Pee Wees

by Rich Cohen

  You can tell a lot about a place by its hockey parents. Lexington and Bedford are affluent towns outside Boston, filled with professors and economists, doctors, biologists and engineers. It skews upper-middle class and Asian. Many of these parents, who sat together across the aisle, wore Patagonia coats or Burberry jackets, tweed pants, loafers. They had the air of overachievers, believers in the meritocracy. They worked hard, as did their children. Their kids would prevail because it’s what they deserved. To win all the games only to lose in the final did not make sense. It’s not just that they wanted their kids to beat our kids; they counted on it. They also had an overdeveloped sense of decorum. Every time one of our kids slashed or threw an elbow, one of their parents would tsk-tsk the Ridgefield side as if to ask, “Did you teach them to play like that?”

  The Barons scored seventy-two seconds into the first period. Dan had not even settled in. Early goals are often the coach’s fault. He’s failed to prepare his team for the onslaught, failed to communicate something important. An early goal can crush the spirit. A few minutes later, they scored again, a kid from the Barons putting the puck between Dan’s legs—the five-hole. The kid said something to the players on our bench as he skated past. I did not hear it—Micah later said he called them “pussies”—but I saw how our kids reacted. It woke them up. That’s when they started to play.

  I got a good look at Micah’s face in the second period. It was sweaty, happy, and beet red. He was pressuring a Lexington-Bedford kid, who, hurried into action, flung the puck away. Micah slid in front, and the puck hit his kneepad. You could hear the thunk in the bleachers. The puck bounced. Micah chased it, got it, and went up ice. A defender pushed him to the outside. This being Olympic ice, he skated and skated, carrying the puck around the net, then set up behind the goalie. The defense backed off, anticipating a pass. Micah looked at his center, Patrick Campi, then skated around and shot instead. A minute later, Micah’s name was announced over the loudspeaker. “Goal, number forty-five, Micah Cohen.”

  The game was tied at two with a minute left in the third period. Cowbells, air horns, kazoos—the Lexington-Bedford parents were on their feet, wild with anticipation. Their entire team had crashed our net and were trying to jam in the winner. Dan slid this way and that, making save after save. He wanted to corral the puck and get a whistle, but it kept slipping away. The Barons had already blown two good chances, but were going to score—you could feel it.

  Then the moment arrived. Dan was out of position; the puck, having pinged off Brian Rizzo’s skate, spun like a top in our crease, a foot from our empty net. There were three things in the world: the Lexington-Bedford center, the puck, the goal line. As the Lexington-Bedford kid tried to finish the play, Barry dove onto the ice and covered the puck with his hand. Everyone jumped on top of Barry, creating a pile. The whistle blew.

  Barry had committed a penalty. No one but the goalie is allowed to cover the puck. It should have resulted in a penalty shot, but the ref either did not see it, or did not want the game to end that way. When the Lexington-Bedford parents realized there’d be no call, they booed. They called us names and spoke to us sarcastically: “Congratulations, Ridgefield. You have taught your children very well. They are the very best. The very best cheaters.”

  Sharon Rizzo said, “Oh my.”

  Simone Camus said, “Mon Dieu.”

  Parents on both sides started shouting at each other. I was right in the middle of it, screaming with the rest. Then something happened.

  My father used to tell me about his migraines and the aura that preceded them, the loss of eyesight and the sense of precognition, nausea, and pain. I did not think much of it till sophomore year in college when, while sitting in a writing workshop, my vision went spotty, as if I’d been staring into the sun. When I looked at my classmates, their faces disassembled, broke into pieces. Everything was like a Picasso. Not a face but a nose, an ear, an iris—a blue iris. I did not feel bad, but actually sort of good. Buzzy, giddy. My soul had been freed from my body and, free from my body, realized the things my body had been furiously engaged in were in fact stupid. The plans, motivations, worries—stupid, stupid, stupid. I found that, in this state, I could see everything in my life with detachment, as if from a distance. When I called my mom to tell her I had a brain tumor, she said, “No, you’ve got a migraine, like your father.”

