Puckhead.(The Talk of the Town)(Sean Avery)

Sean Avery, who plays left wing for the New York Rangers, is what hockey people call an agitator. His job, which seems to have no analogue in sports--or in any line of work, except maybe terrorism--is to annoy his opponents so intensely that they cannot resist retaliating. He goads foes into losing their focus and, in theory, the game. Every team in the National Hockey League has at least one agitator, but Avery may be the best, or the worst, of the current lot. His peers have voted him, by a wide margin, the most hated player in the league, and the dirtiest. In a milieu known for swallowed words and held tongues (to go with surreptitious elbows and deployable fists), hockey players occasionally open up on the subject of Sean Avery. As Gary Roberts, of the Pittsburgh Penguins, said of him, after a tussle earlier this season, for which Roberts received four penalty minutes and Avery got none, "He is an idiot."

Avery's more conventional provocation techniques, such as trash-talking, wife-slagging, face-rubbing, slew-footing, slashing, diving, and flopping, may irritate his adversaries even more on account of his unconventional off-ice persona. Not for Avery the typical prairie-boy self-effacement of the hockey man. He has said that he finds sports, and athletes, boring, and that he'd like to be an editor of a fashion magazine. (He's planning to do a summer internship at Vogue.) Unlike most hockey players, he sees nothing wrong with the fact that he likes to "smell nice occasionally." He has said that he prizes his black patent-leather Yves Saint Laurent high-tops, "a lovely cashmere throw from a friend who works at Calvin Klein," and his Philippe Starck machine-gun-shaped lamp ("It lets you know there's a man living in the house"). For a while, he wore black nail polish on one hand--"my fighting hand." He told one magazine, "Sometimes I'll wear a scarf to the game and my teammates have no idea what to do." He is a conspicuous dater of starlets, such as Elisha Cuthbert, and was recently linked, by rumor, to Mary-Kate Olsen, and, in error, to the alleged Manhattan madam Kristin Davis. He's sort of a puckhead's Dennis Rodman, except that there's more fox in his crazy. He does research on his opponents and tailors his intra-whistle banter accordingly. Avery is a skilled player, agitations aside, but not so skilled that it would explain how much better the Rangers do with him than without him. The discrepancy testifies to the genius of the idiot.

Last week, Avery made agitator history, in the third game of the ...