by Bryan Gruley
We knew ultimate. Soupy had started us using the word as a substitute for “cool.” Bobby Orr was the ultimate. Whoppers with cheese were the ultimate. Still, we stood there dumbly. Coach skated a little circle around us, sizing us up. He stopped where he’d begun and propped his stick up straight on the edge of its blade, the butt end scraping his chin. His eyes fell on mine.
“Gus?”
“Yeah.”
“No, Gus. ‘Yes, Coach.’”
It startled me. He’d come to Sunday dinner plenty of times without ever correcting the way I addressed him. “Uh, yes, Coach,” I said.
“Come on, Gus. You know ‘ultimate.’ Didn’t you just say the other day that your mother’s mashed potatoes were the ‘ultimate’?”
The others tittered. I felt uncomfortable. “To play hockey?” I said.
“Of course we’re here to play hockey, Gus, or you wouldn’t be out here in these goofy outfits.”
I ventured again, “To play good hockey?”
“Well, we’ll certainly have to play good to reach the ultimate goal, but first we have to know what it is. Can anybody help me?”
Again, silence. Then: “To win?”
It was Soupy.
“Alden Campbell,” Coach said. “You’re quite a smooth skater, son. Like a swan. Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Nope-I mean, no, Coach.”
“From now on, you’re the swan-Swanny. That all right with you?”
“I don’t know, Coach.”
“What’s the ultimate goal, Swanny?”
“To win, Coach.”
“To win what? A game? Two games?”
“All the games, Coach.”
Blackburn shook his head. “No. Not all the games.” He stopped and looked around again, catching each of us by the eyes. I felt as if he was about to tell us a secret. “The ultimate goal, boys, is to win one game. One game.” He held up a finger. “That one game, boys, is the Michigan state championship final. Of course we’re going to have to win a few others on the way. And we’re going to have to lose some, too. But that’s all right. Did you hear me? That’s all right. Because losing’s good for winning, boys. Hear me? Losing is good for winning. We’re going to lose some, and then we’re going to win. And we’re going to win that one game. The state championship.” He waited for it to sink in. “Understand?”
“Yes, Coach,” we answered in unison.
He grabbed the whistle dangling at his neck and blew a short blast. “OK,” he said. “Let’s skate.”
A year later, our parents called a meeting. They weren’t happy with Coach Blackburn. He wasn’t the friendly, easygoing guy they’d laughed and drank with at Make-Believe Gardens. He’d had the gall to ban the parents from watching practices. He told them he didn’t want their kids looking to their mommies and daddies for help when Coach was making us skate endless circles and sprints and stops-and-starts without ever once putting a stick to a puck. He’d go around before those no-puck practices and put short stacks of pucks at each face-off dot. We weren’t allowed to touch them. “Dying for those biscuits, eh?” he would say. “Makes you hungry.” Word got back to the parents that a few of us had lost our breakfasts out there.
Worse for our moms and dads, we weren’t winning. We had finished that first season under Coach 23–27 and didn’t make the state playoffs. The parents blamed Coach, of course. For skating us without pucks. For making us play a defensive scheme he called the “Rat Trap” that slowed the game and kept us from scoring many goals. For inviting top-notch teams from Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and, scariest of all, Detroit, to come up and play us on weekends. In the past, the Rats had avoided the Detroit teams until the state playoffs, but Coach said that only by playing those great teams repeatedly could we learn and then exploit their weaknesses. Of course, every time they beat us by six or seven goals, he reassured us that losing was good for winning.
But what really had the parents in a lather was that Coach had begun to recruit players from outside Starvation. On a low rise behind his cabin he’d built three small plankboard houses where those out-of-town players could board from September to May. He called the buildings and the players “billets.” Billets were common in Canada, brand-new to northern Michigan. The day before the parents called their meeting, Blackburn had cut a local player, Jeff Champagne, in favor of a billet from Racine, Wisconsin, named Teddy Boynton.
The parents assembled around the picnic tables in the snack bar at our town rink. My mother sat at a table in the back. The smells of mustard and popcorn wafted on the air. Don Champagne, Jeff’s father, spoke first. “This is our town and our rink that we built with our own hard-earned dollars, and we don’t need a bunch of out-of-town folks who didn’t put a dime into our rink,” he said. “The River Rats ought to be players from Starvation Lake, and Starvation Lake only.”
