Pee Wees

by Rich Cohen

  Micah scored on his first shift. The first goal of the game, it came on a breakaway. He put the puck through a defenseman’s legs. I was openly rooting, a violation of the scorekeeper’s code. I couldn’t help it. (I used to identify with the quarterback leading the two-minute drill. My empathy now goes to the parents in the stands.) I could see the back of his jersey as he made his way toward the goalie, blades churning, ice flying. I could see the number 45 on his helmet and back. I could hear other Ridgefield parents screaming his name—the name that my wife and I carefully selected for him, the name meant to honor my grandfather Morris, who came to this country in steerage in 1910. My heart was in my mouth. I prayed to God: “Oh dear Lord, though it be trivial, please let my son have this goal.” Something in me never believes he will finish the play. There will be cheering, but not for him. But he did finish it, using a move that works at every level, from Pee Wee to NHL: fake the forehand, shoot with the backhand. The referee skated to the scorers’ table with the official line: “Number forty-five, unassisted, thirteen forty-five in the first.” Parky slapped me on the back, saying, “Every time your kid scores, an angel gets its wings.”

  Tommy McDermott added another goal in the second. Brian Rizzo tacked on one more in the third. Dan Arcus stopped thirty-five shots. We won that first game with ease.

  * * *

  The Pee Wee A Bears played again the following night. There was a full moon over the Long Island Sound. The temperature had been climbing all week. The gears rumble, the seasons change. The Bears were outmuscled and outweighed by their game-two opponents, the Norwich Seahawks, junk-food-raised goons who pushed our kids all over the ice. One of the Seahawks, a defenseman with a wispy mustache named Delvecchio, looked less like a youth hockey player than like a TV detective, the sort that lives on a houseboat in the Intracoastal Waterway. Judd Meese nudged me as the kid skated by, saying, “Maybe he’ll buy me a beer after the game.”

  The first period started with Delvecchio hip-checking Broadway Jenny into the boards, possibly to set a tone of general menace. Though splayed on the ice—gloves here, stick there, helmet askew—Broadway Jenny refused to stay down. Her toughness was amazing, her courage. She crawled around, feeling for her equipment, got to her skates, and sprinted back into the play. The crowd, even a few of the Norwich parents, were with us after that. They cheered whenever Broadway Jenny got the puck or stepped out of the face-off circle to reposition the wings. She stood for the resilience and determination of our team. We beat them because we refused to lose. Duffy was our star, passing and shooting, rushing opponents, forcing turnovers. He had his best assist of the season, a long pass that carried the puck from our goal line clear to center ice, where it found Broadway Jenny in full stride. You watched such plays with excitement and regret—this is what we could have been all along if they’d backed off and let the kids play. We won the game 6–4. Duffy got a hat trick. Parky sat proudly in the lobby as the kids changed, defiant and redeemed.

  * * *

  The call came late that night. It was Coach Rizzo. He could hardly contain his glee.

  “We’re playing the Double As!”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow, five p.m.”

  It felt like vindication, even if it smelled like napalm. Our kids had been treated like dogs, and the dogs had caught the bus. It meant our kids, who had been judged unworthy for the Double A team, would finally have their chance.

  The parents spent the rest of the night calling each other to revel. When I spoke to Patrick Campi’s mom, Sue, she was near tears. Patrick was a second-year Pee Wee, a year older than Micah. He’d played on the same team as the current Double As the previous season, as had Tommy McDermott and Barry Meese. They were the only kids from that team not to make the cut. At Lake Placid, where all the Ridgefield kids mingle, the Double As refused to socialize with the Single As. It was a matter of hierarchy. “Patrick had been best friends with those kids just last year and they wouldn’t even talk to him,” said Sue. “Can you imagine?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You know what?” she said. “I hope we kick their ass.”

  The players were usually supposed to arrive an hour before a game. Considering the special nature of this contest, we’d been told to have them at the Whale by 3:00 p.m., 120 minutes before face-off. It meant pulling our kids—sixth and seventh graders—out of school early. (“So much for teaching priorities,” said my wife, writing the permission slip.)

