7

THE FIGHT DID NOT seem different than all the others, except that Derek lost, which was unusual, and he lost a tooth, which no one really saw. Only in hindsight did any of it seem significant.

It was October 16, 2008, an early-season road game against the Florida Panthers. The Wild won, 6–2, and Derek recorded an assist. It was his first point of any kind—goal or assist—since the playoff game against the Anaheim Ducks two seasons earlier.

The fight Derek lost was against Wade Belak, an affable defenseman with a shock of red hair. Belak was born in Saskatoon, just like Derek, and grew up mostly in Battleford, Saskatchewan, not far from Melfort. As a teen, Belak played in the Western Hockey League for the Saskatoon Blades, whose general manager was Daryl Lubiniecki, later the Prince George executive who traded for 17-year-old Derek. Belak was a first-round NHL draft choice in 1994. Like Derek, he had a younger brother, Graham, drafted into the NHL, in the optimistic hope that the family name and a willingness to fight would carry him into the league and to similar stardom.

By the time that Derek and Belak fought in South Florida in Minnesota’s third game of the season, the six-foot, five-inch, 225-pound Belak was 32, an improbable age for someone making a living as an enforcer. But teams viewed him as a solid defenseman with a willingness to throw punches with the heavyweights of the league. He could play decent minutes, fight when necessary, and keep the team loose. Belak seemed to enjoy his role. Others in the fighting fraternity liked Belak and respected him, Derek included.

Belak clutched Derek’s jersey near the bottom, while Derek grabbed Belak’s near the collar. The players yanked themselves into a slow-motion spin, throwing spot-on punches with their free hands while trying to keep their balance. Like a campfire that smolders before suddenly crackling with flames again, the fight slowed several times before another punch reignited it.

Each man took fists to the face, many times. Along the way, one of the punches knocked a false tooth out of Derek’s mouth. He never winced, not even as the officials slid between the exhausted fighters and nudged them toward the penalty boxes.

A team doctor for the Florida Panthers examined Derek and noted that the post of the false tooth hung in his mouth by a piece of skin. He removed the hardware and recommended a visit to the Wild’s team dentist when the team returned to Minnesota.

Derek in the penalty box after a fight for the Wild.

The injury did not prevent Derek from playing the rest of the game. His assist came in the second period.

The Wild played two nights later in Tampa, and Derek again played his usual number of shifts and minutes. On October 20, back in Minnesota, Derek was given a prescription for 15 hydrocodone pills from Wild team dentist Kyle Edlund, pharmacy records showed. It was just a start. Over 33 days, Derek received at least 195 hydrocodone pills from six NHL team doctors, according to medical reports and prescription records later collected by Len Boogaard. The records, and others collected, did not say how often Derek was to take the pills, or how many to consume each time. But it was a far greater quantity of prescription painkillers than Derek had been prescribed in his first three seasons combined.

Five of the doctors were affiliated with the Wild. The sixth was a team doctor for the San Jose Sharks, Arthur Ting, who prescribed 40 hydrocodone pills for Derek when the Wild arrived two days before playing a game in California. While it was not unusual for team doctors to treat opposing players, since not all teams traveled with team doctors of their own, Ting, a former doctor for baseball player Barry Bonds, was under probation from the Medical Board of California, which said that he “prescribed dangerous drugs and controlled substances to friends and acquaintances, particularly athletes, for whom he kept no medical records or for whom the medical records were fictitious, inadequate, or inaccurate,” according to the Associated Press.

A second spurt of prescription pills came in December. Sheldon Burns, the Wild’s medical director, and Dan Peterson, a Wild team doctor who shared a practice with Burns, prescribed 110 more hydrocodone pills to Derek over 27 days, the last on New Year’s Day, usually with no notation in Derek’s medical file to explain the reason, according to records. Amid those prescriptions for painkillers, Peterson also prescribed 30 pills of Ambien, the sleeping drug.

That flurry of prescription pills began with one punch from Belak, who was on his way to becoming undone by demons of his own. On this night, though, it was just another hockey fight, barely noted.

WHEN DEREK STEPPED into Sneaky Pete’s, familiar faces looked up to him and smiled. The bar’s owners and bartenders gave him high fives and shoulder pats. Everyone knew Derek. Like the character of Norm in Cheers, the owner said.

When things got too crowded, or Derek just wanted to escape, he slid behind the bar, where a Derek Boogaard bobblehead doll was prominently displayed on a shelf. A stuffed bison head that Derek bought hung from a wall.

Sneaky Pete’s opened in 2007 on North Fifth Street, on the northwestern edge of downtown Minneapolis, part of the Warehouse District that was quickly becoming a gentrified center of bars and nightclubs. A light-rail station was outside Sneaky Pete’s darkened-glass front wall. The new baseball stadium for the Minnesota Twins, Target Field, was just a block away, out the door to the right. The popular pedestrian-only Nicollet Mall was a couple of blocks the other direction.

Sneaky Pete’s was operated by a couple of brothers of the Hafiz family, which also owned several other bars in the area, including a couple of adult clubs featuring topless dancers. Derek became friends with Stewart Hafiz, who managed the place. He also became friends with Dillon Hafiz, Stewart’s son, several years younger than Derek, who sometimes supervised and worked the bar.

During the day, Sneaky Pete’s was a typical sports bar and restaurant, with tall tables in the front and booths in the back. A long, snaking bar curled along the left side in the back half of the room, and televisions flickered from all corners. The men’s room had two-way mirrors looking toward the bar, so that people at the urinals could voyeuristically scan the crowd.

