All-Star Pride

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Of course, I knew if I even touched my dad’s wheelchair to move him away from the television, he’d yell just as loudly at me. Dad loved to hate the Commies. So when the Russians played hockey, instead of wheeling Dad away, I’d just pull up a chair and sit beside him. I’d listen to him yell the entire game, and I’d dream about the day I might play hockey on television too.

  Now I was here, with less than five minutes remaining in warm-up. Television cameras had been placed high up in the stands of the arena, ready to catch the action of game one in this all-star series. I was here to play hockey. But thoughts of Chandler kept creeping into my mind. Why had he given me that money for no reason at all? I told myself to set aside my questions and concentrate on the game.

  I was playing on the second line of this all-star team. I didn’t get onto the ice until the referee stopped the play for a routine offside call against the Russians. The first line—led by Chandler Harris—skated off the ice into our players’ box. We skated on. Jeff Gallagher from the Kamloops Blazers at center, Miles Hoffman from the Saskatoon Blades at right wing, and me from the Red Deer Rebels at left wing. Nathan Elrod from the Tri-City Americans and Adam Payne from the Seattle Thunderbirds covered the defense positions.

  I looked for my first target as we got into position for the face-off. I found him.

  The Russian number 23 had the name Klomysyk across the back of his sweater. He played right wing. I played left wing, going the opposite direction. Which meant we lined up against each other during the face-off. My goal was to make Klomysyk feel like he’d lost a head-on collision with a locomotive— enough times so he’d learn to hate going into the boards to battle for the puck.

  I glanced into his eyes as we waited for the referee to drop the puck. Beneath the half-shield visor across his face, sweat ran from his forehead into his eyebrows. His face was nearly as ugly as mine. We were the same height. His eyes were blank as we stared at each other.

  I smiled my warrior smile.

  The ref dropped the puck.

  Their center managed to knock the puck back to his right defenseman. He in turn passed it across to the left defenseman. The entire Russian team backpedaled as the two Russian defensemen continued to pass the puck back and forth.

  Jeff charged ahead and pressed hard, almost knocking the puck from one defenseman, who again slid it across to the other defenseman. Miles cut quickly toward center, not quite intercepting the cross-ice pass between the Russians. I stayed back, giving Klomysyk room, but watching him closely.

  Their other defenseman snagged the puck. I saw his head turn as he checked out his options. He saw Klomysyk open. Or he thought he saw Klomysyk open.

  I practice judging how much room I can give without losing my guy completely. Maybe it’s like playing cornerback in football. You want to tease the quarterback into thinking the receiver is open, only to find the juice to step up and intercept the ball.

  It’s risky. In football, the safer play is to cover the receiver so completely the quarterback looks for a better target. At the very least, you should try to just knock the ball down if the pass is made, because if you miss the interception, it’s good-bye and lights out. The receiver will be on his way to an easy touchdown while you’re still looking at your hands and wondering what happened to the football.

  In hockey, it’s not quite as risky to make your man look open. If I missed, he wouldn’t have a sure goal. But he’d be past me, probably with a couple of other guys, and in a good position to put real pressure on our defensemen. Not only that. To me it’s a matter of pride that I never miss.

  I didn’t this time.

  The Russian defensemen fed the puck up-ice to Klomysyk, who was cruising along the boards. I timed it so my legs were in full speed. Just before the puck reached Klomysyk, I was already moving like a buffalo with its tail on fire.

  Klomysyk put his head down briefly to watch the puck come to his stick. That was the moment I hit him. Full shoulders. Full hips. Full body contact at warp speed.

  He was one big Russian. He was so solid that for a moment I wondered if I’d hit him or if I’d missed and hit the boards.

  Then I heard the grunt of the air leaving his lungs as he collapsed like a popped balloon. He fell to his knees. I stood above him. The puck squirted to Adam Payne.