  No one knows what causes migraines. Triggers vary. For some, it’s stress. For others, it’s chocolate. For some, it’s youth hockey. That’s what I learned in the last seconds of the gold-medal game at Lake Placid. My vision fractured and my soul drifted above, then, looking down on the scene, said, “What are you doing? Why do you care! This is all so stupid! You will live and die and none of this will have mattered. The only thing that matters is Micah—not his skill level, not his playing time or status on this team. Just Micah. Your child.” Looking around at the screaming parents, I suddenly felt like a sober person amid a crowd of roaring drunks.

  That’s when I actually began to enjoy the game, which had gone into overtime. Sudden death. There’d be a five-minute period of three-on-three hockey. If that ended in a tie, the game would continue for five minutes of two-on-two hockey, followed, if necessary, by one-on-one hockey played until one side scored.

  Coach Pete sent Tommy, Brian, and Joey out for the first minute of OT—one forward, two defensemen. Micah went out with Barry and Broadway Jenny for the next thirty seconds. Judd Meese sat next to me, keeping score. Sue Campi had broken her own rule and gone for a fourth beer. Tommy’s father was laughing with delight. His wife, Eunice, was praying at his side: “Dear Lord, bring our boys and our girls the success they have worked so hard for.”

  Living large in Lake Placid

  The buzzer sounded and the game went into a second overtime—two-on-two. Tommy and Joey, the stepbrothers, started it and finished it, skating together beautifully, a healing thing to watch. A minute into that overtime, with the spectators on their feet and the noisemakers wailing, Tommy skated toward our own zone with the puck, chased by two Barons, who, in this way, left Joey uncovered. Tommy flung the puck backward down ice without looking. Joey gathered it, turned, took two strides, and shot. It hit the top post and went straight into the goal—this is called “bar down.” And that was it. Game over.

  The rest of the Bears jumped over the boards and sprinted across the ice, throwing off helmets and gloves like Team USA at the end of Miracle. Dan Arcus pushed his mask onto his forehead and leaned against the crossbar, grinning. To be a goalie, to withstand the fury amid teammates and yet remain alone … what must these young netminders be like in later life, when, as bankers and lawyers, they are surrounded by people who have no idea who they really were or what they had accomplished?

  The Barons cried in the handshake line. Our kids were crying, too. Win or lose, the emotion of the weekend overwhelms. A red carpet was rolled across the ice, a podium set up. A Can/Am official talked about the importance of competition and sportsmanship. The medals were presented—silver and gold—with a captain from each team standing on a platform. There was a torch. It went hand to hand. For a moment, I thought it was going to set one of the Pee Wees ablaze. The players skated over one at a time to collect their medals. Barry pumped a fist as he went, then raised his medal skyward. Tommy went down the line of teammates, shoving cheap cigars into various mouths. These were confiscated by Coach Hendrix, but not before Tommy got off a plume of blue smoke. Micah kissed his medal as he’d seen players kiss the Stanley Cup. A picture of this—Micah kissing the gold—would later appear on the cover of Can/Am’s magazine.

  It was snowing when we got out of the rink. The roads had not been cleared. It made for treacherous driving. I descended in low gear. The river had frozen, the waterfalls stopped. It had been autumn when we’d arrived in Lake Placid; now it was winter. That tournament always feels like a turning point, a hockey equinox. Some players who started out strong would fade after Lake Placid. These were hothouse flowers, not bu
ilt for the long haul. Others emerged. The season is endless. To succeed, you have to enjoy the grind. It took us an hour to get down to the highway. The snowplows were out in force by then, blasting tunnels through the storm. It was all flurries and headlights on the Taconic. Micah wore his medal all the way home. I could see him in the rearview mirror dozing with it around his neck.

  I pulled over at the first McDonald’s. The parking lot was nearly empty. An off-duty employee was smoking a cigarette in the storm. I ordered two Big Macs, then headed for the bathroom. And there was Parky, unshaven and alone at a table in back. The term “bedhead” does not do him justice. He was making his way through a stack of cheeseburgers. I approached cautiously, waiting for him to notice me. When he did, it was with a sad smile. His eyes were full of suffering. It was a pain I knew intimately, but would never admit to anyone with real problems. Hockey-parent pain. “My kid is getting hosed” pain.

  “Where’s Duffy?” I asked.

  “Sleeping in the car, though God knows, he doesn’t need it. He hardly played.”

  “Why do you think?” I asked.

  “Rizzo hates him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s better than Brian.”