At night, especially on weekends, Sneaky Pete’s took on the feel of a nightclub. Bouncers stood outside, keeping people waiting behind velvet ropes. A throbbing beat escaped through the walls and open door. Tables were stashed away to create a large dance floor. Brass poles were bolted to the ceiling and floor for women to climb and contort themselves. Dancing atop the bar was encouraged. Attractive women were stationed behind large troughs, offering ice-cold beers. Others female workers roamed the crowd, enticing patrons with sweet-flavored shots.

Downstairs was darker and mellower. With a straight bar hugging the entire right side, it had the feel of a speakeasy.

In 2010, the StarTribune called Sneaky Pete’s “downtown’s most popular party bar.” Maxim magazine made a habit of declaring it one of America’s top sports bars.

There were stretches when Derek was at Sneaky Pete’s several nights a week, especially in the off-season. He was easily recognized. Sports fans knew who he was because of his stature in the Twin Cities. Everyone else assumed he was an athlete because of his size. They called him “Boogey,” or the “Boogeyman,” and sometimes an impromptu chant of his nickname broke through the din.

Derek smiled sheepishly and agreed to every autograph request. He stood for photographs, often with young men, everyone raising their fists like prizefighters at a weigh-in. Derek was embarrassed by the attention, but he soaked it in, too. He managed to be both approachable and awe-inspiring. Friends constantly tugged him away from conversations because Derek was not good at walking away.

He often sat at a table in the back, his back to the wall, where he could see people approaching and where friends could provide a buffer when he wanted one. He sipped on Bud Light.

Derek tried to drag teammates to Sneaky Pete’s, but most had more private lives, or they lived closer to the team’s headquarters in Saint Paul, or they were married with children and did not frequent the bars. Derek insisted one spring that the Wild hold an end-of-season party at Sneaky Pete’s, and so the team did, renting out the lower level.

But most of the time, Derek went to Sneaky Pete’s by himself or with some his non-hockey friends. As in high school, Derek found himself a magnet to people who were not hockey players. One of his best friends was Tobin Wright. Eight years older than Derek, he worked in hockey operations for the Wild at the time that Derek was drafted. Wright left the club during the lockout and became a certified player agent, aligning himself with Ron Salcer, a veteran Los Angeles–based agent whose Minnesota clients included Derek, star forward Marian Gaborik, and defenseman Brent Burns.

Wright was a sort of business manager for Derek and the others, organizing their public appearances and handling whatever daily headaches they encountered. Wright’s relationship with Derek spanned many years and places. He knew Janella from Derek’s days in the minor leagues. He was with Derek the night he met Erin.

In the summer of 2007, Wright introduced Derek to Jeremy Clark, who soon became Derek’s closest friend in Minnesota. Clark, a taut and tightly wound former mixed-martial-arts fighter, raised in a small town in northern Ontario, owned a gym called Top Team. It began in a cramped end of an industrial building hidden off a small road in suburban Eagan, but Clark slowly took over the space next door, and the space next to that, creating a maze of rooms filled with mats and heavy bags and gym equipment. One room had a full-size boxing ring.

Clark slowly found a niche training hockey players. Eventually, entire teams were sent to be trained by Clark, and Clark was being summoned across the country to train teams, including some in the NHL. Derek was his most famous client.

“I get to train this monster,” Clark thought to himself when they met. Derek could lift enormous kettle bells that Clark could barely budge, and stretch rubber strength bands twice as far as anyone else. The first time he stepped into the boxing ring with Derek, Clark was scared. He moved like a moth, trying to avoid Derek’s fists. Derek had a switch, and Clark saw it flip a few times while boxing, usually when Derek’s brother Aaron hit him in the nose. Clark came to recognize it when he watched Derek fight in the NHL. Saying that Derek snapped implied that he lost all control. It was a switch, and Derek knew when to throw it.

Derek liked the art of the fight, and he liked studying and practicing technique, but Clark could see how the teeter-totter of emotions could get to a man. Not knowing when the fight would come, but knowing that it always did, and that it might be the last, and that it had to be done within the boundaries of written rules and an unwritten code, and that the long stretches of time between the fights were a blend of private worry and tedious training, hidden behind a veneer of invincibility and the persistence of public graciousness—well, there might be nothing like that in sports.

“You think of getting in an argument with a driver on the road, or you have a confrontation with somebody, and you’re all riled up and you think about the confrontation for the next two days,” Clark said three years after he met Derek. “It eats at you. ‘I shoulda, I coulda, if he would have just stepped forward I woulda …,’ and you boil it over in your head. And you’ve got to think these guys got to do that. And they’ve got to get themselves to the point where it’s man on man, full out, and then they’ve got to shut that off and come and talk to the press and be part of the team and take pictures with kids and handshake and go home to a girlfriend, wife, kids, whatever the case is. And then, the next night, bring that emotion back up and be the toughest guy in the league and the one that wants to eat somebody alive. And then repeat 80 games a season.”

There’s a toll, Clark thought. There has to be. He never could quite pull it out of Derek. But he knew it was there.

Aaron had come to spend the summers in Minneapolis with Derek, sharing an apartment between his seasons as a minor-league hockey player, trying to reach the NHL. Clark took to calling Aaron “Nick,” like his family members did. They fell into the lazy rhythm of summer. Summer, not hockey season, was Derek’s favorite time of year.

