Pee Wees

by Rich Cohen

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  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  If I were not to dedicate this book, and, what’s more, this entire hockey endeavor, with its early mornings, ramshackle rinks, frozen weekends, road travel, injuries, freak-outs, panics, pleasures, moments of self-love and self-loathing, to my wife, Jessica, who led me through it as a guide leads a wayfarer through an acid trip, there’d be something seriously wrong with me.

  So …

  To Jessica, with love.

  Hell is other hockey parents.

  —JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, French philosopher

  The secret of life is caring, but not that much.

  —HERB COHEN, Brooklyn negotiator

  2018–2019 Roster, Pee Wee A Ridgefield Bears

  Author’s Note

  What follows is the story of a single season in the life of a youth hockey team, the Pee Wee A Bears of Ridgefield, Connecticut, consisting of fifteen eleven- and twelve-year-old boys and girls. In its intensities, the story of this season, which I have translated from life, mirrors the ups and downs experienced by every American parent. It can be football. It can be dance, fencing, baseball, basketball, soccer, theater, or lacrosse. Here it happens to be hockey, where, in the course of eight months, from August to April, my son and I experienced the highest highs and lowest lows of our lives together. When, in the spring of 2019, I asked my big sister why I cared so much, why I was losing my mind, she said, “This is what it’s like to send your kids into the world. Your child is not just like you or raised by you—he is you. And when something wrong or unfair happens to him, it brings up things that are so deep and primal it feels like you will die from it.”

  * * *

  Names of people, teams, and places have been changed, ditto dates and details.

  APRIL

  Every kind of car in the parking lot. German cars. Italian cars. Jeeps with the tops down. Inside the rink, the parents, hundreds of them, some in suits, some in sweats, some dressed like Ralph Lauren, some dressed like John Gotti, have their faces pressed to the Plexiglas. As if they are at an aquarium. As if they are watching sharks and it’s feeding time and the water is full of herring.

  These are Pee Wee hockey tryouts in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In the world of youth hockey, Pee Wees are like Britney Spears in that song—not a girl, not yet a woman. Eleven- and twelve-year-olds, tweens, though certain parents, looking for an edge, have been known to stretch it, fake a birth certificate, which, in addition to a diet of greasy food and prescribed pharmaceuticals, explains the occasional behemoth who crosses the ice like a beluga, all shoulders and legs, a sumo among flyweights, which always elicits the same comments from the same parents. “Maybe that kid can lend me his razor.” Or “Maybe he’ll buy me a beer.”

  Youth hockey is broken into age divisions, each given a cute name. There must be a history behind these names, though I’ve never cared enough to find out. Seven- and eight-year-olds are called Mites. Nine- and ten-year-olds are called Squirts. Eleven- and twelve-year-olds are called Pee Wees. Thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds are called Bantams—that’s when the game changes. Through Pee Wee, checking is not allowed. Once a kid becomes a Bantam, it’s open season.

  My son Micah is a first-year Pee Wee, but could pass for a Squirt. He’s often lined up against second-year Pee Wees who could pass for Bantam. The height and weight difference can be comical. It dramatizes the story of my people. We are moderately sized. It’s always been us against the big fellas. But hockey teaches you a key lesson early: size is not everything. You can beat size with speed or intelligence. Even in the brutal world of youth sports, a smart kid has an edge.

  About two hundred prospects turned up at the Ridgefield Winter Garden Ice Arena for the first day of tryouts. It was mid-April. The buds were on the trees, baseball was on the fields, but it was still January in the rink. Kids had come from a half dozen nearby towns. Wilton. Danbury. South Salem. Fairfield. Katonah. Brewster. Some were from farther afield. These were hotshots, superstars who went from program to program, using each tryout as a practice or an ego boost, a way to humiliate the locals. These kids were from Triple A teams. Parents spoke of their arrival as medieval villagers spoke of nomadic hordes. They are coming! They are coming! From Westchester! From Stamford! From Greenwich! They are coming to pillage and make our kids look silly!

  The Fairfield County Amateur Hockey Conference (FCAH) fields four travel teams. From highest to lowest, it goes AA, A, A1, B. The season is long, fifty games culminating in a state tournament. For the parents, this means waking up early, staying up late, and driving for hours. It means living like a long-haul trucker, making the same sort of calculations and drinking the same amounts of coffee. It means visiting each town in the state, coming to know every mascot and jersey as well as the net income, fashion preferences, and pedagogical style of every sort of hockey parent.

  Tryouts consist of three sessions over three days. Of the nearly two hundred kids who turned out for day one, seventy will be offered a spot. They will be given twenty-four hours to accept or decline. If they don’t respond, the organization will keep their deposit—half the full-season cost, around $1,500. Parents withdraw if they believe their kid has been placed on the wrong team. They might go to another program, where they believe their child will be properly appreciated.

  If you have been in the program for more than a year or two, you will know many of the kids at the tryout. You will have studied them in a way an adult should never study another person’s child—coldly and cynically, noting each strength and flaw. There’s a lot at stake. If your kid makes a top team, he will play with top players. The games will be faster, the opposition better. He will improve just to keep up. He will rise. Choosing a player for a top team can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Did he make it because he was better, or did he get better because he made it? What’s more, the team a kid makes will determine his standing in the youth hockey hierarchy: kids on the AA team rarely fraternize with kids on the B team.

