The Last Season

by Roy MacGregor

  That didn’t end until the following season, on a red light at Santa Barbara. Torchy and Tracy had spent the weekend hiking between the Santa Ines mission and Santa Barbara, leaving just enough time to spare to make it back for a night game against Minnesota. Torchy must have been hurrying. He cut the caution light a little too fine and swung out onto 101 straight into a black Cadillac barrelling down from San Francisco.

  We didn’t hear about it until after the game. Some of the guys were bitching about Torchy not showing and the boss was talking about a fine when the phone rang. One of the rookies overheard Torchy’s name being mentioned and assumed it was a trade or, more than likely, considering the way he’d been playing of late, a quick trip to the minors for the fading veteran. But it was neither.

  Torchy was in a coma at the Santa Barbara hospital. His leg was broken. He had undetermined internal injuries. Someone else had been in the car and was dead.

  Torchy came through the next day and three days later was listed in “fair” condition, able to receive visitors. Some of the guys wanted to go as a team, but I said I had to see him alone and they understood. Most knew how long our friendship went back, none of them knew how far our differences stretched.

  He was sitting up when I entered. I had a card signed by everyone on the team, a separate card from management, a box of strange goodies from Hirohito, the gardener. But Torchy wasn’t interested. He was wrapped where the glass had gone into his temple and the skin near the eye was the colour of the Sudbury sun going down behind the smelter. His leg was wired up and weighted. A tube went in through the forearm, dripping.

  He stared as if not sure who it was. I smiled but he did not smile back. I laid the cards and gifts on the night table but he never even followed with his eyes.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He nodded. I stared at him and could see the water rising in his eyes and spilling. He made no move to wipe them. He tried to speak but his jaw hurt him and he held it to finish.

  “Satisfied?”

  It was Torchy’s old voice. I stared, not comprehending. He looked through tears, but the eyes themselves were frozen solid, sharp as icicles. And then the eyes closed and I was gone. Shut out.

  I went out running, up Hawthorne and across the Palos Verdes hills toward the ocean. The wind was out of the southwest, at my back, as I picked my way along the shore between Point Vincente Lighthouse and Rocky Point, where the best view of the sea was. When I made it, I figured to have come better than twelve miles in less than ninety minutes. My UCLA shirt was stuck to me, my thighs raw along the inside where the thighs rubbed, the outside tendon of my left knee stiffened to the point where it burned to step forward on any downgrade. When I reached the point I climbed to the highest overhang and sat, arms wrapped around knees, Nikes and socks off, breathing deep. Below, the sea broke on the outrocks, the crush so violent it soothed, the sea spitting up at me, as I deserved.

  Torchy was finished hockey even before he predicted he would be out. And, as he had said, I lasted a bit longer because no one ever expected fists to travel quite as fast as legs. But the day came — yes, as he had said it would — when I might have been better advised to use my legs rather than hands, and scram.

  I’d know it was coming since the start of the 1978–79 season, when a goddamn college punk decked me during an exhibition game in Minnesota. It made a big splash in all the papers, and I think only because this big goof was an American and the Yanks saw it all as some kind of American invasion or something. Victory over a foreign power, that sort of thing. Whatever it was, no one bothered to mention it was a sucker punch, which it was, and no one seemed to take much note when in the first regular game against the North Stars I cut the creep for ten stitches late in the third. What they did note was that we blew our lead and they came back to score twice and win with us at a man disadvantage. The man, me. Batterinski fading.

  Since then it had been, in a single word, embarrassing. A month down at New Haven in the minors, two months back with the Kings. Six months with the Kings, four in the minors. It made no difference to my pay, but it hurt in other ways. I made noises in the press about wanting a trade — I figured sure one of the Old World Hockey teams coming into the NHL Hartford say, could use me regularly — but the Kings leaked to the press that I’d been put on league waivers several times without so much as a sniff from another team. It was my big contract, of course. When Vincent Wheeler negotiated an extension through to June of 1982 he hamstrung both me and the Kings. And if I was more like Torchy I would have prayed to God to arrange a conference call to get me out of this mess. I wanted to go. They wanted me to go. And we just needed the right person to ask. Hartford, Winnipeg, Quebec, I didn’t care. I just wanted the one last chance to prove I could still do it, and then go out the champ. Surely anyone could understand that....

