The Code

by Gare Joyce

  “I was in a unique position,” he said. “Some players are lucky enough to play for their fathers. In my time with Peterborough it was like I was playing for both my fathers. Funny thing is, my father wanted me to keep playing. It was Red who encouraged me to go to med school.”

  It was one of his standard lines and it got a bit of a laugh. Bones II was smart enough to keep it short. That said, when he did get up there many in the crowd seized the chance for a smoke break.

  No one took a smoke break near the end when they brought up Billy Mays Jr. to speak for the current team. You couldn’t have asked for more grace under pressure than that kid showed. He didn’t stutter, not once, though he was choked up and close to losing it. I’d find out later that he’d written the speech on his own. He put in the best shift of all those who took centre stage.

  “When I came here Coach told me that he was concerned about me as a person first and a player second and said he took that approach with every player. He told me, ‘You’re going to play a few years but your life off the ice lasts a heckuva …’”

  Clearly, the kid was cleaning it up for the family audience. Bones had put the Ol’ Redhead on a sodium-free diet but the coach’s language was as salty as the Dead Sea.

  “‘… lot longer than your career on it.’ He said, ‘If you look after your life, if you’ve got character, if you’ve got heart, it won’t necessarily make you a great player, but it will make you as good a player as you have the ability to be.’”

  Pass the Kleenex. Hunts wanted to know about what any GM would have: this kid’s character and heart. If I had to file my final report on Mays after he stood up there in the arena that day, Hunts would have thought I’d gone soft. The kid you want your daughter to bring home. Probably leaving the arena to give blood and then put in a volunteer shift at the Peterborough soup kitchen.

  15

  * * *

  Mays was out with mono back in the fall and missed the first twelve games. When he came back, though, he tore up the league, a point-and-half a game, until he tore his shoulder on a blindside hit. I was a bit troubled by the kid’s shoulder but that’s barely in my job description.

  In late May we bring in the meat for inspection. We fly in all our main players of interest, the kids we’re looking at in round one of the draft. We pick them up at LAX and they think they’re in for a vacation in the sun. It’s a bit of a disappointment to them that we put them through off-ice workouts that must seem to them like variations of challenges on Survivor. They’re really disappointed when they get leaned into by our team doctor and a sports psychologist in L.A. The former focuses on reported injuries, the latter on unreported psychic wounds. The former only makes sense, but the latter I don’t have any time for at all, and neither really does Hunts. The psych’s on staff mostly to appease the guy who signs our cheques.

  Yeah, our Gyro Gearloose of Beverly Hills never shuts up about studying psychology in college—to hear him talk you would have thought that Adler had been his thesis adviser. Given that he blows everything up to 400 percent, it’s almost certain that his entire background in the field consisted of a one-semester half-credit course with a final made up of trueand-false and multiple-choice questions and sessions with his shrink after each of his failed marriages.

  My antennae twitch whenever a kid suffers an injury in junior—pros are bound to get in some train wrecks and, with me as one of the exceptions, most come back from them at no worse than 90 percent. With a kid, though, “once injured” has a way of becoming “always injured.” Doctors will tell you that it’s a kid getting all screwed up—his growth plates and all—before the body is fully formed.

  Some scouts go for the high mystical stuff and think the “always injured” is a kid with a black cloud over his head. I wouldn’t discount it. I try to look at it organically: If a kid is getting injured all the time, he’s doing something wrong on the ice. He’s putting himself in bad places on the ice, taking bad risks, not reading the play. He left himself vulnerable the first time and repeats his mistake. And that adds up to bad hockey sense. The casual fan thinks making a great play is hockey sense, but to me that’s just vision. Staying alive and being able to show up for work: That’s hockey sense to me. You make a great pass that no one anticipates: vision. You play a thousand games in the league: hockey sense.

  At the end of the service, I repaired to the scouts’ room, where someone in the team office had thoughtfully placed a few boxes of doughnuts and a couple of stone-cold pizzas to soak up the beer that was on ice in a garbage can in the corner. “Just the way the Ol’ Redhead would have wanted it … if they could take the battery out of the smoke alarm,” Double J noted upon entry.

  I braced the broadcast play-by-play guy for a bit of factfinding. Woody McMullin had been the Voice at Radio Free Peterborough since Year Two of King Red’s Reign over the bucolic principality. McMullin had career ambitions of bigger arenas and more dough beaten out of him long ago when he sent out tapes to Toronto stations and never got a reply. Understandably, because he had no gift for his chosen occupation—he managed to sing the game out of tune and out of rhythm and frequently couldn’t remember the lyrics. He did know hockey, though. He was an assistant coach with the best Peterborough triple-A bantam teams and maybe would have been the head coach and moved up the food chain if he didn’t have to spend all his weekends on the job and half of them on the road.

  “How are the kids taking all this?” I asked as an icebreaker appropriate to the moment.

  “About how you’d expect. They don’t know what happened and what’s next. The ones that you’d expect are pretty messed up. Others hear from their parents that this is finally their chance to get to play …”

  Oh yeah, there was going to be some of that for sure. The Moulder of Men had been the Nemesis of Many Supposedly Stifled Stars, at least to the minds of their parents.