Soupy and I and the rest of the River Rats waited outside, as Coach had instructed, but we peeked and eavesdropped through the cracks in the door, as Coach no doubt had expected. He sat alone at a table facing the parents and listened, wordless, as one parent after another stood to complain about the billets, the no-puck practices, the Rat Trap. Just about everyone had something to say, except my own mother, which wasn’t at all like her.
When every argument had been repeated two or three times, Coach smiled and placed his hands flat on the table. “Folks,” he said. “First, I’d like to apologize for a little lapse in communication. It’s a new season. You’re all welcome to come watch practices. If the boys forgot to mention that, that’s my fault.” Outside, we snickered; Coach hadn’t said a word to us about lifting the practice ban. “Second, no-puck practices will be more the exception than the rule this year. Your sons are all fine athletes, but, let’s face it, they weren’t in the best physical shape. Maybe too much of the pop and potato chips, eh?” He winked. “Hockey takes a lot of stamina, and the only way to build that stamina-the only way I know-is skating. This year, though, the kids’ll be seeing more pucks. After all, you’re right, the puck’s a pretty big part of the game.” A few parents chuckled.
He stood. “As for the various other ways we’ve approached the game, I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to apologize.” His smile melted slowly away. “I’m going to be a little bit blunt with you now, folks. Please don’t take it personally. I really love this town and the lake and how you’ve all welcomed me here. And I love your boys, every one of them, even the one- especially the one I had to cut from the roster.” He was moving slowly around the room now, looking at each parent, one by one. “I don’t come from here. Don’t have kids of my own. So I don’t have all that-that emotion you have tied up in watching your kids. I think I can be a little impartial, if you know what I mean. I’ve won a few championships in my time, and I think I know what it takes.”
“Come on, Jack, we all want to win,” Champagne piped up. “But why do we need players from Timbuktu to do it?”
Coach steepled his hands beneath his chin. “Good question. Here’s the answer.” He paused. “Because the players we have aren’t good enough.” He waited in the silence that followed, which was more awkward for the parents than for him. Then he repeated it: “Because the players we have aren’t good enough. I’m sorry, folks. We have a few guys who are fast enough, or skilled enough. We have one boy who can skate with anyone in Michigan.” I elbowed Soupy in the ribs. “We have another who’s going to be the best stand-up goalie this town has ever seen.” Soupy shoved me back, and Stevie Reneau smacked me on the back of the head. “And we have a few other good players in Starvation Lake. But we don’t have enough. Not if we want to reach the ultimate goal.”
He let the phrase linger on the air, as he had with us. He’d never used it on the parents before. As if on cue, Champagne finally said, “And what would the ultimate goal be?”
“Well,” Coach said, “why don’t I have your sons tell you?” He looked in our direction. “Boys?”
After practice earlier that afternoon, Coach ha
d placed a cardboard box in the middle of our dressing room floor. We’d watched as he sliced it open with a pocketknife, reached in, and pulled out something wrapped in clear plastic that he held up for us to see. “What do you think, boys?” Inside the plastic was a shiny blue jacket with gold stripes on the collar and cuffs, and gold piping along the sleeves. A River Rats logo was stitched over the right breast and a player’s name-“Stevie” this one read-over the left. We all jumped up, oohing and ahhing. “The ultimate ultimate,” Soupy said. We’d never had team jackets before. Coach had told us to stow them in our hockey bags until the parents’ meeting.
Now the seventeen of us filed into the snack bar in our new jackets, as Coach had told us beforehand. It was the parents’ turn to ooh and ahh. We formed a tight semicircle around Coach, Soupy and I on either side of him, again as he had instructed. He laid his hands gently on our shoulders. Surveying the room, I saw my mother smiling from her table. She’d probably known about the jackets ahead of time.
“Gus,” he said. “Can you tell the folks here, what is the ultimate goal?”
All the parents’ eyes were on me. I stuffed my hands in my jacket pockets and blurted, “To win one game, Coach.”
