John Branch > Quotes

“Most of the physical pain was hidden, but some could be seen in the dazed expressions, the lost teeth, the bleeding faces. The emotional toll, the stress, the world, the expectations was masked behind a charade of showmanship and a false display of fearlessness. Like most enforcers, Derek never saw any of that coming, the constancy of pain and the coldcocking of emotion.”
― John Branch, Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

“What Derek could not comprehend was the cumlative damage in his brain, the tau proteins gathering in tiny brown spots in his pink frontal lobe and other recesses of his mind, strangling the cells, one subconcussive blow at a time.”
― John Branch, Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

“Players are shaped into puzzle pieces that fit with all the others. A boy is stripped to a set of skills at the whim of coaches and scouts. To keep playing hockey, do more of this and less of that. The untalented and undedicated are discarded, swept away at the end of each season. Survivors plug away, baited by hope.”
― John Branch, Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

“When You Get to Know a Fellow,” the Edgar Guest poem.”
― John Branch, The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family in the New West

“Derek Boogaard did not have to fight. This time, all he had to do was skate onto the ice. He could keep his thickly padded gloves on his hands, rather than theatrically flick them aside. he did not have to curl his mangled fingers into fists and raise them with malicious intent. Instead of dropping his stick, he could hold on to it with two hands as if he intended to scramble for the puck and shoot it into the net, just like all the other players, just as did as a boy.”
― John Branch, Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

“Four years after this night, he would be a millionaire living alone in a 33rd-floor condominium overlooking Central Park in New York City, a player for the famed New York Rangers, given nothing less than everything he had ever wanted and silently longing for something else.”
― John Branch, Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

“Derek’s center of gravity rested low, in his thick thighs and massive seat, more like a speed skater or a cyclist than a hockey star.”
― John Branch, Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard