by Jack Falla
“Who’s she going with?” I asked.
“You’ll be surprised,” Cam said.
“Christ, does high school ever end?” I said. “OK. I’ll bite. Who?”
“No one,” he said, standing up and heading for the back of the plane.
* * *
We were to play the Rangers in the new 10,000-seat SportsPlex on the UVM campus, the one that recently replaced the old 4,035-seat Carter Field House that Cam and I had played in and that Cam’s grandfather donated. The Cart was one of the great old barns in college hockey. The university was going to tear it down but it’s still standing because of something Cam’s father said to the university trustees. Cam’s dad—who refused to give any money to the SportsPlex—said that if they pulled down Carter Field House he would personally go to the new library wing he and Diana had donated “and tear it down brick by brick until you have to find a goddamn welfare hotel to store all those volumes of Shakespeare and that mither-ficking Chaucer.” I thought the Olde English was a nice touch.
The Cart is shaped like a blimp hangar with this big curved roof. The walls of the concourses are covered with framed photographs of former teams and players. We found a picture of Cam blocking a shot in a game against St. Lawrence and a photo of me robbing Paschal Fleming on that breakaway in the BC game the night I got tickets for Lisa. There I was holding the puck in my glove in front of the goal line with the rest of me sprawled in the net. I’d embellished the save by holding the pose longer than was necessary, something I used to do in college when I got carried away with the crowd and the band and the general mayhem and maybe with an inflated sense of my own importance.
Cam and I walked from the Cart to the SportsPlex, one of those new places with private suites, a souvenir shop, wide concourses, huge concession stands, and restrooms big enough to hold a barn dance. “Great place to eat and take a leak,” Cam said. The new arena is used for basketball and hockey. Men’s and women’s hoops are big at Vermont, bigger than when Cam and I were there. We came across a display case with photos of former UVM women’s basketball greats. There was Faith McNeil, number 31, hair in a ponytail, high cheekbones and squinty gunfighter eyes adding a menacing intensity to her even then regal features. The photo showed her launching a jumper from the corner. “She wasn’t afraid to jack it up,” I said. “Even with the game on the line.”
“Especially with the game on the line,” Cam said. “Girl had brass ovaries. Still has ’em. You should see her portfolio. Faith’s not exactly risk averse.”
The caption under the photo read: “Faith McNeil: America East Rookie of the Year … Two-Time America East Second All-Star … One-Time First All–Star and All–New England … Four-Time Academic All-America.” She was an alpha female even then.
We had a light skate midafternoon on Wednesday just before the Vermont varsity’s regular practice. I’d showered and dressed and was sitting on the UVM bench watching the players—the goaltenders mainly—and waiting for Cam, who was doing an interview with the Burlington Free Press. As soon as I sat down, the goalie on my right skated out of his net toward me. “Excuse me, you’re J. P. Savard, right?”
“What’s left of him,” I said.
“I’m Rudy Evanston. I met you when I was a kid. I was one of Lisa Quinn’s patients. I heard about you and Lisa from Coach Indinacci. I’m sorry about, uh … what happened.”
I was so shocked all I said was, “Holy Moly. Rudy Evanston. I remember you. Jeez, you’ve come a long way.” I didn’t want to say that when I first met him in the cancer ward I thought he was a dead boy walking.
“Been cancer-free for nine years,” he said. “Scary waiting for the test results every six months. Beats the alternative though.” He told me he was in his senior year but he’d redshirted his freshman year, so he had two seasons of eligibility left and he thought he had a shot to start or at least split the job with a freshman Indinacci had recruited.
“How’s Coach Marco treating you?” I asked.
“Coach sure knows some horny women tutors in the Academic Support Group,” he said.
“Hey, Rudy, don’t talk to this guy. He’ll wreck your game.” It was Marco Indinacci skating toward us. “Don’t set foot on the ice, JP. If the NCAA catches a pro on the ice with these kids they’ll launch an investigation. It’ll be death by committee meeting.… Rudy, get in the net.”
I shook hands with Rudy and wished him luck. “Luck doesn’t have much to do with it,” he said. “Got to work at it.”
