Saved

by Jack Falla

  And then the horn, the only thing that could save me and free me. Paul and Andre got to me first, jumping on me just as they had when we were kids on the Skating Pond. Then our bench emptied and I was on the bottom of a pileup of black-and-white uniforms and sticks and gloves, and somewhere above the pileup people yelled and clapped.

  We went through the handshake line, where I got a few “great game” compliments from the Lewiston players, which made me think they were probably pretty decent guys.

  I skated off the ice into the arms of Coach Lennon, who gave me a hug. “Looks like you’ll be opening the playoffs for us,” he said. Coach didn’t know that the lawyer Bernie Fortier’s father hired would help Bernie weasel out of the plagiarism rap, but that’s another story.

  A lot of our fans were still milling around the lobby when I left. They included Aaron Scanlon who was with Holly Van Gelder who was with Chantal Lewis and a whole posse of kids who pretty much made up the social A group at our school.

  “Way to go, JP,” Aaron said, emphasizing the remark with a right-handed fist-pump.

  “I didn’t know you PLAAAAAAYED,” Holly Van Gelder said, and said it just like that—PLAAAAAAYED—as if she’d discovered I could fly or something.

  “Gonna be playin’ for the next two years,” Aaron said. “Gonna be brickin’ up that net, baby. Yeah.”

  “Tomorrow night I’m having a party at my house. Mostly basketball and hockey guys. And cheerleaders,” Holly Van Gelder said, glancing at Chantal Lewis. “Why don’t you come over, JP.”

  I said I would. That moment in the lobby of the civic center was when I discovered there’s a difference between playing hockey and being a hockey player. I liked both.

  Three

  Every shot is a snowflake. No two are alike. Shots differ in speed, distance, and angle. They come at you out of a kaleidoscope of swirling bodies. Pucks can dip, rise, get tipped by an opponent or deflected by a teammate. A lot of things can happen on a shot. Most of them are bad. That’s why I throw up before games.

  Fifteen minutes before warm-up for our game against the Ducks at the Garden I grabbed my bottle of mouthwash, headed for the last toilet stall, and vomited the tea and toast I’d had a few hours earlier. I never throw up before preseason games, only regular-season games and playoffs.

  I throw up because I’m afraid. Not afraid of getting hurt—today’s equipment is so good that goal is the safest position on the ice—but afraid of being responsible for losing a game we might have won. And afraid of being publicly embarrassed.

  I don’t like throwing up but I know it’s a sign I’m ready. I look at anxiety as energy I haven’t used yet. It’s like when I’m stopped at a traffic light with the clutch in and the Ferrari’s engine revving. When the light changes, I pop the clutch and the revs become motion. It’s the same with anxiety. Fear fuels performance.

  I play better scared. But there are nights when I wish they’d never open the dressing-room door and that I wouldn’t have to play. Then I remember something Lisa used to tell her patients—“The only way out is through.”

  A few seasons ago I wrote that line on the four-by-six file card I have taped to the left side of my dressing stall. I read the card before every home game. It says:

  1. Watch the puck not the game.

  2. Make aggressive choices.

  3. There are no easy saves.

  4. The only way out is through.

  The reminders and the throwing up didn’t do me any good. We lost 4–1 to Anaheim, got outshot 33–21, looked almost as disorganized as we had in Montreal, and—except for Jean-Baptiste, who scored our goal—couldn’t have found the net with a satellite positioning system. And I don’t think we hit anybody all night, although as Cam said: “Do you even want to hit a guy with a duck on his shirt?”

  If you were listening on radio you wouldn’t know any of this, because if our radio commentator Spence Evans were any more of a Homer he would’ve written The Iliad. According to Spence, we lost because of “lax officiating” and “bad breaks.” Spence is an ex-Bruin from back in the days when players needed summer jobs to support their family. He knows the Mad Hatter gets approval—and disapproval—of the team’s radio and TV announcers. He also knows he’s lucky to have a job where there’s no heavy lifting. He isn’t about to screw that up by being objective.

