Editor’s note: Over six months, The New York Times examined the life and death of the professional hockey player Derek Boogaard, who rose to fame as one of the sport’s most feared fighters before dying at age 28 on May 13. This article, the first of a three-part series, revisits Boogaard’s childhood in the rugged youth and junior leagues of western Canada and his progression from physically awkward boy to renowned brawler on the ice.

Derek Boogaard was scared. He did not know whom he would fight, just that he must. Opportunity and obligation had collided, the way they can in hockey.

His father bought a program the night before. Boogaard scanned the roster, checking heights and weights. He later recalled that he barely slept.

A trainer in the dressing room offered scouting reports. As Boogaard taped his stick in the hallway of the rink in Regina, Saskatchewan, he was approached by one of the few players bigger than he was. Boogaard had never seen him before. He did not know his name.

“I’m going to kill you,” the player said.

The scrimmage began. A coach tapped Boogaard on the shoulder. Boogaard knew what it meant. He clambered over the waist-high wall and onto the ice.

He felt a tug on the back of his jersey. It was time.

The players flicked the padded gloves from their hands. They removed the helmets from their heads. They raised their fists and circled each other. They knew the choreography that precedes the violence.

Boogaard took a swing with his long right arm. His fist smacked the opponent’s face and broke his nose. Coaches and scouts laughed as they congratulated Boogaard.

He was 16.

Boogaard was exhilarated, exhausted, relieved. Maybe the fear was extinguished, but it always came back, like the flame of a trick candle. One fight ended, another awaited. It was a cycle that commanded the rest of his life.

There is no athlete quite like the hockey enforcer, a man and a role viewed alternately as noble and barbaric, necessary and regrettable. Like so many Canadian boys, Boogaard wanted to reach the National Hockey League on the glory of goals. That dream ended early, as it usually does, and no one had to tell him.

But big-time hockey has a unique side entrance. Boogaard could fight his way there with his bare knuckles, his stick dropped, the game paused and the crowd on its feet. And he did, all the way until he became the Boogeyman, the NHL’s most fearsome fighter, a caricature of a hockey goon rising nearly 7 feet in his skates.

Over six seasons in the NHL, Boogaard accrued three goals and 589 minutes in penalties and a contract paying him $1.6 million a year.

On May 13, his brothers found him dead of an accidental overdose in his Minneapolis apartment. Boogaard was 28. His ashes, taking up two boxes instead of the usual one, rest in a cabinet at his mother’s house in Regina. His brain, however, was removed before the cremation so that it could be examined by scientists.

Boogaard rarely complained about the toll — the crumpled and broken hands, the aching back and the concussions that nobody cared to count. But those who believe Boogaard loved to fight have it wrong. He loved what it brought: a continuation of an unlikely hockey career. And he loved what it meant: vengeance against a lifetime of perceived doubters and the gratitude of teammates glad that he would do a job they could not imagine.

He did not acknowledge the damage to his brain, the changes in his personality, even the addictions that ultimately killed him in the prime of his career. If he did recognize the toll, he dismissed it as the mere cost of getting everything he ever wanted.

The biggest kid, but no bully

There were times, as a boy, that Derek Boogaard’s skates broke, the rivets attaching the blades giving way under his heft. His awkward size and movement led to teases from teammates and taunts from fans. He heard the whispers of parents saying that this oversize boy — too big, too clumsy — had no rightful place on the team.

Boogaard never fully escaped such indignities. But there was one place where he could reliably get away.

Youth hockey in western Canada is a perpetual series of long drives across dark and icy landscapes. For Boogaard, that often meant riding shotgun in his father’s police car.

“I think the best part of playing hockey for ages 3 until 16 was the little road trips with dad,” Boogaard handwrote a few years ago, part of 16 pages of notes found in his New York apartment after his death.

Derek Boogaard was born on June 23, 1982. He was the first of four children of Len and Joanne Boogaard, three boys then a girl, spaced evenly two years apart.

Len Boogaard, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, mostly worked his beats in small towns on the Saskatchewan prairie. RCMP policy dictated a move every few years so that familiarity in one town did not breed comfort or corruption. It cast his family, like those of other officers who are part of the sprawling Canadian carousel of small-town law enforcement, into roles as perpetual outsiders.

No one was more affected than Derek, who spent a childhood trying to fit in. The biggest kid in class, shy and without many friends, Boogaard was often tagged as a troublemaker and dismissed as a distraction. A grade school teacher, the family said, routinely relegated Boogaard to a closet.