  God must have been listening in on the game, because the call finally came. March 11, 1981. They caught me at home. It was the general manager, George Maguire, and I was instantly grateful that I wouldn’t be hearing about it this time through the press, as had happened in Philadelphia. I was neither curt nor hurt over the phone, but completely decent. This would be a gentleman’s agreement, of mutual benefit to both parties.

  Hartford, here I come!

  “Dr. Buss wants to see you, Bats.”

  The owner himself. It had to be good.

  I drove up the San Diego Parkway, hoping a direct route might mean a straight deal. Why Buss? No one had been able to figure him out since he bought the team from Cooke. He was a strange, sad-looking man with Marlboro moustache, thinning hair and a voice that couldn’t possibly belong to a land developer who might soon be a billionaire. The team was fascinated with Buss and what he might mean for us. He already came up with $600,000 a year to keep Dionne happy. Maybe he was prepared to buy my contact out at face value. I might clear $200,000. Maybe more.

  I raced in past the secretaries. Buss was sitting in his black leather chair, feet up, eyes closed, and I thought for a moment I might be interrupting him — Torchy had said Buss was so smart he and a friend used to play Monopoly without a board, just the dice — but his eyes opened slowly and fixed on me with their slow sadness.

  “Felix, come in, please. We’ve been waiting.”

  I entered and noticed there were already two other men inside. And Maguire too. I had seen nothing of them. Had they waited patiently while I drove and Buss slept? The two men did not look hockey, both were sitting extremely straight, with sober grey suits and slick, patent leather briefcases on their laps. They did not look at all like scouts.

  All stood when I entered.

  “Felix,” Maguire began as he came from the side, face hanging like a hound. “This is Mr. Cousins and Mr. — eh —”

  “Dunton,” the smaller man offered. Bald, with thick glasses, he looked like a banker. The other man, despite the similar suit and briefcase was taller, leaner and with short-cropped brown hair looked like a detective. It was he who stepped forward to speak, taking my hand like a priest at a funeral.

  “We’re with the IRS, Mr. Batterinski.”

  My heart skipped and swallowed a small cough. Income tax?

  “Please,” Buss said. ”Everyone sit down.”

  We sat. The smaller man, Dunton, opened his briefcase and hauled out a thick document.

  “We understand you to be a client of Mr. Vincent Brammar Wheeler of New York City and New Jersey. Is that correct?”

  “I am.”

  He handed me the document. “This, Mr. Batterinski, is a subpoena. I’m sorry to have to inform you of this, but Mr. Wheeler has been charged by the United States District Attorney’s office of New York City with 103 counts of fraud.”

  “Vincent?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Buss rattled the top off a jelly bean jar and popped a handful, talking through the chew. “He stole your money Felix.”

  I stared at him and then the other two men. “Is that true?”

  Cousins spoke, hi
s tone like the cop at the catch end of a radar trap. “It is alleged that Wheeler misappropriated funds that were held by his company in trust. The 103 charges involve monies that belong to you and sixteen other professional athletes.”

  My eyes spun about the room. Maguire was staring into his hands. Buss was picking jelly beans from his gums. Dunton was scribbling in a notebook and Cousins was staring at me, smiling, the glad bearer of bad news.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Nothing has been proved in a court of law Mr. Batterinski.”

  “How much do you think?”

  “His records have been confiscated. But I’m afraid we don’t know yet.”

  “But you must have some idea?”

  He must have detected the desperation in my voice. The cop uniform slid off momentarily. “Off the record?” he asked.

  I nodded. This sounded like our locker room.

