Sean Avery Taunted Dustin Brown About Lisp & Girlfriend

Brown lisps. He has lisped for as long as he can remember, although the speech therapy he went through as a fifth-grader helped him learn to control it. (The lisp tends to return when he is engaged in casual conversation or after, say, a puck has given him a fat lip.) But in dressing rooms where razzing is the lingua franca, the lisp made him an easy target early in his career. Sean Avery, an occasional linemate of Brown’s from 2003 to ’07, would insert the needle. “This was bullying, like you might see in high school,” says Ian Laperrière, the former Kings forward who now mentors young players in the Flyers organization.

The analogy is apt; Brown was still a teenager at the time. According to L.A. players and coaches from that era, Brown’s lisp was not Avery’s primary target. Avery also zeroed in on Brown’s girlfriend—now his wife—a slender, fresh-faced girl-next-door-type from their hometown of Ithaca, N.Y. Apparently Avery didn’t think she was glamorous enough to be the girlfriend of a hockey player in Hollywood. “I am not a trophy wife,” says Nicole Brown, who has been with her husband for almost a dozen years (and married to him for five). “By any means.”