Pee Wees

by Rich Cohen

  * * *

  And yet I played on. In high school. In college. In New York’s adult leagues at the Sky Rink at Chelsea Piers. My team was called Blind Justice. Our jersey showed a blindfolded lady holding a hockey stick instead of scales. This team represented the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, though most of the players weren’t lawyers. They were janitors, security guards, paralegals. My brother, who worked for the U.S. attorney, wormed his way onto the roster and brought me along. It was exciting to stand in the traffic of Hudson Street with your hockey bag and sticks, waiting for a cab. It was exciting to step out of the rink into a cool Manhattan night.

  The quality of play was uneven. There were a handful of good players, guys who’d played in high school or college, but many more who’d learned on Rollerblades or from Nintendo’s Blades of Steel. Some of them could barely get up and down the ice. Worst were guys who knew the game only from television. They believed that fighting was a regular part of the sport, that the night was not complete till you’d dropped the gloves. Until then, I’d never been in a hockey fight; now here I was, at one in the morning, being whacked by a hedge fund manager who kept saying, “Wanna go?”

  The late games had a desperate feel. This is how your hockey life ends. One night, one of our defensemen, a prosecutor named Steve Brostoff, was penalized for cross-checking. The call was questionable, which did not justify Brostoff’s tirade. He cursed all the way to the penalty box, where he took his helmet off and went on cursing.

  “Hey, ref,” he screamed, “you’re a disgrace to that uniform.”

  The ref skated over.

  “It’s midnight, and I’m reffing you assholes for minimum wage,” he told Brostoff. “I’m a disgrace all right, but it has nothing to do with this uniform.”

  Our captain was named Steve Caro. He was a contractor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. If you needed a shelf, you called Caro. He stood outside the Sky Rink with a clipboard, calling out names as each player arrived. In a thick Brooklyn accent, he’d say, “Hey, Richie? Richie? Hey, Richie? Ya here?” He made the question seem profound: Was I here? If so, why? What was I doing with my life?

  At some point, my brother took over the team. He liked pep talks. He’d say, “We can do this, boys. We just have to want it! Do you want it?” He began to use me as a counterexample: “See what my brother did? Do the opposite.” He’d scream at me for missing an open net, scream at me for not passing, scream at me for passing too much. I’d be furious when I got home at two in the morning, then lie awake for the rest of the night muttering. I wanted justice. It was only when I understood that there is no such thing as justice, not in this world, that I realized I could quit hockey and go on with my life.

  Blind Justice won the championship of the Chelsea Piers Division III men’s hockey league in my last season. Credit me. I’d recruited two recent college grads who made the difference. It was not that they were better, but that they were so much younger. They blazed with new engines in new bodies while the rest of us sputtered and broke down. Each year I was slower and clumsier than I’d been the year before. At a certain point, I realized I’d been better at twelve than I was at thirty-five. That’s when I decided to quit all activities in which my abilities were on the wane—binge drinking, recreational drug use, ice hockey—and instead focus on those areas where there was still room for improvement: guitar and golf. I got married, had kids—more kids than I’d expected. I had one son. Then I had three. Now I have four. When I say four, some people look at me with respect, others in disgust. (Perhaps I will write a memoir called The Accidental Hasid.) I did not want to leave the city but could not afford to stay. I’d procreated my way out of town. As soon as that third kid was born, a white ball sucked me up and carried me to Connecticut. I knew nothing about my new state or town, or any of those nearby. My wife and I’d picked Ridgefield like we’d pulled a name from a hat. I’d seek out people with roots in Chicago and ask, “Where are we? Is this Winnetka or more like Deerfield? Or Schaumburg? Highwood? Wait a second—are we in Libertyville? It’s Libertyville, isn’t it? Or is it Glen Ellyn? My God, am I living in Glen Ellyn?”

