5

DEREK BOOGAARD’S FIRST NHL fight ended with a knockout and a roar of approval.

It was October 16, 2005, the Wild hosting the Anaheim Ducks, the game still in the first period. First-year Ducks coach Randy Carlyle sent Kip Brennan to the ice for a face-off. The Wild tapped Derek. The two had fought five times the season before in the American Hockey League. Brennan had gouged Derek in the eye back in April, enough to temporarily blur his vision, and Derek wanted revenge.

The players lined up along the outer edges of the circle, and Derek nuzzled close. Brennan tapped him on the foot with his stick, a silent invitation. The puck dropped. Brennan backed up, and Derek chased him with two long strides, both men flicking their gloves away.

Brennan quickly managed to remove Derek’s helmet as they clutched for position. Derek jabbed with a couple of rights, then a couple of lefts, then held Brennan’s jersey by the shoulder with his left hand. Brennan’s helmet slipped back on his head, straining the chin strap.

Boom.

Derek hit him flush in the face with his closed right hand. Brennan’s legs gave way and he fell to the ice.

“Wow,” the television announcer said.

“That’s what you call ‘decisive,’ “ his partner added. “You know what? That kind of fight keeps you on the team.”

The announcers shared a hearty laugh. The crowd cheered.

Later in the period, after Derek had served his five-minute penalty and been given another shift, he fought again. This time, it was Anaheim’s Todd Fedoruk, a six-foot, two-inch puncher from Redwater, Alberta, who had played parts of four seasons with the Philadelphia Flyers. Derek had first come across him at training camp for the Regina Pats, seven years earlier, when Derek was 16 and he’d spied “The Fridge” nervously in the lobby of the Agridome.

“I wasn’t surprised when I heard the name ‘Boogaard,’ “ Fedoruk said several years later. “It’s kind of a name that sticks out, anyways—’The Boogeyman.’ They were talking about him in the NHL when he was still in juniors. ‘They got this guy down in western Canada, the Boogeyman, they call him. A name like that, he’s gotta definitely have our type of role. We’ll be waiting for him when he gets here.’ It wasn’t a surprise: Boogaard’s in the NHL.”

Now Fedoruk crouched with his fists up, a left-hander leading with his right shoulder. Derek, five inches taller and 40 pounds heavier, managed two fully cocked punches to the head. The second dislodged Fedoruk’s helmet. But Fedoruk grabbed hold of Derek’s right sleeve, managing to tangle Derek inside his own jersey—the move of a wily veteran. Derek pulled his right arm out, leaving the empty sleeve dangling. With half of Derek’s upper body bare and his head caught awkwardly in his jersey, Fedoruk pounded Derek with punches until both men leaned, exhausted, into the side boards. They coasted off the ice, serenaded with a standing ovation.

Three nights later, in his fifth NHL game, Derek charged to the front of the net, a bull in a china shop, and poked the puck past San Jose Sharks goalie Evgeni Nabokov to give the Wild a 2–1 lead in the third period. Minnesota erupted for four more goals and a 6–1 victory. But the ovation Derek got for scoring a goal was smaller than the one he had received earlier, when he beat up San Jose’s Rob Davison. With the puck stopped, Davison rushed in to collide with Derek. Derek responded by coolly battering Davison to the ice. He slid casually toward the penalty box with the ease and expression of a man walking a dog.

In his first five NHL games, all at home, Derek had a goal, an assist, and three fights. Replicas of his No. 24 Boogaard jersey were rushed to stores. Newspaper stories were written about how much Derek had improved his all-around skill to reach the NHL, how he was much more than the goon he had been presumed to be in junior hockey.

“An absolute gimmick,” was how Risebrough described Derek’s role in junior to the StarTribune. “Like he wasn’t even a human being.”

Within weeks, Derek’s jersey became the fastest-selling of all the players on the Wild. Two months and seven fights into the season, the Pioneer Press carried a column titled “Wild Realize It’s Finally Boogey Time.” Derek was a rookie, making more money than he imagined but far less than most of his teammates, and he had shown himself to be a sincere, self-deprecating presence off the ice and an energy-inducing hulk on it. The Wild could not have expected more. Risebrough’s draft-day bet from four years earlier had paid off.

Len Boogaard expressed a mix of pride and worry over Derek’s future.

