Those around him jump, and together they move up the escalator to the first-floor banquet room.
I come along a few minutes later. The tables are almost set but there is no food, and I find a seat between Shutt and Lapointe. With others at the table, they’re talking about Bowman. Lapointe is angry.
“Tabernac,” he growls, “did ya hear him last night? ‘Pretty good effort, gang.’ Pretty good effort!” he repeats, getting angrier at the thought. “We were horseshit.”
Drinking their water, the team at the table murmur agreement.
“Those two goals they got near the end,” Robinson adds, shaking his head, “câlisse, that used to drive him crazy.”
Lapointe continues, still angry, “How the hell we gonna win this way?” he snaps. “He’s gotta start givin’ us some shit out there,” and we nod again.
Shutt has been waiting for an opening; he jumps in with the clincher. “Hell, in practice the other day,” he chirps, “I’m skatin’(a)round, he calls me over, ‘How’re ya feelin’, Steve?”’ His eyes widen, as ours do. “What kinda question’s that?” he complains. “I tell ya he’s losin’ his marbles.”
More murmurs.
It has been a curious season for Bowman. Since Pollock’s departure and Grundman’s appointment, he has often seemed passive and indifferent. We allow “unimportant” goals near the end of an easy win, we arrive at practice a little later and leave a little sooner, we do what we seldom did before, what we were afraid to do, then brace ourselves for the outrage we know is coming, and none comes. Now, late in the season, the pattern we knew would quickly change has not changed, and we’re worried. He’s mellowing, we say to ourselves, or he’s having a bad year, or he’s leaving next year and doesn’t care any more, or maybe he just wants to make Grundman look bad. But Bowman, being Bowman, never explains. Except there are two things he said earlier this season that are beginning to make sense to me. I remember them now only because I am looking for an explanation myself. In a strangely sympathetic tone, he told a reporter that it wasn’t easy playing on a team like ours. That winning three straight Stanley Cups, expected to win each year and every game, we had been under enormous pressure for a long time. Then, a few weeks later, talking to us about team rules and fines, as an aside he said that rules or not, a team must really discipline itself.
A team that knows it’s the best, that proves it’s the best, gradually stops listening. It knows best, and if it doesn’t, it must find that out for itself. This season, we weren’t ready to be perfect all the time. We didn’t want to feel the need to win every game we played, or to win a special way every time we did. We wanted to be like everyone else, to know that if we won, everyone would be happy; and if sometimes we lost, to know that everyone—coaches, management, press, and fans included—would pretend to survive the experience. We wanted to relax a bit, to enjoy ourselves. We didn’t want Bowman’s smothering heavy hand any more, and clear from our attitude was that if he tried to lay it on us, we would throw it off as best we could.
Mostly we have gotten what we wanted. Bowman has eased off, we have been far from perfect, losing more often, rarely showing any special flair when we win. Everyone—coaches, management, press, and fans—has shown remarkable patience and restraint, each reminding himself often that to win four consecutive Cups is difficult, that no one can win all the time, and that the season is far from over. And for a time, we did the same. But no longer. We have discovered that we aren’t very good at being like everyone else. We’ve tried to be happy whenever we won, and not so unhappy whenever we lost, but we can’t do it. We’ve tried to relax and enjoy ourselves, but not playing the way we want to play, the way we can play, far from relaxed, we have found we can’t enjoy ourselves at all.
Now nearing the playoffs, an important game with the Islanders a few days away, we try to tighten up our game, to give it the consistency and direction we know it needs. When we can’t quite do it, those who complained most about Bowman’s heavy hand now complain loudest at its absence. After most of a season having it our way, we are finally ready for Bowman. Yet still he does nothing. What is he waiting for?
Eaten with more energy than appetite, lunch is over in its usual twenty minutes, and noisily we disperse: some to the lobby, taking up positions that were left only minutes before, some browsing in the newsstand or in hotel shops; others leave for movies across the street or on walks in various directions, but all of us at some time return to our rooms for game shows or soaps, for cards or backgammon, but mostly to sleep or read.
It is six hours and forty-five minutes to game time and counting, but slowly.
