Pee Wees

by Rich Cohen

  Coach Pete was a hockey progressive, which made him suspect to some of the parents. You could hear muttering when he sent the first line back for another face-off. Judd Meese, our oldest parent, sighed and said, “That’s what’s wrong with America.”

  Tommy lost the next face-off, too. The Lady Wings headed up ice once again. Broadway Jenny tried to block Gallagher, who blew right past. It came down to a one-on-one, Gallagher versus defenseman Brian Rizzo, who stepped up for a steal but missed the puck, taking himself out of the play. Gallagher scored—faked low, beat Arcus high. He slammed his stick against the crossbar, pushed back his mask, and took a drink of water. Patrick went over to talk to him. Arcus listened with his head down. Something Patrick said made him laugh. He looked better after that. And yet, the Lady Wings continued to score. Once on our second line, twice on our third, once more on our first.

  Becky Goodman was solid on defense, but the rest of them were, to quote Jerry Sherman, “playing like they did bong hits in the locker room.” They became confused, turned the wrong way, gave up when beaten. Rizzo had a habit of passing the puck in front of our own goal—you knew when it happened because you could hear Jocko Arcus bang on the glass and moan. Late in the second period, Rizzo and Stanley crashed into each other and both fell down, leaving the puck in the middle of the ice. “You should be seeing the front of a defenseman,” Parky Taylor told me. “You know. The eyes and chest and knees as the kid skates backward. All I’m seeing today is Rizzo’s back.”

  One of their goals came when we were shorthanded, having taken a dumb penalty. Duffy, acting in frustration, checked a Lady Wing from behind. Some of the Darien parents hissed. Coach Pete lectured Duffy as he sat in the penalty box, sweating and suffering. Coach Pete kept Duffy on the bench for most of the game after that. I hoped this meant Micah could move to the second line and skate with some of the playmakers, but Broadway Jenny, the coach’s kid, double-shifted instead. We were down 5–0 late in the second. Hockey is not Little League. There is no slaughter rule. The algorithm wants massacres. You either regroup or take a beating.

  The entire team went onto the ice between periods. They stood in a half circle around Coach Pete, who spoke from the bench. He was not big on inspiration. He did not make speeches. He was buttoned-up, technical, nuts-and-bolts. He held up a wipe board and drew lines to show what he wanted each player to do. His strategy looked complicated from a distance, as if he were describing his honeymoon itinerary. When I asked Micah what Coach Pete talked about, he said, “He told us to keep shooting. He said that if we took fifty shots, at least seven were bound to go in.”

  The Bears had more jump in the third period. They finally seemed to know what they wanted to do: crowd the Lady Wings, clog the passing lanes, gum up the works, test the goalie. The score was 6–2 in the middle of the period when the Lady Wings seemed to run out of gas. Their skating slowed, as did their passes; their shots drifted like struck birds. We scored, then scored again. A wrist shot Barry took from the left hash mark—the parallel lines on either side of the face-off circles at each end of the rink—hit the inside of the Darien net so hard it made the goalie’s water bottle jump.

  We were down by a goal with three minutes left in the game. From that point on, the Bears skated just the two top lines. Micah, Broadway Julie, and Roman were done for the day, turned into spectators, no different from the parents in the stands. It put me in a strange spot. I cheered for the team but secretly wanted them to fail. If this worked, I was afraid Micah would never see the last two minutes of a game again.

  Coach Pete pulled the goalie with fifty-eight seconds left, which meant he could put on an extra skater. I was hoping for Micah, but it turned out to be Duffy, skating for the first time since his penalty. With fifteen seconds left to play, Gallagher took a wild shot from center ice. The puck went up on its side and rolled into our net.

  The rest of the Lady Wings came over the boards when the buzzer sounded and piled on their goalie. The girls grinned through the handshakes. Micah was in back of the line, head down, mumbling as he grasped each outstretched palm: “Good game, good game, good game…” Our kids looked like mourners as they emerged from the locker room. I sent Micah to the car, then grabbed Coach Pete, promising myself, “This is the last time I will break the twenty-four-hour rule.”

