by Gare Joyce
I figured Pembleton would be outside chain-smoking in advance of three twenty-minute withdrawal sessions. Sure enough, I spotted him in an undesignated smoking area, ankledeep in the butts of unfiltered Exports. He stamped out a bare stub and before lighting another took a long hit from a silver flask.
Just hours before, he’d been in a hearing with the league’s commissioner. This had become an almost weekly meeting. Pembleton had been involved in several incidents this season. After a disallowed goal he’d emptied a stick rack onto the ice and would have gone over the boards and after the refs if he hadn’t been restrained by one of his players. That was eight games. He’d grabbed a player by the neck at a practice. Six more. In the most recent brouhaha, Pembleton had narrowly avoided suspension for a profane and slightly physical encounter with a fan in a hallway at the London arena. By the most believable eyewitness account, the fan had slandered Mrs. Pembleton and then spat on this coach.
The latest episode was just another reason to restart the debate about Pembleton’s fitness to coach teenagers, a debate that played out in newspaper columns, on talk radio, and across panels in television studios. His judges and juries were guys who’d never darkened the door of a junior hockey arena. The highest and mightiest said he should be booted out for life for the next merest transgression. I thought that was extreme, and I’d bet his players would too. I’d rather have the Mean Old Bastard Who Knew Hockey as my coach than A Builder of Character Who Couldn’t Match Lines.
I was about to wave or introduce myself or even voice my support for Pembleton when I thought better of it. Mr. Misery was muttering. He stalked a short path, back and forth, step for step, like a caged tiger. He seemed lost in some terrible memory pulled from a thick bank of what-might-have-beens.
I did see Ollie Buckhold, leaning against the hood of a gold Mercedes. He was like a chameleon, his sunbed-acquired tan blending in with the paint job. His V-shaped physique was draped in a seven-thousand-dollar hand-tailored suit.
Ollie was on his Bluetooth talking to a GM in disbelief and dudgeon. “Two-point-four? We’re thinking three-point-two,” he shouted, more amused than angered. His surgically unwrinkled face broke into a smile. This was the sight and sound of millions being harvested.
Ollie had been involved in seven- and eight-figure dealings all his adult life. He’d been a director and producer of football and hockey telecasts and ended up in New York, assigned to the Super Bowl and World Series. People thought of him as a technical genius, the best in the television sports biz. Before his thirty-fifth birthday he walked away from it all and launched a hockey agency with a single client. That his single client went to the Hall of Fame helped his cause. That his single client made ten times as much money off the ice as he did on it had top players flocking to the Buckhold Sports Agency.
At one point, Ollie had tried to steal me away from my shyster agent. Nothing untoward about it, every player is eventually targeted and no agent is above trying. Looking back, I wish he’d tried harder, and I wish I hadn’t considered myself a principled guy, a bad phase I left behind when my liabilities exceeded my assets. My Thanks But No Thanks to Ollie is way up my list of what-might-have-beens.
“Hi, Bradley,” he said, dropping fifty decibels and affecting a voice soothing enough to get parents to give up their fifteen-year-old sons in their living rooms over cupcakes and promises. I just waved. I feared that Ollie was on the phone to Hunts and the boss would take it as some sort of omen if the contract talks went sideways, like I was a black cat crossing through their negotiations.
I waited out the call. Three minutes. I wanted a quick word with Ollie about Billy Mays Jr., who was one of a dozen Buckhold Sports clients likely to be selected in the first round of the draft. Ollie did his best to keep the contract talks short and civil and mostly succeeded. As soon as the call ended, he turned to me. “That no-good bastard,” he said.
“Ollie, is there any way I can sit down with Mays the next few days?”
“He’s a wonderful young man. Brad, my friend, of course, anything for you. We’ll work something out.”
