4

DEREK WAS SUDDENLY WITHOUT a team, and the Wild searched for a place to put him. They opted for their affiliate in the East Coast Hockey League: the Louisiana IceGators of Lafayette, Louisiana.

“We’ve got a guy to send you who has been treated as kind of a circus act in juniors,” Tom Lynn, the assistant general manager of the Wild, told IceGators coach Dave Farrish.

Derek made his professional debut with the IceGators on December 20, 2002, in a game in Biloxi, Mississippi. He was 20 and had a contract to pay him $35,000 for the season. There was no mistaking Derek when he took the ice, wearing number 30—an oversized jersey usually reserved for goalies and their bulky pads, but the only one the IceGators had that was big enough to fit.

The IceGators were completing a 6–2 victory over the Mississippi Sea Wolves, and much of the announced crowd of 2,565 had headed out of the Mississippi Coast Coliseum. Derek fired a wrist shot that looked to be headed into the net, only to have it gloved by the goalie at the last moment. In the waning seconds, Derek approached a Mississippi enforcer, testing his appetite for a fight. The other player skated away.

Farrish took great satisfaction in that. The coach had seen Derek in two rookie camps in Minnesota with the Wild, and knew what he could mean to a game.

“People know he’s out there, because if he ever hits you you’re going to be Wile E. Coyote on the asphalt,” Farrish told the Lafayette newspaper, the Advertiser, after the game. “It’s great to have him on the ice. As you’ve seen tonight, nobody took any physical liberties towards us, and I think that was another big factor in the game.”

But Derek would have to prove himself to be more than a theoretical intimidator the next night, in his home debut. It was a Saturday, and the Cajundome in Lafayette was filled with 5,090 fans. Surprisingly, Derek picked up his first professional point—an assist—before he got into his first professional fight.

The IceGators were on their way to another 6–2 victory, this one over the Arkansas RiverBlades. Early in the third period, Derek awaited a face-off next to Arkansas’s Mark Scott, a six-foot-four, 215-pound enforcer from Manitoba. The gloves dropped in sync with the puck. Scott, 25 years old, landed the first punch, a right-hand jab to Derek’s chin. Derek swung wildly with his right hand and missed. Scott hit Derek squarely with a right hand, then managed to wrestle Derek’s jersey over his head. Holding tight, Scott hit Derek with a left hand before Derek freed himself from the constraints of his opponent and his own jersey.

Derek swung his dangerous right hand and struck Scott in the back of the head, on the helmet. Unlike in the Western Hockey League, the professional players kept their helmets on. That meant many bare-knuckled punches struck a hard shell of plastic, not the relative squishiness of a human skull or jaw.

Derek was growing accustomed to the annual damage. Early each season, after a couple of fights, Derek’s hands were grossly misshapen and swollen. The backs of them looked inflated and were marked by red and blue smudges, and sometimes the tooth marks of opponents. The fingers were thick, like sausages, and so crooked that Derek had trouble extending them. The knuckles, taking the brunt of each blow they delivered, rarely had time to scab and heal until the off-season. If the next fight came within a week or two—and they usually did—the skin of the knuckles would flap open again, pouring blood or oozing pus. First aid came in the form of towels and a bucket of icy water in the penalty box.

“The thing that worried me wasn’t the concussions,” Len Boogaard said years later. “It never really was an issue. It was never brought to the forefront. It was never deemed to be problematic. You got your bell rung? Well, here’s a Tylenol or whatever. The only thing that bothered me was his hands. He would fight and his knuckles would be pushed back into the wrist. And then he’d have to have it manipulated and have his knuckles put back in place. His hands were a mess. My concern was always, okay, he’s going to suffer with this later on in life, in terms of arthritis. It was his hands that I was more worried about.”

Derek bashed his fist against Scott’s helmet once. Twice. Three times. Four times. Scott finally fell to the ice. The intoxicated crowd blared its endorsement.

The night’s work was not over. With about three minutes left in the game, Louisiana firmly in control, Derek checked a much smaller opponent named Damon Whitten into the boards. Derek flung off his gloves and punched Whitten in the head with a right hand. A linesman quickly jumped between the two players. Derek pushed past the official and hit Whitten again. Around them, the eight other skaters on the ice dropped their gloves, too.

Long a staple of junior and minor-league hockey, though increasingly rare in the NHL, line brawls were a peculiar sight. Sometimes staged to coincide with a face-off, sometimes sparked more spontaneously, the players paired off into one-on-one duels, like gangs in a dark alley. Even goalies sometimes skated to the middle of the rink to fight one another.

“Right now, there is an abundance of toughness on this club,” Farrish said after the victory, happy to have Derek’s presence. “I think that will stop teams from being as aggressive as they were against us at the start of the season.”

Derek wanted to build his reputation fast, and he was just getting started. In Louisiana’s next game, against the Jackson Bandits in Mississippi, he fought 5-foot, 11-inch Dave Stewart, a 28-year-old minor-league antagonist. The men grabbed each other and spun around. Stewart could not reach Derek with most of his punches. Derek landed one to the back of Stewart’s head, but missed wildly on others, a narrow victory.

Derek fought twice two nights later in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Jason Norrie was a 25-year-old vagabond, a six-foot, three-inch bundle of bad intentions. In a 12-year career that began in the Western Hockey League and wound through the American minor leagues, he played for 18 franchises. Derek beat him up midway through the first period. Norrie wanted more, and the two fought off of a face-off late in the third period. Derek hit Norrie in the head with a couple of right hands. Norrie retaliated with fists filled with Derek’s own jersey. Amid the clutching, Derek managed to pull Norrie’s helmet loose and toss it aside. He embarked on what had become his preferred strategy—holding the opponent’s shoulder with the left hand and firing well-cocked punches with the right.