  “Why so early?” I asked.

  “Coach Pete wants to say something,” Coach Rizzo told me.

  But when we got to the rink the next afternoon, Coach Pete was not there. The kids played bubble hockey as they waited. The parents stood in the holy hockey circle, gossiping. When it was 3:40 and Coach Pete had still not arrived, the parents became restless. At 4:00 p.m., some started to panic.

  Coach Hendrix went outside to call Coach Pete. He seemed confused when he came back. “I tried his cell, his office, and his house,” he said. “He’s not picking up.”

  “Maybe he’s in traffic,” said Judd Meese.

  “What traffic?”

  “Maybe he got a late start,” said Sue Campi.

  “Yeah, but why wouldn’t he answer his cell?” asked Parky Taylor.

  “Try his wife,” said Coach Rizzo.

  “I tried his wife,” said Coach Hendrix.

  “Try his brother,” said Judd Meese.

  “I tried his brother and his sister,” said Coach Hendrix. “No answer.”

  At 4:15 p.m., Broadway Jenny and Brian led the team out to the parking lot for dryland warm-ups (jumps, stretches, etc.).

  Coaches Rizzo and Hendrix huddled in a back hall, coming up with a plan. In the absence of Coach Pete, the parent-coaches would once again take control. The assumption was that they would stay with the same lines and the same strategy that had gotten us into the second round, but Coaches Rizzo and Hendrix had a different idea. (Nature abhors a vacuum.) They pulled Parky, Albert, and me aside. All our kids had made significant contributions in the first round. Coach Rizzo spoke softly, a doctor delivering bad news. He told us that, as well as our kids had played, the team, as presently deployed, stood no chance against the Double As. “They are just too good and just too fast,” he said. “What we’ve been doing will not work. We’ll get blown out. So we’ve made some changes.”

  The new strategy was clear three minutes into the opening period. Whereas we had been playing three lines, with each line getting equal ice time and contributing to the offense, we were now essentially playing just five kids: Broadway Jenny at center, Tommy at right wing, Joey at left wing, and Brian Rizzo and Barry Meese on defense. This group would skate for two to three minutes, then be relieved by whoever happened to be next up on the bench. That second makeshift grab bag of a line would play for no more than fifty seconds, then make way for the return of the five-player super line. In the course of the game, the first line would play for around thirty minutes. The rest of the team would split the fifteen remaining minutes between them.

  Patrick and Duffy argued with the coaches, who told them to sit down and shut up or they would not play at all. Roman and Leo unsnapped their helmets on the bench, a universal sign of surrender. Rick Stanley refused to go on even when his turn did come around. He cursed and was benched for the rest of the game. Many of the parents did not understand what was happening at first. You had to count minutes and look for patterns. When they did understand, they were furious. What’s wrong with these parent-coaches? Has the nearness of victory driven them mad? Have they become drunk with ambition? Do they have tournament fever? At times like this, you need a compass to keep your sense of direction, but our leaders had neither compass nor code.

  Even major league coaches refuse to do what our parent-coaches had done—remake the roster at the end with a single game in mind, which is a betrayal of the team and the season. Asked to explain his loyalty to his regular pitching rotation in the World Series, the Dodgers manager Tomm
y Lasorda once said, “You dance with the girl that brung ya.” That’s the code. Duffy Taylor, our team’s leading scorer, was sitting idle at the end of the bench, staring dully ahead. Micah, Leo, Roman, Broadway Julie, Becky, Rick, and Patrick were all doing the same. The hockey gods had tested Coaches Rizzo and Hendrix, and they had failed.

  And it wasn’t even working. Our skaters, as skilled as some of them were, were gassed by the end of the first period. You simply can’t play a single line that much. You need every kid to contribute if you want to compete, a truth clearly known to the Double As, who were rolling three full lines of offense and defense. We were trying to beat fifteen with five. As Coach Hendrix himself might have once said, “It just wasn’t good team hockey.”

