floor. More and more, they tumbled out the doors and into the yard.
The neighborhood was filled with split-level houses, most with one-car garages. A hockey goal in the driveway marked where children lived. Across Brunswick Street sat a wide, open park, and in the middle of the park was a massive grass-covered mound, taller than any house. In winter, children sledded down in every direction.
The summit provided views of the strikingly flat surroundings. In all directions, the horizon was a tease. The tallest structures to puncture the landscape were a water tower, a grain silo, and a pair of brick apartment buildings on the north edge of town, not far from the police station where Len worked. Tract houses at Melfort’s boundaries seeped into empty fields that stretched to the far edge of the sky.
Melfort had a few traffic lights, mostly along the two-lane highway lined with a jumble of motels, gas stations, and restaurants. At the corner of Manitoba Street and Stovel Avenue was the Main Arena. It was sided with pea-green aluminum and had a painted-white cinderblock facade. The arched roof displayed the year it was built: 1931.
“Again, the same stuff happened as in Herbert,” Derek wrote in his notes years later. “They picked on the new kid.”
The first nemesis was a boy named Evan Folden. He and Derek met on a soccer field, and Folden, a year older, took an instant dislike to the hulking stranger. There were a few mocking taunts. A crowd gathered. Finally, the intensity led to a wrestling match and a few wild swings. Folden emerged with a bloody nose.
He was cleaning himself off in the school bathroom when Derek walked in. He, too, had a bloody nose, but Folden hadn’t caused it. It had come at the fist of an older girl. She had stood up for Folden and repaid Derek’s punch with a spot-on punch of her own.
Folden would become a friend and hockey teammate, but not before more scuffling. A wintertime snowball fight got ugly when Derek drilled Folden in the face from close range. Folden charged. Derek’s nose streamed blood into the cold air. He came home with his jacket torn.
Derek was viewed as a litmus test of toughness for other boys, particularly older ones, who saw in him an oversized kid with glasses—a physically imposing, meek-minded target. Some nicknamed him “Stupidgaard.” Even the friends of Derek’s brother Ryan, sometimes two grades younger, would come over and pile on Derek, as if he were a piece of playground equipment or an oversized family dog.
Derek quietly suffered the indignities of his size. His knees ached as a teenager because of the growth spurts. He was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter disease, a condition in which the cartilage at the end of the large leg bones swells to the point of pain. Derek wore braces on his legs during bouts of debilitating discomfort.
In the pool, young children hung from him like a float toy. In the rink, rivets attaching the blades to the boots of his hockey skates constantly gave way under his weight.
Amid a rough-and-tumble childhood, the boys took to “cage raging.” They wore hockey equipment and fought, imitating the toughest enforcers of the time—people like Bob Probert, Rob Ray, and Tie Domi.
“It’s where you put your gloves and helmet on and just go at it like a hockey fight and the loser is the one on the ground,” Derek wrote. “This is where you kinda learn how to punch.”
Derek rarely considered repercussions. He once moved a friend’s trampoline close to the garage, climbed to the roof, and—encouraged by other teens—belly flopped onto the canvas. The springs broke and the frame collapsed. Derek hit the ground with a thud, bruising his ribs. Another time, he rode a sled down a mound and into the street, in front of a passing police car. The young female officer, Jody Vail, knew that he was the son of another RCMP member, the one who was training her. She lectured Derek about safety and the importance of making sound decisions.
Somewhat inadvertently, Derek found refuge straddling school cliques while not succumbing to any of them. He was goofy enough, crazy enough, to be entertaining. He was mild-mannered enough, self-deprecating enough, to be endearing. It got him by.
He meshed with the jocks because of his hockey stature. Derek was never the best player on his team, but he was always the biggest. For most of his childhood, that was enough to earn him a perennial roster spot on the top-level teams in town. But Derek also glided into the outcast world of the skateboarders, a clique called the “skids.”
“The girls were even attracted to the skids,” Derek later wrote. “Luckily for me, I was friends with both sides.”
Hockey was the constant, and while his parents did not force it upon Derek, they encouraged it. It was good for him, they thought. It provided structure. It instilled discipline. It occupied his free time and surrounded him with friends. It supplied him with coaches who could serve as mentors.
As much as anything, though, it connected him with family. The Boogaards were leery of outside forces on their vulnerable son. And Derek appreciated the cocoon that the combination of hockey and family provided.
