Pee Wees

by Rich Cohen

  When everything else is equal, look for the incongruity—that’ll be the difference. On that day, it was a Danbury defenseman named Ilya Gogol. He stood six-foot-three in skates, a giant among boys, a shark among minnows. We’d heard about him all year. He was a legend. Tall, fast, and remorseless, a big kid with soft hands. We heard he was a foreign-exchange student, a Russian visitor living with the Danbury coach and his family. They called it educational, but we knew a ringer when we saw one. If he wasn’t dominating a game, it was only because he wasn’t in the mood. That’s how it seemed anyway, for now and then, and with great ease, he’d pick up the puck, skate through our entire team, and beat Arcus with a flick of the wrist. Gogol had a great slap shot, too. He could hit the post at fifty feet, like a hunter picking a bird off a wire. If shot wide, the puck whipped around the boards like an ivorine ball circling a roulette wheel. He was a nearly impossible obstacle for our forwards. No one could get around the Russian. He blasted anyone who got close to his goalie. I’m not sure why he didn’t just take over the game and win it by himself. Maybe he considered it unsporting. Maybe he didn’t want to draw the wrong kind of attention. Maybe he was easily bored. In any case, the score was even at the end of the first period.

  At times like this, I wonder if the lack of hitting—checking is not legal in Pee Wee—puts the smaller kids at a long-term disadvantage. Checking at an early age teaches things no coach ever can—not just about hitting but about how to avoid getting hit, how to be crafty and skirt the blows, how to use a big kid’s size against him. It teaches you to keep your head up and your eyes on the distance. It teaches you to monitor every player, never losing track of the player who can hurt you, to always know exactly where on the ice that person is. Had I been playing against Danbury, I would have charted Gogol’s every move as a matter of survival. But today’s players learn the game in a hockey fantasyland without predators, so skate obliviously, head down, in and out of the fumes of semitrucks. The Russian—the eighteen-wheeler of the previous metaphor—was not trying to hit anyone. He was just going where he was going. What was he supposed to do if you got in his way? He’d only recently come into this big body and hardly knew how to operate the thing himself.

  Patrick Campi was having the game of his life. If the score was close—we were tied at two halfway through the second—credit Patrick. He’d led the rush from the right wing, back-checked with energy, passed and shot in a way that took him all over the ice. He set up the first goal, skirting the defense by flicking the puck to himself off the boards, then finding Barry with a long pass that put him one-on-one with the goalie. He scored the second himself, a wrist shot that found its way through Danbury’s defense. And yet, all the while, Patrick was moving closer to the Russian, closer and closer, dangerously close. It was like watching a loved one dance on the edge of a cliff. My heart was in my mouth. Patrick had a history of concussions. His mother told us that one more might end his hockey career.

  With less than two minutes left in the second, Patrick passed the puck to Tommy McDermott, who passed it back. Danbury’s left wing grazed the puck as it went by, disturbing but not intercepting it. Patrick turned and reached for the puck and, as he did, took his eyes off the ice. The Russian, going for the same puck, skated right through as if Patrick were not even there. The collision, which hardly slowed the Russian, demolished Patrick. He was flung, losing his mouth guard, stick, and gloves. He lay sprawled, as if shot, at center ice. His eyes were closed, his face expressionless and pale. People said Patrick had been “laid out,” but the term does not do the event justice. It was more like he’d been crumpled. The rink got eerily quiet, the kind of quiet only a crowd can make.

  We’d all seen something scary, and the mood that formed around the scary thing was somber and somehow sacred.

  From there, we got the usual protocol, the procession that follows every youth hockey injury: first comes the collision; then the ref blows his whistle, skates over, looks down and talks, or tries to talk, to the kid; then the ref waves to the bench; meanwhile, the other players have taken a knee. It’s a kind of group prayer that suggests the gravity of the moment and the brevity of life. We urge the wayward hockey soul, which is circling the scoreboard, to reenter the body so the game can resume. An assistant or parent coach walks across the ice—Coach Hendrix, hands buried in the pockets of his Bears windbreaker. If the injury seems serious, as it did with Patrick, the assistant or parent waves over a second assistant or parent-coach—Coach Rizzo in Timberlands. At this point, the injured kid will almost always sit up, get to his feet, then skate warily back to the bench as the parents clap. But Patrick stayed down. He was down for what felt like hours. Paramedics were called. He was helped off the ice and taken to a nearby hospital. He’d suffered a moderate concussion, which, compounded by fear—the weirdness of the situation, all those people looking down—would keep him off the ice for at least a month.

