Pee Wees

by Rich Cohen

  And what about baseball?

  The nation in which that sport was invented and served as a pastime is gone. It’s too slow for modern America, too delicate, sophisticated, and subtle to hold the attention of our kids. YouTube and Fortnite and the rest have shredded their attention spans. They can’t handle all the dead time scattered across a six-inning game, which unfolds over the course of an afternoon. They start with T-ball at age six or seven, then quit. Why? It’s boring. And hard. Football, basketball, hockey—there is a place for hustle in these sports, going all-out, forcing the action. Hitting a baseball—if you can’t hit, it’s no fun—is not like that. Hustle will not help. It’s more like belief in God: the harder you try, the harder it gets. You can play hockey angry, with an edge, with a sense of bringing justice to a lawless town, but the opposite is the case when it comes to hitting a baseball. Baseball is like Buddhism. It requires a calm presence. You must clear your mind and concentrate, tune out everything but the ball, which most modern people cannot do.

  I have made a study of the kids playing Little League baseball in Fairfield County, Connecticut. I have asked myself, “Just who is out here?” They break into four groups. First, there are the fat kids. Baseball has become a refuge for overweight children whose parents insist they play a sport. Some can barely run. (It’s only a matter of time till we bring the designated hitter to Little League.) Second, there are the kids whose fathers or mothers—though, let’s be honest, it’s mostly fathers—love the game and insist their children play. These kids are unhappy, and quit. Third, there are the kids whose parents immigrated to this country, the sons and daughters of immigrants from India, New Zealand, or China, who believe that to understand America you must play its national game. In short, their information is out-of-date, their participation based on a misunderstanding. They quit, too. Finally, there are the handful of kids who, for whatever cockeyed reason, actually love baseball.

  Lacrosse, soccer, tennis? I know little about those sports, those kids, and those parents, but I do know hockey. I know what it has to offer and what it teaches. First of all, it’s a tremendous workout. That’s why the locker room reeks, why the equipment bag exudes a stench no amount of machine washing can touch. The kids come off the ice sweat-soaked, spent. Which is itself exhilarating. Exhaust the body, free the soul. Then there’s the importance of teamwork. Hockey is about operating together, passing and making plays. A low-skilled group of kids who play as a team will almost always beat an atomized collection of all-stars. That’s an invaluable lesson. Here’s what it means: teamwork matters more than talent. Or maybe the ability to sublimate your gifts and desires for the good of the team is the talent. When it’s functioning like its supposed to, youth hockey is one of the few communities where America still works, where cooperation is rewarded, where the small things count, where it really does come down to who wants it more.

  * * *

  I learned everything from hockey. I started when I was three, playing tape ball with other little brothers at the Deerfield Bubble, home of the Deerfield Falcons, a rink beside the tollway in northern Illinois. My brother taught me to skate there one afternoon. I started on double blades. This was 1972, 1973. Hockey skates were made of soft leather that gave no support. Novices were identified by their ankles. If they bent, you were showered with ridicule. I had a tough time straightening up. As a last resort, my brother, knowing my fear of being run over, got the rink manager to chase me with the Zamboni, the ice resurfacing machine, which advanced like grim death. Fueled by fear, I got off my ankles and on my blades and flew up the ice. That’s when I got the nickname my oldest friends still call me, though with sarcasm now: “Rocket.” For me, skating has always been connected to the fear of death.

