“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 N.H.L. 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. They stopped at the Hi-Lo Motor Inn on the edge of Melfort and used the fax machine to send the note to the W.H.L. office in Calgary. Then they drove three hours back to Regina.

“Me and Brent talked all the way home about how we’d never seen anything like that before in our lives,” Ripplinger said.

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?

Image Derek was the oldest of four siblings. Credit... Boogaard Family

Derek Boogaard had outgrown his.

Learning His Future: His Fists

The Western Hockey League has 22 teams flung across western Canada and the northwestern United States. The players, ages 16 to 20, have their expenses paid, receive a small stipend for spending money and can earn scholarships to Canadian colleges.

Most harbor hopes of playing professionally. On a typical roster of two dozen, a few will advance to the National Hockey League. And in today’s N.H.L., about one of every five players once played in the Western Hockey League.

It is one of the three top junior leagues in Canada, the others based in Ontario and Quebec. In many regards, the W.H.L. is the toughest. Not only are franchises stretched 1,500 miles apart in some instances, making travel part of the teenage tribulation, but they also have produced some of hockey’s most notorious enforcers — from Tony Twist and Stu Grimson to Colton Orr and Steve MacIntyre. Veteran executives recall games where the only way to stop the brawls was to shut off the arena lights.

The teams are not affiliated with N.H.L. teams, so player development is less a goal than profit. Fighting, an accepted and popular part of the game, is seen as a way to attract fans.

Efforts to ban fighting in the N.H.L. have long been stymied, in part by the popularity and tradition of it in the junior and minor leagues. Web sites are devoted to the spectacle, often providing blow-by-blow descriptions, declaring winners and ranking the teenage fighters.

Boogaard stepped into this culture when he was 16. The unwritten rules were well established.

Both players must agree to the challenge. Gloves are off. Until a few years ago, helmets were removed as both a sign of toughness and consideration to the unprotected knuckles of the combatants. When the leagues made helmet removal illegal, players learned to delicately remove each other’s helmets before the fight began — a concoction of courtesy and showmanship. Players knowingly drifted to the center of the rink. Some, like professional wrestlers, paused to pose or fix their hair.

The reaction of the scouts that winter’s night in Melfort made it clear what to expect when Boogaard went to his first W.H.L. 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.”