But I could only work so hard for so long before Graham crept back into my life. He never contacted me again, I assume because he too was escaping me and any further involvement that would risk my coming forward. No, the things creeping back into my life were all in my head, all part of the carnage that abuse leaves behind.
Because I wanted to run from Graham, I also wanted to run from the Princeton hockey program, believing that I had only been accepted into it through Graham’s assistance. At the same time, I wanted to succeed in the hockey program because it was everything I had ever dreamed of achieving. That had always been my nature: a drive to be the very best, a need to work as hard as possible to succeed at whatever challenge I was presented with. But that drive to succeed created a very difficult, almost impossible dynamic given my need to fail as a result of the abuse. It was the very essence of self-sabotage. Wanting to succeed, I couldn’t just walk away, I wanted to participate and succeed. Needing to fail, to show the world the true me that nobody but I could see, I could never sustain those best efforts. But because I was still trying, I had to keep working to succeed. Yet at the same time, needing to fail, I couldn’t not get in my own way.
Back and forth, over and over again.
I wanted to be free of Graham. I thought that if I could get away from him, go away to Princeton, succeed on my own, make the hockey team, and get a varsity letter, I would have shown that I could defeat him, that I could win back my life. But all of those questions were still inside me:
Why did he pick me? He must have seen I was weak. People must see me as weak. I must be some sort of joke.
Why didn’t I stop it? I must have wanted it. I deserve what I’m feeling now. I deserve to feel like his leftover garbage.
How could somebody like him control somebody like me? I’m worthless and weak. I’m not the strong, tall, intelligent, athlete people see on the outside. I’m a fraud.
What you see isn’t real. I’m a failure, a worthless and weak fraud, and I deserve failure, not success.
Can’t you see that I’m a fraud? I’m a failure, not worthy of this success. I’ll show you I’m a failure, worthless and weak.
Who am I? I’m a fraud, his garbage, his enabler. I’m somebody who doesn’t deserve to live.
BAKER RINK IS located at the southern end of campus, at the bottom of a gentle hill that rises up through the campus toward Nassau Street. Baker is an old stone structure, one of the oldest indoor hockey rinks in the United States. Just across from it is Poe Field, a vast expanse used for virtually anything athletic or recreational. One late September weekday afternoon after classes had concluded, our hockey team met at Poe for one of our usual dryland training sessions. The leaves on the trees were just starting to turn color, there was no wind of any kind, and the clichéd smell of fall was in the air. The skies were darkening as if a storm were coming, but the rain never fell. We were stretching and doing other exercises, push-ups, sit-ups, all the types of things that Graham used to have me do. And just then members of the rowing team came running by in a pack, all in their gray shorts and gray tops with Princeton emblazoned on them in our orange and black colors. On the other side of us, another team was going through its paces. In the midst of it all a group of students carrying books was walking across the way.
It was the most beautiful scene I had ever been a part of. It was everything I had ever wanted to be a part of, an athletic scene set in the midst of this idyllic academic institution. It was everything I had ever imagined Princeton would look like. It was perfect. And all I could think of was that my dad, the Grade Eight dropout hockey player, would have loved to have been there with me, would have loved to have gone to Princeton.
And then I thought exactly the same thing about Graham.
RIGHT FROM THE start, I took aggressive steps to threaten my place in the hockey program. Bruce Delventhal, the assistant varsity hockey coach who was responsible for recruiting, had been my prime contact at Princeton. Because Graham had told me that he was doing extensive work behind the scenes to ensure that I was recruited by Princeton, I assumed that Graham had been working with Bruce.
I came to see Bruce as somebody like Graham, somebody who knew everything about me. Bruce had a moustache, but other than that was very similar to Graham in both physical makeup and demeanor. Beyond that, Graham’s story about helping me get into Princeton didn’t really make sense unless Graham was very close to Bruce. Since Graham had told me that I needed his help to get into Princeton, how could I have been recruited unless Graham had called in a favor with Bruce, the gatekeeper at Princeton? But why would Bruce owe Graham a favor?
I was starting to see ghosts, to see everything as some conspiracy leading back to Graham. To me it made perfect sense that Bruce and Graham would have a special relationship of some sort and that they both knew everything about me, my innermost secrets. I was captive to that alternative reality, one that Graham had initially fostered, one that he nurtured in me, one that now made me fear Bruce, one that made me come to detest Bruce. I couldn’t process reality itself.
I had to fight them, I had to win. And the only tangible way I could win would be by earning a varsity letter from the hockey program. That varsity letter increasingly took on a deeper meaning. Yes, Graham had gotten me there. Yes, Bruce had colluded with him to make it happen. But Graham wasn’t here now and I could do this on my own. A Princeton varsity letter would be my success. Mine. Not his. Then I would be alive. Then I would be truly free of him.
Some chase a huge white whale, others tilt at windmills. Me, I had an orange “P” to strive for. To me, it embodied everything.