Boogaard had a restless, inquisitive mind, but he struggled to follow directions. He labored through reading assignments. On an application for a hockey team in ninth grade, the Boogaards said that Derek had an average grade of 65 percent. They also noted that he was 6 feet 4 inches and 210 pounds.

He was hardly a bully. Paradoxically, he was picked on largely because he was so big. At age 11, after another family move, he was quickly challenged to a schoolyard fight by a boy named Evan Folden, who considered himself king of the school jocks.

Boogaard won his first fight. He bloodied Folden’s nose.

He was continually targeted by older kids and challenged by classmates wanting to build a reputation. Even his younger brother Ryan and Ryan’s posse of friends ganged up on him, like Lilliputians on Gulliver.

The family feared for Boogaard’s safety because he often acted without considering the outcome. He once moved a friend’s new trampoline close to the garage, climbed to the roof and belly-flopped onto the canvas. The springs broke, the frame collapsed and Boogaard hit the ground with a thud, bruising his ribs.

“There were some cognitive issues and behavioral issues that made it difficult, as well, trying to understand what he was doing sometimes,” Len Boogaard said. “He would do stuff and he wouldn’t appear to know the consequences of what he was doing — or why he was doing it, what sort of impact it would have on him or other people around him.”

The family was determined to provide positive reinforcement. Hockey was one way.

“It’s something that he really enjoyed to do,” Joanne Boogaard said. “And because he struggled so much in school, we bent over backwards to give him every opportunity that you could for him to do what he liked to do.”

Floyd Halcro, a coach who helped talk Boogaard into playing after he had quit hockey at age 14, heard all the concerns, from parents of teammates and opponents alike.

“He would get penalties that were not, in any way, shape or form, his fault,” Halcro said. “I’m 5 foot 9, and a little guy my size would take a run at Derek and run into his elbow, and the refs would give him a penalty. He got so many penalties because he was 6 foot 3, 6 foot 4 at that age. And he was actually picked on by other teams, by other referees, other communities, simply because of his size. Derek would certainly stick up for the team, he would stick up for his teammates, but wasn’t mean at all.”

That is what made one particular episode so memorable at the old rink at the corner of Stovel Avenue and Manitoba Street.

Exactly what happened that winter’s night has been left to the rusty memories of the few dozen in attendance. This much is clear: Melfort was losing badly, and 15-year-old Derek Boogaard was suddenly inside the other team’s bench, swinging away at opposing players.

“It felt like I had a force feild on me,” Boogaard wrote. (His notes had occasional misspellings.)

Players scattered like spooked cats, fleeing over the wall or through the open gates.

“He had gone ballistic,” Len Boogaard said. “It was something I hadn’t seen before.”

Eventually subdued and sent to the dressing room, Boogaard re-emerged in his street clothes. He sidled up to his seething father, who was dressed in his police uniform.

“Dad just kinda asked me what the (expletive) are you doing?” Boogaard wrote. “So I stood by him for the rest of the game.”

Len Boogaard nodded toward the few unfamiliar faces in the bleachers. There were about 10 scouts from teams in the Western Hockey League, a junior league that is a primary gateway to the NHL. Among them were two men representing the Regina Pats — the chief scout, Todd Ripplinger, and the general manager, Brent Parker.

“All the Western League scouts’ jaws are down like this,” Parker said. His mouth fell open at the memory.

Ripplinger and Parker scribbled a note saying that the Regina Pats wanted to add Derek Boogaard to their roster.

Ripplinger arranged to visit the Boogaard family a few days later. Boogaard sheepishly made just one request: Could the Pats provide some extra-large hockey shorts?

Derek Boogaard had outgrown his.

Learning his future: his fists

The reaction of the scouts that winter’s night in Melfort made it clear what to expect when Boogaard went to his first WHL training camp in Regina in the fall. If Boogaard wanted to advance in hockey, he would need his fists.

“He knew,” Ripplinger said. “He was a smart guy. He knew he wasn’t going to be good enough to make it on skills alone, and he used his size to his advantage. I remember him at 16 years old, pushing weights and boxing and stuff like that. He knew his job.”

Boogaard’s first fight was the one-punch nose-breaking knockdown of the reigning tough kid during Regina’s first team scrimmage. But Boogaard, seen as a fighter, not a player, played little during the preseason. Finally, he was told he would play one night in Moose Jaw, against the Pats’ primary rival.

The family drove four hours from Melfort. Ryan Boogaard, two years younger, researched WHL fighters, a brotherly scouting service that continued through Boogaard’s career. He warned Boogaard of a player named Kevin Lapp, rated as the league’s No. 2 fighter. Lapp was nearly 20. Boogaard was 16.