  The Pee Wee A Bears and their parents were rattled by the injury. We could not get the image of Patrick down at center ice out of our minds, nor could we stop thinking about worst-case scenarios. Ilya Gogol, the Russian, sat at the end of the Danbury bench with his helmet off. He stared into space, shaken. Even worse than getting hurt is hurting someone else. For the best of us, one goal of life is to get through it doing as little damage as possible. He came back for the third period—he’d not even committed a penalty; the contact was incidental—but had been neutralized by remorse.

  Leo Moriarty took Patrick’s place on the second line. Leo had been underused, supposedly because he missed so many practices for lacrosse. But lacrosse season had been over for a month and they were still not playing Leo, though he usually made something happen on the ice. I knew why Coach Hendrix hated Micah, or thought I did. Because he hated me. But why did he hate Leo? “That’s easy,” said Jerry Sherman. “Because he wears flip-flops to the rink.”

  Broadway Jenny won the first face-off after the injury. She played the puck to Leo, who sped up ice, faking this way and that, splitting the defense, “like Moses splitting the Red Sea,” said Leo’s father, Albert, happily. Leo slowed as he approached the Danbury goalie, waited, waited … then shot. You always have more time than you think. Most coaches want you to get the puck off your stick as fast as possible, but in truth, shooting late can be just as effective as shooting early.

  We won the game less with a cry of victory than a sigh of relief.

  FEBRUARY

  I can’t be alone in hating February more than other months. It’s cold and dark. You might get a few hints of spring—a warm wind, a robin blown off course—but it’s mostly a never-ending tundra of pain. Some days are bitter, others more bitter still. On subzero mornings, you dress like a polar explorer just to reach the car. When you spit, it freezes in the air and slides like a Pee Wee skater along the frozen crust of the earth. “I know how the Okies felt,” I told my wife. “I just want to load the jalopy and head for California.”

  If February 2019 is remembered at all, it’s for what I consider the oddest game of the season. When people ask about the absurdities of youth hockey, it’s this game I tell them about. We were playing the Wild Haven Wombats at the Winter Garden. As Jerry Sherman says, “Beware the Havens.” Micah told me it was a kind of all-star team, the sort that is not supposed to exist. There’d been no tryouts. The coach, a burly man with a red beard, had instead gone from rink to rink at the end of the previous season, watching games and recruiting kids. He’d approach them in the parking lot in the way of a meth dealer: “Hey, pal, wanna play for a winner?” He’d offered cost breaks and incentives—this team was not meant to earn but to be a kind of showpiece, an advertisement for the rest of the program. The result was a mix of excellent skaters and goons. They played fast and clean when possible, slow and dirty when necessary. Their club motto was printed on their equipment bags: “If we can’t beat you, we can at least beat you up.”

  Coach Hendrix had been warned but scheduled the game anyway.

  �
�The algorithm,” he explained. “If we play them tight, we’ll jump five spots.”

  Coach Hendrix gave the Bears a pregame rundown of several Wild Haven standouts. He told them to watch out for a kid named Clay Lowdermilk, who was tall, blue-eyed, and long-haired. He’d been suspended for fighting in September and suspended again in October.

  “He can hurt you,” said Coach Hendrix.

  He named several other Wild Haven players, including a pair of fast, high-scoring twins whom their hockey-loving parents had named “Messier” and “Graves.”

  “Their sister is named Madison after Madison Square Garden,” Coach Hendrix added, “but don’t worry about her. She doesn’t play.”

  The teams stared at each other during the warm-up. Judd Meese told me Wild Haven had lost only one game all year. Parky said, “They look like a bunch of jerks.”