SELF-SABOTAGE. WHEN THE hockey equipment was passed out, the trainer mistakenly confused me with another tall freshman, a defenseman, and issued me a pair of regular hockey pants with minimal protection instead of much larger and more heavily padded goaltender pants. If you don’t know hockey this will mean nothing to you, but if you do, you’ll understand that to play in net with inadequate equipment is simply insane. I said nothing to correct the situation. Who doesn’t get proper equipment to play with? Who doesn’t put his hand up or even simply tell the equipment manager that there’s been a mistake and that he should go back and get me another pair of pants? Somebody who isn’t really there, somebody with no sense of self-worth, somebody who is nobody. When you don’t think you’re worth anything, you act as if you’re not really there.
I had brought my own equipment, no longer good enough for me to use, with me so that I’d have something to put on when I first got there. My upper-body protection was virtually nonexistent—thin felt from the 1970s and meant for younger players. At my size—at that time perhaps the tallest ever to have played the position in any meaningful way—even equipment made for professional players would have been too small, yet my old equipment was beyond insufficient and left my outer ribs, forearms, shoulders, inner legs, and lower thighs all exposed. I said nothing.
I came to see using this equipment as a type of penance for my sins with Graham, and I never got through a single practice or game without a significant bruise of one sort or another. I deserved to feel pain. Yet, as before, there was a certain peace to be found deep within my pain, for when I felt nothing but pain, I wasn’t thinking about him.
Cap Raeder, a former professional goaltender, came to work with our team for a week during that first training camp. As we were doing drills, it became apparent to him that I was doing whatever I could to avoid blocking the puck with my body, instead letting my hands do the work. That is about the worst thing a goaltender can do, but that was my innate sense of self-preservation kicking in to avoid injury during practices, using my gloves as much as possible to catch or block the puck rather than letting my unprotected body absorb the puck. Whenever games came around I was fearless, getting caught up in the excitement and feeling no pain while playing properly. But at practices, well, I owed my ongoing existence to my avoidance of the puck.
I had played this little charade in practice
for years and gotten away with it because of my performances during games. But Cap saw what I was doing, something only a real goaltender could pick up on, my reliance on my gloves while shifting my body out of position to remain safe. I only realized late in the week that he had picked up on what I was doing. I immediately went into game mode and started squaring to the puck and using my body to cover as much of the net as possible, but it was too late to show him I truly played the position. Having never seen me in a game, he had seen all he had needed to, and it was too late for me to change his mind. I had never before encountered anybody who could see what I was doing and was totally unprepared for this. The jig was up.
There are moments in life, small but significant moments, that can make all the difference. As I skated up to him and looked him in the eye, I immediately knew that he knew. I knew that I had to explain myself to him, that I had to show him the equipment that I was wearing, that I had to tell him why I was wearing it, that I had to tell him everything about why I suffered the way that I did while playing the game that I was supposed to love, that I had to tell him everything about Graham and why I was even at Princeton in the first place, and that I had no intention of wasting his time while he was there to help us, that I knew what I was supposed to be doing, and that I did it properly when I played in games. I knew that I had to take off my jersey right then and there and show him that my ribs were exposed, that my shoulders were only partially covered, that my clavicle was not completely covered. I knew that I had to take my shirt off and show him my bruises, show him that I was paying a price for all of this insanity. I knew that I had to tell him that I wanted all of this to end, that I wanted to move on and play and enjoy the game that I loved so much.
But in that moment I did nothing. Because I couldn’t admit to the stupidity of it all. Because it didn’t make any sense. Because it sounds absolutely crazy even now.
I DIDN’T MAKE the varsity team coming out of training camp in my freshman year. I played junior varsity (coached by Bruce) and earned a JV letter. I played very well. I practiced all year with the varsity team, and many of the varsity players came up to me from time to time and expressed surprise that I wasn’t on the team. But I knew why. I knew what Cap had seen and what Cap had told our coaches, who couldn’t see for themselves, coaches who, because they had been told something by an expert, now it was all they could see.
Coach Higgins placed another freshman, Tony Manory, on the varsity roster ahead of me, though we both played alongside each other in junior varsity games and he too earned only a JV letter that year. Tony was a very good guy. I liked him immensely, and he was a good goalie.
Coach Higgins revisited his decision after I dramatically outplayed Tony. My call-up, however, was short-lived. I saw him look away in disgust as I waved at some pucks in a practice warm-up shooting drill, confirming what I assume had been Cap’s assessment.
Still, he had me practice all year with the varsity team in the hope or expectation of things to come. I had some moments where I would stand out, and our star player, Ed Lee, once shook my hand in front of the team at the end of a drill after I had stopped everything he threw at me, much to his frustration.
Coach Higgins would skate up to me during practices and ask how I was doing, ask me how I felt about things, about my game. He apologized several times for not having room for me in the varsity locker room (I had the JV locker room to myself all year for varsity workouts), and he was very supportive and encouraging. He thought he was being helpful in apologizing to me. He didn’t know that he was only making me focus on darker thoughts.
My own dressing room? Bruce knows, and he’s told everybody. They all know. They have to isolate me from the rest. It’s just like Graham said, if our secret ever got out nobody would want me around, nobody would want me on their team, nobody would stand to be associated with me. They know. They have to keep me by myself. I’m not a part of this team. I never can be, so I never will be.
