The Code (10 page)

“No one in this organization has …”

Toe tap and fidget. The team president, mocked as “His Presidency” by Hanratty, was a Reliable Rubber Stamp on all things to do with the team's budget. He was well practised in paper shuffling so that, at board meetings, no one made it so far as the third-to-last page of the pile where he neatly hid a considerable honorarium for Little Red, who posed as a scout.

And, yeah, down in the order, Little Red, who had such a tough act to follow that he long ago stopped trying to do anything but fog his rum-drenched breath with the extra-large handful of mints that he no longer had to ask the bartender for upon presentation of the bill. He was the image of his old man, with features that looked like they were sculpted out of mashed potatoes and two beet slices for cheeks:

“No one …”

He paused to bite his lip and compose himself. Almost believably.

“… cared more about his players. He was my father and I was real lucky that way … to have a father like him. But he was a father to any young man who walked into his dressing room.”

Smirk. Yeah, of all of the speeches, this was the richest, talking about the Hall of Famer as a quality parent when in fact Hanratty had left his kids with father figures who mostly mixed their drinks. When the reading of the will came around I'm sure Little Red would be on the edge of his seat when it came to the assignment of his father's flask.

I mention those four, but more than a dozen got up there to take lead positions on the grief parade. Less would have been more, I figure. The Eskimos had fewer words for snow than the speechifiers had in coming up with ways to say that Red was a credit to the game.

You could have flooded the rink with tears shed by family, friends, team alums, kids who were on the team now. They hauled out a blown-up photo of the Ol' Redhead standing behind the bench in some sort of checkered coat circa '75. He was mid-holler, which is to say it could have been any time, any game. You would have thought that every call had gone against him. Maybe some thought it was inappropriate or undignified to show him this way. Me, I thought it was just about perfect, like he was bitching about this last call. He had been the master bully of refs but, no matter how hard he shouted from the grave, Hanratty was never going to be able to coax a makeup call out of the Big Referee in the Sky.

When you bought a program at the arena, you'd have a hard time finding Bones's name. It appeared in a single line of type, below the names, numbers, and positions of the players, below Hanratty's in bold type as head coach and general manager, below others ostensibly ahead of the team doctor in the organization's pecking order. The bottom line read:
Team doctor … Dr. Gabe McGarry.
The last name to show up on a long roll of credits, at a point when everyone in the theatre has cleared out.

In death, though, his role had to be writ larger, and in fact it was only fair. The Ol' Redhead held Bones in greater esteem than anybody else involved with the team. He admired his expertise. The organizers of the affair were sensitive to this point and thus made sure to get a mention of Bones in all the speeches. They made sure to get Bones's son up in the middle of the program,
likely because they feared that the arena would clear out if they put him last.

“Most don't know it, but my father did all his work for the club on a volunteer basis. When he travelled with the team to championships he insisted on paying his own way. I really think that late in life the team kept him going. He cared about these players, more than wins or losses …”

Bones II's was a pretty touching speech. Bones II was Dr. Theodore McGarry, who'd played a few games but didn't stick with the Peterborough juniors and wisely headed off to med school. With a gut spilling over his too-tight belt and shirt buttons ready to burst, he didn't look like he'd ever been an athlete at all. His father had been a better player before quitting to study medicine, but Bones II became the better doctor. Bones II was regarded as one of the province's top cardiologists, and he kept his hand in sports, consulting with the Olympics associations and the league and minor-hockey organizations.

Bones II seemed shattered. Here was a guy who had to tell people that the odds of getting out alive were long. Here was a guy who had to tell people that they had no shot at beating it and that they should get their affairs in order. The bedside manner had gone out the window. He was pretty much Code Blue with grief. He soldiered on.

“I was in a unique position,” he said. “Some players are lucky enough to play for their fathers. In my time with Peterborough it was like I was playing for both my fathers. Funny thing is, my father wanted me to keep playing. It was Red who encouraged me to go to med school.”

It was one of his standard lines and it got a bit of a laugh. Bones II was smart enough to keep it short. That said, when he did get up there many in the crowd seized the chance for a smoke break.

