The Game (19 page)
Hah hah hah.
Another ball and it’s three-and-two. Readying himself, he stepped toward the next pitch, then held up in time, the catcher short-hopping the ball out of the dirt. Lemaire started for first base. “Strike three!” (t)he umpire said.
Lemaire swung around, his squinting eyes flying open. On the bench, we began to laugh.
“Attaboy, Co. That’s the start we needed.”
Hah hah hah.
He said nothing, and turned and walked back to the bench. That twinkly face, the one that always collapsed and crinkled, now tightened and ground out words we could scarcely hear.
“It was low,” he said.
The grin has left his face, his quarter flips through the air, hits, bounces, and stops just short of the curb. There is a loud yell. Shutt and Lapointe dance up and down screaming insults. Lemaire says nothing, just pumps his right arm at his side as he does when he scores a goal, and walks to the curb to collect his money. On a team of experienced, distinguished big-game players, no one is a better big-game player than Lemaire. It’s his face that fools you.
A few minutes later, the bus driver sounds his horn and it is time to go. Everyone starts for the bus, except Connor. It has been a hard year for Connor. A first-round pick the year the Flyers won their first Stanley Cup, he went instead to the WHA, where he played until this season. But though he arrived to considerable expectations, slowly it has become clear that he lacks the skating and puck-handling skills necessary to be a regular, yet needs to be a regular to make his tough, team-oriented game work. So, unhappily between stools, he plays infrequently, even less than he might otherwise because of a series of quirky illnesses and injuries that by now seem to us as if they can only happen to him. He seems genuinely star-crossed this season, not trag-ically, for, loose and friendly like an ambling cowboy, he seems always able to find the funny side of things.
With everyone else walking to the bus, Connor finally has his chance. Laughing, he yells after those who beat him so mercilessly,
“Ali hah, I’m not gonna lose this time,” and taking a quarter from his pocket, he flips it towards the curb. The quarter hits, bounces, and rolls in a long, slow arc, disappearing down a drain.
Lapointe sits down in his right front seat, Lambert beside him, where until a few years ago Pete Mahovlich sat. Across from them, the seat remains empty as it has for most of the year, as Cournoyer’s back has kept him out of all but a few games. I walk towards the rear of the bus and, just past halfway, turn in to the left, in front of where Jimmy Roberts sat until he was traded two years ago. I sit alone. Others come onto the bus turning in right or left, apparently at random. But nothing is random. Just as it is in the dressing room, we each have a seat that is ours, that is no less ours because once, often many years ago, we assigned it to ourselves.
Like anything else about a team, where we sit on a bus is part of a routine, automatic and unnoticed unless the routine is broken. As so much of our life seems random and inexplicable to us—goalposts, or unseen saves, a bouncing puck, a three-goal game each part of our routine gets associated with good times and bad, and becomes superstition. So we sit where we do because if we didn’t, we might sit in a scat important to someone else. And sitting where we do as much as we do, gradually where we sit becomes important to us. This has been my seat for seven years, and if someone wants to talk to me, he can come here and sit next to me.
At training camp, and the few times each year when injuries bring two or three new players to the team, it can be a problem. For new players, unfamiliar with our habits, sit anywhere, and one person in the wrong seat means someone else in the wrong seat until a simple chain of confusion becomes a mess. While most of us hover near our occupied seats wondering what to do and where to go, not quite willing to admit that a particular seat matters to us, someone will usually come along and say something—“Hey, get the fuck outa my seat”—to straighten out the problem. Over time, the rest of us have simply learned not to make that mistake. If someone momentarily forgets, we remind him—“Hey, don’t change the luck”—and he will move. He knows that if he doesn’t, and we lose, it’s his fault.
The bus is quiet but comfortable. Preoccupied with other things, we don’t notice its silence. A few minutes later, gradually aware of it, we become self-conscious and uncomfortable, and make some noise, but still it is only conversation between seat partners or across aisles, nothing that can be heard more than a row or two away. Mostly we say nothing, because at times such as this, talk can seem an annoying distraction, taking us ahead in time, suspending our mood until it drops us abruptly closer to the game than we are prepared for. Only a few who need to talk as spillover for tensions that build too high do so, because anything too much, too loud, unrelated to the Bruins or to us, can and will be misconstrued as someone not thinking about the game, and not ready to play. We know that at the back, Bowman and Ruel watch and listen, noticing nothing until four hours, four days, four weeks from now when we lose, then remembering everything that happened in between.
