Pee Wees

by Rich Cohen

  The top guy gave a potted speech. He started with youth sports in general, their history and purpose in American life, then went into hockey in particular, then went into the incidents that had tainted our program. He talked about the rules that FCAH parents would now be required to follow. Some were common sense and universal: Don’t curse in the stands. Don’t heckle or challenge referees. Respect all coaches and kids. Others had been invented for us: no cash gifts; no comments regarding gender, religion, or ethnicity; no secret meetings. He said the chances of any of our kids playing college hockey were negligible, “so forget about that right now—this game is not paying your child’s way through university. The kids who will play college are probably not in this program. For your kids, these are the golden days. Don’t ruin it with your fantasies.”

  “Turn to the back page of your workbooks,” he continued, “where you will find a list of goals.”

  He wrote the goals in block letters on a wipe board:

  Winning

  Fitness

  Learning to play hockey

  Learning to appreciate hockey

  Teamwork

  Fun

  Self-confidence

  Memories

  He told us to assign a number to each goal, ordering them in importance. He gave us five minutes to do this, then asked several parents to read their rankings out loud. Though he said, “There are no wrong answers,” he proceeded to tell us why our answers were in fact wrong. “Fun comes first,” he said. “Winning is last. There’s wiggle room with some of the others, but in general, teamwork should come before fitness, self-confidence should come before learning to appreciate hockey.”

  There was a heated exchange when Alan Hendrix, one of our team’s parent-coaches, argued that “fun” could not be first if “winning” was last.

  “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a locker room,” Coach Hendrix said, “but if you’re only losing, it’s not going to be very fun.”

  “It’s not either/or,” the counselor said. “We don’t dismiss winning. We just don’t make it a priority. If you put winning before these other things, your kids will not have a good experience. And they will probably lose anyway. If you emphasize teamwork and fun, they will win. It’s an effect, not a cause. Does that make sense?”

  Most of the parents were more interested in the other parents—what they looked like and did, who they were. That was the meeting’s real takeaway. Text: Don’t lose your sense of proportion; remember this is all about the kids. Subtext: So this is who I’ll be stuck with for the next seven months.

  If your kid plays a travel sport, you’ll end up spending more time with the other parents than you have with any group of strangers since high school—hours at the rink and on the road, meetings, practices, and tournaments. You become a kind of pop-up society. You can spot these groups at a distance. They gather in a circle in the lobby of the rink before games; they talk in low voices, facing in. This arrangement is to youth hockey what the confessional is to church or the huddle is to football. It’s a sacred space, where we share our irritations, hopes, and fears. I call it the holy hockey circle.

  The majority of Pee Wee A parents were white. Otherwise, they seemed, as I’ve said, to represent a fairly broad American cross section:

  There was Judd Meese, rich and retired with a young wife and a young son named Barry. Judd, who would be eighty before Barry finished college, came from a renowned old New England family. Judd’s grandfather had been an industrialist and an ambassador. Judd’s father founded one of America’s most prestigious literary magazines. Judd spent most of his time pursuing his passion—aviation. He bought, restored, and flew vintage aircraft. He showed me pictures of the World War I–era Curtiss JN-4 biplane he flew over the Hudson River Valley.

  Barry Meese seemed to drive his own hockey career, dragging his father along. They spent part of every summer day at the Sono Ice House in Norwalk, Judd reading back issues of Plane & Pilot as Barry worked with a private instructor. A quiet, craggy presence in the bleachers, Judd did not talk during games. He kept score in a notebook instead, recording every goal, assist, and penalty. He was our unofficial data guy. I later learned he’d only recently begun keeping score. It was a strategy, a way to control his emotions. “He used to be a screamer,” one parent told me. “He got kicked out of the rink in Bridgeport. It was a reality check. He started keeping score after that.”