Like a panicked moth caught in a spider’s web, the smaller man fluttered wildly to break free. Derek tried his full repertoire—an uppercut here, a roundhouse there, a quick jab with the clutching left hand. He and Norrie switched hands, quickly grabbing the other with their rights. Derek tried to punch with his left, his weaker arm, and connected twice. Two officials circled with no intention to break it up. One had his arms crossed, as if unimpressed by the spectacle. Finally, as the energy of the fight fizzled and the players nodded a silent signal, the officials stepped in. The fight lasted 90 seconds, the same as a heavyweight boxing round. Fans cheered the effort.

Four games. Four fights. All victories.

“He got into some pretty good scraps initially,” Farrish recalled of Derek later. “And word gets around fast.”

THE AMERICAN DEEP SOUTH was hardly a hockey hotbed. But in the 1990s, the sport saw a vast opportunity for growth there. To the chagrin of Canadians, especially, hockey migrated south, fueled in large part by Canadian imports—teams and players.

Derek was one of them. By the time he arrived in Louisiana, the roots planted in the Sunbelt were in full bloom, led by the NHL, which had placed expansion teams or moved existing franchises to places such as Dallas, Phoenix, Nashville, Raleigh, Tampa, and Miami.

The East Coast Hockey League was founded in 1988. Among the five original teams, stretching from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Knoxville, Tennessee, were the Johnstown (Pennsylvania) Chiefs, named for the fictitious hard-fighting Chiefs of the movie Slap Shot. Much of the film had been shot in Johnstown’s Cambria County War Memorial Arena.

The ECHL grew quickly. By the start of the 1995 season, there were 21 teams, including the Louisiana IceGators, planted in midsized cities not unlike those of the Western Hockey League. But the culture could not have been more different. Fans of the WHL followed their teams with religious fervor and tracked the progress of the teenaged players from years before they arrived until well into the pros. Most fans in the ECHL were simply looking for something to do on a Saturday night. Hockey was a curiosity, and hardly a passion. Plenty of potential fans had never seen ice other than the kind that filled a glass of sweet tea. The ECHL was “AA” professional hockey, two deep levels below the NHL, and the rosters were filled mostly with unknown players from Canada or the northern climes of the United States.

A few players were on their way up. A few were on the way down. Most were in a holding pattern, stuck in their mid-20s in the middle level of pro hockey, unable to climb upward with any momentum, waiting for something—an injury, a relationship, an honest coach—to nudge them out of the game. Of the 33 teammates who played for the 2002–03 IceGators alongside Derek, only three ever played in the NHL—and for a grand total of 67 games. By comparison, seven teammates from the Medicine Hat team that Derek left behind in December went on to play in the NHL, combining for more than 1,400 career games.

Franchises needed to find ways to get fans to pay money to watch these strangers play this strange game. The key to success was getting people to fall quickly for the sport, like a crush. To do that, teams used a full arsenal of flirtations. ECHL hockey meant cheap tickets. It meant colorful nicknames. (The league was part of a trend toward nonsensical, unique team names. In 1995, the IceGators became the third team with “Ice” in its name, as if to remind people what sport they played. Their competition included teams called the Lizard Kings, RiverFrogs, and Mysticks.) It meant goofy promotions and contests during games. It meant costumed mascots and community outreach, particularly toward children.

And it meant fighting.

The Louisiana IceGators had 101 fights in 72 games in 2002–03, substantially higher than the league average. Fans willing to buy tickets knew that at least one fight was likely. A line brawl was possible. And when the opponent was the rival Mississippi Sea Wolves, violence was practically assured.

A season-high 7,726 fans were at the Cajundome on March 22, 2003, as the IceGators and Sea Wolves chased a division title. Louisiana’s 5–3 victory was punctuated by a game-ending bench-clearing brawl. It took a posse of coaches, officials, and the Lafayette sheriff’s department to clear the rink of 36 players. As the players fought, the arena cast the players in bright spotlights, like performers on a stage. Derek grabbed Jeff Hutchins, a 24-year-old forward who never shied from a fight, and pounded him with several blows to the head.

Breaking both the unwritten code of fighting and the written rule making it illegal to join a fight, a Mississippi goalie arrived to try to save Hutchins from Derek. He clumsily knocked the two fighters down, but they continued to punch one another. A linesman arrived to intervene, but the combatants stood and shrugged him off, sending the official looking for an easier fight to stop. Another Mississippi player charged Derek, suddenly a matador avoiding charging bulls. Derek was tackled from behind, and Hutchins climbed on top. The fight died. Others started.

Derek was one of five players suspended, but he received the harshest penalty: six games. He missed the last four regular-season games, and played in only two playoff games as the IceGators were upset in the second round.

Derek finished his first professional season with one goal and 240 penalty minutes, almost identical to the 245 penalty minutes he had in Prince George during his breakout season two years before. But he did it in roughly half as many games—33, compared with 61 in Prince George. Most important for Derek’s career: according to online judges, he won all 13 of his fights.

His family tried to track his progress from afar, but the ECHL elicited little coverage. All the Boogaards knew was that when Derek returned to Regina for the summer, he had a girlfriend and a fist full of swollen knuckles.

BEFORE HE WAS SENT to Louisiana, Derek had wanted to surprise Janella at Christmas by visiting her at home in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland. He wrote a Christmas card to her mother, asking if she would pick him up at the airport and keep his plan a secret.

