Authors: Jack Falla
We'd been getting shelled but I was stopping everything. I was also getting tired. I'd seen mop-up duty in a few games but this was my first varsity start. I kept sneaking peeks at the clock wanting the game to be over. With 1:03 to play we got a two-minute penalty and the Blue Devils rolled out their power play, which featured the state's leading scorer, Geoff Cutting, at center and a couple of howitzers on the points.
Cutting won the face-off and drew the puck to the right point man, who slid it left and,
whomp,
a shot I didn't even see bounced off my left leg pad. Cutting got the rebound but I got my stick glove on his shot. Paul LeBlanc grabbed the rebound and started behind the net with two forecheckers hounding him.
“Two on you, Paul ⦠Two on you ⦠Up the boards!” I yelled. Paul rimmed the puck up the boards, where it was intercepted by a Lewiston player and shot back in on me. I held on for the face-off. There was still 0:51 to play. Lewiston pulled its goalie for a six-on-four advantage. Adrenaline canceled fatigue and I was playing on instinct. Arms and legs moving in the ingrained patterns learned on driveways, ponds, and rinks over the previous eight years. No time to think. With less than thirty seconds to play I dived across an open net to get a stick onto a shot that was headed in. Geoff Cutting clanged the rebound off of the crossbar, and one of our defensemen flipped the puck into neutral ice. The Blue Devils went back to retrieve it. 0:27 to play. They came back on us with six players moving to the attack. The puck went left to Cutting, who accelerated past our defenseman, skated to the top of the face-off circle, and blew a laser into our net high to my stick side. Goal. The Lewiston stands erupted in cheers. Then they heard the whistle. Offside. Now the St. Dom's fans started cheering. I looked at the clock: 0:21. Face-off outside the zone. But it came back in fast. A shot. A skate save. Another shot. The puck went into my glove. “Hold it, JP ⦠Hold it!” It was an exhausted Paul LeBlanc kneeling in front of me, shielding me with his body and not wanting to get up on exhausted legs. 0:11 to play. Fans on their feet. Both sides screaming. Cutting managed a shot off the face-off. It went over the net into the corner. A Blue Devil player slid it up the boards to the point. Two of my teammates blocked my view. “Gimme a look.⦠Gimme a look!” Our left defenseman spun out of the way just in time for me to get a pad on a low slapshot. The puck skidded into the corner, where they had two guys on it and another headed for the low slot. We were collapsing.â¦
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
â
PLAAAAAAYED
â
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.
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 hurtâtoday's equipment is so good that goal is the safest position on the iceâbut 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 patientsâ“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 4â1 to Anaheim, got outshot 33â21, looked almost as disorganized as we had in Montreal, andâexcept for Jean-Baptiste, who scored our goalâcouldn'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 approvalâand disapprovalâof 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 teamâCam, Jean-Baptiste, Flipside, and meânine 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 girlfriendâtogether or sequentiallyâto 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.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
At least this season we played three home games before the long trip. We beat Atlanta 4â3 and Washington 4â0. 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.