The Code

by Gare Joyce

  THE LEAGUE SENT US the schedule for interviews. Some players had only three or four interviews. Some had twenty-five or more. Some meetings were scheduled before their physical testing, some after. With a hundred players involved, the making of the interview schedule was probably as complex as making the league’s schedule of regular-season games. Mays was going to be our second-last interview. L.A. would be the last team he’d talk to.

  The combine interviews remind me of my film studies class at B.C. The funniest film we did in a course-load of doom and gloom was Mel Brooks’s The Producers. In that flick Bialystock and Bloom, played by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, are auditioning actors for the role of the Führer in Springtime for Hitler. I remember watching the movie in class and splitting a gut. Determined to produce a Broadway bust, Bialystock and Bloom have a cattle call and bring in the world’s worst actors for auditions to play Adolph Hitler. They settle on Dick Shawn, a stoned hippie, for the lead role, but it’s the others that stuck with me. After watching it I thought that Sarge must have gone through the same sort of thing when he was questioning witnesses and suspects. Life’s rich parade passes by.

  Back at B.C. I never imagined that I’d sit across from eighteen-year-old kids and feel like Bialystock or Bloom, but that’s exactly how I felt now. There was a sneering Russian goaltender who looked like Eminem, with gold chains as thick as a construction worker’s index finger and a ball cap turned backwards. There was a big, rough winger from Thief River Falls who was stumped when I asked him what he planned to major in when he enrolled at State in Mankato in the fall. There was a skilled centre from Port-Cartier who spoke not a word of English and hadn’t been out of Quebec until his seventeenth birthday, when he played a road game in Moncton. There was Sorensen, a Swedish kid who was at number five on my list but whom I liked a little less in the interview because he reminded me of the other guy in Wham!

  Farm kids. Rich kids. Goofy talkers. Damaged silent types. There were kids who seemed awfully impressed with themselves and thought that they were locks to be stars in the league, though most weren’t even close. There were kids who seemed a little shaky, even though everyone in the room figured they’d be in the league in a couple of years.

  Duke Avildsen did a slow burn through the whole ordeal. He piped up every once in a while with a question that always hit home, usually something no one else had thought to ask, usually producing a Useful Bit of Dope. He had contempt for the process, though. “We’re tipping our hand,” he said. “Teams know who we’re interested in or at least who we’re not interested in when they look at our list of interviews or ask kids about their chat with us.”

  All these prospects passed through the interview room before the one that mattered, the one that I had sat on for weeks by then: Billy Mays Jr.

  “TAKE A SEAT, Billy,” Hunts said.

  Our room was set up so that the tables formed a U and Hunts sat directly across from the kids who were brought in. Hunts caught him straight ahead. I sat hard by kids on their right side, seeing them all in profile. That’s how we were set up for Billy Mays. He went around the room, shook hands, made eye contact, and tried to remember names, just as Ollie Buckhold had instructed all his young clients. Mays remembered more than most kids. A lot didn’t remember anything at all.

  Mays had already done more interviews than he could recall and would have done more, but a few teams didn’t bother because they thought they’d have no shot at drafting him. It was a weird deal. He had to believe that he was going to have to answer the same questions that came up in all the other interviews and that he wasn’t going to hear anything new. That was true for the first half of the session.

  “What are your strengths and weaknesses?”

  “Mr. Hunt, I’d say that skating is my strongest asset. I think at the next level I’ll be more of a playmaker than a scorer, but that’s what you’d expect from a centre. I eventually want to develop into a player who can contribute on the power play and penalty kill. I know my defensive game is going to need work, but I think that my skating and strength will help me with that …”

  He was right on every count. How much was sincere and self-aware, and how much was Ollie Buckhold’s pre-combine coaching? I thought it was more of the former.

  “Who have been the most important people in your development?”

  “Mr. Hunt, obviously my father. He’s a former player and he had me on skates at two or three. He enrolled me in the best programs here in the city and in hockey schools. My coaches in peewee and bantam were very important as well. My bantam coach, Russ Crawford, played for Dallas for a few seasons, and I learned a lot about seeing the ice and awareness of situations from him. And of course there was Coach Hanratty, who taught me about the commitment it takes to be a professional. He used to say that he wasn’t just looking for a season’s commitment … he wanted to see it on every shift no matter which game it was or what the score.”

  “You didn’t do the physical testing here because of your mono and your shoulder injury. When do you expect to resume training?”

  “My doctor says that I won’t be ready for summer prospects’ camp if the league team brings in players in July. I think I’m probably closer than he thinks. I’m hoping to start skating in August. We’re going to see what the doctors say and how I feel. Personally, I think I might be closer than they say. I really want to get back out there, but then again I don’t want to do anything that might risk my career in the long run. My father says, ‘You have to be tough to come back and play after something like this, but it’s even tougher to be patient and smart.’”