“So make sure her other boyfriend isn’t over there!” he wrote. “(It’s a joke.) Just bug her about it.

“I want to tell you how much your daughter has made such an impact on my life, in such a short period of time that we have been together,” Derek continued. “She keeps me outta so much trouble this year and most guys wouldn’t like that. She is helping get to where I want to go one day, and that is the National Hockey League. I am going to play there, but now I am going to get there faster because of her.”

Near the end of his handwritten note, neatly scrawled on the inside flap of the card, Derek wrote: “Everybody that I know have come up to me and have asked me this year what has happened to me? It’s great. I love it that people have come up to me, and I’ve told them that it is your daughter that’s changed me.”

The surprise Christmas trip never happened, because Derek was sent to play in Louisiana. But Janella soon joined him, and they lived together in a Lafayette apartment with rented furniture. They had a little bit of money and a lot of spare time. They spent it at a nearby alligator farm. They found a breeder of bulldogs, and spent afternoons playing with the puppies, daydreaming of someday raising their own. They went to amusement parks, such as Six Flags New Orleans. On roller coasters, Derek, terrified, held the bar in front of him with clenched fists.

They filled their nights at beer joints and with quiet dinners at home. Derek collected cookbooks and experimented with barbecue recipes. He created extravagant dinners at the holidays, even when it was just two of them eating. They once got into a food fight, flinging food and squirting ketchup, mustard, and chocolate syrup across the kitchen. They ended up in the shower, fully dressed.

Derek’s height stalled just short of six foot eight, and weight became a consistent issue. He sometimes ballooned to 300 pounds in the off-season, and then spent the season slowly shedding it. At the end of the season in Louisiana, he stepped onto a coin-operated scale at a store and weighed 269 pounds—12 more than his listed weight. To help shed pounds, Derek and Janella together went on a cabbage-soup diet.

Derek wore glasses, jeans, and whatever clean T-shirt was in the drawer. But he spent money on shoes. It was important to have a good pair of shoes. Someone had told him that once.

ECHL players were rarely stars, beyond the small communities of fans who bought season tickets and showed up at promotional events. Derek was less of a star than others—a midseason addition, much younger than most of his teammates, a player who created occasional and quick bursts of adrenaline but did not dazzle with any semblance of an all-around game.

Still, among hockey executives, his was the future with the most promise.

In May, the Wild offered Derek his first NHL contract. He had shown enough for a minimal payout, and the Wild gave Derek a three-year deal that would pay him an annual NHL salary of $350,000, if and when he reached the top rung of professional hockey. If he continued to play in the ECHL, he would earn $35,000. If he played in the American Hockey League, one level below the NHL and one above the ECHL, he would be paid $45,000.

Derek signed his name to it, in a space next to the signature of Wild general manager Doug Risebrough.

The contract came with a $50,000 signing bonus, worth about $66,500 Canadian at the time. The day before he deposited the check into his Regina account, he had $29.94 in the bank.

One of his first purchases, on his 21st birthday, was for $47.21 at a liquor store. But most of his bonus check went toward a truck: Mike Tobin’s black 2002 GMC Sierra Denali, which Derek had driven when it was brand new in Prince George.

Len Boogaard asked his son why he couldn’t buy something cheaper, maybe an older truck without all the expensive, flashy options.

“How would that look at the rink?” Derek said.

Derek was headed to the Houston Aeros of the American Hockey League, the top minor-league affiliate of the Wild. He knew that a number of their players had bounced between the NHL and the AHL. A look in the players’ parking lot usually could tell you which ones. Derek wanted to belong.

TURN HIM INTO an NHL player. That was the order. Get Derek Boogaard to the Minnesota Wild.

Doug Risebrough had been hired by the Wild in 1999 to build its newly granted expansion franchise. He was an Ontario native, a first-round draft pick of the Montreal Canadiens in 1974, an all-purpose forward who helped them win four consecutive Stanley Cups from 1976 to 1979.

Traded to Calgary in 1982, Risebrough played five seasons for the Flames. He was a pugnacious sort, an upright bed of nails, unafraid to pester bigger players out of their comfort zone. While he scored 185 goals and had 286 assists in 13 NHL seasons, he also had 1,542 penalty minutes. He was only 5 foot 11 and about 180 pounds, but he fought roughly 60 times, including 14 times as a rookie.

Most famously, on January 2, 1986, in Calgary, Risebrough took on Edmonton enforcer Marty McSorley, the longtime protector of Wayne Gretzky and the Oilers’ other high-scoring forwards. Their fight sparked an extended, full-scale brawl between the hated rivals, and McSorley, not surprisingly, pounded the much-smaller Risebrough until the two were separated and steered toward the penalty box.

Somehow, though, Risebrough had McSorley’s Edmonton jersey. And while other fights continued on the ice, Risebrough sat in the penalty box and used his sharp skates to slice the jersey into shreds. He tossed the tattered remains of McSorley’s jersey onto the ice, eliciting a lusty cheer from the home crowd. The sweater was retrieved and returned to the Oilers. Glen Sather, the coach, hung it in the team’s dressing room as a reminder of Edmonton’s nastiest rivalry.

Risebrough embarked on a coaching career that eventually led him to become general manager of the Flames, then vice president of hockey operations for the Oilers. Both franchises made perennial trips to the playoffs under his direction. Risebrough’s career spanned the arc of the enforcer, from the goon’s rise in popular culture in the 1970s to fighting’s apex in the late 1980s to the one-dimensional behemoth who took hold in the 1990s.