“Just one, Gus?”
“Yes, Coach.”
Champagne snorted. “One game?”
“Why don’t you let him finish, Don?” It was the voice of Francis Dufresne, who was leaning on a vending machine in the back of the room. Dufresne didn’t have children, but he never missed one of our games. The bar he owned, Enright’s, ran a shuttle bus to the rink on game nights.
“Gus,” Coach said. “What is that one game?”
I gave the answer. A few parents seemed to sit up straighter. Coach turned to Soupy. “Alden. Is the ultimate goal to win all the games?”
“No, Coach.”
“Why not all the games, Alden?”
“Because losing is good for winning, Coach.”
“Say again?”
“Losing is good for winning, Coach.”
“This is ridiculous,” Champagne shouted.
“Boys,” Coach said, looking around at us, “how many games are we aiming to win?”
“One, Coach,” we answered in unison.
“And that game is?”
“The state championship, Coach.”
“Hear, hear,” Dufresne said. He’d moved away from the vending machine to hover over the sitting parents, a short man in a black leather jacket who seemed to take up more space than he actually did. “The best damn town in the state of Michigan ought to be able to prove it’s the best at the best damn sport there is.” He raised a fist to the level of his shoulder. “We’ve been doing this for, what, twenty years? We’ve got someone here who’s telling us what it takes. It’s time to stop whining and do it.”
Lenny Ziolkowski, the father of Paul “Zilchy” Ziolkowski, stood. Mr. Ziolkowski played poker on Friday nights with Coach, Leo Redpath, Soupy’s dad, and a few other dads at Blackburn’s cabin. “Jack’s got a tough job,” he said. “We ought to give him the room to do it, unless someone here thinks they can do a better job.” He glared momentarily at Champagne. “We’re not out there on the ice with him, but our boys are, and the boys sure seem to like him.”
I looked up at Coach then. I saw a spark in his eye I’d never seen before, a spark like the one I saw in the eyes of shooters bearing down on my net. It wasn’t there long, and it scared me at first, but the fear didn’t last, because I knew Coach was on my side.
“Folks,” he said. “Tell you what. I cut a boy from the team yesterday. Maybe I got a little ahead of myself. I’d like to restore him to the roster, effective immediately. I can’t guarantee he’ll play a whole lot, but he’ll have every chance to earn it.” He looked directly at Don Champagne now. “If you’ll get me the right size, I’ll order Jeff a jacket first thing tomorrow.”
Champagne just nodded. Then I saw my mother waving her hand. “Yes, Mrs. Carpenter?” Coach said.
My mother talked fast, and I worried she’d say something nobody would understand. But it was clear enough. “I would just like to say, I don’t know about anybody else, but I think the boys look just adorable in their jackets.”
“Adorable?” Dufresne cried out. “Bea, we don’t want adorable hockey players.”
“Oh, all right, Francis, wonderful then or-oh, I don’t know!” She started to clap, and then Dufresne started clapping, and pretty soon the whole room, even Champagne, was applauding. By the time the meeting ended, Coach had persuaded the parents to chip in for a new skate-sharpening machine, and Dufresne had offered to organize a committee that would investigate installing new benches in the dressing rooms.
That Sunday, Coach came to dinner at our house. Mom made fried pork chops and baked potatoes with gravy. We didn’t talk about the Rats at first, but Mom finally asked how he thought the meeting had gone. Coach shrugged as he reached for a bowl of peas and carrots. “You know, Bea?” he said. “It’s like I always say. They don’t care how. All they care is how many.”
It was late in our fourth full season that we finally proved ourselves. By then we were whipping all the teams up north and had beaten some good squads from as far downstate as Ann Arbor. But the Detroiters still had our number.
Griffin Hawks, a team from the suburbs west of Detroit, came up for a pair of weekend games. Friday night we blew a 2–0 lead to lose 4–2. There were tears in the dressing room afterward. We’d never come so close to beating a Detroit team. Coach normally would’ve told us hockey wasn’t for crybabies and ordered us to listen up, eh, here’s how we gave up those last two goals. But on this night he just stood by the door, hands folded behind his back. When we’d all gotten our clothes on and our bags packed, he raised his arms for silence.
