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THE FIRST REPORT OF organized hockey played indoors came in 1875, according to the Society for International Hockey Research. That game was noted in two Montreal papers, and took place between two teams of nine players each at the Victoria Skating Rink.

It concluded with a fight.

“The game is generally played with a large rubber ball, each side striving to knock it through the bounds of the other’s field,” the Montreal Daily Witness reported on page 2 of its March 4, 1875, edition. “In order to spare the heads and nerves of the spectators, last evening, a flat piece of board was used instead of a ball; it slid about between the players with great velocity; the result being that the Creighton team won two games to one for the Torrance. Owing to some boys skating about during the play, an unfortunate disagreement arose; one little boy was struck across the head, and the man who did so was afterwards called to account, a regular fight taking place in which a bench was broken and other damage caused. It was the intention of the players to have another game, but this disgraceful affair put a stopper on it.”

There was no mention of a referee, and the sport’s self-policing origins gave root to fighting as a means of justice. Early games were often sticky affairs with little passing, turning rushes toward the goal into a clog of clutches, holds, punches, and stick whacks. Without strong rules to forbid such nefarious impediments, players often settled disputes by punching or swinging back.

In 1905, Allan Loney, an amateur player in Ontario, became the first hockey player charged with murder for an on-ice attack. Alcide Laurin died on the ice after Loney clubbed him with a stick. Charges against Loney were reduced to manslaughter and he was ultimately acquitted, the jury apparently persuaded that Loney acted in self-defense.

In March 1907, Owen “Bud” McCourt, star player for Cornwall of the Federal Amateur Hockey League, died hours after being hit in the head with a stick by Charles Masson of the Ottawa Victorias.

“The game was becoming rather rough and full of cross checking, tripping and slashing as a result of the referee’s leniency,” the lead story of the Evening Citizen in Ottawa reported the day after the fight.

McCourt had traded blows with a Victorias player named Arthur Throop when Masson surged forward, raised his stick, and hit McCourt over the head. Retaliation was immediate; Throop was dropped with a five-inch gash on his head by one of McCourt’s teammates. He and McCourt were helped off the ice by doctors.

McCourt returned to the game, but later fell unconscious in the locker room and was found to have a cracked skull. He died hours later. By morning, Masson was charged with manslaughter. “I’m very sorry,” he said upon learning of the death.

Masson was found not guilty. There was not enough evidence to demonstrate that, amid all the violence, Masson delivered the fatal blow.

The referee that night was a man named Emmett Quinn. From 1910 to 1916, Quinn was president of the National Hockey Association, which reorganized and became the foundation of the new National Hockey League in 1917.

The NHL was heavy with vigilante justice in its early years. The blue lines, roughly dividing the ice into thirds, were introduced in 1918. Forward passing was allowed only in the middle section of the rink, the “neutral” zone, meaning any player rushing toward the net with the puck was ambushed by defenders. Elbows turned to fists, and game-stopping fights became part of the show.

Owners were quick to recognize the excitement such violence stirred in hockey crowds. But knowing that on-ice deaths could threaten the sport’s future—scores of fatalities in American football in the early 1900s nearly led to the sport’s banishment, fueled in part by President Theodore Roosevelt’s frustration with its unmitigated violence—they worked to find a balance amid the orchestrated chaos. The ultimate result was Rule 56, instituted in 1922. It said that fighting was against the rules. But the penalty assessed—five minutes in the penalty box—was hardly a deterrent. It not-so-delicately forced players and coaches to determine whether overly rough play was worth the threat of getting beat up, or whether beating someone up was worth the price of a five-minute penalty.

It proved the perfect middle ground. Like the initial dictum of placing a basketball hoop 10 feet off the ground, or of setting baseball bases 90 feet apart, five minutes for fighting was an early guideline that endured. The NHL guideline was virtually unchanged nearly a century later, labeled as Rule 46.14.

“A major penalty shall be imposed on any player who fights,” the rulebook read. A “major penalty,” compared to a “minor penalty,” was deemed worthy of extended time in the penalty box.