“Kid’s got one of the greatest attitudes I’ve ever seen,” said Indinacci as soon as Rudy was out of earshot. “Sat on the bench most of the last two years. Never complained. Worked his ass off in practice. I think he’s my starter.”
“How much longer you going to coach?”
“I don’t know. This year and next will give me twenty-five. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe not. I still like it. Beats working.… Hey, JP, I gotta go run this circus. I’ll be at your game tomorrow.”
I was still watching practice when Cam slipped up behind me. “Remember when we thought this was good hockey?” he said. “Now it looks like they’re moving in slow motion.”
Speed is the main difference between college hockey and the NHL. Not so much individual player speed but the quickness with which players make decisions and move the puck. Speed kills. And there’s nothing it kills faster than false hope of an NHL career.
Cam showed up and we boarded the bus for the hotel. I made a mental note to tell the Bruins’ scouts to check out Rudy Evanston. And to bring along the Grit-O-Meter or whatever scouts use to measure the size and depth of a kid’s heart.
* * *
There was no team dinner Wednesday, so while most of the guys headed for downtown Burlington restaurants—and some tried their luck trolling for college chicks—Cam and I took a cab to the Inn at Essex, where the New England Culinary Institute runs a gourmet restaurant.
A lot of players cheat on their wives and girlfriends on the road. Hell, a few of them cheat when we’re home. Cam isn’t one of them. And not to sound self-righteous, but I wasn’t either in the years I was married. Even now I don’t go looking, but I’m not one to pass up an empty net. I had a pretty good night with that lady caddy Serge Balon hooked me up with at his golf tournament. “She’ll regrip your irons,” as Serge put it. Then last January there was Deirdre the TV sideline reporter in Ottawa. I wasn’t starting that game and the team bench was crowded so I sat in a folding chair in the runway where Deirdre did her stand-ups. Stand-ups are live reports from ice level where the reporter gives injury updates and stuff while fans behind her wave like fools at the camera and the people in front stick pens up their nose trying to make the reporter laugh on air. Deirdre did good stand-ups. But not as good as the one we combined on after the game under the five-speed shower at the Château Laurier. I suspected Sheri the Equestrienne and Missy Taylor the Patriots Dance Team Coordinator played by the same rules. But by hanging out with Cam I cut down on what the priests in my parish used to call “occasions of sin.”
At dinner we talked about the team and whether or not we had enough talent and grit—grit is a blend of passion and courage; it’s what supports talent—to make a serious run at winning Boston’s first Cup since 1972 and the days of Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito. We figured we had a good core group and that winning it all would come down to our top guys staying healthy and playing like top guys. That and goaltending.
A team can dress twenty players for a game and we usually carry twenty-five on our roster. But there were only a half dozen guys who—with Cam, Quig, and me—would determine how far we’d go.
Phil “Flipside” Palmer is Cam’s partner on defense. Flipside is our music expert, a human discography of rock, rap, jazz, pop, classical, and country. Only guy in the world besides the Kingsmen who knows the words to “Louie Louie.” One day last season Takagi “Taki” Yamamura, a Japanese-Canadian and our second-line center, came into the room and said, “Hey, Flipper, betcha don’t k
now the only Japanese song by a Japanese singer to chart in the U.S. Top Forty.” Without even looking up from the stick he was taping, Flipside said, “‘Sukiyaki’ by the late Kyu Sakamoto, 1963. Covered in the eighties by A Taste of Honey.” You don’t screw around with Flipside.
Bruno Govoni is our number three defenseman and a great penalty killer, which is a good thing because, otherwise, he’s an immature punk. Bruno is a strip club and porn fan. The ring tone on his cell phone isn’t a ring at all but the recorded orgasmic moanings of Canadian porn star Loretta “Lash” LaRue. Of course Cam and I know his phone number and dial it at strategic moments. Like last season when his phone went off—so to speak—during our meeting with the Sisters of Charity about a hospital fund-raiser. “Whoa. Get back, Loretta,” Bruno said, taking out his phone and shutting off Loretta midmoan. A couple of nuns smiled.
