Mavericks enforcer Carlyle Lewis came a long way to be a hit in Missouri

Four minutes into a late-October Missouri Mavericks game against the Wichita
Thunder, Wichita defenseman Jason Goulet mashes Mavericks winger Karl Sellan hard into the boards with a hit near his face. Sellan crumples to the ice for several seconds. The fans, at least the ones who aren’t still filing into the Independence Events Center at that moment, howl. It won’t be the hardest hit of this third game of the Mavericks’ season, but it dictates the way the rest of the night will go.

Eleven minutes later, Mavericks right wing Carlyle Lewis does what he gets paid to do. He skates onto the ice and zeroes in on Goulet rather than going for the puck. The two drop their gloves, gravitate toward the cartoon-horse logo at center ice and begin the first fight of Lewis’ 12th season of professional minor-league hockey.

Goulet is called “The Orangutan” for the unusually long arms on his 6-foot-5-inch frame. They allow him to hold an opponent away while punching. He lands solid blows to Lewis’ face while the Maverick throws wild punches and misses by inches. The linesmen, thinking the skirmish is winding down, close in to stop the fight. But before the officials can tear them apart, Lewis holds Goulet’s sweater and whips him to the left, causing Goulet to change his position and extending the fight.

Off the ice, the first thing you notice about Lewis is that his body sounds pained. His joints groan with noisy reminders of hundreds of Plexiglas-rattling checks and fistfights with other sub-NHL heavies. During conversations, he extends his action-figure legs and arms regularly and curls his fingers and toes in succession — movements that, together, sound like a brush fire.

The rest of his road-weary body hasn’t been spared. At just 32, Lewis has the face of a man who has thrown a lifetime’s worth of fists in small arenas in second-tier markets. The scar over his right eyebrow. The orbital around his right eye that still protrudes a bit — courtesy of a slap shot that sneaked under his visor during a hitch in a European league and broke the bone. The long knee-surgery scar on his left leg, where the muscle pulled away from the bone. Then there’s the 3-inch canyon on the inside of his right thigh.

“I hit a guy, and he fell back, and his skate came up and sliced me right on the leg,” he says. “That thing was open. It was just blood coming everywhere.”

But the enforcer can’t be concerned with vanity, and Lewis is the Mavericks’ enforcer: the tough guy, the goon. Any opposing player who smashes the team’s scorers, jaws too much from the bench or looks at him the wrong way can expect pain and soul-crushing humiliation through a series of swift punches to the head in front of thousands of jeering fans.

“I think there’s not a whole lot of guys in this league — there are a few — that want to go toe-to-toe with him,” Brent Thiessen, the team’s president and general manager, says.

There’s a good reason that Lewis has a reputation in the Central Hockey League (commonly referred to as an AA league). Lewis isn’t a fists-of-fury kind of fighter. Some guys, especially small players looking to find their roles on a team, tangle with opponents and throw as many quick, firecracker punches as they can. Lewis’ fists are more like bricks of C-4. As Lewis and his opponent orbit each other, Lewis bobs his head patiently, waiting for the chance to land an explosive face destroyer.

A career-defining example of his fighting prowess came January 9 this year during the Mavericks’ inaugural season. Lewis and Arizona Sundogs right wing Cedric Bernier circled for several seconds, each looking for an advantage. Bernier attempted to wrap up Lewis’ arms in his own, but Lewis broke free and slammed Bernier in the chin with an impossibly fast right uppercut. The Quebecer collapsed on the ice
unconscious, and slid like a dead man for a couple of feet before coming to rest against one of the referee’s legs. While Bernier stayed down on the ice, Lewis skated his familiar path to the penalty box, put his hands together and rested one cheek on them like a sleeping baby.

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“There was no planning,” he says, recalling the bout. “It was crazy. I had no idea how much people would get wrapped up in that. Fans loved it.”

The team loved it, too. Lewis was branded the Grim Sleeper, and his moniker and face were splashed across T-shirts and in team promotional videos almost instantly. With one punch, Lewis had found a level of stardom that had eluded him throughout his career playing in pockets of the world where hockey is followed less closely than Pop Warner football.