  We lived in Libertyville, a farming town thirty miles north of Chicago. We played hockey because the neighbors played and because there was little else to do in winter. No video games, no movie streaming. Other than Bozo’s Circus, there was nothing on television. So we went to the Bubble, which was on the campus of Trinity International University. It was as sparse as Manitoba, cornfields and sky. At first we played on an outdoor rink enclosed by a chain-link fence. The sky above it was blacker than any sky I’d ever see again. No moon or stars, no worlds out there. Just hockey. At some point, the parents raised money and bought the bubble to cover the rink. It was a tarp, patched here and there, inflated by a massive blower that kept the rink super cold. It was a home ice advantage for Deerfield. Other teams did not think of beating us so much as getting back to the locker room. Once, another kid and I gathered garbage from beneath the bleachers and tossed it into the blower. Candy wrappers, coffee cups, cigarette butts—they made a beautiful arc that rained onto the ice. When players from both teams hit the debris, they lost their edges and went flying. The referee blew the whistle, stopping the clock. He made me and my friend go out on the ice in our sneakers and pick up all that trash.

  When the wind came, the bubble shook. On a stormy night while my brother played, it ripped off and flew away. Astonishing! For the parents in the stands, it was as if the roof of the world had been torn off. And there was the sky, remorseless and black. A posse of mothers and fathers chased the bubble down. It had been expensive; they hoped to salvage it. They caught up with it in Indiana, but by then it had ripped to shreds. A new bubble, with a better design, was in place by the spring.

  It wasn’t the game I loved so much as the culture of the rink, the crowd around the slot hockey, the locker room gossip, the swagger of a coach whose team had given their best effort, how good a chocolate bar tasted after you played. One kid kept his change in his jock—you could hear him jingle by on the ice. I even loved the way the Coke machine went screwy, dispensing the cup after it had dispensed the syrup and ice. This told you about technology. Fewer kids played hockey then, which meant longer drives to the closest rinks, but the drives were the heart and soul of the life.

  I started in the house league. That’s where most kids played, and as a result, the quality was high. Some of the best kids played house because their parents would not pay for travel. I went out for the Deerfield Falcons, the travel team, as a first-year Squirt. The tryout was tough. There were no more than fifty kids on the ice, but it felt like a million. Drills are now designed to isolate a particular skill: inside edge, outside edge. In my day, drills were designed to see how much a kid could take. Making cuts is unpleasant. How much easier if you can encourage the weak players to quit? A few dozen kids gave up after the first tryout; some actually walked out in the middle. There were no outside evaluators. Players were picked by the coaches, the coach of Double A and the coach of Single A, middle-aged Canadians judging players as they themselves had been judged in Regina or Thunder Bay.

  The categories were simple: kids who could play and kids who couldn’t. You didn’t have to wait long to find out. A coach spoke to us as we changed back into street clothes after each tryout, reading the names of those they wanted to return. Fate was revealed by omission. If you did not hear your name, you were done. My name was called after the first day, after the second, after the third. My brother’s teammates stood around me before the last tryout, explaining “what Coach wants to see.” It was all scrimmage. I missed an empty net. And I knew. The coach announced the final roster afterward. Twenty-six kids had gotten this far; twenty-four made a team. Another kid and I had to sit like idiots as every other name was read. Kids screamed when they made it. I was crying by the end. I sat in the lobby of the Bubble for an hour, refusing to go home. My mother tried to console me, but I was inconsolable. My brother and his teammates tried to console me—nope. It was my first big disappointment, the first time I’d been told I was not good enough.

  My father, who’d been reading the newspaper in the car, came and sat next to me. “I want you to listen to me very clearly,” he said. “Life is mostly failure. It’s falling short, getting cut, not making teams. It will happen again. It happens to everyone. All you can control is how you react. Ever
yone gets knocked down. Some people stay down. Others get up. Which will you be?” He put his arm around me, and as he did, the tip of his cigar, glowing like a coal, came dangerously close.

  I worked hard all winter, practicing twice a week with a coach named Ray Carmelo. I am still grateful for the things he taught me. I was different when I tried out again. I survived cut after cut and was one of the kids screaming at the end. A week later, I got my first travel jerseys—white with a red falcon for home games, red with a black falcon for away. I got a jacket, too, a red windbreaker with my number, 13, on the sleeve. The jacket made me feel like an aristocrat.

