The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  And so I always check into the Hotel Saskatchewan when duty puts me out there. Call me a stealthy sentimentalist.

  It was 11 A.M. when I dropped my bags in my room and the game wasn’t until two. The one surviving ligament in my knee was on fire. Arthur had taken up residence in the small apartment where my cartilage used to call home. This souvenir from my playing days had fetched the dirty bastard Lavery a two-game suspension for a cheap hit and was going to keep the needle in the red on the meter that clocked my pain threshold. Yeah, his knee-on-knee hit left me with a Neon Knee, one made of thin glass, filled with compressed gas that pulsed and glowed in the dark. I downed a Celebrex and counted six left in the vial. I was going to have to manage my dosage to make it until Tuesday. I got a load off my feet, jumped up on the bed in my street clothes. Normally I can’t nap, but I hadn’t slept at all the night before and I can never sleep on planes, especially sitting next to some fat slob in economy, as I had been. I couldn’t have been more lights out if I’d been up onstage with a hypnotist.

  I was dreaming about running but before I could get where I wanted to go I woke up. It was twelve thirty and I didn’t have time to sit around tearing the dream apart. I had to go to the rink.

  I collected my car off Victoria Avenue. For a second I forgot what make and model it was. I booted it over to the arena, giving myself enough time to catch up with Chief, our regional scout. Enter his name on YouTube and you’ll get forty-five hits with some of his classic fights from the ’80s and ’90s. Chief played with five teams in the league and a dozen more in the minors. Wherever he strapped them on he was the most popular guy with fans. And with his teammates. From what he tells me he had a rough time in junior. “Never had been off the reserve farther than Yorkton down the road before I went to tryouts in Moose Jaw,” he told me once. “That’s the one time I can remember that I was ever scared of anything.”

  One look at him and you’d think that he got his nickname because he’s a ringer for Nicholson’s sidekick in Cuckoo’s Nest. Not so. Sure, there is a resemblance: six foot four, straggly hair down to his shoulders that look like a football player’s in pads. Fact is, though, every native guy in the game gets saddled with the handle.

  Chief wasn’t an affirmative-action hiring. Not by a long shot. Teams might do that sort of thing in the front office or the arena, but out in the field there’s no sense dressing a window that no one sees. Chief was on the staff on merit and because of a track record. His nickname would be in bad taste in other realms, but we attached a healthy helping of respect to it. He had great gut instincts about players, uncanny, even unnerving. Some guys can tell you that you’re holding an apple. Some guys can tell you that you’re holding an apple seed. Chief can tell if you have an apple seed in your pocket. I’ve pushed other scouts to explain why they liked a kid or why they crossed him off the file. I only pushed Chief once. “No need to ask me why,” he said. “Why doesn’t matter. Why is wasting your time. Ask me how much I like a kid or not. That’s what counts.” Which had never occurred to me and was absolutely true. Chief was intuitive, so I never asked him why. I wasn’t going to waste his time either.

  Chief was in the scouts’ room at the arena when I limped in. He had a coffee going and had one bite left of a maple glazed.

  It was Chief who told me Martin Mars had died.

  “Was he sick?” I asked.

  “Suicide is what I heard,” Chief said.

  Other scouts started to file in. It was all over the grapevine. Why was a question that hung out there and no one had an answer.

  4

  I wouldn’t have pegged Martin Mars as the Happily-Ever-After Guy.

  I was his roomie for most of that season, his only stretch in the league and my last go-round in L.A. I couldn’t have claimed to know him that well. There was nobody I could pump for his story. Most players have family and friends visit them in L.A. No one ever showed up to catch up with Whisper. I tried to read between the lines. They say all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Almost every player tells the story of his parents, the father who made him. That’s how every player frames it, all alike and some of it is even true. Maybe five guys in the whole league volunteer hardship when it’s undeniable, usually because it’s already a matter of public record. An abusive father, a guy with a restraining order, a celebrity father with a drug problem, whatever. I figured that the vacuum of Whisper’s history was the by-product of a unique dysfunction.