“There’s no question he’s our most popular player,” Scott Hillman, Mavericks head coach, says of his team’s fighter. Hillman knows firsthand Lewis’ usefulness in pitching hockey to a city that hasn’t supported an NHL franchise since 1976, plus the importance of keeping a guy like Lewis on the payroll. Hillman, a 5-foot-7-inch Ontario native, was a master puck distributor during eight years as a diminutive defenseman with the CHL’s Odessa Jackalopes, and he credits enforcers for protecting him.

“It extended my career two years for sure, because we brought in a guy like Lewie who could look after a guy like me,” Hillman says, recalling his teammate and fellow defenseman Jeff Ewasko. “It is important. Other teams are going to take less liberties.”

And Lewis is respected around the league for what he does. Kevin McClelland, the Thunder’s head coach and a ruffian on four Stanley Cup-champion Edmonton Oilers teams in the ’80s, says Lewis knows his job and does it well.

“He’s old-time hockey when it comes to fisticuffs,” McCelland says. “He challenges a guy, they fight, and it’s over with. He’s like most tough guys. He’s a gentleman.”

Lewis’ career of battering other men in small markets around the world began when he was 16. With his parents’ support, he escaped the family’s dairy farm in Middleton, Nova Scotia (population 1,800), to play for a club in Prince Edward Island across the Northumberland Strait. From there, he was drafted into the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, an institution that grooms 16- to 20-year-old players for the NHL and impresses onto their optimistic, youthful minds the plain realities of professional hockey. For Lewis, that meant being told he wasn’t star material.

“When I was 17, I wasn’t as skilled as some of the other guys,” he says. “So if I wanted to stay on the team and play, I had to find my niche, my role, what I needed to do.” Lewis the enforcer was minted, and it was a role that he embraced, topping 300 penalty minutes in each of his final three seasons in the league.

Lewis aged out of the QMJHL and wasn’t drafted by an NHL team. But his penchant for physical play caught some attention. The NHL’s New Jersey Devils signed him and sent him to the Albany River Rats, the team’s affiliate in the top-tier minor-league American Hockey League. In two-plus seasons with the River Rats, Lewis rarely flashed offensive skills (two goals and nine assists in 153 games). Instead, his signature continued to be piling up penalty minutes.

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He says the Devils told him that his place was secure. Following Tommy John surgery on his elbow, though, Lewis wasn’t called back to Albany.

Front-office double talk and badly bruised knuckles became Lewis’ traveling companions as he ascended and descended the minors.

He signed a two-way contract (which allowed the club to send him to lower-level affiliates at reduced pay) with the Hamilton Bulldogs, a Montreal Canadiens AHL affiliate, but he was assigned to the lower-level East Coast Hockey League’s Cottonmouths, in Columbus, Georgia.

After one impressive season adding 25 points to his 224 penalty minutes down south, Lewis thought that he had caught the break he needed to get back to the AHL. Claude Julien, the Bulldogs’ head coach, recognized Lewis as an asset.

“He liked me,” Lewis says. “He said, ‘I guarantee I’m going to call you back up because I want you to play up here this year,'” Lewis recalls. “Probably two months later, the Montreal Canadiens fired their coach, and they brought him up to the NHL as coach.” Julien’s promotion meant that Lewis’ demotion became permanent. “I was just like, God, the world is against me.”

Things looked good for Lewis again after two more years in the ECHL, when the Washington Capitals invited him to work out for them.

“They ended up giving me a contract with their AHL team in Portland, Maine. So I went there to training camp after three years not being in the AHL,” he says, still beaming at his ability to hustle and hit his way back up to the top of the minors. But an NHL labor dispute soon disrupted the sport’s professional hierarchy at every level.

“That was the year of the NHL lockout,” he says. “The Washington Capitals sent some of their young kids — first-, second-year guys — since they couldn’t play in the NHL … down to the American League to stay in shape. I got sent down to the ECHL.

“Another year of bad breaks,” he adds. “I was like, I finally get to the AHL after three years —” His voice trails off at the memory. But he knows his experiences haven’t been unique. “There’s thousands of those stories every day,” he says.