“I think the best part of playing hockey from ages 3 until 16 was the little road trips with dad,” Derek wrote years later.
AT ABOUT SIX FEET, Len was not a particularly tall man—all four of his children eventually grew taller them him, apparently inheriting height from their mother—but he was sturdy and broad-shouldered. He expected discipline from his children, and the threat of his temper was the concealed weapon that kept them in line. Derek both loved and feared his father.
Len’s mustache and steely eyes seemed a disguise for his feelings. The inflection of his voice was as steady as a bass drum, and he was fluent in the languages of inquiry and sarcasm. It all made it difficult to decipher his thoughts. Even the most mundane interactions felt part of a silent, internal investigation.
But Len had a playful side, revealed only to some. And Derek came to appreciate, and emulate, his father’s dark sense of humor.
Derek gleefully sat in the front seat of the police cruiser and watched as his father pulled drivers over and wrote traffic tickets. He wanted to hear all of his father’s stories. Some of them, like the one about the man whose excuse for not wearing his seat belt was that he had “anal seizures,” became family chestnuts, told over and over.
Derek also liked the story of Len coming to the scene of a large deer that had been struck by a car, its hind legs broken, but still alive. Len removed his standard-issue .38 revolver and shot the deer in the back of the head. It dropped instantly. On his next pass down the highway, Len saw the same deer, a stain of blood on its head, standing as if nothing was wrong. Flabbergasted, Len stopped and shot it again, with a different gun. Derek, unable to control his laughter, asked to have the story told again and again.
Those stories of adventure—the pursuit of bad guys, the unpredictable bursts of action—made Derek think he might like to become a cop someday, too, as long as he could bypass all the tedious paperwork. That was too much like school.
As much as Len’s vocation threw up hurdles to acceptance for Derek, there was a measure of prestige in having a police officer as a father. Joanne was the prototypical hockey mom, and most of Derek’s friends had one like her, too—shuttling children to practices in the Ford Aerostar and making meals and providing heavy doses of hugs and understanding. But none of his friends had a cop for a dad.
Sometimes, Len came straight from work and drove the boys and their friends in a police cruiser, often all the way to Saskatoon, about two hours away, or any of the small towns that interrupted the landscape.
“I don’t know how many times my dad got in trouble taking us to hockey in the cop cars but I [sic] was awesome and I [sic] so happy and thankful that he cared enough to get yelled at from his boss just to see his kids enjoying a sport,” Derek remembered.
When the car was full, Derek sat up front while his teammates sat in back. Usually, he crowded in back with the others. And when the boys grew too wild, Len would get their attention by pointing out something on the broad fields of nothingness.
“Look!” he screamed.
Wide-eyed faces spun forward. Len stomped on the brakes, smashing the smiles into the clear acrylic partition that divided the front seat from the back. The boys collapsed in laughter.
There were plenty of times, though, that it was just Len and Derek in the car. With towns spread across the countryside, quilted together by threads of two-lane roads, driving long distances was as much a part of childhood as family dinners and sibling spats. They stopped for after-school candy bars and Slurpees on the way out of town. They filled their bellies after the game with rink burgers, the cheap staple of Canadian hockey rinks.
“I would eat my food as fast as I could so I couldn’t feel the cold right when we got in the car,” Derek wrote.
Sometimes, watching from his usual vantage point, standing alone at the end of the rink, Len recognized that Derek needed a postgame boost. Derek had heard the teases of opposing players or fans, or he had received little ice time and been chided by coaches. Maybe Derek was injured or had had the rivets of another skate buckle and pop under his weight. On these occasions, Len would pull into an icy abandoned parking lot and spin the police car into a dizzying series of donuts. Or he would pull alongside a pasture and moo at the cows through the car’s loudspeaker.
There was never much talking, because neither Len nor Derek minded long silences, but there was comfort in close company. The radio on the way home would pick up the signal from some radio tower far over the horizon, relaying games of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Or it would be set to the station broadcasting the games of the Melfort Mustangs of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League. Inevitably, Derek would doze off to the sound of hockey and the hum of the highway. And he would awaken only when the car turned left into the driveway on Churchill Drive and the glowing light from the garage door opener shone brightly and the car’s windshield nudged the fuzzy tennis ball hanging from the ceiling, telling the Boogaards that they had arrived and that a warm house full of family waited inside.
