The Code (2 page)

I'm not sure who could have bailed me out of this jam in Frankfurt. As my problem escalated into a full-blown international crisis, the guys behind me shuffled over to another customs officer. I knew their faces and names. Anderson was the leader of the little pack. Back in my first week in the league he'd jumped me. I didn't appreciate it, but then again it wasn't me who had to get sewn up in the dressing room. You might still be able to lift my knuckle prints from his formerly fractured orbital bone. Anderson learned the hard way that you should always find out if the rookie you're going to chirp and run is a left-hander.

From the other line Anderson panned the room, but he really only wanted to look at me without drawing attention to himself. For the split second that our eyes made contact, he registered exaggerated amusement and unexaggerated condescension. On the ice, Anderson and two of the others had made more in one
contract than I did in my whole career. His look said: Winners' line over here. What's that make your line?

I stood there for a few awful minutes as the others moved through customs with nary a snag. Anderson even offered a smirk and then said, just loud enough for me to hear but not draw attention to himself, “School's out.” My blood pressure shot up and my hands started to shake. In the first-class lounge they were messaging contractors about progress on the additions to their Muskoka estates. Me, I was still standing there, worried that, among other things, my child-support payments might not clear. And, worse, I worried that they'd hook me up to a polygraph and ask me again what I did for a living. Would the arm swing way across the page, catching me not in a lie but in self-doubt about a job I'd been handed unexpectedly? Does it show up as telling the truth if you're talking about living a lie?

Never in my playing days had I been so nervous that I couldn't think straight. I could be counted on to make the right play, the smart play. At this point, though, I made an error that would be replayed forever in
The Worst Plays in Hockey History
should the Frankfurt security video ever land in the hands of a mean-spirited sports-network producer. I reached to my hip and slipped my BlackBerry out of its case.

“Maybe if I call …,” I said and nothing more. At that point red lights started flashing, a buzzer deafened with a white noise, soldiers with guns drawn rushed me, and the area went into lockdown. The BlackBerry was ripped from my hands and I was knocked to the floor, the barrel of an automatic weapon pressed to the back of my head and the heel of a boot cracking my spine.

Before I'd been handed an L.A. clipboard and a windbreaker with the team logo on it, I heard a lot about the fraternity of scouts. I was looking forward to working beside men who shared my love of the game and hoped to be part of a winning team
off the ice. Prostrate on the floor of Frankfurt International, I had my epiphany. I went from disappointment that none of the other scouts had backed me up to anger that Anderson would tell this story over beers on the scouting circuit. And I had plenty of reason to believe that Anderson knew exactly where my passport and ticket were. He was a strong number two to Lavery on my hate list and rising.

I
WAS DETAINED
for forty-eight hours, but thankfully my plight didn't make the national news or the sports pages. My ticket was likely floating in the Frankfurt sewage system and my passport had probably already moved on the black market. The Canadian consulate sent over temporary letters of transit, which were stamped and handed to me without ceremony. No apologies from my captors. They gave me back my BlackBerry, pointed me to the door, and turned their backs. I felt vaguely disappointed that I couldn't sustain their suspicions, that they viewed me as too pathetic to pose even a minimal threat.

I called Hunts from a payphone at the terminal. He told me that he'd been trying to get hold of me and feared the worst— that I was out on a bender or was banging some Czech talent. “If only,” I said. I gave him the cursory details, my passport, ticket, and computer bag lifted when I dozed off on my stopover, leaving out the flashing lights and automatic weapons. Told him that the power wound down on my BlackBerry and I had a short in my adapter. Even downplaying it this way I looked like a screw-up, but at least it was Hunts. He let me off with a “you effin' dope.” I deserved worse since I was sticking the team with a hefty premium to change my flight home.

“Never again,” I told him.

“Same thing occurred to me,” he said.

This mocking forgiveness was a shining example of the
flipside to Ubiquitous and Undying Hate: loyalties. You build them as a player if there's a brain inside your helmet, and you hope they'll keep you in the game at the end of your career.

The loyalties are built around a moment, something that passes between two guys, unnoticed by everyone else but deeply appreciated by one of the principals. It might be jumping into a fight to bail out the guy on the losing end, or covering for a roommate on night manoeuvres when his wife calls. You hope that the guy whose loyalty you've won will become a big deal in the league and you'll be part of his crew. You see it all the time. A team hires a veteran general manager and he gives jobs to the guys who worked for him before. They'll follow him from one organization to another and then on to the next. Or a team will hire a big name, giving him his first executive job, and he puts a bunch of former teammates on the payroll.