  DECEMBER

  Ridgefield has been the setting or the backdrop for many Christmas movies. It appears as “Bridgefield”—genius, that—in the 1939 Cary Grant movie In Name Only, which peaks with an unforgettable Christmas Eve scene, and seems present in half a dozen other movies from Hollywood’s golden age, including Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, The Lady Eve, and Christmas in Connecticut. In 2017, it appeared on the Hallmark Channel in Coming Home for Christmas. Several sequences have been shot on Main Street. There is snow in these scenes, Christmas trees, debutantes. In other words, our town has long been depicted as the epitome of the holiday season. The brick houses and the strings of colored lights, the snow in the spruce trees, the dogs on the porches and the hot chocolate in the mugs—it’s Christmas as imagined by Hollywood. Each decade brings a new population to town, and yet this vibe, which is older and stronger than any of us, remains.

  Ridgefielders tend to be secular, mildly religious at most, yet the town is packed with faith institutions, each nurturing its own tradition and its own truth, each telling its own version of the biggest story. As of the most recent census, Ridgefield had 24,638 inhabitants. Nearly 30 percent of them were under eighteen years old—youth hockey age. About 15 percent were over sixty-five, meaning lots of grandparents to attend youth hockey games. The town covers thirty-five square miles. In that space, among that population, I counted one bookstore, one movie theater, three diners, one candy store, four ice-cream shops, and thirteen houses of worship: Jesse Lee Church, St. Mary’s Roman Catholic, St. Stephen’s Episcopal, St. Andrew’s Lutheran, Ridgefield Baptist Congregation de Notre Dame, St. Elizabeth Seton, First Congregational Church, Ridgebury Congregational, the Ridgefield Christian Center, the First Church of Christ Scientist, Congregation Shir Shalom, the Chabad Jewish Center of Ridgefield, and Christ the King, an ornate cathedral that looks like it belongs on the Russian steppe. (Its congregants are schismatic, Catholics who reject Vatican II.) Do Ngak Kunphen Ling, a beautiful Buddhist temple, is just across the border in Redding.

  All these institutions are packed in the weeks leading up to Christmas. It’s the Frank Capra movie on TV, the candles in the windows, the lights in the spruce trees, the family talk in the supermarket, the snow and smell of snow in the wind, the puffy coats on the toddlers, the galoshes on the elderly, the carolers in Ballard Park, the junior high school concert, the playhouse spectacular. Even if it’s not your holiday, you are driven toward transcendence. One day, I will go into every church, monastery, and synagogue in Ridgefield and ask each priest, minister, monk, and rabbi three simple questions: Who are we? Why are we here? What should we do?

  No matter the denomination or faith, the people in this book share a religion: hockey. We go to games on Sunday mornings and call on the Lord in churchlike rinks across the Northeast. As in Christianity, December is a special time in hockey. This is when we break for two weeks, meaning two weeks of peace on earth and goodwill to men. Two weeks to watch football. Fourteen days to heal and remember. When it gets cold, families build makeshift rinks behind their houses, bumpy ice sheets surrounded by a patchwork of boards, a six-pack of Budweiser cooling in a snowbank. You can spend entire days rink hopping, going from house to house, playing under the floodlights, beneath the glowing stars. Snowflakes whirl out of the void. If it’s very cold, the lakes and the rivers freeze. When it’s cold without snow, the ponds turn into black mirrors. We park beneath the trees on such days, lace our skates in the car, then venture onto the ice with sticks and pucks. We skate for hours beneath the clouds and above the clouds, or, if the ice is exceptionally clear, above schools of fish. When you think of it later, it feels like a dream, hours on the ice, bewitched and between, passing a puck as you move from the lake to the river, then through the woods, with only the sound of wind and skate blades.

  JANUARY

  Hockey returned via email. It came as half a dozen plays sent not by Coach Pete but by Coach Hendrix. He said we were to have our kids memorize these plays, which, when I printed them out and looked them over, made no sense to me. They were super complicated, the sort an NHL team might deploy in the last minute of a playoff game. Hockey is not football. Few actions are choreographed. Mostly you just play. It’s not music read from a sheet—it’s jazz, a freewheeling improvisation. Everyone on the ice has a position and a role, but within that role, you are at liberty to follow the action. There are few stoppages in play, few occasions for a coach to intervene. In the best case, a game flows. You ride its energy like a wave. It’s the game itself that dictates, not the coaches. A good player reads the wave and reacts. A great player anticipates and redirects. The few plays you do learn in advance (power play, penalty kill) are akin to a fast break in basketball—a template deployed in special circumstances. You get into it as a boxer gets into a stance. It tells you where to start but not where to end. But the Pee Wee A Bears had not even learned those basic templates. Our kids were unschooled at the direction of USA Hockey, a national organization that wants pre–high schoolers to forget about templates and diagrams and go, go, go. Coach Hendrix’s plays went against that—they were lousy with arrows, dashes, and dotted lines. You could get a headache just looking at them.