  Yesterday after practice Spence tried to get me to say that our standard early-season six-game, thirteen-day road trip while the Ringling Brothers Circus comes to the Garden is “a great opportunity for the guys to come together on the road and jell as a team.”

  I said it was more like a great opportunity to lose four or five games, for the younger guys to lose confidence, for fans and media to write us off early, and for us to be chasing Montreal until St. Patrick’s Day. Which is precisely what it is.

  What I didn’t tell Spence is that the trip used to be worse because of a hazing ritual that Cam single-handedly put an end to in our rookie year. What used to happen on a team’s first long road trip was that on a night off the rookies had to take the veterans to dinner. Of course the vets ordered the most expensive dishes on the menu along with $500 bottles of wine. By the end of dinner guys who couldn’t tell a Château Haut-Brion from grape Kool-Aid would be ordering Cognacs that would have maxed out Napoleon. And the team’s rooks would be stuck with a bill that looked like the Treasury balance.

  Only someone with major family money and a Zamboni full of self-confidence could have done what Cam did. There were four rookies on that team—Cam, Jean-Baptiste, Flipside, and me—nine years ago when Cam stood up in the dressing room in St. Louis after practice and said: “Just want to let you guys know the rooks are doing things differently this year.” He said that instead of wasting money on a feedbag extravaganza, the four of us were going to pony up five grand each, and the $20,000 total would be matched three-to-one by the Carter & Peabody Foundation and donated to whatever registered charity the veterans voted on. The gift would be in the name of every member of the team. “But you don’t have to go along with this,” Cam said, really putting the screws to the vets. “If you’ve got your heart set on filet mignon and a first-growth Bordeaux, Tamara and I will take you and your wife or girlfriend—together or sequentially—to any restaurant you like when we get back to Boston.” A guy would look like a complete hoser if he took Cam up on that offer. There was a lot of grumbling at first because veterans don’t like a rookie telling them what to do. But I don’t think Cam was ever a rookie at anything, not even life. And nobody seemed to mind when the team got credit in the national media for what amounted to a $60,000 gift to Boston Children’s Hospital, a gift that cost the veterans nothing. I never understood the power of money until I met Cam. Money makes you bulletproof.

  When the Mad Hatter made Cam team captain in Cam’s third season it seemed less of a surprise than a confirmation of the natural order of things.

  * * *

  At least this season we played three home games before the long trip. We beat Atlanta 4–3 and Washington 4–0. The only bad thing about the Washington game was this guy who proposed to his girlfriend and had it televised on the Garden’s JumboTron. I don’t understand people who propose at a sports event. What’s the point? An engagement should be a personal moment of commitment, not a public spectacle. I set the marriage over-under at eight years for people who get engaged on JumboTrons.

  Sheri the Equestrienne wasn’t at any of our home games and didn’t have time to see me before we flew to Minneapolis on Monday for Tuesday night’s game with the Wild. We flew commercial, which is unusual. We normally charter but I suppose the Hatter can save a few bucks by putting us through the traffic jams and unmitigated logistical torture of driving to Boston’s always crowded Logan Airport instead of letting us charter from Hanscom Field, an easy-to-get-to airport in suburban Bedford.

  Like most NHL teams, the Bruins would sooner allow lepers than journalists on team charters. But even the Mad Hatter can’t control who buys seats on a
commercial flight; thus Lynne Abbott, the Boston Post’s hockey writer, was on our flight, as were the radio guys, Spence Evans and play-by-play announcer Mike Emerson. The rest of the Boston sportswriters and broadcasters were home trying to invent ways to get their editors to assign them to a Red Sox playoff.

