Saved

by Jack Falla

  I snapped on the radio and punched up the Bruins game just in time to hear announcer Mike Emerson say that Gaston Deveau had given Boston a 1–0 lead over the Maple Leafs on a power-play goal at 2:58 of the first period. “Jeez. Packy put Gaston on the first power-play unit. That’s a shocker,” I said. But it wasn’t as much of a shock as what Emerson said a few seconds later, which was “A great glove save by Kent Wilson to rob Toronto’s Ken Brewer.”

  “What’s with Kent Wilson starting again? Do we have a quarterback controversy here?” Faith asked.

  “I’ll find out tomorrow,” I said. But I was pretty sure I knew why Wilson was starting. I explained it to Faith: “If the Mad Hatter brings up a new kid and the kid plays well, then it lowers my value and Rinky Higgins’s value and gives Hattigan leverage in contract talks.”

  “By the way, your mother asked me why Hattigan hasn’t met with Denny Moran to start working out your new deal.”

  “How the hell does she know that?”

  “Denny—excuse me, Dennis—told her.”

  “Jesus Christ, I’m thirty-one years old and my agent is tattletaling to my mother.”

  “You sure that’s all he’s doing?” Faith said, and laughed another of her rich throaty laughs.

  “Look. If the Bruins don’t sign me, then I’m an unrestricted free agent. There’ll be plenty of offers.”

  “Great. You want to go to Vancouver? Dallas maybe? How ’bout them Stars?” Faith asked, and began singing Alabama’s “If You’re Going to Play in Texas (You’ve Got to Have a Fiddle in the Band).”

  “No. I’ll give Boston a hometown discount. I’ll play here for less than I’d make somewhere else. I told Denny that. It’s just that the Mad Hatter wants every edge he can get before they start talking. And the longer he delays, the greater the chance my stock will fall. Or Kent Wilson’s might rise, which amounts to the same thing.”

  “If the team loses you to unrestricted free agency, then they don’t get anything in return, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Then it’d be best for them to trade you now and get something for you than to just let you walk away. So why wouldn’t Hattigan deal you?”

  “Could happen,” I said. “A lot of teams would like an experienced goaltender for the playoffs.” I told Faith that if I was traded it would have to be by March 18, the NHL’s trade deadline, about eight weeks away.

  “If they deal you will you go?” she asked.

  “Have to. I’m not exactly in Cam Carter’s financial position,” I said.

  “And where will a trade leave us?”

  “First, I don’t think I’ll get traded. We’re going to the playoffs and my playoff record is better than my regular-season record. Rinky has never even played two consecutive playoff games. Second, you’re in your last year of med school. You’ll be a doctor. You can work wherever you want,” I said.

  “Jean Pierre, we have to talk,” Faith said.

  “But not tonight,” I said in high-pitched chiding mimicry.

  “How about tomorrow night? Dinner? My place. I’ll cook.”

  “Done deal,” I said just as Mike Emerson’s voice on the radio told me that Toronto had tied the game on a fifty-footer. I felt bad for the team. But I have to confess there was a part of me that was glad Kent Wilson had let in a softy. I don’t feel that way when Rinky plays. OK, maybe I don’t want him to play his way to immortality, but I want him to win because I want the team to win. And while I have nothing against Kent Wilson—we barely said hello in training camp—I knew a great game by Kent would put more pressure on me. As if I didn’t have enough of that already.

  Toronto beat us—and Kent Wilson—2–1.

  * * *

  The first thing to catch my eye when I walked into the dressing room Sunday morning was the makeshift nameplate—black felt-tip pen on white adhesive tape—over one of the spare lockers. “KENT WILSON” it read. Two goalies on a team is a necessity. Three is a problem. It means there’s always going to be someone who’s unhappy because he’s not playing and not even dressing. More mind games by the Mad Hatter, I thought, but I made it a point to introduce myself to Wilson as soon as he walked into the room. The kid’s only doing what I did ten years ago and what any rookie would do—trying to play as well as he can and maybe make it to the Show.

  The only good thing about having Kent Wilson around is that I face fewer shots in practice.

