Pee Wees

by Rich Cohen

  “We have our opinions, but we’re going to let Danny decide,” Camille told us.

  “It’s his life,” said Jocko.

  Dan was in the Single A locker room before the next practice.

  I saw Jocko and Camille in the lobby.

  “Does this mean Dan’s staying?” I asked.

  “Yup,” said Jocko. “The kid did good.”

  “You have to be loyal to your team,” Camille added, smiling.

  All this was supposed to be kept from the kids, but of course it got out. It’s a good thing too, as the team bonded in a new way. Everyone worked harder after that. They wanted to prove Dan had made the right choice.

  * * *

  Coach Hendrix spent his non-hockey life traveling back and forth from Purchase, where he drove a golf cart around the PepsiCo perimeter. He’d once been an officer in the army, but those days were long gone. Like the rest of us, he’d thickened as he aged. He was a stout, gray-haired man in his fifties who was always chewing on something—a toothpick, a pencil, a piece of gum. He never seemed less than a little angry. His older daughter had played hockey but quit. It was easy to understand why. Coach Hendrix tried to do the impossible: replace his child’s will with his own. It’s a transplant that will never take. The moment hockey stops being a game, it’s work. Who wants more work?

  Micah told me that Coach Hendrix was a screamer on the bench, but I thought he was exaggerating.

  “He’s a rent-a-cop,” I told Micah. “He’s paid to keep it together.”

  “I know,” said Micah. “That’s what’s so weird. He’s like two different people. He’s one kind of guy with parents but a completely different kind of guy with kids.”

  I paid close attention to Coach Hendrix after that. I watched him at practices but saw nothing. Then came a game in Brunswick, a prep school in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was one of those early mornings when even coffee doesn’t help. There was a mist on the quad when we arrived. The campus was deserted. We parked and walked through empty halls, looking for the rink. In the lobby, we examined pictures of the oldest prep hockey teams. Every coach looked like Warren G. Harding. Most of the kids looked like George H. W. Bush. Every team had at least one ne’er-do-well, a mischievous trickster who you just knew died in the Argonne Forest or at the Battle of the Bulge. The equipment has improved, the game is faster, but important things have not changed. As the Green Bay Packer Max McGee said, “When it’s third and ten, you can take the milk drinkers and I’ll take the whiskey drinkers every time.”

  Coach Pete pulled me aside in the lobby. He said, “Coach Rizzo can’t make it. Can you handle the defensive-side door?”

  And that’s how I came to see the other side of Coach Hendrix. He began screaming as soon as the puck dropped. He did not yell at any particular player, but at the team in general. He shouted what sounded less like specific instructions—“Center the puck!” “Cover the point!”—than like abstract concepts. His phrases were akin to modern paintings that have numbers instead of names. “Where’s the ambition?” “Is your hair on fire?” “Are you a player?” I stared at him in surprise, but he did not seem to notice. He was wearing his Bears baseball hat and his Bears jacket with his name on the sleeve: “Coach Alan.” He chewed a coffee stirrer, eyes like pinholes. The air around him dripped invective. Shirker! Crap pass! Stupid play! I was mesmerized. At times, lost in the moment, I forgot to open the defensive-side door, and the kids lined up, waiting to get off the ice.

  “Hey, Coach,” Coach Pete called to me, smiling. “Your job. The door.”

  It was a close game. The action went back and forth. I tried to catch Micah’s eye, but he looked away. Over time, the nature of Coach Hendrix’s invective changed. It went from fiery but abstract to concrete and harsh. He was yelling at specific players by the middle of the second, screaming till his voice was hoarse. “Duffy! Keep your fuckin’ stick down! This ain’t a prison yard.” “Hey, Tommy! We all know you can skate. How about playing hockey!” His daughter got the worst of it. “Hey, Jenny! What the hell? Are you trying to embarrass me? I didn’t raise you like that!”

  Some parents see only the good when their kids play hockey. Coach Hendrix saw only the bad, the flaws, the smallest mistake or loss of concentration. Every lapse fell on him like a physical blow. He redirected his dismay and pain onto the narrow shoulders of Broadway Jenny, who skated faster and faster and chugged harder and harder but would never be good enough. By the third period, Coach Hendrix’s diatribe, which had been intermittent, became a Joycean stream, a never-ending sentence in which the words were connected by hyphens. “Goddamnit-Jenny-what’s-your-major-malfunction- the-puck-was-right-in-front-of-you!”

