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Pee Wees

Page 6

by Rich Cohen


  The result is thousands of newbie parents. After much fieldwork, I am ready to break them into two categories. First, the big group, which I call “the clueless.” They sign the forms, listen to the lectures, drive to the rinks, and cheer without really caring. They may arrive late or even step outside to take a business call in the middle of the action. These people are akin to old-time sports parents. They know this moment will pass, that, in the life of their child, hockey will be replaced first by something, then by something else. In the end, it’s the passion and not the game that matters, so they don’t get caught up in the particulars. The faces of these parents are calm and unbothered. That’s not the case with the group in which I count myself: we are the crazies, the control freaks, the hyperinvolved, the nutters who have lost perspective. Yes, we are trying to relive our pasts. Yes, we are trying to acquire status through our children. But that’s only part of it. To us, the game is more than a game. It’s a metaphor. When it’s not working, the world itself is not working. The ineffective coaches and favoritism represent the sort of bullshit that is ruining this country. It’s the universal fix. It’s the parent-coaches taking care of their own.

  At times, it can seem as if the very concept of team has broken down. It’s every man for himself.

  In the course of a bad afternoon, such parents move from seat to seat in search of a perch from where life looks better. We know that luck is fickle, that everything changes. We can be recognized by the worry in our eyes. We are teeth grinders and restless sleepers. We suffer from tension headaches. We are shadow people between tournaments; we doze at the wheel on the way home. Our cars weave in traffic. We close our eyes when the whistle blows. If it looks like we are praying, it’s because we are. We are asking God to shower our child with goals. I’d like to tell you what we look like or how we dress, but we are indistinguishable from other Americans. We come from every walk of life, every racial, economic, and ethnic background. We represent every sort of person and every sort of preference and go by every sort of pronoun. We check every box. We are they and me and him and her and you and them. We could be anyone, even the person in the next seat reading Tom Sawyer. We might be the woman you married, though neither you nor she will know it till halfway through that first season. You might be watching us from a distance and wondering, “What is wrong with that person?”

  To you I say, “Don’t judge. We mock what we are to become.”

  I was shocked when I first came down with symptoms. It started when Micah was a Squirt. There was a big play. He was in the middle of it. My heart began to race. Beads of sweat appeared on my forehead, though it was cold in the rink. My jaw tightened and I asked myself, “What is happening to me? Why am I freaking out?” Then, one day soon after, while watching my son score a goal, I experienced a paroxysm of joy. I’d felt nothing like it since college, and then only with the aid of stimulants. There is little to match the intoxication of seeing your child do something well. If you’re a sports fan, you’ll know the feeling. Have you ever watched your team—in my case, the Cubs—win a game on the last play? It’s just like that, only your kid is the Cubs and you are everyone in the stands.

  Some parents, not wanting to become a hockey asshole, bottle up their emotions instead. They say nothing when their kid scores, though you can see them trying to repress a grin. But most parents in the small group scream, the easiest way to exorcise the beast. They keep it positive though sound hysterical: “Let’s go, Bears!” Some shout at their kids. It’s praise from most: “Nice pass, Barry!” But criticism from others: “Where’s your head, Patrick?” A few yell at the referee: “Get some glasses, zebra!” A handful taunt the opposition: “You suck, Ridgefield!” Some denounce their own team: “We suck!” Habits vary by region. This has to do with culture. People learn to heckle by watching their parents heckle. The mildest New Jersey heckler outdoes Connecticut’s most vociferous. The nastiest are found on Long Island. No one can tell you exactly why. Maybe it’s all the muscle shirts and cars up on blocks, or the gridlock on the L.I.E., or the proximity and distance of Manhattan. Maybe it’s the grandparents—fathers teach daughters to heckle, daughters become mothers who teach their sons, who then have hockey-playing kids of their own. They do not merely heckle the other team on Long Island; they heckle the kids on the other team. A Garden City father called my son “a tiny piece of shit.” A mother from Merrick wondered if all Ridgefield kids attend “fuckhead school.”

  When I was reporting my book Monsters, about the 1985 Chicago Bears, the quarterback Jim McMahon, whose kid played hockey in Northbrook, Illinois, told me about a father heckling his—McMahon’s—son. Mac said the guy gave his kid the finger. Mac confronted him—this is the Punky QB we’re talking about. The guy said, “I was giving the finger to another kid.” He offered to apologize. Mac said, “No, you have to stand still as that kid gives you the finger—that’s the only way this gets resolved.”