  At the end of practice Packy called us over to a corner of the rink well out of earshot of the beat writers. All coaches do this as if newspaper reports will compromise national security on what they say. All Packy said was that I’d start Tuesday at home against Washington and Thursday at Pittsburgh and that Rinky would be the backup. Three minutes later Packy was telling Lynne Abbott: “I haven’t made up my mind yet” about which goalie would start on Tuesday and that Thursday was “too far away to even think about.” Coaches don’t lie because they’re bad people. They lie because the flow of information is one of the few things they can control. Coaches like control.

  * * *

  I was nervous driving to Faith’s house late Sunday afternoon. The only time I’d ever talked about marriage was with Lisa years ago. And we didn’t really plan it as much as we drifted into it. I hoped Faith and I were on that same easy, natural path and that our conversation would end in an unofficial engagement with a wedding date to be named later. I figured if we wrapped it up fast we’d have time to watch the NFL Wild Card playoff between Green Bay and San Francisco. A pretty good match, I thought. But that was before I knew about the Match.

  “Part of the problem I have—I mean we have, Jean Pierre—is the Match,” Faith said almost before I had my coat off. She told me that the Match is the national program that assigns graduating medical school students to internships at hospitals across the country. Students can research and apply for various internships listed on the Internet. But it’s the hospital that has the final say. Students get assigned to an internship. And those students who don’t get a match, or don’t want to accept the one they get, have to scramble for whatever leftover openings they can find. “We find out on March 17,” she said. “It’s sort of like a trade deadline for med students. We report to our hospitals July 1.”

  “So you could get sent to Utah or some godforsaken place?” I asked.

  “Theoretically but not really,” she said. “I’m applying to Mass General here in Boston—”

  “Great. Walking distance from the Garden,” I said, interrupting her.

  “—and to Lake Champlain Medical Center in Vermont. It’ll be one of those two,” she said, putting a handful of shrimp into a sauté pan.

  “Lake Champlain is a goddamn par-five from here,” I said. “So which one do you think it’ll be?”

  “Whichever one I want.”

  “Getting a little cocky, aren’t we?”

  “Put it this way, Jean Pierre, they both want the quarter mil I’ll pledge to their capital campaigns.”

  “That’s crass and arrogant,” I said.

  “That’s reality,” she said. “Life’s a power sweep, JP. Saint Vincent Lombardi said that, according to my father.” I looked at her. Looking back at me were the same Clint Eastwood eyes I’d seen in the basketball pictures in her father’s den. Faith McNeil was about to take the medical establishment to the hoop. I was afraid she might take me too.

  “So how’s the decision shaping up?” I asked.

  “Mass General is one of the biggest and best hospitals in the country. But if I go there I’m a spare part. Just another body on the JVs. Lake Champlain is opening a new oncology center. If I go there I’m on the varsity. I’m a player. And I want to be a player, JP. Always have.”

  “So where would that leave us? Besides two hundred and fifty miles apart.”

  “We can’t know that until we know where you’re going to be playing.”

  “I think I’m going to be right here in Boston for four or five more seasons. But you never know. Some
times a contending team will rent a player for the playoffs.”

  “Rent a player?”

  “They’ll find a guy like me who’s got only a few months to go on his contract, then trade for him, knowing they have to pay him only through the playoffs. Sometimes that’s all they want him for.”

  “Then what?” Faith asked.

  “Then the player is a free agent and can sign with anyone. It could be a nice deal financially but I dread being traded. I have the job I want. Let’s assume I keep it.”

  “Well, we’ll always have summers together. Even if I’m in Vermont I’ll get to Boston as often as I can. But they tell me the first year of a medical internship is rough. You work about a million hours. We wouldn’t see each other much for the first year.”

  I sat in a kitchen chair feeling—and maybe looking—like a losing boxer slumped in his corner between rounds. “It’s one thing to put your career above me but I think you’re putting it above us,” I said.

  “And what are you doing by playing into athletic old age? It’s not like we need the money.”

  “Playing hockey is what I do, Faith. It’s all I know how to do. All I’ve ever done. Or all I’ve ever done well.”