For a Brooks and Dunn country music concert at Xcel Energy Center, the three men spent a day shopping for matching shirts, hats, Wrangler jeans, and belt buckles. They arrived looking a bit like backup singers at a Western chuck-wagon show, with a hint of Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short in Three Amigos.

Derek and Aaron became fixtures at Clark’s house, and good friends with Clark’s wife, Jennie. Derek sat on the back deck, chatting away as Clark worked in the yard. He was, in many ways, like the neighbor kid who just hung around, looking for company. When Clark had training assignments for a team in Russia for a couple of weeks in the summer, Derek went with him. He was always up for an adventure.

More than anyplace, though, Clark’s gym became Derek’s second home. Derek’s pictures soon adorned the walls. Clark eventually converted a loft space into a small apartment for Derek, with a refrigerator and a shower, a couch, and a bed, a place where Derek could nap during the day or sleep overnight.

In the warehouse-like room with the boxing ring, giant dock doors rolled up to allow daylight and fresh air to enter. Between training sessions, the men sat on folding chairs, chewing sunflower seeds and talking, sometimes through the afternoon and into the dusk.

They climbed to the roof, using a ladder on a chair to pull themselves onto the fire escape. The view stretched over the trees and marshes of the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge, south of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. The downtown skylines of the Twin Cities gleamed in the distance. Clark and Derek turned on music, usually country music, and talked until deep into the night, often about growing up.

“If Boogey could have come off the ice and hit a switch, and become 5-10 and 185 pounds and a normal guy, he would have,” Clark said. “In a heartbeat. In a heartbeat.”

DEREK’S THIGHS. Pat O’Brien had never seen anything like them. When Derek sat down in a chair, his thighs arced upward, as if he were smuggling a ham in each pant leg.

O’Brien, a Minneapolis chiropractor, had worked on hundreds of athletes, many of them NHL players. In some ways, Derek had a prototypical build, with thick legs and a broad backside. But he also had abnormally huge hands. His arms were not rounded with bulging muscles, like those of a compact bodybuilder. They were long, like massive pistons. If he ever punched me, he’d kill me, O’Brien thought.

Derek, persistently bothered by a back that might need surgery, first came to O’Brien at the recommendation of Gaborik. For a couple of years, O’Brien saw Derek at his office several times a week, using his hands-on, non-surgical remedies to keep his body in working order—massage, acupuncture, whatever made Derek feel better. He worked on his jaw, his neck, his shoulders, back, and wrists. He saw the hands, scarred by cuts and teeth marks.

The two became friends. Derek called from the grocery store, reading a label and wondering if it was something he could eat. He worried about what he put into his body.

Derek became an avid cyclist during the summers, strengthening those thighs with long rides along the bluffs of the Mississippi River with O’Brien, Aaron, and several others. Derek’s size made him look a bit like a clown atop a tiny bike. He would fall behind the group as it climbed hills, then fearlessly whiz past on the way back down, pulled by gravity and his own weight. O’Brien and others marveled at how his thin-wheeled bike held him up. One morning, after a long ride, they found that it barely did. The rims on the wheels of Derek’s new bike were bent out of round.

Another excursion had just begun, up an incline, with Derek at the rear. The peloton came to a stop when the riders heard a crash behind them. Derek stood about 50 feet back, holding the frame of his bike in one hand and the crank in the other. His strong legs had snapped the pedal assembly off. The bike-shop owner had never seen it happen before.

“I don’t know about this biking thing,” Derek said through his crooked grin.

Something about Derek told you not to worry for him. He’d take care of you, not the other way around. He was the guy you went to when you needed help. To O’Brien, Derek had that persona, the kind that deflected attention: I’m fine; let’s talk about you.

O’Brien’s third son was born with Down syndrome, a shock discovered in the delivery room. Derek arrived at his next appointment and asked how everything went. O’Brien could barely speak.

“It’s going to be okay,” Derek said, his smile a burst of reinforcement. “It’s going to be fine.” O’Brien never forgot.

What amazed O’Brien most about Derek was not his body, but his personality. He brought a powerful calm to situations—an ability to soothe people and assure them that everything would be okay in the end.

O’Brien knew some of the owners of the Twins, and they invited him to bring Derek to a game on a Monday night. Just as O’Brien arrived at Derek’s apartment, his wife called in a state of panic. Their three-year-old had fallen in the driveway and knocked his two front teeth out.

O’Brien explained to Derek what happened. He had to rush back home.

“Bring him over here,” Derek said calmly.

He pushed a few buttons on his cell phone and spoke to a team dentist for the Wild.

“He’ll see you,” Derek told O’Brien.

O’Brien’s wife arrived with the boy in the back seat, his face covered in blood, his teeth gone. Derek stuck his head in to talk to him.

“Hey, buddy, how you doing?” he said to the boy. “I heard you knocked your teeth out.”

The boy nodded and stopped crying.

“I’ve lost so many teeth in hockey from getting punched,” Derek said. “I just lost a tooth today eating a sandwich, and went to the dentist and he put it back in. You’re going to be fine. I’m going to send you to this dentist who works on me, who puts my teeth back in.”

BUT SOMETHING WAS changing with Derek, and the Wild coaches noticed. To those on the outside, Derek was still a good quote, a jovial presence at his corner stall in the dressing room, a team leader by virtue of his tenure and standing among those at his position. Increasingly, he supported the fledgling charity work of Defending the Blue Line, a Minnesota-based organization aimed at getting the children of military members involved in hockey. “Boogaard’s Boogaardians” raised money to send children to hockey camps.