  There are occasionally fights in the stands, which is when youth hockey makes it into the newspapers. The Toronto Star likened a parent brawl at a rink outside Ontario to a “Tim Hortons commercial as directed by Quentin Tarantino.” Reporting on a parent fight in another Canadian town, a writer from the National Post was shocked by what he found: “The picture that emerged was often sweet but often incredibly ugly, rife with tales of extra-marital affairs in rinky-dink hotels, fistfights in the stands, threats uttered, coaches bribed and dads getting so sloshed at tournaments that they wind up in the hospital while their child is fast asleep back at the hotel.” In 2002, a hockey father named Thomas Junta beat another hockey father to death after a scrimmage in Massachusetts. In November 2014, Adam Proteau issued a plea in The Hockey News: “Whatever else you do for your kid during their time on the ice, do them a bigger service and ensure you’re not one of the overbearing, interfering, egomaniacal embarrassments of hockey parents roaming arenas throughout North America.”

  At a Squirt game, one of our parents—a short, bespectacled dealer in rare books—got into it with a parent from Massapequa, who was all over our kids. The bookdealer shouted: “Hey, buddy. Why don’t you yell at your kids, and we’ll yell at ours?” Things escalated. The bookdealer was heading to the parking lot to fight the guy when I pulled him aside. “What’s the best-case scenario?” I asked. “You beat up this asshole, get arrested, and go to jail. But let’s be honest—that’s probably not what’s going to happen.”

  My father did not care about my hockey games. He came to only a few and did not pay attention when he did come. He yelled only one thing, and yelled it twice, once when I was seven and again when I was fifteen: “Get up! You’re not hurt!”

  But there’s a new kind of hockey parent. Maybe it’s what we got in place of the old American sense of mission. It’s as if we’re no longer one nation but a million little nations with a million little nationalisms, each being the project of turning a youth player into a star. Sports used to be seen as a hobby, a diversion. To many, it was considered a waste of time, like video games today. Now it’s everything. That change is personified by two athletes, as known from the fables. First Lou Gehrig, the Yankees’ “Iron Horse,” who appeared in 2,130 consecutive Major League Baseball games. Gehrig’s father, who’d emigrated from Germany, worked in a factory. He was epileptic and alcoholic. Gehrig’s mother thought that Lou was the only hope for the future. She wanted him to study and go to college, but he only wanted to play baseball, so he’d sneak out. Gehrig became a star in spite of his upbringing. His mother was the old-model sports parent.

  Elven Mantle, whom everyone called Mutt, was the new model. He’d been a semipro baseball player, good but not good enough. He was working in a lead and zinc mine in Oklahoma when his son Mickey—named after the Yankees catcher Mickey Cochrane—was born. Not making the majors was the big event in Mutt Mantle’s life. He took that frustration and poured it into his son. He taught him how to throw, slide, and hit from both sides of the plate. He turned his boy into the specimen he’d never been. M
ickey got off to a bad start in the majors. He did not get a hit in thirty-six at-bats and was sent down to the minors. It was Mickey’s first failure, and he did not know what to do. He called his father and said he planned to quit. Mutt showed up ten hours later. He’d driven from Commerce, Oklahoma. He went to Mickey’s closet and began packing his clothes.

  “What are you doing?” Mickey asked.

  “I’m taking you home,” said Mutt. “I’ve got a job for you in the mine.”

  Which was exactly what Mickey needed—the threat of ordinary life. He was back in the majors by May. He became a Hall of Famer, but also an alcoholic. Pressure warped him. He had a great career and a troubled life. We’ve all got our kids in the Mutt Mantle training program now.