  “If the charges are correct he’s bilked you out of maybe $300,000.”

  “Three hundred thousand?”

  He nodded and Dunton shook his head and tsked, but whether in disapproval of what Cousins was saying or of what Wheeler had done I couldn’t say, or care less.

  Dunton suddenly spoke up. You weren’t the worse hit, if it’s any satisfaction.”

  No, it wasn’t. Our dry-wall idea had gone bust; now I felt my apartment building caving in on top of me, and my investments closing in like muck around a rubber boot.

  I turned back to Cousins. “Why would he do it?”

  “The state is going to contend to pay off gambling debts.”

  What did it matter how he’d done it? All the time I thought he was up in Torchy’s room beating himself to death he was actually screwing me. It didn’t matter how or why. Just that it happened. I was not only thirty-six years old, over the hill, washed up and finished. I was broke.

  “You’re welcome to come to camp, you know.”

  I looked up at the general manager, grateful for the thought. But I knew, too, it was useless. I hadn’t played more than half the games from the all-star break on, sitting in a hundred different press boxes while leeches asked me about my pulled groin and I lied to them that it was getting better. It wasn’t getting any worse, either. It barely existed. Apart from existing to give me a little dignity, that is.

  “Is there any use?”

  Maguire closed his eyes. “We had a good draft. You know that.”

  “I know.”

  We sat silent, the truth so obvious we could not even see how to lie around it. Finally I stood up and walked to the framed team picture, staring at myself and asked. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Buss will honour your contract if you go permanently to the minors.”

  “Thank you, and I mean that. But no. You understand.”

  Maguire nodded. “The best we can do is buy out your contract.”

  They were generous, but in the end it was all meaningless. Wheeler had finally pleaded guilty, with me and six other NHLers and two NBAers and a single ball player ready to skin him alive if he walked out a free man, and he’d gotten eight years. But what good did that do us? We all had lawyers’ fees, and even if the players’ association picked up a big portion of it, it was still going to cost me big. That plus the fact that Wheeler had somehow spent money of mine I hadn’t even received from the Kings yet meant I was down to $20,000 clear, with luck. And not even in Pomerania do you retire on that. My pension wouldn’t come through for eight more years.

  Maguire, bless his heart, called me in again.

  “There’s one more thing. The NHL Players Association is trying to help out all you guys caught in this. I’ve someone wants to talk to you as soon as you can call him, okay?”

  “What for?”

  “There’s a coaching job up.”

  Me? A coach? So soon?

  “That might be alright. Where?”

  Maguire smiled, his hanging face working up pulleys and blocks and tackle until it stood out sideways on both cheeks. He looked underwater, sinking down.

  “Helsinki.”

  “Where the hell’s that?”

  “There are those who go through life gently touching those they meet, and those whose every touch hurts. Examine Batterinski: the uncle who died when hit by a half-ton when Felix was racing to a party; the best friend, Danny, who told me he gave up trying to prove who was the better player of the two because it obviously meant so much more to Batterinski; and who returned to whatever future the impenetrable bush of Pomerania would yield; Torchy Bender, the one-time NHL all-star now bearing his soul on morning religious programming; Erkki Sundstrom, unfairly fired from his job as manager of Tapiola Hauki, his stomach a Swiss cheese of ulcers — all of this thanks to Felix Batterinski.

  Intriguingly, none are women. Batterinski, known to enjoy the ‘bonuses’ of road life, never managed a lasting relationship with a woman his whole life. There was, apparently, a friend in Finland, but he refused to tell me her name or to even talk about her. I discovered much later she was Kristiina Jalonen, an architect, who refused to be interviewed for this story. We spoke but briefly and by telephone, and the single emotion that spilled out before she cut off the call was neither pain nor anger, but a strange and weary sadness. She would not, however, talk about it.