  “… and for the Russian kid it’s a vacation,” Woody said.

  “So long as the cheque clears, he gives you what he has to,” I told him.

  “Yeah, I guess showing up to the service and the funeral isn’t in the deal they did with the KGB to get him over here. It wasn’t Red’s idea to bring Markov in. He was never big on Euros, y’know …”

  “Shit, he never could figure out how Canada didn’t sweep eight games of the Summit Series.” Woody, who worked road games without a colour guy, was used to pausing only for commercials. “… and he didn’t like Markov even one little bit. The kid hadn’t even played a game and he was bitchin’ that he was promised an apartment and a car. He doesn’t score a goal in the first month but he’s always got his hand out, right in the dressing room, before the game. After the first bag skate the kid packed his bags. I guess he packed them again.”

  “He’s quitting?”

  “Well he ain’t here. AWOL. Mays said he didn’t make it home after the old-timers game. Mays said Markov got a call on his cell during the game—Markov told him that it was his agent and he had to go and that he’d meet him back at the billet’s later.”

  “Does the kid speak English or Mays Russian?”

  “Markov’s English is pretty good. Found out fast that it’s hard to get laid and impossible to order drinks if you don’t speak the language.”

  “Geez, he’d be the first Russian to like to drink.”

  “Yeah, they tried to track him down but the trail of empties and cigarette butts finally ran out. Maybe he thinks ‘Coach die, season over.’”

  It was all an interesting if not completely unexpected subtext. Mays’s outreach, like Markov was an exchange student, was pretty much for naught. It’s hard to get with the program if you don’t understand it and weren’t raised in the culture. I didn’t have any particular interest in Markov, a good skater but too selfish for me. I wanted to know about Mays’s game, his bout with mono, and especially his shoulder. Woody gave me the season-in-review, though with a mouthful of maple glazed.

  “There’s nothing you could fault Mays with,
not a thing,” McMullin said. “A player you just enjoyed watching, making something happen every shift. When he came back from his mono it looked like he’d never even been away. Seamless it was. He was the best player in the league in December and all these other guys had a two-month head start on him. Still growing.”

  “How did he go down with the shoulder?”

  “A game against Kingston and Markov was in the middle of it. He trades a couple of slashes with Kingston’s big Russian defenceman …”

  “Probably some chirpin’ about who squeezed more money out of his team,” I interrupted with acknowledgment.

  “Who knows what it was about. Comes after a whistle. Only time I’d seen any passion out of the Ruskie the whole time. Anyway, big scrum and Mays steps into the middle of it and tries to peel Markov away. Right about this time, Tighe …”

  Tighe being Kingston’s Knucklehead No. 1, 210 pounds or roughly 3 pounds for every IQ point.

  “… blindsides Mays. Huge cross-check, then like a tackle from the back. Sends him almost headfirst into the boards. Could have been worse. I thought for sure it was a concussion or a neck. Stupid ref. Gives him a double minor when he should have got five games. No review by the league either.”

  Well, Voice was effectively on the team payroll and had been drinking Hanratty’s Kool-Aid for years, so I knew that this would have been the way it all looked to someone waving Peterborough pom-poms. Still, the way McMullin described it, and I had no reason to doubt him, Mays’s shoulder had nothing to do with any hockey-sense issue. Fact is, the Boy Wonder was stepping up for a teammate, probably trying to get Markov to buy in. Not a problem with hockey sense, but maybe common sense. Mays was still innocent enough to believe in the basic good in everyone, even in a kid like Markov, who was, in my eyes and every scout’s and I guarantee the Ol’ Redhead’s, a talented dog too lazy to do tricks.

  “Any chance that the mono thing is a cover for something wrong with the shoulder, some type of chronic thing?”

  McMullin looked offended. “All I can tell you is Red looked ashen when he got word that Mays wasn’t gonna be available for the playoffs,” he said. “I wanted Red to do an interview that we were gonna put on the sportscast, but he said he wanted to hold off until he knew more and until he had a chance to talk about it with the kid and his father.”

  “He didn’t want to talk to the agent?”

  “Red never met an agent that he ever wanted to talk to.”

  That sounded about right.

  16

  * * *

  I really didn’t have too many thoughts about the funeral itself, much beyond the fact that the Ol’ Redhead’s pallbearers would have made a helluva power play. I thought it was a nice touch that the hearse and the cars in line behind it made a detour en route to the cemetery and drove past the arena. I imagined that, inside the arena, the eyes of the Queen were watering and the enduring aroma of Cubans in the coach’s office would serve as a reminder of Him Who’ll Never Be Truly Replaced.

  The team came to the arena the day after the funeral and would do that for the next ten days, until they picked up their schedule again. The league put its entire sked on hold for the Friday night, so that all the coaches and general managers could make it out to the service. Peterborough’s upcoming three games were postponed and rescheduled out of respect to the Hanrattys, the Boneses, the organization, the blindsided kids, and the townspeople, dressed in black.