  Scouting the opposition at Lake Placid, New York

  There were fifteen players on the Pee Wee A Bears. Imagine them being introduced like players in an NHL All-Star game, each skating out as an announcer calls their number and shares a few biographical details:

  Number 19, Brian Rizzo! Brian was a rushing defenseman. He’d built his game, even if he didn’t know it, in the style of Bobby Orr. Until the 1970s, even a good defenseman hardly ever scored. Bobby Orr changed that. He’d jump into the offensive rush. He could do this because he was a great skater, fast enough to get back on defense. By jumping into the offense, Orr put his team on an odd-man rush. In 1965, Jacques Laperrière, the Montreal Canadiens’ All-Star defenseman, collected six goals and twenty-five assists. In 1974, Bobby Orr collected forty-six goals and eighty-nine assists. After 1977, every team in North America had a rushing defenseman. For the Pee Wee A Bears, it was Brian Rizzo, who’d been empowered by his father, Ralph Rizzo, one of our parent-coaches, to pick his spots. It gave his game an unpredictable, daredevil quality. Now and then, when Brian took off with the puck, you’d think, “Oh, God, here we go.” The kid was a gambler. If things went well, it meant a dazzling scoring opportunity for the Bears. But if things went wrong, and they often did, it meant a dazzling scoring opportunity the other way. You did not look away when Brian was on the ice.

  A rushing defenseman must be balanced by a stay-at-home defenseman who can cover both positions. A certain type of player excels at this. He or she tends to be sober and responsible, unconcerned with statistics or personal glory.

  For the Bears, it was …

  Number 12, Rick Stanley! Rick was lanky, loose-limbed, the sort of skater who looks like he’s taking his time even when he’s flying. Kids loved him because he loved the game—he spent hours and hours in his driveway, working on his slap shot. He was dutiful and dedicated, which made sense when you got to know his father, Terry, a full-blown Deadhead and the Ridgefield Bears’ only woke parent. Terry’s Chevy Blazer was all social justice bumper stickers on the outside and all Jerry Garcia on the inside. Rick was often late to practice, for which he skated laps, though it was obviously Terry’s fault.

  We also had …

  Number 32, Patrick Campi! Patrick was affectionate, always with his arm around a kid, bucking up the downtrodden, congratulating the scorers. His mom believed he belonged on Double A, and she was right. He was a fantastic athlete, and played the game with intuition. He always seemed to know what was going to happen on the ice. A handful of our players were in fact too good for the A team. They often got it wrong in the tryouts. Some believed it was corruption. Some believed it was intentionally done to balance the teams. Some believed it was simple incompetence. “You’re over analyzing it,” a father told me. “A lot of these coaches are just stupid.” Because he was big, Patrick tended to draw excess attention from other teams. There’s no checking till Bantam, which does not mean they don’t hit, just that it draws a penalty. Never having had to deal with legal contact, Patrick had developed few survival skills. He skated blithely up the ice, head down, as if nothing could touch him. He’d already had two concussions.

  “One more,” the doctor told Campi’s mother, “and he’ll have to take up another sport.”

  “Like soccer?”

  “Like badminton.”

  Then …

  Number 64, Barry Meese, a.k.a. Moose! Our team was half first-year Pee Wees (ten- and eleven-year-olds) and half second-year Pee Wees (eleven- and twelve-year-olds). There can be a tremendous difference. A ten-year-old is usually prepubescent with downy cheeks. At twelve, the same kid might have become a mustachioed monster. Barry was a second-year Pee Wee, a big center with a hard shot. All he lacked was imagination. He’d do the same thing again and again: get the puck behind our net (good), skate in front of our own goalie (bad), carry the puck up the ice by himself (bad), make several players on the other team look silly (good), then lose the puck just inside the blue line (bad). And he did not pass. The only way to beat a faster team is by passing—you can pass faster than anyone can skate—but Barry wouldn’t do it. I began to think of him as a devotee of a mystery cult whose only commandment was Thou Shalt Not Pass. When he did—I mean, yes, sometimes he did—it was always to his right. I wondered if he had a vision problem: Could it be as simple as that? I had a fantasy. I’d take him out to lunch, then bring him to Cohen’s Fashion Optical, where he’d get tested, then fitted with frames, then bingo! He’d see the open wing, make the pass, get the pass, score!

  Then …

  Number 65, Leo Moriarty! A laid-back forward, he had flashes of brilliance followed by periods of indolence, when he seemed to lose focus. Maybe he was too happy, too cool. He showed up to the Winter Garden directly from lacrosse in shorts and flip-flops, which he called “slides,” even when it was snowing. It pissed off Coach Hendrix. “Sandals at the rink? Just wait till someone steps on his foot with a skate and Leo loses a toe! Then we’ll see how cool he looks.”

  Number 89, Roman Holian! He’d been adopted from an orphanage in Ukraine. Good hands, good wrists, but sensitive—a single word of criticism could undo him. He had snowy blond hair and myopic blue eyes that were corrected on the ice by goggles that made him look like a Martian. He was a scorer, but slow. He gummed up the rush.