“For the first major penalty in any one game, the offender, except the goalkeeper, shall be ruled off the ice for five (5) minutes during which time no substitute shall be permitted,” the rule said.

Of course, a fight involves at least two participants, meaning that each team typically lost a man to the penalty box. Such offsetting penalties left teams at equal strength, diluting the punitive notion of the penalty itself.

All that made hockey unique among major team sports. In soccer, football, basketball, and baseball, for example, simply swinging a fist at an opponent was usually grounds for immediate expulsion from the game. Subsequent fines and suspensions were common for any such momentary lapses of self-control. Adding to hockey’s peculiarity, it was typically not the aggrieved parties who sought retribution. When a star player was perceived to have been mistreated or handled too roughly by an opponent—to be the victim of a player “taking liberties,” in the euphemistic parlance of the game—the team might turn to the enforcer.

The term “enforcer” was a bit of a euphemism, too, an obtuse and honorable title of respect that grew alongside the role itself. Enforcer was not an official position on the team, but a title unofficially applied to those whose jobs as fighters overshadowed their play. Referees enforced the black-and-white rules. Enforcers, as if deputized, operated in the gray areas. In the glossiest version of the job description, enforcers kept the peace.

When the NHL adopted the fighting rule in 1922, there was a sense, one that persisted and percolated through the highest levels of hockey leadership through the league’s first century, that fighting acted as a safety valve—a “thermostat,” in the words of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman—against more dangerous, spontaneous violence. Allow two willing combatants to fight, the theory went, and the frequency of cheap shots, from elbows to sticks over the head, would dissipate.

In other words, fighting was necessary to control violence.

The philosophy became a sporting version of nuclear armament: the best way to protect players from violent onslaughts was the threat of more violence, even if the missiles were kept in the silo.

But, in hockey, they never were.

DEREK KNEW NO ONE when he arrived for the Regina Pats’ training camp in 1998. The other boys, some as old as 20, eyed the tall, quiet 16-year-old with a mix of derision and anxiety. Some knew that they would be fighting him, and that their roster spot in the Western Hockey League might depend on whether they could beat him up.

Derek was given practice gear in the team’s red, white, and blue colors. He got to choose a Sher-Wood stick, the nicest he had ever held. But he really wanted to know about the competition. He asked the trainer: Who do I need to watch out for?

Todd Fedoruk, the trainer said. “The Fridge.” He was a 19-year-old from Redwater, Alberta, fearless and sharp-tongued, a seventh-round draft choice of the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers the year before. He was a WHL veteran, having played parts of three seasons for the Kelowna Rockets before being traded to the Pats. The season before, he had seven goals, eight assists, and 200 penalty minutes, many of them in exchange for 17 fights. At six foot two and 230 pounds, he was built like a kitchen appliance.

Also, steer clear of Kyle Freadrich, the trainer said. Derek had noticed Freadrich on the roster. Nearly 20, he was listed at six feet, six inches and 254 pounds. In 112 games for the Pats the previous two seasons, he had just seven goals and eight assists, but 411 penalty minutes. He had had a team-high 25 fights the season before.

On-ice workouts did not begin until the next morning, but Len wanted Derek to absorb the atmosphere. Len and Derek, now several inches taller than his father, stood in the lobby of the arena. Boys came and went.

“I kept asking Dad if we could go but he said, ‘No, just wait,’ “ Derek wrote years later. “I think he did it to see how I would react.”

Derek pointed out Fedoruk. I have to watch out for that guy, he said. Then Freadrich walked by.

“He looked like the Grim Reaper,” Derek wrote. “His eyes pushed back in his head. His forehead hung over his eyes, so you could almost not see his eyes. His nose was a bit crooked and he had no front teeth.”

Derek knew he was being sized up, too.

“My body wasn’t showing any signs of fear but I was definetly [sic] scared in my head,” he wrote.

Len secured rooms at the RCMP Depot barracks, a few miles away. They ate fast food, getting five Arby’s sandwiches for five dollars.

“That night it felt like I only slept 20 minutes,” Derek wrote. “I was anxious, excited, scared and I wanted to hit anything that touched the puck.”