IN MINOR HOCKEY, size mattered. Derek usually found himself on the top-level team. The smallest kids had to prove that they belonged. The biggest kids had to show that they did not.
Derek was never the most talented player on his minor hockey teams—if talent was defined by the usual metrics of goals and puck control, shiftiness and speed. While he could build speed with his long strides, he had none of the nimbleness needed in the quick-changing flow of hockey games. His knees sore from growth spurts, he was awkward, like a newborn foal. One coach called him a baby giraffe on skates. Opposing players avoided him because of his size, but opposing coaches often countered his presence with a speedy lineup that could exploit Derek’s slower pace.
Derek usually played defense, a big obstacle planted in front of the goal to gum up the opponents’ offense. When he was young, he rarely went out of his way to knock down other players on the ice. They usually just skated into him unintentionally and fell, losers in a physics equation.
There were always whispers. Len and Joanne saw the head shakes and the nudges. They overheard the after-practice conversations between concerned parents and youth coaches. They were adept in the art of deciphering what others thought of their son.
“I remember some parents complaining about the way I played,” Derek wrote years later. “They would complain about the penelties [sic] I took and said I should have never made any of the ‘AA’ teams. So it was a struggle mentally hearing that stuff.”
Derek idolized Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmour, who spent several seasons in the early 1990s as teammates with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Neither man was six feet tall or weighed 200 pounds, and both were dependable scorers. But they had reputations for fearlessness and—especially so in Clark’s case—a willingness to dole out big checks and fight in the name of defending teammates.
Clark grew up in Kelvington, Saskatchewan, a tiny town a couple of hours south of Melfort. He was a provincial hero, chosen by the Maple Leafs with the first-overall choice of the 1985 NHL draft. He spent 13 of his 15 NHL seasons in Toronto, serving as captain in the early 1990s. And while he scored 330 goals in 793 games, he was assessed 1,690 penalty minutes, many of them in five-minute increments for fighting.
Gilmour, from Kingston, Ontario, was drafted in 1982, in the seventh round, by the St. Louis Blues. In 1992–93, when Derek was 10, Gilmour played for Toronto and scored a career-high 127 points. He also had 100 penalty minutes that season, one of the highest totals on the team. For two summers, the Boogaards sent Derek to Toronto for a week to attend Gilmour’s youth hockey camp. Derek returned with stories about Gilmour—Doug Gilmour!—skating on the ice with the kids.
In eighth grade, Derek received an assignment asking students how they planned to make a living. He wrote that he wanted to play in the NHL with Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmour. The teacher asked Derek for a backup plan. “I don’t have a backup plan,” Derek remembered telling the teacher in the notes he later wrote. “And I’m going to play in the NHL one day!”
He spent three days in detention.
Derek had his immediate sights set on the Western Hockey League, the top-level junior hockey league for boys 16 and over, considered the ultimate destination for young players in western Canada. It was one of three major-junior leagues in Canada, along with the Ontario Hockey League and the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. They were considered the sturdiest stepping-stones to professional hockey, though most never make it that far.
Teams in the WHL could draft players the year that they turned 15. Derek was constantly reminded that size could not be taught, and he thought he might be selected if he had a good season. There might be a team willing to take a chance on a kid with size.
In the fall of 1996, Derek arrived for tryouts for Melfort’s bantam-level teams, for boys who turned 14 that year. For the first time, Derek did not make the top-level team. He was relegated to Melfort’s “A” team rather than the higher-caliber “AA” squad.
Derek was surprised and upset. He played on the second-tier team, but groused about playing time and complained about treatment from coaches. Interest in the sport ebbed. He was skateboarding and snowboarding and melding into a new circle of non-hockey-playing friends.
Suitably distracted, frustrated by his prospects, Derek quit hockey. His younger brothers, Ryan and Aaron, followed his lead. They, too, would have more free time, that cherished teenage commodity. No hockey practices, no games, no long drives after school and return drives late at night. For Derek, at 14, there was no greater pleasure than freedom from authority and hard work.
Len and Joanne did not try to talk Derek into playing again. They knew hockey was a childhood diversion and would end sometime. There was zero expectation of it becoming a career. And if Derek wasn’t good enough to play on Melfort’s top team, then it was obvious that the end was coming sooner rather than later.
That spring, in 1997, the Western Hockey League’s 18 franchises, from Portland, Oregon, to Brandon, Manitoba, including the Saskatchewan cities of Moose Jaw, Regina, and Saskatoon, took turns stocking their future teams.
