Read this Wikipedia page.
Although Derek Boogaard wasn’t connected to any universities (he was a high school dropout), UD has to say that his story haunts her more than any of the university player biographies she’s read.
No doubt we’re in for more hideous details surrounding the suicide of Ohio State football player Kosta Karageorge, but for sheer fulsome horror, for the capacity to touch on virtually all killing aspects of a violent, out-of-control sports culture, the blighted life of this hockey enforcer is hard to top.
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There’s something about the brief dry chronology of the Wiki page that makes Boogaard’s rapid collapse and death that much more stark… You feel the inevitability of it, I suppose, his brisk unstoppable march to ruin, with so much against the guy: He was naive and mildly learning disabled; he was a hulking kid who’d been bullied and emerged from that himself a bully (see also Richie Incognito, and probably many others punching away on the front lines of university and professional sports); his big break came when a professional agent happened to be at the rink when Boogaard had his first violent breakdown on the ice, practically killing some of the players around him… whereupon the agent, recognizing a monster when he saw one, recruited him; bloodthirsty fans made him a god of gore; he treated his pain from injuries and surgeries, as well as from the anxiety he (and apparently all enforcers) felt as he anticipated one game after another in which he knew his worshippers would demand blood, with the oxycodone that team support staff reportedly dispensed like candy; he became an addict; he drank and partied hard (he came from a rough Saskatchewan background in which he would have hit the bottle and partied hard anyway — so add that to his hockey stuff); and of course his concussed and pummeled brain was beginning to give way, so he didn’t really have much fight left in him on the rink. In fact, friends say he began to act rather like a blank-faced zombie toward the end.
The rest involves a couple of failed rehab efforts, and then, at age 28, death from a mix of alcohol and oxycodone after a long night at the bars with friends.
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UD senses the same pathos of the big sweet dim baby, transformed by agents and fans and drugs and money into a weird amalgam of a hulk and a husk, in the emerging story of Kosta Karageorge.
April 12th, 2016 at 3:17PM
[…] Brandon Bourbon. It reminds her of Ohio State’s Kostas Karageorge’s suicide, and Derek Boogaard’s, and the suicides of some other super-macho way-young heroes of violent […]