No one took a smoke break near the end when they brought up Billy Mays Jr. to speak for the current team. You couldn't have asked for more grace under pressure than that kid showed. He didn't stutter, not once, though he was choked up and close to losing it. I'd find out later that he'd written the speech on his own. He put in the best shift of all those who took centre stage.

“When I came here Coach told me that he was concerned about me as a person first and a player second and said he took that approach with every player. He told me, ‘You're going to play a few years but your life off the ice lasts a heckuva …'”

Clearly, the kid was cleaning it up for the family audience. Bones had put the Ol' Redhead on a sodium-free diet but the coach's language was as salty as the Dead Sea.

“‘… lot longer than your career on it.' He said, ‘If you look after your life, if you've got character, if you've got heart, it won't necessarily make you a great player, but it will make you as good a player as you have the ability to be.'”

Pass the Kleenex. Hunts wanted to know about what any GM would have: this kid's character and heart. If I had to file my final report on Mays after he stood up there in the arena that day, Hunts would have thought I'd gone soft.
The kid you want your daughter to bring home. Probably leaving the arena to give blood and then put in a volunteer shift at the Peterborough soup kitchen.

Mays was out with mono back in the fall and missed the first twelve games. When he came back, though, he tore up the league, a point-and-half a game, until he tore his shoulder on a blindside hit. I was a bit troubled by the kid's shoulder but that's barely in my job description.

In late May we bring in the meat for inspection. We fly in all our main players of interest, the kids we're looking at in round one of the draft. We pick them up at LAX and they think they're in for a vacation in the sun. It's a bit of a disappointment to them that we put them through off-ice workouts that must seem to them like variations of challenges on
Survivor
. They're really disappointed when they get leaned into by our team doctor and a sports psychologist in L.A. The former focuses on reported injuries, the latter on unreported psychic wounds. The former only makes sense, but the latter I don't have any time for at all, and neither really does Hunts. The psych's on staff mostly to appease the guy who signs our cheques.

Yeah, our Gyro Gearloose of Beverly Hills never shuts up
about studying psychology in college—to hear him talk you would have thought that Adler had been his thesis adviser. Given that he blows everything up to 400 percent, it's almost certain that his entire background in the field consisted of a one-semester half-credit course with a final made up of trueand-false and multiple-choice questions and sessions with his shrink after each of his failed marriages.

My antennae twitch whenever a kid suffers an injury in junior—pros are bound to get in some train wrecks and, with me as one of the exceptions, most come back from them at no worse than 90 percent. With a kid, though, “once injured” has a way of becoming “always injured.” Doctors will tell you that it's a kid getting all screwed up—his growth plates and all—before the body is fully formed.

Some scouts go for the high mystical stuff and think the “always injured” is a kid with a black cloud over his head. I wouldn't discount it. I try to look at it organically: If a kid is getting injured all the time, he's doing something wrong on the ice. He's putting himself in bad places on the ice, taking bad risks, not reading the play. He left himself vulnerable the first time and repeats his mistake. And that adds up to bad hockey sense. The casual fan thinks making a great play is hockey sense, but to me that's just vision. Staying alive and being able to show up for work: That's hockey sense to me. You make a great pass that no one anticipates: vision. You play a thousand games in the league: hockey sense.

At the end of the service, I repaired to the scouts' room, where someone in the team office had thoughtfully placed a few boxes of doughnuts and a couple of stone-cold pizzas to soak up the beer that was on ice in a garbage can in the corner. “Just the way the Ol' Redhead would have wanted it … if they could take the battery out of the smoke alarm,” Double J noted upon entry.

I braced the broadcast play-by-play guy for a bit of factfinding. Woody McMullin had been the Voice at Radio Free Peterborough since Year Two of King Red's Reign over the bucolic principality. McMullin had career ambitions of bigger arenas and more dough beaten out of him long ago when he sent out tapes to Toronto stations and never got a reply. Understandably, because he had no gift for his chosen occupation—he managed to sing the game out of tune and out of rhythm and frequently couldn't remember the lyrics. He did know hockey, though. He was an assistant coach with the best Peterborough triple-A bantam teams and maybe would have been the head coach and moved up the food chain if he didn't have to spend all his weekends on the job and half of them on the road.