The early Wild teams had a six-foot, five-inch, 230-pound enforcer named Matt Johnson. He was a perfunctory fighter on a team without much talent to protect. At the end of the 2000–01 season, the Wild’s first in the NHL, Risebrough spent a seventh-round draft pick on an even larger player: 19-year-old Derek Boogaard.

Risebrough encouraged Derek to continue boxing lessons, but also sent him to private lessons with a professional figure skater to improve Derek’s movement. Risebrough knew the Wild would transition to a new enforcer, from Johnson to Boogaard. In the summer of 2003, he made the mandate clear to the coaches of the Houston Aeros: turn Derek Boogaard, from last season’s Louisiana IceGators, into an NHL enforcer.

To Todd McLellan and Matt Shaw, it was a test of imagination. The head coach and assistant coach of the Aeros knew what NHL players looked like. Derek was not one. But it was not their decision. Derek had been foisted upon them.

“Under no uncertain terms, he was going to be in Houston,” Shaw, the assistant coach, said of the edict. “And he was going to play.”

Derek showed up weeks early for the Aeros’ training camp. For a time, amid the heat and humidity of Houston in August, he was the only player there. Derek worked out fiendishly in the weight room and did solo drills on the ice, practicing his skating, shooting, and puck handling. And when he finished, he enthusiastically returned to Shaw, like a puppy playing fetch, to ask what else he could do.

Why don’t you go run those hills out there, Shaw suggested, not sure what else to say. The practice facility in suburban Sugar Land, Texas, near a large high-school football stadium, was surrounded by grassy berms. Derek ran up and down the hills. He ran up and down the stadium steps. When he was exhausted, he did it some more. Shaw could not wear him out.

During the season, when practices ended and teammates scattered to the dressing room, Derek was usually the last one to leave the ice. He stood at the coaches’ sides, wide-eyed and ready, wondering what he could do next.

The contract Derek signed in May made him see, in stark terms, the difference between a minor-league player and an NHL one: 10 times the salary. Elevated from the ECHL to the AHL, one step removed from the Wild, Derek recognized his upward momentum and did not want to squander it. He was motivated by Risebrough’s unbending belief in him, Janella’s unwavering support, and the naysayers back in places like Melfort and Regina and Prince George who never imagined Derek Boogaard reaching the NHL.

The Aeros coaches liked Derek. He was eager to do as instructed and had a gentle way about him. McLellan’s two young sons adored Derek, and McLellan appreciated how he always knelt down to the height of children and spoke softly to them.

McLellan, too, had been raised in small-town eastern Saskatchewan and played in the Western Hockey League, for the Saskatoon Blades. He was a late-round draft choice, by the New York Islanders in 1986, and played five career NHL games. And he’d coached in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, part of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League that included Melfort.

“Once he entered the program in Houston and you could start to see the heart that this guy had, and the work he was committed to putting in, then there was hope,” McLellan said. “And every day the hope grew greater and greater. We became almost father figures to him. Every month he’d take steps and you’d be proud of him, and we’d give him a little bit of a report card. It wasn’t about his ability to fight. That was always there. It was about his work ethic and his commitment level to all the other skills that would eventually make him an NHLer that was most impressive to me.”

Derek’s hit-and-miss relationships with coaches found a sweet spot in Houston. He could sense how close he was to the NHL. He had coaches who believed in him, and who saw that he not only belonged, but that he could outgrow them. Few had viewed Derek that way before—as a player with potential for something bigger than what he already had.

DEREK DREAMED OF building a house one day. He bought software with blueprints and floor plans and read architectural and design magazines. He visited open houses to gather ideas. He searched for land in Kelowna, British Columbia, envisioning a time when he would build several houses—one for him and Janella, surrounded by smaller homes built for his mother, his father, his brothers, and his sister. They would all live close together.

In the fall of 2003, though, the life that Derek and Janella constructed in Louisiana simply moved west to suburban Houston, to an apartment complex in Stafford with the aspirational name of The Preserve at Colony Lakes. Unlike most players, who filled their apartments with little more than the necessities of a bed, a couch, and a large television, Derek wanted a home. He and Janella filled it with rented furniture they chose together.

In little more than two years, Derek had gone from a throwaway goon to an NHL draft pick, from the Western Hockey League to the top step of the minor leagues. If Janella had seen in Derek a chance to latch onto a future hockey star, as some “puck bunnies” were known to do, she had both incredible foresight and a willingness to detach herself from her own ambitions. She followed Derek from Medicine Hat to Lafayette to Houston, trading part-time jobs and placing college plans on hold. She paid at least as many bills as he did. When he totaled her car in an accident, they shared Derek’s new truck. She humored Derek’s idiosyncrasies, his quixotic quests, and his constant daydreaming. He went through a phase when he thought he would open a fast-food franchise when his hockey career ended. During one spell, he went to Chipotle, day after day, watching the employees and studying the process of efficiently making burritos and tacos to order.

His fixations ranged from trucks (he scoured car lots until he bought the one from Mike Tobin) to hammocks, which he wanted for the porch of the apartment. He went through a phase when he searched for chopper-style motorcycles. He collected movie DVDs by the hundreds. Later, he collected high-end liquor bottles (the contents of which he did not drink), then Buddha statues of all shapes and sizes.

But his greatest infatuation was with bulldogs. In Louisiana, he and Janella found a breeder out in the country. They visited often, looking at dogs, frolicking with the puppies. It was one of their favorite ways to spend an afternoon. They returned again and again, waiting for the right dog at the right time. Finally, after moving to Houston, they returned to the breeder and bought one. Its name was Trinity, with a white coat splotched with charcoal gray, a scrunched-up face, and a protruding lower jaw.