  That’s how it went for the first ten minutes. Hunts asked most of the questions but others jumped in. Our guy in Michigan asked Mays why he decided to play junior after being recruited by the top schools in the States. Mays said that he and his father had given the move serious thought but ultimately decided that he’d get the chance to play more in Peterborough. Besides, his father said he had a good time there. Duke Avildsen asked the kid how much he followed the league. Mays told him he knew that Duke had played for three Cup winners and scored about 300 goals in his career. It was actually 292. I suspect the kid knew to fudge up. Sven asked him what he thought of the game he’d played against Sweden at the summer 18s, because it was one of two games that Sven had ever seen him play and because Sven could never get enough of talk about Sweden. Mays gave him a pretty comprehensive scouting report of the players on the Swedish team, a somewhat generous one, enough so that Sven was beaming until the last player’s name came up: Sorensen. I was sort of heartened that Mays was high on Sorensen like I was. Sven didn’t take that as well.

  “I couldn’t shake him,” Mays said. “I was busting it trying to keep up with him and he wasn’t even breathing hard.”

  I looked at my watch. We had Mays booked until 2:40 and it was half past. Hunts looked over at me and I nodded.

  “Gentlemen, if I could meet with you outside the room. Let Shadow here handle the rest of the interview. Billy, don’t get fooled. He’s smarter than he looks. Thanks for your time and best of luck.”

  The rest of the staff looked puzzled at this turn of events but followed Hunts out the door.

  I PULLED MY SEAT around the side of the table and parked it about arm’s length away from Mays. I wanted to win his trust. I started by telling him about cards I wasn’t going to show my boss, not now anyway.

  “The Markov thing didn’t happen,” I said. “Nobody in this room knows anything about it. I gotta believe that no one you’ve talked to in the last couple of days knows anything either. I haven’t told a soul. I think you were wrong but for all the right reasons. Sometimes life’s like that. You were in a tough spot.”

  “Thanks,” he said. He looked down at the floor between his Cole Haans. Embarrassment and relief. I don’t know if Markov’s end of it would stay dead and buried or if it might follow the Russian kid down the line. Videos are like that. That Mays tried to help him wasn’t likely to surface.

&n
bsp; I moved directly to some business-as-usual stuff to snuff the uncomfortable moment.

  “Any teams here give you the third degree? Try to sweat you?”

  “A couple were in my face, trying to push my buttons. You can’t let it bother you.”

  “Well, I’m not here to bother you. Tell me about your father.”

  “I wouldn’t be here without him. I appreciate all that he’s done for me.”

  “How much does he push you and how much do you do on your own?”

  “I pride myself as a self-starter. It’s one of the messages my father has driven home again and again, my whole life. ‘You’ve got to do it for yourself because you can’t wait for someone to do it for you.’ He says that all the time. Another one is: ‘When you do it on your own, you own it.’”

  “Good messages,” I said. I suspect that the kid took them to heart, but I thought that the maxims were a bit rich coming from William Mays Sr. Mr. Self-Reliance grew up Old Money, skating out of Rosedale and into the best schools, Upper Canada College and all, before heading off to Peterborough for a single season in junior.

  I paused and looked down at some notes I’d scribbled. “What’s tough about being the son of a famous father?”

  “I honestly don’t think anything is tough. I know I’ve had opportunities that others didn’t. My father’s in business but he knows all about hockey. I think that’s been the most important thing—his support. Yeah, I’ve been able to get the best coaching and off-ice work from private instructors, but my father knew what it was going to take from his own experience as a player. He always says he wished that he’d had the same sort of encouragement. My grandfather sailed and rode horses. He didn’t care about hockey at all and only came to see my father play a few times, never even went to Peterborough to see him. He died young. I guess my father knew some of the things that can be tough about being the son of a famous father and made sure that I didn’t have to worry about them.”

  Since I first crossed paths with William Mays Sr. I never imagined that I’d pity him, but at that moment I did.

  I tried to segue as softly as I could. A little interview shell game. “Your father make it out here today? I didn’t see any Jaguar or Lamborghini in the parking lot.”

  “Yeah, he’s here. He never brings one of his good cars to stuff like this, a hockey thing, anyway. He thinks some people might see it as showing off. He gets a rental. It’s what he’s done since I started playing. Didn’t want other parents to dislike us.”

  “So he has those great rides and takes rentals?”

  “Yeah.”

  I could see that being a write-off in his business expenses. I could also see Senior doing it so that a hockey bag didn’t turn his Lamborghini into a Toxic Bacterial Incubator.

  “Disappointed that you couldn’t do the testing?”

  “Yeah, really disappointed. I was aiming to get back in time to do some of it. I wouldn’t be able to do the bench because of my shoulder rehab, but I did think I’d have a chance to do the stationary bike stuff, the VO2, and the rest. That’s what I’d been working on when Doc McGarry shut me down because of the relapse with the mono.”

  Now we were getting to the Juice Not from Concentrate. I wanted to know what he knew about his health issues, what other teams had asked, what he had told them. And I wanted to ask him all this before he had a chance to talk to his father and Ollie Buckhold.

  “Yeah, help me out with that, Billy. What was the timeline on that? I’m not really sure from talking to people. It would have been something that I woulda wanted to ask Doc McGarry myself. How and when were you shut down?”