I go up to the room and call Lynda: “Hi, how’re ya doin’? You’re kidding! How long’s he been—not the flu? Brother! Sarah’s okay? On the steps again! Oh no, how’s she feelin’? Mmm, um, hmm—well, um, what’ve you been doin’—no, no, no, I know. I mean what else have ya been—since Tuesday night? Did Luc shovel the driveway? Brother!
Huh? Oh, fine, er, not too bad. It was really cold in Toronto. You wouldn’t have believed how cold—huh? In Boston? Oh, um, not too bad. A bit windy. Huh? Oh, nothing much. Just um, oh, not much really. Oh, I dunno, probably just more of the same….”
I lie down and take a nap.
Late in the afternoon, bored with napping and reading, I go down to the lobby for something to do. Outside, through its tall, patchwork windows I see several players in the parking lot in front, bent over, huddling around something, arguing, pointing here and there, crouching lower, still arguing and pointing, then straightening up, some of them laughing, a few still arguing, and walking back to a white line painted on the pavement. The laughing and arguing continue, then one by one they turn and approach the line, pause, and flip quarters against the curb several feet away. I go outside and watch. Loud and mocking, the happy banter keeps up. Yet as each player steps to the line, his mood changes. Brows knit, lips draw tight across teeth, smiles disappear. Quarters arc through the air, hit, bounce, and stop; faces turn anxious, then hopeful, then angry or jubilant: hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year men’, many-time Stanley Cup winners, playing a game and wanting to win.
Lapointe and Shutt have their quarters near the curb; only Cam Connor and Lemaire are left. As Connor winds up, like Meadowlark Lemon at a foul shot, Lapointe walks in front of him, excuses himself, and walks back. Several more times, he pretends to do the same and Connor stutters and stops each time. At the side, Shutt makes rude comments. With each aborted try, the tension builds. Connor has gone in the hotel several times for change, and down to his last quarter, he tries again. Lapointe and Shutt stay (more or less) quiet and still; Connor’s left foot starts ahead, his right arm moves back in a pendulum swing, then smoothly forward, until just before the moment of release his thumb twitches and the quarter skitters noisily across the pavement, stopping halfway to the curb. There are screams of laughter and more rude comments. Connor, not completely surprised, borrows some money from Robinson and goes for more change.
It is down to Lemaire. The heckling increases as he steps to the line and grins into the sun. Short , balding, like the Pillsbury dough-boy all round and not very firm, his soft, wide face a sea of crinkles when he smiles, his laugh a tickled squeal he can’t control, he looks far from formidable. But don’t be fooled.
Last summer, we played a softball game at Quebec’s giant James Bay hydro-electric development. One of about ten such games we play each summer, they are strictly good-time, beer-on-the-bus, run-the-bases-the-wrong-way stuff. But this night, through forty feet of twilight, we faced a hot pitcher. Lemaire, “Co” as he is called, was our lead-off batter. As he stepped to the plate, the chatter on the bench began:
“C’mon Co, get us started.”
“He throws’em like you shoot’em, Co. No sweat out there.”
Hah hah hah.
Lemaire swung and missed at the first pitch.
“Oooh, close Co, close,” someone yelled. “Try a little more to the right.”
“Y
eah, and about six seconds sooner.”
Hah hah hah.
Looking into the remaining light, we could see Lemaire’s eyes twinkle and his mouth in a grin and we knew he was enjoying this as much as we were. Two balls, then one more swinging strike.
“Hey, that’s better, Co,” another voice shouted, “at least you’re on the same pitch.”
Hah hah hah.
Another ball and it’s three-and-two. Readying himself, he stepped toward the next pitch, then held up in time, the catcher short-hopping the ball out of the dirt. Lemaire started for first base. “Strike three!” (t)he umpire said.
Lemaire swung around, his squinting eyes flying open. On the bench, we began to laugh.
“Attaboy, Co. That’s the start we needed.”
Hah hah hah.
He said nothing, and turned and walked back to the bench. That twinkly face, the one that always collapsed and crinkled, now tightened and ground out words we could scarcely hear.
“It was low,” he said.
