If you didn't play with Derek Boogaard on your team, chances are good you thought he was an asshole.
If you ever had to muck it up in a corner with the New York Rangers forward or skate through the neutral zone with him on the ice, you knew he was there, you probably weren't thrilled about it.
If you were his teammate, though, you loved him. That's because he was an enforcer; a hard hitter and frequent fighter whose role, although intimately connected to hockey's history, is now at its fringe.
So when Derek Boogaard died in May—40 days before his 29th birthday and not long after consuming a deadly cocktail of pain killers and alcohol—he took with him a complicated legacy. It's the kind that comes from a career spent toeing the line between hockey's tough style and the ugly places its violence can go.
His job as an enforcer is a part of hockey's history, albeit a controversial one, and his hits and fights were an equal measure of what hockey is, what it was and what it hopes to never become.
It would be easy, then, to say Boogaard was out to destroy hockey, a reckless goon hell-bent on turning the sport into nothing but mindless hits and fights But he wasn't, and that's the thing about enforcers like Derek Boogaard: They must love the game more than we can ever know. They have to.
Advancing through hockey's minor leagues is hard enough for any player. But most do it imagining a future modeled after guys like Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky.
Boogaard knew there wouldn't be glory in what he did, even if he got to the game's highest level. He knew he'd be the bad guy in every game. He would work his ass off hitting for his team and fighting for it, only to see everyone in hockey say he's a stain on the sport, and yet he still came to the rink every day. He still gave every bit of himself to hockey.
He is a reminder of how much we can give to something, but only if we love it enough. Only if we're willing for it to hate us; only if we're willing to be its bad guy, its pugilist, its Boogey Man. If we still give more when the thing we dedicate our lives to decides it doesn't want us any more, if our dedication never waivers when it tries to erase us from its history, we will know Derek Boogaard's dedication.
He was with us for an unbelievably short amount of time, but as stupid and as selfish as this might sound, I'm jealous of his ability to live a life that full of dedication. We all should be.
We can only hope we're lucky enough to share that love. Even if it's just for 28 years.
EPILOGUE
What started as a shocking but, at that time, isolated tragedy in May soon led to a haunting summer for hockey.
On Aug. 15, Vancouver Canucks enforcer Rick Rypien, a player very much in the same mold as Derek Boogaard, and a tough guy who struggled mightily with depression, was found dead. Then on Aug. 31, recently retired tough guy Wade Belak passed as well. A number of news outlets have reported both men committed suicide.
How much sense is there when three men so similar die by their own doing. How much logic can we see when a family has to bury its 28-year-old son, and another puts a 27-year-old in the ground a few months later.
How much reason can we force onto this summer when two daughters are left without the father everyone said was the happiest, funniest guy in the dressing room.
There's a lot to learn about these deaths—about the depression that gripped Rypien and Belak, and the addiction that overtook Boogaard—and we should take those lessons to heart so more families don't face a similar tragedy. For now, though, we should know the lives they gave to hockey, and marvel at the love they had for the game.
Comments for Nico? E-mail him at nicosavidge@gmail.com.