  The Wombats did have an arrogant swagger. That’s what tailored recruitment and a fearsome reputation will do. They gathered together before the face-off and put their hands in a circle. Clay Lowdermilk led the cheer: “Two, four, six, eight, let’s go annihilate. Wombats!”

  In a game like this, if the refs lose control early, it’ll never be regained. That’s what happened. Wild Haven came after our kids less like a team of Pee Wees than like the Jets in West Side Story, all elbows and slew foots and cross-checks. When they scored, it seemed less the intended outcome and more a side effect of the real mission, which was to humiliate the Bears. At one point, late in the first period, five of our kids were down on the ice at the same time. The Winter Garden looked like the scene of a bizarre mob hit.

  Micah limped off the ice at the end of one shift. Later, when I asked what had happened, he said, “I got credit-carded.”

  “‘Credit-carded’? What does that even mean?”

  “A kid’s skate blade went up my butt.”

  Coach Hendrix called a time-out. Several of the Wombats had taken multiple penalties. “Let’s use that,” said Coach Hendrix, reminding the kids of the automatic ejection that awaits any player with more than four penalties. “If they keep going like this, half their team will be gone before the third.” He picked out a handful of forwards—Duffy and Tommy, Micah and Joey—and told them to trash-talk the gooniest Wild Haven players. “Chirp at them,” he said, “especially Lowdermilk. Goad them into taking penalties, then, with the goons gone, we can get to work.”

  Tommy and Joey were on the ice at the start of the second period. Joey crashed into Lowdermilk. The height difference meant that Joey’s head, or more specifically, his helmet, hit Clay Lowdermilk in the ribs. The blow sent both kids reeling. Joey said something—chirping, as ordered—as Lowdermilk skated away. Lowdermilk stopped and skated back, looming over Joey. Words were exchanged. Lowdermilk punched Joey in the head. Joey stood there stunned as Lowdermilk landed three more blows. Joey charged Lowdermilk, throwing haymakers as they both fell. Tommy, seeing his stepbrother in trouble, dove on Lowdermilk, too.

  Parents from both sides were banging on the glass, screaming at the referees, who pulled the kids apart.

  “No penalty box for these three,” the ref told the scorekeeper (Terry Stanley). “They’re ejected. Goodbye. Gone.”

  Micah exiting stage left

  Coach Hendrix told Micah and Roman Holian to serve the time in the box. We were losing 5–1 at that point. Three of their players soon collected a fifth penalty and were likewise ejected. We lost Rick Stanley for taking five. Rick, our big, left-handed defenseman, moved about as well as a traffic cone but played with an anger that could be helpful in a game like this. His father was, as I’ve said, a serious Deadhead. It was like San Francisco ’69 in his truck. Rick had formed his personality in opposition. That’s the edge you saw in the Wild Haven game. On the score sheet, it read as “hooking, interference, cross-checking, checking, roughing.” On the ice, it was beautiful rage.

  Duffy Taylor, normally our biggest hothead, had been surprisingly calm all game, perhaps because he was so locked in. He scored in the first period, then again in the second. He rode the stick as if it were a pony after that second goal. But he looked exhausted on the bench. All the ejections meant a shortage of personnel. Duffy was skating far more than he was used to.

  “I took him to lunch at Friday’s before the game,” said Parky. “I hope that wasn’t a mistake.”

  The score was 5–3 going into the third. Duffy drank some water, grabbed his stick, and went out. He won the face-off, then was on the rush with Leo and Roman. Leo came up the left side. Duffy skated behind him. Leo dropped the puck to Duffy, who blasted a shot through a defender’s legs. It hit the crossbar and bounced up into the netting. The whistle blew. Duffy turned to skate to the bench, slowed, bent over, and puked. He never stopped skating, so the puke became a long, chocolate-colored trail on the ice.

  The referee either did not notice the puke or was pretending not to. He carried the puck to the circle for a face-off. Jack Camus had come out in Duffy’s place. Parents from both teams were screaming at the ref.

  “Hey, ref,” Leo’s father, Albert, shouted. “There’s puke on the ice.”

  The ref skated over and examined the puke, looked up at Albert, and said, “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Albert. “Something.”

