Pee Wees

by Rich Cohen

  Jerry Sherman filled in the gaps, sending texts that grew in detail the longer I stayed away:

  February 16, 9:33 p.m.:

  JS: 12 penalties! And we … tie. Apparently this team is ranked higher, so it’s like a win. Kids played better. Great game. We should have won, but typical of our coaching staff we had a line in for 2+ minutes and New Canaan had fresh legs. Dan had at least 50 saves. We are a morning team. Micah played well. I think we do ourselves a disservice by not changing the lines. Barry doesn’t pass, and Rick and Brian’s chances of going to Ivy League institutions are in jeopardy.

  February 17, 1:15 p.m.:

  JS: Micah just scored! 3–1.

  February 23, 1:19 p.m.:

  JS: Micah just got another one! 4–2

  JS: Just finished. Great game. Other team had about 10 penalties. 4–3. Other team was better. Very lucky.

  February 24, 10:11 a.m.:

  JS: What a nightmare … kids for the other team were yelling at refs and once again I noticed gun stickers on the other team’s cars. Rough crowd. But two win weekends are good.

  RC: Were they also from Gun Haven?

  JS: I told them I wanted to run a urine check on their kids. Newington and surrounding areas. Troubled youth.

  February 25, 4:03 p.m.:

  RC: How’d the game go?

  JS: We lost 1–0.

  JS: Micah had best game. Goalie too.

  JS: I don’t understand the sport.

  JS: Rizzo tells me Barry was having an off game. Barry always looks the same to me. He doesn’t pass.

  RC: I think that kid needs glasses.

  JS: Honest?

  RC: Honest.

  JS: I don’t like it when Hendrix’s kid plays so much. It feels dirty.

  JS: Brian and Rick have moments when they forget they are not supposed to let people skate right past them.

  JS: The talk was our team was sleeping. If that’s the case, they are the best-rested team in Connecticut.

  February 27, 9:04 p.m.:

  RC: Just heard that if we make it to Tier 3 states we might play the Ridgefield Double As. Think we have a shot? It’d take a miracle just to get there. We should show them the old Rocky movie. Ya know, “Nobody’s ever gone the distance with Creed.”

  JS: Playing the Double As? I hadn’t heard that. Who told you?

  RC: Micah. Said he heard it from Coach Rizzo.

  JS: That’d be great, but we have a lot of work to do before that. Been watching our defense close, and they really make a shitload of mistakes. Rick and Brian are loose. Team today exposed them badly. Duffy is a hothead, a penalty waiting to happen. Tommy is going good. Micah is lights-out. Roman, Leo, and my Broadway Julie are starting to see some fog on the mirror.

  JS: Forgot to mention. Micah was down twice. One kid tackled him. I didn’t see the other hit. He was OK but he got up slow. I think he just lost his wind. I dropped an eff bomb when he got tackled. The five away dads were looking at the floor.

  JS: Miss ya:)

  * * *

  It was a team parent confab that brought me back. We met at the Hideaway, a local bar where we talked and drank and crunched the numbers in search of an answer to the ultimate question: Just what did the kids need to do to make it to the postseason? Our record was 32–28 on Valentine’s Day. According to the algorithm, we’d need forty wins to reach Tier 2 of the Connecticut state tournament. We had fourteen games left to play. Three of these were against teams we had no realistic chance of beating. Three were against teams we should roll over. Eight could go either way. We’d need to run up the score in the easy games, hang tight in the impossible ones, and win at least five of the toss-ups. We took the kids aside before the next practice and laid it all out. Instead of saying, “You must do this,” we asked them, “Do you want to make it to the state tournament? Because here is what it will take.”