  Me on the lower left, looking unaccountably sad. The Deerfield Bubble, Deerfield, Illinois, Spring 1977

  We were coached by a man named Jim Freeberg. When people say you’ll be lucky if you have one great teacher in your life, they mean Coach Freeberg. This was the mid-1970s, which explains his big rust-colored beard. If you lost a piece of equipment, you’d look for it in “Coach’s beard.” He wore bell-bottom jeans, cable-knit sweaters, and his own team jacket. His eyes were shiny and full of mischief. He looked like a hippie but was in fact an evangelist, soberly dedicated to a mission—spreading the game. He’d grown up in Canada but spent his adulthood bringing the good news to hockey-deficient American towns. He was a figure of distinction. In addition to the Squirts, he coached a local high school team, which he’d led to several state championships. He could have coached college kids, even pros, but wanted to work with players at what he considered the crucial moments in their hockey careers—ten years old, seventeen years old, grade school and high school, when they’d either make the game a part of their lives or drift away. He did not expect his kids to play beyond high school, but did want them to remain devotees of the game, which he believed would make them better people.

  His methods were old-school. He taught us the game, introduced us to its language and culture. He explained each position and how we were supposed to play it. The center takes the face-off and patrols the middle of the ice and is as responsible for defense as offense. He is supported by his wings—a right wing and a left wing. He called a line with a strong center but weak wings a helicopter, because it flew “without wings.” Behind the center are the defensemen—right D and left D. Then the goalie, also known as the backstop or netminder. He or she—the best goalie in Ridgefield is a girl—is said to play “between the pipes.”

  Coach Freeberg played me at left wing, but I kept drifting right. Realizing I could not discern left from right, he taped a white X on my left glove. “When you don’t know where you’re going,” he said, “follow the X.” When I insisted on skating with one hand on my stick, he taped my other glove to the shaft. I was cured. It’s from Coach Freeberg that I learned the origin of the term “hat trick”—that’s what they call it when a player scores three goals in a single game. It possibly comes from Maple Leaf Gardens, in Toronto, where, in the 1920s, a local haberdasher promised to give a new fedora to anyone who scored three goals that night. It was Coach Freeberg who told us that a natural hat trick means getting those three goals in a row, with no one else scoring between. He told us that a “Gordie Howe hat trick,” named for the Detroit Red Wings star, means getting a goal and an assist and having a fight in a single game. Coach Freeberg called the penalty box “the sin bin,” called a slap shot a “boomer,” called a mustache “lip lettuce,” said anyone who was fast had “wheels,” and called the sort of goal you scored from a scrum a “garbage goal,” adding, “of course there really is no such thing as a garbage goal.” He’d knock you down when you got cocky and lift you up when you felt low, saying, “There’s still a lot more hockey to play.”

  For him, a game was a story, a fable with a moral to those who could read it. After we collapsed in the third period one day, he said, “There’s nothing more dangerous than a two-goal lead. You think the game is over, when in fact it’s never over till it’s actually over.” After one of our players, having absorbed a cheap shot, delivered a cheap shot in return, he said, “In this game, winning is the only revenge that counts.”

  A hockey game, for those who don’t know, is divided into three periods. A period lasts twelve minutes in Squirt, fifteen minutes in Pee Wee, and twenty minutes in college and pro. The hockey we played in the Bubble was old-time hockey—the game before it was remade by Russian talent. Skate the puck across the red line, dump it into the corner, chase it, and throw it in front of the net, where your teammates bang it in. There was no more ominous phrase than “Man on,” which meant that an opponent was shadowing you as you chased the puck. Your opponent’s aim? To check you before you could make a pass, to drill you into the boards.

