Still, the worst part of being a healthy scratch was going to home games. Healthy scratches sit up in the press box during games. In every other arena in the league, the scratches can take the elevator that takes the media and people in the luxury suites up to the top level. In Edmonton, though, there is no private elevator to the press box. Scratches have to walk through the arena concourse to take escalators upstairs. It’s like a public-shaming exercise. Fans will heckle you, and you have to not make eye contact or engage them or you’re just asking for trouble. One time I just stayed down in the dressing room when the team went out on the ice for the game, but then management set down a rule that barred healthy scratches from the room on game nights. The team wanted you to parade in front of the fans on the worst nights of your career.
As a healthy scratch, the love I had for the game was getting sucked right out of me. Worse, a healthy scratch showing up on the box score was a black mark on a player’s resumé. Memories are short in the game. Two years before I had been a twenty-goal scorer playing on a second line for an emerging team. But no one remembered that after the season in Edmonton. The team was a mess, the worst in the league, and I was a healthy scratch. People would put it together: if he can’t play for Edmonton, who can he play for?
* * *
Edmonton, Alberta, April 13, 2010
When I went into Steve Tambellini’s office, I didn’t know that our end-of-season meeting would turn out to be a bookend to those few minutes I had spent with Jacques Lemaire. After all, I had been just a kid all those years back in Minnesota, hadn’t played a NHL game outside of exhibition season. Back then I couldn’t have seen what was coming. Going into Tambellini’s office, I was an established player with almost three hundred career games, and I knew how the league works. I thought I knew how bad it was.
Tambellini let me do the talking, and I wasn’t going to try to write a fantasy when it came to my self-evaluation. I wasn’t going to try to explain or defend my season. I didn’t say anything about being used on the checking line—Tambellini had been in the NHL a long time, so I figured he knew what a bad fit it was for me to skate there. I didn’t say that the lines of communication with our coach and his staff were an issue—the Oilers were going to fire Pat Quinn after one year of his three-year deal, so I would have just been piling on top of their mistake. I stuck to the subject of my play and I said that I was really disappointed in my season. I owned it. Tambellini nodded but said nothing.
I told Tambellini that I knew that my body language was bad, that I acted out on my frustrations too much, that I could have handled bad situations better. And I told Tambellini that I wanted to play better for the Oilers, that I was willing to work in the off-season harder than ever.
I had planned to say all of this. It didn’t make any impression on Tambellini. Then I went off the script, or at least said something that came to me while I was sitting there.
“I think it might help if I saw someone,” I said.
I spelled it out. With the team going bad, just like I had laid it out and just like we both knew; with other things in my life going bad, though I didn’t get into the split between my mother and me. I told Tambellini that I could be better for the team if I were in a better place emotionally. And that some outside professional help might get me to that place.
Tambellini said nothing. He didn’t pick up his pen and make a note of it. He let it go right by.
About five minutes later, the meeting was over.
* * *
Sophie and I were on our honeymoon in Bora Bora when I got the news from my agent: the Oilers had traded me to Phoenix and were buying me out of my contract. I hated the timing but I wasn’t surprised.
I don’t know why Tambellini brushed off my suggestion about getting help. Maybe I wasn’t his type of player, even if he had traded for me and taken on my contract. Maybe he didn’t believe that type of work can help a player—no one on the team was seeing a sports psychologist so far as I knew. Plus I wasn’t the only one on the team who felt like we were playing in a cloud of poisonous gas in our rink. A few of their young players had to walk through the concourse as healthy scratches and were taking it at least as hard as I was.
Tambellini might not have reacted to me floating the idea of psychological help because he didn’t believe in me as a player. That would have been him changing his mind over a bit more than a year—when he had traded for me, he had handed L.A. a useful second-line player and knew exactly what my salary was.
Why Tambellini did any of this didn’t matter. Things had gone bad, and fast, in just over a season. How bad I didn’t know, though.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d never have a one-way NHL deal again. The 1 percent players, the very top guys, leave the game on their own terms. The average player doesn’t. For him it happens fast. I might have had a different story than anyone else, and I think I had more skill than most. But at the end of the day I had turned out to be an average NHL player.
35
THE LAST TIME
There is no curtain dropping at the end of my career. It’s not like Rudy. For a pro athlete it’s almost never like a movie, almost never a dramatic finish that plays out in front of a packed arena. It’s usually something small and private, not a last game but something near the end. That’s how it was for me.
I asked my agents to try to find me a one-way deal after Phoenix bought me out—a one-way contract that would guarantee me an NHL wage and give me a real shot at making a team. After a few weeks my agents told me there weren’t any one-way offers out there but ten teams had interest in me if I’d sign a two-way contract. Offers ranged but I’d make the NHL minimum for as long as I stuck with a team and then, if I was sent down to the minors, I’d be looking at making about a fifth of the NHL minimum.