  Parent-coach Alan Hendrix was a security officer at PepsiCo in Purchase, New York. His wife, Grace, an executive at Pepsi, was freckle-faced and small, with black eyes and Coke-bottle glasses. Their daughter Jenny—the kids called her “Broadway Jenny” because she was obsessed with show tunes and could name and sing every song that appeared in certain Broadway productions—was one of three girls on the team. In recent years, especially as the game has come to reward speed and smarts over size and force, girls have become an ever bigger presence in what had been boy’s youth hockey. There are all-girl teams, but many parents prefer that their daughters play with the toughest competition, which tends to mean playing with boys. Why? Because the better the players, the better the play. This has been good for the boys as well as the girls—it’s rid them of many of the gender assumptions that warped the minds of previous generations, like mine. In uniform and equipment, you can’t even tell the boys from the girls. Often, it’s only the hair that gives them away.

  Jenny Hendrix was small, like her mom. The grown-ups called her the Energizer Bunny. Tough and determined, she never stopped moving. Cross-checked or tripped to the ice, she’d pop up like a Weeble. Some kids are motivated by a love for the game. Jenny was motivated at least partly by fear of her father, who called out even her smallest mistake, blaming her for things that weren’t really her fault.

  There were Jocko and Camille Arcus, gearhead car enthusiasts who’d met at Lime Rock, the racetrack in Lakeville, Connecticut. They crisscrossed the travel hockey world in a 1968 vermillion green Dodge Charger as Dan, their child and our Hoover Vacuum of a goalie, dozed in the back seat. Jocko was burly, bearded, bejeweled, tattooed, and very happy. He walked with a limp, which he’d apologize for, saying, “Someday, I’ll tell you my story.” Camille was pretty, and tired of it all. They lived in a distant blue-collar town and traveled hundreds of miles each week for practices and games.

  Parky Taylor was a private equity guy—like just about every other private equity guy, he talked constantly about how much he hated his job. He’d grown up in Darien, Connecticut, which, he often told us, “is fancier than Ridgefield.” He’d lived in London and New York City before returning to Fairfield County to raise his family. A lot of our games were played at prep schools, about half of which Parky had attended. He’d look around as we came in the door and say, “I got kicked out of here, too.” He was married to Jill, whose grandfather played in the NHL in the 1960s. This meant that Parky’s son Duffy, maybe the most skilled Pee Wee in town, had royal blood. He was eligible for the throne. But like an epic hero, Duffy had a fatal flaw. For Odysseus, it was pride. For Duffy, it was temper. The kid could not control his rage.

  Bobby McDermott was a beer importer. He knew more about hockey than the rest of us combined, which is why he hardly ever spoke. As Lao Tzu said, “He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know.” Bobby, who grew up in suburban Toronto, played two seasons of Juniors in the notoriously rough Western Hockey League, which includes teams from Regina, Moose Jaw, Swift Current, and Red Deer, Canada. Bobby had the look of an enforcer—stoic with short red hair and scars. He had two kids on the team—one biological (Tommy) and one via his second marriage (Joey). His wife, Eunice, who told us she couldn’t care less about hockey, hardly ever came around.

  Simone Camus was a French physicist sent by the government in Paris to explain the most recent developments in particle science to her American counterparts at Yale. From what I understood, she came directly from the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, where she’d been part of the team that detect
ed the so-called God particle. She’d been in Ridgefield for three years, in which time her son, Jean, had, to her horror, become Americanized. He wore a Mets cap, loved pro wrestling, and insisted on being called Jack. Jack Camus had once been among the best players in the program, but an injury, suffered at the beginning of his second Squirt year, knocked him off his game. He’d been badly concussed by a cheap shot. He’d recovered physically, but the injury made him timid. He steered clear of corners, avoided physical contact, and at times even seemed scared of the puck. A survival instinct is great for longevity but terrible for your hockey. Jack fell from the first line to the third after the injury, shedding status along the way. Simone had become an outcast as a result, though she did not seem to know it. A single mother, probably a genius, she was treated dismissively by parents and coaches, especially Ralph Rizzo, who’d given up on her as soon as he was certain she would never buy a BMW. “I offered her a great deal, but she’s just as scared as her kid,” he told me.

