10

EARLY ON THE JANUARY morning that Len was to fly home to Ottawa after three days in New York, he heard a knock at the door of Derek’s apartment. Len was still in bed, and Derek answered. Len heard some indecipherable small talk, and when he rose a short time later, he spotted a small cup and a stick in the garbage. It was the drug test, on schedule, just as Derek had said three days earlier.

Once home in Ottawa, Len received an e-mail message from Ron Salcer, Derek’s agent, who wrote that he had spoken to Brian Shaw, one of the co-founders of the NHL/NHLPA Substance Abuse Program. Dan Cronin, the program’s lead counselor, was spending the day in New York with Derek.

“He is in experienced hands and we can only hope for the best,” Salcer wrote.

The next day, Derek had an appointment with Dr. Macaluso, the neurologist. He prescribed 30 pills of Ambien, records showed. A week later, Dr. Weissman of the Rangers prescribed more Ambien and more Xanax.

Yet the next three drug tests administered to Derek, through most of February, came back negative.

It was up to the administrators of the substance abuse program to determine which drugs should be tested for through the urine samples. For a long time, the test did not search for Ambien, although that was one of the drugs that Derek abused on his way to rehabilitation in 2009.

It was unclear whether Derek was cheating the drug testing system, but such attempts were not uncommon. Brantt Myhres had been in more than 50 NHL fights and violated the substance abuse policy so many times that he received a lifetime ban from the league. His addictions to alcohol and cocaine led him to spend eight months in rehabilitation in 2008.

Myhres said that he sometimes used hockey tickets to befriend specimen collectors, who would then not follow him to the bathroom or would report that he was not home. He stored clean urine and learned to heat it quickly under water to get it to the correct temperature before handing it over. One collector, Myhres said, confided that he only wanted to catch people whose drug use could prove lethal to others—pilots, drivers, and the like. Not athletes.

Derek not only seemed to know ahead of time when the collector was coming to retrieve a sample, but he often managed to avoid the tests for several days. Salcer received calls from the substance abuse program reporting that Derek was being evasive. And Derek told friends that he had learned how to beat the testing system from others in rehabilitation, like prisoners in jail who learn to be better criminals.

By midseason, Derek was a mere afterthought to the Rangers’ push toward the playoffs. The Rangers were frustrated and puzzled by his lethargy—concussions rarely kept players out of action for so many weeks—and public updates on his health were rare. When Derek was spotted by reporters at the rink, he referred questions about his health to team management, an unusual deflection from someone usually friendly toward the media.

On the January day that Len arrived in New York at Derek’s request, newspaper reports included a pessimistic and cryptic diagnosis for Derek from Coach Tortorella.

“We’re trying to stimulate him and trying to get him moving around,” Tortorella said. “But he still doesn’t feel well.”

Asked if Derek would be ready to play by the end of the season, Tortorella hesitated.

“I can’t … we’ll have to see what happens,” he replied. “It’s not close.”

The relationship between Derek and the Rangers was distant. Derek came to home games, usually watching from the press box, but complained that the bright lights and dizzying movement and loud noises sometimes were too much to bear. He was excused from most practices, which were held a 30-minute drive north of the city in suburban Westchester County.

The remedy for concussions was time, and the Rangers wanted Derek to rest. They tracked him mostly through reports from doctor visits and trainers. (“Remaining at home—still complains of headaches,” one recorded on January 18.) Worried about his conditioning and diet, the Rangers delivered healthy food to the apartment. It piled up on the counter or went straight to the trash.

Derek asked if he could travel with the team on road trips, even though he was not playing. He was told no. He began to see it as an insult—the team telling him to keep his distance.

He still might have been better connected to life back in Minnesota. The weekend after Len left New York, before Derek spent the day with Cronin, another visitor arrived: a young woman named Ashley, whom Derek had met at Sneaky Pete’s. He bought her a last-minute flight to visit him for a couple of days.

The NHL All-Star Game was on January 30, 2011, in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Rangers played a home game on January 25, then had a week before their next game. Derek asked the Rangers if he could fly to Minnesota during the break, in part to get treatment from O’Brien, the chiropractor whom Derek had used extensively when with the Wild. The Rangers approved. The day before he left, Derek received the Xanax and Ambien prescriptions from Dr. Weissman, records showed. He also withdrew $1,700 in two ATM transactions.

