9

DEREK WAS NERVOUS ABOUT playing and living in New York, but he tried not to let on. In the two months before he left Minnesota, after he signed with the Rangers, he told people how excited he was to play in Madison Square Garden. He told friends about his 33rd-floor apartment at the Sheffield on 57th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, with views of Central Park through the skyscrapers of Columbus Circle. The apartment was rented for $6,900 a month from Aaron Voros, a former Wild teammate who had spent the previous two seasons as a forward with the Rangers.

No. 24 was taken by another player, so Derek deftly chose jersey No. 94, representing 1994, the last year that the Rangers won the Stanley Cup. That team broke a 54-year championship drought behind the likes of captain Mark Messier, winger Adam Graves, goalie Mike Richter, and defensemen Brian Leetch and Sergei Zubov. It was a tough team, backed by enforcers Joey Kocur and Jeff Beukeboom. Derek knew the history.

In New York, there would be sponsorship opportunities he had never fathomed. He would bring the burgeoning Defending the Blue Line charity to New York to establish roots. He would find endorsement opportunities and business offers he never would have received in places like Edmonton. Derek saw the potential. But it still scared him.

In the summer of 2010, Derek lived in one side of Gaborik’s cavernous apartment near the Walker Art Center on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, while Aaron lived in the other. They had to shout to hear one another. Tobin Wright, the business manager for both Derek and Gaborik, also had a real-estate license and made preparations to sell the unit for Gaborik. He stepped into Derek’s bathroom and saw a crystal wine stopper, with a Wild logo, on the counter. Why would Derek have a wine stopper in here? Wright wondered to himself. He picked it up. It had a bulbous handle on one end and a smooth, flat surface on the other.

When Wright touched the flat end, white powder rubbed off onto his fingers. Wright looked around. Nearby on the counter was a dollar bill, rolled up. Derek, he surmised, was crushing pills and snorting them.

When summer began, Derek and Aaron, both single, celebrated with several weeks of parties and barhopping. They spent several weeks in Manhattan Beach, California, visiting Derek’s agent, Ron Salcer, and getting into a routine of workouts and parties. On the beach, Derek lifted, pulled, and coiled shipping ropes, giant spaghetti noodles as thick as logs, in a one-man tug-of-war to build strength. He tried to get a tan. The brothers shot videos that showed Derek, a bit heavier than usual, making jokes, playing in the waves, learning to use a stand-up paddleboard, and driving a convertible Maserati he had rented.

Wright called Salcer and told him what he had found in Derek’s apartment. When Salcer confronted him, Derek denied anything unusual. He took Ambien on occasion, he said, but he would never crush it. Somebody must have left that in there during a party or something.

But then Derek showed up to the apartment one day, around the first of August, with 100 OxyContin pills.

“Where did you get those?” Aaron asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Derek replied.

“What are you doing?” Aaron said. “We’ve worked our asses off.”

Their relationship had grown increasingly tangled. It was weeks earlier, at a bar in Minneapolis, that Aaron had met a young woman he began dating. Derek liked her at first. But as he saw Aaron’s one-night fling evolve into a relationship, he was not happy. The more Aaron saw his girlfriend, the less Derek saw of Aaron.

Derek had not gotten over his love for Erin, and, as if filling a void of his own, he began to contact her with increasing regularity as his final weeks in Minneapolis loomed and anxiety rose in advance of his move to New York. Erin could not fully resist the overtures. “Magnets,” she called them.

Aaron began to worry. He had grown increasingly protective of Derek. Now, less than a year after Derek was in rehabilitation, as he nervously awaited his move to New York, he was coming home with bags of prescription pain pills. He was contacting Erin. He was hanging around people that Aaron didn’t like. Every summer, it seemed, the number of people who elbowed their way into Derek’s life grew, and Aaron was skeptical of their motives. He saw how Derek surrounded himself with people at restaurants and bars, people he considered friends, and when it came time for the bill, they all looked away.

He told Derek that those friends—”leeches,” he called them—were taking full advantage of Derek’s wealth and fame.

“I know,” Derek would say. “I just can’t say no.”

One summer night, when Aaron and his girlfriend were at Sneaky Pete’s, Aaron saw Erin. She asked to talk, to let her explain everything that had happened between her and Derek. Aaron did not want to hear any of it. He walked away.

Within an hour, Aaron’s cell phone rang. It was Derek, furious, demanding that Aaron apologize for his rudeness toward Erin.

On Aaron’s 24th birthday in mid-August, in the presence of their friend Jeremy Clark, Aaron and Derek bickered about Erin again. Aaron screamed that he was not the only one who felt that way about Erin; Jeremy thought so, too.

Derek stopped. His head turned slowly toward Clark. You do? Suddenly, the three of them—Derek, Aaron, and Clark, like boyhood brothers back in the Melfort basement—were in a fist-swinging scrum on the lawn of the apartment building.

By then, the first batch of 100 OxyContins was gone. Derek replaced it with another 100. He told Aaron that he bought them for $6,000—$60 a pill.

Aaron did not trust his brother with the pills, and he worried about the speed with which Derek went through them. Derek let Aaron take the pills and divide them, stashing them in drawers or closets. Only when Derek came to Aaron and asked for some, insisting that his back ached and that he needed the pills to combat the pain, would Aaron hand any over.

“What am I going to do?” Aaron explained later. “Deny this guy the pills that he just spent six grand on? Is his back really that hurt?”

Derek tried to hide his anxiety about the move to New York. He wanted summer to last forever. Friends promised to visit, and Derek talked about making a big, immediate impact with the Rangers. Privately, he worried that he would be unable to live up to the expectations.

Derek wanted Aaron to quit hockey and come live with him in New York. But Aaron had his own aspirations to pursue, even if the long-term prospects looked shaky. After being drafted by the Wild, Aaron had joined the Pittsburgh Penguins organization. He played three seasons divided between the American Hockey League and the East Coast Hockey League. Now he had a contract in the lower-tier Central Hockey League, for a franchise in Laredo, Texas, on the Mexican border. Like Derek, he did not know what else he would do if he could not make a career out of hockey. He did not want to give up now.

In early September, Derek left to catch his flight to New York to join the Rangers. When he arrived at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport, though, he panicked. He could not remember whether he had packed his latest batch of OxyContin pills. He wanted to rummage through his suitcase, but worried about doing it in the terminal, in front of people who might recognize him. He walked back out of the airport. He arrived back at the apartment, missing his flight, and dumped his suitcase. The pills had been packed, after all.