Defending the Blue Line’s founder, Shane Hudella, a first sergeant with the Minnesota Army National Guard, found Derek to be unlike most stars he met—a guy who just as easily could have been a best friend working at the factory. Derek, beyond autograph sessions and meet-and-greets with the military, sometimes spent days with the National Guard, donning fatigues and shooting weapons. He told Hudella that someday, after he retired and took care of his family financially, he might join the military.

Derek’s reputation as the everyman, underdog overachiever was intact. But things were different at the rink. Teammates and coaches saw a darker Derek emerge. Sometimes it took someone who had not seen Derek regularly to notice it.

Matt Shaw had been the assistant coach in Houston when Derek played two years there in the minor leagues. He watched Derek run the hills outside the rink, spend an extra 30 minutes on the ice after practice, and always come back asking for more. Shaw watched Derek’s first two seasons with the Wild from a distance, proud that he and Aeros head coach Todd McLellan had helped mold Derek into something they initially did not think he could become: an NHL player.

Shaw was promoted in 2007 to become an assistant for the Wild. He was surprised to learn that Derek had grown into a source of frustration for other Wild coaches.

Derek was frustrated, too. Fewer of the league’s other enforcers wanted to engage Derek, so his number of fights declined. He thought he could be trusted to play an expanding role. But his average time on the ice fell from 5:23 in his rookie season to 3:56 in in his third year. He thought he had shown enough to deserve more respect.

Shaw saw that Derek was sulking.

“What’s up?” Shaw asked Derek one day. “What’s up with you? Where’s the Derek that I know?”

Derek would not look Shaw in the eye. Guilt? Shame? Shaw could not tell. He just knew that the player he once trusted to work harder than anyone else on the team was not there anymore. Derek was no longer the first one on the ice and the last to leave. He was still relaxed away from the rink, still threw playful barbs from his corner of the dressing room. But something was gone. It was hard to pinpoint it. Derek was just … distant. He would sleep for 12 hours in hotels on the road. He fell asleep in the middle of card games on the airplane. Teammates looked at one another, smiled, and shook their heads.

The dressing room was an insular place, a clubhouse for players. Coaches tended to pass without stopping and team executives rarely entered. Their primary link to players—their moods, their attitudes, their concerns—resided in a web of people like team trainers and equipment managers, unsung grunts in the background of every organization that kept the day-to-day operations moving.

That is how coaches or executives would learn that one player arrived in the mornings smelling of alcohol, or another was having trouble at home, or another was not working hard to rehabilitate an injury, or another was poisoning the positive attitude inside the dressing room.

Wild management had not heard bad things about Derek. But something had started percolating in the back of Tom Lynn’s mind. The assistant general manager, a former Yale hockey player, and part of the Wild’s original staff, Lynn began to note an unspoken trend around the league. While evidence was anecdotal, enforcers were more likely to have personal problems, he thought. Lynn saw it mostly from afar, through roster moves and whispers, but the tallies of names could not be ignored. Something about that role, it seemed, made players more susceptible to problems like addiction to alcohol and drugs.

Maybe it was the role itself—the pressure of the job, the eternal spot at the bottom of the roster, the pain hidden behind a facade of fearlessness. Or maybe the role attracted a certain devil-may-care personality, young men from rough backgrounds who were more susceptible to personal problems whether they fought or not.

Lynn had not connected it to Derek, who seemed to be different than other enforcers in so many ways—quiet, a kid with an admirable work ethic and from a good family. But then Lynn started hearing things from the dressing room. Derek was taking Ambien, and not just the usual amounts. Most players used it as a short-term solution to sleeping problems caused by rugged travel schedules or discomforting injuries, but Derek was constantly asking for it.

THE WILD WAS desperate to keep Derek on the ice, but injuries made it increasingly difficult. In December 2008, before a game in Calgary, doctors administered an injection of Toradol into Derek’s sore right shoulder.

Toradol, the brand name for ketorolac, was a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory used to treat acute pain over no more than a few days. It is what athletes of all kinds sometimes received as a last resort to mask severe pain in places and joints like the knee, ankle, elbow, and shoulder.

Such an injection came with heroic undertones. For decades, athletes gamely took last-minute, painful shots to get them on the field, the court, or the ice, and myths had been built around such acts of brave desperation. Basketball player Willis Reed of the New York Knicks cemented his legacy by making a surprise start in Game 7 of the 1970 National Basketball Association Finals, a selfless return credited to his ability to withstand a huge needle filled with painkillers.

But Toradol, a blood thinner, could increase the risk of life-threatening heart conditions or circulation problems, and it could cause serious stomach and intestinal bleeding. One warning was to never use Toradol if the patient suffered from any sort of closed-head injury or bleeding on the brain—something such as a concussion. In 2011, a group of former National Football League players sued the league for its widespread use of Toradol, saying that its dangers had never been fully explained to players and arguing that the masking of pain—including symptoms of a concussion—was dangerous. By 2013, most teams in Major League Baseball had stopped using it. Several European countries had banned its use entirely.

For Derek, the shot on December 29, 2008, was the first of at least 13 such game-day Toradol injections over two seasons, records showed, several from doctors of other teams while the Wild was on the road. Many of the injections to his shoulder came on nights when Derek expected to fight.