  Why do we push our kids? Why do we put them in high-pressure situations? Why do we treat them in a way that we ourselves would resent being treated? No one knows what sort of engine drives the sports parent. A friend is always there to absolve you, to say, “You just want what’s best for your kid.” It sounds right. It lets you off the hook. But then, as you watch the Zamboni, you ask yourself, “Is that true? Is that why I behave this way? Because I want what’s best for my kid?” The answer is yes and no. Yes, that is what you want, but that’s not all that you want. It’d be nice for him to win, but it’d also be nice for you to watch him win, nice to talk about and remember. It’d make you feel good about him and also good about yourself. You’d believe you’d done something right. You want what’s best for your kid, but who even knows what that is? Maybe it’s succeeding at hockey, but maybe it’s failing. Maybe it’s quitting altogether. Maybe it’s winning, but maybe it’s losing. Being a good person is hard.

  * * *

  Coach Pete returned a few days after we’d explained the task to the team (how many games they needed to win, etc.). He did not say where he’d been, or what he’d been doing, or if he was back for good, but something about him was different. He’d changed in the way Mike Ditka had changed after his heart attack. Chicago Bears fans will know what I’m talking about: the coach, with his mustache and sweater vests and polyester pants, had been a kind of communal gym teacher for the kids of Chicagoland, calling us shirkers and making us drop and give him twenty “good ones.” He looked the same when he got out of the hospital, but different, too. He seemed smaller, wiser. He’d had a brush with the infinite. He knew something he had not known before. He’d looked back on his career and had seen dark places where the love and fun should have been. He wanted to continue living the same life but experience it in a different way. He’d gained perspective, realized, in the way only a brush with death can teach, that all this is real. Something like this happened to Coach Pete. For the first time all season, the practices became fun. Coach Pete tore up Coach Hendrix’s game plan and simply let the kids play. He turned everything into a contest. He took the team out for pizza. Instead of grueling off-ice training—stretches and knee bends—he had them play dodgeball and led them on hikes through the woods.

  Coach Rizzo seemed OK with it, but Coach Hendrix was pissed.

  “If you wanted to do this kind of thing at the start of the season, fine,” he told Coach Pete, “but not now, when every game is do-or-die.”

  Coach Pete pointed at the kids up the trail and said, “By climbing hills, they’re working the same muscles they’d be working in dryland training.”

  He shuffled the lines, moving Joey McDermott, who’d been playing defense, to wing, where he’d skate beside his stepbrother Tommy, because, as Coach Pete said, “brothers don’t need words to communicate.” This adjustment alone led to an offensive burst. He moved Micah, too. When playing left wing, Micah has a tendency to cherry-pick. He camps at the blue line, waiting for the puck and a breakaway. It dulls him—while waiting, his feet and mind slow. He’s better at center, where he’s forced to play at both ends of the ice. So that’s where Coach Pete put him, third-line center, with Broadway Jenny on one wing and Barry Meese—whose father, at my insistence, had taken Barry to the optometrist; he was now wearing corrective lenses, and it made all the difference—on the other. Patrick Campi, back from his concussion, centered the top line. Duffy Taylor played second-line center. What followed was a return of the wide-open style that characterized the first weeks of the season. It was like the recurrence of a favorite childhood melody, a song from better times. Coach Pete used this style—the breakouts, the three-on-twos—to build plays, which we worked on in practice. In other words, he did not try to teach the kids new skills so that they could execute plays downloaded from the internet, but rather designed plays around what they were doing already.

  In this way, the team came to grapple with a basic hockey conundrum: How does a decent team beat a good or even a very good team? How can the mediocre be made to defeat the excellent?

  Passing is a big part of the answer. You can beat speed
by spreading out and moving the puck, using the entire ice. No player is faster than a strong pass. Hustle is another part. When hockey coaches want to remind players to hustle, they tell them to keep moving their feet, which is confusing. Here’s what they mean: never stop going. Think about running: if you stop, you stop. A hockey player glides, which is what a lot of kids do when they get tired. Instead of telling the kids to “move their feet,” Coach Pete told them to “keep pedaling,” which they understood right away. He also reminded them to “make a move.” “You hardly ever beat a goalie because you’ve got a great shot,” he explained. “You beat a goalie with your brain. If you trick him and get him to move out of position, you’ll be shooting into an empty net.”