Derek arrived two hours early for the 10 o’clock start. He quietly got himself dressed and walked into the hallway. He saw another player, as tall as Derek, with “some weird Elvis-looking hair,” putting tape on his hockey sticks.

“He walks up to me,” Derek recalled in his notes, “gets in my face and says, ‘You’re fucking dead! I’m going to fucking kill you and you will regret coming here!’”

His name was Travis Churchman. An 18-year-old from Calgary, with a doo-wop haircut and a steel-wool patch of a beard on his chin, he was six foot four and 235 pounds. And when Derek took the ice that morning, Churchman was there, repeating the threats he had made in the hallway. The two were placed on opposite teams.

The scrimmage began. Derek was tapped by the coach to take a shift. He chased opposing players and tried to crush them with checks. He felt a tug on the back of his jersey.

“I turn around and Churchy is there, squared up and ready to go,” Derek wrote.

Derek had never been in a “staged” hockey fight, the kind that did not come from a spontaneous combustion of emotion during the course of intense play. They were fights without spark, meant to attract attention or send messages. Derek had seen them countless times on highlight reels and during National Hockey League games. He knew what to do. He flicked his gloves from his hands and took off his helmet—part of the protocol at the time, meant to reduce the pain absorbed by hands pounding plastic. He raised his fists and glided slowly in time with Churchman. Derek swung with a looping arm. His right fist crashed against Churchman’s face.

It was over. Churchman skulked away, holding his hands to his face. His nose was broken. Derek left the ice exhausted, relieved, and happy. Pats coaches and scouts laughed and congratulated him, patting him on the back for doing a good job on his first day.

IN THE 1970s, comedian Rodney Dangerfield famously said that he went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out, a joke that needed no explanation to a mainstream audience. Paul Newman starred in Slap Shot, a 1977 film about a struggling minor-league team that used over-the-top violence, mostly at the hands of a motley threesome called the Hanson Brothers, to attract crowds in a dying town. For decades, clips from that movie remained a staple of NHL arenas, an effort to get the fans excited during lulls in the action.

A caricatured archetype of the hockey enforcer took hold—a big, dumb, lovable lug, a “goon,” portrayed with a black eye, a knot on his skull, a bandage on his chin, and a smile of missing teeth. They were underdogs, of a sort—men who might otherwise have no business being in the NHL, men who clung to the bottom edge of the roster, whose next fight might be their last. Some barely played and rarely scored. But they were seen as a sort of outed superhero—blue-collar, understated types with selfless alter egos and a devotion to helping those in need. It was work that most of their own teammates would not consider themselves.

“I hate the word ‘goon,’ “ Fedoruk, who went on from Regina to become an NHL enforcer, said after his playing career. “It should almost be changed to ‘the guardian.’ There’s no better feeling then when you’re in the penalty box after a good tilt, both teams are jacked up. You get to rest, you’re resting for five minutes, and there’s no better feeling than when the boys get a rise from you showing up, putting yourself out there. I’m getting chills right now from talking about it.

“We want to play that game so bad, and we’re willing to do that part of it to play,” Fedoruk added. “The appreciation we get from our teammates is everything to us.”

Fans, too, saw something noble and human in the enforcer—a good-guy counterweight to some of hockey’s darkest episodes.

The sport’s history could be marked by violent milestones. At the end of Game 4 of the 1927 Stanley Cup final, Boston Bruins defenseman Billy Coutu, a vicious player known for wielding sharp elbows and a dangerous stick, attacked two referees, knocking one down with a punch and tackling the other. He received a lifetime ban from the game.

About the same time, boxing promoter Tex Rickard’s new NHL franchise, the New York Rangers, parked ambulances outside Madison Square Garden. More ambulances brought more fans, apparently lured by the prospect of violence.

The Rangers also used “Dead or Alive” posters, featuring the likes of notorious Boston brawler Eddie Shore, from Saskatchewan, to drum up business. In 1933, Shore chased and tripped Toronto’s Ace Bailey, who fell to the ice and was knocked unconscious with a brain hemorrhage. Shore was knocked out by one retaliatory punch from Toronto’s Red Horner.