Hockey practices often became futile attempts to remain focused.
What am I doing here? They know, they’re laughing at me. Come on, shoot, shoot harder. Maybe I’ll get out of the way. Or maybe I’ll stop it, maybe I’ll let you hit me, hurt me. I deserve the pain. You don’t know anything about me, about who I really am. The real me, I deserve to be here, the true me is good enough, real hockey programs wanted me. But I’m here, and I get it, you know everything about me. You know who I am. I’m a fraud. I don’t deserve to be here. Shoot harder. Come on, this is a joke. What am I doing here? How did I ever let this happen to me? Why can’t I just stop it, stop all of this, and just have fun and play hockey. Why won’t this go away? Why can’t I just be normal?
That’s not exactly being in the zone and reacting naturally to the flow of the game, or practice, in front of you.
I kept fighting through the madness enough to hang around. I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t, and I kept showing up, never missing a practice, three hours a day, sometimes more, day after day. A part of me still wanted to win. And at the end of the year, Coach Higgins called me in with the rest of the varsity players to go through equipment catalogs to select new gear for the next season, pick stick brands and patterns, and discuss training plans for the summer.
IN HINDSIGHT, THAT first year of Princeton hockey was still a wonderful experience for me. A hockey trip to West Point to play the cadets, with dinner with them afterward in their immense dining hall—the one where General MacArthur addressed the cadets and said, “Old soldiers never die”—watching the plebes serve dinner to the upperclassmen. Away hockey at Yale, games at prep schools, against senior men’s clubs on the east coast. And so many laughs along the way.
Coach Higgins presented us with no shortage of humor. He was such a good man and he tried so hard to do his best for all of us. But he was a hockey man, and for the most part, we were never the hockey men he was. “The Bagger,” as he was known, was not one to suffer fools, and in terms of what the hockey world had to offer, we, unfortunately, were fools. His frustration with us was intense.
Coach Higgins was a balding man. That was unfortunate, not because there is anything wrong with being bald, but because his scalp served as a type of barometer for his level of frustration with us. He could set up the most elaborate of drills only to see them fall to pieces within seconds of us actually trying to implement them. His scalp would increasingly redden, and then further brighten, to the point where his head almost matched the orange of his Princeton jacket. And the thing is, once his scalp reached that certain color it was a very short step until he would blow the whistle, throw his stick, throw his gloves, remove the whistle from his neck and throw it too. It was at this point that we thought we knew how “The Bagger” got his name—namely, by putting his teams through “bag skates,” the name denoting a workout where you skate until you throw up into a bag. As much sense as that made, it was only later that we found out that his wife had given him the name when he was working as a checkout boy to earn money to go to school.
Some of the Coach Higgins stories were experienced directly. Others were passed down as if from the hockey gods. From “A goes to B, B goes to C, and C goes to One,” to “Blue jerseys down there, red jerseys down there, yellow jerseys down there, and gold jerseys down there”—yellow and gold, of course, being the same color and certain players literally doing pirouettes trying to figure out where to go—the stories are told with affection. But the classic Coach Higgins story involves his assessment of the modern economy. One early evening at a practice, the team not performing well and the Coach Higgins scalp-o-meter rising to increasingly dangerous levels, he chose a different approach. Blowing his whistle, he called the team over to the boards and in his deep Boston accent implored the team to work harder. “Men, you gotta work hahhd. You gotta work hahhdah. You can’t just loaf around. You gotta work. You gotta focus. You guys, look around. You got everything. This place, you got everything. But you loaf! But you’re not working hahhd enough! You gotta work hahhd
!!! You’re not… you’re not… you gotta… you gotta… IT’S WHY THERE’S SO MUCH UNEMPLOYMENT IN THIS COUNTRY!!!!!”
I HAD HOPED that things would be better in my second year, that maybe, just maybe, after spending the summer in Winnipeg and consciously avoiding the places that would bring back bad memories, I could say that I had made peace with my past and move forward. Maybe things would be different and offer a new start.
Instead, on arriving back on campus, I felt a crushing realization that things would be exactly the same no matter how hard I tried. In fact, because there was less distraction arriving as a sophomore, because things were less new and patterns had already been established, it was actually worse. The published college hockey scouting report pinned to our locker bulletin board, the one touting me as the new Princeton goalie who had big skates to fill with the graduation of our senior goalie, Ron Dennis, did nothing to take away my certainty as to what was about to happen.
The hockey equipment that Coach Higgins and I picked out in his office? I never asked for it when we started up the next year, and it sat, unused, while I continued to wear my old, undersized, flimsy stuff. Insanity.
During my medical I sat down for my eye test.
“Greg, what’s this letter? OK, what are these? Now these?”
“I can’t make those out.”
“You’ll need to get glasses or contact lenses.”
“OK.”
Except I did nothing. Breakaways? Easy. Shots from longer range? Much more difficult. Insanity.
I Am Nobody Page 10
