Pee Wees

by Rich Cohen

  Winning has its lessons, too. We all hate sore losers, but sore winners are worse. Be modest in victory, knowing you could just as easily have been on the other side, as you were yesterday and will be tomorrow. Don’t be a wise guy. Don’t chirp. Don’t say “ha-ha” in the handshake line. Follow the golden rule. In my day, we raised our sticks when we scored to draw attention. The modern kid goes in for more elaborate celebrations, fist-pumping, pointing. And yet, even in the NHL, hockey celebrations come nowhere near the decadence of the touchdown dance. Our game is the best kind of throwback: a fortress against a pagan tide of gloating. A few years ago, when a New York Ranger, having scored, pretended his stick was a rifle, then, looking through the scope, pretended to assassinate the goalie, he was denounced even by his own teammates.

  NOVEMBER

  A bitter wind drove the last of the leaves from the trees. The roads were icy in the morning. The hills dreamt of snow. Hemingway said bare trees are OK once you accept them as modern sculpture, but it’s a trick I could never manage. The season that comes after the leaves and before the snow makes me want to cry. Some say it’s the lack of light, the earth spinning away from the sun. In November, the only dependable light is rink light. We live as if in a terrarium.

  The Bears had been losing for what felt like eternity. After the ninth consecutive defeat, the kids had learned all they could from the experience. It was just pain from there, as coaches turned on players, and players turned on each other, and parents pontificated and proposed, “What if we skate five forwards?” In the end, you stop scheming and instead wait for the clap of thunder that signals the end of drought. It came in the middle of November in a town in the center of Connecticut. I was not sure where I was, but I knew it was in the middle—the middle of the state, the middle of the season, and the middle of my life.

  The town itself was nothing but boarded windows and shuttered stores. “It looks like this place never got over the recession of ’08,” said Parky Taylor, sipping from his supersize coffee.

  “More like the crash of ’29,” said Jerry Sherman.

  The rink was in a sheet-metal warehouse that creaked in the wind. It felt haunted. You glimpsed the ghosts of hockey past, players in Lange skates with plastic boots, Super Tacks, Stan Mikita helmets, and the sort of exterior mouthguards that dominated in the ’70s, a time of great bloodletting. The locker room was small, low-ceilinged, and hot as a schvitz. There were no benches and no cubbies in the visitors’ clubhouse. The hooks had been removed from the walls. The Bears had to sit on the floor to lace their skates. This is called gamesmanship, home advantage. Even the ice was strange, damp and small, surrounded by rickety boards that yielded crazy bounces. We must have passed through a portal on I-84—this was like a visit to an earlier place in hockey time.

  The Ridgefield parents sat on one side of the bleachers, the home team parents on the other. The kids came out through a tunnel between. The home team parents jeered at our kids. The Ridgefield parents jeered back. The arena was soon in an uproar. There are just a few rules for spectators at a youth hockey game, and the hometowners had broken three of them before the first puck dropped: they heckled; they swore; they blasted an air horn, the sort that clears your sinuses.

  “Oh Lord, look!” said Jerry Sherman, pointing at the home team goalie, who was leading his players onto the ice.

  Once upon a time, kids wanted to play goalie for a single reason: the face masks, which, in the 1970s, were still the kind worn by the psycho in Friday the 13th. Imaginative goalies painted their masks, a burst of creativity in an otherwise conformist culture. Certain NHL netminders became known less for prowess than for artistry: Gary Bromley, whose nickname was Bones—the guy was skinny as a rail—painted his mask to look like a skull, which was called Skeletor; Gilles Gratton of the New York Rangers painted his to look like a tiger; Gerry Cheevers of the Boston Bruins painted stitches everywhere a puck had hit his mask, showing what his face would’ve looked like had he played in the iron age. By the 1980s, fiberglass masks had given way to cages, which offer better protection. Yet here was the hometown goalie in an old-fashioned nonregulation mask painted to look like a grinning red devil.