Bailey was read his last rites. Shore, reawakened, was told he would be charged with manslaughter if and when Bailey died. But Bailey made a surprise recovery, though he never resumed his hockey career. Shore did, and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1947.

In March 1955, Montreal Canadiens star Maurice “Rocket” Richard was suspended for the rest of the season and the playoffs after punching a referee who was trying to prevent him from retaliating against a Boston player. The incident led to the “Richard Riot,” in which angry fans at the Montreal Forum threw debris at NHL president Clarence Campbell, forcing the forfeiture of a game against the Detroit Red Wings. The disturbance moved outside, where 60 were arrested during a night of vandalism and looting. The Canadiens, without the best scorer of the era, lost in the Stanley Cup final.

In 1968, Philadelphia’s Larry Zeidel and Boston’s Eddie Shack pummeled one another with their sticks, taking long, deliberate swings. During the next preseason, St. Louis’s Wayne Maki clubbed Boston’s Ted Green, fracturing his skull. He was later acquitted of assault charges.

The allowance of fighting as an outlet for aggression—or the thin five-minute penalty associated with it—did not deter those assaults. Such incidents merely slowed over the years as a reflection of society’s changing views toward violence. But fighting—a more controlled form of hockey violence—was on the rise. In 1960–61, the NHL averaged 0.2 fights per game, or one for every five contests. The rate rose rapidly until 1987–88, when the average game had 1.3 fights.

That period included the rise of the Boston Bruins, who resurrected the art of intimidation and mixed it with uncommon skill, winning the Stanley Cup in 1970 and 1972. Led by future Hall of Famers Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito, the Bruins showed that grace and intimidation were not mutually exclusive. They led the league in penalty minutes in 1970 and were third in 1972.

In 1970, the team with the most fights—as measured by fighting penalties—was the Philadelphia Flyers, with 37. An NHL expansion franchise in 1967, the Flyers quickly built a fan base and a championship team with muscle. The Broad Street Bullies, as they were called, won the Stanley Cup in 1974 and 1975.

Dave “The Hammer” Schultz, from Saskatchewan, had 472 penalty minutes during the second championship season, a record that still stands. He helped give rise to the narrowly defined role of the enforcer in both hockey and popular culture.

Fighting grew exponentially. When the Flyers won the Stanley Cup in 1975, they had 77 fights. By 1980, the top-fighting team, the Vancouver Canucks, had 92. In 1988, the Bruins led the NHL with 132. By then, some team owners in the NHL wondered aloud if it was too much. Their concerns had nothing to do with protecting the health of players. It had to do with marketing.

In 1986, Sports Illustrated wrote extensively about fighting in hockey. “Oh, dear,” the story read. “Just when you thought it was safe to take the kids to an NHL game again—goon hockey is back.”

“The NHL has got to decide,” the story concluded, “whether to continue presenting itself as a carnival show or to rejoin the ranks of major-league sport.”

The NHL was increasingly ambivalent about the role of the enforcer. The league’s board of governors, composed of owners, took occasional stabs at reducing fights, but the push of anti-fighting pacifists was routinely checked by compromise.

By 1992, a minority faction of team owners proposed that fighting players be ejected, the type of rule common not only in other sports, but in most hockey leagues around the world and in North American colleges, where fighting was rare. The idea was debated and dismissed in lieu of stricter rules targeting “instigators,” those deemed to have started the fight. “NHL Settles for a Jab in Confrontation with Goons,” read the headline in the New York Times.

The battle was between traditionalists and progressives, and, to some extent, Canadians and non-Canadians. European players had begun to flood the NHL, and the league was expanding deep into the United States. Traditionalists wanted to cling tightly to the game’s roots, to protect the physical brand of hockey made in Canada. Progressives saw fighting as an obstacle to the mainstream growth of the sport.

“I think fighting will suffer an evolutionary death,” Pittsburgh Penguins owner Howard Baldwin said at the time. “But it will be helped by mortal stab wounds like this.”