  Number 33, Becky Goodman! Her brothers were high school hockey stars, making her a kind of royalty. She’d grown up with the game, which is probably why she had a better feel for it than just about anyone. A stay-at-home defender, she was the biggest kid we had. When not in the locker room or in action, she was watching TikTok videos on her phone, studying dance moves. She had long blond hair and the glazed look of a screen addict. You’d never guess she was such a force on the ice.

  Number 14, Joey McDermott! He was a skilled stick handler, and a constant scoring threat. He worked beautifully with his stepbrother Tommy—they communicated on a supersecret stepbrother frequency—but the coaches usually put Joey on defense. He was often in the company of his little brother Chase, a Squirt goalie. I sought Chase out at the rink because no one offered better postgame analysis. “He didn’t score,” Chase said after Campi missed an open net, “because deep down he doesn’t want to score.”

  Number 15, Duffy Taylor! A wildly talented player, arguably the best Pee Wee in Ridgefield, Duffy had that single flaw—temper. He had the kind of blond hair that looks white in the sun, and his eyes were washed-out blue. He had ice vision, that rare thing—he could see the patterns and possibilities before anyone. He was a Double A talent placed on our roster by way of punishment, as a disobedient soldier might be transferred to the Aleutian Islands.

  Number 66, “Broadway Jenny” Hendrix! Tiny, freckle-faced, incredibly hardworking, and show-tune singing, Broadway Jenny played forward on legs that went like pistons. You could almost hear them chugging. This was a girl getting fifteen pounds into a ten-pound sack, driven by a fuel even more powerful than love of the game—fear of her father, Coach Hendrix, who had taught her the sport. There was not a moment when Broadway Jenny did not know where she was supposed to be or what she was supposed to do on the ice. She would step out of the face-off to reposition her teammates before the puck was dropped. It was like having a coach in the game.

/>   Number 55, “Broadway Julie” Sherman! A brown-haired, green-eyed, straight-A student, Broadway Julie was smart, modest, and happy just to find a place in the scheme. Why the nickname? Because her father was a well-known theatrical producer, many of whose plays had appeared on Broadway. Perhaps it was all the years of auditions that made him honest enough to describe his daughter as “a great kid but a third-line hockey talent. My heart wants her to lead,” he told us, “but my head knows she belongs in the chorus.”

  Number 3, Jean Camus! He had the name of a Quebecois, a French-Canadian icebound maestro, but he asked teammates to call him Jack. If they called him Jean, which they often did, he flew into a rage. Now and then, he’d do something great, made thrilling by its rarity. He loved skating but only liked hockey.

  Number 00, Dan Arcus! Our goalie, “the Arc,” turned out to be the key to whatever success we had. He was big and quiet, like his father. For Jocko, it was the Dodge Charger that did the talking. For Dan, it was that goalie stick and oversize pads. Having the Arc in the net was like having an ace on the mound every night.

  And then my own kid …

  Number 45, Micah Cohen! When Micah made his first travel team, we were told to choose a number for his jersey. This is important. We’re all numerologists now. It seemed best to take a number that had belonged to an NHL great—such a number is blessed. He tried 9, which had belonged to Gordie Howe; 99, which had belonged to Wayne Gretzky; 11, which had belonged to Mark Messier. They were all taken. He went after a few others—7 (Phil Esposito), 21 (Stan Mikita), 87 (Sidney Crosby). Taken, taken, taken. He switched to the numbers of football players, because, as I explained, it’s the spirit and not the particular sport that matters. He settled on 45, which had been worn by Chicago Bears’ safety Gary Fencik, a.k.a. “the Hitman.” Fencik was a legendary overachiever, a medium-size athlete who got by on smarts. He played at Yale, was drafted and cut by the Dolphins, then walked on in Chicago, where he stuck around for fourteen seasons, becoming an All-Pro and the Bears’ career interception leader. Fencik was never the best player on any of his teams, not even in high school. He just kept improving. In him I recognized Micah, who starts at the bottom of each new roster and climbs. Sometimes I think it’s the way he skates. There’s a hitch in Micah’s stride. He’s fast but not pretty. He does not look like the kid in the instructional video. As some players overachieve in tryouts, he underachieves. He can’t skate the cones and doesn’t nail the drills. All he can do is play hockey.

 

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