  It was a strange moment in the season. Coach Pete did not turn up for much of the month. It was like when Reagan got shot. There was a void. Coach Hendrix flowed into it as naturally as Al Haig. He was as exuberant as Haig, too, and no one was in the mood. A kid named Nico Mallozzi, who played for the Connecticut RoughRiders, had died a few weeks after Christmas. He’d not been well but went to a tournament anyway, toughness being a primary virtue in hockey. He’d sickened at a rink in Buffalo, New York, then died on the way home. He was ten years old. It was sepsis, a result of pneumonia. We played the RoughRiders a few weeks later. It was on temporary ice, beneath a tent in a park on Long Island Sound. The wind whipped off the water, snapping the canvas. The kids got changed in a trailer, then stood at the blue line before the game with their helmets off and heads bowed, observing a moment of silence for Nico Mallozzi. The puck was dropped, but neither team could focus on the game.

  I overheard Barry Meese ask his father: “Why are we even playing?”

  Coach Hendrix yelled at the kids between periods. He was throbbing with anger. We could hear him calling out individual players, demanding an explanation for their “half-ass effort.”

  “Where are your heads?” he demanded.

  And so the Bears began the second part of their season in another funk—it was like a relapse, the recurrence of a bad mood. It had to do with Coach Pete’s absence. I figured—who really knew?—he’d gone off to deal with his father’s case, which I’d followed in the paper. Old Buck Wilson had been sentenced to six and a half years in a federal penitentiary. I suspected Coach
Pete was needed at home, which is why he’d disappeared. When he did show up at one practice, he seemed diminished. The bounce was gone from his step. He was hangdog and looked older. We were a crew without a captain in those weeks, which allowed the mad, self-interested first mates (Rizzo, Hendrix) to take over, give orders, and chart a new course, turning us immediately into the wind. Coach Hendrix’s plays were step one. Then the practices changed. What had been happy sessions dominated by scrimmages, shoot-outs, and relay races were now all about drills. “Who said hockey is supposed to be fun?” Coach Hendrix shouted through his whistle. “Skate!”

  Though they worked together, Coaches Rizzo and Hendrix clearly had different objectives. Coach Rizzo wanted to develop his son, which meant getting him as much ice time as possible. He remade the defense to do this. What had been two units became a platoon, with Brian on the ice every other shift. In a forty-five-minute game, Brian Rizzo might play thirty-five minutes. Other kids were shortchanged as a result.

  Coach Hendrix aimed for something similar, only it was his daughter Broadway Jenny he wanted to rebuild around. She’d been a top player in Mites and Squirts but had begun to fall behind. She was small and weak on her pins. Even a glancing blow sent her sprawling. She’d gotten by on hustle and hockey sense. It’s not that she was working less—her legs were still driving like pistons—nor had she forgotten how to play, but the boys were getting bigger and stronger and more physical. While she stayed the same speed, they’d found another gear. That’s why Coach Pete had moved her from center to right wing. Centers have to do the most skating, while a wing can cheat a bit, positioning himself or herself near the blue line at the start of the rush. Coach Hendrix could have dealt with this in a variety of ways. He could have accepted reality and prepared Jenny to be a center on an elite girls’ team. He could have taught her to play wing properly—a smart wing can make up for a lack of speed by being in position. (You don’t have to be as fast if you’re waiting when the puck arrives.) He decided to remake our offense instead. We’d played with nine forwards divided into three lines. Coach Hendrix moved one of those players—Patrick Campi—to defense, then switched the others around. There’d now be three sets of wings and two centers, who’d double-shift, playing on every other line. Tommy would be one of the centers. Broadway Jenny would be the other. Coach Rizzo had Brian double-shifting. Coach Hendrix would do the same with Jenny.