  We were down by one with five minutes to go. Tommy stole the puck and skated up ice with Broadway Jenny, a two-on-one. (Brunswick had been caught changing lines, leaving them momentarily shorthanded.) They passed back and forth, back and forth. Tommy faked a shot—the goalie slid to cover—then passed to Broadway Jenny. She held the puck for what seemed like—one one thousand, two one thousand—two full seconds, then shot high, sailing the puck over an empty net. Her eyes were red when she got back to the bench. She sat next to her father, who had stopped yelling, who had stopped talking altogether. Ominous silence. His arms were crossed. He stared ahead. He leaned down and whispered to his daughter. She started sobbing. The other kids stole a glance at her, then looked away.

  “Oh, stop it,” said Coach Hendrix. “This is hockey.”

  I stared at him. He met my gaze, then said, “I’m not a hugger.”

  I looked at Coach Pete. He kept his eyes on the ice.

  Broadway Jenny did not miss a shift. She was back out there a minute later, charging across the ice, hurling herself into the corners, redoubling her effort, as if this time she’d finally get it right.

  Coach Pete pulled Dan with a minute left. Micah went on as the extra skater. He wore a plastic shield instead of a cage, which gave him the look of the boy in the bubble, closed off from the fury of the world. He got the puck inside the blue line, made a move, then carried it behind the net. He stood there with ten seconds to go. He waited a beat, then passed to Barry, who was rushing the goalie. What’s more important? The pass or the shot? Barry snapped off a hard wrister and won the game.

  I called Ralph Rizzo that night to ask about Coach Hendrix.

  “Is he always like that?” I asked.

  “Yeah, man. He gets into it. He goes a little far sometimes, but his heart’s in the right place.”

  When I spoke to Coach Pete a few days later, he said the same thing.

  “What he’s doing to his daughter isn’t right,” I said.

  “I hear you,” said Coach Pete, “but it’s his kid.”

  LAKE PLACID—AN INTERLUDE

  An engraving from 1796 shows men on skates playing a game that looks like ice hockey on the frozen Thames in London. British soldiers played the same game on the Saint Lawrence River while stationed in Canada in the nineteenth century. Trappers carried it west, where they played on lakes and ponds amid old-growth evergreen forests. At first, they used a ball. They later switched to a wooden disk. On the frontier, the game was rough. Some players lost teeth. Others were knocked senseless and sat dumbstruck beneath the winter sun, wondering, “Who am I? Why am I here?” For most, it was a diversion. For a few, it became a passion. Because it was played on rivers that ribboned the North Woods, it was linked to the freedom and romance of the New World. Some called it “shinny.” Some called it “hockey.” It’s been said to descend from lacrosse, football, even golf, but its adherents knew that it was its own game, with its own dangers, ethics, and code. It’s the only major sport played someplace other than dry land. In North America, it’s an example of man adapting to a hostile environment, a winter world of violence, teamwork, triumph, and pain.

  The first indoor game was played on March 3, 1875, at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal. The teams—McGill University students—played nine to a side. Some positions
in evidence that day (center, wing) remain familiar, while others (roamer, broom) have been forgotten. There were enough teams in Canada by 1883 to stage the first “championship” as part of Montreal’s Winter Carnival. Within a few years, the winner of this tournament was being given a large silver punch bowl purchased for the occasion by Lord Stanley of Preston, who fell in love with hockey soon after he was appointed governor general of Canada by Queen Victoria in 1888. This cup, or one of its descendants—there have been three Stanley Cups—has been given to the world’s best hockey team ever since.

