Boy on ice : the life and death of Derek Boogaard

The tragic death of hockey star Derek Boogaard at twenty-eight was front-page news across the country in 2011 and helped shatter the silence about violence and concussions in professional sports. Now, in a gripping work of narrative nonfiction, acclaimed reporter John Branch tells the shocking story of Boogaard's life and heartbreaking death.

Boy on Ice is the richly told story of a mountain of a man who made it to the absolute pinnacle of his sport. Widely regarded as the toughest man in the NHL, Boogaard was a gentle man off the ice but a merciless fighter on it. With great narrative drive, Branch recounts Boogaard's unlikely journey from lumbering kid playing pond-hockey on the prairies of Saskatchewan, so big his skates would routinely break beneath his feet; to his teenaged junior hockey days, when one brutal outburst of violence brought Boogaard to the attention of professional scouts; to his days and nights as a star enforcer with the Minnesota Wild and the storied New York Rangers, capable of delivering career-ending punches and intimidating entire teams. But, as Branch reveals, behind the scenes Boogaard's injuries and concussions were mounting and his mental state was deteriorating, culminating in his early death from an overdose of alcohol and painkillers.

Based on months of investigation and hundreds of interviews with Boogaard's family, friends, teammates, and coaches, Boy on Ice is a brilliant work for fans of Michael Lewis's The Blind Side or Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights. This is a book that raises deep and disturbing questions about the systemic brutality of contact sports--from peewees to professionals--and the damage that reaches far beyond the game.

Author Notes

John Branch is a reporter for the New York Times. His 2012 piece "Snow Fall" won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. He lives near San Francisco.

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

New York Times reporter Branch's chronicle of Derek Boogaard's winning but ultimately tragic life as hockey's greatest enforcer is as tense and exciting as a hockey game. Branch follows Boogaard from his earliest days in the rinks as a member of the Regina Pats to his days with the Minnesota Wild and eventually to the New York Rangers. Boogaard, he points out, was never the most talented player on his minor hockey teams, but that he was a "big obstacle planted in front of the goal to gum up the opponent's offense." As his career took off, Boogaard accepted his role as enforcer, and Branch brings to life the highlights of his biggest fights, including his bout against Todd Fedoruk, which effectively ended Fedoruk's career. Boogaard's kindness and compassion off the ice contrasts with his on-ice persona, and the many fights and the painkillers begin to take their toll. Branch captures the sorrow and anguish of a young athlete's career collapsing due to the combination of drugs and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)-a kind of dementia that causes memory loss and emotional instability (sufferers are referred to as "punch drunks")-and asks piercing questions about violence in sports. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

In hockey, the enforcer is an unofficial role usually held by players with size and fighting ability but not necessarily great hockey skills. From a young age, Derek Boogaard, known as The Boogeyman, found his place on the ice as the protector of his team and the intimidator of opposing players. Ultimately, injuries sustained from repeated fighting led to his addiction to painkillers and tragic death from an overdose at age 28. Branch, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, examines Boogaard's stunningly violent on-ice career in blow-by-blow detail, from his beginnings in Saskatchewan to his rise with the NHL's Minnesota Wild and New York Rangers. Autopsy reports showed that Derek also suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition often associated with football players and boxers that has become a recent focus of sports-safety advocates. Known as a gentle giant when outside the rink, Derek lived a conflicted and painful life, the facts of which will certainly add to the debate on the ramifications and necessity of institutional fighting in hockey and the debilitating effects of repeated head injuries in all professional sports.--Clark, Craig Copyright 2014 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