Derek showed up to one appointment at O’Brien’s office wearing his Russian fur hat, with the tall front brim and floppy earflaps. O’Brien and his assistant thought it was hilarious.

“It’s really warm,” Derek said. “You should get one of these.”

O’Brien saw Derek several times, for an hour or so each time. And though he never received an explanation for the Christmas Eve brush-off, O’Brien never felt that anything was amiss with Derek.

Derek stayed at the Hotel Ivy in downtown Minneapolis from January 26 to February 6. His bill came to more than $6,200. Laurie, the woman with whom Derek reconnected during his Christmastime trip to Minnesota, was a frequent companion. Unaware of Derek’s addiction problems, past or present, she saw pill bottles in the hotel room. On February 2, records showed, Derek picked up a prescription for 30 Ambien pills at a Minneapolis Walgreens, prescribed by Peterson, a Wild team doctor.

“You having trouble sleeping?” she asked Derek.

“Yeah,” he said. “But don’t tell anybody I’m taking them.”

The two weeks in Minnesota were spent getting treatment and visiting familiar haunts. On his first night, Derek spent $648.42 at Manny’s Steakhouse. He returned twice more in the next three days. On another day, he spent $68.16 at McDonald’s. Sneaky Pete’s was a regular stop. Derek charged anywhere from $13 to more than $200 on his credit card there.

There were shopping excursions—$646.50 at Nordstrom’s, for example—that were all part of Derek’s extended spending spree. He had always spent money loosely, but things had grown out of control in the past year, which is why he now had a financial advisor overseeing his budget. More and more in New York, Derek spent huge sums on spur-of-the-moment merchandise, from a big-screen television at Best Buy to $10,061 from a gun web site. In March, he spent nearly $1,000 to add to the growing collection of Buddhas that he displayed in his apartment. He spent hundreds of dollars on night-vision goggles.

“Retail therapy,” Derek joked with old friends when they questioned his erratic buying behavior.

Derek was feeling better, and it seemed that he was serious about working his way back to hockey. Family and friends reported that Derek seemed happier than he had been in months. On February 16, New York newspapers reported that he had resumed light workouts, mostly on stationary bikes. Internal reports from team trainers noted few problems.

Salcer sent Len Boogaard e-mails on February 20.

“I have been talking with Derek these past couple of weeks and have noted a marked change in his attitude/demeanor, all for the better,” Salcer wrote. “It is somewhat reminiscent of his former self.”

He noted that Derek had been going to the rink every day and was “interacting with teammates. We are not out of the woods yet but certainly the signs are better.”

Len and Joanne each noticed the same thing when they spoke to Derek on the phone. Again, maybe the worst was past.

When Derek spoke to reporters in early March, he sounded optimistic about playing again before the playoffs. He told them the concussion he had suffered at the hands of Carkner was the first of his career, and that he was “symptom-free, for the most part.” He categorized his season as “very disappointing,” and “not the year I wanted to have,” especially in the first year of a contract.

The day before, Derek had handed over a urine sample for drug testing. A few days later, about the time that the test came back positive for prescription painkillers, Derek was seen by a friend crushing Ambien pills and snorting them.

ON MARCH 3, 2011, the New York Times published a story about the examination of Bob Probert’s exhumed brain. Probert had been an inspiration to many young hockey enforcers, including Derek, who chose No. 24 in Minnesota in Probert’s honor. Probert had 245 fights in 16 NHL seasons, from 1985 to 2002. A Hockey News poll in 2007 named him the greatest enforcer in history.

Probert died of heart failure in the summer of 2010, at age 45. Shortly before his death, he and his wife, Dani, watched a news program about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease that scientists believed was caused by repeated blows to the head. CTE could only be diagnosed posthumously, through careful examination of brain tissue. But more than 20 former National Football League players had been diagnosed with it.

“I remember joking with him, ‘Wouldn’t your brain make a nice specimen?’ “ Dani Probert told Times reporter Alan Schwarz. “He started questioning whether he would have it himself. He told me that he wanted to donate his brain to the research when he died.”