Every Buckhold client was “a wonderful young man.” Everybody in the business was “my friend” to Ollie, including “that no-good bastard” the next time Ollie saw him. The single exception to this was Mays’s coach in Peterborough, who’d made life tough on all agents, and especially Ollie. Red Hanratty bad-mouthed Buckhold to all his young charges, calling him “that effin’ nancy agent” and “that bucktooth fairy.” He alluded to Ollie’s life away from the arena, one that Ollie managed to conceal fully. That Hanratty had said this to Mays was a cause of some strife over at Buckhold Sports, enough so that Ollie was commuting to Peterborough seemingly every other night to make sure that no agent was trying to scalp his prized client aided and abetted by the homophobic coach.
I WAS EN ROUTE to the dressing room when I heard a desperate “Brad, Brad, Brad!” behind me. I turned to see an old guy in a brown corduroy jacket with elbow patches and well-worn brown Oxfords struggling to make his way through the fans crowding the hallway. Though I was walking with my bag over my shoulder and an armful of sticks, the old-timer was on a dead run (emphasis: dead) and losing ground to me. Predictable, I guess, as he was packing about 270 pounds on his five-footseven-inch frame.
“B-bbb-brad, Harley Hackenbush of The Peterborough Times,” he said, as if I should have recognized his name. I did but hadn’t heard it for years. Back in the ’80s, he used to write the Ontario junior league column for The Hockey News. The headshot they ran with his column looked like something you’d see in the house of mirrors: a half-inch of forehead and cheeks the size of cantaloupes. His blood pressure was probably along the lines of a properly inflated bicycle tire. “C-ccc-can I get a minute with you, Brad? Just a c-cccc-couple of questions?”
I stopped in my tracks. Not that I like doing interviews. I don’t, never have. The next intelligent question I hear from a reporter will be my first. But I figured if I didn’t stop and this guy kept chasing me, he was going to need CPR and his blood would be on my hands.
“Sure, I got a minute.”
“Brad, we got all these great players coming here tonight for this game. W-www-what do you think Coach Hanratty means to the game of hockey?”
My career-long streak of dumb questions was intact. Oh well, flick the bullshit switch.
“The game is only as good as the kids who come up through the system. And they’re only as good as the coaching they get. Numbers don’t lie. No one has won more than your coach here, and I don’t know that anybody turns out all-stars and Cup winners like he does.”
(Of course, a thoroughly mangled version of my words was going to show up in the morning Times. Something about stars at this game not making it to the league without the sage mentoring of Coach Hanratty, blah, blah, blah.)
Hackenbush wrote furiously in a tattered, ketchup-stained notebook. It was hieroglyphic shorthand. He seemed to get three or four scrawled symbols on each page. At that pace the notebook shouldn’t last even one decent interview.
He managed to spit out a few more questions, panting like a bulldog in a heat wave. I would have begged off, but I feared he’d go into cardiac arrest if he had to chase any more quotes. He hemmed and hawed, scratching around for something that would fill out his story for the paper. I mean, what can you really say about an old-timers game? I tried to throw this mutt a bone, but when I got to the part about the debt we former pros owe the game, coaches like Hanratty, and the fans, Hackenbush’s pen had run dry and he was trying to shake ink out to the tip. He was so preoccupied he didn’t hear a word I said.
I checked my watch. I had to get moving but worried that I hadn’t been much help to him. He looked disheartened, and his “Th-thanks” sounded soaked in a healthy scratch’s defeat. So I offered up a bit of sunshine.
“Harley Hackenbush … I used to read you in The Hockey News when I was growing up.”
He lit up like he’d won the lottery. And then it was as
if he realized he’d been looking like last week’s numbers.
“Yeah, everyone used to. Been f-ff-four, no, f-fff-fifteen years since I wrote those columns.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“I g-ggg-got yanked off the junior beat and moved to the night sports desk at the Times. F-fff-fifteen years working 5:00 to 12:30. Kept me s-sss-sober, mostly, and in c-cc-clothes.”
The broken blood vessels in his nose and the frayed and ill-fitting thirty-year-old jacket said otherwise.
Behind him I saw a fan pointing at him and talking out of the side of his mouth to a friend. I couldn’t make out exactly what it was he was saying, but I could imagine it: “That used to be Harley Hackenbush,” or something like that. My guess was more accurate than anything Hackenbush attributed to me, I’d bet.