  I got to know Ridgefield by living in Ridgefield. It’s a beautiful, storybook New England town with a tree-lined Main Street, ponds, and what my father calls “rolling hills.” Everything from my old life seemed to follow me here. Bands I’d listened to in high school (Squeeze, Erasure) turned up on a senior circuit that went through a theater a mile from our new house. I spotted a hockey rink about a thousand yards from my front door. The Winter Garden—it’s out of my past, Deerfield Bubble vintage, with a rickety roof and a single sheet of ice. It was like Brigadoon for me, a vision that appears only when you absolutely need it. As soon as I saw the rink, I knew my hockey life was not over. I had quit the game, but it had not quit me. I also knew I’d changed roles. I’d been a player. Now I’d be that most terrifying of monsters, a hockey parent.

  * * *

  I started with my oldest son, Aaron, who was six at the time. I did not ask permission, nor talk it over with my wife. I simply signed him up. I was now my father, my son was now me. In this town, you start with Ice Mice, which consists of a few dozen tiny kids in oversize gear pushing toys around the ice. We were lucky to find a great teacher, Cathy Bonner, who got our kids to love skating, even if they did not always love hockey. Aaron was a natural on blades. He played a season in the house league, then I signed him up for travel. Tryouts lasted two days. He made the Ridgefield Mite B Team, then climbed to A1.

  I’d volunteered to coach. After all, this was said to be the whole point: father and child together on the ice and on the road. But I was a bad coach, moody and aloof. I’d never been a leader. I’m a slave to the chemicals in my brain, that great tidal flow. Sometimes happy, sometimes angry, sometimes sad. I attribute this to a strain of mental illness that runs in my family, along with birth order. My sister is the oldest. She’s a lawyer. She stands before juries making her case. My brother is the middle, betwixt and between. I am the youngest, the slacker who stands back, observes, and reports. For a freelance writer, life is a sick day without end. I imagined being a different sort of person as a coach. I’d skate beside Aaron and his teammates, guiding them through the particulars of the game, but I was in fact impatient. I could never clearly explain what I wanted them to do, or get them to do it. It was even worse with Aaron. I never forgot that I loved him, but I could only see what he was doing wrong.

  And the other parents drove me nuts. Most had never played, yet they were all experts. They wanted me to teach their eight-year-olds how to take a slap shot, though such shots were verboten till Pee Wee. I told them it was unnecessary as well as forbidden—a player can live an entire hockey life, even play in the NHL, without ever developing a slap shot. But to them hockey meant slap shots, and I was raining on their parade. In this way, they came to distrust me, then dislike me. I didn’t blame them. I didn’t like myself very much that season.

  The games could be unbearable, especially considering how long it took to get to some of the rinks. It was less hockey and more like a drunken dream of hockey. Aaron handled the puck well but, for whatever reason, didn’t seem to get the point of the game. He was involved in a kind of parallel play. If the action was here, he was over there; if the action went over there, he came back here. He shied away from contact and never felt the urgency. Now and then, though there were no goalies in Mites, he’d station himself in the net, as if guarding a bank that had not yet been built. It seemed like abdication.

  When I asked about it later, he said, “I was protecting.”

  “What were you protecting,” I demanded. “What?”

  All those skills—crossovers, backward pivots—are merely tools meant to help you score. He never seemed to accept that. He skated in a bubble, happily lost in his own world.

  Near the end of Aaron’s hockey career, we played in a tournament in West Hartford. A Sunday in November, the worst time of year. The leaves had fallen, the highwa
ys were black. The parents sat in the locker room with their kids before the last game, bullshitting. They chatted as they filed out, men swaggering in flannel. Then they filed back in, only now quiet and pale. Something terrible had happened.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Do you know who’s coaching the other team?”

  “No. Who?”

  “Messier.”

  Mark Messier played in the NHL from 1979 to 2004. He was one the best forwards in history, a Gordie Howe–like All-Star who, like Gordie Howe, could score, assist, and brawl. He’d been a champion and a captain in Edmonton and New York. In 1994, when the Rangers faced elimination in game six of the Stanley Cup semifinals, Messier guaranteed victory, then backed it up by scoring three times in the third period against the New Jersey Devils. It was not just how Messier played that intimidated people, but the way he looked. He has high cheekbones and dark, almond-shaped eyes and chiseled features. Even in repose he seems to be glowering. He can’t help it. It’s his face. He did not mess around with the puck when he played—no dipsy-doodle for the captain. When he got the puck, he went to the net by the shortest route possible. He never lost sight of the game’s essential object: to score more goals. He collected forty-three points in his last season, when he was forty-three years old. He’d slimmed down since retirement—was bald, tall, and handsome, but still 100 percent Messier. He’d helped establish a youth hockey program in Greenwich, Connecticut, where his son played. He was presumably coaching for the same reason as me: togetherness.