Our first-line center and top scorer is Jean-Baptiste “JB” Desjardin. JB will score forty to fifty goals a year and get close to a hundred points. He’ll also irritate most of the English-Canadian guys on the team because he’s an outspoken separatist. JB thinks Quebec should separate from the rest of Canada and form a new French-speaking country. “Hard to build a national economy on doughnut shops and chain-saw repair,” Cam tells him just to piss him off.
Jean-Baptiste’s right winger is Luther Brown, an African-Canadian from Niagara Falls, Ontario. Luther almost always has his headphones on. For his first three seasons on the team I figured he was listening to Dr. Dre or Ludacris or various rappers who sing about hos and bitches and going down to the candy store and other lyrics you can’t play at the junior prom or in pregame warmup. One day last season when he was taking off the headphones before practice I asked Luther whom he was listening to.
“Count Basie,” he said.
Rex Conway, another of our forwards, is a combination shit disturber and Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Rex could score five goals in a game but he wouldn’t get on TV because every producer knows they’d blow the start of the ten o’clock news while Rex talked about how he owed his goals “to my personal relationship with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” just as if it were Jesus and not JB and Luther who’d been feeding him the puck all night.
Taki Yamamura, who can play wing as well as center, is the fastest skater in the league but not even the best athlete in his own family because that has to be his wife, Su, a principal dancer with the Boston Ballet. Taki brought some of us to the opening of The Nutcracker last November. We had one of those eight-seat private boxes like Abe Lincoln got himself shot in. At intermission—or “halftime” as Kevin Quigley called it—we hit the champagne pretty hard. Had a couple of glasses in the lobby and brought a tray of them back to our box. So when Su, as the Dew Drop Fairy, did a beautiful grande jete—a leap in which she hung in the air like Kobe Bryant—we clapped and whistled. Later we booed the army of mice and Quigley threw a plastic champagne glass at the Rat King. Taki told us the next day that Su said if he ever brought us to the ballet again she’d do things to him that would make Iwo Jima look like a Boy Scout jamboree.
We’ll have a dozen other guys shuttling up and down from Providence. We call them the Black Aces. Packy calls them spare parts. The Mad Hatter calls them flotsam and jetsam.
* * *
At dinner with Cam on the night before our preseason game with the Rangers, I was set to plunge a dessert fork into the Inn at Essex’s killer crème brûlée when Cam said, “We really gotta have it between the pipes this season, JP.”
“What the hell have you had for the last nine years?” I said, miffed that Cam seemed to have forgotten that I consistently put up good numbers and usually pass up a potential three-day midseason vacation and sex rodeo with a Sheri the Equestrienne by getting myself picked for the All-Star Game. The only mark on my rap sheet is that three or four times a year I’ll let in a long one.
“This can be a special year, JP. Gotta stay dialed. Can’t let in one of those rollers like against Montreal.”
I looked up from the crème brûlée. “You son of a bitch you heard everything Lindsey said.”
Cam was chuckling now.
“Your own daughter is tuning me up and you let her.”
“What’d you want me to do? Cross-check her into the living room? Besides”—he was laughing now—“she was right.”
“It was one stinkin’ goal.”
“Cost us the game.”
“It was a best-of-seven series for Christ’s sake, Cam.”
“Cost us home ice.”
“Think of all the saves I made.”
“That goal was like letting in a sectional sofa.”
“I’ll get even, Cam. Payback’s a bitch, babe.”
* * *
Cam was joking but he’d made a point. It’s harder to be a good good-team goalie than a good bad-team goalie. A good bad-team goalie knows he’s going to get a lot of shots—a lot of chances to be a star—and his team isn’t expected to win, so there’s less pressure. All a good bad-team goalie has to do is keep it close, and because what a goalie does is so obvious to fans, he’s a hero. It’s different on contending teams like ours. There’s more pressure because there’s more at stake. The job isn’t about making forty saves a game. It’s about making the two or three saves that make winning possible. Goaltending for a good team is less about being a star than about overcoming fear, injury, fatigue, sickness, circumstance, and other people’s mistakes to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. Not some of the time. All of the time.
