Saved

by Jack Falla

  “Lost in the past,” Tim Harcourt said. He told me that before a home playoff game the arena darkens and old photographs of Canadiens immortals—Aurel Joliat … Georges Vezina … Boom Boom Geoffrion—are projected onto the ice ten or twelve at a time. The sight of these Montreal Hall of Famers whips the crowd into a nostalgic frenzy. But that’s only prelude. The frenzy rises when, one by one, photos of the Canadiens Holy Trinity are projected the full length of the ice. First, Guy Lafleur in full stride, the puck on his stick, his hair flying, the consummate Flying Frenchman. Then Jean Beliveau, Le Gros Bill, the big handsome graceful center with the C on his shoulder, captain for life and forever in the hearts of Montrealers.

  The cheers accompanying those two photos are like storm waves breaking ever higher against a seawall. But with the projection of the last photo, the wave goes over the top and unbridled emotion floods the arena. The final picture—taken on the night the team closed the old Montreal Forum—is of Rocket Richard holding a flaming torch. Even in his seventies the Rocket’s face was dominated by those piercing angry brown eyes. Angry at what? Opponents who routinely hacked and slashed him? Affronts to the French people? Both? I suppose fans could see whatever they were looking for. Whatever it was, the roar told me that playing hockey in Montreal was different from playing any sport anywhere else in North America.

  “Tabernac. Got to have this one, boys,” Joe Latendresse yelled, standing up and banging his stick on the dressing-room table, thus toppling two pyramids of tape and twenty half-filled paper cups of Gatorade, this to the annoyance of assistant trainer Marc Wilson. “Tabernac your fucking self, Joe,” said Wilson, who had to clean up the mess. When you’re an NHL player there’s always someone to clean up after you.

  * * *

  With only two minutes to go before the clock in the dressing room ticked down to 0:00 and we headed for the ice, I knew my nerves were OK. I felt more resolve than anxiety. Maybe it had to do with what Faith told me before I left the hotel. I’d been my usual anxious pregame self, worrying out loud about everything from bad bounces to shaky officiating, when Faith cut me off midlitany: “Take it from an old gym rat, JP—you can only play the next shot, not the whole tournament.”

  After beating Boston 3–2 in the final regular-season game between us, we’d gone on to win our last four games and wrap up first place in the Northeast Division and in the Eastern Conference. Philly won the Atlantic Division and Carolina took the Southeast Division, so those were the top three seeds for the playoffs. Boston also won its last four games—with Rinky playing well in goal—to take second place in our division and get fourth seed for the first round of the playoffs. The way the playoffs work is that the number one seed plays the number eight seed, number two plays number seven, and so on. So the matchups were: Montreal versus Tampa; Philly versus the New York Rangers; Carolina versus New Jersey; and Boston versus Ottawa. The Bruins had by far the toughest opponent so I and a lot of other people were shocked when Boston won in a four-game sweep. And I was equally surprised when it took us six games to eliminate Tampa, partly because playing hockey in Florida in April is like skating on Italian slush in Naples. “I’ve seen better ice in my driveway,” Justin Pelletier told the media after we’d lost Games 3 and 4 in Tampa. Justin, one of our defensemen, is from Trois-Rivières.

  Philadelphia bounced the Rangers in five games with Serge “the Weasel” Balon scoring five goals, picking up three assists, and instigating a near riot. It happened in Game 4 in New York when a Ranger fan threw a dead fish at Flyers goalie Jeff Fishbane after the Rangers scored. Serge put the butt end of his stick in the fish’s mouth, then used his stick to sling the fish eighteen rows into the stands, where it hit an ice-cream vendor, knocking him down in an aisle. Some Rangers fans started toward the Flyers bench but—this being New York—they stopped long enough to steal the vendor’s ice cream, thus giving the cops extra time to move into the area.

  We lucked out in the second round. Because the New Jersey Devils had upset Carolina we played the Devils, while the Bruins had to face the much tougher Flyers.