Hockey players routinely received potentially damaging hits to the head, most almost instantly dismissed as inconsequential. They came from the shoulders and elbows of opponents, from collisions with the glass and boards that surrounded the rink, maybe the occasional smack of a puck or an inadvertent high stick. Most of those could not be avoided.

But one type of blow could be prevented, if the NHL and other hockey leagues deemed it enough of a safety issue to legislate it out of the game: the blow to the head from the fist of an opponent.

“Hockey’s enduring tolerance for and celebration of fighting will almost certainly be tested anew now that Probert, more pugilist than playmaker, has become the first contemporary hockey player to show C.T.E. after death,” Schwarz wrote in the front-page story.

Until Probert’s brain was examined, the only other hockey player known to have had CTE was Reggie Fleming. But he was a rough-and-tumble player from the 1960s, an era long before helmets were in wide use. His brain was examined after he died in 2009 at age 73.

Probert’s litany of personal problems were acknowledged in the story—his long trouble with alcohol, his arrest for cocaine possession, his police record for bar fights and assaults on officers. But the story also listed the symptoms of CTE, usually seen only in the final years of life, understood only with postmortem hindsight: “drug abuse, impulse control and impaired memory.”

Back home in Ottawa, Len Boogaard read the story, and it all hit him like a punch to the gut. Probert sounded a lot like Derek. Derek, too, was a hockey fighter who absorbed more blows than he remembered. He became addicted to drugs, including painkillers. He became impulsive and moody, facing bouts of depression. And his memory seemed to be short-circuiting.

What could we have been thinking? Len wondered. It was not the hands, Len realized, that he should have worried about with Derek all those years. It was the head.

AMONG THE 13,724 text messages that Derek sent and received from mid-February to mid-March, detailed in a monthly cell-phone bill that consumed 244 pages, were notes to Todd Fedoruk.

Fedoruk was 32, recently retired from hockey, living with his family in the suburbs of Philadelphia, about 100 miles from New York. He and his wife, Theresa, figured that Derek was lonely, living in a strange city, and sitting out with an injury. Derek said in a text message that the team didn’t want him around. Fedoruk replied that he and Theresa would come to New York to see him.

No, Derek said, I’ll come down there.

He arrived one morning while Fedoruk was in the garage, doing some woodwork, a postretirement hobby. The garage door was open, and Fedoruk heard Derek arrive and saw him emerge from his Audi with a big Derek smile and a hug for the man whose career he had almost ended with one crushing right hand.

Derek came inside and helped himself to slices of leftover pizza in the refrigerator. He played with the three Fedoruk children, aged seven, five, and just a few months. The oldest, Luke, remembered the Boogeyman from Minnesota—or, at least, the stories often told about his father’s giant friend. The older children climbed on Derek as if he were a piece of playground equipment, and Derek laughed his heh-heh-heh laugh.

Derek spent hours in the basement, where he and Luke played Guitar Hero on the video-game console. Fedoruk recorded them with his phone. On the toy electric guitar, Derek tried to keep pace with classic rock songs. He had to get this game, he said. His brothers would love it.

Time ticked through the late afternoon, and Derek was in no hurry to return to New York. It occurred to the Fedoruks just what it was that Derek wanted: time out of the city, away from the concrete and the crowds, in the vast expanses of countryside and subdivisions. He wanted to be in a home filled with voices and laughter.

Derek had always felt comfortable around Fedoruk. Maybe it was their similar childhoods and lives as junior hockey players in Regina and western Canada. Maybe it was the way that Fedoruk so easily forgave Derek for shattering his face in the NHL. Maybe it was the late-night conversations on the road as teammates. Or maybe it was that Fedoruk understood the pain as much as anyone else. Probably all of those.

Fedoruk had played his last NHL game less than a year earlier, with the Tampa Bay Lightning, on the last day of the 2009–10 season. Two nights earlier, in a home game against the Ottawa Senators, Fedoruk had briefly fought Matt Carkner—the same man who then beat Derek in December, sending him off with a concussion and a separated shoulder. Carkner was much bigger than Fedoruk, but they exchanged a few punches as the play moved up the ice without them. By the time the whistles blew and the cameras captured them, the two had wrestled each other down.