Derek was only 21, but he had re-created some semblance of family. He had a home, a car, a job, a girlfriend, and a dog. Janella, who was 23, wanted more security. Like a lot of girlfriends of young hockey players, she worried about her lack of health insurance and being single without steady employment. They spoke to Derek’s agent. He gave them a form that lots of other players used. It provided Janella benefits through Derek’s hockey. It implied, but never stated, that the two were married. They filed taxes as a married couple, but never described themselves as such to friends and family.

It was an innocent time. On Janella’s birthday, Derek made a birthday card, three feet tall, and filled the living room with balloons. Late one night after a long rain, Derek took Janella to a vacant field next to a strip mall. In the Denali, they zoomed and slid and spun, Derek showing Janella the way his father used to spin donuts in icy Canadian parking lots.

On their way to dry pavement, the truck got stuck. A teammate was summoned to provide a tow. Once rescued, Derek found that one tire had been stripped from the rim. He spent an hour pulling it off and replacing it with the spare tire. Janella took pictures. Derek smiled from ear to ear.

Among the friends that Derek and Janella made in Houston, none were as close as Rick and Heather Bronwell. Rick was an equipment manager for the Aeros. It was Bronwell who assigned Derek the oversized goalie’s jersey. It was Bronwell who repaired and replaced Derek’s skates when they broke under his weight, the rivets of the blade pulling apart from the boot, time and time again.

But it was Bronwell who saw the quiet side of Derek, too. When the Bronwells had a baby, Derek was there—the first non-family member to hold it, comfortably nuzzling the tiny infant softly in his enormous, bruised hands.

WHEN DEREK’S FIGHTS were shown on the video replay board at the Toyota Center, the downtown arena where the Aeros played their games, they were framed with a title, initially misspelled: BOOGYMAN CAM. Midway through Derek’s second season, the Aeros honored him by handing out 3,000 of his likenesses on “Derek Boogaard Bobblehead Night.” Not only did his head bobble, but his fists did, too.

Derek fought more for the Houston Aeros than he did during any two-year stretch of his career. When he fought, as was the custom through much of the minor leagues, spotlights shone on him and his opponent. In some cases, music over the arena’s sound system—the theme from Rocky, for example—provided a soundtrack to the bout. Sometimes a bell rang, as if marking the start of a boxing match. He became one of the team’s most popular players, despite not scoring a goal for Houston until his 106th game.

On January 1, 2004, months into the first of Derek’s two seasons in Houston, a weekly newspaper called the Houston Press devoted a lengthy story to Derek and teammate Chris Bala. Titled “Harvard and the Boogeyman,” it offset two seemingly opposite prospects, pondering which had the brighter long-range future, “the brawler or the brainiac.”

“He’s disconcertingly mellow off the ice, and his most eloquent defense of his play seldom goes beyond a shrug of the shoulders and an acceptance that outsiders will never understand,” reporter Richard Connelly wrote of Derek.

“Boogaard lives with his girlfriend, likes watching a lot of movies and The Simpsons, but he loooves hockey,” Connelly explained. “He hopes to coach after his playing days.”

Derek made no proclamations about his abilities.

“It’s no big secret that I’m not a big goal scorer,” he said in the piece. “I just love to hit guys. Some guys have it and some don’t.”

The story noted that Derek was the only minor-league player regularly featured on the web site WildEnforcers.com, which chronicled the actions of Minnesota’s pugilistic players. But it also quoted a skeptic: Kevin Oklobzija of the Hockey News, “who’s covered the AHL for 19 years.”

“I don’t think he’s a prospect,” Oklobzija said. “He’s just a guy to fight and to protect the team’s other players on this level.”

Reaching the NHL was far from a certainty. Derek’s 22 regular-season fights in 2003–04 ranked him only 12th in the AHL. Brandon Sugden of the Syracuse Crunch led the league with 41—including six against Rochester’s Sean McMorrow. Sugden was far more of a self-promoting brute than Derek. He made no secret that his primary mission was to lead the league in fighting majors. He explained one rivalry with pride.

“I knocked him out cold this year,” Sugden said in a 2004 story widely distributed by the Canadian Press. “First game this year, we knew we would fight each other, we nearly went in warmup. But we went during the game and I caught him with a nice right hand to the jaw. He dropped like a sack of potatoes. It took him 10 seconds to get up and then he skated to the wrong box.”

The minor leagues were filled with young men like Sugden—older than Derek, a bundle of braggadocio wrapped in menace. He was drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs in the fifth round of the 1996 draft, but never reached the NHL. In 13 professional seasons, including several early ones in which he later admitted struggling with alcohol and drug use, and despite a lifetime ban from the East Coast Hockey League (later rescinded) for throwing a stick that struck a fan, Sugden played for 12 teams in eight minor leagues. The only time he fought Derek, early in the 2004–05 season, Derek beat him. It was considered Sugden’s only loss in more than 30 fights that season.

But things in Houston started slowly for Derek. His first American Hockey League fight was on October 17, 2003, against Milwaukee’s Raitis Ivanans, a six-foot-four Latvian who had worked his way up from the lowest levels of minor-league hockey. For Derek, it was, at best, a draw. The two traded blows before Derek fell and Ivanans landed on top of him.

It got worse. In Utah three weeks later, Derek lost twice to the Grizzlies’ Mike Sgroi. The first came early in the game, a bout at center ice with an extended preamble of tough talk. Sgroi slipped when throwing a punch, but he recovered to throw another, knocking Derek off balance and to the ice. Sgroi landed three more lefts to Derek’s head before skating away to the cheers of the crowd.