  We scored three goals in the first period, building a lead that seemed insurmountable. I looked over at Messier. He looked back—he was wearing jeans and a long, black coat—and nodded.

  By God, he nodded!

  I called my wife between periods. You’re not supposed to use a phone on the bench, but I couldn’t help it. “I just wanted you to know that we’re playing Mark Messier’s team and we’re going to win,” I told her. “I am going to beat Messier!”

  We would’ve won, too, if not for the most ostentatious celebration I’ve ever seen. A kid whose name I forget scored early in the second period, putting us ahead 4–0. He pumped his fist when the puck went in—which, fine—then did a routine that covered the entire ice. He pointed at every kid on the Greenwich bench, rode his stick like a pony, did the robot, and gave his goal to God, at which point, Messier, who had not seemed all that engaged in the game, called a time-out. He said a few words to his players, then made some adjustments. A Greenwich kid who’d been sitting out tightened his skates and went onto the ice. Messier’s son Douglas moved from defense to center. He won the face-off, then scored. He scored again, then again. When it was over, Greenwich had beaten us by six goals. Our parents waited at the rink door to shake Messier’s hand. Parents are normally quiet after a thumping. Ours were giddy. They said things like, “Great game, Mr. Messier. It’s not who wins or loses, right, Mr. Mes-sier?” Being at the rink with the Hall of Famer seemed to justify every decision they’d ever made. The schools they’d attended, the jobs they’d accepted, the people they’d married—every choice had been correct because it led them here, to the same place as Mark Messier.

  I was not in such high spirits. It was a dark autumn night with a cold front moving in. I carried Aaron’s equipment bag to the minivan, then stood over the hatchback trying to make it fit. I felt something roll up beside me, the humming presence of an elegant machine. I looked over. It was the Messiers—Mark and Douglas—in a low-riding car, possibly a Maserati. Messier flashed me a peace sign, or maybe it was V for “victory,” then roared off. Watching his taillights, I said to myself, “Fuck you, Messier.”

  Aaron and I drove in silence. The game encapsulated our entire situation. Hockey was my passion, not his. He did not like it, but pretended to for me. I knew he didn’t like it, but pretended to believe he liked it, for him. We were living a lie, but I couldn’t find a graceful way out. Finally, because he is more adult than I am, Aaron came to me and said, “Dad, I don’t want to play anymore. I’m done.”

  I tried again with my second-born, Nate, but not with as much determination. My ass had been whipped by reality. I was in no hurry to have it whipped again. But I did want him to give it a try. I signed him up for Ice Mice. I won’t go into detail, but suffice to say Nate did not take to the game. Getting him into the gear was like getting a dog into a sweater. His arms went straight, his legs turned stiff, and he stared at me with hatred. I came back from the rink wiser. I’d finally realized that you can’t make a person do what they don’t want to do, especially if it’s your own kid. You can’t tell them what to care about, be interested in, or love. They come into the world hardwired. The most you can do is clear the path. There is no invention, just discovery.

  I’d given up on hockey by the time Micah was in school. He found the game on his own, which is probably why he loved it. He started to play by following his friends to the rink. My wife signed him up for house league. I refused to buy new equipment. I told him to search among the discarded junk in the garage instead, that depository of faded dreams. I did not go to his games. My wife dropped him off or he got a ride with friends. I’d stopped caring about hockey.