  The Squirt A Deerfield Falcons were clicking before the first snow. By mid-December, we were a famed powerhouse, feared throughout Chicagoland. We’d become that most deadly of organizations: a team. No one wanted to disappoint Coach. Everyone wanted to hear him say, “Way to go, gamer.” We sublimated our individual hunger for goals in the service of the greater project. That’s when we really started to pass. We blew away the Peoria River Rats, the Quad City Ice Eagles, the St. Jude Knights, and the Buffalo Grove Miners. The Zion Huskies were the only team with a greater home-ice advantage. Their rink was on the fence line of the Zion nuclear station, their parking lot in the shadow of the cooling tower. Every time the horn blew, we flinched, fearing a meltdown. We were less concerned with winning than with escaping with our reproductive systems intact. “Don’t get irradiated” was the order of the day. Some Deerfield parents came up with a cheer:

  We don’t care

  If we score

  As long as water

  stays in the core!

  Yet we did win, and kept on winning. We made it all the way to the Illinois State Championship, which was played at the home of the Chicago Cougars, a semipro team. Nine thousand seats, a four-sided scoreboard above center ice. We were introduced like pros, our names announced over the loudspeaker as our faces flashed on the monitor. “And now, playing left wing for the Falcons, Richard ‘Rocket’ Cohen!”

  The game was a barn burner. The lead changed hands again and again. It was tied late in the third period when I got out on the ice. I was skating up the left side, hoping not to make a mistake, not to screw up. The thought of letting down Coach terrified me. Our right D dumped the puck into the corner. Our right wing threw it toward the net. Our center took a shot, which their goalie deflected. I picked up the rebound, went behind the net, and jammed it in from the right side. They call this a wraparound; it ended the game. My teammates swarmed me. “Here’s the game winner,” Coach Freeberg said, handing me the puck in the locker room. My goal was shown on TV that night after a Cubs spring-training report. It was at the end of the news, comic relief, but that’s not how it felt. It felt like the biggest thing that had ever happened.

  It was my last season as a Falcon. My family had moved up the lake to Glencoe, and my mother refused to make the drive to Deerfield three nights a week. If I wanted to play, she said, it’d have to be for the local team, the Winnetka Warriors. This was like a football player switching, mid-career, from the Patriots to the Bengals. It meant going from the top to the bottom. It wasn’t just the Winnetka Pee Wees—I was now a Pee Wee—but the entire organization that stank. Deerfield was a hockey powerhouse. Winnetka was a loser at every age level. The Winnetka kids knew about me before the tryout, because I’d played at Deerfield. They called me “Mr. Deerfield.” When I got to practice, one kid—his name was Ethan and he had a wispy blond mustache—always asked if I’d come “from the synagogue.” There was a mistake with our jerseys. On half of them, the Warrior’s logo—the flying W—had been printed upside down. People called us the M’s. We were coached by a parent, a big, angry stock trader named Jim Campbell. He had intense eyes and shattered blood vessels all over his face. He wore the sort of glasses you might find in the Jeffrey Dahmer collection. You never knew what you were going to get. On some nights, he was warm and encouraging. On ot
hers, he was punitive and mean. I later learned that he’d been going through a divorce and was self-medicating. He drove a Harley. Once, when his bike fell over, he made us go out and stand it up.

  “Consider this part of your training,” he said.

  He made me alternate captain. After I’d blown a scoring chance, he cut the A off my jersey with a Swiss Army knife, saying, “You don’t deserve it, Mr. Deerfield.”

  We lost fifteen games in row. Then won. The other team was demoralized, knowing they’d lost to a team that had lost fifteen games in a row. We stood beside them after the horn, waiting for someone to find the key to the dressing rooms. Kids on our team started singing “We Are the Champions.” When they got to the part that goes “no time for losers,” they pointed at the other team, and a melee ensued.

  That’s me, bottom row, second from the left. Winnetka Ice Arena, Winnetka, Illinois, Winter 1980

  That season did not make me hate hockey, but it did kill the love. The wrong coach at the wrong time can do that. That’s why I was involved with Micah’s team in a way my parents had never been with mine. That’s what I told myself anyway. I was on the lookout for the wrong coach, who I knew would come.