The men later traded ankle-high slashes and agreed to a rematch. With efficiency and a high percentage of successful punches, the two took turns with momentum—Sgroi first, Derek second, Sgroi third. Just as Derek hit Sgroi in the head, Sgroi latched on to Derek’s helmet and dragged the scrum to the ice.

Sgroi, six foot five and 230 pounds, was 25 that season. He had played in the ECHL and the AHL, just like Derek, and won most of his fights. He even scored a few goals every season, occasionally reaching double digits. But he was not drafted by any NHL teams and never made an NHL regular-season roster. He was a minor-league vagabond who, in the decade after beating up Derek twice in one night, played for nearly 20 teams.

In 2005, he was runner-up in a pay-per-view event called Battle of the Hockey Enforcers. The premise was simple: pit hockey enforcers against one another in an on-ice, on-skates boxing tournament—hockey fights without the interruption of an actual hockey game. The event made national news and elicited widespread commentary on the state of hockey, fans, and violence.

Only one city would agree to host the event: Prince George. About 2,000 fans showed up in the 6,000-seat arena. The winner, Dean Mayrand, reportedly made $62,000, more than the going rate for a full season in the AHL.

Mayrand, too, never reached the NHL. He spent years in the Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey, a low-level professional circuit in Quebec where the typical game in the mid-2000s had four fights—about six times the rate of fighting in the NHL.

Derek didn’t need the constant reminders, but they were there, almost every fight. For every enforcer like Derek within reach of the NHL, there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of others enticed to punch their way to hockey stardom, with almost no chance of getting there.

DEREK FOUND THE schedule of a professional hockey player to be both erratic and mundane. Flares of activity—early-morning skates, afternoon practices, evening games—were divided by hours of mandated lethargy. Games ended late at night, and adrenaline prevented sleep until hours later.

Travel disrupted attempts at normalcy. Games sometimes fell on back-to-back nights in distant cities across different time zones. Stretches like the one that Derek and the Aeros had early in his first season in Houston were not unusual: at Grand Rapids one night, at Milwaukee the next, home for a game in Houston two nights later, a game the next night in San Antonio, a game in Syracuse three nights later, one the next night in Hartford, home for a game, then at Utah two nights later. Planes and buses might depart at midnight or 5 A.M., and arrive at dawn or noon. Checkout times in hotels could be 6 A.M. or 5 P.M.

In the hours before games, players rested in their rooms, which they shared with a teammate, watching television or playing video games. Sometimes they wandered a nearby mall or sat through a movie, killing hours until pre-game meals and bus rides to the arena.

Rare were long stretches of idle time in the dark of night. Rest came in the odd corners of the schedule—on the plane, in the afternoon, maybe a rare day off. Combine the inconsistent schedule with the consistency of pain, which all players endured with little complaint, and sleep was a luxury not always afforded.

By then, Derek had been introduced to Ambien, also known by its generic name, zolpidem. It was never hard to get in professional hockey. It was a prescription sleeping pill, a short-term antidote to insomnia, but it was rarely prescribed; it was merely handed out in training rooms and locker rooms, and often traded among players, like aspirin or Tic Tacs. There were few paper trails of prescriptions or formal dosages tracked. There was little worry of overdoses or abuse, no matter what the fine print on the label might say. If a player thought he needed help sleeping, he received sleeping pills—often Ambien.

It certainly helped Derek sleep, through the pain and in the odd hours, but he did not like the way it made him feel—groggy and off-kilter during the morning skates. With Janella’s help, he searched for other sleep aids. He occasionally took melatonin supplements and over-the-counter medicines that made him drowsy. But Ambien was easy to get. All he had to do was ask around.

It was in Derek’s first season in Houston that injuries started to mount. In January 2004, having just missed a couple of games because of a sore hip, Derek sprained his wrist during a fight with Cincinnati’s Sheldon Brookbank. In the course of a minute, Derek hit Brookbank more than 20 times with his right hand, another five or so with the left. He pulled Brookbanks’s helmet off and pounded him with blows to his ribs. Derek’s wrist was not examined until the period ended, and he sat on the bench the entire third period. An x-ray taken the next day was negative. It was a sprain.

Ten days later, Derek cut his right hand open with a knockdown blow against the helmet of Chicago’s Libor Ustrnul. The team injury report said that Derek “opened up an old laceration on his hand that had been very minor but is now opened up a lot more. Had hand treated at period break—continued play OK.”

It was signed JM, for Aeros trainer Jerry Meins. He wrote that the injury would be monitored “for infection and healing.”

Derek reopened the wound in a fight a week later. A week after that, on February 21, Derek beat up Chicago’s Brendan Yarema with several shots to head. When Yarema dropped, Derek helped pull him to his feet and hit him more. As the officials closed in, Derek jabbed Yarema with a left hand. Persuaded the fight was still going, the officials backed away to watch the conclusion of one of Derek’s most dominating and violent victories.

Yet Derek, the clear winner, missed the next two games. Upon his return, he immediately opened the wound again in a fight. Medical reports showed that it was swollen for another week and that Derek was prescribed pain relievers. When he played again, he got into a fight against Grand Rapids. He quickly pulled off the opponent’s helmet, then pounded him with jackhammer right hands. The trainer later reported that Derek’s hand experienced “no increased swelling.”