  Jeff and Miles hadn’t made it back yet, so they were still up the ice and wide open for a pass from Adam. Adam fired it to Jeff, who was busting toward the Russian net and cutting between the two defensemen. The puck landed perfectly on Jeff’s stick, and in that flash of time we had our first breakaway.

  I didn’t move from where I stood over the fallen Klomysyk. I just watched and grinned as Jeff pulled the puck left, faked a backhand, pulled it back to the right and lifted the puck over the diving goalie.

  One to nothing for us!

  Klomysyk pushed himself to his feet, glared at me and said some loud, fast words in Russian.

  I just smiled. It was nice to know when a person was appreciated for his good work.

  chapter four

  A knock on our hotel room door woke us up for breakfast the next morning. My roommate for this tour, Nathan Elrod, bounced out of his bed and began dressing. Nathan had curly red hair. He was short and very wide, a fast skater with good hands who scored plenty of goals. This was his second year on the all-star tour to Russia. But at this moment—wearing boxer shorts decorated with Valentine hearts—he looked like anything but one of the leading goal scorers in the WHL.

  I stayed in bed, turned my gaze to the ceiling and thought about the five hundred dollars I’d placed beneath my pillow before falling asleep. Since I had gotten the money from Chandler Harris at the airport, we’d been in a whirlwind. Bus to this hotel. A four-hour nap before last night’s game. Bus back to the hotel right after the game. An entire night’s sleep. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to Chandler privately. As soon as I could, though, I would give him the money back.

  “You played a great game last night,” Nathan said from the other side of the room. He was hopping, with only one leg in his pants. “Or did I already tell you that as we were falling asleep last night?”

  “Only about a dozen times,” I said as I slid out of bed. “But you’re welcome to say it another dozen times.”

  I was glad to have Nathan as a roommate. Before we’d each been traded, we’d played together briefly on the Kamloops Blazers. More than a couple of times, we’d had late-night conversations on long bus trips. Serious discussions you never had in the locker room. Meaning-of-life discussions and questions about God and things like that, which seem easier to talk about when it’s dark and quiet and the highway is humming beneath the bus wheels.

  “You were nailing Russians left and right,” he said, grinning. “They didn’t have a chance.”

  “It did feel good,” I said. “So did the 4–0 win. I hope we can keep it going and win tonight.”

  Nathan pulled a T-shirt over his head.

  “By the way,” he said as his head popped into sight again. “Make sure to take your food bag down to breakfast with you.”

  “Why? Won’t it be easier just to take what I need?”

  Every guy on the team had arrived with three pieces of luggage. A suitcase with clothes for ten days of travel. A duffel bag filled with hockey equipment. And a food bag, almost as big as the duffel bag, filled with cereal, granola bars, jars of peanut butter, cans of mixed nuts, and other assorted foods that wouldn’t go bad without refrigeration. We’d each been told—actually ordered—to fill a bag because it was the best way to make sure you didn’t starve or get sick.

  “Why? So the hotel maids don’t steal from it. We’re in Russia. You take everything of value with you everywhere you go. Wallet, watch, Walkman, Game Boy.”

  I pulled on my pants. I didn’t have a Walkman or a Game Boy. Just an empty wallet, a cheap watch and five hundred dollars to return to Chandler Harris. “Get out of here. Maids can’t just walk in our hotel room and steal.”

 
“I’m serious.” Nathan was fully dressed now. “This is my second year on the tour, remember? People are desperate here. Poor. You should know that just from how bad the showers work. And this is one of the better hotels.”

  Cold, dribbling water was the best our shower would do, which was why we had both skipped it.

  I shrugged. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  I finished dressing.

  Nathan grinned at me as I picked up my food bag. “By the way,” he said, “if it’s anything like last year’s tour, I think you’ll find breakfast quite interesting.”

  It didn’t take me long to discover what he had meant. We walked into the large room that our team would use as an eating area. Cheap folding chairs had been set behind long wooden tables. The tables were bare, except for cutlery, empty bowls, and bottles of cola, already opened.