  Persistence is another key, especially over the course of a season. It’s a talent just like speed or good hands. It’s what keeps a person working when everyone else has quit. Maybe it’s obtuseness. Maybe players with that kind of talent are too dumb to know they’ve been licked. “When I played, I never sat on the bench,” the Chicago Bears safety Doug Plank told me. “You know why? I wanted to watch Walter Payton. I would stand on that sideline and just look: the way he hustled, even in games when we were hopelessly behind, you could learn from that. If you put on a tape and watch a player and cannot tell from the way he plays whether his team is ahead or behind—that’s who you want.”

  The Pee Wee As blazed through the second half of February, winning twice as much as they lost, even taking some of the games the parents had considered unwinnable. If this were a movie, and let’s face it, everything is a movie, I’d show these halcyon days in a montage. There’d be shots of kids—Micah and Barry, Broadway Jenny and Broadway Julie, Brian, Dan, Tommy and Joey—entering arenas in khakis and ties, headphones on their ears, flashing the hang-loose sign, striding onto the ice in superslow-mo, like Apollo astronauts gliding along in space helmets and silver suits. There’d be close-ups and panoramas from each game: Brian Rizzo beating the Darien goalie with a slap shot, sliding on his knees in celebration; Barry flying on a breakaway; Tommy McDermott lacing a no-look pass to Joey McDermott, who finishes the play with a one-timer; Dan doing the split and the butterfly, making every kind of save, snagging a puck out of the air—all of it set to power ballads like, “Seven Nation Army,” and “Dude Looks Like a Lady.”

  On the last day of the month, Coach Pete stuck his head in the locker room door to deliver the news: “Hey, guys. You made the state tournament.” I will not describe the ensuing scene, but instead urge you to go on the internet and look up footage of the Chicago Cubs celebrating the playoff win that put the team in its first World Series in 108 years.

  MARCH

  Many years ago, John Belushi delivered a brilliant SNL commentary on the month of March. He was specifically interested in the ways that month swings like a door between winter and spring. Starting with the cliché “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb,” he went on to describe the various ways March “comes in” and “goes out” in different parts of the world, such as Norway, where, he insisted, it comes in like a polar bear and goes out like a walrus; and Honduras, where it comes in like a lamb and goes out like a salt marsh harvest mouse; and the Maldives, where it comes in like a wildebeest and goes out like an ant, “a tiny little ant”; and South Africa, where it comes in like a lion and goes out like a different lion—“one has a mane, and one doesn’t have a mane”; and South America, where it “swims in like a sea otter and slithers out like a giant anaconda.”

  In Ridgefield in 2019, March came in like a lion and went out like the same lion. The month started and ended with a blizzard. We had rain, ice, hail, wind, frost, freeze, black ice, and flooding in the days between. The first storm consisted of pepperoni-size snowflakes that accumulated hour after hour on the narrow roads. They muffled every sound, cushioned every step. It was a cake crust, a wonderland. The dog disappeared in the snow. We saw her tail moving in the distance like a dorsal fin. We were captives in the house, waiting for plows. The drivers were giddy from lack of sleep when they finally arrived at 4:00 a.m. It was hard to tell those who’d made erratic patterns in the snow because they were exhausted from those who’d made erratic patterns in the snow because they were drunk. The second storm consisted of BB-size flakes that piled up fast. The trees were sheathed in ice at dawn, the roads slick as salesmen. Then the air warmed and the sun came out and the snow melted. The sound of cracking ice and rushing water was everywhere. The days got longer. In the morning, as you lay in bed, you’d listen to the birds at the feeder and think, “I’m going to make it.”

  The state tournament was played at Yale University’s Ingalls Rink, in New Haven, at the end of March. A famous building, it was designed in the 1950s by Eero Saarinen. It’s easy to see a relation between the rink and some of the architect’s other iconic work—the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis, the TWA Flight Center at JFK International Airport—in the sloped roof and cathedral-like interior that give the facility its nickname, the Whale.