  It’s even worse for parents. In our program, the adults constitute a tremendous socioeconomic cross section. You see it in all those cars in the lot: Hyundais, Toyotas, Fords, BMWs, three Volvos, two Teslas, and one canary-yellow Lamborghini, owned by a cowboy hat–wearing father in the depths of a midlife crisis. (The pickup trucks belong to the coaches.) You see it in the clothes of the mothers and fathers who line the Plexiglas, which range from bespoke suits to yoga pants, from cashmere pullovers to Target hoodies. Though most of the kids are indeed white—this is starting to change—nearly every income level is represented, every profession, sensibility, and temperament. It’s like that Sesame Street song “The People in Your Neighborhood.” We’ve got a security guard, a financial adviser, an electrician, a demolition man, a veterinarian, a retiree, a nurse, a pulmonologist, an architect, a contractor, a digger of septic tanks, and a Broadway producer. It’s not wealth or fame that determines social position in our neighborhood. It’s your child’s speed, hands, and “hockey IQ.”

  If a kid wh
o’s been on Single A slips to B, he will be ostracized, his parents cast out. If you talk to them, it’s the way you talk to a formerly rich man who has lost everything. You wish you could help, but, really, what can you do? I know a father who cried when his kid didn’t make the cut, not because it would hurt his kid, but because it would destroy his own social life. “The Double A parents were my best friends,” he said through tears. “Who will I sit with now?”

  I’d always heard that a certain kind of sports parent uses their child to fulfill their own unfulfilled childhood dreams; that they live through their nine- or ten-year-old daughters and sons; that they’d only made it so far in sports themselves because they’d been missing a key element, had not worked hard enough or the right way, had given up when they should have pressed on, or had “grown late.” Armed with adult knowledge, they’d save their progeny from a similar fate. In this way, they’d vicariously live the life they’d wanted but could not have—the life of the standout, the superstar, the kid who just might go all the way.

  And yes, there is some of that. But the motivation for most parents is more immediate. When your kid excels, you are treated better. I’m talking about status, how people greet you as you come through the big double doors into the rink. Once, when my son scored an especially pretty goal, a father climbed out of the bleachers just to shake my hand. I’ve gotten high-fives, even high-tens. There have been full-body hugs. This is not about the past. It’s about right now.

  The first tryout session lasted an hour. The parents not pressed against the Plexiglas were in the stands, with steaming cups of coffee. Some took notes. Others were on the phone, giving a blow-by-blow to an absent spouse. There were as many mothers as fathers, and the women seemed, if anything, even more stressed out than the men. (“Why isn’t he on his edges? I told him to be on those edges!”) Now and then, a mom would shout a bit of instruction, but that’s the beauty of hockey: the Plexiglas encloses the ice, protecting the kids from the parents. You can yell, but they can’t hear you.

  Scattered here and there among the parents were strangers in overcoats, iPads on their laps. In response to the inevitable post-tryout parental blowups, several programs have come to employ “outside evaluators.” It’s a boom business. These experts make an independent evaluation of each prospect, grading kids from one to ten in a series of categories: inside edge, outside edge, crossover, pivot. It’s less about hockey than about skating. The evaluators judge blind—no names, nor stories, nor statistics. Just the randomly assigned numbers on the back of the pinafores passed out at the start of each session. We’d been warned not to interact with the outside evaluators. “Don’t even say ‘hello.’” When I accidentally approached one of these experts, mistaking him for a college friend, panic came into his eyes, and he said, “Get away, oh please, get away.”

  When I asked why we used outside evaluators—why not just let the coaches pick their teams?—I was told it was about fairness, impartiality. But since the teams really were picked by the coaches and the parents on the board—FCAH is governed by a democratically elected board—it seemed more likely that the evaluators had been brought in to give the organization plausible deniability. It was something to point to when a parent complained: “It wasn’t us. It was them.” You got the sense, when you probed, that the expert recommendations came into it only at the margins. The coaches basically knew who they wanted before the first tryout. And those cases in which the outside evaluations did play a role were even more problematic. In fact, tryouts, especially when it came to the nitty-gritty of evaluations, had the same flaws as the rest of the meritocracy. The outside evaluators judge only what can be measured. If it can’t be measured, it’s as if it doesn’t exist. The intangibles, which turn out to be the very qualities that distinguish a good skater from a good hockey player, get lost.

  Wised-up parents with money hire private coaches to teach their kid how to excel at the handful of skills measured by the outside evaluators. Edges. Turns. Stride. Like public school instructors, they teach to the test. Over time, the aesthetics of the game have been remade by youth hockey tryouts. All those things that can be measured have improved. The game is faster, the skating more precise, than ever before. All those things that can’t be measured have atrophied. Character, leadership, how to deal with boredom or defeat. On the last day of a tournament, in the third period of the seventh game—that’s when you’ll find the best hockey players. A tryout cannot tell you.