A more debilitating injury came a week later, on March 12, 2004, before the game started. Derek was stretching on the ice when he felt a pop in his back. He was given Vioxx, a widely used anti-inflammatory and pain reliever that was barred in the United States months later because of growing concerns that it could cause cardiovascular problems, such as heart attacks and strokes. For days, Derek received other prescriptions, too, including various muscle relaxants and pain relievers. Finally, tests revealed the extent of the injury: a ruptured disk. On March 17, in an injury log that Derek was asked to keep to monitor his own rehabilitation, he wrote: “Jerry said my hockey season is done for this year and I need surgery. Also said the rupture is 8mm. Doctor told Jerry that doctors start talking surgery when people rupture their discs 4 mm. Said we have to wait and see what doctors in Minnesota have to say about surgery.”

He did not skate again for 10 days and missed the rest of the regular season. In his log, Derek wrote that, when the Aeros were on the road, he stayed home and was treated by “Janella D’Amore girlfriend.” He managed to play two games in the playoffs as the Aeros were dispatched in the first round.

Back surgery never took place. In a postseason physical exam performed by team doctor Eddie Matsu on April 15, several of Derek’s ailments were listed. It was noted that Derek—the doctor’s form called him “Eric”—had a bulging disk in his back. It also said he had sustained, during the season, a “fractured” right hand, which was completely healed, an apparent reference to the January sprain. It noted a broken collarbone that Derek sustained as a 13-year-old. It made no mention of concussions, other head injuries, his sore shoulder, or anything else.

“Is presently playing and may continue to play ice hockey,” Matsu wrote in his conclusion.

DEREK PLAYED 53 of 80 regular-season games in his first season in Houston. He had no goals, four assists, and 207 penalty minutes. He added an assist and 16 penalty minutes in two playoff games. It was all considered a stirring success. Derek’s two-loss night to Sgroi early in the season became a faded memory. He did not lose a fight once the calendar turned to January.

In June, the Wild doubled the number of Boogaards in the organization. Risebrough, the general manager, drafted Aaron Boogaard, four years younger than Derek, in the sixth round, 175th overall, of the NHL Entry Draft. That was one round—27 elections—earlier than the Wild had picked Derek three years before. It was a surprise. Aaron had been steered into an enforcer’s role in the Western Hockey League by the Calgary Hitmen, who, disappointed in his progress, traded him to the Tri-City Americans in Washington. In 23 games, Aaron fought just once and scored three times. But the selection of a second Boogaard by the Wild set in motion a unique, tightening bond between Derek and Aaron, linking them on parallel career paths. Suddenly, Derek and Aaron had the same goal: to reach the NHL. That shared ambition was strengthened by the possibility of doing it with the same team. They spent the summer together, working out in Regina, building their strength through long workouts and improving their boxing skills against one another in the ring.

But Derek’s competition was about to get tougher. The NHL owners, trying to wrangle a more favorable salary structure with players after the expiration of the collective bargaining agreement, locked out the players. Negotiations stalled. The entire NHL season was canceled. Players scattered to other leagues, looking for a paycheck and a place to play. More than anywhere, the migration beefed up the American Hockey League. Of the 25 regular-season fights that Derek had in his second season in Houston, 16 came against men with NHL experience. Another three were against players who would make the NHL someday, too.

Kip Brennan was Derek’s primary nemesis. He played most of the previous season in the NHL, with the Los Angeles Kings and Atlanta Thrashers. Now representing the AHL’s Chicago Wolves, Brennan was 24, stood six foot four, and weighed 220 pounds. He and Derek fought in Houston’s third game of the season. Brennan ended an otherwise even fight with a big right hand to the side of Derek’s head and a wrestling-style takedown. They fought again in late January, then on back-to-back nights in February. And they ended the season, in the playoffs, fighting again. After the first fight, Derek fought Brennan to a draw or beat him every time.

Derek knew that NHL coaches and officials, idled by the lockout, were paying more attention to the AHL than usual. Some minor-league teams visited the big-league arenas to satiate the hunger of starving hockey fans. When the Aeros played a game at the Wild’s in Saint Paul, 12,204 saw Derek get an assist, one of four he had that season.

The game against Utah on February 8, 2005, was held in the afternoon, a rare weekday matinee. The crowd at Houston’s Toyota Center was announced as 9,062. About 7,000 of those were school children, many watching their first hockey game as part of a team promotion sponsored by the Houston Chronicle called “Chronicle Education Field Trip Day.”

The lasting memory of a 5–2 home-team victory was forged with 1:44 left in the third period. A Utah player clobbered one of the Aeros. All 10 players on the ice, including the goalies, converged in one corner of the rink and fought. Derek bloodied at least one opponent during a rambling scrum of fits and starts that delayed the game for 15 minutes.

After the game, officials needed another hour to sort out the penalties. It was ruled that the teams combined for 164 penalty minutes. Derek established a team record with 44 of them.

In a March game at Utah, Derek outwrestled an antagonist named Ryan Barnes, but skated away with a bloody nose. More memorably, Derek was granted a penalty shot after being hauled down from behind on a breakaway. Derek’s backhanded penalty shot was stopped by the goalie.

“I thought it was good that I actually got a good shot off, instead of fumbling it off into the corner,” Derek, a master of self-deprecation, said after the game.

His season’s personal highlight, though, came on March 27.

“Aeros forward Derek Boogaard is cheered on a regular basis at Toyota Center,” the Houston Chronicle wrote. “The 6-7 fan favorite leads the team with 247 penalty minutes and is often on the winning side of his fights. But Sunday night, in one of the biggest games for the Aeros this AHL season, Boogaard was lauded for being more than just his usual intimidating self.”