“How are the kids taking all this?” I asked as an icebreaker appropriate to the moment.

“About how you'd expect. They don't know what happened and what's next. The ones that you'd expect are pretty messed up. Others hear from their parents that this is finally their chance to get to play …”

Oh yeah, there was going to be some of that for sure. The Moulder of Men had been the Nemesis of Many Supposedly Stifled Stars, at least to the minds of their parents.

“… and for the Russian kid it's a vacation,” Woody said.

“So long as the cheque clears, he gives you what he has to,” I told him.

“Yeah, I guess showing up to the service and the funeral isn't in the deal they did with the KGB to get him over here. It wasn't Red's idea to bring Markov in. He was never big on Euros, y'know …”

“Shit, he never could figure out how Canada didn't sweep eight games of the Summit Series.”
Woody, who worked road games without a colour guy, was used to pausing only for commercials. “… and he didn't like Markov even one little bit. The kid hadn't even played a game and he was bitchin' that he was promised an apartment and a car. He doesn't score a goal in the first month but he's always got his hand out, right in the dressing room, before the game. After the first bag skate the kid packed his bags. I guess he packed them again.”

“He's quitting?”

“Well he ain't here. AWOL. Mays said he didn't make it home after the old-timers game. Mays said Markov got a call on his cell during the game—Markov told him that it was his agent and he had to go and that he'd meet him back at the billet's later.”

“Does the kid speak English or Mays Russian?”

“Markov's English is pretty good. Found out fast that it's hard to get laid and impossible to order drinks if you don't speak the language.”

“Geez, he'd be the first Russian to like to drink.”

“Yeah, they tried to track him down but the trail of empties and cigarette butts finally ran out. Maybe he thinks ‘Coach die, season over.'”

It was all an interesting if not completely unexpected subtext. Mays's outreach, like Markov was an exchange student, was pretty much for naught. It's hard to get with the program if you don't understand it and weren't raised in the culture. I didn't have any particular interest in Markov, a good skater but too selfish for me. I wanted to know about Mays's game, his bout with mono, and especially his shoulder. Woody gave me the season-in-review, though with a mouthful of maple glazed.

“There's nothing you could fault Mays with, not a thing,” McMullin said. “A player you just enjoyed watching, making something happen every shift. When he came back from his
mono it looked like he'd never even been away. Seamless it was. He was the best player in the league in December and all these other guys had a two-month head start on him. Still growing.”

“How did he go down with the shoulder?”

“A game against Kingston and Markov was in the middle of it. He trades a couple of slashes with Kingston's big Russian defenceman …”

“Probably some chirpin' about who squeezed more money out of his team,” I interrupted with acknowledgment.

“Who knows what it was about. Comes after a whistle. Only time I'd seen any passion out of the Ruskie the whole time. Anyway, big scrum and Mays steps into the middle of it and tries to peel Markov away. Right about this time, Tighe …”

Tighe being Kingston's Knucklehead No. 1, 210 pounds or roughly 3 pounds for every IQ point.

“… blindsides Mays. Huge cross-check, then like a tackle from the back. Sends him almost headfirst into the boards. Could have been worse. I thought for sure it was a concussion or a neck. Stupid ref. Gives him a double minor when he should have got five games. No review by the league either.”

Well, Voice was effectively on the team payroll and had been drinking Hanratty's Kool-Aid for years, so I knew that this would have been the way it all looked to someone waving Peterborough pom-poms. Still, the way McMullin described it, and I had no reason to doubt him, Mays's shoulder had nothing to do with any hockey-sense issue. Fact is, the Boy Wonder was stepping up for a teammate, probably trying to get Markov to buy in. Not a problem with hockey sense, but maybe common sense. Mays was still innocent enough to believe in the basic good in everyone, even in a kid like Markov, who was, in my eyes and every scout's and I guarantee the Ol' Redhead's, a talented dog too lazy to do tricks.