  On the hockey end he was a decently talented guy, a bit over six feet, a bit under two hundred pounds, a good skater whose hands were better with a wrench than a stick, true of a lot of career minor-leaguers. He had spent five full seasons in the bus leagues with only a couple of call-ups that lasted no more than two weeks. It was easy to see why. Sometimes when he mishandled the puck, I wondered if maybe he needed a different prescription for his contacts. If you get down to it, a player without vision isn’t a player. With one fairly famous exception, Whisper never seemed to be angry about being the Black Ace in L.A. Everybody else in the game would have been burning up. I saw guys trash rooms over smaller indignities. Whisper took it all with beatific calm, like he had skipped all the stages of denial and grief and gone directly to acceptance. I remember hearing Grant Tomlin on a broadcast talking about the difference between those who play and those who don’t. “Gord, it comes down to need,” he said. “The best don’t want. They need.” Bullshit. It isn’t need. It’s greed. A player not only wants it but he wants it for himself. Whisper didn’t have the greed to play his way in from the margins.

  Whisper’s bio in the team’s program listed “cars” as his hobby but it wasn’t that he collected big-ticket rides. No, he liked fixing them. Nothing made him happier than getting under the hood of 99’s Jaguar. Whisper’s ’69 Benz was his first love, though. He changed its oil like a first-time mother changed a diaper and spoiled it with high-test. The owner of our team back then, long ago RIP, missed the occasional dialysis appointment if he was getting rogered by his secretary. Martin Mars would never miss his biweekly appointment to have his ride detailed.

  Mars’s second-biggest night with L.A. had nothing to do with a goal or anything else on the ice. That year we had some guys who would rather gamble than fuck and we had a bullshit game of poker going on road trips. I hosted one in our hotel room and dealt a reluctant Whisper in. He anted and folded every hand. The last deal of the cards was Match-the-Pot Guts. Everybody anted five hundred bucks each, cheques would do. Each player was dealt two cards and made the best poker hand he could with those two cards. Ace high is pretty good. Ace-king close to a lock, and any pair you can start counting your money. The tough part: You have to drop a coin on a count of three to declare you’re in. If you drop the coin and lose to a guy you have to match the pot, which, with seven players, was thirty-five hundred. I kept my straightest face when I looked at my cards: a pair of eights. We put our cards down and our hands behind our backs so no one would know who was loading or off-loading a coin for the drop. Blakey, our trainer, acted as emcee, calling for the drop and then counting it down. A quarter fell out of my hand, a penny out of Whisper’s. Anyone else I would have been licking my chops but I felt sorry for him. I wasn’t even sure he understood the rules. He flipped over the ace of clubs.

  “No good,” I said. “Eights.”

  I started to sweep in the pot.

  Whisper put his hand on my sleeve and gave me the universal sign of Not-So-Fast. He flipped over the other card: ace of spades.

  “Shadow, you got done in by the Black Ace,” Hunts crowed.

  Hunts was and is my best friend so I pretended that I had a stick with too much flex in it at the next practice when I drifted a head-high slapshot that had him ducking for cover under the crossbar.

  5

  Regina versus Red Deer was game 120 for me that season. Hogan, the kid who interested me on Red Deer, had two goals and an assist, and if he’d been six foot two he would have been loo
king at first-round money. But you can say that about a hundred kids in any season. He was listed at five foot eleven in the program but stretched to only five nine and a quarter when the Central Scouting Registry dropped in to inspect the meat. He had great hockey sense and all kinds of try in him, but scouts are whores for size. If he had showed another gear I could have liked him more, and I already liked him more than the rest of the L.A. staff. Hogan was Mr. Close but Not Enough.

  Chief did the drive out to Moose Jaw. He wanted the lowdown on the doings at our offices. All the regional scouts wanted that. The farther they were from L.A., the more they wanted to know.

  “I’m just asking you,” Chief said. “Should I take out a long-term loan?”