  Most of the players like and respect Lynne, who’s been covering the team since before my time here. One thing we admire about her is that if she rips you in the paper she’ll be at practice to face you the next morning. Lynne says she’ll come in even if it’s her day off. She doesn’t hit and run like some of these national writers and local columnists who show up in the dressing room once a year, hammer you in their stories, and then disappear. And Lynne’s not a pecker checker. Most of us wear robes or towels in the dressing room but there are times you’ll be butt naked at your dressing stall and Lynne will be on deadline. She just comes over, looks you dead in the eye, asks her questions, and leaves. She’s as much a pro as we are. And she’s not a woman you want to hassle. A year ago we called up Brendan Fitzmorris, who was playing his first game in the NHL. He scored a goal and the next day at practice the kid was strutting around like he’s Wayne Gretzky. He tried to harass Lynne. “Hey, lady, you know what this is?” said Brendan, holding on to his penis as if it were a fishing rod and he was hooked up to the marlin in The Old Man and the Sea. Lynne took him out fast. “Jeez, I dunno, kid. It looks like a penis. Only smaller.”

  Cam made Brendan apologize. Brendan said it wouldn’t happen again. Lynne said that was too bad because “I’d like to be the first woman to own the Bruins.”

  Lynne is in her midthirties. Her shoulder-length blond hair frames a thin face highlighted by huge blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. She’s from Boston but she dresses country. She’s big on blue jeans and cowboy boots. Monday she wore a $2,000 pair of custom-made boots she bought in Calgary last year. They’re monogrammed LBA. I asked her what the B stood for. “Depends on the situation,” she said. “My parents say it stands for Bethany.”

  Packy nicknamed Lynne the Knower of All Things. He did that four years ago when she broke a story on a Mad Hatter trade that even Packy hadn’t known about. Lynne is seriously sourced, as writers like to say.

  It’s different with broadcasters. They’re entertainers not journalists. Except for Mike Emerson, our radio play-by-play guy, who does more homework in a week than I did in three years of college. We were flying back from Vancouver on a red-eye last season. It was about 2 a.m. and I had to take a leak, so I was walking down the aisle and the only reading light still on was the one over Mike’s seat. He was updating the stat sheets and file cards he keeps on each player. “Sleep is overrated,” he said as I walked by.

  The only trouble with Mike is that he thinks he knows music. But Mike’s in his late forties and probably couldn’t name a song recorded in the last fifteen years. That doesn’t stop him from taking an occasional run at Flipside.

  “Pop quiz. What were Sonny and Cher’s real names?” Mike asked Flipside just after we boarded.

  “Salvatore Bono and Cherilyn LaPiere,” said Flipper, who then undid his seat belt, stood up, and pretended to swat away a basketball while he yelled at Mike: “Get that stuff OUTTA here, Emerson.” I think Flipside did that only to embarrass Mike and keep him from asking more questions.

  * * *

  Fans have a romantic view of a road trip. They think it’s a group vacation where someone else pays the bills. It isn’t. I’ve gone to Buffalo forty times and still haven’t been to Niagara Falls. Baseball players go to a city and stay three or four days. Hockey players are in and out. Here’s our schedule for the day after we arrive in Minneapolis: Bus from the hotel to the rink, light skate, bus back to the hotel, have a team lunch and meeting, go to our rooms and try to nap, bus back to the rink and play the Wild. Then we can either bus to the hotel for a postgame meal or go out on our own, which is what Cam and I will do. Wednesday morning we bus to a suburban rink for a midmorning practice, then bus to the airport for our flight to San Jose. But I’m explaining, not complaining. When we fly over a city and I see all those office buildings containing all those cubicles I think of what life would be like working nine to five Monday through Friday. I know I’m lucky to do what I do.