  It’s hard to really see your own kid play anyway. It’s like trying to see the Grand Canyon free of expectations. In the end, it’s not the Grand Canyon you see but yourself seeing the Grand Canyon. It’s like that watching your kid play hockey. You see only the positives or negatives. As a result, you will, depending on your personality, think your kid is the best or the worst. Almost no parent thinks their kid is in the middle, not great, not awful, just average, which most of them surely are. If you want the truth, it’s best to wander into the rink by accident and see your kid without knowing what you are seeing.

  My wife asked me to pick Micah up at the Winter Garden one day. He was supposed to be outside. I parked and waited, then got annoyed and went in. My eyes went straight to the ice, where a kid was carrying the puck. He faked his way around two forwards and was one-on-one with a defenseman when another kid knocked him down. It was only then, as I was still admiring the play, that I realized I’d been watching my own kid.

  AUGUST

  The storms blow in from the south. It’s strange to feel a Caribbean wind in Connecticut, that hurricane ache as the clouds pile up and the sky darkens. The owners of the Winter Garden melt the ice in May and keep the rink closed for half the summer. The Zamboni is locked up, the cones and nets put away. The rink is shadowy, its doors wound in padlocked chain. The town itself is given to indolence, awnings shade Main Street, the schools are empty. Certain words linger: “sleepy,” “inert.” Sitting beside a pond, you can almost believe that life here has not changed in two hundred years. It’s the same kids and the same dreams, the same men fishing for descendants of the same fish in the same waterways, the same shade on the same roads, the same banjo frogs in the same vernal pools.

  What happens to hockey kids and their families in the summer?

  If casual and sane, they turn back into ordinary Americans, put on bathing suits and flip-flops and head to the beach, play Wiffle ball, swim and sail, walk in a pack through town, go to the shorefront cottages of grandparents or camping in the White Mountains with overly enthusiastic uncles. We used to hang up our skates in April and not think about them again until the first cold night of autumn. By August, hockey was a memory from another life. But America has changed. Downtime has been banished. Kids used to play everything; now they’re encouraged to focus like a laser on a single sport. Blame Malcolm Gladwell, who, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, says that a person must practice for ten thousand hours to master anything, the assumption being that if you do practice for ten thousand hours, you will become a master. Gladwell lays out a program in those pages, a way to turn a kid into a star. Millions of tiny athletes have been held back as a result. The parents tell you it’s because their baseball- or football-loving son or daughter had not been “mature” enough for kindergar
ten at the time, had not been “ready,” but there’s a more prosaic reason: by waiting a year, the parent had, as per Gladwell, made their kid the oldest in class, thus the biggest and most developed in their game, giving her or him a better shot at making the top teams, meaning more and better coaching, the result being a confidence that just might carry him or her all the way! Of course, she or he will still need to put in the work, which is yet another reason to focus on a single sport. It’s the fastest way to accumulate the all-important ten thousand hours.

  Gladwell is a guru, heeded by people who have grown tired of waiting. In the process, parents have remade the game in the image of the adult world, turned it into work. When hockey season ends, many kids continue with spring leagues and summer clinics, followed by sleepaway hockey camps. There is no off-season, just as there is no summer inside a rink. When you see those kids in the fall, they look as pasty as workaholics. They have grown as players, and all it cost was a summer of their childhood.

  * * *

  We had our first team meeting in mid-August, just the parents, twenty or so middle-aged adults dragging themselves across the sunstruck parking lot of the Winter Garden. Too hot, too soon. The season always catches you by surprise, before you are ready. We sat in a windowless room filled with detritus—broken nets, smashed wipe boards, and other relics of the life. We’d expected to meet the coach but were greeted by a bureaucrat instead. Certain incidents from the previous season, most having to do with the Bantams—a kid was cursed out by another kid’s mom; a Darien player was, at the instruction of a Ridgefield father, knocked down with a vicious blindside check; a Bears’ coach was supposedly offered a bribe and, had it not been so chintzy, might have taken it—required instruction and correction.

  FCAH’s parent board had hired a service called Hockey Fix, which, when an alarm is sounded, dispatches counselors to meet with parents and remind them what really matters. Here’s another sign of societal breakdown: what’s no longer taught at home must be imported via a fee-charging service, which sent two men, a guy in khakis and his assistant, who handed out worksheets and pencils.