by Jack Falla
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Copyright Page
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To Barbara,
a.k.a. the Franchise
Acknowledgments
An assist is as good as a goal, or so goes an old hockey saying. Thus, I want to acknowledge—indeed, celebrate—the assistance of several people who helped with this book.
Thanks to my Canadian writer friends Steve Dryden, Eric Duhatschek, and Frank Orr for their support and encouragement during the early stages of the work. And likewise my gratitude goes to my American writer friends Michelle Seaton and Mark Leccese for coming up big when it counted most.
Sportswriter Justin Pelletier of The Lewiston Sun-Journal and his mother Marguerite Pelletier of Lewiston, Maine, helped me with their knowledge of Franco-American culture. Marc Jacques of the Boston office of the Consulate General of Canada was helpful with his knowledge of French-Canadian culture.
My friend Larry Bean supplied me with technical specifications and background on the Ferrari 612 Scaglietti Supercoupe and, wisely, didn’t let me drive one.
Dr. Lisa Cogliano explained to me some of the workings of medical education and the internship process.
Tom (Chico) Adrahtas, director of the Midwest Goalie School, was generous with his knowledge of that position. Rock musicians Chris McManus and Gerry Hailer helped me with some of the music trivia. And nephew Michael Reynolds bailed me out when my computer was on the disabled list.
My son Brian and daughter Tracey were helpful and encouraging as they have always been.
Additional assists in the form of friendship, encouragement, and information were dished out by Ken Holmes, Micha Sabovik, Theresa Spisak, Heidi Holland, and Elizabeth Shinzawa.
Special thanks to my agent Mollie Glick of the Jean V. Nagger Literary Agency for taking care of the numbers so I could take care of the words. Upraised hockey stick salutes go to copy editor Adam Goldberger (third man in during my battles with syntax and punctuation) and editor Peter Wolverton who may have saved Saved.
And a celebratory hug to my wife, the former Barbara Spelman Baldwin of Northampton, Massachusetts, who can still skate into life’s corners and come out with the puck, a trail of bodies in her wake.
—Jack Falla
Natick, Massachusetts
July 3, 2007
The first rule of life, love, and hockey is the same rule—you’ve got to play hurt.
The Skating Pond
I remember the day I became a goalie.
I was playing pond hockey with the twins, Paul and Andre LeBlanc, on a little thumb-shaped cove on what we called the Skating Pond in Lewiston, Maine. The LeBlancs and I were second-graders at St. Ursula’s, “the Sisters’ School” we called it. We were playing against a couple of other second-graders from the public school and Russell White, a third-grader from a private school. Russell was the only kid on the pond wearing a complete hockey uniform and a knit hat that said Parkhurst Country Day. Russell White was a preppy twit but he was also the best skater in our game. We were playing five goals wins, and Russell and his friends had beaten us three or four straight. Not that Russell needed teammates, seeing as how he passed the puck about as often as I passed arithmetic.
“Next goal wins!” yelled Russell, who somehow got to decide everything.
“Your turn in goal, Jean Pierre,” Paul LeBlanc said to me. I knew it was Paul’s turn not mine and I was only being put in goal because I didn’t skate or play as well as the other kids. My mother bought my skates at a secondhand sporting-goods store called On the Rebound. She deliberately bought them one size too large so I could “grow into them” and they’d last two years. But even my thick woolen socks didn’t make the skates fit, and instead of gliding across the ice I clip-clopped along with a stride that more closely resembled running than skating.
I took my place between the two boots that marked our goal. I held my hockey stick in my right hand, tapped it against my shin pads, which were really Andre LeBlanc’s old pads tied to my legs with frayed skate laces. I put my stick on the ice and bent into a deep crouch as I’d seen goalies do on TV. Off to my left on the best ice in the middle of the pond there was a bigger game played by high school kids. Their skates tore the ice with a scrunch … scrunch … scrunch … as they crosscut on turns, their bodies extended at what looked like impossible angles, their heads up and the puck seemingly stuck to their stick blades. God I wished I could skate like that. On the edge of that game three girls wearing white figure skates glided backward in unison. “What are they doing?” I asked Andre LeBlanc.