He took the first shot before the game in Calgary, after missing Minnesota’s previous game, because he had had a fight with the Flames the last time. The second Toradol injection came two nights later, when the Wild hosted the San Jose Sharks on New Year’s Eve. Derek and Jody Shelley had fought four times before, and it was early in the second period that they ran into each other again. After a big check by Shelley—a man from Manitoba who was six years older than Derek and measured a beefy six feet, three inches and 230 pounds—he chased Derek from behind, soon getting Derek’s attention. The gloves were off. The fans were up. Derek pounded Shelley quickly. His right fist shattered Shelley’s helmet, and a piece of it flew through the air clearly enough for television cameras to capture and replay.

Four days later, at practice, Derek was “blind-sided by a teammate along the boards and hit the right side of his head against the glass,” a team medical report read. “Derek felt momentarily dazed,” had “some fogginess to the right field of vision.” The symptoms persisted. Derek missed five games with an apparent concussion. Publicly, the team reported that Derek was out with an “upper body” injury.

Derek’s season ended early, 10 games short of the scheduled 82-game conclusion. Derek finished with three assists in 51 games. He had nine fights, only two more than teammate Craig Weller. Rookie Cal Clutterbuck stepped in for several fights, too, and the Wild signed six-foot, eight-inch defenseman John Scott during the season to help fill the void created by Derek’s injuries. Derek’s importance to the team was slipping.

The Wild finished two points out of the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference. After the last game, coach Jacques Lemaire resigned. Within days, Doug Risebrough was fired as general manager. The two men most responsible for building Derek’s NHL success were gone.

DEREK AND ERIN were engaged, but it felt more like the end than a beginning.

When they first met, it did not take Erin long to see past the brutality and folklore of Derek’s public persona. She met him at a club, and soon watched him crush the face of Todd Fedoruk. Boogey was a folk hero, the opposite of Derek. Derek was shy and patient, rarely angry. He was a go-with-the-flow type, aiming to please. He worried about everyone else’s comfort and happiness. He wanted to be liked.

And he was deeply in love with Erin.

He bought her expensive gifts. He gave her a car and helped pay for her courses at a Minneapolis art institute. He was protective of Erin, proud to call her his girlfriend, still surprised that someone so beautiful would want to be with him. He liked that other men left her alone, knowing that she was the girlfriend of the Boogeyman. He liked to have someone who depended on him.

She loved that it made him so happy to see others so happy.

“He was like a puppy dog,” Erin said. “You didn’t have to say anything. You just had to be there. You had to be next to him. Sometimes he preferred that you didn’t say anything. He was a very quiet person. He just wanted somebody to be with him.”

She worried about him getting hurt, but Derek seemed to injure others more than he got hurt himself. Erin did not follow the NHL closely, and Derek would not tell her when the Wild played a team with an enforcer that he expected to fight. He did not want her to worry.

Their relationship took a course much like Derek’s four-year relationship with Janella. Derek and Erin spent quiet hours wandering shopping malls and eating at restaurants. They dreamed about places to live and went to open houses. They, too, shopped for a dog—and bought one, only to find that their high-end apartment building would not allow it.

And as with Janella, Derek’s relationship with Erin unraveled over bouts about money, fears of distrust, and the fact that Derek, especially, seemed to become something different than what he was.

Erin recognized the toll on Derek’s body, especially his lower back. Derek declined suggestions for surgery, partly because his father had had back surgery, and it had only seemed to make things worse. Len was eventually relegated to desk work, unable to continue as a beat cop in Regina, and ultimately transferred to the RCMP’s headquarters in Ottawa.

But Erin, over a couple of years, began worrying less about Derek’s physical injuries and more about his mind. Derek began to repeat himself. He would tell a story, and soon tell it over again. His sentences occasionally came out muddled. His memory slipped. Erin noticed. Concussions, she thought, collecting those episodes in the back of her mind.

Derek dismissed it all with a laugh.

“Yeah, I got hit in the head too many times,” he joked.

Their worlds never seemed to completely blend. Erin did not know the Boogaard family well, and the family was persistently and, in Derek’s view, unfairly skeptical about Erin. The Boogaards had never been sure about Janella, either, wondering if she was good for Derek’s hockey career. But they had respected that Janella’s relationship with Derek began when he was a poor, unknown teenager. Erin arrived just as his career bloomed with fame and wealth.

Despite the completion of Derek’s customized condominium in Regina, intended for use in the summers, Derek spent less time there every off-season. Erin was not a fan of Regina and had little interest in being there. That did not endear her to Derek’s family.

But Derek was there enough to create some memorable times, like when Aaron shot a rubber-tipped dart that struck Derek in the neck, leading Derek to shove Aaron through the drywall. There was a time that one of Derek’s high school friends from Regina came to a party and pulled out cocaine, and Derek kicked him out because he did not want drugs in his home.

Summers were a time when Derek reconnected with family. He would box and train during the days, and occasionally play recreational hockey at a Regina rink. He would call his father and ask him to watch—watch the toughest guy in hockey, a well-known player in the NHL, play a couple of hours of rec-league pickup games without any fighting. Len did.

But the pull toward Minneapolis was an ever-stronger one. Derek, now in his mid-20s, had less contact with his mother and father and his siblings. Ryan was a young RCMP member, assigned to far-flung posts in Saskatchewan the way his father had been a generation before. Aaron was a professional hockey player, playing in Pennsylvania in the American Hockey League. Krysten, at six feet, five inches, was a starting center for the University of Kansas women’s basketball team.