After a season playing in Connecticut for the Danbury Trashers, whose owner was indicted on federal racketeering charges in 2006 (“It was like The Sopranos,” Lewis says), Lewis looked for opportunities overseas. He and two former teammates signed with HC Bolzano, a club in Italy’s upper-tier league.

“They don’t do a lot of fighting and physical play there,” Lewis says. “They’re more skilled. It’s more of a finesse game.”

He didn’t have to punch out opponents every night over there. But when he did, he usually had the advantage.

There was, for example, the game against Bolzano’s rival club from Milan — and the fight between Lewis and Milan player Michele Strazzabosco. It has been viewed thousands of times on YouTube, and Lewis says it’s one of the most memorable of his 200-some fights.

“He had actually been over to the Buffalo Sabres camp that season and got sent back,” Lewis says of Strazzabosco. “Everybody was scared. They thought he was a big tough guy. He was acting all tough, intimidating guys that are, like, 5-foot-9. You get suspended for fighting over there, so I was just holding him, and our coach was just like, ‘Yeah, go ahead — do it.’ He didn’t care at that point. He was like, ‘I’ll pay your fine, just go! Just go!'”

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The Canadian, still on the bench, began pummeling Strazzabosco’s head with rapid right hooks. When Strazzabosco staggered just out of Lewis’ reach, Lewis leaped over the board and continued pounding away on his opponent’s skull and pride.

“It was pretty funny. Had to go over the bench, the whole thing,” he says, laughing at the memory. The Milan fans were not pleased to see their tough guy rendered pathetic.

“They were throwing coins — euro coins — at me, cell phones, lighters. It was pretty funny. We picked up some of the cell phones and, driving back to Bolzano, we called home back to North America on them. So the joke was on them.”

After Italy, Lewis logged two seasons in the perpetually fledgling Elite Ice Hockey League in the United Kingdom. Skills are appreciated there, he says, but fights are adored.

“The people are just tough. They’re hard people,” Lewis says of British hockey fans. “Those guys, they love to sit there and pound their pints of beer. They get hammered and scream and go crazy. They would rather see a fight and blood than see someone score a nice goal. As long as you have a great fight that night, the fans would love it. They’d want to shake your hand after.”

Three years of the European game and uncertainty about how much longer he would be playing made Lewis crave North America, especially Columbus, Georgia, which he had adopted as his offseason home. “Some days, it’s raining, cloudy, dark and dreary all the time,” he says of the U.K. “You’re looking out your window at three o’clock, and it’s raining and coming down sideways, and you’re just like, What the hell am I doing here?”

He made some calls, and his old coach at the Cottonmouths got him in touch with Hillman, who was preparing to coach the expansion Mavericks’ first season. A couple of weeks after talking with Hillman, Lewis says, his contract was done, and he was on the team.

In Independence, the Grim Sleeper has job security. Hillman says he is one of the few players whose roster spot is guaranteed. Still, middle age in the CHL comes with more mundane career hiccups than Lewis endured in his prime.

During training camp, the team moved a scrimmage to Centerpoint Community Ice, a rink attached to the Independence Events Center, while stagehands prepared the arena for a Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper concert. The 30 men competing for 19 roster spots — with an average salary of $500 a week — knew that fanning on a slap shot or making a sloppy pass could wash them out of the league. Unproven players needed to display skills that would stay in Hillman’s mind. They skated with purpose and tried to hold onto the puck with flashy stick handling.

And, as Lewis did 15 years ago, the guys with less finesse showed their worth by hitting. A few short fights broke out, with would-be teammates swapping jabs. “They know camp is short,” Hillman said as he watched.

As the players exhausted themselves showing off for Hillman, a clump of anxious toddlers and grade-school kids assembled at the entrance to the ice, uninterested in the action on the rink. Fawning parents filled the bleachers, and at 6 p.m. sharp, Hillman ushered his boys to the dressing room. It was the children’s turn, and they wobbled fast onto the ice for skating lessons.

Fans cheer louder for Lewis when he fights rather than when he scores. But besides the volume, there is a noticeable difference when fans cheer for aggression instead of offense. The shouting and screaming take on a personal and hostile tone. When gloves are chucked to the ice, the burden of civility falls with them.