  “I want to be good at what I do, too,” she said. “And I think I can be. And for a long time…”

  She didn’t want to say what I knew came next, so I finished the thought for her: “… and what you’ll be doing is a lot more valuable than what I do,” I said. “So should I tell the Boston Garden JumboTron guy to forget showing the scene where I propose on bended goalie pad?”

  “Not forget it. Maybe postpone it for a year.”

  “Faith, if you’re not the best-looking single woman in northern Vermont you’ll be in the top five. You’re going to get hit on by every doctor in that hospital. And the married ones first.”

  “I’ve been known to hit back,” she said, placing two dishes of shrimp pasta on the table, then pulling the cork from a chilled bottle of Pinot Blanc and looking at me again. Clint Eastwood was gone this time. “There’s no one else, Jean Pierre. And I don’t plan for there to be anyone else … not until you and I know for sure. I lost on my first marriage. I don’t like losing. I’ll pay the price to win.”

  “But not if it means taking one excellent internship that would keep us together over another excellent internship that will keep us apart but advance your career?”

  “Let’s not fight. It reminds me of my first marriage. It’s why I kept putting off this conversation.”

  “There’s no one else in my life either. And I don’t want there to be. But I need time to think about this. Give me a few days, OK?”

  “Sure. I think there are ways to do this. But there’ll have to be a lot of compromise.”

  “Yeah. Mostly by me,” I said, instantly feeling whiny.

  “Let’s give it a week or so, Jean Pierre.”

  “OK, but the series moves back to my place next time. I need the home-ice advantage. I’m already down 0–1,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

  “What is this? Best of seven?”

  “Best of whatever it takes,” I said.

  We did the dishes, at the end of which I used a hook shot to launch an SOS pad at the wastebasket. My shot was going long but Faith reached out with her right hand and slammed it into the basket with an authoritative alley-oop flourish. “You get the assist,” she said, pointing at me as if we were on a basketball court.

  “I think I should go home tonight,” I said.

  Faith said she understood.

  We kissed good night in a perfunctory way. I drove home unhappy and confused and wishing my Ferrari had an automatic transmission so I could spend less time shifting and more time feeling sorry for myself.

  * * *

  It was strange that I didn’t throw up before our Tuesday-night game with Washington. That happens two or three times a season but never before home games, where the pressure is greater than it is on the road. I also didn’t play very well but we won 7–4, which is all that counts. Quig and Cam had a busy night. That’s because the more Gaston Deveau scores—and that’s a lot since he moved to center—the more he gets hammered by opposing checkers and goons. The tactic is as old and as primitive as the game, but a lot of time you see another team’s fourth-liners, fringe players, sent out to rough up a scorer. Washington’s Drew Campbell, a spare part who’s lucky to be in the lineup, started hacking at Gaston early in the game. The theory here is that if Gaston retaliates and both players get sent to the penalty box, then our team loses its number two scorer and all the Caps lose is a no-talent stiff. Worse, if the refs catch only Gaston retaliating and don’t see the original infraction—and that happens a lot—then Washington gets a power play. Someone had to stop it and that someone was Quigley. It was worth the instigator penalty to watch Quig drop Campbell with a two-punch combo—Splat! Splat!—you could probably hear in row 15. The guys on our bench were standing up pounding their sticks on the boards—the age-old hockey players’ applause—when Quig effectively won us the game by challenging the Washington bench. He skated over to within ten feet of the bench and used both hands in a gesture that said, “Come on. Who’s next?” There were no takers. And there was no one hassling Gaston for the rest of the game. Set the price high enough and no one will pay it. I don’t know where our team would be without Kevin Quigley. Out of the playoff run probably. That’s why I was shocked by what happened a few weeks later in Detroit.

