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Tie Domi

The Toughest Man On Ice

Meet Tie Domi: a good skater, a friendly guy, and hockey’s best enforcer. Just don’t call him a goon, or he’ll knock you on your ass.

On a cold night last January, the Toronto Maple Leafs skated onto the ice against the New Jersey Devils. It was a mid-season game of little importance; there wasn’t much to keep your eye on except for Krzysztof Oliwa, the Devils’ inexperienced but huge 235-pound Polish left wing. Oliwa was spending the season doing what many skill-impaired players in the NHL do: starting a lot of fights, spilling a decent amount of blood, and hoping to carve out a permanent niche for himself as an “enforcer.” The job of enforcer calls for being both unhesitatingly violent and jail-yard mean. It requires intimidating the other team’s players by getting in their faces and muttering poignant words of warning such as: “Watch your back, understand?” But on this particular winter night, young Oliwa would meet Toronto’s Tie Domi and learn a hard lesson about what being an enforcer really means.

Oliwa started the second period by skating menacingly close to the Maple Leafs’ bench, sending a message that they’d better steer clear. He finished off his visit with an ample serving of trash talk — a serious breach of hockey etiquette. A few minutes later, the 5’ 10" Domi skated over to the 6’ 5" Oliwa and said something the crowd couldn’t hear. He then promptly dropped his gloves and let loose a series of quick but brutal blows to the Pole’s head. When it was all over, Oliwa was bloody and shaken.

Domi is recounting the fight for me in graphic detail over dinner at a Toronto restaurant. He is eating chicken on a stick. “Is it scary,” I ask, “having to face off against guys the size of Oliwa for a living?” Domi looks insulted by the question; he scrunches up his inordinately large face and leans in close, looking me square in the eye. If he had come to the restaurant wearing gloves, he’d have dropped them by now.

So I backtrack and ask, “I mean, what did you do when you skated over to Oliwa?” With his game face still on, Domi replies, “What did I do? I said, ‘Hey, what the fuck are you doing — don’t even fucking come near my bench! Get the fuck out of here. Nobody talks to my bench! Nobody!” Quite an effective little speech, really.

The Evil Curse of Tie Domi Sports Illustrated denies it. ESPN pooh-poohs it. But Maxim has uncovered the awful truth: Tangle with Tie and your future is grim. On October 10, 1993, fans in Chicago roared as Darin Kimble traded punches with Domi. A mere five years later, Kimble was playing for the ultra-minor-league Shreveport Mudbugs and fighting Shawn Legault, a rookie with the Austin Ice Bats, at the Travis County Exposition Center. Attendance: 3,648. Although Domi was voted the Winnipeg Jets’ most popular player, they traded him to the Toronto Maple Leafs on April 7, 1995. Six months later, suffocating under mountains of debt, the Jets were forced to move the franchise to Arizona and change its name to the Phoenix Coyotes. Four months after he scrapped with Tie, John Kordic was cut by the Washington Capitals. The following year, he was released by the Nordiques after only 19 games and then charged with assaulting his fiancée, stripper Nancy Masse. On August 8, 1992, after ingesting alcohol, cocaine, and anabolic steroids and wrestling with nine police officers in his Quebec City motel room, Kordic died on the way to the hospital. After mixing it up with Domi in the ‘93-‘94 season, Enrico Ciccone found himself traded to the Tampa Bay Lightning, who were so consistently awful that even their coach, Jacques Demers, called them “a team of limited talent.” In 1994, Shawn Antoski brawled with Tie. On November 24, 1997, he suffered a skull fracture in a car accident, had a steel plate inserted in his head, and underwent months of rehab. One day his Doberman drank some Tidy Bowl, and while Antoski listened for a heartbeat, the dog kicked him in the head. “It felt like a golfer took a divot out of my head,” he said. “I had this huge dent.” At press time, Antoski was still recovering. — Charles Coxe

Call Him the Dominator

Tie Domi will never be the Ken Griffey, Jr., or the Tiger Woods or the Michael Jordan of hockey. He will never skate with the skill of Gretzky or chalk up a 50-goal season, like Mark Messier. His photograph will never hang in the Hockey Hall of Fame alongside that of Phil Esposito — and Tie Domi knows this better than anyone. Still, the man has amassed a huge fan base, and when he hits the ice — at home or away — the crowd goes nuts. He recently inked a long-term contract, a rarity for a tough guy: $1.36 million a year for the next five years.

Why the Domi mania? Look at his numbers: In his nine-year NHL career, the right winger has served a whopping 2,260 minutes in the penalty box (not counting this season’s many transgressions). That’s 37 hours of hard time! For every 10 minutes Domi was on the ice last year, he spent about 4.5 minutes in the box.

But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. In 1994, the Dominator, as he’s known to fans, fought Chicago’s Steve Smith with such fury that Smith’s leg broke in two places. A year later he knocked New York Ranger Ulf Samuelsson out cold with a single punch to the jaw, rocking him so solidly that Samuelsson’s eyes rolled back in his head before he fell to the ice. Last April, in a violent fight with Domi, Chicago Blackhawk Cam Russell hit his head on the ice with brutal force; he had to be carted off on a stretcher. The overwhelming guilt he felt about that, Domi tells me, almost made him quit the sport.