  Tommy McDermott scored early—unassisted on a breakaway—but was soon exhausted by our strategy. Like the other forwards, he stopped moving his feet and glided. He stopped back-checking, leaving our overwhelmed defense to fend for itself. For long stretches, we could not get the puck out of our zone. Dan Arcus was characteristically brilliant in goal, but he was like the kid with his finger in the dike. How long could you expect him to hold back the flood? Jocko Arcus was cursing behind the Plexiglas, imploring the coaches to send in fresh skaters.

  If we did somehow get the puck out of our zone, Brian Rizzo, urgent to keep the game close, would jump into the offensive rush, try something fancy, and invariably lose the puck, leaving Dan to face the full force of the Double A onslaught alone. Dan was like a target in a shooting gallery, spun this way and that by grapeshot. “Goddamnit,” Jocko shouted, banging the glass, “get him some help!”

  Halfway through the second, when the score was still relatively close—we were down 3–1—Dan finally broke. You could see it; his shoulders slumped, his stance relaxed. He’d been staring into the maw for twenty minutes. Exhausted and realizing no help was coming, he removed his finger from the dike and let the flood come. By the middle of the third, even easy shots were beating him. The Ridgefield Pee Wee A parents sat silently in the stands as the Ridgefield Double A parents celebrated.

  There is a moment near the end of The Bad News Bears, the Walter Matthau movie. In the middle of the championship game, when the mood is so tense that it seems the fate of the world is at stake, the camera pulls back. You see other fields with other games, then, beyond that, cars going by on the road, and so remember that none of this really matters, that it’s just another game in a game-filled world. That’s what we needed at the Whale—a panorama, an establishing shot. We got Jack Camus crying on the bench instead, his mother, Si-mone, ranting in French. We got Tommy McDermott shouting at Coach Hendrix, imploring him to put other kids into the game. We got Dan Arcus banging his stick on the crossbar after letting in a goal that made the score 9–1. We got Barry Meese passing the puck to the wrong team, and Brian Rizzo turning his back on the play, and Joey McDermott gliding lazily end-to-end. Broadway Jenny being knocked clean off her skates was the last thing we got, which happened as the final horn blew. Everything the coaches had told the kids about hustle and teamwork had been violated in the course of a single afternoon.

  There is dignity in losing if you lose as a team, but what could the kids take away from this? What would we tell them on the way home? That life isn’t fair? That if you want to play in the big games, make sure your mother runs for the board or your father’s a coach? It would be Leo’s and Duffy’s last season in the program. They’d go on to play on better teams in Greenwich and Stamford, teams Coach Hendrix told them they were not good enough to make. Patrick Campi would make Bantam Double A, while Tommy and Joey McDermott went to Bantam A. Broadway Jenny and Broadway Julie, despite disparity in playing time, ended up on the same roster—Bantam B. Micah moved up to Pee Wee Double A, as did Roman Holian and Brian Rizzo. But all that came later. In the meantime, our kids were going listlessly through the handshake line. They bickered in the locker room. Duffy Taylor denounced the parent-coaches as “F-tards.” Roman Holian agreed, then lost it completely. He was not the only player crying.

  Coach Rizzo came out to talk to the parents.

  He said, “Go in and comfort your kids.”

  “Why?” asked Sue Campi.

  “They’re crying,” said Coach Rizzo.

  “Why are they crying?” asked Albert Moriarty.

  “They’re heartbroken about the loss,” said Coach Rizzo.

  “Bullshit,” said Jerry Sherman. “If they’re crying, it’s because you humiliated them. What a way to end the season! Play five months as a team, then finish as a single line.”

  “Yeah, why did you do that?” asked Albert.

  “We had to play our best kids if we wanted to compete,” said Coach Rizzo.

  “We lost eleven to one,” said Sue. “How’s that competing?”

  “It would’ve been even worse if we’d played your kids,” said Coach Rizzo.

  The state tournament is usually the end of the season. Due to an odd bit of scheduling, we still had four regular-season games. But the team was never the same. It had split into hostile parties: there were the parents of the five who’d played, then everyone else. These groups would neither talk nor sit together. Albert and Sue refused to go inside the rink at all. They waited outside in their cars during practices and games. Coach Pete, who returned without explanation, tried and failed to heal the rift.