Derek had grown closer to Curtis, the half-brother he did not know he had until he was 18. Curtis was 10 years older, worked as an operations manager for an oil-and-gas company, and lived in Lloydminster, Alberta, on the border with Saskatchewan. He came to Derek’s games when the Wild played in Edmonton and Calgary. Curtis and his wife were raising three children, and when the youngest was born, Derek rushed there and held the boy in his arms.

But family was far away, and age had a way of widening the distance. The rest of the Boogaards increasingly worried about the strangers who, like meteors, drifted in and out of Derek’s orbit in Minnesota. Derek would call and mention another name that his parents had not heard before, and they worried about that person’s motivations and influence.

They knew Derek was in love with Erin. But they noted how she talked about Derek—she focused on what he bought, what they did together, where they planned to travel. Sensitive to how others treated Derek and what they expected from him, they worried that Erin did not love Derek for who he was, but for what he did for her.

The family’s concerns about Erin only drew Derek closer to her. After Derek and Erin had been dating for about two years, Derek made a call to Mike Tobin, his former billet father in Prince George, asking about wedding rings. Tobin, owner of a jewelry store, was surprised at the size and extravagance Derek considered—custom designs, two-karat diamonds. He remembered Derek as the jeans-and-T-shirt teenager who never had more than few dollars in his pocket.

Derek and Erin went to a Minnesota jewelry store and designed a ring. It cost about $55,000, according to the Boogaard family. Derek and Erin were informally engaged for months, until the ring was ready in the spring. When it arrived, Erin took pictures of it on her finger from several different angles and e-mailed them to friends and family. “We’re engaged!” she wrote.

By then, Erin admitted later, she had reservations about getting married at all.

BETWEEN THE END-OF-SEASON departures of Lemaire and Risebrough, Derek had nose surgery to repair the airways that had been crushed from blows to the face. He was prescribed 40 pills of oxycodone by the oral surgeon.

A week later, on April 21, Derek had surgery to repair the labrum of his right shoulder. It was the day of a farewell press conference for Risebrough, held at a sports bar called Tom Reid’s Hockey City Pub, two blocks from Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul.

“In a touching scene,” the StarTribune reported, “Derek Boogaard, in pain after being discharged from shoulder surgery Tuesday, was driven to Tom Reid’s by his fiancée, Erin Russell, because he wanted to thank Risebrough.”

Derek arrived just as the press conference ended. With his right arm hanging from the passenger window, he asked someone to tell Risebrough that he was outside. Risebrough came out. Derek thanked him.

“You have no idea how much I owe him and Jacques for playing in the NHL,” Derek told reporters.

That same day, records showed, Derek picked up a prescription at Walgreens for 40 oxycodone pills, prescribed by the Wild’s team orthopedist. Three days later, team doctor Dan Peterson prescribed 30 more. Three days after that, the orthopedist prescribed another 40. Over 16 days, Derek was prescribed 150 oxycodone pills and 40 hydrocodone pills—both considered Schedule II controlled substances under the Controlled Substances Act, “with high potential for abuse.” Generally, the recommended doses for the types of pills that Derek received were one pill every four to six hours, as needed for pain. But because the records obtained later by Len Boogaard do not detail the recommended number of pills to take at a time, or how often they were to be taken, it is unclear if Derek did anything other than follow the doctors’ advice.

In total that season, Derek’s fourth in the NHL, he received at least 25 prescriptions for oxycodone and hydrocodone, a total of 622 pills, from 10 doctors—eight team doctors of the Wild, an oral surgeon in Minneapolis, and a doctor for an opposing team. It is unknown how many other pills he might have received directly from the doctors, or in transactions unnoted in pharmacy records and medical records later obtained by the family. But Derek quickly discovered that team doctors did not communicate with one another when it came to prescriptions. There was no tracking system in place to tell one doctor what another had previously prescribed. He could get pills from a doctor one day, and more from another the next. He also learned that team doctors might dole out drugs without an office visit. Derek had their cell-phone numbers and could call or text them and ask for a refill. He could then pick up the prescription at his nearest pharmacy.

By the time Derek had the nose and shoulder surgeries a week apart in April 2009, he realized that he preferred oxycodone to hydrocodone—OxyContin and Percocet (a combination of oxycodone and acetaminophen) to Vicodin (hydrocodone and acetaminophen). He told doctors that Vicodin made him feel strange. They began to prescribe him the others instead.

His building tolerance for the pills fed his appetite. Aaron had a similar surgery on his shoulder at the same time as Derek that spring. Doctors said it took twice as much anesthesia to knock out Derek than it did Aaron. Like Derek, Aaron was prescribed oxycodone to combat the pain. But while Aaron took three or four pills at a time, Derek gobbled eight or 10.

Team doctors continued to prescribe Ambien for Derek all through the summer of 2009–210 pills between late April and early September, records showed. But prescriptions for painkillers appeared to stop during the off-season.

By then, Derek had found other sources.

AARON BOOGAARD RETURNED from his season with the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins of the American Hockey League. His ambitions of being an all-around player had faded. After scoring two goals and fighting 16 times, his goal of reaching the NHL rested largely in his fists.

Aaron ended the season with shoulder surgery, just like Derek. He moved into the apartment that Derek and Erin shared in Lilydale, across the river from downtown Saint Paul.

Between hockey seasons in which they rarely saw one another, the two brothers were virtually inseparable. They went to Jeremy Clark’s gym. They rode bikes. They played video games for hours. They went to bars at night. Almost every errand, from filling the car with gas to buying groceries, was done together, because Derek hated to be alone.

