The Code

by Gare Joyce

  With this one exception, Hanratty seemed like the Beloved Icon. He always smiled, always cracked wise, always perched a cheap stogie in his pie-hole. (You had an open invitation to enforce a no-smoking bylaw on him and have hockey fans stone you. Fact is, he mostly gnawed at an unlit cigar that lasted from his morning coffee to last call.) He evoked a time when men were men and helmets were for soldiers. You just sort of imagined that his home looked like a wing of the Hockey Hall of Fame. If you loved this game, you loved Red Hanratty. This was the flipside of the Rocket Richard–Teeder Kennedy vignette: Red Hanratty was the Beating Heart of Oldetime Hockey.

  Hanratty was coach of the Peterborough alums that night. His former players, the guys who went on to fame and millions in the league, came out to the old-timers show just to pay homage to the Ol’ Redhead. As soon as they heard him bark they were sixteen all over again. When they posed with him for a team photo that would appear in the local rag the next morning, they all beamed like they had just won the Cup. The Peterborough alums lineup had three Hall of Famers: Bobby Reagan, Reggie Hofferman, and Eddie Talbot. All had dropped Hanratty’s name in their acceptance speeches at their induction ceremonies, putting him at the top of the list of Those Who Made It All Possible. Talbot, in fact, a three-time fifty-goal scorer but in a lot of ways a social misfit, went into great detail about his indebtedness to Hanratty twice in his incoherent ramble and forgot to mention his own wife and parents.

  Whatever Hanratty did to make these guys players is at best mysterious and to my mind debatable. I always say genetics is destiny. Hanratty turned out the most players because he was around the longest and he did less to hold them back. That’s not a knock. Hanratty himself admitted that he always believed the worst thing you can do is overcoach talent. Self-deprecation was the perfect coaching philosophy for Hanratty to bring to this old-timers game. Hanratty’s chief responsibility this night—check that, his only responsibility—was something he had a lot of practice at. He had to make sure the beer was cold.

  At the end of the game the beer was cold. At the end of the night, so was Red Hanratty.

  7

  * * *

  The old-timers game ended up 12–10, and when the goaltenders went down you would have needed a crane to get them back up on their skates. I pulled off the impossible and went scoreless, pointless, again. Most of the time I was the youngest guy on the ice, too.

  The Peterborough alums won, natch, while Hanratty and Pembleton jawed at each other. Thankfully, the cheers and hoots drowned out a bunch of f-bombs that were attached to aspersions about manhood, character, heritage, and intelligence or lack thereof. The two old pros invoked incidents, most of them Pembleton’s embarrassments, that were league lore. They made it look like it was real. Or maybe made it look like an act. I couldn’t really tell which and Pembleton was right standing behind me, reeking of vodka.

  I had a beer in the dressing room after the game. A chamber of commerce type came by to thank me and hand me an envelope with gas money and a gift certificate good for seventy dollars toward a dinner for two, drinks extra, at the Falling Water Café.

  Who knew Frank Lloyd Wright worked in Peterborough? (I was going to drop that line on receipt of the comp but already had my fill of blank stares.)

  All in all, a night well passed. Nobody who played got hurt, though everyone was going to be sore as hell the next morning. Small blessings. For me it didn’t even take that long. Arthur had my knee pulsing like the windshield wipers on the ninety-minute drive back to the Big Smoke. By the next day, Arthur was the only one who would remember that I played in the charity game.

  I sent a text to Hunts on the drive back—fear not, I did it while sitting in the full-service lane at a gas station just outside the city limits.

  No sick leave necessary. Hurtin’, chronic but not terminal.

  It was about midnight but he was on the West Coast. He knew about the game in Peterborough.

  Chek fine print of yer contract: old-timers injury gets unpaid leave only.