Predicting talent at such an early age is a fickle business. Of the 18 boys chosen in the first round, about half eventually played some level of professional hockey. Four reached the NHL. The first player chosen, a boy from Yorkton, Saskatchewan, named Jarrett Stoll, was selected by Edmonton. Five years later, he embarked on an NHL career as a center that would last more than a decade.
A boy from Melfort, Jason Armstrong, was chosen in the third round, 53rd overall. He never reached major-junior hockey and became a farmer.
There were 195 boys chosen in the draft. Derek was not one of them.
THE TIMING OF Floyd Halcro’s call was perfect. A small man with a baritone voice and a bushy mustache, Halcro was taking over the Melfort Bantam AA team that fall. He had a son on the team. And he was friends with Len.
By summer, Derek’s latest growth spurt pushed the 15-year-old to six feet, four inches and 210 pounds. The tedium of the long days, the thoughts of another school year of struggle, made Derek consider what he wanted to do with his life. With a 65 average in ninth grade, he knew he would not go to college. Maybe he would become a cop, like his father. Maybe join the military. Maybe work the oil fields across the prairie. There was good money in that, Derek had heard.
Halcro, though, thought Derek had long-range hockey potential, given the combination of his size and skating stride. He saw that hockey became more physical the older the boys got, and that someone like Derek might be handy as an on-ice bodyguard. Besides, he liked Derek and knew that the Boogaards worried for him.
Halcro told Derek he could audition for the AA team. He told him that he thought his size was a benefit, not a curse, and that his other skills were underestimated. Derek was rejuvenated with confidence and direction.
Halcro, Len, and Brian Folden, Evan’s father, took turns shuttling their sons to Saskatoon for “acceleration” workouts several times a week. At a gym, the boys used treadmill-like machines to improve their leg strength and skating strides.
But Len knew what Derek’s role would be on the ice. Almost every teenager in hockey would find himself in a fight, sooner or later. And Derek’s size meant he would be expected to do so, to step in to protect his teammates. It also meant that other teams would test his toughness. And if Derek was going to fight, Len was going to be sure he was prepared for it. He found a gym in Saskatoon and registered Derek for boxing lessons, too.
It was a cramped place on the upper floor of an old warehouse near downtown. The trainer was a weathered old man with gold chains around his neck and gold rings on his fingers. He told Derek he could turn him into a boxer.
“I’m not here to be a boxer,” Derek said. “I just wanna learn how to punch on skates.”
There was more money in boxing than in hockey, the man said.
“I want to try the hockey thing first,” Derek told him.
Between skating workouts and boxing lessons, the 100-mile trips to and from Saskatoon became a metronome to daily life. Derek lifted weights. He ran down gravel roads outside Melfort while Len trailed behind him in the car. Some days, Derek rode his bike alone toward Saskatoon. Len gave him a 30-minute head start to see how far Derek got.
“My dad was pretty much my trainer that summer,” Derek wrote.
Like taffy, Derek grew taller and thinner, and the chubbiness that he carried with him as a child melted away. In pictures, his head still popped high above those of classmates and teammates, but the roundness of his face was gone.
After training camp, Halcro put Derek on the season roster. He dismissed the calls from other parents saying that Derek, that son of a cop, did not deserve a spot on the town’s top team, that he was not only a danger to others but an obstacle to the success and promising future of boys of their own.
“I’ll take who I want on the team,” Halcro told the naysayers. “If somebody is going to go somewhere, this kid will do it.”
Until boys reached junior at age 16, fighting was met with stiff penalties, usually suspensions. But body-to-body checking was part of the game at the bantam level, and Derek could serve as a deterrent to opponents wanting to charge the star players. Checks escalated into skirmishes. Teams, imitating those from major junior on up to the professional ranks, stocked themselves with a bruiser or two.
Derek’s size often worked against him. When boys collided, the bigger one was usually whistled, and opponents learned to coax Derek into penalties to gain a man advantage. Halcro heard the taunts from other players, coaches, and fans. He heard the laughs when Derek fell clumsily. He heard the jeers when Derek knocked someone down. If only they knew the boy, he thought to himself. A meek, quiet boy, without a malicious bone in his body. A boy who wanted to protect his friends, not hurt others, who liked to fend off trouble before it started.