On occasion, Derek stopped the car at a check-cashing store. Aaron never quite understood what was happening. He just knew that Derek sent money to someone in New York.

Aaron, four years younger, revered Derek. He wanted to follow him to the NHL. But four years was a strange distance in age. In the summer of 2009, Derek turned 27 and Aaron turned 23. Aaron was old enough to recognize what was best for Derek, but too young and obedient to tell the mightily successful Derek what to do.

Aaron was a hockey enforcer, too, and he understood the pain and quiet desperation. But he never quite understood why Derek always had so many pills. Maybe it was just different in the NHL.

Aaron once saw a package arrive for Derek that looked like a book, only its pages were carved out and filled with pills. Aaron came to learn that Derek also got pills from at least a couple of sources in the Twin Cities, including a young woman near Saint Paul and people he met at Sneaky Pete’s. When Aaron asked, Derek offered the same reply.

“Don’t worry about it,” he would say.

It was Erin, more than Aaron, who found Derek uncharacteristically mysterious and undependable that summer. On sunny days, he would keep the blinds closed and black out the room and play video games or sleep. He spent less time at the gym than ever. Surgery was a good excuse for his lethargy, but Derek seemed sapped of his drive. A zombie, she thought sometimes.

The two drifted apart, and their lives, even within the apartment, crossed with fading regularity. Erin left for a family wedding, and heard stories about Derek’s nights at Minneapolis bars while she was gone. She canvassed social media and found photos of Derek out at night, often smiling amid pretty women.

During a time together, Erin, Derek, and Aaron visited the jewelry store where Derek had purchased the engagement ring. Erin wanted something looked at, so Derek and Aaron made amicable small talk with the owner in the back room while Erin’s ring was fixed. After 30 minutes or so, they came back out to the showroom. Erin had found a ring she liked better. She wanted to trade in the one Derek had helped choose for her and bought her. Aaron was furious.

“I don’t think she’s in it for the right reasons,” Aaron told Derek later. “I don’t think she’s right for you. I think she’s more into the money than she is into you.”

“Yeah, I know,” Aaron recalled Derek responding. “I’ve noticed that, too. It’s just hard to admit.”

Erin was having second feelings about the whole relationship. Derek was changing, and she did not like who he was becoming. He slept during the day and went to bars at night. He showed a grumpy side she had not seen. His moods swung wildly. His memory seemed frayed.

She began to question him about the pills, the Ambien that was being constantly prescribed in the off-season by Wild doctors, the pain pills that Derek always had by the handful, and he waved her off, the way he waved off Aaron when he dared to pry.

“He joked about it a lot,” Erin recalled in an interview two years later. “But I worried even when he joked about it, especially when he started to take more and more of them. And he would say he was in pain—’It’s OK.’ The biggest thing that made me worry was that he was in denial about it. He wasn’t saying, ‘I know I shouldn’t be doing this, I know it’s a problem, but I’m in pain.’ He wasn’t even being honest with himself about it. I was angry more than anything. There was nothing you could do. You can’t do anything with somebody who can’t even admit it’s a problem. More than anything, it was just really frustrating. I felt like there was no outlet for my frustration because of who he was. There were so many favors. They give him so much more slack than the average Joe.”

He was the toughest man in the NHL. Who was she to question that? The relationship deteriorated, though Derek was slow to recognize it. Erin wondered about the long-range future: What will it be like when he is not playing hockey? What’s going to happen when he finally admits to a problem and no longer has the resources available to him? Marriage? Children? Where will this all end up? She had met Derek when everything was going perfectly—a future bursting with possibility. She shuddered at the thought of where it was all headed.

DEREK’S LIFE UNSPOOLED quickly in small episodes. In August, during a phone conversation with Ryan, Derek slurred words and spoke incoherently. Was it alcohol? Drugs? Concussions? Ryan called his parents. His mother and father had had similar experiences, too.

Near the end of August, Derek, still volunteering for public appearances to help the Wild, unveiled the team’s new third jersey at the Minnesota State Fair. He was unshaven and wore sunglasses. Even in pictures and videos from the event, Derek’s friends and family could tell he was not right. Was he drunk?

September came. Aaron left for the start of his hockey season, back to Pennsylvania with the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins. Derek called his agent, Ron Salcer.

“Ronnie, my shoulder’s still not right,” Derek said. “Think I should go see Chuck and tell him I need another month?”

Chuck was Chuck Fletcher, the Wild’s new general manager, who had taken the place of Doug Risebrough. Salcer was aghast.

“You kidding me, Derek?” Salcer replied. “What have you been doing? You’ve got to be doing whatever it takes to get yourself ready for training camp in two weeks. Call them and tell them that you need another month? That doesn’t sound like someone with an NHL mindset.”

Derek showed up to training camp overweight and out of shape. On September 20, the day of a home preseason game against the Chicago Blackhawks, he was found asleep in the driver’s seat of his Denali along the side of a road. A police officer stopped behind the car and recognized Derek. He brought him home to Erin. The Wild reported Derek as a healthy scratch for that night’s game.

Derek had no recollection of any of it. Erin could not figure out what was wrong with him. There were times when she found pills loose in his jacket pockets. Derek told her they were anti-inflammatories, but when she looked them up online, she found they were prescription painkillers. It was late one night when she watched him bump into walls and stumble over things, like a drunken sleepwalker. Derek spoke, but his words made no sense. Through the haze he said something about taking four Ambien—Wild team doctors prescribed him 90 of them between September 1 and September 16—but Erin knew it was something more than that. She was scared. She called Joanne Boogaard in Regina.