  Most of the day-one drills were designed for the evaluators. They are meant to isolate those skills that can be measured. This means five rows of kids executing, at the sound of a whistle, basic maneuvers. Crossover, pivot, sprint, stop—forward, backward. These skills are akin to the primary colors used by a painter: by mixing them, you can do everything that needs to be done in the game. The kids carried the puck only at the end, when they were set against each other in one-on-one, two-on-one, and three-on-two drills. They passed, they shot. The goalies were somewhat exempted. Because there are so few kids who play goalie, they often play for free. They were in the nets for tryouts, giving skaters a way to end a drill, a target—“Go through the cones, then shoot”—but it was only the skating that mattered. And yet the kids spent most of their energy faking out the goalie. They were like a guy on trial playing to the crowd, which has no say in his fate. In short, the kids missed the point, proving my long-held belief that kids are dumb.

  I waited with the other parents in the lobby after the session. My son was always one of the last kids out of the locker room, which, especially when it’s 4:00 p.m. and dark and the snow is falling on a December afternoon, can be maddening. It’s because he likes to hang out with other players, linger and talk. It’s because he loves hockey, not just the game but the life. He loves it like a mobster loves Vegas. He’d been playing in Ridgefield since he was five. He was a Mite then, in the house league. He tried out for the travel team as a first-year Squirt. He started on the B team and climbed from there. He now was hoping to make Pee Wee A.

  I questioned him as we drove home. I wanted to know how he thought he’d done. At such times, my normally talkative son—on most occasions, I can’t get him to shut up—turns into Gary Cooper, strong and silent. He frowns when I question him, then looks away.

  “I already told you,” he says. “I don’t know!”

  Meanwhile, in a room in back of the Winter Garden, coaches, board members, and outside evaluators were making the first big cut, dividing the kids into two groups: a small group and a big group. The small group consisted of 40—these kids would later be divided into Double A and Single A. The big group consisted of everyone else, 160 or so kids who would later be divided into A1 and B, or cashiered. The cut was not final. An overlooked standout could conceivably jump from the big group to the small, but it was hardly ever done.

  The results of day one would be posted on the internet that night—no names, just numbers. Many parents had compiled cheat sheets: the name of each kid beside the pinafore number. That way, they would know the fate of not only their child but also friends’ and rivals’ children. For the coldhearted, there is as much pleasure in another’s failure as in your own success.

  I spent the night with my phone in my lap, hitting refresh. I knew I should not care this much. I knew I had lost perspective. I knew none of it mattered. I knew my son, as good as he was at hockey, was not that good—that neither the NHL nor college hockey lay in his future. But I could not help myself. I was reacting at a cellular level. In those hours, I cared about the numbers on that page more than anything else in the world.

  * * *

  The posting was made at 9:00 p.m. I searched the small group for Micah’s number. I did not find it. I searched again and again—at first in disbelief, then in confusion, then in fury. I finally spotted it amid the common clay of the big group. I called a half dozen other Pee Wee parents trying to determine who’d made the cut and who, like my son—look at what they’ve done to my beautiful boy—had been shot
full of holes. I came to identify with and almost love the parents of those who’d been kept back, and I came to loathe those who’d left us behind.

  Only two kids from Micah’s Squirt team made the small group, a boy named Brian Rizzo, who played defense, and a kid named Niels Andren, who’d been Micah’s rival. Niels played center on the first line for Squirt A. Micah played center on the second line. Micah chased Niels all season but could never catch up. Niels’s father, Blake Andren, was a local politician with clout in town, which helped get his kids onto all the top teams. Micah had grappled with Niels in soccer and hockey. Whenever there was a single spot left, it seemed to go to Niels. Meanwhile, Niels’s father, Blake, blustery and gregarious, sat with the other top-team parents, not even bothering to watch tryouts. If asked, he’d say, “I’m just the kid’s ride.” In fact, he seemed certain of the outcome before the tryout began.

  The other kid, Brian Rizzo, was the son of the parent-coach Ralph Rizzo, who’d coached Micah for two seasons in Squirts. We were almost friends. Ralph Rizzo looked at Micah and saw a possible obstacle to his dreams for Brian. I looked at Ralph and saw the corruption of America. Ralph made the safest hockey-parent play. He’d signed himself up as a parent-coach, which meant going to classes, getting “certified.” Most of the classes were about keeping your mitts off the kinder and watching out for bullies. Many FCAH parents did not play hockey growing up—that lack of firsthand experience could make them insecure and aggressive. Once certified, that changed. The unknowing parent became the all-knowing coach. Ralph was issued a black uniform—pants and jacket, team logo on one arm, his name on the other. Plus a baseball hat. Parent-coaches were merely meant to help the professional head coach—these tended to be men in their twenties or thirties, young fathers who’d played high school hockey—opening the doors to the bench, tending to the injured, directing player traffic. But you put a middle-aged man into that black-and-gold jacket with that all-powerful title on his sleeve—“Coach”—and he is going to exert himself. All to say, Coach Rizzo, who spent the rest of the week selling BMWs at a nearby dealership, entered the Winter Garden like Vince Lombardi entering Lambeau Field. The parents stepped aside, nodded and whispered, “Morning, Coach.”