The grin has left his face, his quarter flips through the air, hits, bounces, and stops just short of the curb. There is a loud yell. Shutt and Lapointe dance up and down screaming insults. Lemaire says nothing, just pumps his right arm at his side as he does when he scores a goal, and walks to the curb to collect his money. On a team of experienced, distinguished big-game players, no one is a better big-game player than Lemaire. It’s his face that fools you.
A few minutes later, the bus driver sounds his horn and it is time to go. Everyone starts for the bus, except Connor. It has been a hard year for Connor. A first-round pick the year the Flyers won their first Stanley Cup, he went instead to the WHA, where he played until this season. But though he arrived to considerable expectations, slowly it has become clear that he lacks the skating and puck-handling skills necessary to be a regular, yet needs to be a regular to make his tough, team-oriented game work. So, unhappily between stools, he plays infrequently, even less than he might otherwise because of a series of quirky illnesses and injuries that by now seem to us as if they can only happen to him. He seems genuinely star-crossed this season, not trag-ically, for, loose and friendly like an ambling cowboy, he seems always able to find the funny side of things.
With everyone else walking to the bus, Connor finally has his chance. Laughing, he yells after those who beat him so mercilessly,
“Ali hah, I’m not gonna lose this time,” and taking a quarter from his pocket, he flips it towards the curb. The quarter hits, bounces, and rolls in a long, slow arc, disappearing down a drain.
Lapointe sits down in his right front seat, Lambert beside him, where until a few years ago Pete Mahovlich sat. Across from them, the seat remains empty as it has for most of the year, as Cournoyer’s back has kept him out of all but a few games. I walk towards the rear of the bus and, just past halfway, turn in to the left, in front of where Jimmy Roberts sat until he was traded two years ago. I sit alone. Others come onto the bus turning in right or left, apparently at random. But nothing is random. Just as it is in the dressing room, we each have a seat that is ours, that is no less ours because once, often many years ago, we assigned it to ourselves.
Like anything else about a team, where we sit on a bus is part of a routine, automatic and unnoticed unless the routine is broken. As so much of our life seems random and inexplicable to us—goalposts, or unseen saves, a bouncing puck, a three-goal game each part of our routine gets associated with good times and bad, and becomes superstition. So we sit where we do because if we didn’t, we might sit in a scat important to someone else. And sitting where we do as much as we do, gradually where we sit becomes important to us. This has been my seat for seven years, and if someone wants to talk to me, he can come here and sit next to me.
At training camp, and the few times each year when injuries bring two or three new players to the team, it can be a problem. For new players, unfamiliar with our habits, sit anywhere, and one person in the wrong seat means someone else in the wrong seat until a simple chain of confusion becomes a mess. While most of us hover near our occupied seats wondering what to do and where to go, not quite willing to admit that a particular seat matters to us, someone will usually come along and say something—“Hey, get the fuck outa my seat”—to straighten out the problem. Over time, the rest of us have simply learned not to make that mistake. If someone momentarily forgets, we remind him—“Hey, don’t change the luck”—and he will move. He knows that if he doesn’t, and we lose, it’s his fault.
The bus is quiet but comfortable. Preoccupied with other things, we don’t notice its silence. A few minutes later, gradually aware of it, we become self-conscious and uncomfortable, and make some noise, but still it is only conversation between seat partners or across aisles, nothing that can be heard more than a row or two away. Mostly we say nothing, because at times such as this, talk can seem an annoying distraction, taking us ahead in time, suspending our mood until it drops us abruptly closer to the game than we are prepared for. Only a few who need to talk as spillover for tensions that build too high do so, because anything too much, too loud, unrelated to the Bruins or to us, can and will be misconstrued as someone not thinking about the game, and not ready to play. We know that at the back, Bowman and Ruel watch and listen, noticing nothing until four hours, four days, four weeks from now when we lose, then remembering everything that happened in between.
The bus turns onto Causeway Street under the permanent shade and grime of the meccano-like elevated “Green Line” of the MBTA.