“He’s encountered a number of injuries with his hands, and he’s going to have repercussions years down the road,” Len told reporter Michael Russo of the StarTribune early in Derek’s rookie season. “But what he’s accomplished to get here, the obstacles and hurdles he’s overcome, I’m very proud. I’m mostly proud that he has a different persona off the ice than what you see on the ice.”

WHENEVER HE WAS asked if he liked to fight, Derek would say some version of the same thing: It has always been part of hockey, and it always will be. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t do it.

But he was not fearless.

“If I think about it, I get nervous sometimes,” Derek said in early December of his rookie season. “There are guys here who can put fists through your face.”

The worry was always that an opponent would get a clean shot, a one-punch knockout that removed more than a couple of teeth or did more damage than merely crushing the air passages inside the nose. The fear was of the one punch that indelibly rearranged a face, and maybe a career. There was little attention paid to the flurry of blows that the men absorbed, or to the cumulative effect of soon-forgotten punches that blurred together through fights and games. If nothing got broken, and nothing bled, then there was little reason for concern.

Derek bloodied after a fight for the Wild.

Most players had only vague notions of what a concussion was. Their frames of reference probably began with childhood cartoons, the victims portrayed comically with stars in the eyes and a tweeting bird circling overhead. They might have felt one, or a dozen, and tried to “shake it off,” tried to “clear the cobwebs,” as if it were no different than slamming a finger in a door.

Concussions occur when the brain bounces against the inside walls of the skull. The damage can include bruising of the brain tissue and tearing of blood vessels and nerve fibers. Microscopic cell damage is possible, which can impact cognitive processing, even motor skills. Severe bruising can lead to swelling, which can cut off oxygen and glucose to the brain, leading to strokes or permanent disabilities.

Concussions do not always involve blows directly to the head. In car accidents, for example, the skull may go untouched, but a sudden stop forces the brain, floating inside in fluid, to bang against it. In sports, however, most concussions come from direct impact—everything from helmet-to-helmet collisions in football to a headfirst fall in skiing, heading the ball in soccer, or fists in boxing or hockey.

Concussions can cause a loss of consciousness, but most do not. Symptoms vary widely, but can include immediate dizziness, confusion, headaches, vision problems, memory loss, even a diminished sense of smell and taste. The treatment usually involves rest, until the symptoms subside. Sometimes, they never fully do. In the case of professional athletes, including countless hockey players, post-concussion syndrome can force early retirements.

Occasionally, the likelihood of a concussion was obvious—a big mid-ice collision, or replays showing a player falling and smacking his head on the ice. But that was not how most concussions happened. They happened during seemingly benign checks against the boards, the accidental stick to the jaw or knee to the head, the short uppercut in a hockey fight that was overshadowed by the flailing, jaw-cracking haymaker.

In 2005, scientists were slowly, quietly learning about the effects of such blows among athletes. They were learning about a disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, eventually to become known simply as CTE. It was not caused by major blows to the head, necessarily, but by repeated blows, even small, forgettable blows, the subconcussive hits barely noted—the kind of hits that occurred across the sports landscape, from the youngest ages.

It was an affliction long recognized in boxers, dating back nearly 100 years, sometimes referred to as “dementia pugilistica.” Aging boxers, often dismissively referred to as “punch drunk,” were actually victims of a degenerative brain disease. By 2005, Derek’s rookie year in the NHL, there was growing evidence that CTE was inflicting athletes beyond boxing. The focus had turned to football. Hall of Fame center Mike Webster died in 2002 after years of battling drug addiction, depression, and dementia. He was 50. And when his brain was examined after his death, he was found to have had CTE. A steady stream of other deceased football players, whose families donated their brains in a desperate search for clues to their late-life demise, were discovered to have had the disease, too.

Scientists found that repeated brain trauma could cause the buildup of tau, an abnormal protein that can lead to neurofibrillary tangles that interfere with brain functioning. The results of such degeneration could include memory loss and impaired judgment, aggression and impulse-control problems. Depression was a common symptom. In the long run, CTE—a scientific cousin to Alzheimer’s disease—could lead to the early onset of dementia, scientists said.

But in 2005, evidence was spotty and sample sizes were small. The National Football League was denying the science and the impact that football had on the post-career lives of former players. And there was no link of CTE to the NHL. Not yet.

It was certainly not a concern for the likes of Derek. It was the hands, the back, the shoulder, the nose that he and those around him worried about, if they worried at all. Not the head.