“They call it sympathized skating,” Andre said. Andre knew everything.
It was our turn to bring the puck up ice. Paul LeBlanc started up the right side, drew Russell White toward him, then passed left to Andre. But the pass was in Andre’s skates, giving Russell time to recover. Andre shot just as Russell hooked him. The puck bounced off the boot marking the left goal post and skittered back toward White, who corralled it with his stick, whirled, and started up ice, leaving his teammates and the LeBlancs behind. Russell had scored a bunch of goals on me that day and always by doing the same thing—faking to his forehand, then drawing the puck to his backhand and tapping it into the goal, after which he lifted his stick in the air like he’d just won the Stanley Cup. This time, instead of waiting in my goal for trouble to arrive, I moved out toward the streaking White. When White dropped his head to see where the puck was I hit the ice and slid directly at him, my body in the shape of a V, a box canyon from which Russell White had no escape.
“Ah, shit!” he yelled as he crashed into my shin pads and flew—headfirst and puckless—toward our goal.
I hopped to my feet and passed the puck up to Paul, who passed to Andre, who scored with a long shot that slid between the boots and into the frozen marsh grass beyond. Paul and Andre, their sticks in the air, skated back toward me, where we pounded one another and fell to the ice in a pig pile, our gray hooded sweatshirts reeking of sweat and melted pond water. At least we’d won one game.
“That was trippin’,” Russell White said as he hauled himself to his feet, his game shirt covered with ice chips, his knit hat askew.
Andre looked up from the pig pile. “Hey, Russell, quit whinin’ like a bitch,” he said. I didn’t know exactly what that meant but it sounded funny so I laughed. The LeBlancs and I skated over to a fallen tree we used as a bench to take off our skates. Russell White picked up his boots and headed for the far side of the pond, where his father had just arrived and was flashing the lights on his Jeep.
“Great save, JP,” Andre said to me. “I’m gonna use that move tomorrow.”
“That’s right. It’s your turn to play goal,” Paul said.
“Shit. I hate playing goal,” Andre said.
“Don’t you guys have a goalie?” I asked.
“Had one but he quit. Now the coaches make us take turns. Sucks,” Andre said.
“I’d play if I had the pads and stuff,” I said, still flushed with the feeling of having stopped Russell White.
“The coach gives you all the stuff. You wanna play
?” Andre said.
“I’ll ask my mother,” I said.
We ran the shafts of our hockey sticks between the boots and blades of our skates, put the sticks over our shoulders, and headed through the trees toward the streetlights, which had just blinked on. When we got to the street the LeBlancs turned right toward their house and I continued across the street and down a side street toward my grandmother’s house, which is where my mother and I had lived in the two years since my father did his Barry Bonds and took a walk.
I was cold, wet, tired, and content. I liked playing hockey. It made me feel like I belonged. And I had liked playing goal. It made me feel important.
I climbed the stairs to my grandmother’s house. It was Saturday night and I could smell the homemade baked beans we’d be having with franks and brown bread. As I opened the door I glanced back up the street and saw one of the older boys from the game in the middle of the pond. He was walking with one of the figure skaters. He carried her white skates on his hockey stick. I wondered why any boy would walk with a sympathized skater. Or a girl. But this was a long time ago and there were a lot of things I had to learn.
One
A Ferrari is foreplay on wheels. Lisa would have hated the car. And was the reason I’d bought it.
It was a 612 Scaglietti—Boss Scags I called it—a bluish gray hardtop four-seater with a six-speed gearbox and scooped-out sides like the Ferrari Italian film director Roberto Rossellini had custom-made for Ingrid Bergman in 1954. I don’t know what was on Rossellini’s mind but I’ll guess it was the same thing that was on mine. Ferraris are about sex first and speed second.