  Coach Pete sent Barry Meese out for the opening face-off—at this point, the coaches were juggling the lines, looking for a spark. Barry played the puck to Leo, who quickly found himself in a battle along the boards, which ended with Leo and Barry on their backs as the hometown center skated away, setting the tone for what followed. As a group, the other team was slow, dogged, and rough. They held our skaters by the jerseys, stood in front of their shots, and whacked their legs. They seemed to be following a flood-the-zone-to-overwhelm strategy: if they all committed penalties simultaneously all over the ice, the refs would catch only a fraction. Their forwards came out for warm-ups each carrying four or five sticks—wooden cheapies, the sort that sell for ten bucks in the pro shop’s used bin—which should have told us they’d been planning to lay the lumber.

  Micah was centering the third line but could do nothing with the puck. If it did not hop over his stick, he lost it to whatever kid was hanging on his back. Brian, Joey, Broadway Julie, Rick, Tommy, and Jack Camus were all being stymied in the same way. Dan was doing his best in goal, but a few shots found their way into our net. It was 3–0 at the start of the second period. The home team parents had been taunting so much that we actually stopped noticing. Our kids were not only losing; they were getting bullied. It was hard to watch. At such times you wonder why you filled the car with gas and drove all this way. When one of our forwards did get past their defense—I’m thinking of Joey, who made a deft pivot—he found himself staring into the grinning eyes of that red devil in the net.

  Coach Pete called a time-out. Our kids stood around, shoulders slumped, listless. Their body language sucked. They looked as if they could not wait for the game and even the season to be over. Nothing is sadder than a sad kid on skates. Duffy was the only Bear who had not given up. The refs had stopped calling any but the most blatant penalties, making it his kind of game. He said something to Coach Pete, who let him take the face-off after the time-out. He won it, kept the puck, headed up ice, lost the puck, got it back, passed, received a pass, lost it again. He was all over the place. His feet never stopped moving. Somebody hacked him, he hacked back. Somebody shoved him, he shoved back. You could see that he was getting angrier and angrier. He could not ignore the slightest discourtesy. You could hear the ticking. You knew at some point he would explode. It was Coach Pete’s job to channel Duffy’s rage. Hotheaded kids often turn out to be the kids with the most potential; they hate to lose and can’t stand to be shown up. But our coaches failed Duffy and, having failed, gave up on him. Which only made him angrier, thus more likely to erupt.

  The home team had a player named Eli Malachi. I know this because while most kids have just their last name on their jersey, Eli Malachi had the whole thing: Eli Malachi. He was a good player, but arrogant and heedless in his arrogance. He skated with his head down. Half the time, he did not know where he was. Late in the second, he carried the puck blindly through the neutral zone, the middle of the ice between the two blue lines. You could not see his face, but knew it was clever and mean. He looked up as Duffy moved in and, in looking up, lost the puck in his skates. Duffy reached for the puck and skated right through Eli Malachi. He was sent sprawling. The ref blew the whistle. A blast of air horn, a ring of cowbell. A parent’s voice could be heard above the din: “That little bastard almost killed Eli Malachi!” When Eli Malachi sat up, you could see birds twittering around his head. He did not know where he was. Then he did. He got to his feet, crying and shouting.

  Duffy served two minutes in the penalty box for roughing. The hometown parents were infuriated. They wanted Duffy tossed, but he was back before the end of the period, skating like a dynamo, fast and with purpose, poke-checking, lifting sticks, driving the net. He got off a hard shot as the buzzer sounded. It rang off the post, the most frustrating sound in hockey. A
s the players skated back to their benches, Eli Malachi hopped over the boards and went for Duffy. He turned his stick around and carried it like a lance. He speared Duffy below the ribs, a place unprotected by pads. Duffy fell to his knees. Players came together, shoving. The coaches and refs broke it up. Duffy was helped off the ice, one arm around Coach Hendrix, the other around Coach Rizzo. Eli Malachi had his helmet off and was being lectured by the official. We could hear him explaining himself: “Nobody touches Eli Malachi! Nobody!”

  Between periods, our players gathered around Coach Pete.

  “Make one play,” he implored. “That’s all we need: one play.”

  He wrote it on the wipe board and held the words before the kids: “ONE PLAY!”

  The Bears were distracted by the home team coach, who was screaming at his players: “This is not the time to relax,” he shouted. “This is the time to bury these losers. You know what they are? Turds! We’ve got turds in the toilet! And what do we do with turds? We flush ’em! Now get out there and flush these turds!”

  “I agree with the second part,” said Jerry Sherman.

  “What’s that?” asked Parky.