  I took my seat beside Nathan.

  “What’s this?” I asked him. “Where’s the milk? Juice? Water?”

  “Like I said, this is Russia. You can’t drink the water, you might get sick. Same with the milk, even when it’s not sour. And juice is too expensive.”

  He searched through his food bag for a box of cereal. It rattled his bowl as he poured. Then he took a bottle of cola and dumped it over the cereal.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he said between bites. “It’s better than eating cereal dry. And lots better than getting sick and spending hours on a toilet or, more gross, leaning over a toilet and—”

  “I get the message,” I said.

  “The worst thing is they think it’s special service to open the bottles ahead of time. So not only is the cola warm, but it’s also flat.”

  “Great.”

  He watched me pour cola into my bowl.

  “Bon appétit,” he said, “and welcome to hockey in Russia.”

  I caught up to Chandler Harris as we were filing out of the breakfast area. I pulled him aside in the hallway so we could speak privately.

  “I need to talk to you about the money,” I said. “I can’t keep it.”

  He stared at me as if I were crazy. “You can’t use five hundred dollars?”

  “Not when I haven’t earned it.”

  “You will,” he said.

  That set off major alarm bells in my head. “How?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m giving it back to you.” I reached into my pocket and brought out the wad of money. I held it out to him.

  Chandler put his hands on his hips and stared me straight in the eyes. He wore the grin he always gave goalies after scoring on them—a mean, teasing grin. “If you don’t want it, Hog, throw it out. Dump it down a toilet. Give it to beggars. Or drop it here in the hallway for the next person to pick up. I don’t care. I’m not taking it back.”

  Without another word, he walked away from me.

  Fine, I told myself. I won’t throw it out. I won’t dump it down the toilet. Or give it to beggars. Or leave it here in the hallway. I’ll keep it until I find out what he wants me to do to earn it. And then I’ll tell him no and give the money back.

  chapter five

  “Listen up, guys,” Coach Jorgensen said.

  We listened. With about thirty minutes left until the start of the second game against the Russians, we were in various stages of equipment and uniform readiness in the dressing room. But we stopped our chatter and gave full attention to the man who had just walked in.

  I had a small propane blowtorch in my hand. I had just lit it and was preparing to heat up the aluminum shaft of my hockey stick. Some players preferred to use a traditional wooden stick. I couldn’t. I tended to snap the shafts too easily. The aluminum shafts lasted longer. Only trouble was I often needed to replace the wooden blades, and the only way to do that was to heat the aluminum with a blowtorch to loosen the blade insert.

  When Matthew Martin Henley walked into the dressing room, I adjusted the valve on the blowtorch so that the blue flame barely showed and barely hissed. It would save me time relighting the flame later. I set it nearby on the floor.

  Because he had flown in the first-class section on our way here, this was my first good look at Matthew Martin Henley, the tour promoter who had put this series together. Henley had his hair spiked, shiny and short. His face was red and sweaty. He was fat and wore a three-piece navy blue suit. Although he had an unlit cigar in his mouth, ashes from previous cigars were sprinkled down the front of his navy blue suit. Not that I would let him know what I thought about his appearance. Matthew Martin Henley was the one who would be signing my paycheck if we won this series against the Russians.

  “Last night’s game wasn’t bad,” Henley said. He plucked the unlit cigar from his mouth and waved it around in his fat fingers like a baton, slashing the air to emphasize his words. “But it wasn’t good enough.”

  Not good enough? We’d shut them out four to nothing. What more did he want?

  “This ain’t no charity tour,” Henley told us. “You guys probably got that figured out. Every penny of your expenses and every penny of prize money comes out of my wallet.”