  We broomed New Jersey in four, which gave us a few days to rest and to watch the Bruins struggle with Philly. It was predictable during the off days that the question reporters asked most was whom we’d rather face in the division finals, Boston or Philadelphia. It was equally predictable that we lied. We said it didn’t matter, that they were both tough. But the truth, at least for me, was that I’d rather play Philly than have to face Boston and all my former teammates. The second-to-last thing I wanted was to stand in the way of Cam Carter winning the Cup. The last thing I wanted was to lose my own chance.

  The Boston-Philly series was tied at two games each when I tuned in for the telecast of Game 5 and saw a pregame graphic telling viewers that Rex Conway would miss his fourth consecutive game. Pulled groin, the TV announcer said. But everyone knows you can’t believe injury reports, especially during the playoffs. Lynne Abbott told me that she has a formula for figuring out management’s lies: “If they say it’s the left ankle it’s the right shoulder … if they say right knee it’s left elbow.…”

  The next day I phoned Cam to see what the truth was about Rex. Cam’s story was moderately amusing. Rex had recently taken to wearing a gold cross about the size of one of my goalie sticks. This to better advertise the fact that Rex has God on speed dial, just in case any of us had missed the news over the previous seasons. It was after the Bruins eliminated Ottawa that Flipside had another of his team parties and Rex showed up with a girl named Christina, a soprano in the choir of the Foursquare Bible-Believing Church. “One of those eye-batting faux-naive-southern types who pretends not to know she’s a home-wrecker-in-embryo,” Cam said. “So Rex gets her into one of the upstairs bedrooms at Flipper’s house and in about two minutes we hear Rex scream and the door opens and out comes Christina the Choir Singer yelling, ‘Jesus may love you, Rexall Conway. But ah don’t.’” So Rex’s alleged groin pull was really some major testicular bruising where Christina speared him with his own cross. “Christina didn’t seem to understand why we laughed as she came down the stairs,” Cam said. “I don’t think Christina spends much time hanging around people who laugh.”

  “Sorry I missed it,” I said.

  “Me too. It’s been one of the few smiles this month.” Cam paused for a second before he said what both of us were thinking. “Could be you and me in the conference finals, JP. There’s no part of that that won’t suck.”

  “You have to beat Philly first,” I said.

  “We can beat Philly. The league finally got around to suspending Serge for the rest of the playoffs for the fish-throwing incident. Flyers aren’t the same without him.”

  Cam was right. After losing Game 5 to fall behind three games to two, Boston bounced back to win Games 6 and 7 and earn a date with Montreal.

  Meanwhile, the Western Conference was a bigger upset than the Revolutionary War. Anaheim stunned top-seeded Detroit in the opening round and followed that with an upset of the L.A. Kings. The San Jose Sharks pulled off shockers by eliminating Colorado and Dallas. So the Western Conference Finals came down to Anaheim and San Jose, teams that Boston or Montreal should beat. The winner of the Boston-Montreal series would be a lock to win the Stanley Cup.

  * * *

  The Canadiens had the better regular-season record so Games 1 and 2 were in Montreal. Faith planned to be at Game 1 but then she’d have to go home for graduation from med school. “Graduation doesn’t mean much to me but it’s a big deal to my parents,” she said.

  Faith was finished with classes and wasn’t scheduled to start her internship until July, so she’d been spending about half of her time with me and the rest either in Boston trying to sell her house or in Vermont looking to buy a place for us. She drove Boss Scags on all of her trips. “Hit seven thousand rpm and it’s like sitting in a six-speed cordless vibrator,” she said. I told her to call Modena, Italy, and pass that on to Ferrari’s ad agency.

  Faith als
o made good on the quarter-million-dollar pledge to the Lake Champlain Medical Center, the gift that was contingent on her getting the internship she wanted. She insisted on the gift being listed as “anonymous,” so she never took any public credit for it. “It was just business,” she said. I think Faith McNeil has a stronger power play than the Bruins and Canadiens combined.

  * * *

  “How do you feel?” Faith asked me as I was leaving the hotel for the opening game of our series with Boston.

  “Like a guy who’s eight wins from the Cup he’s dreamed about but has to fight his way through his friends to get it,” I said.

  “Conflicted?”

  “No. I want to win.”

  “You thinking about your dad?”

  “He’s my father, not my dad.”

  “Semantics, JP. Is he lurking in your mind?”