Tobin Wright, Derek’s friend and manager, hurried to the apartment. He had been suspicious of Derek’s drug use for months, but Derek adamantly denied that anything was wrong, and Wright said that he could never catch Derek buying drugs or taking them. But there were times when they were together, like in a restaurant or in a car, when Derek’s phone rang, and he would speak in some strange, suspicious code to someone on the other end. All the small episodes were beginning to make sense.

Wright cried as he sat in front of Derek. He was scared to confront him.

“I’m putting you in the substance abuse program,” Wright said, recalling the conversation with Derek. “Enough is enough. If you don’t do it, you’re going to be suspended, probably without pay, and it’s going to be public knowledge. Everybody’s going to know about it.”

Calls bounced between Erin and Joanne and Len and Salcer. Dots were connected, and the message was clear: Derek was addicted to something. There was talk of OxyContin and Percocet and Ambien, drugs that sounded familiar but that no one knew much about.

Ryan Boogaard was with his mother in Regina while he attended a training session at the RCMP Depot. A few miles away, at the Agridome, now renamed the Brandt Centre, an NHL preseason game between the Tampa Bay Lightning and Ottawa Senators was underway.

Wait a minute, Ryan thought. He had read a newspaper story about the return of Todd Fedoruk, the former Regina Pat, now with the Tampa Bay Lightning. Ryan rushed to the arena and arrived just as the game ended. He managed to work his way to the tunnel where players walked between the ice and the dressing rooms, and he shouted at Fedoruk, whom he had never met.

“Todd!” Ryan shouted. “I need to talk to you! I’m Derek Boogaard’s brother! I need to talk to you!”

Fedoruk said he would change clothes and come back out. He did. Ryan explained the situation, and Fedoruk was not surprised. He had seen the arc of Derek’s troubles bending more than a year earlier. But he had his own problems. By the end of the season, Fedoruk would be drunk at a game that proved to be his last in the NHL.

“He has to admit he has a problem,” Fedoruk told Ryan. “He has to want to get help.”

Ryan booked a flight for the next day to Minneapolis. He had no passport with him, so his girlfriend drove several hours to meet him with it at the airport in Saskatoon. While he waited for his flight, Ryan received a call from someone in the NHL’s substance abuse program. Derek was scheduled to go to a clinic in California, Ryan was told. And you can go with him.

THE NHL’S SUBSTANCE ABUSE and Behavioral Health Program began in 1996, co-founded by Dr. David Lewis, a psychiatrist based in Los Angeles, and Dr. Brian Shaw, a clinical psychologist in Toronto. The men created and oversaw a similar program for Major League Soccer. Salcer had sent players their way before.

“I need to get Derek out here,” Salcer told them.

In Minnesota, Ryan sat on the end of Derek’s bed. Derek was curled under the sheets. It takes a big man to admit he has a problem, Ryan told his brother. The family will support you. Get the best possible treatment, get better, and put this behind you.

Derek was embarrassed. He was afraid that people would find out. He was afraid that the Wild would replace him. He was adamant that he had no problem, but if the league insisted that he do something, Derek wanted to stay home and go through detoxification in Minneapolis, and keep Ryan around for support. He would be fine, he said. He just needed a little bit of time.

But plans were set. A day later, Ryan and Derek were on a plane to Los Angeles. Derek called Risebrough, the deposed general manager, to apologize for letting him down.

Salcer met Derek and Ryan at the airport. They stopped for lunch, where Salcer told Derek that other clients of his had had the same issues, but they had gotten help and made it through.

“You’ve got a pot of gold here,” Salcer told Derek. “Don’t piss in it. You are one of the most unique guys in the world. How many guys are six foot eight, 270 pounds, and can skate like you and play hockey? People are supporting you. You know how expensive this place is? It’s, like, $50,000 a month. But they’re paying it for you. They’re paying for you to get better. Don’t piss in your pot of gold here.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Derek said.

Salcer, like an exasperated father, hoped the message sunk in. He could never quite tell with Derek.

They drove less than an hour to the Canyon rehabilitation center, set in the serene hills above Malibu. Lewis was on the staff there, listed as a consulting psychiatrist. Derek and Ryan were given a tour of the facilities, its grounds pristine as a country club, its atmosphere as relaxed as a spa. Ryan sat in on an introductory meeting.

Derek was admitted. Ryan left the next day.

In notes from the Canyon later obtained by Len Boogaard, Derek provided his “substance abuse history” upon admission. He said he had been taking eight or nine tablets of OxyContin and three tablets of Ambien daily. He admitted to recent use of Vicodin and Percocet, up to 10 pills per day. He said he regularly used Vicodin and Ambien throughout the previous season, to combat a sore back and sleeping problems, and sometimes chewed them.

The Minnesota Wild announced that Boogaard was out with a concussion. It was the only time that he was publicly diagnosed with one. It just happened not to be the reason for his absence.

“We don’t know the extent of it,” first-year Wild coach Todd Richards told reporters, when asked how much time Derek would miss. “It could be a week, two weeks. It could be a month, two months. We don’t know.”

He said he did not know how the concussion occurred.

Players figured out the truth. The Wild never told Derek’s teammates, and Derek never told them, either. But they knew. One day, Derek was there. The next, he was gone. It was not hard to understand why.