Derek rebooked his flight to New York for the next day. But he was suddenly worried about getting caught with the pills.

“Send these to me in a week or so,” Derek told Aaron, handing them to him.

For a few weeks, through Rangers training camp and before Aaron left for his own hockey season, Derek texted and called his little brother from New York to ask the whereabouts of the pills. But Aaron knew it was a crime to ship prescription pills, and he worried about his status as a Canadian resident living and working in the States. For several weeks, Aaron waffled—torn between getting caught and disappointing his older brother.

Finally, Derek erupted. Forget it, he said. Just take them back to where I got them, and give them to a friend who is coming to visit me soon in New York. Aaron carried the bag of prescription painkillers to Sneaky Pete’s, he said later, and handed them over.

He was relieved to be rid of them. Aaron left for Texas for the hockey season. He and Derek barely spoke for many months.

LEN BOOGAARD SENT the e-mail on the evening of October 13, 2010.

“I am the father of Derek BOOGAARD and need to make contact with Doug RISEBROUGH ASAP,” he wrote to an administrative address for the New York Rangers. “I can be contacted via the noted e-mail as well as my work e-mail.”

He provided two e-mail addresses and two phone numbers. “Regards, Len Boogaard,” the note ended.

Aaron had told Len about Derek’s late-summer slide and the pills he wanted shipped to New York. Len had presumed that Derek’s addiction had been resolved a year earlier, in rehabilitation, and had trusted that his son was being closely monitored by the substance abuse program. He sent a note to Salcer, Derek’s agent, but when he did not receive an immediate response, he went straight to the Rangers.

Len knew that Risebrough had a close relationship with Derek, dating all the way back to when Risebrough drafted the 19-year-old for the Minnesota Wild. Risebrough knew about Derek’s troubled past.

Len’s e-mail message was forwarded from the website manager at Madison Square Garden to an assistant in the Rangers’ front office. In a reply on the afternoon of October 14, two games into the season and the day before the Rangers’ home opener at the Garden, she assured Len that the message had been sent on to Risebrough.

About then, Risebrough called. The men were acquaintances, having met several times, and they exchanged pleasantries, Len recalled later, before Len told Risebrough that Derek was abusing prescription drugs again. Len relayed what he had heard from Aaron—that Derek was taking painkillers, and he had sources on the street, maybe even in New York.

Risebrough said he needed to think about how to proceed, Len later recalled.

Len awaited a response. It came two days later, when Derek called. He told his father that Glen Sather, the general manager of the Rangers, had called him into his office and berated him.

“He said, ‘Tell me what’s going on,’ “ Len recalled Derek saying. “ ‘And if you’re lying, I’ll trade you so fast.’”

Derek also called Aaron and told him the same thing. He wondered if Aaron had told anyone about the incident at the airport, because Salcer asked about it, he said. Aaron denied telling anyone.

Derek never realized that it was his father who had prompted the Rangers to question him. Len listened to Derek as if he had no clue. Lying about what? Len asked. Derek turned typically evasive. He never admitted he had an addiction problem, and he was not about to now, over the phone to his father. It did not matter. Len was happy and relieved. He had told the Rangers, and the Rangers were taking action. Derek would get help.

What Len didn’t know was that Derek had been asking a Rangers trainer for Ambien and painkillers—requests that made their way to Lewis and Shaw of the substance-abuse program. According to their notes on Derek later obtained by Len, each warned Derek about his use of the drugs.

Len also did not know that, within two weeks, a Rangers team dentist would give Derek the first of five prescriptions for hydrocodone.

DEREK IMMEDIATELY MISSED the life he had left in Minnesota. He had parted with Aaron, headed to another minor-league assignment, on unsettled terms, divided over girlfriends and pills. Derek had left behind Erin, the ex-fiancée he still hoped to marry. He had left behind friends he had made over five years, including Jeremy Clark and the suburban gym that had become a second home. He had left behind his creature habits, from restaurants to gas stations to grocery stores to Sneaky Pete’s. He had left behind the familiar relationship he had with the media. He had left behind the goodwill of the charity work he had done and the legions of fans who spontaneously chanted his name, whether by the thousands at the Xcel Energy Center or by the handful at bars or on city sidewalks.

But Derek never fully disconnected from Minnesota. He begged friends to visit and stay with him in New York. Early in the season, several of them did. Erin came and stayed with Derek several times, for up to a week at a time, spending many of the days shopping in Manhattan with a friend she knew in the city.

On October 11, just as Len Boogaard learned about his son’s relapse into addiction, Derek welcomed some acquaintances from Minnesota—among them, Dillon Hafiz, his father, Stewart, and his uncle Peter. They attended the Rangers’ road game against the Islanders on Long Island that afternoon—Derek played one shift, and the Rangers lost—and then the Monday night football game in New Jersey between the Minnesota Vikings and New York Jets. They traveled in a limousine, and Derek paid the bill for $1,508. He supplied the tickets and bought No. 94 Rangers jerseys with BOOGAARD on the back. The men posed for pictures in front of the new football stadium at the Meadowlands.

Rob Nelson, Derek’s financial advisor from Minnesota, brought on to help him manage his money and control his increasingly erratic spending habits, brought his girlfriend to visit Derek at the beginning of the season. Nelson had become another sort of big brother for Derek, someone to support him but also steer him straight. He did not know that Derek was abusing pills again, but found him nervous about the start of the season in New York and still unsettled about living there.

It was awfully big, Derek told him. When they went out, walking the streets of Manhattan or having dinner in restaurants, no one recognized Derek—or at least did not say anything to him if they did. He was not a star, not the way he was in the Twin Cities. He was one person among eight million.

Clark, too, came to visit, bringing his wife, Jennie. Derek and Clark were two small-town Canadian boys who appreciated the simple pleasures of life—a few friends, a couple of beers, a setting sun. Clark quickly decided that he did not like New York. He could not imagine Derek liking it, either, no matter how much of an optimistic spin Derek put on it.

Derek was welcomed at Madison Square Garden, but he was relatively anonymous everywhere else in New York, a city that shrugs at celebrity. Derek put more faith in his old friends from Minnesota than he did in his ability to make new friends in New York.

Among the connections he kept were those with some of the Wild’s team doctors. Medical director Sheldon Burns gave Derek a final physical on July 13, after Derek signed with the Rangers, and completed both a medical form and one for an insurance company that covers professional athletes. Under the pre-printed category of head injuries (“including concussions”), Burns noted two: one in January 2007 (“headaches” and “missed 4–5 days,” he wrote) and another in September 2009 (“headaches,” “dizziness,” and “missed 2½ weeks”). There was no mention that the second absence was for substance abuse rehabilitation. Burns noted several past injuries, such as broken fingers, a “fractured nose this year,” a high ankle sprain several years earlier, and the bulging disk in Derek’s back, but gave Derek a clean bill of health. “I do not see anything that would be a long-term concern or threatening his career at this point,” he wrote.