  Chief could see through the standard answer. I gave it to him anyway. It’s my job, even with a good worker like him, even with a friend. “I can’t tell you anything beyond July 1. It was a two-year deal you had, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Well, Hunts is all twisted. I know he’d want to give you another two years, but a lockout in the fall is a done deal from what I hear. Hunts told the owner that we have to keep our staff together, but he’s tuning Hunts out a lot lately.”

  Chief sighed but said nothing as we sped along Highway 1. I filled in the unnecessary detail.

  “I’m lucky I’m still around. We had a good draft and we have some good kids in our system. I don’t think the owner can have any complaints. But when Tomlin came in, everything changed.”

  Grant Tomlin had never been a player above the college ranks, had been an assistant coach in the league for about fifteen minutes, and had weaseled his way into a broadcast gig. He developed this Smartest Man in Hockey role so convincingly that Joe Public thought he was that. Real hockey men just figured he had done a theatre degree and laughed at him, at least until they found out that he was making seven figures to wear makeup and talk out of his ass. Then Tomlin wormed his way into the president’s job in L.A. He had campaigned for it on the air and practically speed-dated our owner, Galvin, the Society Page’s Favourite Tech Baron, Founder of Fideligence Smartware. Tomlin was as subtle as a slapshot off your cup. At the draft he had gone up to Galvin’s box with a copy of Fast Company that featured its Man of the Year on the cover, the man who just happened to be signing our cheques.

  “You know Tomlin threw Hunts under the bus,” I said. “The rest of us too, I guess. If I hadn’t re-signed with the team before Tomlin came aboard he was going to replace me. I still don’t figure I’ll be around the team in two years’ time.”

  Chief was phlegmatic about our office intrigue. Then again, he was phlegmatic about almost everything. “Nothing guaranteed on the ice, nothing guaranteed off,” Chief said.

  “I’m thinking of getting out anyway,” I said.

  Chief took his eyes off the road for a second to see my expression. It was dead serious.

  “This isn’t for public consumption and deny it if you hear it,” I told him. “I got a call a while back from the investigations outfit I used to work for before Hunts brought me in. They’ve moved up into corporate stuff. It’s good money. Since I left the company really took off. They might even give me a piece of it.”

  That was the upside. I left out my past history in investigations, an awful stew of bogus insurance claims and cratering marriages seasoned with missing persons, the majority of them missing by their own volition. I left out the awful fact that a couple of hours into my working day I hit the daily recommended requirement for other people’s heartache.

  Chief didn’t bother with the particulars. “That’s good … for you,” Chief said, leaving out that the fact that it might be bad for him.

  The prospect of a minty life after scouting was hanging there like an air freshener from the rear-view mirror when Moose Jaw was finally in sight. We were greeted by Mac the Moose, the twenty-foot statue of Bullwinkle’s brother that stands at the first exit westbound.

  We grabbed burgers at Harvey’s. Chief didn’t go for fine dining. He had four patties and squeezed them into one bun. Chief didn’t go for vegetables, either. He’d be more likely to offer you a slice of bacon than a stick of Juicy Fruit. I didn’t want to disrupt his digestion so I kept work talk to a minimum.

  “You played with Martin Mars back then,” he said.

  “Couple of years, as much as he played,” I said. “And that last game too.”

  6

  I try to avoid getting asked about the game, but I can’t always duck out of it. People ask me over and over again about the same themes. What was it like shutting down 99 in the Cup final? Nerveracking, I tell them, feigning modesty. Where’s your ring? In storage, I tell them, leaving out the part about it being stored by the guy who bought it at an auction after I had to declare bankruptcy. What was it like being married to a starlet and going to Hollywood parties? Overrated, I tell them, absolutely straight up and praying that they don’t want any gory tabloid-worthy details of how it all came apart. I regularly get asked about Whisper. What happened with that Martin Mars thing in L.A.? They don’t need to get specific about it. I know exactly what they’re talking about: his last game. All anybody remembers about him is his last game, and all they really remember is his last shift and the aftermath. I’ve always used the standard answer: I don’t know and I was there.