  One beer in the showers hadn’t fully rehydrated me, so I parked trusty Rusty Beemer in the underground lot and limped over to the Merry Widow for a pint or three and a quick update on the league’s late games from Nick the barkeep, father of the next phenom, sez he. Hearing the latest exploits of young Pericles was a small price to pay for good company and a seemingly endless stream of jokes. I’ve never had the heart to tell Nick that a kid in bantam double-A, not his team’s best player or even its fourth best, should look to the game for a good time and nothing more. I’ve always suspected that Perry will follow his father into the biz and become the hole-in-the-wall’s proprietor. I told Nick that he missed his calling—any guy who can watch four games simultaneously at 7:30 and four more at 10:00 and give you eight game summaries from memory while keeping the regulars’ orders straight would make a hell of an air-traffic controller. Then again, air-traffic controllers don’t bet on the planes landing safely.

  “Your company won tonight,” Nick said. It was always easy to tell if Nick had put a check mark or an X beside the L.A. game, and it was plain that tonight my team had cost his kids new shoes. He knew that, given my team’s favourable outcome, he wouldn’t have to pull out the Bushmills and pour me a double. Sure enough, the score came up in the news scroll below the highlights: L.A. 5, Calgary 3. My ragged colleagues on our patchwork staff would sleep the sleep of scouts knowing that their jobs were safe, which was ever a night-to-night proposition. I already knew the score before I walked in. I was listening to updates on satellite radio sports.

  “My company needed a win,” I said. “It was starting to feel like we hadn’t won in a month.”

  “You guys took two of three on the road, what, ten days ago. It’s not that bad.”

  “That’s how it looks to you, not me. If you had a bunch of rich guys in here …”

  “I wish,” Nick said, looking down the bar at the unwashed and broken men staring at the last inch of their drinks and rooting around their pockets for elusive change. In some bars they’d be called regulars. Nick called his sorry lot the Irregulars.

  Some had names. Polo had just one, a two-syllable handle instead of the three names he was given at birth that totalled over forty letters. Polo was on his BlackBerry, looking at game summaries, counting goals and assists for his all-Czech team in the Merry Widow hockey pool. Some had jobs. A bunch of paramedics anaesthetized themselves after twelve-hour shifts delivering fallen seniors, stabbed wannabe gangstas, and all-thumbs home handymen to the emerg at East Gen. They had their own cachet, separate from those who wore hospital blues and mostly pushed brooms or delivered food trays to patients. A lot more were familiar faces whose stories went untold and whose source of drinking money was unknown and uncertain.

  It was comforting that none ever bothered me with questions about the game or players I knew. They weren’t the least bit impressed. The worst cases didn’t go there to be social. Exactly the opposite. They went there to forget themselves.

  I ignored Nick ignoring me and carried on with my rant. “… those rich guys would be asking you to turn off the game and put on a business channel where they can watch the stock ticker to see if Apple is down a nickel. You could drop a bomb beside them and they wouldn’t hear it. That’s human nature. Every loss is a kick in the nuts. Some are worse than others, but there’s no upside to having your whole living threatened. A kick in the nuts is a kick in the nuts …”

  My diatribe was gathering from stage four to five, but Nick drifted off into his thoughts, some graduate-level calculus, a formula factoring the night’s handle at the bar plus sales he didn’t ring in, less his lost wagers and the vigorish. The last line of these complicated equations would be his stake for an all-night poker game in the basement of a souvlaki palace in Greektown. Little did his countrymen suspect that they were regularly cleaned out by a high school dropout Pythagoras.

  My BlackBerry pinged. Another text from Hunts. He must have been channelling me. Did he know I w
as in a bar? We’re tight. As soon as the draft hit my lips, he probably broke out in a cold sweat.

  Did you ask Red about Mays????

  Billy Mays Jr. was seventeen going on two point five million.

  In four months’ time he was going to be selected in the top ten of the league’s draft, quite possibly top five. As a result of a pretty wizardly shell game orchestrated by Hunts on the trading floor the previous June, we owned Columbus’s first-rounder, a deadsure lottery pick. Mays was way up on our list, even though his left arm had been in a sling a few days back, the result of a hit from behind a couple of weeks earlier. He was Red Hanratty’s leading scorer this year. He’d shattered a Peterborough rookie scoring record that had stood for twenty years. He was six feet three and two hundred pounds as lean as a slice of deli turkey, and blond with a jaw borrowed from an actor on the soaps. With his arm now out of the sling, he had nothing but open ice and a league owner’s open wallet to look forward to.