  Albert Moriarty was an FBI agent out of New Haven. His son Leo was only half dedicated to hockey; he was a standout lacrosse player and now and then missed hockey games to attend lacrosse matches. In other words, he was not only cheating on hockey—he actually seemed to prefer the mistress! Though he could skate and shoot, Leo was the most suspect sort, a player of two games, a sports bigamist in an age of specialization. “If that boy isn’t committed to us,” Coach Hendrix asked, “why should we be committed to him?”

  Sue Campi was a dental hygienist in Danbury. At one point or another, she’d cleaned the teeth of every kid on the team. She split parenting time with her ex-husband, Gordon, whom I did not like at first but later came to love. That’s the way it is on the adult side of the youth game: you start out hating these people, because in them you recognize your own worst qualities, but end up loving them for the same reason. Gordon worked as the American distributor for a French cheese consortium. He brought samples of gaperon and Camembert to games, offering to give a wedge to the parents of any kid who “puts in more than four.” Gordon and Sue’s son Patrick, tall and earnest, was having trouble making the transition from defense to offense. He was a good player but had little instinct for scoring.

  And there was Jerry Sherman, who would become my confidant. He was a bear of a man, wore thick glasses, and laughed all the time. His suits looked like they came off the rack at the Big and Tall Men’s shop. He’d take his coat off in rinks, but his hat—a winter hat, complete with pom-pom—never left his head. Though he was a fairly well-known theatrical producer—you might remember his show The Green Awning—he seemingly spent most of his time sending funny texts. He was the only parent to take advantage of the travel part of travel hockey. During a tournament in Philly, he dragged his daughter Broadway Julie on a tour of a nearby Civil War battlefield. In the course of the season, Jerry and Broadway Julie toured the PEZ Visitor Center, the Mark Twain House, and the Peabody Museum at Yale, “to see that big goddamn dinosaur.”

  Most of the other parents were involved in finance. If they did not work at trading houses or banks, they managed hedge funds, worked for companies that insured those funds, or worked for regulators that policed them. To these people, Ridgefield was a bedroom community—they spent the working day in glass office buildings in Westport, Stamford, Greenwich. To the kids of these bankers, the adult world was money. There’s a connection between banking and hockey. For the children of finance, hockey is the game. Maybe it has to do with the neatness of life on the ice, the importance of the clock, or the invariance of the physical environment—always cold, always winter—or maybe it’s economics. To play basketball, you need only a pair of sneakers. It costs thousands just to gear a kid up for hockey and thousands more to put him on a good team. A typical travel season will set you back at least ten grand.

  I was the only writer among the parents, the only person in the business of turning out a product for which there was little market and no need. It made me an oddball. When you tell people you’re a writer, they assume you’re unemployed. When they find out you actually earn a living, they chuck you on the shoulder and say, “Terrific!”

  We were asked to sign a pledge at the end of the meeting. In it, we promised to “follow the rules of conduct, to neither heckle nor throw items from the stands, to neither engage in taunting nor fisticuffs, to neither seek preferential treatment for ourselves or our children, but in all ways set a good example.” We agreed to wait twenty-four hours before discussing a game or game decisions with any of the coaches. The “twenty-four-hour rule” was said to be of paramount importance. “I think you’ll find that, a day or two later, you won’t even remember what was bothering you,” the Hockey Fix counselor told us.

  This turned out to be true almost all the time.

  * * *

  We met our kids’ head coach at a local bar a few days later. His name was Pete Wilson, but he told us to call him Coach Pete. He was closer in age to the players than to the parents, boyish with a lock of hair that swung across his forehead like a pendulum. He was of average height, carried himself like an athlete, and looked like a hockey player, which was comforting. Unlike the parent-coaches, he did not wear much official gear, but favored jeans, sneakers, and sweatshirts. We knew his particulars from the FCAH website, where the bio and headshot of every coach was posted. According to this official history, Coach Pete was twenty-five years old, a newly married accountant. He grew up in Ridgefield, where he played high school hockey. Whereas other programs boasted coaches who’d played in college or even professionally, Ridgefield was run by locals, by townies, who’d been coached by locals in their time.