Gary Bettman became NHL commissioner in 1993. He often cited statistics indicating fighting’s slowly shrinking role in the league during his tenure. That raised uncomfortable questions about why the league was averse to nudging it further from the game. If less fighting was good, wouldn’t no fighting be better?

DEREK BARELY PLAYED most of the preseason for the Regina Pats, despite his knockout debut at training camp. The Pats moved him from defenseman to left wing, mostly because a fourth-line forward plays far fewer minutes than a defenseman, limiting Derek’s time on the ice. Beyond fighting, Derek was a liability.

But coach Parry Shockey told Derek one day that he would play the next night against the Moose Jaw Warriors. Derek called his parents and told them.

Moose Jaw was an hour’s drive west of Regina down the Trans-Canada Highway, and the Warriors and Pats were bitter rivals. Around the Western Hockey League, teams often did not warm up on the ice at the same time because pregame fights were common, and that was particularly true in Moose Jaw. The Moose Jaw Civic Centre, the squat, 3,000-seat arena nicknamed the “Crushed Can,” was packed.

The Pats did their warmups first. Derek scanned the faces in the crowd as he circled the ice. He found his mom and dad, as well as Ryan, Aaron, and Krysten. He smiled and gave them a nod.

After last-minute preparations and speeches in the locker room, the Pats headed back to the ice for introductions.

“The place was really loud, and it felt as if the fans were on top of you,” Derek wrote. “You obviously got the boos as we were walking threw [sic] the tunnel. I think that’s the worst I have ever heard people yelling and screaming at the tunnel.”

Fourteen-year-old Ryan took on the role of Derek’s advance scout for fighting. He scanned web sites and online bulletin boards for information on players Derek might face. Against Moose Jaw, one potential foe was a 20-year-old named Kevin Lapp. He was six foot seven and 250 pounds, and was the league’s No. 2-rated fighter, according to at least one site, behind Regina’s Kyle Freadrich.

Derek was the last of the Regina players to get a shift. “You’re up,” Shockey finally said. Derek clambered over the boards.

“Not even 5 seconds on the ice I get a tug,” Derek wrote. “So I turn around and there was Kevin Lapp. Just standing there waiting for the gloves to drop. He said, ‘Ready to go?’ I said, ‘Yep.’”

The fight was nothing more than a quick flurry of punches. “He absolutely destroyed me,” Derek wrote.

The Boogaards had come to watch Derek play and saw only a few seconds of him getting beat up. He went to the dressing room to check his wounds. After the game, after spending a few minutes with his family, he boarded the bus and sat near the front.

“The vets were obviously in the back of the bus,” Derek wrote. “But I knew those guys were making fun of me.”

Shockey called Derek into his office the next day. The Pats were demoting Derek, sending him to the Regina Pat Canadians, the city’s top midget team, a classification for 16- and 17-year-olds, a big step down from the WHL.

Len waited for his son outside the Agridome, the Pats’ arena in Regina.

“He didn’t have much to say,” Derek wrote. “But later on in the car ride he said he was proud of me making it this far, when all the people in Melfort said that I wasn’t any good. He said I shoved it up there [sic] asses already.”

THE PEAK OF FIGHTING in the late 1980s gave way to another NHL trend: that of the one-trick enforcer, a player who provided little value to the team beyond the threat of revenge and the occasional use of it. It coincided with a league-wide scoring boom, propelled by the likes of Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers.

Gretzky, from Brantford, Ontario, may be the world’s most famous Canadian. A suave, swift, and slight six-foot, 185-pound center, he won seven straight scoring titles in the 1980s and ultimately shattered NHL career records for goals and assists. The high-scoring Oilers dazzled fans on their way to five Stanley Cup championships in seven seasons, starting in 1984.

Gretzky gave much of the credit to players who scored little—on-ice bodyguards like Dave Semenko, Kevin McClelland, and Marty McSorley, each of whom had nearly 10 times as many penalty minutes as points during their NHL careers. McSorley followed Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings in 1988 to serve as his personal protector.