  There were a hundred Canadian hockey teams by 1900. Many of the standout players can be seen in photos at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. They wear wool sweaters and skimpy pads and primitive-looking skates. The first pro league was created in the United States. That’s what America is for: inventing the market and making it pay. Called the International Professional Hockey League, it collapsed in 1907, only to be followed by other leagues that formed and dissolved, culminating with the founding of the National Hockey League in 1917. The NHL’s early years were marked by the rise and fall of franchises, their names redolent of a lost age: the Vancouver Millionaires, the Seattle Metropolitans. By the 1940s, only a handful of clubs remained, the so-called Original Six: the New York Rangers, the Boston Bruins, the Montreal Canadiens, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Chicago Blackhawks, and the Detroit Red Wings. Considered a golden age, the six-team era lasted until the league’s first expansion in 1967. There are currently thirty-two NHL teams, with clubs in such unlikely cities as Miami, Phoenix, and Las Vegas.

  The early days were marked by innovation, but the game settled into an equilibrium in the six-team era. This is hockey as I knew it in the 1970s. Dump and chase: the center dumps the puck into the corner, and the wing chases it, digs it out, and throws it in front of the net, where the center and the other wing try to bang it past the goalie. The object is to keep the puck in the other team’s zone. Now and then, there’d be a breakaway, or you might live to see a genius like Bobby Orr, but for the most part, nothing much changed. The game we played was like slot hockey on ice, with each player stuck in his groove.

  The stars of the NHL, as well as the team owners and announcers, believed there was no other way to play the game. Fans believed that no one in the world was playing it half as well. We knew about the Russians, of course—they were targeting us with nukes. We spent every minute watching for missile shadows. But we did not think much of their hockey. Russia, with its frozen steppe and endless winters, is God-given shinny country, but the Soviets got serious about the game only in the 1950s, when every sporting event came to be seen as a theater in the cold war. If the Russians got good fast, credit coach Anatoli Tarasov, who took control of the program in 1958. The Russian national team was part of the Red Army. Tarasov did not have to worry about recruiting players—he could simply have top prospects drafted. That’s where the dictatorship of the proletariat has it all over capitalism. The fact that Tarasov did not grow up with the game turned out to be another plus. He came to it with what Buddhists call “beginner’s mind,” open and eager, a problem-solver unencumbered by old habits. He built his team in the style of Russian folkways, influenced less by dump and chase than by the Bolshoi Ballet. To him, players were like gears in a machine. You did not pass to a teammate. You moved the puck to the place the cog would be when the wheel turned. What’s more, while North American players, needing to make money to support their families—the average NHL salary was $17,934 in 1960—spent the off-season selling insurance or pumping gas, the Soviets, being lieutenants and majors, were able to train in a season without end. NHL players returned from the summer with love handles and beer guts and had to spend the first months of the season working their way back into shape. The Russians were never in anything but perfect condition. A typical NHL player might have taken a class and earned a license so he could sell real estate or life insurance in the off-season. The Russian’s Boris Mayorov took up juggling so he could improve his stick handling.

  By the 1960s, the Russians had crafted a unique style. Whereas the Canadians went up and down the ice—north to south; dump to chase—the Soviets traveled every which way, north to south, east to west, side to side, advancing, retreating, feinting, following an orbit that took them everywhere. It seemed counterintuitive. If the object is to score, shouldn’t the players rush the goalie? But Tarasov, not knowing any better, built his scheme on misdirection, with players spiraling, probing, searching for a weakness. It violated the old rules. The Russians carried the puck in front of their own net, went back and forth across the blue line as if it wasn’t even there, forsook a good shot believing a better shot would come. This was about teamwork, speed, strategy. Dump and chase was based on a simple idea—give up the puck, then get it back. That made no sense to Tarasov. Why would you give up possession? The Soviets never willingly relinquished the puck.

  When the Red Army started beating North American amateurs, no one thought much of it. The Soviet team was the equivalent of North American professionals, the best in their nation, men in their twenties and thirties. In the capitalist West, amateurs really were amateurs: unpaid college kids or those not good enough for the big leagues. We believed that any halfway decent NHL team—the 1966–67 Rangers, say, who finished 30–28–12—would annihilate the Russians.

  In the summer of 1972, a team of Canadian All-Stars played an eight-game series against the Red Army. It was called the Summit Series. Team Canada included many of the best players in the NHL: Bobby Orr, Bobby Clarke, Stan Mikita, Phil Esposito, and Ken Dryden, who published the diary he kept during the match as Face-off at the Summit. Every fan figured it would be a blowout, a schooling for the Commies. Team Canada did in fact score just thirty seconds into game one. “Phil Esposito tapped a rebound past [the Russian goalie] Tretiak,” Dryden wrote. “I felt pretty confident. Then we scored again. Bobby Clarke clearly won a face-off to Tretiak’s right, drew the puck back to Paul Henderson, and he scored. Tretiak never moved on Paul’s shot. Two goals in less than seven minutes.”