On one side of the street are burger joints and shabby bars; on the other is a huge brick structure joined on the outside, divided inside into the derelict Hotel Madison, North Station (of the Boston and Maine Railroad), and Boston Garden. In front of the Madison, a tat-tered, weathered man, maybe forty, maybe sixty, staggers along the sidewalk, here and there raising a brown paper bag to his face and tipping it back. Stopped by traffic, we sit and watch. Finally tipping it back too far, he loses his balance and stumbles to the sidewalk. “Hey, must be an old goalie,” a voice shouts, and everyone laughs. Several times a season, a spaced-out face singing in an airport, a patron passed out in a bar, someone in loud conversation with himself, anyone whose mental, physical, or emotional state seems the slightest bit shaky, it’s always the same thing: “Must be an old goalie.”
I have always been a goalie. I became one long enough ago, before others’ memories and reasons intruded on my own, that I can no longer remember why I did, but if I had to guess, it was because of Dave. Almost six years older, he started playing goal before I was old enough to play any position, so by the time I was six and ready to play, there was a set of used and discarded equipment that awaited me—that and an older brother I always tried to emulate.
I have mostly vague recollections of being a goalie at that time. I remember the spectacular feeling of splitting and sprawling on pavement or ice, and feeling that there was something somehow noble and sympathetic about having bruises and occasional cuts, especially if they came, as they did, from only a tennis ball. But if I have one clear image that remains, it is that of a goalie, his right knee on the ice, his left leg extended in a half splits, his left arm stretching for the top corner, and, resting indifferently in his catching glove, a round black puck.
It was the posed position of NHL goalies for promotional photos and hockey cards at the time and it was a position we tried to re-enact as often as we could in backyard games. There was something that looked and felt distinctly major league about a shot “raised” that high, and about a clean, precise movement into space to intercept it.
Coming as it did without rebound, it allowed us to freeze the position as if in a photo, extending the moment, letting our feelings catch up to the play, giving us time to step outside ourselves and see what we had done. In school, or at home, with pencil and paper, sometimes thinking of what I was doing, more often just mindlessly doodling, I would draw pictures of goalies, not much more than stick figures really, but flesh
ed out with parallel lines, and always in that same catching position. Each year when my father arranged for a photographer to take pictures for our family’s Christmas card, as Dave and I readied ourselves in our nets, the shooter was told to shoot high to the glove side, that we had rehearsed the rest.
To catch a puck or a ball—it was the great joy of being a goalie.
Like a young ballplayer, too young to hit for much enjoyment but old enough to catch and throw, it was something I could do before I was big enough to do the rest. But mostly it was the feeling it gave me.
Even now, watching TV or reading a newspaper, I like to have a ball in my hands, fingering its laces, its scams, its nubby surface, until my fingertips are so alive and alert that the ball and I seem drawn to each other. I like to spin it, bounce it, flip it from hand to hand, throw it against a wall or a ceiling, and catch it over and over again. There is something quite magical about a hand that can follow a ball and find it so crisply and tidily every time, something solid and wonderfully reassuring about its muscular certainty and control. So, if it was because of Dave that I became a goalie, it was the feeling of catching a puck or a ball that kept me one. The irony, of course, would be that later, when I finally became a real goalie instead of a kid with a good glove hand, when I learned to use the other parts of a goaltender’s equipment—skates, pads, blocker, stick—it could only be at the expense of what had been until then my greatest joy as a goalie.
I was nineteen at the time. It surely had been happening before then, just as it must before any watershed moment, but the time I remember was the warm-up for the 1967 NCAA final against Boston University. For the first few minutes, I remember only feeling good: a shot, a save, a shot, a save; loose, easy, the burn of nerves turning slowly to a burn of exhilaration. For a shot to my right, my right arm went up and I stopped it with my blocker; another, low to the corner, I kicked away with my pad; along the ice to the other side, my skate; high to the left, my catching glove. Again and again: a pad, a catching glove, a skate, a stick, a blocker, whatever was closest moved, and the puck stopped. For someone who had scooped up ice-skimming shots like a shortstop, who had twisted his body to make backhanded catches on shots for the top right corner, it was a moment of great personal triumph. I had come of age. As the warm-up was ending, I could feel myself becoming a goalie.