  Scouting reports from the L.A. crew read like mash notes to Tiger Beat. The last and representative entry in our database was filed by Kapps, our impossible-to-impress septuagenarian part-time bird dog in Sudbury: Upside is franchise forward, all-star. That passed for a discouraging word among the twenty game reports on Billy Jr. this season.

  Red Hanratty said that Billy Mays was the best pro prospect he’d ever coached, and, though the coach was a famous BSer and hype artist, no one doubted it. That meant Hanratty rated Mays a better pro prospect than two guys who wear Cs in the league right now: Floody in Phoenix and Rox in Edmonchuk, who just happened to be the youngest captain in the league. Better than the three Hall of Famers who came out for the old-timers game. Better than two other guys in the lineup that night who would have plaques in the Hall of Very Good: Mel Malinowski (394 career goals, including a Cup winner) and Kevin O’Brien (a.k.a. K.O. the Destroyer).

  My GM figured that if I was in Peterborough I might as well get the goods on Baby Jesus from the Grand Old Man. It was something the GM and I had talked about, but I had decided to wait until the next time I saw Peterborough play. Red probably had a jar going and was being pulled in every direction all night long. Better to handle it when I could buttonhole him privately (and introduce myself if necessary), I thought.

  Just asked around.

  A white lie. A lot of guys freeze when you pump them. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, you have to keep your radar on if you want the Juice Not from Concentrate. Especially if you want the Juice with Lots of Pulp. I was listening hard (and not just for someone to cheer for me in the pre-game introductions). You have to scope things out like a security camera, replaying the significant moments, the character tells after the fact. Life as a scout is a stakeout, chum.

  Golden Boy came into the room before the game to shake hands with the legends. He introduced them to Markov, the Russian import who was his linemate, his roommate, and his special project. A lot of Russian kids are phlegmatic, but not the one Mays had in tow. Markov was engaged, pretending to recognize names and understand what was going on around him. The one thing he did know was that his friend owned the room.

  Seventeen-year-old Billy Mays Jr., the Peterborough mayor, and Giuseppe Visicale were going to be dropping the puck for the photo-op opening faceoff, and it was the ironing-boardstiff Waspy mayor and the glowering, gold-chained Sicilian who looked star-struck. On the sidelines applauding were the mayor’s enablers, the geriatric town councillors, and Visicale’s posse, a couple of thumb-breakers and his consigliere. The applause for the mayor and the hockey boss was polite. A thunderous roar went up for Mays, and he gave a wave that made it seem like he’d done this all his life.

  Standing on the blueline while they rolled out the red carpet, I got a laugh out of Hank Royden, a scout for Montreal. “What’s wrong with this kid that he can’t sing the anthem?” In the folds of scar tissue under his visor Royden rolled his eyes. “Too pretty to play this game,” quoth he. The gods of the game won’t punish Royden, for he knew not what he was saying.

  Those teenagers who are destined for a big place in the game get it. They do the right things. They say the right things. They know the dressing-room etiquette like they wrote it. Polite. Deferential. Comfortable in their own skin. Well turned out in appearance. Social. So it was with this kid. Meeting the legends pre-game, he didn’t walk around the room so much as glide. Tomlin buddy-buddied him, acting like he’d been the kid’s best friend going back to kindergarten, and the kid suffered it— nota bene, this high school kid wasn’t impressed by Tomlin and knew that he shouldn’t be. That’s genius-level social intelligence needed to handle all the crap that’s inevitable when you convene a couple dozen egos on a daily basis with millions at stake.

  He was accompanied on the tour of the room by his father, William Mays Sr., who had once been a player in Peterborough and was now a player of a different sort: a guy who wore ten-thousand-dollar suits and stared out smugly from the cover of business magazines that promised to reveal the secrets of his investment successes. On this count they failed, but they did manage to fully portray his vanity (dramatic changes in appearance that might be traced back to a plastic surgeon’s office, a syringe full of testosterone, and a bottle of Grecian Formula), his ostentatious lifestyle (an over-the-top mansion on Post Road that had riled powerful neighbours enough that it ended up as a landmark city bylaw case), and his love of the usual expensive toys (a collection of vintage sports cars and a Rolls to run household errands in).