  “I’m OK with what you said yesterday,” I told Coach Pete, “but Micah not getting any ice for the last five minutes just seems wrong, for him and for all the kids on the third line.”

  Coach Pete looked at me, confused. “Really? Micah didn’t play in the last five minutes?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t notice,” he said. “Coach Hendrix works the door. Half the time I don’t even know who’s out there.”

  But when I asked Coach Hendrix, he said, “Don’t ask me. All I do is open and close the door.”

  * * *

  Sunday night. I-95 North. America’s bleakest highway. We drive in silence. Malaise drifts off the sixteen-wheelers. Even Micah feels it. I’m thinking about the game and all the work I have to do before another weekend comes around. He’s thinking about school. It’s dark at 5:00 p.m.

  “Let’s get dinner,” I say, exiting near Stamford.

  The stores are closed, the houses dark. We drive through a small town. There’s a village hall and a public square with a statue of a WWI doughboy. It’s nights like this that made Eugene O’Neill long for Communist Russia. I park in front of a diner. The windows are aglow. It’s a refuge on a desolate shore, a clean, well-lighted place. We go in and order cheeseburgers. As we look for a table, I spot Parky and Duffy in a corner. Having finished his meal, Parky is eyeing Duffy’s food. He looks up when I say hello, smiles sadly, and says, “I can’t stand this season.”

  “Don’t give up,” I tell him. “There’s still a lot more hockey to play.”

  * * *

  Thus began a listless run of practices and games—a losing streak, a funk—that those who believe in curses would call star-crossed. Get out Fodor’s New England and check the index for Connecticut. We lost in every one of those towns. We lost in Greenwich, Southport, Fairfield, Norwalk, Bridgeport. We lost in Kent, Washington, and Westport. We lost in both Milfords and several Havens. Some games were close; in others, we were blown out. “There’s nothing to learn from a game like that,” Coach Pete said after a shellacking in Simsbury. “Just go home and forget it.” Some teams were better than we were. Others hustled more. Some had a better goalie. Others had a better coach. Some got lucky. Some had a better plan. Some were gracious in victory. Others were cruel. Some talked trash. Others talked trash and played dirty. The Pee Wee A Bears imbibed an adult portion of shame in those weeks. It was an echoing spiral. The more they lost, the worse they felt. The worse they felt, the worse they played and the more they lost. Down we went, until the biggest question, the only real mystery, was, How deep does this hole go?

  Meanwhile, the story behind the story—the probable source of the funk—had been unfolding in a Hartford courthouse, where Coach Pete’s father, convicted of wire fraud, theft, and embezzlement, awaited sentencing. Coach Pete must have been anxiously anticipating, on hold till he knew the shape of his family’s future. None of the other parents seemed to be clued in, or maybe they were being discreet. I could not stop imagining the sorry affair, the middle-aged man and the young woman for whom he’d sacrificed everything. How did Coach Pete keep smiling and drawing plays through it all? He was either numb inside, or very tough and brave. At practices and games he behaved as if nothing else were happening. Maybe hockey was his escape, the place he kept his old identity, which is one reason I did not ask about his father. If this was his bubble, I would not pop it.

  Losing affected the mood on the bench, the behavior of the kids, everything. They bickered, became unruly. Patrick threw a puck. It hit Duffy, who, or so Micah said, spit out a tooth, smiled and called Patrick an F-tard, though now with a lisp. Rick brought a pizza to the locker room, which was verboten, then
made things worse by sharing it with only select teammates—Roman, Leo, Joey. Brian took a piece anyway. Rick threw the box aside, stood, and said, “You wanna go? Let’s go!” Blows were exchanged. After a loss in New Canaan, Brian’s mother sent Brian’s sister into the locker room to tell Brian to hurry up. Tommy made a gross sexual remark. Brian punched Tommy, sparking a general melee. Standing in his underwear and prescription goggles, Roman shouted, “Who wants to fuck me? I’ll fuck anyone who wants to fuck me.” Coach Rizzo tried to have Tommy suspended. When the board dismissed this suggestion as unnecessarily harsh, he asked that Tommy be made to dress alone. This too was rejected.

