Provide names of other journalists involved.
Reporter: John Branch Video: Shayla Harris Photography: Marcus Yam Others involved: — Joe Sexton: Editor — Jason Stallman: Editor — Josh Williams. Multimedia — Jackie Myint. Multimedia — Dave Rummel. Video senior producer — Justine Simons. Video senior producer — Becky Lebowitz-Hanger. Photography editor — Tom Bodkin. Design director — Wayne Kamidoi. Page design — Sam Manchester. Page design — Ann Leigh. Page design — John Otis. Transcription — Phil Coffin. Copy Editor — Victor Mather. Copy Editor — Andrew Devigal. Multimedia — Graham Roberts. Graphics — Joe Ward. Graphics — Andrew Kueneman. Web design
List date(s) this work was published or aired.
The articles were published in 2011 in the print version of The New York Times on Dec. 4, 5 and 6. They were published online, at nytimes.com, the preceding day.
Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.
On May 13, 2011, Derek Boogaard was found dead of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs and alcohol. He was 28. Boogaard, in his six seasons in the National Hockey League, had scored all of 3 goals. But then his job wasn’t to score, or, in truth, even to play very much. His job was to fight. Nightly, and bare fisted. He did that job well. And at great cost. John Branch of The New York Times spent six months exploring the life and death of Derek Boogaard – his childhood in rural Saskatchewan; his unlikely rise to the NHL; his fights and his injuries, his broken fingers and damaged brain, and the addiction to prescription drugs that helped kill him. The series was constructed with the very best, old school narrative raw materials: intrepid research (Branch got hold of 16 pages of handwritten notes Boogaard had scratched out recounting his conflicted boyhood love of hockey), extensive travel (thousands of miles crisscrossing western Canada), penetrating interviews (with family, friends, fighters, scientists), and blockbuster news (Boogaard’s brain, donated to researchers by his parents after his death, had evidence of a degenerative disease that, had Boogaard lived, likely would have condemned him to dementia by middle age.) – Branch showed how an awkwardly large but mild-mannered boy was indoctrinated into the hockey world of western Canada, where a kid lacking conventional hockey skills could carve a career path to the N.H.L. with his fists. And he then gave you this scene: Boogaard, 16 years old and his mouth wired shut after his jaw was broken in a fight, learning to cram food through an opening left by a missing tooth. – Later, after Boogaard had brawled his way to become the most feared fighter in the NHL, he had to deal with the psychological and physical toll his role had taken. Branch captured his hurt: Boogaard, at 6-foot-8, 260-pounds, reduced to asking a teammate to slip a pillow under his feet in their hotel room. – And as Boogaard’s concussions became numerous and his addiction took hold — his father determined he was able to have almost a dozen team doctors prescribe painkillers for him without any oversight — Branch painted him marooned in his $7000 a month Manhattan apartment, manic, lonely, desperate. Boogaard would, in a effort to manage his own need, stash limited numbers of pain killers in plastic Easter eggs, in what one Branch called “a one-man game of hide and seek.” – Finally, after Boogaard’s brain was cut out of his skull, Branch put you there as it arrived at a laboratory in Boston: “The brain was vibrantly pink and weighed 1,580 grams, or about 3 1-2 pounds. On a stainless steel table in the basement morgue, Dr. Ann McKee cleaved it in half, front to back, with a large knife. Much of one half was sliced into sheets about the width of sandwich bread.”
Explain types of documents, data or Internet resources used. Were FOI or public records act requests required? How did this affect the work?
No FOI requests were made. Branch relied on public records and documents provided by family and friends, including 16 pages of Boogaard’s handwritten notes and his medical records.
Explain types of human sources used.
Branch interviewed family, friends, teammates, coaches, league officials and medical officials. For the chapter on Boogaard’s brain, Branch conducted extensive interviews with the researchers at Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.
Results:
It’s still too early. The impact of this project will be felt over several years as hockey leagues around the world re-examine their policies on fighting.
Follow-up (if any). Have you run a correction or clarification on the report or has anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
No, no one has challenged the accuracy of any of the stories.
Advice to other journalists planning a similar story or project.
We were determined not to make this a story about a scientific condition, but about a person who had CTE. The key is to know the audience. We were not writing for scientists, but for a broad spectrum of readers– including, presumably, many who never heard of Derek Boogaard, the role of a hockey enforcer or the brain disease called CTE. We spent two days and more than 10,000 words painting the narrative picture of Derek Boogaard’s life, with little mention of what scientists might later learn about him. Our readers, we believe, were invested in the man and his life story. He was never seen as a “case” or a “specimen.” Once it was revealed in the final installment of the three-part series that Boogaard had CTE, and we described in detail just what CTE is, the news– while no surprise– resonated with readers. There is little doubt that readers walked away with a strong sense of who Derek Boogaard was and what CTE is. Many of those readers, surely, now have a face on a disease that they previously knew little about.