THERE WAS NO way of knowing how many concussions Derek had had by the time he reached the NHL. The Wild knew of at least one, back in junior, and his family recalled several discombobulating blows that likely were concussions shrugged away. Surely there were more. What counts as a concussion, anyway?

Fighting, after all, was a relatively small part of hockey, and even the top enforcers in the NHL fought only once every few games, on average. They wore helmets. They were balanced precariously on skates, so the blows were delivered without much leverage. Fights were short. Doctors were nearby. It was more of a show than a danger.

That is what everyone thought.

Enforcers never complained about their role, and players rarely admitted to concussions. Enforcers, especially, did not concede to anything that could be construed as a weakness or a lost edge. Such an admission raised doubts about an athlete’s commitment and toughness, the most important qualities for an enforcer. To admit to concussions was to commit career suicide.

There was too much to lose. The fall to obscurity was not a long one.

Trainers might have sympathy for a head injury, but most coaches and general managers did not. Either you could play or you could not. And while anyone could understand the seriousness of an injury when they saw a cast or learned about the rehabilitation time of a surgically repaired knee or shoulder, the debilitating effects of a concussion were not obvious to anyone but the injured.

There was no protocol for handling possible concussions then—no baseline test against which to measure the effects of an obvious blow to the head, no requirement to leave the game or move to the training room for examination. For the most part, players were on their own, left to decide for themselves whether they wanted to draw attention to the fogginess or strange symptoms in their minds.

There was a more immediate and practical matter. One thing that was understood about concussions was that one could easily lead to another, and then another. It seemed as if athletes who were knocked out once by a concussion often got knocked out again, and then again. Maybe that was a question of science. Or maybe it was because players known to be susceptible to concussions became targets for more blows to the head. Target an opponent’s weak spot, whether an ankle, a shoulder, or a head—it was an understood part of the strategy.

In a sport where injuries were masked to laughable lengths—a broken toe in hockey might be described publicly only as a “lower body” injury—a known concussion was kept secret by teams, too. Such misdirection was common, meant to protect the player. But it had the effect of disguising a serious health issue afflicting all levels of hockey. No one kept track of the truth. Teams wanted to protect players from further injury. Players wanted to protect their jobs. It was a circular culture of concussion denial.

Yet, by 2005, there was a growing body of worrisome evidence across the NHL. The careers of bankable stars were ending because of concussions. Enforcers? No one paid much attention to why they faded away. But as an increasing number of well-known players had their careers shortened by concussions in the years leading up to Derek’s arrival to the NHL, people began to notice.

The most noted case was that of Eric Lindros, the No. 1–overall draft choice in 1991 and the NHL’s most valuable player in 1995. His potential was snuffed by a stream of concussions—eight of them, reportedly, beginning in 1998—that fanned the flames of criticism of his overall toughness. Some of the sharpest jabs came from his boss, Philadelphia Flyers general manager Bobby Clarke, a hard-nosed captain during the franchise’s Broad Street Bullies heyday and a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Brett Lindros, Eric’s brother, was also a first-round draft choice, by the Islanders in 1996. He quit the game at age 20 after three concussions, each with deepening effects. Pat LaFontaine had a 15-season Hall of Fame career, but it ended bleakly in 1998, at age 33, after the last of at least six major concussions. New York Rangers goalie Mike Richter suffered a fractured skull and a concussion from a puck one season, then took a knee to the head the next. He retired 10 months later, in 2003, before the symptoms subsided enough to allow him to play another game.

Devils defenseman Scott Stevens, known largely for dishing out vicious checks, sustained a concussion from a puck in 2003 and retired in January 2004. That same season, the burgeoning career of Steve Moore of the Colorado Avalanche ended when Todd Bertuzzi of the Vancouver Canucks, looking for retribution, punched Moore from behind and drove him face-first to the ice.

Keith Primeau, one of the league’s top power forwards, retired early in the 2005 season, unable to recover during the lockout from a string of concussions two seasons earlier. And Moore’s Colorado teammate Adam Deadmarsh missed parts of two seasons because of concussions—the most debilitating one sustained in a fight—and retired in 2005.

“It’s one of the most frustrating injuries I think you could possibly have from a sports aspect,” Deadmarsh told the Canadian Press. “Unless you have concussions, it’s kind of hard to explain to someone what it feels like. But you know it’s something that’s not supposed to be there.”

Enforcers, too, were among those who left the game due to concussions. Dean Chynoweth, who bounced between the minor leagues and the NHL while fighting for the New York Islanders and Boston Bruins, retired in 1998 at age 29 after being diagnosed with 13 concussions. The better-known Stu Grimson, nicknamed “The Grim Reaper,” was involved in about 200 NHL fights. He was concussed for the last time in 2001 during a bout with Georges Laraque and never played again.

That was the world of NHL hockey that Derek entered in 2005. Concussions were a growing concern, but not enough of one to alter the rules or greatly impact safety measures. They certainly were not enough of a concern to curtail fighting, the one part of the game where players intentionally tried to hurt one another with repeated blows to the head, while everyone else gave them room and watched.

No one knew whether concussions were occurring more than they ever had, or if players were simply more aware of them—if a name had been given to what had long been euphemistically called “having your bell rung” or “getting dinged.” It was not a new problem, just an old one dressed in a more cautious, more scientific vernacular.

There was no rhyme or reason to those inflicted, it seemed—goalies or slick forwards, hulking defensemen or lumbering brawlers. Concussions could happen to anybody. You just hoped it was not you—that you were not a victim of bad luck or an unwitting owner of a soft head.

The least of the worries, if there were worries at all, was for the enforcers. They knew what they were getting into. They chose to fight, and they loved to fight. Why else would they do it?

IN THE FIRST HALF of Derek’s rookie season, the role of the enforcer was considered a dying one, on its way to slow extinction. It had nothing to do with the danger of the role, or concussions, or even fighting’s sideshow characteristics that many purists felt detracted from the beauty of the game. The league did nothing to deter fighting from its long-held place in the sport. The NHL, returning from a canceled season, merely warned that rules for obstruction, hooking, and holding would be more strictly enforced. Teams interpreted that to mean that there would be a premium on speed, not brawn. There was no room for lumbering players in an increasingly fast game.

Teams that typically reserved a roster spot for a single enforcer were going without. They needed players who could chew up minutes, not opponents. Many of the enforcers who led the league in fights two years earlier were relegated to the minor leagues.

“When I think of a role of a guy that just can fight, it was gone for me years ago,” Risebrough told the StarTribune.

Yet Risebrough had employed Matt Johnson, who had never tallied more than eight points in his four seasons, and replaced him with Derek, who had not scored more than one goal for a team in any season since he was 16.

But the league’s fighting numbers were down. In 2003–04, before the lockout, there were 789 fights in the NHL, as measured by fighting penalties. In 2005–06, Derek’s rookie year, there were 466. About 38 percent of NHL games had a fight, the lowest rate since the late 1960s and about one-third the rate of the late 1980s.

“I don’t know if you’ll ever take fighting out of the game or whether we really want to,” Canucks coach Marc Crawford told reporters in Vancouver, offering an echoed refrain. “When emotions spill over, it’s better to let it take care of itself right there than to have anything fester.”

Derek fought 16 times during his rookie season, more than all but three other players. And, according to the online judges, Derek had the league’s second-highest winning percentage (61 percent), trailing only Georges Laraque (64 percent).

On November 2, just as NHL followers started analyzing the diminished role of fighting in the game through the early weeks of the season, Derek pounded Vancouver’s Wade Brookbank, a 28-year-old from Lanigan, Saskatchewan, not far from Melfort. With his left arm, Derek held Brookbank—who, along with his brother Sheldon, had been adversaries of Derek’s in the minor leagues—and assailed him with a flurry of punches to the head. One of them broke Brookbank’s helmet free. Another dropped his body to the ice.

Four nights later, in Anaheim, six-foot, three-inch, 230-pound Trevor Gillies made his NHL debut for the Ducks. Derek had already beaten Kip Brennan and dueled Todd Fedoruk in an earlier game with Anaheim. With Brennan nursing a shoulder injury, Gillies was promoted from the American Hockey League for the singular purpose of standing up to Derek.

Midway through the first period, the two began a fight near the boards. The crowd stood. Derek clutched Gillies’s jersey on the shoulder and hit him several times with his right fist. Thirty seconds into the fight, the two twirled in front of the Anaheim bench. Derek pulled Gillies closer and clocked him in the face with a right-hand uppercut.

Derek knew immediately. Like a heavyweight moving to his corner knowing he had scored a knockout, he turned to skate toward the penalty box at about the time Gillies crumpled to the ice. The crowd responded with a mournful ohhh.

Gillies was helped to the dressing room. Sent back to the minor leagues when he recovered, he did not reach the NHL again for four more years.