  How intense this relationship between a hockey player and an architect could have been is something we cannot know, but it is fair to say that Felix Batterinski was a throwback socially as well as athletically. According to those who knew him best, Batterinski viewed women as either fallen or precious saints. Danny Shannon told of Batterinski’s first experience, when he was a raw teenager in Vernon, and how even the local prostitute laughed at him. Who knows how many blows he would later land on the ice thinking it was her he was striking out against?

  He came from a closeted world where women had a specific function, he was never able to realize that when he came into the modern world it was he who could not function properly. Just as hockey was surely passing his kind by, human relationships had left him behind from the start.

  So when I said Kristiina Jalonen seemed struck with ‘sadness,’ the temptation was strong to resort to another, perhaps more condemning word: ‘pity.’ But we shall never know.

  What was it about Batterinski that made him such a critical force in so many lives, albeit usually a negative one? It could be nothing more than he was accident-prone — although his hockey career was remarkably clear of serious injury — but certainly his touch seemed to spread like iodine on a potato, forever blackening….”

  — Excerpted by permission from “Batterinski’s Burden” by Matt Keening, Canada Magazine, June 1982

  March 15, 1982

  Lahti, Finland

  We are a two-hour drive directly north of Helsinki in a small city called Lahti for the deciding game of the first-round playoffs and I don’t give a sweet fuck who wins. Tapiola has already managed the impossible. Thanks to the second best record in the league since Christmas, we’re the talk of the country. None of the analysts can figure it out. And I’m not saying.

  My own season has also been a delight, the incident in Sweden excepted. In thirty-six games I scored eleven goals, had twenty-three assists and served a mere fifty-two minutes in penalties, a career low. To put it in proper context, though, I still led the league.

  Kovanaama. Bully. It seems to have become my third nickname. Not as fine as Frankenstein, but a whole lot better than Canucklehead. Since the Swedish thing, hardly a day has gone by without my name getting into the news. So I was not only selling seats for Erkki, I was selling newspapers. But I also had a problem, and it, too, involved the press. Despite my attempts to block him, that son-of-a-bitch Keening had come over from Toronto. First I knew of it was a telegram giving his arrival time, where he’d be staying and that Canada Magazine wished us luck in the playoffs. Sneaky.

  He caught me at the worst possible time. We’d just trounced Helsinki Jokerit 8–3 at the Ishallen to make the playoff cut, and I’d
been the star of the game with a goal and three assists. I was sitting naked in front of my locker, sucking on a Koff beer and smiling for the cameras while a camp of Finnish journalists asked simple questions in simple English. Are you happy? Can you beat Lahti? How does this compare to the Stanley Cup? (Yes, yes and a diplomatic fudge.)

  “Super game, Felix.”

  I looked up, startled by the accent. He was so clearly a Canadian sportswriter that he could have formed the mold: thick glasses over nervous eyes, balding, a too-eager-to-please smile, cheap clothes in need of press and coordination, the kind of body that should say nothing but goes on forever about jogging and tennis and all those other bullshit words they invent to replace ability. The body of a true athlete speaks for itself. When a true athlete says “tennis,” he means the same thing as if he’d used the word “beer” — something social rather than beneficial.

  “Mat Keening,” he said, shoving out a hand. A nail-biter. I took the hand slowly. Sweat. “Did you get the telegram?”

  “Yah.”

  “Good. I tried to call a dozen times, but you were always out.”

  “You should have left a message.”

  “I did. Didn’t you get them?”

  “No.”

  “Shit, that’s too bad. I swear I left them.”

  I leaned back to haul out my shoes and socks, escaping to my own lingering equipment smells. “You should have checked with me first.”

  Instantly defensive, eagerly apologetic — how typically the Canadian sportswriter. “It was my fucking editor,” he said. I caught the swear word as it was intended — a gift, to show he was of the earth, an athlete perhaps, who through injury (brain damage?) became a sportswriter — and I let it bounce away, ignored; I would clean up my own speech in retaliation, letting him worry that perhaps he’d offended me.