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Swinging Goulet off balance gives Lewis a half-second window to strike. He extends his right arm as far back as he can, then thrashes at the side of Goulet’s head, sending him to his knees. Lewis whacks him again in the head before Goulet pulls him down to the ice. The linesmen pounce on them, in effect awarding Lewis the victory.

Every fan in the arena — frustrated office workers, high school girls, homemakers, beer-soaked middle-aged men — gets a vicarious thrill when Lewis climbs up from the ice and pumps his punching fist into the air as he is escorted to the locker room, and the crowd, not a sellout, gets even louder. “The fans here love it,” Lewis says. “They love seeing the physical game. They love to see some fights.”

He’s right. Even the most hockey-minded fans say Lewis’ fights are some of their favorite moments of Mavericks’ games.

Watching the team practice during training camp, a few Mavericks fans with nothing better to do on a weekday morning discussed a CHL preseason game in Colorado that got so violent in the final period, one team left. “Ten [fights] is too many,” says Kris Grimes, president of the Wranglers, the team’s fan club. Two or three scraps a night, he says — that’s just right.

Part of what makes Lewis an icon for fans is that he makes a spectacle of his fights. In a March tilt against an Odessa player, Lewis tore the name patch off his opponent’s jersey and tossed it aside like a piece of trash. During a February bout with the Tulsa Oilers’ Thomas Harrison, Lewis looked bored after his successive punches left Harrison dazed but unwilling to go down. Finally, Lewis shoved him over and jumped on him.

Years of propping up struggling hockey clubs with theatrical mayhem, though, have begun to wear on Lewis.

“Last year … there were some games that we got outmanned a little bit, outsized, a little bit more physical on the other side of the puck,” Thiessen, the general manager, says. He and Hillman made a point during the offseason to surround Lewis with more threatening teammates than he played with last year.

“What you see out there now is a team that’s going to give a guy like Carlyle Lewis a lot more support,” Thiessen says.

At 32, Lewis is the oldest man on the Mavericks, and he likes what he sees. “I think we got a couple more young kids that like to play physical, so [they can] take a little workload off me. Spread it out a little bit,” he says.

So far this season, the plan is working. In the first game, Nathan O’Nabigon, one of his new teammates, hurt his hand in a fight. And there were two more fights in the game against the Thunder.

But a team shift to muscle by committee won’t put retirement on Lewis’ mind.

“Right from when I was kid, I wanted to play hockey — of course, in the NHL, but I didn’t get to realize that dream,” he says. “But I’m still playing and having a good time doing it.”

Judging by the excited way he talks about his first fight of the season, Lewis might play until he needs to push a walker on the ice.

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“Good to get the first one out of the way,” Lewis says after the game, as the Mavericks rush to pack their duffel bags and pillows for a bus ride to Mississippi for the season’s fourth game.

“We had fought a couple of years ago in England,” he says of Goulet. “I think we both knew we were going to fight each other [tonight]. We were going to fight earlier, but we decided to wait a few more shifts, and then wait for the right time to get it done.”

He raises his chin, revealing bright-red scratch marks. “He needs to cut his fingernails,” he says, then laughs. “Maybe I’m going to grow mine for next time.”

Before the season began, in the empty concourse of the Independence Events Center, Lewis had described his original feelings about playing professional hockey.

“I remember back when I was 21 or 22, sitting in the locker room with guys that were 32, like I am now. I was like, God, they’re old,” he said. “I was like, Man, I’ll never play until I’m that old. I used to say, I’ll play three, four years. If I don’t make it to the NHL, I’m going to hang ’em up and get a real job.”

Other than returning to Columbus, Georgia, and training to be a firefighter, Lewis doesn’t have a career in mind after hockey. But with post-fight adrenaline pulsing through his veins after the first fight of his season, Lewis doesn’t sound like a man looking for a master plan.

“Every time you win, I love it,” he says. “There’s nothing fun about getting punched in the face every day, but it’s a fun job. Beats sitting in an office, typing on a keyboard. Going out, get to hit people, have people cheer about it. It’s a good time.”