  I played in the league with guys with less talent, but I never played with anyone whose makeup was like Whisper’s. Fear is the worst thing you can accuse a player of, but I always thought that Whisper might have been afraid of success. He wouldn’t skate that last half inch that separates players from pretenders. In most other walks of life there are a lot of people like that. In the league all the guys like that could have fit in Mars’s Benz with room left over for two tubas. It’s hard to get to the league. It’s almost impossible if that’s your attitude.

  In the spring of ’92 we snuck into the playoffs and faced Edmonton in the first round. Edmonton had racked up thirty more points than we had during the regular season. People figured we were going to lose four straight. And none of us figured that Martin Mars was going to be a factor at all. He had played only a dozen games since Christmas. That’s when the front office fired Al Hampton, an easygoing lout, and replaced him with John B. Harris, a.k.a. Iron John. I played for a few coaches like Iron: Surrounded by players in the prime of their lives, these guys worry that in the autumn of their years they might seem unmanly. To compensate they become inhuman. The hiring of this scowling despot had no obvious effect on our performance during the regular season, just soaring numbers on our misery index. His too. Blakey had to get Iron out of the hotel bar and back to his room six times in three months using the fireman’s carry. Iron managed to miss a couple of practices with recurring cases of “the flu” and spent shivering hours with room-service coffee and aspirin while we skated on game days.

  The game is sometimes beyond explaining, one notable occasion being our series against Edmonton. Somehow we won games one and two in Alberta. Hunts was in the zone. “I played pro sixteen years and earned my millions over the course of a week,” he always says and it’s absolutely true.

  By the time we came to L.A. for game six we had a chance to close out the series, but that afternoon Hines, the left winger on our second line, a dependable but not flashy guy, came down with food poisoning. It didn’t come out until later that he had been done in by a bad fish taco served up at a beachside joint near Malibu way, an establishment with a history of health-code violations. Iron John couldn’t have felt worse if he’d had a couple of those spoiled tacos washed down by a forty-ouncer of JD. We were banged up. Three guys had broken bones in five games. I was playing through a fractured wrist. We had one open spot in the lineup and no one except Whisper to fill it.

  Iron John’s modus operandi was known to all of us. He ignored the top half of the roster and treated the rest with withering contempt. He had mixed results with six franchises over twenty years, teams that made it to the finals, teams that finished in th
e cellar. The bigger the stakes, the worse his mood. By game six, with the opportunity that we faced and the physical state we were in, Iron showed up in satellite photos as a giant black cloud hovering over SoCal.

  “You guys gotta get it done tonight,” he said, shaking, reddening. “We got three lines, ’cause Edwards is all shot up and can’t hold a stick and this guy, the Black Ace, can’t play at all, healthy or not. He can’t play so he won’t play. We don’t want to go back to Edmonton. We win this, we can send this clown back to the press box and we can get healthy. We can have a real shot at the Cup, but it’s gonna take a big effort from our best. If you don’t do it, no one else can do it for us. You can’t go looking for the Fuckin’ Black Fuckin’ Ace to get us there. Hey Ace, do you hear me?”

  Bud Sutherin tried to peel Iron Manic off Whisper, going so far as to tug him by the sleeve. But an assistant coach, even if he’s the general manager’s brother, can only tug on the sleeve of a tyrant like Iron the Terrible.

  My stall was next to Whisper’s. His head was hanging down as he listened to Iron’s rip job. His face was in there, somewhere folded up under his beard. I was the only one who could see his grill. He took it hard, really hard, harder than I ever saw anyone take it in the league.

  Iron was good to his word through sixty minutes. Edmonton came at us in waves. We hung on by our fingernails and Hunts was playing out of his mind again. It was 1–1 at the end of regulation. At the end of the first overtime. And at the end of the second OT. Martin Mars’s ass was nailed to the bench throughout. In the third OT the trainer pulled off Malloy because he seemed delirious. I thought he might have had his bell rung, but it was dehydration and our team doctor had to hook him up to an IV. That left Iron with no choice but to throw Whisper out there. Iron did his best to raise Mars’s spirits. “Don’t fuckin’ lose it,” he said. Whisper, as usual, said nothing.