On August 11, Burns’s medical partner and fellow Wild team doctor Dan Peterson prescribed 30 Ambien pills to Derek, pharmacy records showed. Another prescription was dated September 5, the day Derek went to the airport to fly to New York.

DEREK DID NOT make a good first impression with the Rangers. Once in New York, a week before training camp began, Derek went to dinner with Gaborik and Salcer, the players’ agent. After dinner, Gaborik and Derek agreed to meet at a corner coffee place at eight the next morning. They would go together to the practice rink where most of the veteran Rangers worked out together in preparation for the rigors of training camp. Attendance was not mandatory, but it was a sign of solidarity and commitment.

Derek did not show up the next morning. Gaborik fumed.

“Don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it,” Derek told Salcer later. “Training camp starts next week. I’ll be okay.”

He was not. He was overweight, pushing 300 pounds, and the Rangers were not pleased with his condition. When the preseason games began, Derek received little playing time—enough to try to coax him into shape, but not enough for Derek to prove his worth on the ice.

Preseason games in the NHL tended to have about twice as many fights as those in the regular season, as young players tried to fight their way onto rosters by demonstrating their scrappiness. With the Rangers, Derek did not fight.

On September 29, the Wall Street Journal featured Derek in a story, noting that he had not scored a goal since January 7, 2006, a streak of 222 regular-season games, the longest among active players. The story raised the age-old question of whether there was a benefit to enforcers. It asked Derek’s new teammates. One of the unspoken axioms of the NHL was that no player degraded the position of enforcer, and no one argued for its demise.

“It’s not just that he makes our guys comfortable,” Rangers captain Chris Drury told the paper. “It’s that he makes the other guys uncomfortable, and now maybe they make the wrong play, they turn it over and we score—that’s the sort of thing just his presence can mean.”

Rangers coach John Tortorella offered a succinct answer to whether enforcers—the Wall Street Journal interchanged the term with “goon”—had a place in the NHL.

“It’s still part of our game,” Tortorella said.

Publicly, despite training camp reports about Derek’s poor conditioning, the season began with great promise for Derek.

“I think Boogaard is going to be an absolute superstar in New York,” Darryl Wolski, who created the made-for-TV Battle of the Hockey Enforcers tournament in Prince George, told the New York Daily News. “I don’t think the Rangers have seen a guy like him in a long time, maybe back to the Tie Domi era.”

Derek told the reporter that fans should not expect Domi’s notorious post-fight celebrations.

“You have to have respect for the guy that you just fought,” he said. “I think it’s absolutely ridiculous when guys do the showboating and all that. What if the other guy gets hurt? Everyone wants to watch the fight, but it’s just a respect factor. I don’t like it. I don’t like to do it.”

Tortorella told reporters that the Rangers expected Derek to be more than a fighter, someone who could play extended minutes as a power forward. It was a tease that Derek had heard most of his life.

In his first regular-season game as a Ranger, a 6–3 victory at Buffalo, Derek played a tentative seven shifts, for 6:03 of ice time—more than his career average, but less than anyone else in the game. Two nights later, in a 6–4 loss at the Islanders, Derek played three shifts in the first period, one in the second (for 22 seconds), and none in the third. His ice time was 1:34.

On October 15, the day after Len Boogaard spoke to Doug Risebrough about Derek’s latest pill problems, the Rangers played their first regular-season game at Madison Square Garden. The Toronto Maple Leafs, an Original Six rival and a team off to a hot start, were in town. Most expected a duel between Derek and enforcer Colton Orr, the former Ranger, now in Toronto thanks to a four-year, $4 million contract.

The Rangers lost in overtime, 4–3, and Derek recorded a third-period assist, the 13th of his NHL career. But that was overshadowed by how the Rangers lost. The Maple Leafs knocked Gaborik out of the game with a separated shoulder; he would miss four weeks. They charged and knocked down goalie Henrik Lundqvist.

Derek played eight short shifts. His lone contribution was the assist—not the kind of physical contribution he was paid to make. It was undersized sparkplug Brandon Prust who fought for the Rangers, and agitator Sean Avery who tried to ignite the team with combative hits and penalties for roughing and slashing.

Derek faced criticism like he had not had before.

“This isn’t really about Derek Boogaard even though it is,” longtime New York Post hockey writer Larry Brooks wrote, “but if Friday’s calamitous night at the Garden doesn’t expose the fatal flaw in the concept of hiring the biggest, toughest, most feared puncher pound for pound in the NHL to act as a deterrent, then nothing does and nothing will.”

Brooks used the game as an example of how the notion of an enforcer had changed over the years, until it had become something cheapened, with little value.

“The idea a fourth-line player—who gets a mere handful of fourth-line shifts a night and who is essentially in the lineup to punch it out with the opposition’s fourth-line heavyweight—can be a deterrent is flawed,” he wrote. “The idea this presence will create more skating room for his team’s stars is misguided.

“The heavyweight as a deterrent is an anachronism, proven so for the latest time before our very eyes Friday night,” Brooks concluded. “Unfortunately, the Rangers have invested $1.625M in cap space to be lost in time.”

IT WAS THE day after the Toronto game that Derek phoned his father, complaining about Sather. Derek saw it as a slight, proof that the Rangers did not believe in him. Derek’s playing time plunged the following game.

Derek looked for a scapegoat, and found one in Tortorella, the coach. The positive reinforcement from coaches—from Floyd Halcro in Melfort to Jacques Lemaire in Minnesota—that Derek thrived upon over the years never materialized in New York. Tortorella was not unlike the coaches that Derek detested as a teenager, the ones Derek believed treated him without faith and respect. Derek came to joke with friends about the rare days that Tortorella exchanged a greeting when they passed. Quietly, among friends, he called Tortorella “Little Hitler.”

He complained to Salcer and others about Tortorella’s treatment. They don’t like me here, Derek said. They aren’t playing me, and they don’t even want me. The retort was simple and obvious: The Rangers wouldn’t have signed you to a four-year contract worth $6.5 million, Derek, if they did not believe in you.

