The Game (26 page)

When I talk to old friends who earn a thirty-year-old’s average wage, they seem uncomfortable, or I do. For me, money, which seemed always a by-product, distant, even unrelated to the game, has taken on new importance. A cause of great bitterness and division, it brought me to retire for a year; a cold-eyed standard against which I judge my relationship with the team, and against which I am now in turn judged.

It is the other side of the Faustian bargain. For when a high-priced player, especially a free agent, comes to a team, he comes with a price tag—the “million dollar” ballplayer. It was the market that created the price tag, but now it’s the price tag that he must live up to. So, with nothing more than a bigger bank account to make him a better player, he must play better, like a “million dollar” ballplayer, or be bitterly resented. For many, it’s too much of a burden. Surrounded by goodwill at one moment, feeling immense satisfaction at exceeding others’(e)xpectations; then signing a new contract so large that performance is no longer relevant, for expectations cannot be reached, a shutout, a home run being simply what you’re paid to do. And while once you were allowed such motivations as personal or team pride, such postgame feelings as satisfaction or sadness, that no longer applies. With all that money, all other feelings, all other motivations, are relin-quished. Nothing else can feel good or bad, nothing else can matter; nothing else is relevant. What was always a business transaction, but never seemed so, can seem like nothing else again. It sounds like a small price to pay, except to the athlete it doesn’t feel that way.

I have never been able to justify the amount of money I earn. I can
explain
it, but that’s not the same thing. I know it has to do with the nature of the entertainment business, that, as with actors, dancers, musicians, and others, thousands will attend an arena and pay to watch me work, and millions more will stay at home to do the same on TV.

I know that large revenues are produced, which in turn get shared among those who produce them, that indeed using strict economic argument, my teammates and I, more important to producing those revenues, more irreplaceable in their production than most owners or executives, should probably be paid more. I also know that I’m as skilled at my job as most senior executives are at theirs, that I’ve trained as long and hard as they have, that my career is short, with risks and life-lingering side effects not present in other jobs, that soon I will retire and earn less than others my age with my training and experience earn.

Still, that is not enough. And if someone asks me why I
should
earn more than a teacher, a nurse, a carpenter, a mechanic, I have no answer. I can simply say that, offered money for something I always did for nothing, and would have continued to do for whatever the“(g)oing rate” was, with no obvious strings attached I take it, which, if eminently human, doesn’t come without its own psychic downside.

In his fine book,
Life on the Run
, former basketball star Bill Bradley relates overhearing another player explain, “Money alone makes you more of what you were before you had money.” I would like to think it does, but I’m not so sure. Because money buys you a return ticket from anything you do, it may only make you less sure of what you really are. But I suppose that’s the kind of nice intellectual distinction I can afford to make.

For a player, money is also important another way. To many, it means respect, and ultimately self-respect, offering a new life-style, new surroundings, new friends—doctors, lawyers, professional people many years older—a new self-image. The kid who never seemed too smart is suddenly a businessman,
un homme d’affaires
, for the first time in his life feeling like more than a jock. He is dressed up in expensive suits, briefcase and agent in hand, riding elevators to skyscraper offices, listening to smart people use words that never made sense, but that coming from their mouths almost do (though trying to explain them later to his wife he will become angry at
her
when he can’t quite do it).

But nothing comes free and clear. With more money than you can handle yourself, you hire others to do it for you, and so you never learn. Budgets, tax returns, the disagreeable facts of other people’s lives, are passed on and out of yours because of money. Only later, gradually disoriented by all you have, feeling helpless before the costly infrastructure needed to support it, do you realize there was a price; that in its freedom, money can be a trap. For what happens later?

What happens to the life-style, the expectations, the lawyer, accountant, and investment counselor, the respect and self-respect when the money stops? And it will stop. What then? Like an oil-rich third-world country, an athlete, beginning with little, finding himself with great unplanned-for riches, is suddenly aware that in him is a finite resource fast running out. Without the broader sophistication to deal with it or to build something lasting from it, surrounded by others too anxious to try, he lives with one desperate, nagging fear—this is my chance,
don’t blow it
.