Derek occasionally came to Halcro with confidential news: some teammates were drinking or using drugs. Halcro, wanting both to keep his team intact and steer the teenaged boys from trouble, intervened. He never revealed that Derek was his source.
During a game at a tournament in Prince Albert, Halcro became upset with officials, and his caustic tongue got him ejected. He was still steaming when the tournament ended late that night and he, his son, Len, and Derek headed to the rink parking lot for the drive home. Halcro started the engine and began clearing snow from his red four-door Ford truck. Nearby, two officials, lacking a brush, cleaned the snow off their car with their hands. Halcro offered his brush. The officials sensed sarcasm, and an argument ensued over the best place to stick the brush.
Len stepped out of the truck and stopped one of the officials headed toward Halcro. Halcro was willing to take on the other. But Derek unfolded himself from the back seat and emerged to slide between them.
“Floyd, he’s not worth it,” Derek said as he tugged Halcro back to the car.
AMONG THE ARMY of scouts who crossed the prairies in the dead of winter, looking for teenaged hockey talent in forlorn rinks in small towns linked by snow-swept highways, Melfort was never a favorite stop. There were only a couple of passable restaurants, one of them the Italian place in the strip mall. There wasn’t even a Tim Hortons back then. The Travelodge, where the CanAm Highway from Regina makes a hard left on its way to Prince Albert, was the only decent place to stay.
Old Main Arena was an outdated barn, not a great place to see a game. The ceiling, about 20 feet up, was lined by fluorescent lights. Electric heaters, with coils that turned a fiery orange when hot, hung from the ceiling and pointed toward the three rows of wooden bleachers. There was a small foyer where people milled about or bought hot cocoa from the snack stand. The dressing rooms were nothing but painted concrete-block walls embedded with steel hooks to hang gear.
By then, Main Arena was Melfort’s secondary rink. The Northern Lights Palace, with seating for 1,800 and an indoor swimming pool, with individual stalls in the dressing rooms and seat backs in the stands, had been built a block away, on the other side of Melfort’s curling club.
The new arena was home to the Melfort Mustangs, part of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League, a tier below the major-junior Western Hockey League. The Mustangs had won the league championship in 1992 and 1996. They sometimes played in front of more than 1,000 fans. Their games were broadcast on the local radio station, its signal uninterrupted for miles and miles across the plains.
Derek’s team, the bantam-level Mustangs, sometimes practiced and played at Northern Lights. But on this particular night, an especially cold one in southern Saskatchewan, the team was at Main Arena. The heaters glowed orange. A few dozen people huddled beneath them. Len, in his police uniform, stood alone behind the boards at one end of the rink.
About a dozen WHL scouts sat in a loose cluster on one side. Among them were two men representing the Regina Pats: Brent Parker and Todd Ripplinger.
Parker was the team’s general manager, a measured man who had grown up around minor-league sports. Parker’s father had owned and operated teams for years, including a AAA baseball team in Calgary and a minor-league hockey team in Kansas City. When the Regina Pats, founded in 1917 and considered the oldest major-junior team in the world, were for sale in 1995, the WHL asked the Parkers to buy them. Brent was named general manager.
Ripplinger was the director of scouting. A Regina native, he had been a WHL scout for years for the Kamloops Blazers before Parker hired him to stock the hometown team. Ripplinger—”Ripper”—was a bundle of fast-talking energy who spent winters cruising the vast frozen spaces of the Prairie provinces chasing rumors of teenaged hockey players among the dim rinks in desolate towns. No matter the season, his ruddy complexion gave Ripplinger the look of someone who had just come in from the cold.
Parker and Ripplinger had been at a tournament in Prince Albert, about 90 minutes away. Ripplinger wanted to detour through Melfort to see a couple of young players on his list. The other scouts, he could be sure, were there to watch the same boys. None of them were there to watch Derek.
Things did not go well for the home team. North Battleford built a 7–2 lead in the third period, and the game’s tenor straddled the faint line between aggressive and cheap.
Parker, Ripplinger, and the other scouts could not help but notice a tall, gangly defenseman on the Melfort team. His hockey shorts were noticeably short and his arms seemed to hang to his knees. He spent shifts knocking down opposing players with his combination of momentum and menace.
At one point, the Melfort goalie, Brett Condy, dropped and controlled a loose puck. A North Battleford player poked under Condy with his stick. The whistle blew. Derek, coming to Condy’s defense, roughly grabbed the opponent and shoved him hard. Other players converged in a familiar post-whistle hockey scrum of grabs and insults.