  “That that’s what you do with turds,” said Jerry. “It’s the first part, the part about our kids being turds, that I dispute.”

  I could hear Simone Camus muttering, “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu.”

  Micah took the face-off to start the third. He was playing with Broadway Julie on right wing and Roman Holian on left. He sent the puck back to Brian Rizzo, who was playing defense on the right side. Brian passed cross-ice to his defensive partner, Joey McDermott, who took off. Joey is so small that you forget his speed. He blew by the opposing wings, then blew by the defense. He passed to Micah, who passed to Broadway Julie, who was waiting just outside the crease. She held the puck long enough for the devil in net to slide over, then passed—a saucer pass, it hopped a defender’s stick—to Roman, who was beside the left goalpost. He finished with a snap shot.

  GOAL!

  The players on the Bears bench went wild, hooting, banging their sticks on the boards. Jerry Sherman pounded me and Parky on the back. Parky choked on a pretzel. I spilled my coffee. In that moment, the team, which had touched bottom, began to surface. Coach Pete was correct. One play—that’s all it took. Even better that it was the sort of play that involves every Bear on the ice. Sometimes you root less for the team than for the game itself, for seeing a thing done well.

  Everything clicked from there. Tommy scored on the next shift, a breakaway. Barry scored after that. He scored from behind the net, bouncing the puck off the goalie’s leg, which is like punching a kid with his own fist. Broadway Jenny popped in a rebound late in the third, giving the Bears their first lead in weeks.

  The score was 5–4 with twenty seconds left. The top line went out to finish it. Barry won the face-off, passed to Brian, who passed to Joey, who skated with the puck till the horn blew. The Bears swarmed Dan. I could hear them chanting, “Arc, Arc, Arc, Arc.”

  Jerry Sherman texted me that night:

  JS: A triumph, huh? I’m still flying. Just glad we got out in one piece. I spotted gun stickers on every windshield in the parking lot. All pickup trucks.

  RC: I saw a backhoe.

  JS: To bury the dead!

  RC: Well, we’re alive. And we won. Finally.

  RC: What do you think did it?

  JS: Turd speech. No one likes being called a turd.

  * * *

  And so began a time of success, the salad days. A winning streak is a losing streak in negative. Whereas the Pee Wee A Bears once felt they could neither defend nor score, they came to believe they could not be stopped. This made them happy. They lingered in that happiness, taking more and more time in the locker room, blasting “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Dude Looks Like a Lady,” “Hot for Teacher,” emerging wet-haired, smiling. Tommy showed up with a pack of condoms, which he inflated and floated and punched. The kids loved one another again, hung out after games, had sleepovers, walked through town in their jackets like a victorious army. Micah bought a box of snappers at the toy store, which, whenever he heard something he liked, he’d throw at the ground. These were confiscated by Coach Hendrix. The more they loved each other, the better they played. The better they played, the more they loved each other. What had been a negative feedback loop gave way to a virtuous cycle.

  It was a group effort of course, but if you wanted to credit a single player, it’d be our goalie Dan Arcus. Tall, olive-skinned with warm brown eyes, shy and distracted off the ice but practiced in the art of high focus between the pipes, he was brilliant throughout the streak, a highlight reel, a catalog of every kind of save: the butterfly, the split, blocker and glove. Goalie is the toughest position in hockey. Within the ecosystem of the ultimate team sport, the goalie remains an individual, solitary and intense. He succeeds and fails, lives and dies, alone. It takes a certain type. When the puck is on the far side of the ice, two hundred feet away, he has nothing to do but wait. What does he think about? What does he see? When fortunes shift and the opponent heads the opposite way on the rush, two or three forwards passing the puck or a hotshot coming in alone, the goalie shifts from the periphery to the center of the action. Imagine it: eight kids coming at you full stride, your defensemen, just their backs, gliding in like recalled kites, everyone on the move but you, the object of it all, pinned between the posts, trapped in the prisonlike crease. When the team wins, the goalie is hardly credited. Most of the glory goes to the scorers. When the team loses, the goalie takes most of the blame. “If only Dan had not given up that soft goal,” Coach Hendrix says, shaking his head. The goalie is different from the others, set off by the uniqueness of his task and the oddity of his equipment. Even his skates are different. His blades are flat instead of curved, to give him stability and lateral movement. His only compatriot is the backup goalie—we didn’t even have one—who is also his only rival. It’d be enough to make anyone crazy, hence the famous eccentricity of the netminder.