  “Where I come from,” said Jocko Arcus. “You’re either on the team or off the team.”

  “Not to mention the fact that, without Tommy, we’d never win another game,” Jerry Sherman added.

  But here’s the thing about hockey: it’s good even when it’s bad. There’s always the possibility of a breakaway, life on the rush, how the puck feels on your stick. And of course there’s the culture of the game, the values, philosophy, minutiae. There are the rinks, the ice palaces and winter gardens, each different but all the same, the smell of sweat and hum of industrial equipment, exhaust fans, pumping units, and chillers. There are the lobbies with soda, candy, and claw machines and of course the vintage pinball and arcade games—PAC-MAN, Defender, Galaxian. There’s the Zamboni driver finishing his task with broom and scraper, smoothing the lip of ice that accumulates in front of the big doors where the Zamboni sleeps. There are rink rats with tape balls, chewing tobacco, tall tales, and broken sticks mined from the dumpster. There are TVs showing great games from hockey’s past. There is satellite radio to fill all the hours on the road. Micah and I would listen to New York Rangers games on the way and to Los Angeles Kings games on the way back. We agreed that a game can be even better on the radio. “With television, the game is played on a screen,” Micah explained. “On radio, it’s played in your head.” He liked when the announcers were quiet and you could hear the crowd, the hoots and whistles, the slap of the puck. We’d argue about players. He championed the stars of the moment: Connor McDavid, Sidney Crosby, Patrick Kane. Being an old man, I liked the old-timers: Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Stan Mikita.

  I told Micah the history of the sport, how it likely started on frozen ponds in western Canada and then moved indoors. I told him how it evolved, what it had been, and why it changed. I told him about the famous arenas: the Montreal Forum, the Boston Garden, and the old Madison Square Garden, where the Brooklyn Americans played on the same ice as the Rangers. I told him about the renowned NHL teams, the villains and heroes. I told him about the 1977 Canadiens, and the 1982 Islanders, and the 1984 Oilers, and the 2013 Blackhawks. I told him about the first goalie to wear a face mask, the first player to curve a stick. I was introducing him not just to a history, but to an ethos and lore. I wanted him to become a citizen of Hockey Nation. I wanted to give him something he could enjoy long after he stopped playing.

  “Every team loses the way your team is losing now,” I told him. “It’s important. It can even be seen as a kind of opportunity. You don’t learn by winning: you learn by losing. You have to go through it. That’s how you become a hockey player. We all get knocked down. Who gets back up? That’s the question.”

  I showed him the hockey cards I’d collected in the 1970s. Each pack came with a booklet, a cartoon biography of a player who grew up in the 1940s or 1950s. These were fables, morality plays. They all started the same way: with a kid too poor to buy equipment fashioning a puck out of an old pair of socks, pads out of an old mattress. He’d turn up in hand-me-down skates at the pond only to be laughed at and driven away. He practiced alone. He was the young David sent to tend sheep while his brothers battled the Philistines. When Goliath appears in the valley, he will emerge. The comics all ended the same way, too: with a young player, Denis Potvin or Greg Polis or Brad Park, sticks in hand, bag on shoulder, staring at the facade of Chicago Stadium or Maple Leaf Gardens—the promised land!

  We watched hockey movies. Miracle, in which Kurt Russell plays Herb Brooks, coach of the 1980 U.S. Olympic team that shocked the Soviets in Lake Placid, New York. “You think you can win on talent alone?” Brooks tells his players. “Gentlemen, you don’t have enough talent to win on talent alone.” Youngblood, in which Rob Lowe plays a prospect making the transition from amateur hockey to the game’s violent minor leagues. The Blackhawks’ brawler Eric Nesterenko, playing Lowe’s father, teaches Lowe to fight. “You can learn to punch in the barn,” Nesterenko says, “but you gotta learn to survive on the ice.” And of course we repeat-watched Slap Shot, in which Paul Newman plays Reggie Dunlop, aging player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs of the Federal League. “Let ’em know you’re out there,” Reg tells his team. “Get that fucking stick in their side! Let ’em know you’re there! Get that lumber in his teeth! Let ’em know you’re there!”