  William Mays knew how one company could swallow up another for fun and profit and, if his critics were to be believed, how a CEO could raid a pension fund. I don’t know about that, but he did know hockey. He had gone around the room, knew our names. It seemed like millions and billions demanded that work never stop—he had fumbled a file folder and a vibrating iPhone, spilling his coffee on my sweater, when he extended a thick right mitt for a vise-like handshake. He posed for pictures standing beside each of us: He was being tailed by a photographer and an authorized biographer for what was sure to be the bestselling business book of the coming season. He went up on his tiptoes just before the flash.

  I find it hard to be impressed by a kid who grows up with all the advantages, but I was by Billy Jr. He was snagged by the local radio reporter for an interview and sounded more professional than the guy asking the questions (and, it goes almost without saying, than Harley Hackenbush). He went into great detail about his shoulder, sprained and bruised “but no damage to the rotator cuff. This sling is strictly precautionary. I could be out of it this week after I go in for an assessment.” He won the league’s academic award last season and was a lock to win it again. Carrying a full load of math and science. Story goes that he finished in the top ten of the provincial high school math competition. Fluently bilingual. Christ, why don’t we just make the kid the commissioner and be done with it? (A: overqualified.)

  His father had played for Red Hanratty and scored fifteen goals in his one season in junior. The old man did get full marks for turning out a kid like this, though. Maybe the mother was a player—happens more than you know. Either way, I figured, you had to give sire and mare a lot of credit for turning out this colt.

  After the game I snagged Spike, the long-time Peterborough trainer, for an icepack for the road and dropped Mays’s name. If you ever want the unvarnished truth, the most likely source, the one without an agenda, is a team’s trainer. This, however, was a testimonial. I swear, Spike’s tears flowed as a rivulet along an eighty-four-stitch scar where he caught a skate blade in his playing days. “As good as he’s been for us, it’ll be hard to see him move on, but there’s nothing more we can do for him here,” he said. I figure I could spend two lifetimes in the game and never meet another trainer going wistful on me.

  “When that kid came down with mono last fall he wanted to be on the ice the next day,” Spike said. “We had to fight ’im to get ’im to rest like he was supposed to. When he came back, he played as hard as any two kids in the league. Ju
st an unlucky break, him doing up his shoulder and all. Maybe it was for the best. He was working real hard—skating, the bike, lower-body work that no kid would get through—to get ready for the playoffs, and I guess he wasn’t really over the mono when he came back in November. They had to shut him down cold the other day. I dunno when he’s back.”

  Work ethic, three check marks. I asked Spike what the downside was, because there always had to be one. “Meddling father and a divorced mother who’s a piece of work,” he said. It meant nothing to me. Every coach or trainer thinks a kid has meddling parents unless he’s an orphan. As for the mother being a piece of work, Spike would never be up to the job with any skirt. Given his trade, days pass without a woman speaking to him unless she’s asking him, “More coffee?” His bosses were old men, his charges teenage boys, and women were on the other side of the Plexiglas. Alas, a lot like the found-ins at the Muddy Waters.

  Barside, I tried to encapsulate the background check in 140 characters or less. I looked at the draft taps and saw the handle of the Irish brew that’s my private stock at my local.

  I heard the kid fart and it sounded like a harp.

  I hit Send and looked up at the widescreen. A fight between two knuckleheads in the league. Oh yet again, the elemental soul of the game, I thought. Just at that point my eyes drifted down to the news scroll at the bottom of the screen. I wanted to see who’d scored for us against Calgary. The scroll of game scores and goal scorers gave way to a news flash.

  BREAKING NEWS: JR. COACH RED HANRATTY RUSHED TO HOSPITAL.

  I didn’t think much of it, really. The old guy overcome by a toxic level of nostalgia, I figured. Maybe he was laughing so hard at some old joke that he choked on his cigar and needed his stomach pumped.