  At first it looked as though the middle seat between Kevin Quigley and me might go empty. No such luck. Just before the plane pulled away from the gate a fortyish-looking woman in a black pantsuit and white oxford shirt scrambled down the aisle and settled into 16-B. She began flipping through a folder and pulled out a brochure titled Understanding the Angry Child. With her big black-rimmed glasses and blond hair pulled back and fastened with a clip that looked like a leghold trap, she had the classic librarian look, the one giving rise to the fantasy that—fortyish or not—if you took off those glasses and freed her hair from the leghold trap you just might uncork a sexual Vesuvius quaking on the brink of long-supressed eruption. But I have a policy about talking to people on planes. I don’t do it. Not unless I know them. There’s too much risk that the person will be in sales or academia and will bore me into a tongue-lolling stupor. But Ms. Vesuvius must have overheard some of us talking and figured out who we were. Sort of. About an hour out of Boston she turned to me and said: “Are you people the Red Sox?”

  “No, ma’am. We’re the Bruins. A hockey team,” I said, observing another of my in-flight survival rules, namely that any attractive woman who speaks to me on a plane will be addressed—at least at first—as “ma’am.” Pretty women aren’t used to being called “ma’am.” It handcuffs them. Puts them down 0–1 in the count. They feel vaguely offended but they can’t say anything because, on the surface, it looks as though I’m just being polite.

  She said she was a social worker with the Archdiocese of Boston’s Catholic Charities and was on her way to a national conference in Minneapolis. Her name was Nan O’Brien and she ran what she called “a family-preservation program” that tried to help dysfunctional families and prevent child abuse and neglect.

  We were making our descent into Minny when Nan O’Brien gave me her business card:

  Nancy C. O’Brien—LICSW

  DIRECTOR

  Catholic Charities Family Preservation

  I asked her what the LICSW stood for. “Licensed independent clinical social worker,” she said. Then she asked me if I could donate some equipment to her program’s annual fund-raising auction. “Maybe some autographed sticks and balls.”

  “Pucks,” I said. “We’re a hockey team. We use pucks.”

  “Oh, of course. Sticks and pucks then?”

  I said I’d give her a couple of game-used goalie sticks and a few pucks.

  “I’ll get you a stick from everyone on the team,” said Quigley in a voice suggesting that any player who didn’t give Kevin an autographed stick might be endangering his health and general well-being. Nan gave Kev her business card.

  * * *

  The trip was a nightmare. We lost 2–1 to Minnesota and 3–2 to San Jose. I played both games. Rinky Higgins got his first start of the season in Phoenix and he threw thirty-seven saves at the Coyotes but we lost 1–0. Whenever I watch a game from the bench I’m surprised at the speed and violence. When I see the game from the goal crease I’m focused on the puck, the whole play is in front of me, and the players are just colorful swirling chess pieces whose movements I have to keep track of. But when I sit on the bench the game moves horizontally and speed is more obvious. Once or twice a game a player will get checked into the boards in front of me, the force of the collision shaking the bench and making me wonder how a skater—a nongoalie—can take that kind of pounding for eighty to a hundred games a year. Cam tried to explain it to me once: “There’s an anesthesia that goes with playing,” he said. “Mostly you only hurt after the game.”

  I was back in goal in Anaheim, where we lost 4–1.

  We had an off night in Nashville and Cam thought it’d be a good idea if we forgot our 0–4 road record and took in some country music. D
uring a break by the band—the all-girl Cotton-Eyed Jo—Cam and I went to play the jukebox. I remember when you could hear a song on a jukebox for twenty-five cents. This machine wanted fives, tens, or twenties. “Someday it’ll cost you ten shares of Google just to hear a little Alan Jackson,” Cam said as the machine inhaled his ten and he punched up some Gretchen Wilson, Tim McGraw, and the Dixie Chicks. The best part of the night was watching Lynne Abbott, an easterner, outdance half of the Stetson-hatted, I-was-country-when-country-wasn’t-cool, phony cowboys in the joint. Some of them tried to hit on her but she always slipped back to the safety of our table. The team had an 11:30 curfew (is that demeaning or what?) and it sure looked like there were a lot of unhappy counterfeit cowboys when Lynne decided she’d be safer walking back to the hotel with us than staying in the honky tonk. Surrounded by players Lynne looked like a twelve-meter yacht in a convoy of destroyers.