“This kid is a monster, Boogaard,” the television announcer said.

THE WILD BASKED in popularity, still in a honeymoon phase in the Twin Cities. Minnesota had been home to the North Stars from 1967 to 1993, when they moved to Dallas in hockey’s southern migration. In 2000, the Wild began play as an expansion team, a franchise smothered warmly with newfound appreciation. The Wild made the playoffs in its third season, reaching the conference final. There was momentum in Minnesota. Derek both rode it and pushed it.

Fans latched on to something more complicated than Derek’s ability to punish opponents. He was cheered for his fists, beloved for his humility. He was, in the kindest sense of the term, a beloved goon.

His on-ice manner was cool and humble. He carried none of the histrionics of some other top enforcers, who might blow on their knuckles after a knockout or make a pugnacious show of retreating to the penalty box. Derek seemed, somehow, more reluctant, more clinical. His face rarely showed anger. Even during ferocious fights, Derek looked like a man exerting himself, not one lost in a rage.

“But you get in his face, and the minute you do, it’s on,” his brother Aaron said years later. “And there’s nothing you can do about it. He just took personal offense to people challenging him like that. I don’t think he ever wanted to be bullied.”

As in his fight with Gillies, Derek did not gloat over his knockouts. He was readily available to reporters in the dressing room and had a knack for self-effacing, humorous quotes. When the public-relations department needed players to attend off-ice events, from on-location radio spots to hospital visits, Derek volunteered. He was not covered in tattoos, he did not have facial hair, and did not cut or color his hair in some self-aware way, like many of his foes who felt a need to create or adhere to an image. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, like the kind he had worn since middle school, which gave him an unintentionally bookish, Clark Kent persona.

He was well liked by teammates, too. As he had as an outcast in high school, Derek gathered a misfit assortment of friends from all corners of the roster. He quickly became close to Slovakian Marian Gaborik, the rising 23-year-old star, a fleet scorer whom Derek was expected to protect. On buses and during meals, Derek often sat with teammates from foreign countries, peppering them with questions about their homelands, playfully trying to learn words from their language. He had several friends from his playing days in Houston, such as goalie Josh Harding, from Regina, and defenseman Brent Burns.

Derek entertains young Wild fans during a summertime team event in Saint Paul.

But Derek knew that his roots in the NHL were not deep. Minutes were scarce and chances were few. A couple of losing fights might send him to the minors. An injury might lead to his replacement. A punch might change everything.

There may have been no fighter who gave Derek more problems than Georges Laraque. Bulging with muscles, six foot three and 240 pounds, Laraque was widely considered the league’s toughest enforcer. Derek, brimming with confidence after his first few fights, wanted to measure himself against the best. His first chance came on November 23, 2005, in Edmonton. Laraque was 30, but he remembered his early years, when he tried to prove himself against the likes of Bob Probert, Tony Twist, and Tie Domi. He was receptive to accepting a challenge from a young, legitimate fighting talent.

Barely two minutes into the game, Derek and Laraque were side by side for a face-off. The puck and the gloves dropped. Fans stood. Flashes from cameras lit the arena like strobe lights. Laraque threw the first big punch, a right fist that came up short, but his fingers caught Derek’s jersey by the collar. Derek lunged with a left hand that missed. Laraque swung a left that landed. Derek, still clutched by the collar, was off balance, his head down, trying to shake free from the man considered the strongest in the game. Laraque did not let go. He pulled Derek closer and hit him with another left. Derek slipped to the ice, Laraque fell on top of him, and fans cheered the reigning champion.

“It’s not very often I feel like a midget,” Laraque told the Edmonton Sun afterward. “He had to be 10 feet tall.”

It did little to tarnish Derek’s reputation. Veterans, as Derek came to know, tended to dismiss challenges from up-and-coming fighters, knowing that they had little to gain in a fight with an unknown player. That Laraque so willingly took Derek on only validated Derek’s rising stature.

A couple of weeks later, Derek fought Donald Brashear, another of the vaunted heavyweights. Again, his opponent’s raw strength kept Derek off balance. Brashear was eager to throw punches again and again before falling on top of Derek.