Moments into Boogaard’s first shift, Lapp asked if he was ready. Boogaard said he was. He was not.

He heard the older players in the back of the bus making fun of him on the way home. The next day, Boogaard was reassigned to a lower-division team in Regina.

He later lashed out at the coach in the hallway and quit. Joanne Boogaard came from Saskatchewan to retrieve him. She drove him eight hours home.

“For your son to cry halfway from Calgary to Regina, just to be beside himself with, ‘Why does this have to happen?’ ” Joanne Boogaard said. “All he wants to do is play. All he wanted was to have his fair share, to show people.”

Boogaard thought his hockey career was over. His parents were divorcing. Len Boogaard was reassigned to Regina, the provincial capital. Joanne Boogaard, a Regina native, moved from Melfort, too. Derek Boogaard was failing classes at his new high school. The family worried about the people he hung around.

By fall 1999, the 17-year-old Boogaard had grown a few more inches, to 6-7. The Regina Pats wanted him back in training camp. Desperate to prove himself, he fought teammates 12 times in four scrimmages.

Called into the coach’s office one day, he thought he would be cut from the team. Instead, he was told he would play that night against the Kelowna Rockets.

Kelowna featured a 6-7 enforcer named Mitch Fritz. Ryan Boogaard provided the scouting report. Fritz had an overhand punch that reminded the Boogaards of the villainous ape in the Donkey Kong video game.

Fritz won. Boogaard was traded. There is not much use for an enforcer who loses fights.

Struggling with everything

Prince George, British Columbia, where Boogaard had been dealt, was curious to meet its new teenage enforcer, but not quite prepared. Boogaard’s jersey had to have extra bands of cloth sewn to the bottom and at the end of the sleeves.

After his first practice with the Prince George Cougars, Boogaard met with the team’s general manager, Daryl Lubiniecki.

“If you win a few fights in this town you could run for mayor,” Lubiniecki said.

“It was a very long year for me,” Boogaard wrote. “I struggled with everything it seemed.”

Boogaard was hardly a model citizen. He quietly rejected authority figures — teachers, coaches, host families — who treated him with what he sensed was distrust. He disobeyed rules, particularly curfews, and rotated through several families. He never completed 10th grade.

“He was a boy in a man’s body,” said Dallas Thompson, then an assistant coach for Prince George. “Everything was in a hurry. He knew what he wanted to do: He wanted to play in the NHL. A lot of things, like school and growing up, got accelerated a bit, and I think it overwhelmed him at times.”

Boogaard ultimately found refuge at the home of Mike and Caren Tobin, owners of a Prince George jewelry store and longtime hosts for the Cougars. Boogaard trailed a teammate to their house and never wanted to leave.

Boogaard felt an instant kinship with Mike Tobin — an affable man who treated Boogaard less like a son than a little brother, who did not finish school but built a successful business, who drove nice cars and had a stately home on the edge of town.

Boogaard, with a backlog of frustrations, wanted to quit during training camp in 2000. He was 18. He called his father to tell him. He told his teammates he had a plane ticket home. Tobin ultimately persuaded him to stay.

And, suddenly, Boogaard started to win fights.

“His first year in the WHL, I think, it was mostly adjusting to his frame, not knowing how to use his reach,” Ryan Boogaard said. “I think he felt more comfortable with that frame in his second year in the WHL, and he did a lot better.”

The 2001 NHL draft began on June 23, Boogaard’s 19th birthday. Now of legal drinking age, he spent the night mostly at the Iron Horse Bar in Prince George with a couple of friends.

The next day, the phone rang at Joanne Boogaard’s house in Regina. It was Tommy Thompson, then the chief scout of the Minnesota Wild.

“I told her I was calling from the Minnesota Wild and that we had drafted Derek,” Thompson said. “She clearly was not expecting this call. She said he was already on a team, in Prince George. I said, ‘No, the NHL draft.’ She said: ‘NHL? You’ve got to be kidding.’ ”

Caren Tobin answered the ringing telephone in Prince George moments later. She ran upstairs to the bedroom where Boogaard was sleeping. She pounded on the door. Boogaard answered in grunts and asked her to take a message. She coaxed him out of bed and downstairs to the phone.

“In typical Derek style, he goes, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, OK, yeah, OK, thanks,’ ” Tobin recalled. With little emotion, he hung up and said he was drafted by the Wild in the seventh round, No. 202 overall. The Tobins screamed in excitement.

Boogaard said he was going back to bed. He had a headache.

A month later, he was in St. Paul, home of the Wild. An arena worker let him into the team dressing room. For the first time, he put on an NHL uniform.

And it fit.