Perhaps a Time to Ache
Derek Boogaard: 1982-2011
A memorial is simply an object or a statue or a park that is there to remind people of someone (usually who has died) special. Chicago’s O’Hare Airport is a memorial named after a World War II pilot. Our country is unique, today we celebrate a day of memorials. It is a day on which each person decides what memorial to remember. Most think Memorial Day is a day for remembering the troops especially those that never came home. Growing up after World War II in a small Minnesota town that was not the main thought on Memorial Day. Younger people viewing history today would question that. With WWII just ended, what other shrine could be of importance? Family was more important. Many of the families that lived in our Minnesota small town were affected by the war, but Memorial Day for our families meant a returning soldier left flowers on his mother’s grave at our small town cemetery, a mother he last saw when he left to fight overseas. Family meant a lot in the 1950’s. Today, in most parts of Minnesota, it still does. It shows. Last Memorial Day, a grandmother laid a flower wreath on the grave stone of a grandchild she held as the child died. She had done that for 20 years. She shuddered and ached when she did so.
Unfortunately Minnesota’s Hockey family has lost both young and old this past year. It is sad. But it is worth remembering those that have died in the past year; worth remembering their memorials. This post is about a memorial to a hockey player hockey player that died almost four years ago in Minneapolis on a day in May. His death was the talk of the state having played for the Wild and the New York Rangers. He had yet to reach his prime, just 28-years old. It is a memorial that needs to be a part of this day with posts about Minnesota hockey players that are starting to move on in their hockey careers. Unfortunately, it is sad memorial for instead of being on the ice at the Xcel last week, what remains of Derek Boogaard, his ashes, sit as a small memorial in his mother’s home in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Boogaard was 6’7” tall when he died. He was big as a youth hockey player standing 6’4” at 15. As a bigger youth player, Boogaard drew more, most likely unfairly called, penalties. It happens. He often fought the penalty and set a goal of becoming an NHL player. Boogaard struggled in school and at the age of 15 was the defender of teammates at hockey games. His father was a Mountie, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He was a physical player and tended to look after his teammates. He was the team's enforcer. It was at one youth game in the late 1990's that Boogaard’s anger exploded. He jumped into the opponent’s bench taking them all on in a fight. Shortly after that, he was offered a chance to play junior hockey.
Boogaard struggled in his first season playing junior hockey in Canada. He played 35 games in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League in 1998-99 and posted 5 points/2goals. He started to get into fights on the ice and off the ice and outside of bars. He switched teams for the following two seasons and played 94 games in the Western Hockey League posting 9 points/1 goal. After completing a third season in the WHL, now 20-years old, Boogaard was drafted in the seventh round by the Minnesota Wild. The following season he moved from the WHL to ECHL and from 2003-2005 played for the Houston Aeros before joining the Minnesota Wild for the 2005-2006 season. In Boogaard’s seven seasons in minor league hockey, he posted 44 points and scored seven goals. But he was becoming a physical player, an enforcer. And his body was hurting. And he had stubbornly driven himself to the NHL.
He skated five good seasons for the Wild. The Wild didn't want him to leave. But when his contract came up for renewal, he opted to sign a $6.4 million contract with the New York Rangers starting in 2010-2011. He played 22 games for the Rangers and then two months into the season, he lost a fight. The other player struck first. He willed himself to comeback and in a second fight suffered another bad blow to the head. After that, he had trouble simply skating. With the physical play came pain, and with the pain came pain killers and the alcohol, a deadly combination for a hockey player. In early 2011, the Rangers sent him to rehab in California. In May, 2011, Boogaard ended up in Minneapolis visiting his brother.
Boogaard and his brother went out to eat the night he died. Boogaard had taken pain killers before he left his apartment. After eating, he went to four bars and then returned to his place. He could not sleep and complained that the bed was spinning while making pancakes at 3 AM. He finally stopped complaining, went to bed, and was left alone. The next afternoon, he was found dead in the bed. He had been dead for sometime. Rigor mortis had set in. Records later disclosed a week earlier, he had flown to New York from California, bought pain killers, flew to Minneapolis, stopped at his apartment, and flew back to California.
Somewhere, in Boogaard’s life story, there is a thread that runs in all of us. The emotion between the ache to explode with anger and the ache to care as the grandmother did visiting her grandchild’s grave is governed in each of us by a fine line. Abusing one's body with stuff that a person thinks he can control makes that fine line in the brain very fuzzy. They lose control. Some never recover. Those that never recover become a memorial in a mother’s home. There is nothing to indicate that Boogaard wanted to do any more than just play hockey. Each hockey player making the move to the next level should remember Boogaard as a memorial each Memorial Day to be thankful it is not their memorial because they are doing the right thing.