The bus turns onto Causeway Street under the permanent shade and grime of the meccano-like elevated “Green Line” of the MBTA.
On one side of the street are burger joints and shabby bars; on the other is a huge brick structure joined on the outside, divided inside into the derelict Hotel Madison, North Station (of the Boston and Maine Railroad), and Boston Garden. In front of the Madison, a tat-tered, weathered man, maybe forty, maybe sixty, staggers along the sidewalk, here and there raising a brown paper bag to his face and tipping it back. Stopped by traffic, we sit and watch. Finally tipping it back too far, he loses his balance and stumbles to the sidewalk. “Hey, must be an old goalie,” a voice shouts, and everyone laughs. Several times a season, a spaced-out face singing in an airport, a patron passed out in a bar, someone in loud conversation with himself, anyone whose mental, physical, or emotional state seems the slightest bit shaky, it’s always the same thing: “Must be an old goalie.”
I have always been a goalie. I became one long enough ago, before others’ memories and reasons intruded on my own, that I can no longer remember why I did, but if I had to guess, it was because of Dave. Almost six years older, he started playing goal before I was old enough to play any position, so by the time I was six and ready to play, there was a set of used and discarded equipment that awaited me—that and an older brother I always tried to emulate.
I have mostly vague recollections of being a goalie at that time. I remember the spectacular feeling of splitting and sprawling on pavement or ice, and feeling that there was something somehow noble and sympathetic about having bruises and occasional cuts, especially if they came, as they did, from only a tennis ball. But if I have one clear image that remains, it is that of a goalie, his right knee on the ice, his left leg extended in a half splits, his left arm stretching for the top corner, and, resting indifferently in his catching glove, a round black puck.
It was the posed position of NHL goalies for promotional photos and hockey cards at the time and it was a position we tried to re-enact as often as we could in backyard games. There was something that looked and felt distinctly major league about a shot “raised” that high, and about a clean, precise movement into space to intercept it.
Coming as it did without rebound, it allowed us to freeze the position as if in a photo, extending the moment, letting our feelings catch up to the play, giving us time to step outside ourselves and see what we had done. In school, or at home, with pencil and paper, sometimes thinking of what I was doing, more often just mindlessly doodling, I would draw pictures of goalies, not much more than stick figures really, but fleshed out with parallel lines, and always in that same catching position. Each year when my father arranged for a photographer to take pictures for our family’s Christmas card, as Dave and I readied ourselves in our nets, the shooter was told to shoot high to the glove side, that we had rehearsed the rest.
To catch a puck or a ball—it was the great joy of being a goalie.
Like a young ballplayer, too young to hit for much enjoyment but old enough to catch and throw, it was something I could do before I was big enough to do the rest. But mostly it was the feeling it gave me.
Even now, watching TV or reading a newspaper, I like to have a ball in my hands, fingering its laces, its scams, its nubby surface, until my fingertips are so alive and alert that the ball and I seem drawn to each other. I like to spin it, bounce it, flip it from hand to hand, throw it against a wall or a ceiling, and catch it over and over again. There is something quite magical about a hand that can follow a ball and find it so crisply and tidily every time, something solid and wonderfully reassuring about its muscular certainty and control. So, if it was because of Dave that I became a goalie, it was the feeling of catching a puck or a ball that kept me one. The irony, of course, would be that later, when I finally became a real goalie instead of a kid with a good glove hand, when I learned to use the other parts of a goaltender’s equipment—skates, pads, blocker, stick—it could only be at the expense of what had been until then my greatest joy as a goalie.
I was nineteen at the time. It surely had been happening before then, just as it must before any watershed moment, but the time I remember was the warm-up for the 1967 NCAA final against Boston University. For the first few minutes, I remember only feeling good: a shot, a save, a shot, a save; loose, easy, the burn of nerves turning slowly to a burn of exhilaration. For a shot to my right, my right arm went up and I stopped it with my blocker; another, low to the corner, I kicked away with my pad; along the ice to the other side, my skate; high to the left, my catching glove. Again and again: a pad, a catching glove, a skate, a stick, a blocker, whatever was closest moved, and the puck stopped. For someone who had scooped up ice-skimming shots like a shortstop, who had twisted his body to make backhanded catches on shots for the top right corner, it was a moment of great personal triumph. I had come of age. As the warm-up was ending, I could feel myself becoming a goalie.