  He paused to dig in his pockets and came out with a heavy silver lighter. He waved his unlit cigar some more, as if he’d forgotten about the lighter he had just grabbed. “It works the same as last year. Our video crew patches the highlights together to make a one-hour special. Sure, the tour has seven games. What’s that? Seven hours of ice time? Figure it out, guys. Seven hours cut down to one. Only the best hockey gets put on tape. And last year’s special got good ratings. Real good ratings. You think it would hurt your pro career to get a big chunk of that hour on television? What I’m saying is each one of you should be trying to be a big hero and get your cut of the prime-time action.”

  He coughed and wheezed. Talking so much must have taken too much of an effort. I looked at his huge belly covered with enough navy blue material to make suits for three regular-sized men. I wondered when Henley had last been able to see his feet.

  Matthew Henley brought the lighter up and jammed the cigar in his mouth. He flicked a flame and drew hard on the cigar, rolling it in his mouth to light it evenly. When he finished, he held the cigar up to admire it, then blew smoke into the center of the dressing room.

  “So what I’m saying is it isn’t good enough just to win. I want you guys passing the puck less.”

  Less? This was a team game. I glanced at Coach Jorgensen to see how he was taking it. After all, Henley had just marched in and given us orders, something that was supposed to be the coach’s job. Coach Jorgensen simply stared at the ceiling. Obviously Matthew Henley signed Jorgensen’s paycheck as well.

  “You heard me,” Henley said. “Less passing. Carry the puck more. I want some tough, gritty hockey. I want some great clips for the television special.”

  He grinned at us through a blue haze of cigar smoke. “Boys, don’t think of this as hockey. Think of it as entertainment.”

  I was beginning to understand. Mainly because of what Nathan had earlier explained to me about this tour.

  Matthew Henley and his financial partners backed all of it. Our expenses. The camera crew’s expenses. The cost of renting each ice arena. The hundred thousand dollars in prize money for the team that won the best-of-seven series—two games here in Moscow, three scheduled in St. Petersburg, followed by a final two games back in Moscow.

  Apparently it had taken a lot of wheeling and dealing for Henley to put the first tour together three years earlier. First, he’d had to convince the Western Hockey League to let him approach a selection of all-star players. He had promised the league would get excellent prime-time exposure on television, plus a percentage of the profits.

  His second step had been to sign up WHL players. That wasn’t difficult. We knew we would split the prize money. Our team had twenty players. If we won, it meant five thousand dollars to me. While the guys in the NHL made much more serious money, for us players, one step below, a chance at five thousand dollars for only seve
n days of playing seemed like a good deal, especially since we would have played for nothing—just to be able to play. It didn’t hurt, either, that the high visibility of the series might help us make the NHL some day.

  Henley, in fact, would have preferred to put together an all-star team from the NHL—even if it would have cost him ten times as much. But he had found it impossible; all the players were bound by contracts and couldn’t play for anyone else in the off-season. We WHL juniors, of course, didn’t have those kinds of worries, although we all hoped for and dreamed about the day we would.

  After getting commitments from the all-stars in North America, Henley had gone to Russia and convinced them to put together a junior all-star team. Not only did he promise them a chance at the prize money, but he also gave them all the gate receipts from spectators. Nathan had explained that the Russian players couldn’t divide the money like we did. Instead, it would support the team in its travels to different tournaments around the world during the rest of the year.

  Nathan had also informed me that Henley had invested close to five hundred thousand dollars. I’d whistled. A half-million dollars.

  I’d asked why Henley and his partners would spend so much.

  Nathan had solemnly said just one word: television.

  Matthew Henley called this the East Versus West Shootout, and he reduced all seven games into a fast-paced one-hour hockey extravaganza. This television special would be released three months from now, in September, right when viewers were itching to see hockey again after the summer without it.

  Henley had already sold his special to Canadian, American and European television networks for a big profit. The networks, in turn, sold advertising space and made an even bigger profit.

  “You got me, boys?” Henley was saying. “You ain’t hockey. You’re entertainment.”