I wound up signing with the Carolina Hurricanes. It seemed like a fit. The team was rebuilding, and though I’d never lived in Raleigh, I knew and liked the state where I had spent a lot of my youth. That my father had wasted all those years in North Carolina playing in the Atlantic Coast league didn’t weigh on my mind—maybe he would turn up at a Hurricanes game, but then again it had been a few years since he had shown up on the radar and he could have shown up anywhere. That my mother was living with my sisters just down the road didn’t weigh on my mind either—maybe she would reach out, but then again I didn’t need to be within driving distance for her to do that, not when she could have just picked up a phone or even sent an email.
In the end, it didn’t matter.
It didn’t work out for me with the Hurricanes. There was one spot open on their roster and my competition was an eighteen-year-old straight out of the draft, Jeff Skinner, who would be the league’s best rookie that season. That was all she wrote in Carolina. After I played in ten games and was a healthy scratch for ten more, the Hurricanes traded me to Minnesota. I finally played for the team that had originally drafted me, but that only lasted a couple of months. I didn’t get to play much and didn’t make much of an impression.
The Wild ended up assigning me to their minor-league team in Houston, where I had played as a first-year pro. Minnesota might have thought and hoped I wouldn’t report—especially because at this point Sophie was pregnant and we had set up house in Minneapolis. In fact, right before the Wild sent me down, Sophie’s father had driven from Toronto to Minneapolis with a trailer full of furniture. Moving to Houston would be a whole new set of headaches—getting out of a lease, finding a new place and a new obstetrician. If I didn’t report, Minnesota would have been off the hook for the balance of my contract. Even Mike Yeo, the coach in Houston, told reporters that he doubted I’d stick it out. “You don’t know if the buy-in factor is going to be all there and if he was going to be completely committed to the team concept,” Yeo said.
I did stick it out. At that point I hadn’t given up hope of getting back in the game. Hope was fading fast, but not gone completely.
It turned out that I would never have as
much fun as a pro as I did playing for Houston that spring. We had a great bunch of guys. Only a few had played in the NHL. Most were rookies or second-year pros who were going through this for the first time. They didn’t look at veterans just as obstacles on their climb to stardom. If my teammates had heard any bad buzz about me after Edmonton, it meant nothing to them. And over time they got to know my story. My roommate and best friend Jed Ortmeyer is the person I told the most to.
In Houston I never felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. We just went out and played. The team had been struggling before I got there, but we wound up making a long playoff run that spring.
Still, a long way from the NHL, my past revisited me and gave me a couple of bad memories that were never going to fade.
* * *
Peoria, Illinois, April 19, 2011
We had won the first three games of our first-round series against the Peoria Rivermen—that didn’t make game 4 a desperate situation for the Aeros, but it was for me. Sophie was with her father and stepmother in Florida and ready to give birth to our son. I was going to miss games 5, 6 and 7 if the series went that far because of the birth—there was no way that I was going to be away from Sophie and our newborn for a game in the minors, and to the credit of Mike Yeo, the team didn’t expect me to come out to those games if it played out like that. If Yeo and management questioned my buy-in when I arrived in Houston, I had proven to them that I was committed to giving my best.
Midway through the second period of game 4, I picked up the puck on a turnover at our blue line and had a breakaway. Peoria’s goaltender was Ben Bishop, who’d end up being one of the top goaltenders in the NHL a few seasons later. I fired a puck past Bishop and put Houston in front 2–1. Peoria came at us the rest of the game, but that wound up being the final score. We were through to the second round and I was going to be able to be with Sophie in Florida the next day, and with our newborn the day after that. It was a huge relief and as satisfying a goal as any I had scored since the gold-medal game at the World Juniors all those years before.
After the game Jed and I walked out of our dressing room together and headed down the hallway to the back door of the arena and to the bus that was going to take us back to the hotel. We planned on getting a few guys on the team together that night and having a few beers to celebrate the win and toast my first son.
My father was standing in the hallway, smiling.
It registered but it didn’t register. Or at least, I didn’t let on that I saw him or recognized him. I hadn’t seen him this close since I appeared before a judge for a restraining order when I was with the IceDogs. Still, there was no mistaking him. He looked the same, sounded the same.
Why now? And of all the places, why Peoria?
It made sense, though. My father couldn’t get that close to me or any other player at an NHL rink. Arena security keeps everyone at a distance from the teams. In the minors, though, security is nonexistent and autograph seekers can pretty much walk right up and knock on the dressing-room door after a game. In Peoria my father was just a face in the crowd. In this case, he was a face in the crowd that I wasn’t going to acknowledge.
I gritted my teeth, stared straight ahead and kept on walking. Jed didn’t know that anything was going on. He just thought my father was another fan and ignored him.
“Hey, Patrick,” my father said.
He actually thought that I was going to stop to talk to him. He made it sound all buddy-buddy, like nothing happened over all those years, like nothing had happened eleven years before on his parents’ lawn, like he had never gone to jail.
I tried to hold it together. I tried not to be mad. I tried to ignore the knot in my gut. I tried to keep composed. Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t say anything. Don’t do anything. All these thoughts were other ways of saying: Don’t be impulsive, like he always had been.