“HEY, UH, Shadow? Is that you?” Grant Tomlin said when I walked into the visiting team’s dressing room. It wasn’t a greeting so much as an anal probing. Every hockey fan recognized Tomlin. These days he’s the Outspoken Conscience of the Game, jumping in front of television cameras harder than he ever went into the corners. Yeah, he put me in my place when I walked in. Millions recognize him, him with his frosted tips and gel, and he traded on the idea that guys who’d played with and against me don’t recognize me. Is he ever out of character?
“Geez, Toms, any way you could make me your heart-and-soul guy tonight?” I said. This was strictly my shot at one of his on-air tropes, which, as everyone in the room recognized, bestows honour upon a player who possesses qualities that Tomlin himself never did.
I don’t hate Tomlin. Hate would be too strong a word. I just imagine that there’s a special place in hell where they’ll apply fire-retardant foundation on his scarless mug, enabling him to do his stand-ups. This, of course, was consensus sentiment in the room. Tomlin was the only one who’d played fewer games in the league than me—one season and part of another for Ottawa in their expansion year. Yup, I was taking a shot from the Ultimate Media Whore, an imposter who, to the torment of the great talents in the room, was making bigger coin running his mouth these days than they had in the best seasons of their Hall of Fame careers. Tomlin is irrefutable evidence that the systemic organization of hatreds is utterly devoid of proportion and justice.
Tomlin smiled his studio smile like it had been punched in by a producer in the control room. There were no buddy-buddy bygones, et cetera, in this for me. A month back he’d told viewers that Hunts was in over his head as a GM. “Chad Hunt knew the problems with his team last summer and he has done nothing to address them. It’s not like he doesn’t have the answers. It’s like he doesn’t understand the questions.” He pulled this line out of his ass on the U.S. national broadcast on a Sunday afternoon. This pithy observation wasn’t intended for the millions who’d tuned in to a game on a Saturday night. The executive workings of our front office wouldn’t have resonated with our fan base, never mind a national audience. This was a direct appeal to The Guy Who Signs Our Cheques. Hunts told me that Tomlin had been chatting up Our Perpetually Tanned Titan of E-Business outside the executive boxes during intermission a week before in Vancouver. They hadn’t been talking about the price of real estate in Beverly Hills. By the accounts of neutral eavesdroppers, Tomlin was carving Hunts and, of course, positioning himself first as the owner’s newest BFF and eventually as Hunts’s successor.
I looked around the room, at a bunch of heaps of gristle and bones and scar tissue left over from the abuse of themselves, each other, and the game. The game doesn’t discriminate and doesn’t reward. Some of the constantly cautious emerge from it crippled, some reckless bastards come out of it pristine. I was probably the most banged up in here and there were a couple of guys who’d played 1200 games in the league. The others in the room were wearing numbers that were retired and today hang from the rafters in the arenas where they won Cups. Me, I was assigned a sweater, number twenty-eight, a number I’d never worn before, and there was no name on it, just a fresh coffee stain when I stepped on the ice. Perfect. That’s me, generic old-timer. Retired but still a call-up.
The Peterborough minor-hockey program had a cute idea, getting each old-timer to skate out with a kid from the atom house league. The kid who drew my name could scarcely conceal his disappointment and, after the handshake, never said a word or made eye contact. If I ever needed a reminder about my very small place in this universe, the pre-game would have provided it. You’ve heard players say that they don’t hear the crowd during the game—me, I listened hard when they introduced me before the game.
“He played nine seasons in the league …”
Technically true but misleading: parts of ten seasons would be more accurate. Better: parts of seven seasons playing in the boonies and Europe.
“… and played on a Canadian team that won a world junior championship …”
True as far as it goes: On that team I wasn’t one of the ten best pro prospects. They show highlights from the gold-medal game and I’ve never been able to find myself except at the bottom of the pile of teenagers celebrating. I was nearly smothered by the backup goalie’s chest protector.
“… you know him best for the unforgettable shutdown job he did on the Great One for the Montreal Cup winner back in ’93 …”
Yeah, Grant Tomlin, that would be the ring you never wore. The one I had to buy back from a good-hearted collector when I got back on my feet. The one I was wearing inside my glove.