Fedoruk drank excessively the next night. He said he spent the early-morning hours in a stupor, wandering the streets of Tampa and the sidewalk of Bayshore Boulevard, sometimes called the world’s longest continuous sidewalk, stretching nearly five uninterrupted miles.

When the Lightning took the ice that night in the season finale against Florida, Fedoruk still felt unsteady. On one play, he slipped behind the net and slid into the boards. He was not hurt, but he pretended to be, giving him an excuse to leave the game and not return. He later checked himself into rehabilitation—not to save his hockey career, but to save his marriage and his family, he said.

And now here he was, surrounded by the warmth of his wife and their three children, living inside the glow of a gleaming home. For Derek, it must have seemed perfect.

Fedoruk knew about Derek’s first time in rehabilitation, at the start of the season before, Derek’s last with the Wild. Derek had told him about it, and Fedoruk was struck at the time with one impression: He’ll be back. He could tell by how Derek responded to Fedoruk’s question about how it went.

“Pfft,” Derek said. “I’ve got nothing in common with those people.”

Eighteen months later, Fedoruk searched for signs of trouble. He studied Derek’s eyes, looking for pupils the size of pinholes or lids that hung at mismatched levels. He listened to Derek’s speech and searched for the hidden meaning behind the words he used.

Throughout the day, Fedoruk detected loneliness, and he knew that Derek was in chronic pain, but no other flags were raised in the recesses of Fedoruk’s mind. Derek seemed like his usual self—happy and chatty, not medicated, eager to be part of a group.

Todd and Theresa had plans for dinner in Philadelphia, and they asked Derek if he wanted to come, too. He did. They drove from their neighborhood of big brick houses and large lawns, across the Delaware River and into the city. Derek ordered a Jack Daniels and Coke and had chocolate cake for dessert.

While waiting for the valet to bring the car after dinner, out of earshot of Fedoruk, Derek turned to Theresa and told her how much he missed his friend and former teammate. He apologized for the punch that changed everything more than four years earlier. She made Derek make a promise: If Todd comes back to hockey, Derek, you will not fight him.

Derek promised.

The Fedoruks asked if Derek wanted to spend the night, but he declined, saying he was just starting to work out with the Rangers again and had to get back for training in the morning. It was after Derek left, driving back up the New Jersey Turnpike on the 90-minute trip to Manhattan, that Theresa turned to her husband.

Something’s not right with Derek, she said. Something’s off.

DEREK DROVE FAST, his GPS counting down the minutes to his arrival. Devin Wilson, sitting in the passenger seat of the Audi as it sped through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and onto the Long Island Expressway, begged him to slow down.

They had spent the weekend at Derek’s apartment, Derek’s mood shifting like a pendulum. One minute, he complained about headaches and wanted to do nothing but sit on the couch, in the dark. For months, Wilson had been a regular visitor at Derek’s apartment, and he had never seen the blinds open. Then Derek would be up, wanting to go to a Duane Reade drugstore for candy or to Best Buy to shop. He was like a kid again, big and energetic and silly, just like the teenager Wilson remembered as a teammate with the Prince George Cougars a decade earlier: kind, non-threatening, quick to laugh. The moods often swung with the painkillers that Derek consumed, and Wilson saw Derek swallow them by the handful.

Like Derek, Wilson was from Regina. He spent four seasons with Prince George, a steady defenseman with a penchant for parties. His hockey career faded after a few minor-league seasons, and he drifted between jobs. In the fall of 2010, he arrived in New York, just as Derek did, with a sales position with the New York Islanders.

Derek and Wilson had not been great friends. They had occasionally crossed paths in Regina during summers after their days in Prince George. But they reconnected at a Rangers game against the Islanders in the fall, and their relationship grew through the winter. By spring, no one spent more time with Derek than Wilson. They planned to move into a different apartment together in Manhattan during the summer.

