Offside by Sean Avery

Author:Sean Avery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

A NEW LIFE IN PARADISE

There’s no time like being out of work and filled with doubts to end a relationship and move, but now that Rachel and I had parted company, I had to move out of her house. I didn’t have much stuff—I can fit my life into a bag. Rachel was away in New Zealand with the kids for a work-vacation, so the place was empty. It hit me hard, because I loved her, and I didn’t know if I was making the right decision. We didn’t break up because we had lost that love, we broke up because of circumstance. I needed to bear down and get even more focused for the future. I had just lost a year of my career, and the average length of a pro hockey career is five or six seasons. So possibly a fifth of my career. If you work for forty years in a profession, it’s like saying goodbye to eight of them. I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself at all, but I had a pretty damn strong sense of urgency to get back to the thing that gave me meaning: my game.

I rented a room in the Sunset Marquis in Hollywood, which is a rock ’n’ roll hotel with a very different LA style from the Chateau Marmont. It was a temporary stop until I found a house to buy.

I know—I’ve just said how tight money is and how worried I am about the future, but I had made the decision I was going to buy a house because I had to do something to give myself some stability. And there are now noises that we’ll be getting a settlement before the summer is out. The NHL can’t afford to blow two seasons. No one can. And owning property is an investment.

I have a budget of $800,000 and I’ve asked my broker to show me some homes in Laurel Canyon in the shimmering hills of West Hollywood. Laurel Canyon was made famous by the music scene of the 1970s with the Doors and Joni Mitchell and CSNY and Bob Dylan and all those who wanted to be just like them calling the place home. Laurel Canyon has its own trippy energy, perfumed by the incense burning from all the cool little cottages that dot the neighborhood.

What I got was a Spanish-style casa hanging over the Canyon, with a giant deck that overlooked the City of Angels. I loved it. I had already decided I was going to do the forty-minute drive to the Kings’ practice rink in El Segundo and the twenty-minute drive to Staples Center where we played our games. I mean, you have to drive everywhere in LA anyway, right? Luc Robitaille was the only other King who lived outside Manhattan Beach, and no King has ever lived in the hills of Laurel Canyon. I had a feeling my teammates would think I was trying to make some kind of statement—they lived within a six-block radius of each other.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.