Teams imitated the strategy. High-scoring, highly paid stars needed security. The golden age of the hockey enforcer was born, stretching through McSorley and Bob Probert, Tie Domi, Georges Laraque, Rob Ray, and Donald Brashear. They increasingly settled their teammates’ scores by fighting each other. Imagine in American football, if a linebacker hit a quarterback with what the quarterback’s team believed was too much force. Or if a baseball pitcher plunked a star batter with a ball, or a basketball player committed a hard foul on a top scorer. The equivalent to hockey’s brand of justice would find those teams sending a specific player from their bench—someone hardly valued for his skill as a player, perhaps rarely used—and having them fight one another.

Their bouts combined the brutality of boxing and the showmanship of professional wrestling. The men sometimes fought for no purpose other than to satisfy the expectation of fans or the chance to be relevant. Coaches used them to stem the opposing team’s momentum or change the tenor of the game—maybe “send a message” for the next time the teams played. It felt like a sideshow. But the punches were real.

When the enforcers fought, the game clock stopped. Other players, restricted by stricter rules barring entry into a fight, backed away and watched. Fans, invariably, stood and cheered, often more vociferously than when a goal was scored.

Television cameras zoomed in, and a graphic providing each fighter’s height and weight often appeared on the screen. Play-byplay men took on the role of boxing announcers, their hyper-charged voices rising and falling with every blow. Punches produced a reflexive chorus of oooohs from the crowd. The volume ratcheted with the sight of blood, flying equipment, maybe a dislodged tooth. The fight ended only when one of the players fell to the ice or when the violence slowed, like the dwindling energy of popcorn when nearly every kernel has popped. That was the sign to officials to step in and nudge the combatants toward the penalty box.

Sometimes fights ended unceremoniously with a clumsy slip and fall. Sometimes they ended with two men, like exhausted heavyweights, clinging to one another. A knockout punch by the hometown enforcer usually brought the loudest cheer of the night.

When officials declared an end to the combat, fans gave standing ovations. Teammates banged their sticks on the boards in appreciation. Replays of the fight, usually in slow motion, filled the giant video screens in the arenas and the television screens at home. Fights were staples of the nightly sports highlight packages.

In the mid-1990s, a hockey fan from Long Island, New York, named David Singer began to archive fights in the NHL and, eventually, leagues around the world, including the major-junior leagues of Canada and the minor leagues of the United States. What began as an unheralded blog turned into HockeyFights.com, a full-fledged, up-to-date repository, in 1999. It had links to video clips of recent fights. Users voted on winners, and some described the blow-by-blow action in detailed accounts.

The site, like its growing posse of imitators, had pages for each enforcer that included career fight logs dating to junior hockey. It had statistical analysis, showing trends in fighting, and tracked fights from about a dozen leagues around the world. Enforcers themselves used it to replay their own fights and scout opponents for the next, some of the tens of millions of page views the site received each NHL season.

Without sites like HockeyFights.com and DropYourGloves.com, it might be difficult to find that the Medicine Hat Tigers led the WHL in 1997–98 with 211 fights—far more than teams in the NHL. Or that the Regina Pats had 183, or that Kyle Freadrich and Barret Jackman, each on his way to the NHL, would lead the team with 25 each. Or that Travis Churchman had 14.

Each of those boys had ambitions for professional hockey, and the NHL of the late 1990s still had plenty of appetite for enforcers. Most would prefer to have reached the NHL on the merit of their other hockey skills, but were glad to have found a well-traveled back entrance to a world where they were respected by teammates and revered by fans.

Into this era entered a gangly 16-year-old named Derek.

DEREK THOUGHT HE was too good to play for the Pat Canadians. He had been playing with and fighting 20-year-old boys working toward the NHL. Now he was on a second-tier team with boys his own age. And he was not getting much playing time.

“I was playing cocky and thought I didn’t deserve to be there,” Derek wrote. “I look back on it now and I do regret acting like that.”

Coach Leo MacDonald played Derek a few shifts a game. Derek used his infrequent ice time to show how he could intimidate with his energy and hammer opposing players with big checks. MacDonald was not impressed. The Pat Canadians were winning—on their way, in fact, to capturing the Air Canada Cup, awarded to the national midget-level champions. They did not need Derek’s brand of hockey.