Salcer, though, called Sather for an assessment. He found the general manager’s words as haunting as they were surprising. Derek is in the worst condition of anyone on the team, Sather said, according to Salcer. He’s in no condition to be playing in games. He’s lucky to be playing at all. We’re just trying to get him into shape.

Quite frankly, Salcer remembered Sather telling him, I’m really worried about Derek. There are a lot of big guys in this league, a lot of guys in really great shape. And I’m afraid someone’s going to hit Derek and end his career.

Derek’s first fight for the Rangers came in the rematch with the Toronto Maple Leafs on October 21. That morning, the Globe and Mail, the nationally distributed Canadian newspaper based in Toronto, contained a column by hockey writer Roy MacGregor. He had grown weary of the latest debates over the role of fighting in hockey.

“Surely the time has come to make fighting a penalty,” MacGregor wrote. “It is not a penalty, no matter what the rulebook pretends. Two players fight—usually as staged as the intermission T-shirt giveaway—and the game comes to a grinding halt.

“And here I must apologize, as I suggested higher up that fighting had no effect on the momentum of a game. It does. It kills momentum.

“Whistles blow, gloves are picked up, the long WWE grand march to the penalty box is held and, presto, the game begins again as if nothing has happened.

“Not only is neither team penalized in any imaginable capacity, but the two fighters count their majors as the skilled players count goals and assists. The fighters use their number of majors to argue in favour of a salary increase the next time their contract comes up.

“Fighting, therefore, has been deemed a reward by the league that would have you believe it is actually a penalty.

“So let us all strike a deal here. We agree to accept that fighting is part of the game. So long as the NHL accepts the same. And makes fighting a real penalty with real consequence.”

Colton Orr was a former Ranger who, in 2007, knocked Todd Fedoruk unconscious at Madison Square Garden. He also was a foe of Derek’s from the Western Hockey League and a good friend in Saskatchewan of Mat Sommerfeld, Derek’s boyhood rival. Derek and Orr had fought twice in a month nearly a decade earlier, when Derek played for Prince George and Orr for Kamloops.

The game between New York and Toronto at the Air Canada Centre was scoreless and only two minutes old. As the puck and the rest of the players headed down the ice, Orr pestered Derek, asking for a fight in front of the team benches. He did not wait for an answer, throwing a punch before Derek removed his gloves. Derek demurred before engaging. He soon popped Orr in the face with his right fist, loosening Orr’s helmet, then hit him again in the side of the head. Holding Orr around the collar with his left hand, Derek finally shook his right glove free. Orr got in a firm shot of his own, raising the volume of the crowd, then managed to fling Derek onto his back and to the ice. The noise rose to a crescendo. Players on both teams banged their sticks.

Len was in the arena that night. Like friends and family of Derek who watched on television, he could see that something was not right. Derek should have been eager to make amends for the disappointment of his first matchup with Toronto. Instead, he fought with uncustomary nonchalance and an expression that exuded more than its usual poker-faced tautness. There was a reluctance to engage, and then a fight without fury.

They came to know something that most witnesses did not: one of Orr’s punches dislodged a three-tooth bridge in Derek’s mouth.

Two nights later, Derek fought Boston’s Shawn Thornton, a fearless pit bull. The game was still in the first period, the visiting Rangers leading 2–0, when Thornton wrapped up Derek in front of the Boston net just as the Rangers were firing shots on goal. Whistles blew. Players stepped back. Fans stood.

The predictable “Tale of the Tape” graphic appeared on television screens before the first punch was thrown. It showed that Derek had an advantage of five inches and 48 pounds—a conservative estimate, really, thanks to Derek being listed, graciously, at 265 pounds.

The two stayed knotted as Thornton steered the encounter into one corner. Thornton grabbed Derek’s outstretched right arm and jabbed him in the face with a couple of punches. Derek finally freed his right hand and delivered several shots to Thornton’s ribs. Officials pulled the men apart unusually early.

After the game, Derek was diagnosed by a team doctor with a cut on his right index finger. The wound became infected, and the injury was serious enough to be cited in at least eight subsequent internal injury reports.

On October 26, three days after cutting his hand on Thornton and five days after having his bridge damaged by Orr, Derek was prescribed 20 hydrocodone pills by Rangers team dentist Joseph Esposito. The dentist’s notes that day described Derek’s mouth injury, including a “nerve exposed,” as an “EMERG.”

That same day, at 3:08 P.M., Derek received a text message from Dan Cronin, the director of counseling for the NHL/NHLPA substance abuse program. It was, according to Derek’s cell-phone records, their first phone interaction since June 24. The two exchanged five more text messages that afternoon, the last at 5:35 P.M.

Derek also exchanged six text messages with Dr. Esposito, between 4:38 and 4:57 P.M. And between 6:26 and 6:33, Derek called Cronin six times. If Cronin answered at all, the conversation never lasted more than a minute, cell-phone records showed.

Derek received a second prescription of hydrocodone from Esposito on November 13, plus three more through early December—a total of 64 pills, records show.

Whatever pain Derek was in did not prevent him from fighting. On his first shift of a November 4 game in Philadelphia, Derek got into a fight with veteran heavyweight enforcer Jody Shelley. The men had a twisted history, through years of bouts when Derek was with the Wild and Shelley was with the Columbus Blue Jackets and San Jose Sharks. Shelley had spent the previous season with the Rangers, but was cast off in favor of Derek. He now played for the Flyers, one of New York’s biggest rivals.

The two circled one another near center ice. The public-address system heralded the raised fists with a bell, as if it were the start of a bout between Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed. Derek opened with two overhand rights, then jabbed with a left fist filled with Shelley’s jersey. Shelley never got comfortable and balanced enough to pose a knockout threat. Derek hit him in the back of the head a couple of times before Shelley slipped to a knee and officials intervened.

Despite the momentum that a victorious fight is supposed to bring, the Rangers lost, 4–1.

But Derek’s minutes on the ice began to climb. His career with the Rangers peaked on November 9, against Washington at Madison Square Garden. He was on the ice early in the second period of a 2–2 game. Washington defenseman Tyler Sloan missed the puck along the boards in the New York zone, and Derek chased it down in front of the team benches. There was no one in front of him besides the goalie.

He heard teammate Brian Boyle shout a simple instruction: “Shoot!”

Derek cocked his stick and released a slap shot from just above the face-off circle. Washington goalie Michal Neuvirth lunged with his stick and missed.

The red lamp lit behind the net. The crowd lifted as one. Derek raised his arms and smiled—an emotional exhalation he never displayed when he beat someone up. He cruised behind the net and stopped against the boards in an embrace with teammate Erik Christensen. Others quickly swarmed him. Derek, his stick raised—the rare time he was cheered with a stick in his hand—returned to the bench as the arena still buzzed.