During the season, though, Wilson still lived on the south shore of Long Island, in Long Beach, a few streets on a narrow, low-lying barrier island. Derek liked it there. He liked going to the beach bars, which reminded him of some of the places he went during the summers in Los Angeles. People came to know who Derek was, and they welcomed him without smothering him. Derek had not had that since he left Minneapolis—the affection of strangers glad to have his company.

Usually, though, Wilson came to Manhattan to stay with Derek. Derek implored him to come, playfully telling him to “bring girls,” and Wilson would arrive to find Derek sitting in the dark. More times than not, they stayed in the apartment, playing video games and filling the long silences with bursts of conversation.

Derek’s moods swung with little notice, though, and Wilson’s suggestions for things to do would be dismissed because Derek did not feel well, only to be happily overridden by a sudden idea. And, sometimes with little warning, Derek would tell Wilson he needed to leave at that moment to take him back home to Long Island. And they would get in the Audi and speed east across Manhattan and the East River and into Queens, usually stopping at several ATMs along the way. Derek needed cash, and he usually withdrew between $3,000 and $4,000, pulling out the maximum amount the machine would allow before moving on to another.

Once, when a machine denied his withdrawal, Derek entered the bank and made an uncomfortable scene, unable to understand why tellers could not accept his credit card to withdraw cash from his account. Wilson pulled him out of the bank.

Wilson assumed that Derek was getting some pills from team doctors. But he knew that Derek was spending several thousands of dollars a month on prescription drugs bought off the street from at least one supplier.

Derek called the man “The Dude,” Wilson said, and he was a sharp-dressed man about their age. Sometimes Derek would drop off Wilson at home and go on his own, but Wilson accompanied Derek now and again. They met the man in a parking lot in Huntington, a sprawling Long Island suburb. At least once, they went to a house. In exchange for the cash he had withdrawn, Derek was handed a Ziploc bag filled with colorful pills. He took them back to his apartment and spent hours organizing them by type and dosage. He placed them in pill organizers and empty bottles from old prescriptions.

And as Easter approached, Derek began a little ritual: he sorted the pills in pastel-colored plastic eggs, the kind used to hold candy or coins for children. He often carried one in a pocket when he left home for a few hours, a dose for when he needed it, no matter where he might be. And he hid the others around the apartment, a one-man game of hide and seek.

ON MONDAY, FEBRUARY 28, the Rangers’ trainer noted that Derek had called late on Saturday night, complaining of “severe pain behind his eyes and vomiting.” Derek had done some skating and light work with weights on Friday and Saturday without any reported problems. On Sunday, when the Rangers had an afternoon game at Madison Square Garden, records showed that Derek picked up 30 Ambien, prescribed by Weissman, the Rangers’ team doctor. He also drove to Long Island, withdrawing $1,600 in cash at two ATMs on the way.

On Tuesday, March 2, Derek provided a urine sample for a drug test. It came back a week later showing a positive result for hydromorphone—a narcotic pain reliever often sold under the brand name Dilaudid. Among its purported effects was a sense of euphoria and stress relief.

Jeremy Clark, Derek’s good friend and trainer from Minnesota, arrived on March 3.

The Rangers were on the road that day, without Derek, and the two friends wandered around Manhattan, shopping and eating. Derek charged $237.61 at Caviar Russe, a restaurant on Madison Avenue. He spent $504.16 at Davidoff of Geneva, a high-end cigar store. At some point, he also retrieved $2,700 from his bank account through ATMs.

Derek and Clark went to a movie that afternoon. And they stopped at a Walgreens drugstore on 57th Street, on the same block as Derek’s apartment. There was confusion about a prescription, and after a discussion with the pharmacist, Derek made several calls on his cell phone to Weissman, records showed. Derek left with 30 pills of Ambien.

Clark did not think it was strange. He had close ties to many hockey players, and he knew that Ambien was commonly used. And in this case, it was being prescribed by a team doctor. It was only strange when Clark found that Derek crushed the pills and snorted them.

Most thought that Derek was on the mend. On March 15, the day after another trip to Long Island that followed the withdrawal of $3,200, Derek skated with teammates for the first time since the concussion in December. A few days later, Michael Russo of the StarTribune in Minneapolis wrote an item about Derek for the newspaper.