Those were hiccups, considered worthy bouts of experience, amid an otherwise impressive assortment of punch-out victories. Derek’s standing grew in accordance with his string of fallen victims. There was Ottawa’s six-foot, five-inch, Brian McGrattan, a fellow rookie and the league leader in fights. The two traded right-hand blows for 45 seconds before Derek landed one on McGrattan’s jaw that felled him. There was a similar beating of Chicago’s Jim Vandermeer, then a mauling of Columbus’s Jody Shelley and a one-punch knockdown of Phoenix’s Matthew Spiller. There were two more bouts with Laraque, more evenly fought than the first.

“TO TELL YOU the truth, I never really loved fighting,” Chris Nilan, a noted fighter of the Boston Bruins and Montreal Canadiens, told Sports Illustrated in 1986. “You get sore hands. There have been nights when I’ve sat in the dressing room between periods with my hands in buckets of ice. Who in their right mind likes to do that? But to be honest with you, I don’t think I’d ever have gotten the chance to play up here if I hadn’t fought.”

For generations, enforcers liked what the fighting brought them—respect and a career—but not the hidden costs. Their popularity grew exponentially when they battered another enforcer, but it was a small fraternity. There was no room for grudges. Unlike any other player in the sport, their success came at the expense of someone else’s health, reputation, even livelihood. But the alternative was worse. Derek recognized that quickly.

“Derek was so big and powerful, he knew what he could do to people,” Todd Fedoruk said. “And when it happened, in some cases he felt bad about it. But I always told him, ‘You’ve got to understand, man, I would do the same thing. I would love it if I had your size.’ But he had that strength and that power and that ability to really beat guys, and he didn’t like it. He enjoyed it when he needed it, but some of it weighed on him.”

All enforcers shouldered the weight of expectations, worry and unpredictability. The pressure was enormous.

“The thing about that job is that it’s mental,” Laraque said. “The fact that at any given time, you might fight somebody. Even if you’re tired or something happens, even if the other tough guy doesn’t play much, if the score of the game is out of proportion, you’ve got to go out and show up and fight, and show that you’re there for your team. You always have to be ready at any time. And depending on who it is and what team you play, your level of nervousness might be higher from one game to another. You might not be able to sleep during your afternoon nap, or you might not be able to eat. You go to the movies, you might not be able to get into the movie because you know the next day you’re playing this guy. You’re worried. So many things that can happen, and it’s mostly in the head. Because once you start fighting, it’s different. It’s okay. The adrenaline kicks in and you don’t feel anything.”

Outsiders, and some teammates and coaches, never understood. They underestimated the toll, both physically and mentally. They saw a player who played the fewest minutes on the team and who got into a fight only once every few games. They saw it as a job with few responsibilities, rewarded by lots of admiration. And they saw the enforcers as fearless.

If a scorer missed a good shot on goal, it rarely haunted him. There would be other shots and more goals, perhaps as soon as the next shift. But a fighter was keenly aware that every fight could be his last. The opportunity might not come again, particularly against a specific foe. A lost fight might mean a trip to the minor leagues. One big punch might end a career.

“Toward the end of my career, when I had a really good reputation, I started getting less and less nervous because I knew how the other tough guys felt,” Laraque said. “I knew I had a mental advantage. Because if I was nervous, I knew the other guy was 10 times more nervous than me.”

Most misinterpreted the enforcer. Despite their rugged reputations, many lived with an inferiority complex. They wanted to be more like everyone else, not less. They wanted to be all-around players trusted in every phase of the game. Nearly every young fighter who reached the NHL told the same story that Derek told all along: I know my role as an enforcer, but I know I need to improve my other skills, too, so that the team can trust me in all of those other game situations. Most of them, like Derek, remained fighters, first and foremost. Rare was the young fighter who grew into something more.

In early July 2006, the Wild announced that it had re-signed two of its young players to new contracts. Marian Gaborik had played 65 games that season, the same number as Derek. He scored 38 goals and recorded 28 assists, a point total that ranked him 58th in the league. Gaborik received a three-year contract worth $19 million. Derek scored two goals and fought 16 times, third most in the league. He signed a one-year contract for $525,000.

The lower pay, and the constant realization that fame could be fleeting, may be part of the everyman charm of the enforcer. But it ate at many who played the role.

Enforcers never knew for sure what a particular game might bring. The team might start slowly and need a fight as a momentum changer. A blowout might force the losing team to start a fight to restore its honor. An unexpected hit might light the match and quickly turn into an unpredicted brawl. Shift by shift, enforcers had to be ready to fight at a moment’s notice.