  Of course, having been a great player doesn’t mean you’ll be a great or even a good coach. The opposite may be closer to true. For a great player, the game comes naturally, instinctually, making it hard to teach. It’s impossible to explain what you don’t remember learning. The kids who have to work the hardest can frustrate a great player turned coach. He will scratch his head, then say, “Don’t do that.” Or, “Goddamnit, just score!” You’d rather have a coach who never played but knows how to talk to kids. Coach Pete did not fit in either school. He’d been a middling high school player who loved hockey but did not really like to talk at all. He was self-effacing, distracted. This probably had to do with his unofficial bio, which only a few of us knew. His father and older brother had been beloved Ridgefield coaches. Charismatic and kind, they were something like “made men” in town. If you mentioned “Coach Wilson” around older parents, they’d smile and ask, “Is your boy being coached by Old Buck Wilson?”

  “No, his son.”

  “Bobby? Heck, he’s even better than Old Buck!”

  “No. The little brother.”

  “There’s another Wilson?”

  Coach Pete had spent a single season behind the bench when he took over the Pee Wee A team. He’d worked as an assistant for his brother, who coached the Midget Double As. This would be Pete’s first season as a head coach, but that was not the part of the unofficial bio that would impact our season. What I have in mind could be followed in the local newspapers, though no parent other than me seemed to.

  After decades of coaching hockey and running an investment firm in Westport, Coach Pete’s father, Old Buck Wilson, fell in love with a client who was even younger than Coach Pete. In the process of wooing and keeping this woman, Old Buck, who had a wife and several children, betrayed several oaths he’d sworn to uphold. In the end, to pay for jewels and outfits, vacations and houses, Old Buck first emptied his own accounts, then stole from clients, even his kids. He would be convicted of embezzlement, breach of trust, tax evasion, and other financial crimes, and sentenced to prison. This story was splashed across Danbury’s The News-Times.

  Coach Pete had only a few rules, which he explained at that first meeting. Players must arrive an hour before games, a half hour before practices. They must wear a tie and khakis to tournaments. “Complaints about playing time will not be tolerated,” he ad
ded. “If a parent complains, I will ignore it. If a kid complains, he or she will be benched. And you already know about the twenty-four-hour rule.”

  * * *

  The team had its first practice a few days later. Last week of August, ninety degrees in the shade. The ice was damp in the corners. The kids surprised me with their speed, size, and skill. It’s amazing what a summer of growth can do. They flew through drills, then broke into lines to work on game situations: three forwards facing two defensemen. Pass, pass, pass—shoot! If all went well, the puck made the goalie’s water bottle—always placed on top of the net—jump.

  Coach Pete was on the ice with the kids, as were the parent-coaches. Coach Alan Hendrix raced up and down beside the Pee Wees. He had the intensity of a parent who takes out an eight-year-old in a father-son game. Coach Ralph Rizzo stood back, smiling. He was tall with an amused old-time face. He was a member of the FCAH board, though he’d never been elected. We’d all gone to the meeting, heard the speeches, and voted in the spring. The board had five members, including a treasurer, a secretary, and a chairperson. In the summer, we got an email saying a sixth member had been added, Ralph Rizzo, “who will bring his unique skills as a BMW salesman to the task of growing our program.” Of course, Coach Ralph was really there to keep an eye on his son Brian, a happy eleven-year-old with dark curls spilling out of his helmet.

  Many of the parents were new to hockey. The fathers had played football, which, because of all the research into head injuries, they’d judged too dangerous for their daughters and sons. Hockey seemed like a good alternative. Fast and exciting, here’s a sport that’s physical yet not quite as violent as football. There is hitting in hockey, but not until Bantam year, and even then it’s not as frequent or as brutal as the tackling in football. It’s possible to imagine a version of hockey that banishes checking altogether. Contact would be incidental, as in basketball, yet the game would remain essentially the same. Football is different. Football is hitting. The pigskin is like the McGuffin in a Hitchcock movie. It’s there merely as an excuse—because the players need something to chase. Which explains the hockey boom. Whereas participation in Pop Warner football has fallen, participation in youth hockey has jumped. In 2019, close to 600,000 kids registered for travel hockey, a number that does not include the hundreds of thousands who play in house leagues.