  As you make your way through this oeuvre, one question keeps recurring: What’s the best way to turn a kid into an athlete or any kind of artist?

  There are two basic approaches: force or enticement. You can think of it in terms of broad pedagogical concepts, or you can imagine two fathers, each with his own parenting style.

  First, there’s Press Maravich, the father of basketball prodigy Pete Maravich. Press, who played pro basketball for the Youngstown Bears and the Pittsburgh Ironmen, had made the transition to coaching by the time Pete was born in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, in 1947. Pete began to show interest in basketball as soon as he could walk, yet, disturbingly for Press, he showed interest in football and music, too. Press responded with reverse psychology: he’d host pickup basketball games at his house but refuse to let Pete so much as touch the ball. Pete sat in the window watching. He came to know the basics even before he could dribble. Press finally “gave in” and let Pete play. OK. I can’t stop you. Pete—later known as “Pistol” because he shot from the hip, like a gunfighter—had been hooked by forbidden fruit. The way he moved, how he carried the ball, the don’t-look passes, and the shots that came off the rebound—his game had the joy of something sinful. He scored fifty points in his college debut. He averaged 44.2 points a game at Louisiana State University, where he was coached by his father. He became a national sensation. His floppy hair, saggy socks, and lope were imitated by kids across the country. He was taken third in the 1970 NBA draft. He was a great player on a mediocre team in Atlanta, what the franchise gave its fans instead of victory. He served the same function when he played in New Orleans. He was not on a good pro team until 1980, when he was signed by the Boston Celtics partly to mentor the rookie Larry Bird. Pete’s knees were shot by then; the picture of him packed in ice at the end of the bench is pure American melancholy, what the game does to beautiful youth. He retired at thirty-two and died eight years later, collapsing during a pickup basketball game. An autopsy showed he’d been born missing a coronary artery on the left side. He shouldn’t have been able to run, let alone play the way he played for over twenty years. His was a miracle, driven by the desire of a kid forbidden to play. He was convinced that he’d chosen his course, though it had been chosen for him. That’s the Press Maravich method.

  There was no illusion of freedom for Andre Agassi, whose father, Mike, plotted his course in the way of a mountain climber. Mike, an Iranian immigrant who started in this country as a doorman in Chicago, recognized tennis as a back way into the upper class, and so had his son on a court before he was strong enough to hold a racquet. He made Andre hit five thousand tennis balls every morning, afternoon, and night. If there was a conflict with school, there was no school. Andre came to hate tennis but stayed with it because Mike would not let him quit. Mike Agassi was Malcolm Gladwell’s dream father, working his son like a thoroughbred—no freedom, no joy, just the long road to ten thousand hours. Tennis stopped being a game for Andre before he was ten years old. It was early mornings, screaming adults, impossible standards, the end of childhood. It’s the Mik
e Agassi method that made Andre Agassi into one of the greatest tennis players in the world.

  Which brings us to another question, the only one that really matters: What do you want out of the game?

  For most parents and kids it’s about fun as well as the lessons that come from the experience, lessons that can be applied to the rest of life. Teamwork means sacrifice; effort means playing through pain. A good player learns to plan for the future. You don’t pass to a teammate. You pass to the place that teammate will be in the future. You learn the art of friendship. The violence of the sport increases intimacy. You become comrades facing a threat. Feelings of appreciation and equality emerge: I don’t care what you look like, only if you can help get us out of this jam. But losing is the game’s great teacher, even if you’d rather not sit through the lessons. Even a good season will include slumps and spirals, moments of fury and walks of shame. The game is ecclesiastical. It teaches the folly of pride. “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” It lectures on human limitations. No matter how good you are, someone is better. Losing is humbling. “In much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” You shouldn’t like losing, but must know how to do it. Being a good loser means not blaming the refs, even if the refs were at fault. It means knowing when the game is over. It means crediting the other team. The handshake line that follows even the most contentious game is hockey’s greatest ritual. It’s a way of saying, “That is finished and we accept each other and continue on with our lives.” Being a good loser means learning these lessons, then leaving the loss behind. If you brood, you will lose again. That’s how a bad game turns into a slump.