  “No. The fucker’s lurking in his luxury suite.”

  * * *

  Boston set the tone early. The Bruins started Gaston’s line with Kevin Quigley on left wing. It took twenty seconds for Quigley to come crashing through my crease like the Polar Express, knocking me to the ice mask-first, the jolt bringing back the headache I’d had after my concussion a few weeks earlier. Headache or not I wasn’t going to give Quig the satisfaction of knowing he’d rocked me. I jumped up fast. So did Quig.

  “Congrats on the engagement, JP,” Kevin said as though his running me over were just another day at the office, which, for him, it was.

  “Nice of you to drop by, Kev,” I said just as our conversation was interrupted by referee Jimmy Simpson.

  “That’s goalie interference, Quigley. You’re gone for two,” Simpson said, raising his arm to signal the penalty.

  “Bullshit, Jimmy,” Quig said, skating toward the ref and apparently preparing to launch a harangue about a miscarriage of justice. But Quig fooled me. “That wasn’t intah-ference. It was chah-ging,” Quig yelled.

  “What difference, Kev? They’re both two minutes,” Simpson said, sensibly, I thought.

  “My image, Jimmy. Intah-ference is wussy. Chah-ging is more my style.”

  Simpson was already skating backward toward the penalty box and I wasn’t sure he’d heard Quig until the public address guy announced the call: “Boston penalty. Number sixty-three. Two minutes. Charging,” Simpson said. Quig skated toward the penalty box tapping his stick on the ice a couple of times in what I took to be grateful acknowledgment of the ref’s highly evolved sense of semantics and public perception.

  The hit from Quigley and the banter we’d exchanged sent a clear message: that even between friends there would be no quarter asked, given, or expected.

  We scored a power play goal while Quig sat out his penalty and we went on from there to take a fairly easy 6–2 win and a 1–0 series lead. We outshot Boston 41–19, so you couldn’t blame Rinky Higgins for the loss. But the fact is he didn’t play all that well. I had a headache throughout the game, a throbbing in my left temple, the same place I’d had a concussion weeks earlier. But it was the playoffs, when everyone plays hurt, so I didn’t say anything.

  * * *

  I returned from practice the next day to find a note Faith left before she took off for Boston: “Call Rudy E. Needs 4 tix for tomorrow. 2 for him, 2 for parents.”

  Tickets are the bane of every pro player’s existence and never more than when you’re in the playoffs. With every round you win the calls get more frequent and bizarre; a second cousin twice removed whom you haven’t seen in seventeen years will try to get a couple of good seats for a playoff game. “Hey, I’ll pay for them,” he’ll say as though he’s doing you a favor. Or like we get tickets for free, which we don’t except for wives and immediate family. In my second year in the league I had a former high school classmate from St. Dom’s—a guy I hadn’t heard from in six years—call me for Bruins playoff tickets. When I called back to tell him I had his tickets he wanted to know the seat location before he agreed to pay for them. I was young then. Today, I usually don’t return calls that might have anything to do with tickets. But I like Rudy Evanston. So I called Jean Picard’s secretary, a woman the guys on the team tell me could find four on the aisle for the Second Coming, the Gettysburg Address, or a Beatles reunion. She got me four good seats for Game 2. I called Rudy.

  “I hope your parents and Claire enjoy the game,” I said.

  “Claire can’t go. She’s cramming for her last two finals. The fourth ticket’s for Coach Indinacci,” Rudy said. “I hear he talked to you about coaching.”

  “He invited me to take a two-point-seven-million-dollar pay cut, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “I like you, Rudy, but not two-point-seven mil worth.”

  Rudy laughed.

  “I’ll work with you at Marco’s summer hockey camp. You’ll be there, right?”

  “I’ll be there. But I have to work as a volunteer. The freakin’ NCAA won’t let him pay me.”

  “Check your shoes,” I said.

  “What?”

  “This summer. After camp. Check your shoes. I worked Marco’s camp when I was a student. And the NCAA had the same rule. But while I was on the ice, hundred-dollar bills had a way of growing in my shoes.”

  “There’s a few technical things I want to work on this summer. But I think my problems in the second half of the season were mostly mental. Indinacci is a good coach but he never played goal,” Rudy said.