  The tournament followed a two-round structure: each of twenty participating teams would play two games in the first round; the eight teams with the most first-round points would continue to a second round of single-elimination play that would culminate in the championship. Being the last seeds in the tournament, the Pee Wee A Bears were not expected to win a single game. We were cannon fodder, bums who’d overachieved just by making it to the Whale.

  I spent the first day of the tournament wandering the lobby, writing down the names of each club, which I spotted on equipment bags and jackets. The Fairfield Rangers. The Greenwich Cardinals. The Hamden Green Dragons. The Salisbury Redhawks. The Shoreline Sharks. The Norwich Seahawks. The Southern Connecticut Storm. The Stamford Sharks. The Colebrook Galassis. The Wallingford Rockets. The West Hartford Wolves. The Bridgeport Wizards. The Yale Bulldogs. The New Canaan Winter Club. The Danbury Doves. The Griffin Flames. The Southern Stars.

  The Pee Wee A Bears dumped their bags near the locker room and went out to watch the Ridgefield Double As play West Hartford. If I were a different sort of writer, I would end the story here, on a high, because it was a mission- accomplished moment—our kids had indeed caught the top team, the coach of which had rejected every one of them.

  The Double As raced up and down the ice, led by the best Double A in the state, a big kid named George Matoose, who would soon ascend to Triple A, then continue on to prep school. Matoose had a way of making his teammates look better than they actually were; it was his passing, which pushed and pulled kids into position. The game stayed close through two periods, when West Hartford, which had been smothering on defense, made the mistake of chasing Matoose. This opened passing lanes and left players uncovered. Matoose found every open teammate. A cascade of goals followed.

  The West Hartford Wolves had a Russian coach. You could tell by his intensity and by his accent, which could be heard all over the facility when he shouted, “Skate, you sons of bitches! Skate!”

  Our kids were outside their locker room when the game ended (Ridgefield AA 7, West Hartford 2). The hall was filled with players and parents. West Hartford came through with their helmets off, red-faced, sweating. Some were crying, others crying hysterically. This was round one, game one. It made you think, “My God, what does that coach do to them?” Then I saw him. He was wearing a gold team jacket, his dark hair slicked back—Brylcreem? pomade?—like a memory of Leonid Brezhnev. His name was stitched on his breast pocket: Gabe Petrenko. His son—the kid had the same last name on his jersey—walked a few yards behind, head down, sniffling. Coach Petrenko muttered in Russian, turned and yelled in English: “You know what you are, Dmitri? Human fucking garbage.” Dmitri followed his father into the locker room and slammed the door. Our players could hear Coach Petrenko yelling through the wall. I saw him in the lobby later. He was laughing on the phone, saying, “Yes, baby. I love you, too.”

  * * *

  If I coached, my pregame talks would be stemwinders. I’d call on the kids to “
give a hundred and ten percent” and “leave it all out on the ice.” But contemporary youth coaches tend to shy away from grand pronouncements. I’ve yet to hear one of them speak the sentence that was standard in my day: “You are the best team I’ve ever coached.” It’s as if they are afraid of saying the wrong thing and getting hung by their own words. It’s another thing we can blame on social media. Every one of the great pep talks of my childhood, riddled with words like “pussy” and “wimp,” would get a coach fired today. Coach Pete was especially subdued before the first game. He spoke softly. I was standing outside the open locker room door and had to lean in to hear him. “It’s been a long season, and you have worked hard,” he said. “Here is your chance to shine. Here is your chance to prove you can play with anyone. Just remember, forwards, stay in your lanes. And defenseman, keep the puck away from Dan, even if that means stepping in front of a shot. Now … Bears on three!”

  Parky and I had been tasked with keeping score, which meant sitting in a box near the team bench and recording every goal, assist, and penalty. We shuffled across the ice to assume our Plexiglas perch. You feel like Eichmann on trial out there, the man in the glass booth. We were playing the Bridgeport Wizards, a team that had already beaten us twice this season. They blew us out in the fall. We played them closer in the winter. That game had ended with Duffy Taylor swinging his stick like Joe Pesci in a mob movie. Our kids did not seem to remember any of that, though. They played like a new team at the start of a new season.