In December, the Pat Canadians headed to the Mac’s tournament in Calgary, a prestigious event for top midget teams from across Canada. Game after game, Derek sat on the bench. He was embarrassed and annoyed. As he watched his teammates take turns on the ice, Derek stewed. He finally turned to MacDonald during the middle of the game.

“I’m good. I can play,” Derek said. “I’m right here in front of you.”

MacDonald told Derek to keep quiet. Derek exploded in anger. On the way to the dressing room, he corralled the coach in the hallway.

“I lit into him again and we got into the room and I said he was an awful coach and didn’t know how to coach,” Derek wrote later.

Derek carried his belongings into the hallway and found a pay phone. He called his mother. Joanne was in Swift Current, visiting family, and drove five hours to Calgary to retrieve Derek.

For much of the way back across the flat Saskatchewan prairie, he cried.

JUST WHEN DEREK’S hockey aspirations had stalled, Todd Ripplinger was there again. The Regina Pats’ head scout had had a feeling Derek would clash with MacDonald, the coach of the Pat Canadians. He was not surprised to learn that Derek was no longer on the team. By then, Ripplinger had already called another Regina coach named Don Pankewich.

The Regina Capitals were a Junior B team—a group of 16- to 20-year-olds a couple of cuts below the Western Hockey League. It was hardly a stepping-stone to a hockey career, but it was a timely teenage diversion.

Derek’s parents were having marital problems, sparked by Len’s relationship with Jody Vail, the newest RCMP member assigned to Melfort. She was blond and petite, about 10 years younger than Len. A friend of Derek’s told him that Len’s car was constantly parked at her house. Derek kept the revelation to himself, but Joanne soon caught on. One argument between his parents ended with a phone being pulled from a wall and Derek playing peacemaker.

The Boogaards had been in Melfort about five years, and it was about time for the RCMP to move the family again. Len negotiated a transfer to Regina, well timed for Derek’s move there for hockey. Joanne hoped that the move to Regina, her hometown, could keep the family together.

Len, Derek, and Ryan settled in Regina first, into an apartment. Joanne stayed in Melfort with Aaron and Krysten, the two younger children, to sell the house. The Boogaards found a tri-level home on the north side of Regina, on a shady section of Woodward Avenue. They renovated the house before they moved in, with three bedrooms upstairs and a couple more on the lowest level, so that there were bedrooms for each of the children.

The house was near Archbishop O’Neill High, a Catholic school that Pats players attended. But Derek found few friends. He had been cut from the 1998–99 Pats team, and he had been kicked off the Pat Canadians, too.

Derek immediately fit in with the Capitals. He liked the coach. He made several good friends. The pressure in the South Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League was several degrees below that of the WHL, and the Capitals were one of the better teams, making it to that season’s final. Derek’s love for hockey, so often ignited and extinguished, was ignited again.

The Pats were still intrigued by Derek’s size, and invited him to skate with them on days when the Capitals did not practice. They stoked his ambition. He stoked their interest with a growth spurt. If he made the Pats, he might be the biggest player in the WHL.

Derek turned 17 in June and spent the summer lifting weights, preparing for his second training camp with the Pats. The older Pats whom Derek had found intimidating—boys like Todd Fedoruk and Kyle Freadrich—were gone to professional training camps. But other willing fighters remained, including Travis Churchman and future NHL defenseman Barret Jackman. They found a burgeoning rival whom they barely recognized from a year before. Derek had grown three inches, to six foot seven, and the camp roster listed him at 255 pounds, 45 more than he had weighed a year earlier.

Trying to make an impression, Derek fought 12 times in the first four scrimmages.

“Derek Boogaard, a 17-year-old man-child, was in four or five fights, depending on who is doing the counting, during one scrimmage at the Regina Pats’ training camp yesterday,” the Leader-Post, Regina’s daily newspaper, reported on September 1, 1999.

The headline read “Beware of the Boogeyman.” The article said that the first fight, on the first shift, ended with Derek “bodyslamming” Churchman to the ice. Another fight with Churchman ended the same way, and the two then stood up and boxed.