Yet despite the incident with Russell, Domi says last year was his best ever. He played in 80 games and logged a career high 365 penalty minutes, leaving him just seven minutes shy of the league’s first-place slot. He also chalked up 26 so-called fighting-major penalties for hand-to-hand combat. On top of all that, he managed four goals and 10 assists.

The Making of an Enforcer

Domi made a name for himself in 1992, with two brawls that hockey fans recall more vividly than they do who won the Stanley Cup that year. The first fight started when Domi, then 22 years old and playing for the Rangers, faced off against legendary Detroit Red Wings enforcer Bob Probert. Domi pulled Probert’s jersey over his head and thumped his face without mercy. When Probert went to the bench to have a deep cut above his eye patched, Domi hammed it up in front of the home crowd: He wrapped an imaginary heavyweight belt around his waist and did a memorable Hulk Hogan impersonation. To say that Probert was pissed would be to greatly understate the matter.

Domi vs. Probert was intense, but round two figured to be Armageddon. On rematch night at Madison Square Garden, scalpers got $800 a seat as thousands of crazed Ranger fans chanted for their champ: “Do-mi! Do-mi! Do-mi! Do-mi!” They didn’t have to wait long. Thirty-seven seconds into the game, Probert and Domi went at it. They grabbed each other’s jerseys and circled around in their own little mosh pit. The haymakers started soon after; within 10 seconds, Domi’s helmet flew off. Some 61 punches were thrown in 48 seconds, the majority by Probert. It was by all accounts one of the greatest fights in hockey history.

Domi had been beaten, but as he scraped himself off the ice, he turned to the crowd and flashed an eerie Jack Nicholson smile that seemed to say, “I kinda liked that.” The kid could take it from the best that hockey had to offer. The crowd howled, and for a fleeting sports moment, Tie Domi was an honest hero.

What’s Behind the Fighting?

At a practice rink on the outskirts of Toronto, Gus Cecchini and I wait for Domi to leave the locker room after an off-season scrimmage. Cecchini, an NYPD detective who, believe it or not, goes by the name of “Cheech,” is Domi’s best friend from the enforcer’s Ranger days. “Tie Domi is the kind of guy who will do anything for his friends,” Cheech says in thick Brooklynese. “We send my son to private school, which isn’t easy on a cop’s salary. And while I’m not the type of guy to take anything, Tie always wants to make sure we’re doing OK.”

Cheech is obviously talking his pal up for my benefit, but my guess is that he isn’t exaggerating much. If you watch enough hockey, you quickly see that Domi punches and pummels and swears not for the sheer joy of it, but out of fierce loyalty to his teammates. If you’re Tie Domi’s teammate, you’re his best friend. And that means you can skate with the warm, fuzzy feeling that if some goon even considers laying a finger on you, he’s going to have to deal with your enforcer, your own personal 200-pound human-dozer.

Domi’s been an enforcer for as long as he can remember. “It started when I was young,” he says. “I was a short kid, and I didn’t take any shit from anybody, ever, and so I got this reputation for not taking shit. I still don’t take shit from anybody, and I don’t let my team take any shit.” In summary, Tie Domi takes no shit. “Obviously, starting my career as a fighter helped me. And I’ll never change,” he says. “I know what got me here, and I know what’s going to keep me here. But people are finally realizing that I’m an all-around player, that I can play hockey, too.”

Where Tough Guys Sleep

One day Domi invites me to his house and introduces me to his wife, Leanne, whose very first hockey game featured the second fight with Probert. I ask her about Tie’s tough-guy rep. “At the games, fans always say things like ‘Tie, you gonna fight that guy tonight?’” she says. “I can tell that it bothers him sometimes, because he answers, ‘You know, you have to be able to skate, too.’ But that’s his job, and it puts the bread and butter on the table and pays the mortgage. When we first got married, I had a hard time watching the games, but now I critique him.” “Like how?” I ask. “He’ll come home and I’ll say, ‘Hey, why didn’t you hit that guy!’”

Maxim

Before I leave, Domi takes me on a tour of his basement, with its stocked bar, pool table, and big-screen TV. All four walls are covered with memorabilia: a Michael Jordan jersey, a Jordan shoe, a picture of Jordan and Domi in a golf cart. There’s Tie with Doug Flutie, Tie with Arnold Palmer, Tie with Bobby Orr. Then there’s a shot of the great Ryne Sandberg in a Cubs uniform; across the photograph is written “Tie Domi — a future hall of famer. Ha Ha.”

Tie works his way across the room toward one of his favorite photos. It’s of Domi with former teammate Teemu Selanne, the high-priced goal scorer whom the Winnipeg Jets hired Domi to protect. When I ask if anybody ever touched Selanne while Domi was there, the enforcer answers without cracking a smile, “If they did, they got hammered.” The photo was taken moments after Selanne set the NHL rookie record for goals scored. Domi provided the assist. It was the same season Winnipeg fans voted Domi most popular player. In the photo the fans are up out of their seats, cheering, while the team surrounds Selanne and Domi in celebration. “I’ll never make it into the hall of fame,” Tie Domi says, looking at the photograph. “But I’ll make it into the record books.”

John Galvin. The Toughest Man on Ice. Maxim. July 2000.

Enforcer: This book may be fiction but the story is amazing. The author makes sure that every encounter on the ice and behind closed doors is explained in pain-staking detail. The hockey jargon is perfect and the author's knowledge of the sport is both impressive and appreciated.

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