It was Derek’s first NHL goal since his rookie season, five years earlier, a streak of 234 games. It fell 21 games short of the NHL record. Derek told reporters in the dressing room—a losing one, as the Rangers fell, 5–3—that it was his first goal on a slap shot since he was 20, playing in the East Coast Hockey League.

Derek spent most of the night talking to friends on the phone and returning congratulatory text messages. They all had seen the highlight, across the sports channels of Canada and the United States, of big, bad Derek Boogaard lumbering down the far side of the ice, barely slowing to unleash a ferocious shot, raising his arms in triumph and surprise, then soaking in the affection of a suddenly adoring crowd.

Unexpectedly, the biggest cheer he ever received in New York came on a goal.

IN THE THIRD period of a Sunday afternoon game on November 14, Derek fought twice against Edmonton’s Steve MacIntyre.

MacIntyre was from a small town in Saskatchewan, too. He was two years older than Derek, but they crossed paths as teenagers in the Western Hockey League. Mat Sommerfeld was Derek’s first-ever fight in the WHL; Steve MacIntyre was his second.

Unlike Derek, MacIntyre was not drafted by an NHL team. After the WHL, his odyssey took him through eight franchises in seven minor leagues over seven seasons before he finally reached the NHL with the Edmonton Oilers. One of the six fights he had his rookie year was considered a draw against Derek.

This one was Derek’s first fight at home for the Rangers. But the crowd at Madison Square Garden knew the protocol. Fans chanted “Boo-gey, Boo-gey” as Derek pummeled MacIntyre with nearly 20 right hands to the head, each eliciting an ooh from the crowd. It took most of the punches to knock MacIntyre’s helmet free, and the fight ended with MacIntyre looking as if he could absorb more.

MacIntyre, fresh from the penalty box, wanted a rematch. It goes against the unspoken code for enforcers, and Derek had no reason to oblige. The Rangers were on their way to an 8–2 victory. Still, after MacIntyre sidled up to Derek during a face-off, he provoked him with a cross-check. Derek flipped the switch.

They wasted no time shedding their gloves, instead just clutching and punching and trying to shake free their fists. They drifted against the Rangers bench, exhausting themselves with uppercuts and jabs from close range.

Without a haymaker blow, few realized that one of the shots broke Derek’s nose and probably gave him a concussion. The Rangers’ medical notes made no mention of the injury. But a few hours after the game, at 6:21 P.M., Derek sent a text message to the cell phone of Sheldon Burns, the Wild’s medical director back in Minnesota. He exchanged seven texts with Dan Peterson, Burns’s partner and Wild team doctor, over nearly three hours. In one six-minute span in the middle of that, Derek traded six texts with Esposito, the Rangers’ dentist.

By Tuesday, Derek had a prescription from Esposito for 12 more hydrocodone pills. He also had a prescription from another Rangers team doctor, an orthopedic surgeon, for 40 pills of tramadol, a narcotic-like pain reliever. The two prescriptions were picked up from two different Manhattan pharmacies—both on 57th Street, close to Derek’s apartment.

He missed the next night’s game in Pittsburgh, but took time to photograph his right hand and send it to a few friends. It showed the knuckles and fingers grotesquely swollen and scabbed from the repeated bashing against MacIntyre’s helmet.

The injuries continued. On November 24, in Tampa, Derek fell hard on his left shoulder, an injury that surfaced in internal medical reports for a couple of weeks. Derek missed three games. When he returned to the lineup, Derek was injected with Toradol.

On December 2, he deconstructed Trevor Gillies of the Islanders in a long-lasting fight instigated during pregame warmups. The next night, also against the Islanders, Derek was inadvertently struck in the face with a stick. During the intermission after the second period, a team doctor used three nylon sutures to close the cut. No anesthetic was used, the doctor noted.

Derek, as he had been the season before in Minnesota, after his trip to rehabilitation, was randomly drug tested. The latest one showed positive results for two types of decongestants, plus Xanax—despite no known prescriptions of Xanax from team doctors. Later in the day of that drug test, Derek was prescribed hydrocodone by Esposito, the dentist, for the fifth and final time.

Another drug test came on December 8—results would be reported as “negative” six days later. The test was taken on the same day that Dr. Ronald Weissman, a team doctor, gave Derek two prescriptions that Derek had filled at a pharmacy not far from the Rangers’ suburban practice facility. One was for six pills of azithromycin, an antibiotic. The other was for 30 pills of trazodone, an antidepressant.

The timing was peculiar. Erin had been in New York. She had come several times through the fall, staying for most of a week here and there. She shopped, spent time with an old girlfriend, and stayed with Derek. Most of Derek’s family and close friends did not know. Derek rarely talked to them, and he knew what they would have said, anyway.

Erin could tell all fall that he was lonely, by the calls and text messages he sent to her and others, asking for visits. And he seemed happy when she was around. But she came to realize, just as she had more than a year earlier, that there was no future with Derek. She could not picture the two of them raising a family and growing old together. Part of it was that they were so different; something Derek’s family recognized but Derek either did not or never minded. And part of it was that Derek was different than he used to be. Erin struggled to explain it. He was more distant, more forgetful, more … something. It was hard for most people to notice in short bursts of time with Derek, because he was adept at disguising his shifting moods. But those who came to stay with him, especially, began to see that something was not right.

Erin accused Derek of taking drugs—more than he was supposed to, at least—but he always pointed out that he was being prescribed them by team doctors and passing his drug tests. He complained constantly about the tests, about having someone come to his apartment periodically to collect a urine sample, and Erin never understood why it was such a big deal—it was merely the cost of having a past addiction problem, she thought.

There was more than that for Erin. Derek was increasingly hurt, and he seemed to be lazier than he used to be, and his mind seemed to be slipping, and his family did not like her, and none of this felt like the makings of a lifetime together. Finally, in New York in part to celebrate her friend’s birthday in early December, Erin did it again: she told Derek it was over. This time, she said, it was for good. This time, she left New York and did not come back.

She never could have known that Derek’s next hockey game would be his last.

THE FIGHT BEGAN with little of the customary pageantry. Derek and Matt Carkner were still skating down the ice in Ottawa, Derek gliding backward, when they threw the first punches.

There were about two minutes left in the first period. The score was 1–1. Derek had plowed into Ottawa’s Jesse Winchester, a low-line center, and knocked him down with a late, hard check. Carkner, looking for retribution, chased Derek down.