“Former Wild enforcer Derek Boogaard was so sensitive to sunlight during the early portion of the concussion that still keeps him out of the Rangers lineup, that he stayed in his Manhattan apartment for three weeks at one point,” Russo wrote. “He started to get depressed, go stir crazy. ‘That’s why when [Marian Gaborik] got his concussion this year, I’d call him every day and say, ‘I want you to call me and we’ll go for lunch and we’ll do something for at least an hour just so you get out of your apartment,’ Boogaard said.”

Through the spring, Derek privately rooted for the Rangers to lose. The team spent much of the season outside the eighth and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference, and Derek thought that if the Rangers missed the postseason, they might fire the coach, John Tortorella. That is what he hoped. He was optimistic that a new season, with a new coach, would bring him a new start.

Derek tracked all the playoff scenarios, figuring out how many wins and losses, combined with wins and losses of other teams, would keep the Rangers from the playoffs or allow them in. Hopes were dashed when the Rangers went on a hot streak in the middle of March, going 8–1–1 in one 10-game stretch.

Derek flew Laurie in from Minneapolis on March 18. They had spent time together at Christmas, and again during his two weeks in Minneapolis over the All-Star break, and Derek had tried to persuade her to move to New York with him. She demurred, but was falling for Derek’s kind, gentle, giving ways.

She barely recognized him this time. The first signal arrived before she did, when she worried about her medication for a respiratory infection. Derek wanted Laurie to bring nothing but a carry-on bag, but she worried that her liquid cough medicine with codeine would be confiscated. He told her to leave it behind.

“I can get you whatever you need,” he wrote in a text message. “Whatever you need I can get from the trainers.”

When she arrived, he gave her a small Ziploc bag with six or eight oval pills in them. Derek told her that they were Vicodin, a painkiller that no Rangers team doctor had prescribed, according to medical records. Laurie took one that night.

The next day, Derek napped through the afternoon in the dark apartment. He woke up screaming, then jumped to his feet, shaking. Laurie could not tell if he was awake or asleep.

“I’m scared,” he said. “Scared about what they’ll make me do.”

“Who?” she asked.

“The trainers,” Derek replied.

He fell back to sleep. But Laurie was shaken. She wondered how a grown man, a man that size, could wake up screaming in terror.

They went out that night with Devin Wilson and another woman. Derek paid the $575.24 bill at Quality Meats, a steakhouse on 58th Street, a block south of Central Park. At bedtime that night, Laurie took a second Vicodin. When she awoke, she spotted the baggie on the kitchen counter. Most of the pills were still there. A bit later in the morning, the baggie was in the bathroom and the last pills were gone.

Breakfast at a nearby restaurant was washed down with Bloody Marys and mimosas, followed by stops at several bars in midtown Manhattan.

Laurie headed home to Minnesota, confused by the weekend. Derek had always been so happy, so bubbly, so outgoing, she thought. Now he was none of those. He was erratic.

The results from Derek’s next test came back positive for hydrocodone and hydromorphone. The next day, he withdrew $4,000 from ATMs. His next drug test revealed hydromorphone. Another test, five days later, showed positive for hydromorphone, morphine, oxycodone, and oxymorphone. On April 2, Derek was screened again. The results took six days to return, and showed a positive test for oxymorphone. By that time, the evidence was too much to ignore.

DEREK NEVER EXPECTED to be told that Mark Messier wanted to talk to him.

Messier might have been the most revered Ranger in history. While he spent most of his career with the Edmonton Oilers, part of a high-scoring dynasty alongside Wayne Gretzky, Messier established permanent residency as a New York sports icon in 1994. He was the 33-year-old captain of the Rangers, a man with his named etched on the Stanley Cup five times from his days with his hometown Oilers. The Rangers had lost Game 5 of the Eastern Conference final to the cross-river rival New Jersey Devils, and Messier was damned if the Rangers would lose again.

“We’re going to go in and win Game 6,” he said. The New York tabloids splashed his guarantee across their covers, making it the city’s most famous victory pledge since New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath promised a win in Super Bowl III.

“I’ve put my five Stanley Cup rings, my reputation and my neck on the chopping block, boys,” Messier said he told his teammates. “Now save me.”