So, torn between extravagance and tomorrow, it means a Corvette with the signing bonus of your first contract, then agents, lawyers, accountants as partners to the rest, instead of the taxman, hoping the ledger works out right. In the first few years, it seems like more money than can be spent in a lifetime. In the last few, married, with a family, a house and two cars, you wonder where it went. It was money you once had spread in your mind over thirty years or more, but you forgot the price of beer would rise. And now, while the pile looks much the same, it is filled with 80¢, 70¢ inflation-weakened dollars, and you can see the years ahead shrink agonizingly back. It is like living through an Arctic summer for the first time. Arriving in May or June, and feeling the wonderful, endless sunlight, knowing, but forgetting, that sometime it will end. Then one day in July, long after it began to happen, five, six, eight minutes a day, you feel the sun slowly hemor-rhaging away. And unable to stop it, suddenly you know what’s ahead.

Before it can happen, you retire, your problems disappearing with you, later to be uncovered by some inquiring journalist. It is in no way a remarkable story, though the celebrity of the names involved makes us think it is. Rather it is simply the universal story of having something before you can appreciate it, then having it go away when you can. And as Roger Kahn discovered in his accomplished book
The Boys
of Summer
, and as others have discovered since, it’s an easy story. Like nursing-home abuses for an investigation reporter, it is one that’s always there, you only have to decide to find it.

But there’s one more thing. What does money do to the game on the ice? How does it affect a player? In playoff games, does Guy Lapointe put aside his shot-blocking phobia because of money? And what about Lafleur and his relentless brilliance? What about Robinson and Gainey and Lemaire? What about the so-called money players? Do they play the way they do because of money? No amateur would believe it, nor would many fans, nor indeed many players, but on the ice, in a game, more money, less money, playing for team or country, a blocked shot, a body-check, a diving save comes only from instinctive, reflexive, teeth-baring competition. Money, like other motivations, comes from the mind and has nothing to do with it. More money can’t change that.

After practice, I cross the street to the bank. Though it’s almost 2 p.m., a line of people remains, winding in and out between makeshift barriers, waiting their turn at the scattering of tellers’ windows still open. I stand near the door, away from the line, scanning the off-duty tellers at their desks. One looks up, catches my stare, and I walk past the line to a section marked “New Accounts.” There, a woman beside me fills out forms for a new account. As many in line watch absently, assuming I’m doing the same, I fill out a deposit slip, hand it to the teller with some checks, and get back a receipt. In five minutes, while those in line have only moved three or four places closer to the front, I am done and leave the bank.

Once I used to wait in line like everyone else. Then one day a teller motioned me out of line, and I haven’t been back since. Feeling a bit guilty each time, I continue none the less, unwilling to give up its convenience. For the tellers and me, it has become routine and normal.

They treat me the way they think people like me expect to be treated.

And I accept.

It is the kind of special treatment we have grown accustomed to, and enjoy. We have been
special
for most of our lives. It began with hockey, with names and faces in local papers as teenagers, with hockey jackets that only the best players on the best teams wore, with parents who competed not so quietly on the side. It will end with hockey. But in between, the longer and better we play, the more all-encompassing the treatment becomes, the more hockey seems irrelevant to it. For we are special,
period
. Others understand that—
they know
. We know. They give, easily and naturally: slippers, sweaters, plant holders, mitts, baby blankets, baby clothes knit and sent in the mail; paintings, carvings, etchings, sculptures in clay, metal or papier mâché; shirts, slacks, coats, suits, ties, underwear; cars, carpets, sofas, chairs, refrigerators, beds, washers, dryers, stoves, TVs, stereos, at cost or no cost at all. A hundred letters a week, more than 3,000 letters a year—“You’re the best,” all but a few of them say. On the street, in restaurants and theaters, you are pointed out, pointed at, talked about like the weather. Your picture is hung from a boy’s bedroom wall, appears in magazines and newspapers, on radio and TV; hockey cards, posters, T-shirts, and curios, everywhere, anywhere, name, face, thousands of times, flashed to an audience that waves into TV cameras, that writes to editors to have proud yellowed clippings in their wallets.