The Boss carried a 540-horse, twelve-cylinder, all-aluminum engine and could pretty much suck the headlights out of anything on the road. But it didn’t, because I drove it at the speed limit or maybe five miles per hour over, which made cops and other drivers crazy—the cops because they couldn’t pull me over and the drivers because I wouldn’t race them. I drive the Ferrari the way I play goal: patiently, letting the others come to me, then denying them and sending them away and, by that, changing the game. Then I wait for the game to come to me again. Lisa used to say I’m passive-aggressive.
I’m Jean Pierre Lucien Savard, thirty-one, and I could be a stunt double for Ichabod Crane. I’ve got big ears, long arms and legs, floppy blond hair, and a big hooked French nose that isn’t good for much of anything except hanging over the rim of a wineglass … well, that and breathing. I’m six feet and 170 pounds. I dropped out of college and I don’t know much about anything except my job. But I make $2.7 million a year, which is serious money even in pro sports. I do this by playing goal for the Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League. I think the money, the job, and Boss Scags were what appealed to the women I dated in the years after Lisa.
Now that you think I’m one of these obnoxious nouveau riche pro athletes we’re all tired of reading about, I should explain that I’m a widower. I hate that old-fashioned word—widower. It makes me think of the nodders and droolers you see slumped in wheelchairs in nursing home parlors. But I don’t know what else to call myself. Lisa was twenty-eight—two years older than I—when small-cell lung cancer ripped through her like fire through a three-decker. Took her down seven months after a self-congratulatory surgeon came out of the operating room at St. Elizabeth’s and told me, “We did it. Got it all.” Doctors always say they won. The operation is always “a success.” Must be nice to be the one who gets to decide. None of Lisa’s doctors showed up at her funeral. Four of her nurses did.
Lisa was a registered nurse. She gave me the skinny on male doctors. Maybe there are a few saintly ones at inner-city clinics and a handful of medical missionaries working in a jungle somewhere, but they’re the minority. Ask any young female nurse and you’ll find out that a lot of male physicians are as vain, arrogant, and horny as an NHL owner. Some docs will hit on your wife or girlfriend as fast as they’ll take swag from a drug company. Lisa liked her job as an oncology ward nurse and she worked part-time even after we got married. But I think she took more hits from doctors than I take in an NHL season. Unlike me, Lisa never got scored on. “One more dinner invitation and I tell your wife, your girlfriend, or Cam Carter,” Lisa would say in a voice serious enough to keep the doc off balance.
Forced to choose from Lisa’s list I doubt any of the doctors would’ve picked Cam Carter, my teammate, friend, fishing buddy, confidant, onetime best man, investments adviser, and part-time bodyguard. Maybe you were watching the playoff game two seasons ago when we were hammering Philly 5–1 in the third period and Serge “the Weasel” Balon of the Flyers jumped on me and cross-checked me on the back of the neck after I’d fallen on a loose puck. That was Cam you saw dropping his right glove, putting two fingers in Balon’s nostrils, lifting him up about a foot, then using a gloved left hand to fetch Serge a clout on the ear that dropped the Weasel like a sack of cow manure. Cam would’ve hit Serge with a bare fist if we weren’t all such good friends.
The ref gave Cam a five-minute penalty, which didn’t matter because we won the game anyway. The best part was when that smarmy Channel 8 TV reporter Alvin “Captain Baritone” Crouch asked Cam on a live-from-the-dressing-room interview after the game: “How can you explain that kind of violence?”
“It wasn’t violence. It was justice,” Cam said.
I think even Balon agreed. Two nights later, after we eliminated Philly, we went through the postgame handshake line and no one was chirpier than Serge. “Good series, JP,” he said, shaking my hand and giving me a squeeze on the neck he’d tried to chop off. “You’re in my golf tournament in July, right?”
“If I get the same pole dancer who caddied for me last year,” I said.
“She could really tend your pin, eh?”
“Good luck against Montreal,” I heard Balon say to Cam, who was two players behind me in line.