“Men?” he said. He never called us that. “Are you ready?” We lifted our wet heads to meet his gaze. “Ready for what, Coach?” one of us asked, and Blackburn shushed him. “Are you ready?” he said again. “You better be ready. Because tomorrow will be the biggest night of your life.”
I got an inkling of what he meant just before the next day’s game. The guys were warming up our backup goalie, and I was in a corner shoveling pucks out to the shooters when I noticed one of the Griffin coaches standing on their bench, gnawing on an unlit cigar in his black-and-orange Griffin jacket. He was watching Soupy. Soupy was skating tight figure eights, backward, with a puck on his stick, flipping it back and forth like it was glued to the blade, his head up, gathering speed as he circled. The coach leaned to his right and called another coach over. He said something to the other coach and gestured toward Soupy. They both nodded.
We weren’t invisible anymore.
As we played that night, word was getting around town that the Rats were about to beat a team from Detroit. Later I heard that Francis Dufresne had made a bunch of phone calls. Whenever play stopped, I glanced into the stands. It seemed as if more people were there every time.
By the start of the final period, the bleachers were filled. I hadn’t seen that since the Red Wing old-timers had come to town for an exhibition game. As we were lining up for a face-off just to my left, I heard banging on the glass behind me. I turned to see people lined up all along the glass, two and three deep, neighbors and friends and people I’d seen on the street and at church, some I’d never seen before. The game was tied at 2, and those people were pounding on the glass, shouting my name and my teammates’ names, yelling for us to hang in there, we could do it, we could win. As I turned back to the game, I slammed the heel of my stick into my catching glove and drew down into my crouch and I could feel my heart pounding, swelling as it never had before, and I knew that we could not possibly lose. And I knew that I’d known this even before the game had begun. Just as Coach had known.
With less than a minute to go in the game, we were still tied when a Griffin wing deked past a Rat at the blue line and swooped in alone on me. First he faked a shot, trying to get me to drop, but I held my ground as he
fired a low, hard bullet to my left. The puck looked huge to me. I kicked my left leg out at precisely the right instant and deflected it across the ice. Soupy gathered it up in stride and bolted down the left side of the ice, the crowd shrieking, the clock counting down to twenty-nine seconds, twenty-eight, twenty-seven…Soupy charged into the Hawks’ zone and launched a rising shot that caught their goalie off balance. The puck caromed off his shoulder to Jeff Champagne, who had sneaked to a corner of the net, alone. He took a backhand swipe and knocked it in.
I’ve never heard anything louder than that rink at that moment.
Although we were eliminated in the state playoffs by Detroit’s O’Leary’s Heating, we knew we could play with anybody. Two seasons later, we made the state quarterfinals and fell to Byrd Electric, another Detroit squad, 5–3. When our bus pulled onto Main Street after the three-hour ride from Flint, everyone at Enright’s spilled outside to cheer us. We smiled and waved, but the older Rats-Soupy, Teddy, Stevie Reneau, Brad Wilford, me-knew we had just two years left to win that one big game before we’d be going off to college or jobs or whatever else the real world held. Coach seemed unfazed, though. Before we departed the bus that night, he told us yet again, “Losing is good for winning.”
We made it a step closer the next year, upsetting Paddock Pools in the quarters when Soupy scored on the end-to-end rush memorialized on the wall at Enright’s. We thought we’d finally get our shot. But in the semifinals we were routed, 7–1, by the Pipefitters, a street gang of a team from the steel-making furnace of downriver Detroit. It seemed like they were all big and hairy except for number 17, a scrawny winger named Billy Hooper who skated like his feet had touched molten metal. He scored four, and to this day I can’t remember seeing three of them until they were behind me. Even Soupy had trouble staying with Billy Hooper. We stayed downstate to watch the Pipefitters demolish O’Leary’s in the final, 9–2. Hooper scored three, assisted on two others, and was named MVP of the tournament. Late that night, our bus pulled into the high school parking lot where our parents sat waiting with the exhaust snaking around their cars and trucks. Coach stood at the front of the bus and called for quiet. Then he said, “Men-are you ready?” We knew what that meant. We filed silently off the bus.