And we love it. We say we don’t, but we do. We hate its nuisance and inconvenience, the bother of untimely, unending autographs, handshakes, and smiles, living out an image of ourselves that isn’t quite real, abused if we don’t, feeling encircled and trapped, never able to get away. But we are
special
, head-turning, chin-dropping, nervous, giggly, forget-your-own-name special, what others buy Rolls-Royces and votes and hockey teams for, what others take off their clothes and kill for, we have. All we have to do is play.

We are
celebrities
. Like actors, musicians, politicians, writers, famous people, we are common threads between husbands and wives, parents and kids, friends. And once a celebrity, always an ex-celebrity; in thirty or forty retirement years here and there we are bound to be dredged up and recalled, if briefly. Until then, our images and names are reported on, gossiped about, carried over great distances by cable or wave—and we renew our celebrity each time we play.

But if exposure is the vehicle of celebrity,
attention
is what separates one celebrity from another. Guy Lafleur and Yvon Lambert are both celebrities, yet on the same ice, on the same screen, Lafleur is noticed, Lambert is not. Lambert, methodical and unspectacular, has nothing readily distinctive about him; his image is passed over, his name unheard. Lafleur
is
distinctive: the way he skates, the sound of the crowd he carries with him, the goals he scores. And so too are others for other reasons: Tremblay for his fiery, untamed spirit; Gainey for his relentless, almost palpable will; Tiger Williams, Eddie Shack, Ron Duguay, each colorful and exciting; and Dave Schultz.

More and more as sports coverage proliferates beyond games, as it becomes entertainment and moves to prime time, as we look for the story behind the story to put performance into a context, and drama into life, then off-ice, off-field performance becomes important.

Personas are born, and sometimes made, cameras and microphones there as they happen. The crazies, the clowns, the “sports intellectuals,” the anti-jock rebels, Jim Bouton, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, the playboys, Joe Namath, Derek Sanderson, Duguay, all are distinctive
personalities
, some real, some not so real, but getting our attention, each bigger celebrities because of what they do away from the game.

But while few can be virtuoso performers, TV has given us a new minimum off-ice, off-field standard.
Articulateness
. The modern player must be articulate (or engagingly inarticulate, especially southern style). It is not enough to score a goal and have it picked apart by the all-seeing eyes of replay cameras. A player must be able to put it in his own eloquent words, live, on-camera words that cannot be edited for the morning paper.
How did you do it? How did you feel?
If the answers contain grammatical errors or profanity, the magic is broken for the fan at home. For celebrity is a full, integrated life, earned on-ice, performed, sustained and strengthened, re-earned off-ice. As writer Roger Angell once put it, we want our athletes to be “good at life,” (r)ole models for children, people we like and commit to, people we want to believe earned what they have, every bit as good at things off the ice as they are on. But if players are inarticulate, suddenly harsh and pejorative, they’re
jocks
—less likeable, less good at life, less celebrated; finally, seeming even less good
on
the ice.

At its extreme, it creates the category of professional celebrity, those “famous for being famous,” so accomplished at being celebrities that their original source of celebrity is forgotten (does anyone remember what Zsa Zsa Gabor was?). At the least, it encourages learning the
skills
of the public person: how to look good, how to sound modest and intelligent, funny and self-deprecatory. It’s a celebrity’s shortcut to the real thing, but it works. Walter Cronkite
looks
trust-worthy, Ronald Reagan
seems
like a nice guy, Steve Garvey and Denis Potvin
sound
intelligent. Or are they only articulate? Good enough at something to be a public person, or simply a good public person?