  “Goalies don’t need coaches, we need gurus,” I said. “We’ll talk about it this summer.”

  “Thanks for the tickets. Good luck in the game.”

  “Aren’t you the one who told me luck doesn’t have anything to do with it?”

  * * *

  Game 2 was on a Saturday night in Montreal. The first thing I did at the morning skate was introduce myself to Montreal team doctor Wingate Desaulniers. The second thing I did was lie to him. Told him I was getting migraine headaches. I said it always happened in the playoffs because of the pressure. He frowned, wrote me a prescription, and didn’t ask any questions.

  I took it easy in practice and let my backups—Ryan McDonough and Demetre Fontaine—take most of the shots. Fontaine was the teenager who had played most of the season with the Lewiston Mainiacs in my old hometown. Demetre would likely become Montreal’s goalie of the future, but management only brought him up for the playoffs to take a lot of practice shots and to get his first wide-eyed look at the Show. You wouldn’t want to start either of those guys in a playoff.

  * * *

  I filled my prescription at the hotel pharmacy. There were still eight hours before I had to play so I took one of the pills, figuring the drugs would be out of my system by game time. While waiting for the pill to kick in, I ordered a salad from room service and called Denny Moran at his office.

  “Caught me just as I was leaving,” he said.

  “What? You don’t work all day Saturdays anymore?”

  “Taking Jacqueline to the Sox game. Two o’clock start. A little hors d’oeuvre before we watch you beat Boston tonight. What’s up?”

  “Paperwork,” I said. “Can you transfer ownership of Boss Scags from me to Faith?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Why?”

  “Graduation present.”

  * * *

  Fatigue, the headache drug, and a disconnected phone combined to help me get a two-hour nap. I felt good when I woke up at 3:30, but an hour later, as I arrived at the rink, my headache was back. And it was so close to game time that I didn’t dare take another pill.

  I hadn’t heard from Cam or he from me. What could either of us have said? The playoffs had become a zero-sum game. Like tennis. The point one of us wins is the point the other loses. But we did connect, sort of, during pregame warm-ups. Both teams were skating around in huge counterclockwise circles when Cam and I happened to arrive at the center-ice logo at the same time. It’s part of hockey’s code that you don’t skate into the other team’s territory during pregame. Not unless you want to start a donnybrook. But as Cam and I skated cl
ose to the center-ice face-off dot I reached out and tapped his shin pads and he tapped my right goalie pad.

  We won again but it wasn’t easy this time. We fell behind 1–0 when I fanned on a sixty-footer. I think my eyes were slow to pick up the puck. I never played baseball but I know what batters mean when they say that when they’re hitting well they can see the stitches on the ball. When I’m at the top of my game I can see the long shots clearly almost as if the puck were approaching in slow motion. But that first goal was a blur. I settled down after that and stopped J.-B. Desjardin on a breakaway and Rex Conway on a rebound, and made that rookie Billy Shannon look like the ex-Yalie he is by poke-checking the puck while he was trying a curl and drag. In a case like that I don’t get credit for a save because Billy never got off a shot. Back in high school my coach didn’t like to see me attacking a puck carrier like that. “Don’t bother a puck that’s not bothering you,” he used to say. But that’s wrong. A lot of goaltending has to do with stopping trouble before it happens.

  I also started holding on to pucks. It slowed down the game and kept Boston from building any flow or momentum. Some fans, players, refs, and coaches don’t like it when a goaltender stops the game a lot. But I figure the puck is safer in my glove than on anyone’s stick, even a teammate’s. Besides, I like to jam up the game and to frustrate and annoy attackers. Refs rarely call me for delay of game. There’s a part of me that would rather destroy than create. Or maybe destruction and creation are the same thing in goaltending.

  We scratched out goals in the second and third periods to take a 2–1 lead into the final minute, when Boston pulled their goalie for a sixth attacker and we scored into the empty net for a 3–1 win and a 2–0 series lead. When the game ended, Cam smashed his stick over the crossbar, something I hadn’t seen him do since college.

  As soon as we got back in the dressing room I ducked into the trainer’s room, closed the door, and popped another headache pill. “What’s that?” Marc Wilson asked.