  Still, the kids reported to the rink around two in the afternoon on weekdays after school, and about ten on weekends. The earlier start and daylong sessions on the weekend were a bit much I thought, but those in the organization figured it was an effective deterrent against any of the players partying away their grief. They all came except Markov, but this went generally unnoted in the media. Maybe the team put up lost-dog signs on bulletin boards in supermarkets. No one seemed that concerned about his whereabouts. I thought his absence was curious.

  A bunch of parents of players stuck around town for as long as they could get off from their day jobs. For some, the working stiffs, this was hard. They had to use sick days. For the white collars it was a little more manageable. It would have been heartwarming if they were still on the scene out of concern for their sons’ emotional well-being, but I’ve been around enough hockey parents to know that a good number of them were worried about their considerable investments, i.e., the kids whose minor-hockey careers they had underwritten to the tune of ten thousand a year or more in some cases. They had signed their sons on with Peterborough to play for the Ol’ Redhead and to have him develop them into pros. Yeah, a lot of them were bitching and moaning all the time about The Leader of Young Men being unfair to their sons, none of them getting the ice time they deserved. Soon as he was gone, though, they were all wet-eyed and worried. I thought it was bogus.

  And it seemed like all through this stretch the Ontario league was issuing statements. Every day they had a news release out. One day, the league announced that its most valuable player award was going to be renamed the Red Hanratty Trophy. The next: One of the main league sponsors, a chain of pizza joints, had set up a scholarship program in his name, the best student on each team getting five grand toward his education, which was laughable given that the man himself had a healthy distrust of all manner of higher learning. I was half-expecting that they’d be putting him up for sainthood. Throughout, the league gave assurances that it was doing all in its power to address the emotional needs of these kids, who would forever after be like a Pavlovian kennel, bursting into tears every time they smelled a cigar. I found it all hard to take.

  Sandy was on the scene, and I tried to throw anyone from the team off the scent by telling them I was sticking around only to support her with the grief counselling she’d offered the club. This was true, or at least partly true as far as it goes. I dropped her at the arena each day. If she had a question about the hockey end of all this, I did my level best to fill her in. As a professional taking into account patient privilege, she couldn’t discuss a whole bunch of things with me.

  Like the fact that Mays was the player in the dressing room who took charge when the team met behind closed doors with all adults locked out. Like the kids were shutting out almost all adult help, or at least adult professional help. Like grief-stricken wasn’t a way that you’d describe some of the players. Like a few of them were shrugging off the Ol’ Redhead’s death and just wanted back on the ice. Like Mays had sought out Sandy independent of his teammates and was pouring it out about the pressures he faced from the town, the team, and his father, that being in exponentially ascending order. Like Mays was concerned about his injury and feared that maybe, maybe, his career was in jeopardy.

  It would have been helpful in my workup on Mays to know about his leadership in the room, even with older players around. And it would have been useful in my workup to know that he was genuinely wounded by the deaths of the coach and the team doctor—he’d had more to do with Bones than most of his teammates. Yeah, there would have been a whole bunch of things she could have told me that might have been helpful, and even though a glass of wine or two might loosen her tongue a bit, the whole patient privilege thing had to be taken into account. If she violated that, she’d be slapped down by the folks in the province who oversee her profession. So even if she did tell me something that would have been helpful, like those things I mentioned, I couldn’t tell you what it was.

  “There are just some things that I can’t tell you,” she said.

  There are just Some Things I Came to Know. Let’s leave it at that.

  17

  * * *

  I picked up the morning paper to check out the coverage of the memorial service. The news story grabbed a few quotes from former Peterborough players and several of the league’s general managers who, unlike my own, were able to make it to the event. I hoped to see a story of Peterborough police busting the professional autograph collectors who’d planted themselves on the sidewalk outside the funeral hom
e and beside the most expensive cars in the hotel parking lot. Alas, the ghouls fled the scenes.

  One item did pique my interest: a column by Gus Stern, the guy who had bumped Harley Hackenbush. THE MAYSES KEEP RED’S MEMORY ALIVE: that was the headline.

  We’ll never see the likes of Red Hanratty again, and that’s a shame. That Red didn’t live to see the best days of the greatest player Peterborough has ever had is a lesser tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless. Barring an unforeseen contract snag with the club that is lucky enough to draft him, Billy Mays Jr. has played his last game for Peterborough. He gave Red two great years. Red returned the favour.

  I shook my head to reload. You usually have to swat away flies from fruit this ripe.

  “I had a chance to go another direction and take a scholarship to a school in the States, but the coach was the reason I came here,” Billy Mays Jr. said after the memorial service yesterday. “I owe the coach everything for the opportunity he gave me and all he taught me as a player and us as a team. I’m going to dedicate the rest of my career to his memory. I mean that with all my heart.”

  Impressive. It made me wonder if Ollie Buckhold had put this through a focus group or something.

  Mays is, of course, the second in his family to lug a hockey bag from Toronto up to these parts. The father of the wunderkind, William Mays Sr., played one full season season in Peterborough before enrolling at York University and focusing on his studies. After graduating from business school with honours he quickly established himself as a titan of industry.

  “Red was a great man and he did right by my boy,” Mays Sr. said. “Doc had a part in my son’s success too.”