Derek scored the game-winning goal. He had captured a rebound and shoveled the puck into the net as he fell. It was his first goal in more than two years, stretching back to his lone season in the East Coast Hockey League. Derek was named the game’s No. 1 star. It was such an honor, such an unusual proclamation for him, that Derek saved a copy of the official score sheet.

Still, it was hard to gauge Derek’s development over two seasons in Houston. He won fights and was a crowd favorite, but his contributions were rarely tangible. Improvement was not obvious to those who saw him every day.

After the Aeros lost a playoff series to the Chicago Wolves, McLellan and Shaw, Houston’s head coach and assistant, met with Chicago coach John Anderson. Shaw and Anderson had known each other for years, and it was common for opposing coaches to chat casually about the series that just ended.

“Boogaard was your best player,” Anderson said.

“Seriously?” Shaw replied. Derek had played in all five games, scored no points, and had 38 penalty minutes.

“Yeah, our team was so concerned, so frightened when he was on the ice, it changed their game,” Anderson said.

That was when it hit McLellan and Shaw, two full seasons after Derek arrived with explicit instructions from Doug Risebrough to get him to the NHL.

“Good God, maybe this guy is going to play,” Shaw thought to himself. “Maybe Doug was right.”

DEREK’S NAME WAS on the list, and the list was inside Tom Lynn’s pocket. Derek was going to be cut from the training camp roster of the Minnesota Wild, again, and sent back to the minor leagues for another season.

Lynn, the Wild’s assistant general manager, was responsible for carrying out the cuts—usually three rounds of them, spaced over a couple of weeks during training camp. It was a delicate process. Coaches and executives privately agreed on the names. Lynn secretly made travel arrangements. Players were discreetly retrieved from the dressing room, usually by an equipment manager or trainer to keep suspicions down. Players stopped talking and their backs stiffened whenever Lynn or someone else from management walked in.

It was the first round of cuts in September 2005. The NHL, given a chance to remarket itself after the lockout, returned with a vow to reduce the stickiness of play and add a fan-friendly dose of fluidity. That led teams to believe that the game’s pace and scoring would increase. Speed would be prized over strength. Fighting would drop.

But the Wild had bought out the contract over the summer of its veteran enforcer, Matt Johnson. He had struggled with lingering injuries, including concussions. The 28-year-old said he planned to take some time off, get to feeling better and return to the game. He never did.

Lynn carried five names in his pocket to a meeting to confirm the cuts with other team officials before he notified the players. He read the names aloud. Everyone in the room, from general manager Doug Risebrough to head coach Jacques Lemaire, nodded their approval.

Lynn broke the lingering silence. He did not want Derek Boogaard to go without discussion.

“Do we have to let him go on the first cut?” he said. “He’s worked so hard. He’s been through a couple of summers, he’s been a good guy. Maybe we should keep him around. Not to make the team, maybe, but for a few more days, to reward him for his hard work.”

Assistant coach Mike Ramsey spoke up.

“I was thinking the same thing,” he said. “Boogey’s worked hard, he can skate, he’s not holding us up in practice or anything. Let’s keep him around.”

Derek’s name was crossed off the list. Someone else was cut instead.

The next night, Derek played against the Buffalo Sabres in a preseason game at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul. In the game’s first few minutes, he got into a fight with Andrew Peters, a six-foot-four, 240-pound behemoth, one of the NHL’s top enforcers. He had fought 23 times the season before the lockout, more than all but three others in the league.

With the Minnesota crowd on its feet, cheering for the unfamiliar giant wearing the unfamiliar No. 46, Derek absorbed a couple of small shots to his head before the men clasped onto one another’s shoulders. Derek squirmed loose and belted Peters with an overhand right fist, sending Peters’s helmet flying and dropping his body to the ice.

Two days later, the Wild cut 10 more players. Derek stayed.

At home against the Chicago Blackhawks, he fought Shawn Thornton, an emerging scrapper. Derek lost his helmet, but bombed Thornton with three right hands to the head before tugging Thornton’s helmet off. It was a narrow victory for Derek, but he was rewarded with a standing ovation.

“The token appearances are over for Derek Boogaard, the hulking Clydesdale who has become the dark horse of Wild training camp,” the Saint Paul Pioneer Press reported.

Lynn told the newspaper that Derek was the hardest-working player he had ever seen. Teammates agreed.

“Few expected Boogaard, whom the Wild drafted in the seventh round (202nd overall) in 2001, to survive long with Houston of the American Hockey League let alone compete for an NHL job,” the story said.

Lemaire was convinced that Derek changed games—not just through fighting, but by intimidation. When Derek was on the ice, Lemaire could sense the discomfort of opponents, worried about a crushing hit. When Derek was on the bench, they knew a cheap shot could mean his deployment.

“I saw him last year, I never thought he could be at this point,” Lemaire told reporters. “And I saw him quite a few times. But he grew through the camp and did things that made me say, ‘Hey, maybe he’s got a chance to play.’ We worked with him on positioning. He seems to understand the game. He’s improved his skating. Now it’s up to him to keep improving.”

Derek made the final team. He got to choose his number. He picked No. 24, in honor of Bob Probert, the longtime enforcer of the Detroit Red Wings and Chicago Blackhawks, widely considered the best of all time.

“A lot of people thought I would never make it, but I always had confidence in myself that if I went out and practiced hard, I’d eventually make it,” Derek told the StarTribune on the morning of the season opener. “And today’s the day. Hopefully I don’t get hurt in warmup.”

Derek had phoned his parents a couple of days earlier to share the news that he had made the NHL. Joanne was surprised and excited, still wary that her son was a fighter.

“Mom, it’s what I do now,” Derek told her.