  Question: Does the job make the goalie nuts, or do only nutty people apply?

  Goalies have been known to touch every corner of the net before a face-off. Some twitch when not engaged. All drink water immediately after getting scored on, even if not thirsty, leaning on the crossbar as if they’re having a beer at the pub—they do this to tell the world and themselves that they remain calm and unperturbed. The Blackhawks’ goalie Glenn Hall used to vomit in the locker room before games. Nerves. The Canadiens’ goalie Patrick Roy developed a kind of ice-only Tourette’s. He’d curse and tic all game, and talk to the goal posts, who were always dressed in red. Though just twelve years old, Arcus had already developed weird habits. He’d eat only McNuggets with barbecue sauce on game days. If given sweet and sour, he’d blow. He tapped his forehead against the crossbar before each face-off. He sang the Ludacris song “Get Back” between periods:

  See I caught ’em wit a right hook, caught ’em wit a jab

  Caught ’em wit an uppercut, kicked ’em in his ass …

  Get back motherfucker! You don’t know me like that!

  We questioned none of it, not even the profanity, because it was working. In those weeks, we won in Hamden, Norwalk, Brewster, and Greenwich, defeating teams named Cougars, Panthers, Ducks, and Turtles. We won close games and blowouts. Whenever possible, we ran up the score—this was our tribute to the algorithm. We went online to check our ranking. We started November ranked fifty-second in the state. By the end of the month, we were forty-seventh. As our ultimate goal was to catch the Double As, we checked their rank, too. Having begun the season at fifth, they’d fallen to thirty-third by November. It was the talk of the organization. The Double A team, which was supposed to be the jewel of the program, had won just five games.

  What was happening?

  Everyone had an opinion. Many blamed the tryouts. They spoke of a “scouting-combine effect,” referencing the annual NFL camp (“The Combine”) where pro football coaches put college prosp
ects through drills and tests, scoring and assessing them ahead of the draft. Since the combine started in the 1980s, NFL teams have come to overvalue the things that can be measured (height, strength, speed) and undervalue the sort of intangibles (intelligence, creativity, will) that make for winning teams. As a result, many teams are stocked with great athletes who can’t really play. Had something similar happened here? The Double As had all the top skaters, but it seemed we had more intuitive hockey players.

  Gordon Campi thought it was about corruption. “If you figure out why the Double As are no good,” he said, “you’ll understand what’s wrong with the way talent is judged in this country. It’s like college admissions,” he explained. “They say there are fifteen roster spots, but half of them are filled before the first tryout. They go to the children of the parent-coaches and their pals, or to the sons and daughters of board members. No more than six or seven spots are genuinely in play.

  The Double A coach—Jamie McRae, whom everyone called Mack—tried to fix his team midseason, on the fly. The easiest way was by replacing the goalie. A strong netminder can carry a weak team. The Double As did not have a strong netminder. They had a big, slow, easily distracted kid whose mom was on the board and whose dad worked in Zamboni maintenance—he serviced the rink’s 552AC. Good goaltending is the art of deep concentration. A good goalie can fix on a puck and follow its every flip and spin for an hour. A great goalie attains a level of presence sought by yogis. A great goalie lives in the now. The Double A goalie dwelled on his mistakes, which is living in the past. If he had a good game, it was a shutout. As soon as he’d given up one goal, he’d give up three. If he gave up three, he’d give up seven.

  Coach Mack, scruffy and irritable, with a dirty blond beard, began showing up at our practices. He’d sit by himself in the bleachers, never taking his eyes off Arcus. One night, after everyone else had left, I saw him talking with Dan and his parents, Jocko and Camille, on the home bench. The rink was closing; the lights had been set to dim. There were rumors that night. The next day, several of our parents cornered Jocko and Camille in the parking lot. We stood around their Dodge Charger asking questions. We wanted to know if Dan had been offered a spot on the Double A team, and if so, would he take it? The Arcuses seemed upset by the whole thing. “It’s a shitty position for a kid,” Jocko said. “If Dan should be a Double A, he should’ve been on that team from the start. What were the tryouts for anyway?”