“This one was pretty much a sawoff,” the story said.

Derek was big, but his fighting skills were unrefined. He tried to knock every opponent out with one punch. He had no strategy, no moves. He fell down easily.

Aside from the fighting, Derek had little usefulness on the ice. He could build up good speed but had little agility. He was not a great puck handler. He did not have innate hockey sense, the ability to see plays forming before they happened, to know where the puck needed to go without pausing for consideration. He was clumsy. He often botched drills in practices, interrupting the flow and frustrating coaches.

Mainly, he was raw, and there was no time for raw at this level. Coaches were paid to win and to fill seats. Derek, as enticing a prospect as he was, was not good enough to do either.

The Pats won four of their first five games. Derek barely played. But in the one loss, a 3–0 defeat at Swift Current on September 29, Derek got into his first regular-season major-junior hockey fight.

Mat Sommerfeld was not a big kid, but he was a sturdy one, a farm boy willing to dish it out and take it in equal doses. He grew up in Shellbrook, Saskatchewan, a town not unlike Melfort and about 90 minutes away. A few years earlier, as 14-year-olds on competing teams, Derek and Sommerfeld tussled during a game in Shellbrook. Afterward, Sommerfeld was in the arena lobby with friends when Boogaard approached. He introduced himself and thanked Sommerfeld for the fight. They shook hands.

But now they were 17, and the stakes were far higher. Late in the second period, awaiting a face-off, the boys began to scuffle. The referee told them to wait for the puck to drop. They did. Then they flipped their gloves off and flung their sticks to the side. They casually removed their helmets and tossed them aside as they circled clockwise. Derek closed the gap and jousted with his right hand. He grabbed Sommerfeld with his left hand, and Sommerfeld grabbed back, slipping to his knees momentarily. They wrangled and tried to punch one another. Sommerfeld pulled the back of Derek’s jersey onto Derek’s head. They fell in a heap and continued to jab and pull. Two officials jumped on top to separate the boys.

Sommerfeld rose first, holding Derek’s uniform nameplate—BOOGAARD—in his hands. As he skated to the penalty box, he held the fabric trophy overhead, like a boxer displaying a championship belt. The crowd on its feet, Sommerfeld tossed it dismissively aside.

On October 11, at Red Deer, Derek fought again, this time against Steve MacIntyre, a burly, six-foot, six-inch 19-year-old from a blip of a Saskatchewan town called Brock. MacIntyre won with little effort, but Derek was rewarded with another chance two nights later, at home against the Kelowna Rockets.

Ryan Boogaard had scouted the Rockets. Ryan, two years younger than Derek, played hockey, too. He was not built like an enforcer the way Derek was. And he was not as smooth with the puck as Aaron, the third of the Boogaard boys. But Ryan followed the WHL closely. He scoured statistics and tracked the online bulletin boards for information on players. Before the Pats hosted the Rockets at Regina’s Agridome, Ryan told Derek about Mitch Fritz. He was two years older than Derek and stood six foot seven. Ryan told his brother that Fritz had a strange style, an overhand, club-like punch that he compared to Donkey Kong, the video-game villain.

“I was never nervous before my fights,” Derek wrote. “I think I just excepted [sic] the fact that I could get hurt.”

Fritz took the ice during Derek’s first shift and asked for a fight. The boys dropped their gloves and removed their helmets. Derek swung a wild right hand that punctured only air. Fritz used his own long reach to pull Derek in close. Fritz tied Derek in knots and pounded him with a series of jabs and overhand “Donkey Kong punches,” Derek wrote, until officials interrupted.

“After the fight, he was waving his finger in the air like he was the champ,” Derek wrote. “I never did like that when guys showboated. It just pissed me off even more, and in junior hockey, you saw a lot of it.”

Fritz saw reason to gloat. On a hockey fight web site, someone reported that Fritz landed 10 of his 26 punches. Derek threw five punches and did not land any of them.

The Regina Pats had seen enough. Before Derek played again, he was traded. There is little in hockey more useless than an enforcer who loses fights.