“Uh-oh,” one of the television announcers said, interrupting his partner. “Boogaard and Carkner. Two big men have dropped the gloves.”

Carkner was a six-foot, four-inch, 237-pound tower of muscle from Winchester, Ontario. Two years older than Derek, he played junior in the Ontario Hockey League and, built like a model power forward of the era—a bit like Eric Lindros or Keith Tkachuk—was drafted by Montreal in the second round of the 1999 NHL draft. He and Derek first met in 2004, in an unmemorable fight in the American Hockey League, when Derek played for the Houston Aeros and Carkner for the Cleveland Barons. Unlike Derek, though, Carkner did not break into the NHL in a meaningful way for 10 years after he was drafted, a rookie enforcer for the Senators at age 28. He had something to prove.

The entire episode lasted 20 seconds. Carkner had given Derek a shove at mid-ice. By the time their momentum carried them to the top of the face-off circle, they were swinging wildly. Derek landed a strong right hand, but Carkner immediately responded with a punch to Derek’s face just as Derek was swinging again.

Derek’s nose was broken again. He turned his face away, his spirit shattered. Carkner hit Derek with a series of short left-hand jabs. The men clenched near the boards, grappling for dominance, pawing at one another’s face. The crowd in Ottawa cheered.

Carkner had one arm around Derek’s neck, the other under his left arm. He tried to lift Derek up, but it was like trying to uproot a sequoia. He took a quick breath and tried again. Two officials swirled within a few feet, helpless and unwilling to interrupt due to the unwritten codes of tradition. Carkner pulled Derek to one side, until all of Derek’s body was off the ice. He rotated him over his hip. Derek landed hard on his right shoulder. The fans cheered his fall.

Carkner landed on top of Derek and was slow to get off of him. The two officials tried to pry them apart. Carkner knew Derek was hurt. On his way off the ice, he gestured to the Rangers’ bench—some Rangers said he flicked blood at them—and was penalized with an extra 10-minute misconduct penalty.

Derek and Matt Carkner exchange blows in the last fight of Derek’s career.

Derek clambered uneasily to his feet, hunched over in pain. The fight had occurred near the gate at the end of the Rangers’ bench, and Derek quickly stepped through it, past backup goalie Martin Biron, and shuffled toward the dressing room.

“He landed a quick punch and I got lucky to land one real good one, as well,” Carkner said the next morning. “I didn’t really know I hit him flush like that. I noticed he kind of stopped fighting and I took him down and landed on top. Obviously, if you land a punch on a guy like that, it feels good. It feels good to take down a big man like that. But he’s definitely one of the toughest guys in the league, and I’m fortunate to get the upper hand in that one.”

The game took place at Ottawa’s Scotiabank Place, about 20 minutes from where Len and Jody Boogaard lived. But they were not at the game. Len had driven down to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to watch Krysten play basketball for the University of Kansas. He spoke to Derek after the game on the phone. Derek told him his nose was still broken from the MacIntyre fight a few weeks before, and doctors had just set it again a few days earlier. The punch damaged it again.

And Derek had landed on his perpetually aching right shoulder, the one that had been surgically repaired about 18 months earlier. He also landed on the back of his head, though camera angles made it hard to see.

Derek was out indefinitely, the Rangers reported publicly, due to a shoulder injury.

“His shoulder’s pretty sore,” Tortorella told reporters several days after the game. “He won’t even be in the building. It’s not a day-to-day thing, it’s recurring.”

The issue was not Derek’s shoulder. The Rangers had privately sent Derek to see a neurologist the day after the game.

“Mr. Boogaard suffered moderate blunt facial/head trauma without loss of consciousness,” New York neurologist Dr. Claude Macaluso wrote after an examination of Derek that included a magnetic-resonance exam. “The constellation of symptoms following the injury, even in the absence of loss of alteration of consciousness, qualify as a cerebral concussion.”

The report noted that Derek “suffered nasal fractures on several occasions, the last time as recently as three weeks ago,” a reference to the broken nose at the hands of MacIntyre.

Derek soon told a story to friends about a doctor asking him his history of concussions. Derek had no idea how many he has suffered. A few, probably. The doctor framed the question differently. How many times, would you say, have you been struck in the head, and everything went dark, if only for a moment? Five? Ten?

No one had ever defined a concussion that way to Derek. He laughed.

“Try hundreds,” he said.

THE SYMPTOMS IN his head not only persisted, they worsened. Within days, Derek displayed all the signs of post-concussion syndrome. He complained about bright lights and loud noises. He kept the blinds in his apartment closed, obscuring the million-dollar views. He wore sunglasses when he left the apartment, even at night. He could not ride in cars or taxis, because the motion made him queasy. At times, he struggled to form coherent thoughts and speak in sensible sentences.

Still, the Rangers listed Derek out “indefinitely” with a shoulder injury. It was nearly two weeks before the Rangers publicly acknowledged that Derek had sustained a concussion and was feeling its aftereffects. Tortorella said Derek’s problems “started off” with his shoulder injury, and Derek now had “some problems” “with headaches and stuff like that.” The news of a concussion became a short notebook item in news reports.

“With Derek Boogaard continuing to experience headaches that started during his rehab from a shoulder injury suffered in a fight with Ottawa’s Matt Carkner on Dec. 9, the Rangers are sending the enforcer to see a neurologist,” the New York Daily News reported on December 23–13 days after he had been fully diagnosed by a neurologist.

But even the Rangers did not know what else had happened on December 10, the day Derek returned to New York from Ottawa for further examination. Derek received a phone call from a man on Long Island. The two exchanged dozens of text messages. The man told Derek that he could get him prescription painkillers. And on December 12, Derek did something he rarely ever did: he withdrew $700 from an ATM. It was telling, if only anyone had known. Derek rarely carried cash, and was known among his friends for his flippant use of his credit card. He would buy a bag of chips at a convenience store and put the $2 sum on his American Express gold card.

Then Derek went to another ATM and withdrew $700 more. Then he did it again. Over the next several months, it became a pattern—ATM withdrawals on his Wells Fargo bank account timed with charges for tolls for bridges, tunnels, and roads between Manhattan and Long Island. Sometimes he stopped to grab something to eat or fill his car with gas. The withdrawals and charges created a secret financial footprint that indicated when Derek bought drugs.

The Rangers and the substance abuse program remained focused on Derek’s acquisition of pills from prescriptions written by team doctors. Weissman contacted Derek on December 14, five days after his injury, to check on him. Derek complained of “chronic insomnia,” the doctor wrote in his notes.