  We played in a sold-out and screaming Joe Louis Arena and won 3–2. I had thirty saves, twelve of them in the last period, when we were just hanging on and the Detroit crowd—one of the greatest in hockey—was in full roar. Packy liked Gaston at center so much that he moved Taki to right wing. Quig’s line was on the ice late in the game when I smothered a puck with my catching hand and the Red Wings’ Bobby LaForrest whacked me with his stick on the back of my glove trying to get me to cough up the puck. The ref didn’t whistle a penalty, probably because we were in the late stages of a close game. Refs say they don’t officiate the clock or the score. Refs lie. Hockey’s Code requires that an opposing player taking liberties with a goaltender has to answer for his crime, so I wasn’t surprised to see Quigley skate over to LaForrest. I was surprised when all Quig did was point to the scoreboard and tell LaForrest, “You’re not worth taking a penalty on.” I’ve seen Quig beat the shit out of guys for less—close score or no close score. It was a very un-Quigley-like thing to do. I filed it in my memory.

  I didn’t see Faith when we got back to Boston, partly because she was getting ready for her last semester of med school and partly because we had back-to-back games. We beat L.A. 5–0 at the Garden on Saturday afternoon. That was my fifth shutout of the season and I was starting to think I might have a shot at playing in the All-Star Game in early February. In another surprise move, no doubt dictated by the Mad Hatter, Kent Wilson started Sunday at the Garden against the Islanders, and the boy wonder got blown out 5–4. I thought Wilson might get sent down but he was still around at Monday’s practice. And now he had an official nameplate above his locker.

  Rinky started at Washington, where he lost a 1–0 heartache, and I had a comparatively easy seventeen-save game in our 5–2 home win over Ottawa. Then it started to unravel.

  I lost three in a row, 2–1 at St. Louis in the opener of a home-and-home, 4–3 to St. Louis in Boston, and an embarrassing 8–4 loss to the Rangers in Madison Square Garden where Packy had to take me out in the first period. Packy usually makes his goalie changes between periods, which Rinky and I like because it’s a lot less embarrassing than making that long skate to the bench in front of seventeen thousand people during a stoppage in play. But we were down 4–0 in the first twelve minutes of the game. After the fourth goal, Packy sent Rinky over the boards and called me to the bench. I got a loud mock cheer from the Ranger’s fans, who rank with Philly’s as the toughest in the league. After the game we were filing off the ice when a fan chinned himself up on the glass and c
alled Luther Brown a nigger. Luther and Bruno Govoni climbed the glass and went into the stands after the guy but he’d run away by the time they dropped into the seats like paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne. Kevin Quigley, always our last guy off the ice—just in case he has to engage in a rearguard action—made a move to go into the stands but changed his mind. “That scumbag’s gone. They’ll never catch him,” Quig said. That surprised me too. Common sense never stopped Kevin before.

  We chartered out of New York right after the game, arrived in Ottawa at 2 a.m., and that night suffered our fourth loss in a row, 4–3 to the Senators, with Rinky Higgins in net. We were still in second place but ten points behind the Canadiens and only two in front of Ottawa when we came limping back to Boston.

  We had midweek home games against Florida and Chicago, then a rare open weekend, the Sunday of which was reserved for the Bruins Wives Carnival to benefit the Boston Boys and Girls Club. We beat Florida 4–2 thanks to Jean-Baptiste’s hat trick, then knocked off Chicago (hands down the best uniforms in pro sports) 2–1. I started both games but Kent Wilson was the designated backup against Chicago, which meant Rinky watched the game from the press box.

  “Hard to be happy about that,” he told me.

  * * *

  Faith phoned me a few times after our unhappy talk at her house but we didn’t see each other until the Wives Carnival. Tamara Carter, the carnival’s organizer, had Rinky, Kent, and me in our goalie gear, and we took turns standing in front of a net facing shots from kids whose parents paid $10 for four pucks. A few hours of that is damn tiring if you want to know the truth. Faith wandered over a couple of times mainly because located to the left of the shoot-on-a-pro-goalie area, Kevin Quigley was conducting a shooting clinic. “I just come over to hear Kevin talk,” Faith said right after Quigley had explained to a bunch of kids the difference between the slapshot and wrist shot: “You don’t always have to use the slappah, the wristah is bettah because you get it off quickah.”

  “Stick around. Pretty soon he’ll talk about the backhandah,” I said to Faith.