A Guy Like Me: Fighting to Make the Cut by John Scott

Author:John Scott [Scott, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Howard Books
Published: 2016-12-27T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

A Terrible Loss

It was about three weeks after we ended our season in Vancouver when I heard that Boogey had passed away. Danielle and I were playing cards at Troy Bouwer’s house when Hank sent me a text saying that Derek was gone. He had overdosed on painkillers and medications to help him sleep. When Danielle heard about it, she started crying immediately. Me, I was dazed. It was tragic to learn about what he had gone through in the last year of his life, but also to hear about some things that happened early in his life that he never told me. There were articles and documentaries, including a three-part series in the New York Times that pieced a lot of loose ends together.

His dad was a cop, and his family had moved from a five-hundred-person town to a one-thousand-person town, where everyone talked about leaving and going on to better things one day. Kids teased Derek all the time because of his size and because he didn’t like getting into fights to have to defend himself. The few times he did, one teacher in particular used to stick him in a closet. He was so big on the ice that one time his skates broke apart. The rivets scattered left and right, and Derek fell down as the other kids laughed at him. He also had a class assignment that was a lot like mine. What did he want to do when he grew up? Derek said he wanted to play in the NHL. His teacher asked what his backup plan was. He said he didn’t have one. She gave him detention.

Hockey was Boogey’s way out. More to the point, fighting was his way out. I saw fighting as a way to play in the NHL. Some people who had known Boogey earlier in his life said he saw the NHL as a way to fight and vent the excess anger he had built up. Boogey had a one-day fight camp for kids age twelve to eighteen, teaching them how to handle themselves in a scrap. He was taking medications to deaden the aches and pains and keep him from staying awake at night. In his last preseason in Minnesota, he had been driving around Minneapolis in a fog when a cop picked him up and took him home to sleep off the meds on his couch. His fiancée, Erin, had noticed him bumping into things, and a few days later, he had checked himself into rehab in California.

I think Derek and I were similar in a lot of ways: We both didn’t have time for people we didn’t enjoy, and we weren’t shy about letting someone know our feelings about them if they asked. He liked to have fun. He didn’t really give a crap what other people thought of him. He was real. He wasn’t trying to put on a show for people; he just wanted to live his life. That’s what I liked about him.

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