“At a previous conversation with Dr. Lewis from the NHL substance abuse program we suggested use of trazadone 25 mh h.s. the patient had a prior history of abuse Ambien CR,” Weissman noted. The Rangers had not given Derek Ambien all season, and program doctors were careful not to recommend it now.

Derek instead would be given Restoril, a different sedative. “Limited quantities will be given to the player and it will be dispensed directly from the team trainer,” Weissman wrote.

He also noted another request from Derek: Xanax. Derek asked to have some for when he traveled on airplanes. Weissman wrote in his notes that he discussed the request with the team trainer and with Dr. David Lewis of the league’s substance abuse program. Derek had tested positive for Xanax twice already in December, despite there being no record of it being prescribed by team doctors. If Lewis or Weissman had seen Derek’s positive drug tests for Xanax, it did not stop them from prescribing it to Derek now. Weissman wrote a prescription for 20 pills.

Derek was out of the lineup indefinitely. He was told by the Rangers to hibernate, essentially, the recommended method for recovery from post-concussive symptoms. But the symptoms came and went more than Derek let on. At 6 in the morning on December 24, he flew to Minnesota for Christmas, arriving shortly after 8. At 9:46 A.M., his cell phone records showed, he sent the first of four text messages to Dan Peterson, a doctor for Derek’s former team, the Wild.

Later that day, Derek picked up a prescription at a Minneapolis Walgreens for 30 zolpidem—Ambien. Peterson was listed as the prescribing doctor.

IT WAS CHRISTMAS EVE, and Derek had a 5 o’clock appointment scheduled with Pat O’Brien, the Minneapolis chiropractor who had done work on him when he played for the Wild. Nobody made Derek feel better than Dr. Pat, as he was known. But Derek did not show up.

O’Brien wondered if he had missed his flight, because Derek had never missed an appointment and had made a special request to be seen on Christmas Eve. O’Brien called Derek and sent a text message. Derek did not respond. O’Brien was hurt and disappointed. Derek, of all people, he thought.

Derek was with a woman named Laurie whom he had met a couple of years earlier when he sat courtside at a Minnesota Timberwolves basketball game. He had asked a server to deliver his name and telephone number to her. Someone had to explain to Laurie who Derek Boogaard was. They went to Sneaky Pete’s after the game, where Laurie was smitten by Derek’s boyish kindness—a gentle man and a gentleman. But Derek was still involved with Erin, and Laurie moved out of state for work.

But after Derek moved to New York, he heard that Laurie was back in Minneapolis, and he called her before he came for Christmas. He landed at the airport, and the two met at the Mall of America. Laurie found Derek standing there, wearing a big grin and a Russian-style fur hat he had bought. Outside, it was below freezing, and the forecast for Christmas the next day called for a high temperature below 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Derek checked in at the Hotel Ivy, a luxury hotel in downtown Minneapolis, and ate dinner at Seven, an upscale steakhouse and sushi bar, on Hennepin Avenue at Seventh Street. It was where he had eaten his last big meal before leaving for New York in September, nearly four months earlier, and had run up a $243.59 bill.

Derek spent Christmas Day at Sneaky Pete’s. He paid a tab—his own and that of many other people, apparently—of $840.

He returned to New York early on December 26. Before he left, though, Derek withdrew $500 from an ATM. Upon landing, he made more withdrawals.

The Rangers trainer made a note in the log that day—”Complained of headache today”—and wrote that Derek “continued rest/follow-up with Dr. Macaluso,” the New York neurologist who had been analyzing Derek since his concussion on December 9. On December 28, Macaluso’s thorough examination of Derek noted “post-concussive syndrome, mild but with persistent symptoms.” He also wrote that Derek had “persistently blurred vision from left eye” and a “nasal fracture.” He advised Derek to use Breathe Right nasal strips, Nasonex spray, and Simply Saline to aid the difficulty of breathing through his nose, and referred him to an ophthalmologist to assess Derek’s complaint about “blurred vision from the left eye.”

An ophthalmologist later noted “there is no evidence of any ocular trauma.”

On January 4, Derek made nine ATM withdrawals, for thousands of dollars. Five of them were in Manhattan. The other four were in and around Huntington, New York, the Long Island town where Derek often drove to exchange cash for prescription painkillers, returning to Manhattan with them in a Ziploc bag.

On January 6, Derek filled a prescription for five pills of Ambien from Weissman, the Rangers’ team doctor who, weeks earlier, had declined Derek’s request for Ambien after consulting with the league’s substance abuse program. Weissman prescribed Ambien to Derek at least seven more times, a total of 179 pills through early April, according to pharmacy records.

On January 7, the urine collector arrived at Derek’s apartment. Nearly a week later, the result from the screening laboratory of Quest Diagnostics in Santa Ana, California, was returned. Derek tested positive for oxymorphone, an opioid known under the brand name Opana. The result could not have been a surprise to Lewis and Shaw, the substance-abuse administrators. They were in regular contact with Derek, and Lewis wrote in his notes on January 10 that Derek had made an admission. “DB reports buying oxycodone from person in MN,” Lewis wrote. “Refused intervention or therapy. Refuse to fly to CA for treatment. Doesn’t want to leave apartment.”

Derek’s behavior was increasingly erratic, and his good-natured pleas for visitors became incessant. He called some friends 10 or more times a day. During the month of January, he exchanged about 10,000 text messages, and his cell-phone bill consumed 167 pages. And, to his closest friends—including the men, from Jeremy Clark in Minnesota to his half-brother, Curtis, in Alberta—Derek began signing off in a way he never had before: I love you.

He sometimes told friends that his head hurt. Over several weeks, when Laurie and Derek spoke on the phone, Derek sometimes groaned and cried, saying his head hurt so badly. From a thousand miles away, she screamed at him, worried that he was having an aneurysm or something.

His behavior was considered symptomatic of the recent concussions. But there probably was some lingering effect of his breakup with Erin and the loneliness of New York, and the frustration that he was too hurt to play hockey. That’s what everyone thought—Derek is lonely and bored—but they had their own lives to attend to. They had come at the beginning of the season, to watch Derek play and see New York. He wasn’t playing now, and most couldn’t drop everything and come just to keep Derek company.

Derek will be all right, they thought. It’s Derek.

Rob Nelson, Derek’s financial advisor, and Tobin Wright, Derek’s manager in Minneapolis, each visited for a few days in January. They found Derek in his apartment, looking as if he had not showered in days, his hair matted and his face unshaven. Fast-food packages littered the apartment. Blinds were closed.