  * * *

  Why did all this bother me? Why did I care so much about the rise and fall of a Pee Wee hockey team? Why did I spend nights on the phone with my father and other fathers, talking and texting? Why did I sleep fitfully or not sleep at all? Why had I come to dread 3:00 a.m., the witching hour, when the clock sounds like a hammer and there is a noise in the kitchen and I’d get lost in a mental loop, in which each move, shot, and game of the season was attempted, taken, and played again? Why was I angry at the parent-coaches? Why was I angry at myself? Why had I become so agitated in the course of the season that I had to remove myself from road trips and rinks altogether?

  It was just so hard watching what was done to this team. The Pee Wee As had started as an accidentally beautiful collection of hockey kids. They were fun to watch because they were having fun—passing, goofing, and playing together. Then, over the weeks, sometimes in pursuit of a collective goal, sometimes in pursuit of an individual interest, the parent-coaches remade the team in the image of the grown-up world, breaking its spirit with the weight of their adult needs. But if you asked the kids, they’d tell you that all of it, even the losing, had been fun. Most of them didn’t care what line they played on, or for how many minutes, as long as they were treated fairly and with respect, as long as they were part of the team. And they had improved as players, all of them, having sucked every nutrient out of the bitter fruit of defeat.

  Parky Taylor, who’d suffered more than the rest of us, said something at the end of March that sounded like wisdom. “From here on,” he told me, “I’m going to let Duffy fight these battles himself.”

  APRIL

  T. S. Eliot called April “the cruelest month,” but T. S. Eliot was wrong. February is the cruelest month. April is a hand clearing the frost off the window so that you can see the hills. In Ridgefield, it arrives like a green messiah bringing visions of hammocks and white-wine coolers. Afternoons are gentle. You open your eyes to the sound of lawn mowers and the smell of fresh-cut grass.

  The joy that animated the Pee Wee A Bears at the start of the season was still there and always had been, only sublimated, buried beneath tirades, drills, and statistics. In those final weeks, after the state tournament, when the algorithm released us from its steely grip, the games were fun again because they were games again, an end in themselves.

  As luck had it, the Pee Wee As played their final game against the Pee Wee Double As. A rematch, a do-over. Some of us met for breakfast that morning, our last meal as a team. It made me sad. You spend so much time with these people, more time than you spend with anyone other than the people who live in your house. You form a s
ociety and come to think of these other parents as friends. Then, in a moment, it’s all over. With tryouts for the next season a few weeks away, these friends become rivals, and once again, it’s every man and woman for himself or herself.

  Coach Pete, perhaps seeking to right a wrong, went back to the original lines for that final game, with everyone getting equal time. Micah and Duffy played center. Coaches Rizzo and Hendrix welcomed this. Though they did not say so explicitly, they seemed to believe we’d get trounced, proving the correctness of their state-tournament strategy. But that’s not what happened. The team, all fifteen of them, having been given an unexpected shot at redemption, played great hockey—hustled, passed, set up goals, and scored. When I looked at the clock, it was the end of the third period and we were winning 5–3. A Double A parent pulled me aside in the lobby after the game and asked why we hadn’t played like that at the Whale.

  “You could have won it all,” he said.

  But it didn’t matter. All of this was now the past. The sun was shining when we left the rink. It was almost too hot. “I’m sorry it’s over,” I told Micah.

  “Don’t be,” he said. “We’ve got baseball.”

  Acknowledgments

  Like hockey, getting a book from inside your head to out in the world is a team effort. I’d like to thank the following teammates (if there is any of this book you hate, that part is their fault): Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Jennifer Walsh and Jay Mandel at William Morris; Aaron, Nate, Micah, and EZ Cohen—and Jessica!—in Ridgefield; Herb Cohen, Steven Cohen, and Lisa Melmed in Brooklyn; Sharon and Bill Levin on the road between residences; Coach Freeberg at the Deerfield Bubble; and Ellen Eisenstadt Cohen in the Celestial City, where she is drinking a Bloody Mary while being serenaded by Francis Albert Sinatra.