But this one was different. Nudges turned to shoves, which turned into punches. It quickly got out of control, like a bar fight. The boys began pounding on one another, their sticks and gloves littering the ice in front of the goal. Officials were overmatched. Fans stood.
“So I pulled a guy outta the pile and kicked the shit outta him,” Derek recalled years later.
He pummeled one boy and was ready to take on others. Officials scrambled to restore order, but it was like helplessly stomping out a spreading brush fire. They peeled boys from the tempest, but there were more boys than officials. They were only a few years older and certainly smaller than Derek, at the center of the chaos.
Eventually, the fire burned itself out, and officials pulled Derek away and escorted him toward the penalty box. An opposing player barked something from the bench that caught Derek’s attention and relit his fuse. He broke free of the clutches of officials and rushed the visitors’ bench. He clambered inside, his arms swinging wildly. Like spooked cats, players escaped over the wall and through the gates at each end of the bench. Even the opposing coach backed away from the one-man siege.
“It felt like I had a force feild [sic] on me cause that team just scurried as far back as they could,” Derek remembered.
In the stands, the scouts stood dumbstruck, jaws unhinged. Opposing parents shouted at the teenaged monster. A group of older boys from the high school cheered wildly. Joanne Boogaard, surrounded by her three younger children, sat in stunned silence. She had never seen Derek lash out so uncontrollably.
Finally corralled again by officials and ejected from the game, Derek was guided toward the large open gate at the end of the ice. Awaiting him was a uniformed member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
“Oh my God, they called the cops,” Parker said. It was Derek’s father.
Derek stomped past Len and into an empty locker room. He threw equipment bags and kicked benches with his skates. He sat until the adrenaline waned and reality sunk in. He showered and dressed in time to watch the end of the game.
Derek silently sidled close to his father. Len said nothing to his son. Smoldering, he shot Derek a glance of disappointment and anger. The boy knew he was in trouble. He knew he had blown an opportunity.
Len eventually nodded to the stands. He pointed out the scouts clustered on one side, wearing colorful shirts and jackets with logos that broadcast their affiliations.
“Are you happy with what you did?” Len asked his son. It was a rhetorical question. Derek knew there was only one answer, and he did not have to say it.
Neither deciphered the buzz of excitement from the scouts. None of them had come to see a boy named Boogaard, but they knew who he was now. They nonchalantly whispered to one another and tried to mask their giddiness from their competitors.
Parker and Ripplinger nudged one another. They slipped out of the old rink and into the cold night. There was a long drive ahead of them, back to Regina. But first, they drove just a few blocks, to the Hi-Lo Motor Inn along the highway. They asked the clerk at the front desk to use the fax machine.
On a piece of blank paper, they wrote, “Regina Pats would like to add D. Boogaard, Melfort.” In a small office 500 miles west, at the headquarters of the Western Hockey League in Calgary, the machine beeped and buzzed and printed out the message. It would be discovered early the next morning, but the time stamp would show that it was sent before midnight—the day before.
Several teams sent similar notes to the league office the following morning, making their claims on Derek Boogaard. It was too late. Derek had already been added to the 50-man protected list of the Regina Pats. They had first rights on him. He would be invited to their training camp the following fall.
Through the dark on the three-hour drive home, Parker and Ripplinger could not get over what they had seen. They talked about Derek all the way.
“We just couldn’t get him out of our head,” Ripplinger recalled. “It was … you know what? If you like that kind of stuff, it was impressive, really impressive what he did, how strong he was. And you thought, ‘Maybe this guy could be an animal one day.’”
They even conjured up a nickname. “The Boogeyman,” they called him.
Ripplinger called the Boogaards with the news. He told Len and Joanne that their son had been added to their list, but warned that there were no guarantees he would remain on the roster. He could be dropped just as quickly as he was signed. Derek needed to keep doing what he was doing—intimidating the other boys, protecting his teammates, knocking bodies to the ice. Ripplinger said he would be back in Melfort in a few days to talk to the family about what it all meant and where it could all lead.
Not long afterward, Len called Ripplinger. Derek was too shy to make the call himself, but Len handed the phone to him.
“Do you think you might be able to bring some hockey shorts with you when you come?” the boy asked sheepishly.
Derek had outgrown his.