But Derek, typically, did not want to burden others with his problems. He never disclosed his ongoing reliance on pills, and few connected his issues to drugs. Derek merely wanted someone around. Nelson assumed Derek’s fragile emotional state stemmed from the latest concussions, plus his general unhappiness in New York. And when he left to return to Minnesota, Nelson felt that he had helped improve Derek’s mood and outlook. Wright, who had confronted Derek in Minneapolis on the eve of his trip to rehabilitation, was more skeptical. He placed calls to Salcer and to Derek’s parents. Something is not right, he said.

Len Boogaard had been on the receiving end of some of Derek’s calls. When Len was not home, Derek talked to Jody, his stepmother. Years before, Derek had been the first of the Boogaard children to accept their stepmother into their lives, and their relationship remained close. Derek told Jody he wished Len could come and visit. Just ask him, Jody told Derek. You know he would.

Derek got Len on the phone. Dad, he said, I want you to come stay with me. Can you?

LEN ARRIVED IN New York on January 11. His son looked horrible. The apartment was a mess. It was a surprise to Len, who had never seen the worst of Derek’s problems. When Derek had gone to rehabilitation 18 months earlier, it was during the Wild’s training camp; Len was far away. When Aaron called the previous fall to tell his father about Derek’s descent back into the drugs, it was weeks after the episode at the airport.

Now Derek was in the throes of something real, calling out for help but still trying to conceal the problems. He wanted his father there, but he never explained why. It wasn’t his style. And Len did not always push Derek to open up. Derek hated to be prodded with questions. It made him feel doubted or untrusted, and it often spun him into a mood of irritability and sulkiness. Len, like others close to Derek, knew what kinds of things upset him, and those things were best avoided.

But Len did not like what he saw. Derek was irritable and complacent. He talked badly about the Rangers and complained about bright lights. The mood was dark. Derek slept for long stretches of daylight hours. He never opened the blinds. He complained of headaches. A dried, dying Christmas tree still stood in the corner. Len offered to take it out of the apartment, but Derek insisted. It left a trail of brown needles. When Derek cleaned them up, he sweated profusely and stopped to throw up.

The concussion, Len thought.

But Derek also complained about the drug testing. It was a Tuesday, and Derek told his father that the urine collector was coming on Friday morning. Len realized that the drug tests were not “random.”

Len saw a prescription bottle on the bathroom counter. Weissman had prescribed 14 Ambien pills the day before, the label showed. There were 10 left.

Salcer, Derek’s agent, was in New York, too, where he had been raised and where his mother still lived, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Marian Gaborik had called Salcer in California and told him that he was worried about Derek, that he seemed “out of it.” Salcer flew across the country. He and Len accompanied Derek to Madison Square Garden that night to watch the Rangers play Montreal.

When Derek stepped out of earshot, Len told Salcer about the Ambien on the bathroom counter. What’s that about? Derek’s not supposed to have Ambien; it had helped send Derek to rehabilitation in the first place. Salcer said he would report it to the substance abuse program.

But Salcer had information to relay to Len, too. He told Len about Derek not showing up for the pre–training camp workout with Gaborik back in September. He told him about the Rangers’ November game against the Wild in Saint Paul, when Derek received a warm ovation from the crowd and Brent Burns, one of Derek’s best friends on the Wild, asked him to come over to the dressing room after the game to meet a special guest from the military—the type of meeting that Derek had always enjoyed. Gaborik, Salcer said, came from the Rangers’ locker room, but Derek never showed up. He had left with friends for Sneaky Pete’s. Burns was upset.

And just the day before, Salcer told Len, he had invited Derek over to his mother’s apartment on East 72nd Street. Derek came, but Salcer noticed immediately that he wasn’t himself—slurring his words, acting loopy, far from his cheerful self. Salcer wondered if Derek was drunk, high, or something else.

Salcer escorted Derek on a walk through Central Park. Derek began to cry, talking about his loneliness and his depression, about the fits of fogginess that he could not shake from his head. Whatever spell Derek was under seemed to wear off with time, Salcer told Len, but not before he collapsed onto a park bench, weeping uncontrollably.

Once Derek had regained his composure, Salcer said, he told Derek he would have him talk to other clients of his who had battled concussions. Derek then talked about joining the military someday, maybe going to Afghanistan to root out bad guys. On Madison Avenue, Derek stopped at the boutique of Officine Panerai, famous for the stylish dive watches they made for the Italian navy in World War II. Many Panerai watches cost well more than $10,000. Derek wanted one.

“You can spend your money how you want, Derek,” Salcer said, “but I think you need to get yourself right first.”

Len absorbed what Salcer told him. The next morning, Len noted that six more Ambien pills were gone; there were four left.

Len and Salcer sat Derek down. They saw it as an intervention, and they told Derek they wanted to help. In the dimness of the apartment, New York’s afternoon light blocked by the blinds that Derek insisted stay closed, Derek slowly opened up.

He was lonely. He ached for Erin. He felt detached from the Rangers. He felt debilitated by the concussions and frustrated by the drug tests. He felt helpless. He spilled all his problems and bled all his emotions.

Len walked Derek through all that he had overcome to get where he was. He reminded his son of the grade-school teacher who stuck him in the closet. He told him about the parents that he overheard saying that they didn’t want Derek on the hockey team. He recalled the kids who picked on him and the coaches who never gave him a chance. They talked about Derek’s struggles in Prince George, and how hard he had worked to get drafted into the NHL, and how much he had devoted himself in the minor leagues to make the Wild. They talked about the admiration that Derek had earned from his teammates and legions of fans. They talked about how Derek had overcome his addictions in rehabilitation with his reputation intact and become a prized free agent, signed by one of the league’s premier franchises.

The Rangers want you, Len and Salcer told Derek. That is why they gave you a four-year contract worth millions of dollars. And that is why they are giving you the best care, to get you back on the ice so that you can keep doing what you do best. Salcer wanted Derek to understand just how bright his future was, if he was willing to commit himself to staying straight and focused. And Len wanted Derek to remember, always, how far he had come.

For Christmas, Joanne had compiled years’ worth of family photographs and created a video album that she gave to her children. The three men sat in Derek’s dim apartment, high above New York City, and watched Derek’s life unfold in warm images. The photographs showed Derek with his parents and his siblings, during all the happy stages of growing up and deep into the NHL.

Derek had been handed more than he could have imagined, and it was nothing like he had dreamed. And that was the first time that the toughest man in hockey clung hard to his father and sobbed uncontrollably in his arms.