  “Doc gave me the go-ahead to start skating again in early November. I had been diagnosed by my GP with mono back in the summer, ’round Labour Day. I’ll admit that I felt pretty tired the first week back from the summer 18s, but I pushed through it. I was completely revved when I got into games …”

  “You were playing really well. I saw a bunch of those games.”

  “Thanks. When I hurt my shoulder in early February, I missed a few days of off-ice stuff. I was really limited and had to improvise a bit. Because of the shoulder I was practically off lifting completely—no squats, no cleans, no bench. But I used a deep-sea diver’s weight belt to do lunges and other stuff with resistance, and a Swiss ball for my core strength. And I used the bike. I figured there was nothing wrong with getting cardio and it would help me come back for the playoffs, which was the timeline we were looking at.”

  “And so what happened that changed all that?”

  “I felt a little short of breath the one workout. I had the resistance on the stationary bike set at seventeen out of twenty, which was my normal number. I could do seventy rpms for forty-five minutes pretty easily, maybe more if I felt like pushing it. But this time I felt a little sluggish and dizzy. I thought it was the flu or something so I went to Doc. Coach Hanratty had me on a sked for workouts and I could miss a day only if I had medical clearance, so I went to Doc to get him to sign for me. He gave me a checkup and sent me for tests.” It sounded like Beef’s story was the straight goods.

  “I’ve felt crappy like that in workouts,” I said, just to give him the Old I Understand. “Just out of the blue. A cold. Flu. Something you ate didn’t agree with you.”

  “My meals the night before and that day were the same as usual, the stuff that my nutritionist set me up with. My billet family is great about all that. No, Doc brought me in and did the usual stuff …”

  “Like?”

  “Temperature, blood pressure, checking my throat, my ears, checking my pulse, getting blood, and having me give a urine sample. He told me to stay out of the gym until he said it was okay to go back. Then he sent me for more tests at his son’s clinic.”

  “And what did they do there?”

  “They monitored me walking on a treadmill. They did some imaging.”

  “And what did Doc tell you was wrong?”

  “Well, it was Doc’s son who told me about the relapse and told me that I had to shut it down for the season. Doc got the results when we were on the road. He wanted me to see my father before telling me that I had to stop. Y’know, in case there were any questions. But then Doc and coach got killed. And it ended up that my father met with Doc’s son. My father said Doc was a guy who would tape me up and send me out to play in the playoffs. He said his son had all the tech stuff and he’d look after me best.”

  Evidently Senior didn’t let his son in on the fact that he had met with the Ol’ Redhead and Bones before the old-timers game. Noted.

  “Did Theo put you on any meds?”

  “Just a few pills a day to take.”

  “What were they?”

  “Vitamin supplements. He said that I might be anemic.”

  “You know the names of those vitamins? B12 maybe?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have to get a prescription filled or buy them over the counter. He gave me samples that he had from a drug company. He put them in brown plastic containers and said he’d look after the refill. I took three a day of the one bunch for a week and felt pretty lousy. Must have been some sort of reaction. Then it was down to one each and I started feeling better. A little tired but better.”

  So the pills weren’t drugs, by Bones II’s account anyway. They were vitamins. But a drug company was handing them out as samples to doctors. And they gave them to Bones II, who gave them to Wonder Boy. They made him feel worse before they made him feel better.

  “How did your father take the news when you told him?”

  “He’d already met with Doc’s son the day before. I go up to his clinic every week, just waiting to get the green light to be ready to go. But Dr. McGarry says that won’t happen until after the draft.”

  “He didn’t want to send you to a specialist in Toronto?”

  I wasn’t quite sure which type of specialist that would be if we were talking about mono, but I imagined there had to be one. And if there wasn’t, if it was basic garden-vari
ety doctoring, why not send the kid to a good GP rather than steal time from Peterborough’s only home-based cardiologist?

  “My father said that he only wanted the best and he trusted Doc’s son. They were roommates when they were on the team.”

  “Yeah, I knew that. Tell me, when you’ve talked to other teams, how much have they asked you about your mono and your visits to the doctor and all that?”

  “Almost none at all. Some ask how I’ve been feeling or about my shoulder. That’s about it.”

  “Nothing about meds or anything or seeing Doc’s son?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Billy, I hope you don’t mind, but I’d like to be able to visit with you and your father off-site. Twenty minutes isn’t a heckuva lot of time, especially when we’re talking about investing millions and the future of the franchise. There are still things I’d like to talk to you about. Will you be around the city the next few weeks? You’re not going out of town, are you?”

  He said that he’d be around Monday morning to Thursday afternoon the next couple of weeks. His father decamped with son to a spread in Bala on weekends. In the old man’s income bracket, weekends start at lunch on Thursday. Mays said his father was competing in the masters division of the Muskoka triathlon. I suggested meeting at his home. He said that would be fine. I told him I had his father’s card and would be in touch.

  MAYS AND I EXITED the room together. Hunts was standing there. He shook the kid’s hand and gave me a dirty look. He understood kicking everyone else out of the room. He didn’t like being shut out himself. He was going to simmer on that all day and the next. Then he’d probably simmer on that on his flight back to L.A.

  It wouldn’t be the last thing I’d do independent of him.