What Captain Baritone and a lot of reporters and fans don’t know about the culture of professional hockey is well worth knowing. As Robert Duvall said in The Godfather, “It’s business, not personal.” Balon is what players call “a shit disturber” and management calls “an energy guy.” Every good team has one. Serge’s job is to get under our skin, get us off of our game. He’s the best at what he does.
Cam, a six-foot-four, 230-pound defenseman, is one of our enforcers. Part of his job is to cancel out guys like Balon, to balance the game and to make our smaller players—and me—feel comfortable. It’s all part of an unwritten code we’ve known since we were kids playing on ponds and backyard rinks. Justice was built into our game, not tacked on by a rule book that’s grown bigger than the Yellow Pages.
Serge’s good wishes notwithstanding we lost to Montreal in the next round. The Canadiens threw their speed at us and we had no answer for it. We planned to hit them but you can’t hit what you can’t catch. Every time I looked up, Montreal was on an odd-man rush: three on two, two on one. To make it worse, I helped cost us the series by giving up a couple of soft goals, including the first goal in Game 1 in Boston, a seventy-foot roller that hit a gouge in the ice and hopped over my stick and between my legs. We lost that game 5–4, and were swept 4–0 in the series. And don’t think that a gouge in the ice absolves me. It doesn’t. My high school coach, Hartley Lennon at St. Dominic’s in Maine, told me, “In sports there’s reality and there’s ultimate reality.” In this case the reality was that the puck took a quirky and unpredictable bounce. Ultimate reality is that it ended up in the net and we lost by one goal. “In sports, ultimate reality is the only reality that counts,” Coach said.
We were two games into the Montreal series when the league announced it was fining Cam $5,000 for arguing with and bumping into the ref after the Balon incident. But that’s beer money to Cam, not because he’s pulling down $2.3 million a year but because Cameron Cabot Carter III is the grandson of the founder of Carter & Peabody, the private Boston-based mutual fund company. Cam is the only guy in the NHL who could make more money in the family busines
s than he can playing hockey. Four years ago I asked him why he keeps playing. “You ever been to a business meeting?” he said. “It’s five minutes, max, before someone says ‘synergy’ and your eyes glaze over. The over-under on ‘paradigm’ is seven minutes, and I’d bet the under. Besides, my family built the business. I made it in hockey on my own. Hockey’s mine. A game belongs to the people who play it.”
“Try telling that to an owner,” I said. “They’re the ones the game really belongs to. What do you do if the club trades your aging butt to Buffalo?”
“Son, say hello to the newest senior partner of Carter & Peabody,” he said. “And, Mr. Savard, I think it’s time we rebalanced your portfolio.”
* * *
Last season—the season that changed our lives forever—I felt Cam was close to calling it a career. I had to envy the Camster, an All-Star who had serious money waiting for him no matter what happened on the ice. Not that I have to worry about where next month’s condo payment is coming from. After I’d signed that last five-year deal with Boston I figured I’d need only one more contract to retire with enough money so that I wouldn’t have to become a scout, a goalie coach, or, worse, one of those front-office coat holders. But I mostly wanted to keep playing because goaltending is the only job I know. And it’s a good life. Except for the games.
The problem with being a goalie is that you can’t win a game, you can only not lose it. You try to lose as few as you can before you get hurt or old or lose your job to someone younger and better. Goaltending, like life, is only a question of how much you eventually lose by.
Like a lot of goalies I’m a worrier, which means I spend most of the eight to nine months of the season—depending on how deep we go in the playoffs—in varying states of anxiety ranging from mild apprehension the day before a game to throwing-up scared forty-five minutes before face-off. That’s one of the reasons Cam and I cooked up our little end-of-summer fishing trip. It’s a chance to relax before life disintegrates into the chaos of a hockey season. We go to his parents’ waterfront house in Falmouth on Cape Cod. It’s a seven-bedroom gray-shingled Colonial with its own dock and a twin-inboard fishing boat.