  To fans—the game was played before eighteen thousand at the Montreal Forum—it looked like the expected cakewalk, but the players knew better. The fact is, the Canadians, many of whom were still in “summer shape,” could not keep up with the spinning gyre. It was more than just conditioning: Team Canada was a collection of All-Stars—these guys had never played together. The Red Army had been working as a unit for a dozen years. They functioned like a machine. “They started to pass the puck with beautiful combinations,” wrote Dryden. “There was Yevgeny Zimin banging one in from the crease. Goal. 2–1. Then they began playing keep-away with the puck.”

  The Red Army tied the score at the end of the first period and went on to win the game 7–3, sending the Canadian populace into shock. “It was a really interesting game,” Dryden wrote. “You learn only when you lose.”

  The Canadians battled back, winning several games, but this was clearly not going to be easy. The series then shifted to Russia. (“I slept for about an hour in the airport, woke up, started to read James Dickey’s Deliverance, and then decided to buy a camera at the duty-free shop,” Dryden reported.) The games were played at the Palace of Sports in Moscow, where, according to Dryden, “the big three of Soviet politics—Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny—sat in the presidential box, while Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the great poet, was practically in the rafters.”

  The series came down to the final minute of the final game, which Team Canada won with thirty-four seconds left in regulation—Esposito shot, Henderson got the rebound and scored. And though Canada won, they lost something, too—that aura of invincibility. “It took us about ten minutes to realize the Canadian professionals are ordinary human beings, like us,” one of the Russians said. The Red Army only got better. They won the Olympic gold in 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976. By 1980, they’d come to be seen as a kind of dark star, the unbeatable hockey monolith from beyond the sun.

  The
United States won gold in hockey at the 1960 Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, but it seemed like a fluke. Compared with Russia and Canada, America was a shinny backwater. We were the land of baseball, football, basketball. Hockey was less sibling to these sports than first or even second cousin. Few American players had ever been good enough to play in the NHL. There were just fourteen in the league in 1970. It was closer to twenty-one by 1980, still a distinct minority, and most of them were barely hanging on. That’s why the success of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team was considered a miracle. The squad, coached by the University of Minnesota’s Herb Brooks, consisted entirely of college kids. Fans can still recall certain names—Neal Broten, Jim Craig, Mike Eruzione—but even these were not great players. Only five of them went on to significant NHL careers. What the team had was strategy, chemistry, and timing, as well as a great coach. These were the bleak last days of the cold war—act 5, scene 10—a time of hostages and mullahs, stagflation and ICBMs.

  Team USA beat teams they had no business beating at Lake Placid. Czechoslovakia, Norway, Sweden. Then, on February 22, 1980, a day inscribed in the heart of every American hockey fan, they beat the Russian national team. The final score was 4–3. Millions of us remember where we were when the news came. The game was shown on tape delay—it was played in the afternoon, but the network held it for prime time—but word leaked. In Chicago, the sports anchor threw his blue cards in the air and screamed, “We’re not supposed to say, but I can’t keep the secret. We won! We won! We beat the Commies!” Many of us still remember the go-ahead goal, which came in the middle of the third period. A Team USA defenseman dumped the puck into the Russian corner. It ricocheted, bouncing back along the boards, where another American, a forward seeking to corral it, fell down as he redirected the puck to center ice, and that’s where Mike Eruzione picked it up. A little older than the others, Eruzione was the team’s chunky, dark-haired, hardworking captain—his college teammates called him “Pete Rose on skates.” Eruzione, a bartender’s son raised in Winthrop, Massachusetts, the captain of his high school team and a Boston University standout, got the puck at center ice, twenty feet from the Russian goal. He took three strides, leaned in, then shot around a Russian defender, using him to create a screen. The Russian goalie Vladimir Myshkin never got a good look. The puck was in the back of the net before he knew what was happening.