Some games were almost guaranteed to have a fight. Those were the hard ones. Enforcers learned to look ahead at the schedule to see who and when they were likely to fight. Maybe there was a debt to be settled from last month or last year—retribution for a cheap shot that injured a teammate, payback owed for a beating during a fight. Maybe there was an up-and-coming enforcer who wanted to prove himself. Maybe there was a long history of acrimony between particular fighters.

The anticipation could be ignited by the media, showing highlights from the last time and debating what would happen this time. But, mostly, enforcers internalized the pressure. They masked it behind their rugged, unworried faces.

Fans never saw enforcers curled up in a ball on the hotel room floor. They didn’t see the food left on the plate during the pre-game meal. They didn’t know that the enforcer tried to take his mind off of the fight with an afternoon movie or a long walk, and later had no idea what he had seen or where he had been.

Don’t have the appetite to fight that night? Move aside. There are plenty of others who would love your job.

The role, and the pressures associated with it, could propel enforcers into a cycle of personal problems. Even as Derek arrived, the line of NHL enforcers was littered with broken lives. Alcohol and painkillers, especially, became the silent antidotes to the pain and pressure.

One of history’s great enforcers, an idol to many players of Derek’s generation, was Probert, who retired in 2002. He was a brutally effective fighter, a decent scorer, and a beloved teammate. He was also an alcoholic and a drug addict, he admitted in his autobiography, arrested at the United States-Canada border once for cocaine possession and suspended by the NHL for substance abuse multiple times. There were many other enforcers of the era who struggled through addiction, including Nilan and Brantt Myhres, whose career ended with a Laraque punch that broke his eye socket in the 2005 preseason, just as Derek arrived in the NHL.

Their problems, and those of many others that were not publicized, were dismissed as a side effect of their personalities, the kind of daredevil traits that led them to fight in the first place.

TODD FEDORUK, “THE FRIDGE,” wanted a piece of Derek. The puck had been sent to the other end of the ice, and as players chased it, Fedoruk tugged on the back of Derek’s jersey.

It was early in the second period of a game between the Anaheim Ducks and the Wild, in Saint Paul on October 27, 2006. In the first period, Derek had kneed Anaheim’s Chris Kunitz. Shane O’Brien came to Kunitz’s rescue to challenge Derek. Derek pummeled him to the ice.

Now came Fedoruk, seeking hockey’s convoluted brand of revenge. For several years, he had proved to be a willing and capable fighter in the NHL, with a bit of scoring punch. His grittiness had made him popular in Philadelphia, where he spent four seasons, and coveted by Anaheim, which traded a second-round draft choice to get him. Fedoruk was, in many ways, the type of all-around player Derek wanted to be—back when they were both in Regina, and here in the NHL.

Derek glanced over his shoulder and momentarily resisted the temptation. The whistle blew, and Fedoruk followed Derek into the corner. They grabbed one another, slipping their hands from their gloves as they glided toward the nearest face-off circle.

Derek popped Fedoruk in the face with a right hand. He had Fedoruk in his grip with his left hand, and Fedoruk ducked and squirmed to escape Derek’s reach. He tried to keep his head turned away, out of range. Derek’s next punch, cocked from his right hip, hit Fedoruk squarely on the right side of his face. Fedoruk dropped immediately. Derek skated away.

“Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho,” one television announcer said.

“Oh, boy,” the other replied over the din of the rollicking crowd.

Wild teammates banged the boards in front of their bench with their sticks, the ultimate ovation of appreciation for a fighter. Ducks players watched Fedoruk rise, one side of his face caved in, sickly demolished. Some turned away in horror.

Derek breaks Todd Fedoruk’s cheekbone.

As he stepped, expressionless, into the penalty box, Derek raised his left hand to acknowledge the crowd. It was a rare display for Derek. Len Boogaard called his son after the game. Do not ever do that again, he told him.

In the hallway outside the locker room, Derek spoke to friends with a pang of disbelief. His right hand was wrapped in ice inside a towel. It would throb for days.

“Oh, my God, I feel so bad for him,” Derek said. “I crushed his face. My hand is killing me.”

Derek bottled his astonishment and empathy in front of reporters.

“You never, ever wish that on somebody,” Derek told them. “But you’ve got to look at it in a different way, too. What happens if he had you in that position? Do you think he would let up? You know he wouldn’t.”

The one punch altered the arc of both men’s careers. For Derek, in his second season, it announced his coronation as the most feared fighter in the NHL. For Fedoruk, then 27, it irretrievably interrupted his career trajectory.

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