* * *
We beat the Rangers 5–1 Thursday night. It was a typical preseason game. I didn’t recognize half of the Rangers players because they were all minor leaguers auditioning for jobs. Most of them would end up back in the AHL. But the game meant more than most exhibitions because part of the proceeds went to the Lake Champlain Medical Center, where private donations were funding one of those hostels where parents can stay while their kids are being treated.
There must’ve been a lot of Vermont fans in the building, because Cam and I got cheered every time we touched the puck even though the Rangers were supposed to be the home team. Cam scored one of his rare goals—slapshot from the right point that dinged in off of the crossbar—and the fans chanted, “Go, Cats, Go.” The college atmosphere made me think of the great times I’d had playing in Burlington. A minute later I blew the shutout by giving up a sixty-footer. It was embarrassing. The first thing you want to do is smash your stick over the crossbar, partly to let out the frustration and partly as a cheap way of publicly apologizing for your gaffe. But I’d learned not to do that. I learned it the same way I learned everything else I knew about goaltending—the hard way. It was mostly Chantal Lewis’s fault. Chantal and I were freshmen at St. Dominic’s High School. She was a cheerleader. I was the JV goalie. I thought she was prettier than a five-goal lead, which is the main reason I never got up the nerve to talk to her. She used to show up for the third period of some of our games because the varsity played the next game and she was dating a sophomore defenseman. Chantal Lewis was worth a goal a game to the opposition any time I knew she was in the rink. And knowing she was there wasn’t hard, because only a dozen or so people came to JV games. Take Chantal Lewis out of my high school and I would’ve had a better goals-allowed average and more than one college scholarship offer. It was a Saturday in February when I went out for the third period and saw Chantal and her cheerleader friends sitting in the stands behind my goal. We had a one-goal lead at the time but not for long because in the first minute I let in a shot that skidded under the stick blade that I should have had on the ice. Embarrassed and frustrated I smashed my goal stick over the crossbar. Right away our coach pulled me out.
“Grab some pine,” he said as I took a seat on the end of the bench and watched our backup goalie play—and play well—in a game we’d go on to win 4–2.
“You know why I pulled you?” Coach asked me after the game.
“Because I let in a bad goal,” I said.
“Guess again.”
“Because I smashed my stick?”
“You’re getting close,” Coach said. “I pulled you because you showed how much you were hurt. JP, in the goaltending business you never—ever—show how much you’re hurt. Get up, shut up, and stop the next shot.”
* * *
About a half hour after our exhibition win over the Rangers I was walking across the rink parking lot to our bus when Marco Indinacci caught up with me. “Good game, Ace, except for that last goal,” he said. “Hey, you asked me when I was going to retire,” Marco said. “What about you? When you going to hang up the tools of ignorance?”
“Four or five seasons,” I said. “One more contract.”
“Don’t stay too long, JP,” my old coach said. “There aren’t many happy endings in the NHL.”
* * *
It was after 2 a.m. when the bus pulled up to the Château Frontenac. Packy told us we had practice at Le Colisee from eleven to noon.
I’m an early riser, which is a good thing if you want to get one of the few copies of the Toronto Globe and Mail at the Frontenac’s front desk. I think breakfast with the sports section is one of life’s minor pleasures. I was reading an NHL Notes column while finishing my coffee when I saw the news that, in the aftermath of the Rangers’ loss to us, New York had called up my old UVM teammate Gaston Deveau. I knew most NHL GMs thought Deveau was too small—he’s about five feet nine, 160 pounds—to play in the the Show. So Gaston went overseas and for six seasons tore up Europe like the plague. The Rangers signed him two years ago but buried him in the minors. I was happy he’d get his first shot at the bigs.
* * *
We coasted through practice. Guys were more interested in what restaurants and clubs they’d hit than in Packy’s penalty-kill and power-play drills. Bruno Govoni tried to round up a party to hit a suburban strip club. He asked Rex Conway to go but our Christian right winger said he wasn’t a big fan of strip clubs because, as Rex put it, “Like Moses ye shall see the Promised Land but ye shall not enter.” About once a year Rex gets off a good line. I figured that would about do it for the season.
