Sean Avery to work at Vogue.

It appears that Rangers tuff guy Sean Avery is going to work at Vogue this summer. I wonder if this will come up on the ice in the next series. If I was Pens tough guy Georges Laraque I might mention it.

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.