Goaltending is often described as the most dangerous position in sports. It is not. Race drivers die from racing cars, jockeys die, so do football players. Goalies do not die from being goalies. Nor do they suffer the frequent facial cuts, the knee and shoulder injuries, that forwards and defensemen often suffer. They stand as obstacles to a hard rubber disc, frequently shot at a lethal speed, sometimes unseen, sometimes deflected; the danger to them is obvious, but it is exaggerated—even the unthinkable: a goalie diving anxiously out of the way of a hundred miles per hour slap shot, the shooter panicking at his own recklessness, the fans “ah”—ing at the near miss. Except for that one, feared time, the time it doesn’t happen that way, when the puck moves too fast and the goalie too slow, and, hit in the head, he falls frighteningly to the ice. Moments later, up again, he shakes his head, smiling as others slowly do the same, again reminded that he wears a mask which at other times he sees through and forgets. The danger of playing goal is a
potential
danger, but equipment technology, like a net below a trapeze act, has made serious injury extremely unlikely.
From the time I was six years old, until as a freshman at Cornell I was required to wear a mask, I received fifteen stitches. Since then I have had only four—from a Dennis Hull slap shot that rebounded off my chest, hitting under my chin, in my first playoff year. I have pulled groins and hamstrings, stretched, twisted, and bruised uncounted times various other things, sent my back into spasm twice, broken a toe, and torn the cartilege in one knee. In almost eight years, after more than four hundred games and one thousand practices, that’s not much.
Yet, I am often afraid. For while I am well protected, and know I’m unlikely to suffer more than a bruise from any shot that is taken, the puck hurts, constantly and cumulatively: through the pillow—thick leg pads I wear, where straps pulled tight around their shins squeeze much of the padding away; through armor-shelled skate boots; through a catching glove compromised too far for its flexibility; with a dull, aching nausea from stomach to throat when my jock slams back against my testes; and most often, on my arms, on wrists and forearms especially, where padding is light and often out of place, where a shot hits and spreads its ache, up an arm and through a body, until both go limp and feel lifeless. Through a season, a puck hurts like a long, slow battering from a skillful boxer, almost unnoticed in the beginning, but gradually wearing me down, until two or three times a year, I wake up in the morning sore, aching, laughing/moaning with each move I make, and feel a hundred years old. It is on those days and others that when practice comes, I shy away.
The puck on his stick, a player skates for the net. Deep in my crouch, intent, ready, to anyone watching I look the same as I always do. But, like a batter who has been knocked down too many times before, when I see a player draw back his stick to shoot, at the critical moment when concentration must turn to commitment, my body stiffens, my eyes widen and go sightless, my head lifts in the air, turning imperceptibly to the right, as if away from the puck—I bail out, leaving only an empty body behind to cover the net. I yell at myself as others might (“you chicken”). I tell myself reasonably, rationally, that lifting my head, blanking my eyes, can only put me in greater danger; but I don’t listen. In a game, each shot controlled by a harassing defense, with something else to think about I can usually put away fear and just play. But in practice, without the distraction of a game, seeing Tremblay or Lambert, Risebrough, Chartraw, or Lupien, dangerous, uncontrolled shooters as likely to hit my arms as a corner of the net, I cannot. In time the fear gradually shrinks back, manageable again, but it never quite goes away.
I have thought more about fear, I have been afraid more often, the last few years. For the first time this year, I have realized that I’ve only rarely been hurt in my career. I have noticed that unlike many, so far as I know, I carry with me no permanent injury. And now that I know I will retire at the end of the season, more and more I find myself thinking—
I’ve lasted this long: please let me get out in one piece
. For while I know I am well protected, while I know it’s unlikely I will suffer any serious injury, like every other goalie I carry with me the fear of the
one big hurt
that never comes. Recently, I read of the retirement of a race-car driver. Explaining his decision to quit, he said that after his many years of racing, after the deaths of close friends and colleagues, after his own near misses, he simply “knew too much.” I feel a little differently. I feel I have known all along what I know now. It’s just that I can’t forget it as easily as I once did.