“ … ladies and gentleman, ‘the Shadow,’ Brad Shade.”
I stepped off the blueline and waved. I think I heard a guy in the last row crack his knuckles.
6
* * *
It was league alums versus Peterborough alums, a date to raise funds for a bunch of local charities. The usual. Sign some sticks and sweaters. Silent auctions. Fifty-fifty draw. (I bought a ticket. Do I have to tell you how that turned out?)
You might wonder if there would be enough Peterborough alums around to ice a team. Rest assured, you practically have to have played ten years in the league and salted away eight figures to afford a place on a lake up there. Dozens of famous guys have settled in Peterborough and have nothing better to do than drive up the price of real estate. Those who played junior there, even guys who originally came from Toronto or Ottawa or Kingston or wherever, end up settling there. Twelve league scouts, all former players, live within ten minutes of the arena. I went to a minor midget game there one time and the two teams were both coached by guys who’d played in the league all-star game, and four sons of players scored in the tilt. I read somewhere that there are more league alums per capita in Peterborough than any place in the world, and I believe it. They could have iced two Peterborough alumni teams that Wednesday night, but then who would the fans root for?
Because this was Peterborough, it meant a turn by Red Hanratty, the coach of the Peterborough juniors since they used to play with a rover. Okay, not quite that long, but he played in the Original Six. At seventy-something he was still getting on the ice with the junior team in practice most days when his shingles weren’t acting up. He had worked thirty-plus seasons and missed only five games—four with suspensions and one because of the death of his wife.
Back in ’84 Hanratty had picked me in the junior draft in the fourteenth round coming out of minor midget and talked to my parents about sending me to Peterborough. A few junior teams had called my folks before the junior draft, and my father let them know long and loud that I was going to college. Hanratty drafted me anyway. He came over to our house and made his pitch. Hard-ass versus hard-ass.
“No,” my father said. “He’s going to be the first in our family to get a college degree. It wouldn’t have mattered if you took him in the first round. What round did you have him, first or second?”
“Sarge, I hate to break it to you,” Hanratty said. “We had him in the fourteenth. I didn’t even know about this college thing until I walked in here.”
My father was offended. He figured Hanratty was a sor
e loser. In retrospect, I’m sure Hanratty was telling the truth. Direct, yup. Blunt, you betcha. Trying to con my father? Nope. With his history, if he didn’t have a parent at a handshake, he’d have said to hell with you. I’m glad my father didn’t ask Hanratty to show him his scouts’ list because I would have quit the game right then and there if I’d seen the names of 260 Ontario sixteen-year-olds ahead of mine.
I mustn’t have made any impression on Hanratty. In the warm-ups before the old-timers game, I skated by him and gave him a “Hey, coach.” He had no idea who I was. If I told him I was the one who got away, he would have called security.
If you think I ever hated Red Hanratty, you’ve got it all wrong. I never regretted going to college instead of Peterborough, but I probably would have liked playing for him. He won a helluva lot more than he lost and turned out more pros than any junior coach. More wins in the juniors than anyone else … check that, than any two guys else. Some have thought that his position these last few years was ceremonial—you hit seventy and leave it to your assistant coaches to be on the ice and take on the lion’s share of the work. So the thinking went. Not the case at all. He ran every practice, his voice echoing through the arena, every last profanity. He was the one who identified the talent, and he was the one who put them in the position to succeed, first in junior, then in the league. He was the one with the clearest read on opposing teams. His players didn’t panic because he did. They played their bags off for him.
If you went by the stories in the sports sections you’d have assumed that Hanratty was the exception to the Rule of Ubiquitous and Everlasting Hate. Yeah, Norm Pembleton’s teams had played Hanratty’s for thirty-plus years and Pembleton was the ultimate hard-ass—never shook the hand of another coach, not even Hanratty. Still, Pembleton’s enmity seemed a little theatrical—the bad moustache bought second-hand from a ’40s B-movie villain. And at some level, he and Hanratty knew each other’s life and work better than anyone else could.