  “I’m only paid to officiate,” said the ref, returning to the circle.

  Coach Rizzo went out and squirted some water on the puke. Everyone seemed to agree that that was good enough. And still, the puke remained, a Bermuda Triangle to be avoided at all costs.

  Micah was skating without the puck in our own zone a few shifts later. He was poke-checking a kid from Wild Haven when another kid stepped in front and blocked him, which is not allowed. It’s interference. Micah, sent sprawling, jumped to his feet and slashed the kid who’d hit him, and that’s what the ref saw, and that’s the only penalty he called. Micah’s third: roughing, cross-checking, slashing. I could see him stewing in the box. As soon as he’d served his time, he went back on the ice, found and tackled the kid who’d hit him. What’s worse, they both landed in the puke. The Wild Haven parents booed. One of them said, “What is this, pro wrestling? Why doesn’t he just climb up onto the ropes!”

  I could hear Coach Hendrix screaming at Micah, calling him stupid and selfish. That was Micah’s fourth penalty, but its flagrance made it count as two. He was ejected. Roman had to sit Micah’s double minor.

  Later in the third, when Wild Haven had opened up a 9–4 lead, Broadway Jenny was called for hooking.

  Coach Hendrix screamed at the ref: “That was no fucking penalty! You need glasses! You’re blind. I bet your parents are blind, too. And your kids.”

  The ref gave Coach Hendrix a two-minute minor for heckling, which, once again, was served by Roman.

  Broadway Jenny was in the box when the game ended, feet out, head back, singing “Naughty,” a song from the show Matilda. Her voice, plaintive and high, could be heard all over the rink: “Just because you find that life’s not fair it / Doesn’t mean that you just have to grin and bear it.”

  The Bears were quiet in the locker room after the game. There’d been a total of forty penalty minutes, a franchise rec-ord. Four of our players—Joey, Tommy, Micah, Rick—had been ejected and would have to sit out the next game, too. Coach Hendrix was suspended for two games. Another such showing, and the Pee Wee A Bears would be disqualified from the state tournament, a fate that had befallen only one other local club, the Long Island Cruisers, banned for putting excrement—possibly canine, possibly human—in a visiting team’s equipment bags.

  Coach Hendrix made each of our ejected players stand up and give a postgame analysis.

  “Tell us why we lost,” he said.

  After the kids had spoken, Coach Hendrix turned on them, pointed, and said, “Wrong! It’s you! You four are the reason we lost! If you hadn’t lost control and been ejected, we could have won that game.”

  Micah and I watched the Zamboni prepare the ri
nk for the next game. The puke was still there, only it was being covered with a fresh coat of ice. This had to stand for something, though neither one of us could figure out what.

  The Wild Haven game and its ejections turned out to be my breaking point. The weather, the losing, the parent-coaches, penalties, and recriminations—it was too much. My heart started racing. Beads of sweat appeared on my forehead. I couldn’t stop the stream of nonsense flowing through my mind. I went to the doctor, who sent me to a cardiologist, who gave me tests, charged me several thousand dollars, then sent me home with instructions to “calm down.” I blamed hockey, not the game but the culture, ins and outs, favorites and outcasts. According to my father, “The secret to life is caring, but not that much.”

  I was having trouble following his advice.

  My wife decided I should take a break from youth hockey.

  “It’s not that it will kill you,” she said, “but that it’d be such a stupid reason to die.”

  “So what should I do?” I asked.

  “Take some time off,” she said. “I’ll deal with the practices and games. It’ll be here when you get back.”

  I knew she was right. I needed a break from the game as much as I’ve ever needed anything. If I did not get away from these parents and these kids, from these rinks and punishments and coaches and lectures and losses, I’d fall down and foam at the mouth.

  “But Micah…”

  “Micah will be fine.”

  And so Jessica and I swapped jobs. She drove Micah to hockey. I drove Aaron and Nate to mock trial and theater, noble pursuits that I cared about, but not that much. I took up daily meditation. I’d sit in the car outside the playhouse, focus on my breathing, clear my mind and think about nothing. Jessica updated me on the games and the team, though I sensed she was not telling me everything.