The Rangers won Game 6, by a score of 4–1. Messier, nicknamed “Captain Courageous,” had three goals, perhaps the boldest hat trick in league history. And the Rangers won Game 7, too, back in Madison Square Garden, in double overtime. And then they beat the Vancouver Canucks in the Stanley Cup final, the Rangers’ first championship since 1940.

Messier left the Rangers after an acrimonious contract dispute in 1997, but team president and general manager Glen Sather brought him back in 2000. Messier played his final four seasons with the Rangers, and the team retired Messier’s No. 11 in 2006. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2007.

In 2009, Messier joined the Rangers as a “special assistant” to Sather, who had built and coached those Oilers championship teams in the 1980s.

It was a vague title and an unclear role. Messier spent part of one season as general manager of Canada’s world-championship team. During the first half of Derek’s first season in New York, Messier coached a low-level Canadian national team in a pair of European tournaments. Messier was barely seen or heard in New York. He seldom spoke to the media. The rare times he spoke publicly were usually when he promoted the “Messier Project,” with a mission “to address the issue of concussions, which has become an epidemic in hockey, through product development and a public-awareness campaign.”

In tandem with his sister, Mary-Kay, Messier worked to develop helmets with better protection and to educate players on the need to wear them properly, with the chin strap cinched.

“The NHL still continues to be our greatest challenge,” Mary-Kay Messier told the Gazette of Montreal in early March of 2011. “One of the things we’re really working on is changing the culture of hockey so that head protection becomes a priority.”

Mark Messier, never quoted about the state of the Rangers, was willing to talk about the importance of protecting the heads of players. Helmets, he said, “were designed to stop catastrophic injuries and have done a great job of that. But our game has evolved where now concussions are part of our game, so we have to design our helmets not only to stop catastrophic injuries, but also to help reduce the risk of concussions.”

And now, a couple of weeks later, Messier wanted to talk to Derek. Derek was incredulous. Mark Messier wants to talk to me?

It was a pep talk, not unlike those that Messier surely used to inspire teammates to rally for the good of the team. The Rangers had put a lot of faith in Derek, giving him a four-year contract and a lot of money to be the enforcer that he had shown he could be. But Derek had been injured since December, out with a concussion for several months, and it was fair to wonder why his recovery was taking so long. Even some of Derek’s friends wondered whether he was milking the injury, in no hurry to return to a middling team with a coach he did not like. Messier’s intent was to motivate Derek, to scare him into taking responsibility, to push him into becoming the player the Rangers thought they were getting and hoped they would get for the next three seasons.

At the team’s suburban practice rink a day or two later, Derek skated with several other teammates who were out of the lineup, too hurt to play but healthy enough to exercise. Derek had been skating with the team for several weeks, but he was still in bad shape—overweight, slow, and unmotivated.

Assistant coach Jim Schoenfeld oversaw the workout. He was 58, a former captain of the Buffalo Sabres during a 13-year NHL career as a sturdy defenseman. He might have been best known, however, for his postgame outburst as coach of the New Jersey Devils in 1988. “Have another donut!” he screamed at referee Don Koharski in the tunnel after a playoff loss.

Schoenfeld had taken a keen interest in Derek. He had coaxed him into low-impact workouts, including yoga. But Derek complained that Schoenfeld forced him to skate hard in two-minute intervals. He didn’t see the sense in it. His shifts never lasted two minutes.

It did not take long for Schoenfeld to see that something was different with Derek this time. Derek fell. He tried to stand up, and then fell again. He had no coordination. Like a newborn colt trying to gain footing, Derek could not keep his feet underneath him. It was obvious that Derek was drunk or on drugs. Other teammates watched as Schoenfeld ordered Derek off the ice.

Derek, back on his feet, stormed through the gate of the rink and stumbled into the dressing room. He threw a tantrum, throwing his equipment to the ground. He sat on a bench and stewed. He clenched his fists in frustration, a rare display of anger.

Schoenfeld left to call other team officials. In front of team trainers, Derek went through the range of emotions again, unable to recapture his composure.

“People think I’m a pill head,” he screamed, again and again. And he started to cry.

Within hours, plans were made to send Derek to rehabilitation.