A small part of me wanted to finish the fight he’d started when he jumped me at sixteen, but that could only lead to trouble and I couldn’t afford anything like that with Sophie back in Houston.
“You had your kid yet?” my father said.
For a second I thought that this was his way of telling me that he had been keeping tabs on me, stalking me, all these years. But then I remembered that a newspaper story that day had mentioned how I would miss the rest of the series if Peoria won game 4.
I wanted to lip off to my father like I would have years back. I could have said that I was bringing my son into the world and that I’d never look at him as a retirement plan. But again, I didn’t want things to escalate. I just wanted to be away from him and back in Houston. I walked right by him.
“The least you could do is get a haircut,” he said.
I went through the doors and got on the bus without a word.
“Patrick just shut himself down and right then I knew something was up,” Jed says today. “I knew something had gone on back there in the hallway and I had some idea what it was.”
I walked past my seat and into the washroom in the back, locking the door. I stood there for about ten or fifteen minutes, until the bus started to pull away. There was a mirror in the bathroom but I didn’t look in it. I didn’t want to see anything that looked even a little bit like my father.
When the bus pulled away, I was sitting on the other side of the aisle from Jed. The bus was noisy and my teammates were still buzzing after the win. Jed was watching me.
“You know who that was?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Are you okay?”
I told him I was.
I was angrier than I let Jed or anyone else know. I had a few beers with my teammates that night, but I wasn’t happy the way I should have been. I felt like my father had come back from being dead-to-me to steal what should have been a good moment, the last good one I’d have in the game.
* * *
Houston, Texas, April 20, 2011
I drove Sophie to the hospital the next day. On the drive she asked about the game and I gave her a blow-by-blow of what happened on the ice. I didn’t tell her about seeing my father. I wasn’t going to let him ruin a great moment in my wife’s life. It wasn’t hard to keep the incident on the down low. Sophie was obviously preoccupied, and over the years I’d had a lot of practice at holding the worst stuff back. I tried not to think of the implications or what he might do next. Clearly, he still wanted to get back into my life. He might have thought that he was all that was missing in my career—that with him in the picture, I’d be back in the NHL and be an all-star in no time.
I wouldn’t tell Sophie about seeing my father in Peoria until I thought the time was right and she was ready for it. That time wouldn’t come until months after, maybe even close to a year. I knew it would ruin her day, but she had a right to know.
* * *
Binghamton, New York, June 3, 2011
I was stretched out on my bed in the hotel room, trying to grab a nap after lunch and before we had to go to the arena for a game against the Binghamton Senators in the league finals.
The phone rang and Jed answered it.
I just heard Jed’s side of the conversation.
“Hello . . . Who’s this? . . . He’s not here.”
Jed hung up without saying goodbye.
I didn’t think anything of it. I figured it had been a fan—a lot of times the shit disturbers who pull for the home team will make prank calls, trying to wake up the other teams’ players when they’re trying to sleep. I didn’t bother asking Jed who it was who called.
A few minutes passed and Jed checked to see if I was asleep. I wasn’t.
“That was your father,” Jed said. “He said he wanted to talk to you. When I told him that you weren’t here, he told me to ask you to leave tickets for him at Will Call. I didn’t know if I should tell you, but I think you’d want to know.”
He knew it would gnaw at me, but it was something he had to do. It would be worse if I just spotted my father when we stepped on the ice or if he tried
to do what he had in Peoria.
I didn’t bother alerting arena security. There was no restraining order against him, nothing to prevent him from buying a ticket and walking through the door, but still, if he did show I had no idea what might happen. I was annoyed, not worried, by the prospect of him showing up. On the ice that night, I looked into the stands like I had back in junior, like I had on my draft day. I hadn’t done it in five years or so. I looked for him and I thought I spotted him, but I didn’t stop and stare and tip him off. I tried to be discreet. I didn’t want him to know that I’d got the message he left with Jed.
I didn’t see him after the game. I don’t know if he tried to see me and arena security headed him off. If he had managed to get past security, it might have been the worst thing to ever happen to him. All my teammates had my back and they would have been in a bad mood after a tough loss on the road and just looking for any reason to take it out on him. It didn’t come to that.
* * *
Since that night in Binghamton, I haven’t had a phone call from my father. Not a letter. Not an email. I haven’t seen him. I don’t know if he has tried to find me, and I don’t know if he’s still looking for me or not.
In the years since, I’ve heard only one story, just a few weeks before I sat down to write. Someone back in Michigan said that he bumped into my father a couple of times in bars there. My father still tells people he’s in touch with me. He says he still talks to me and that we’re on good terms.
“I don’t know if he had a load on or if he’s too embarrassed to say that you two don’t talk,” the guy who saw him told me.
It’s hard to imagine how trying to fabricate a story of our relationship is any less embarrassing and shameful than what’s already public knowledge, including his criminal record.
It might be that he really believed what he said—that he is on good terms with me. Maybe that ambush of me in Peoria passes for a father–son moment for him. Maybe he thinks I left tickets for him in Bingo but they just couldn’t find them at the Will Call window. It might be that he is that deeply delusional.
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