AS GENRES GO, the sports biography plays by established rules. More often than not the young hero, toiling in obscurity, is suddenly recognized for his or her formidable talents. So begins the stirring journey to fame. In the case of John Branch's devastating new book, "Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard," this moment arrives when Boogaard, a clumsy 15-year-old hulk from small-town Saskatchewan, goes berserk at a junior league hockey game. He clubs one foe to the ice, shrugs off the refs and storms the opposing team's bench to inflict further damage. The scouts on hand from the Western Hockey League, a feeder to the vaunted National Hockey League, begin to nudge one another. None have arrived with any interest in Boogaard, but a pair of them hastily alight to a nearby motor inn to fax league headquarters an official request for Boogaard's services. The music swells. A goon is bom. Branch then offers the eager testimony of one of these scouts, Todd Ripplinger: "We just couldn't get him out of our head. It was ... you know what? If you like that kind of stuff, it was impressive, really impressive what he did, how strong he was. And you thought, 'Maybe this guy could be an animal one day.'" No single statement captures so succinctly the harrowing nature of the Boogaard saga, the corrosive pact by which a troubled, needy boy reduces himself to savagery for the entertainment of bloodthirsty fans, the financial gain of cynical promoters and his own glory. Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, knows he has a blockbuster story on his hands and lets the facts drive the narrative. (The book is expanded from a three-part series published in The Times in 2011.) We see Boogaard evolve from a shy, awkward teenager, initially demoted for losing a fight, to a polished brawler who becomes the N.H.L.'s pre-eminent enforcer. For those unfamiliar with the tribal codes of hockey, Branch explains the rules that govern fighting in the N.H.L. It is single combat for the modern age, a ritual in which designated fighters from each side square off to settle collective vendettas: "When the enforcers fought, the game clock stopped. Other players, restricted by stricter rules barring entry into a fight, backed away and watched. Fans, invariably, stood and cheered, often more vociferously than when a goal was scored. Television cameras zoomed in, and a graphic providing each fighter's height and weight often appeared on the screen. Play-by-play men took on the role of boxing announcers, their hypercharged voices rising and falling with every blow." This is to say nothing of the "Rocky" theme music that sometimes accompanies bouts. Boogaard racks up fights and penalty minutes, crushes the cheek of a rival and earns the menacing sobriquet "Boogeyman," along with a promotional bobble-head doll whose fists also bobble. To the victor, naturally, go the spoils. Soon after Boogaard joins the Minnesota Wild in 2005, his jersey ranks among the most popular with fans. By 2010, the big kid from western Canada has earned a multi-million-dollar contract with the New York Rangers. But Branch forces us to look past the spotlight and toward the darker arc, a story of spiritual decay invisible to fans. Boogaard and his ilk, for all their courage, are essentially unskilled laborers whose careers might end with one punch. They put their bodies, egos and livelihood at risk every night and are expected to sign autographs for the kiddies in the morning. Like countless athletes before him, Boogaard seeks refuge from the battering in booze and painkillers. Branch grimly details his descent. "In total that season, Derek's fourth in the N.H.L., he received at least 25 prescriptions for oxycodone and hydrocodone, a total of 622 pills, from 10 doctors." By the time he reaches New York, Boogaard is buying pills from private dealers, which he puts in pastel-colored Easter eggs and hides around his apartment, "a one-man game of hide and seek." He is also showing signs of incipient dementia. A year later, Boogaard is dead of an accidental overdose. The neuropathologist who examines his brain is astonished at its condition. She has never seen such deterioration in the brain of a person so young. Boogaard was 28. What emerges most forcefully from this patient and painstaking account is the entire system erected to nurture hockey's cult of violence: the fans who clamor for fights from the safety of their sofas, the cartel of mercenary owners who accordingly refuse to outlaw fighting (the practice is rare in European and college hockey), the medical staffs whose role is to narcotize players and get them back on the ice, and the team officials who ignore injuries while issuing happy lies about player safety and pro forma drug rehab programs. Yet Branch never resorts to polemics. His book is heartbreaking because it shows us, in tender detail, a life consumed by our unholy appetites. There's an eerie parallelism in effect here, as we come to see how Boogaard's addiction to painkillers is the direct result of our addiction to watching men like him "dutifully distribute punishment and quietly absorb pain." "Boy on Ice" is a startling indictment of the groupthink that prevails within America's vast athletic industrial complex, those bright arenas in which any pleas for mercy or morality are drowned out by the roar of our own barbarism. Seeing the young Boogaard fight, a scout thought, 'Maybe this guy could be an animal.' STEVE ALMOND'S new book is "Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto."

Kirkus Review

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Branch debuts with a biography of hockey player Derek Boogaard (1982-2011), a fierce fighter on the ice who died of an overdose of alcohol and prescription painkillers at the age of 28. "No one ever told Derek that his primary mission in hockey would be to fight," writes the author. Yet that is what the shy, oversized Saskatchewan native did throughout his career, first for minor teams, then with the Minnesota Wild and the New York Rangers, where he became the NHL's most feared fighter. In this engrossing narrative, based on an award-winning Times series, Branch details both Boogaard's life growing up in rural, hockey-mad Canada, where his size stigmatized him in school, and his years of playing hockey, when sizenot talentbrought him success. In a sport where violence attracts crowds, Boogaard's role as an enforcer was to intimidate opponents and protect his team's star players, often engaging in game-stopping fights. With spotlights beaming and Rocky theme music blaring, the enforcer and his adversaries would beat on each other with fists and sticks and then spend a few minutes in a penalty box. To alleviate stabbing pain in his back, hips and shoulder, Boogaard took increasing amounts of painkillers. In his fourth professional season, he obtained 25 prescriptions for oxycodone and hydrocodone from 10 doctors. Despite efforts at rehabilitation, he persisted in his addiction, becoming increasingly erratic and depressed. An autopsy revealed that Boogaard had suffered a series of concussions as well as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative condition caused by repeated blows to the head. Boogaard's death and increasing public awareness of the dangers of concussions have prompted steps to limit fighting in hockey's junior leagues, but there's been no action at the professional level, where a culture of "concussion denial" reigns. A sad, tragic story that underscores the high human cost of violent entertainment. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

Starred Review. There is no question that hockey is a beautiful sport to watch and an exhilarating one to play. Its practitioners accomplish their feats at lightning quick speeds while under heavy duress from their opponents' potential body checks and stick work. However, the sport has often been cast in the dark shadow of the existence and acceptance of fighting. In this debut book, journalist Branch examines the life and death of one noted hockey pugilist whose job-he argues-led to chronic and traumatic brain damage as a result of numerous concussions, prescription drug abuse, and ultimately, his death. It traces Derek Boogaard's humble beginnings playing minor hockey in frigid arenas in small towns in Saskatchewan to his life as a National Hockey League enforcer, plying his trade in modern day ice palaces as thousands of fans chanted his name. Branch tells a tale of Faustian proportion, describing a young man who desperately wanted to play hockey professionally, but whose only means to accomplish this were through using his great size (he was 6'7" without skates) and his fists. VERDICT A heartbreaking examination of a young man's life destroyed by the sport he loved. Highly recommended.-Brian Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Prologue	p. 1
Part I Saskatchewan	p. 11
Part II Minnesota	p. 135
Part III New York	p. 235
Epilogue	p. 305
Acknowledgments	p. 329
A Note on Sources	p. 335
Photo Credits	p. 341
Index	p. 343

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