It doesn't matter if it's a GM who's in the Hall of Fame or someone who's sitting behind the desk for the first time. He'll presume that the members of his posse will have his back. They usually do, though often with knives in their hands. That is to say, loyalties are forever except when they're just memories.

Yeah, the game is played on ice but the league is like an iceberg. If you're not on the inside, you don't see five-sixths of what's going on. People think of hockey as a cold-weather game, but it's tropical compared to the league. The league is a business as cold as the dark side of Pluto.

I have a job thanks to a loyalty forged, as usual, with generosity in awful circumstances. Chad Hunt, the GM who hired me, slept on my couch in Los Angeles when his wife threw him out. Her mistake.

Nobody thought that much of Hunts at the time—he was just some kid from Morden, Manitoba, a goaltender, making the league minimum. Hunts looked like a career backup or even a
minor-leaguer. But once the divorce was final you wouldn't have recognized him. He lifted his chin off his chest and angled it upwards. His back straightened out of a depressed stoop. His demeanour went from all-is-lost to eff you. He turned into the Masked Marvel. Three times he landed on the league's second all-star team and he parlayed that into a five-year contract, that, for a season anyway, made him the highest-paid goaltender in the game and one of the ten highest paid at any position. When he signed that deal I'd played my last game in the league and was playing out the string for sixty grand tax-free in Europe.

People outside the league thought his breakthrough was a matter of him getting her off his mind. It was really him getting off the bottle. His drinking was common knowledge around the league, but I was the one who stayed awake with him when he had the DTs. He's been forever loyal to me. I'm loyal to him, but if he had to go, well, draw your own conclusions. Like I say, I'm pragmatic.

I
THOUGHT
the worst part of this trip was behind me. Not quite.

I had a six-hour wait for a seat in the last row of a Lufthansa flight to Toronto, one that was held up for three hours on the runway for unspecified mechanical malfunctions. While the mechanics were counting and tightening the bolts, I hoped they'd get around to patching the air seal around the washroom directly behind me. Assaulted by the constant fragrance of methane, I tried in vain to figure out how to get my oxygen mask to drop down without tripping an alarm.

Wedged into a seat that would cramp a lithe schoolgirl, I remembered those too-brief salad days when I had flown on team charters joyous after victories. My career on the ice is safely behind me but so, unfortunately, are my oversized glutes and quads that make it impossible to buy jeans off the rack. The
charters accommodated our extreme lower-body development with first-class seats stem to stern. Other organizations recognize that a scout, inevitably a former player, doesn't revert to your average Joe's physique upon announcement of his retirement or, as was the case with me, the morning-after realization that the phone won't ring again with his agent delivering the happy news of a contract offer.

Kind-hearted GMs will make sure that their scouts, the guys who travel offshore and cross-continent, can park their battleswollen glutes in first class. It's not just considerate. It's humanitarian. No such luck this trip. The team had to pay a premium to rebook my ticket. Asking for first class would be really pushing my luck, especially with my tainted rep. Anyway, I was originally booked in economy, as I always am.

Don't imagine that I'm a whiner. With so many guys on the outside looking in, I'm grateful to have and desperate to keep my job in the league, more grateful still on many counts that I work for L.A. While the Edmonton scouts are freezing their asses going to mid-winter meetings in their team's offices at the arena, our staff gathers in SoCal for our draft-prep war rooms. The Edmonton guys pack their parkas and our crew brings golf clubs.

Climate, though, is just about the only perk our franchise offers the scouting staffers. Our owner, Mark Galvin, made his wad in high-tech but can't get his mind around the idea that a hockey team lives or dies with its R&D. He believes scouting can be done on the cheap and should be if that enables him to stock higher-grade caviar in his plush, nay garish, box at the arena. So while struggling starlets roll out a Trumpian spread for Billionaire 4.0 and his guests at games, we go about our business as Spartans, sustained many nights by steamed tube steaks dispensed by acne-scarred teenagers at the snack bars in Chicoutimi, Sudbury, and Swift Current. While Software
Scrooge gets his publicist to plant fact-free stories about his philanthropy in the Sunday papers, our salaries have been frozen for two years and counting. Pensions remain something this Nerd in the Clover vows to get around to someday. And while the Proprietor is air-lifted to New York in his Learjet to inspect the Broadway show he's underwriting for the amusement of his fourth diamond-encrusted wife, my sorry ass is jammed in economy.

I dropped down my tray, grabbed a napkin, and borrowed a pen from the fat lady spilling out of the seat next to me. As others might do crossword puzzles to the point of obsession, I'm forever writing down the names of teenage future millionaires and those who'll fall short. My job is to sort the former from the latter, to get the names in the right order. To compile a shopping list that, over the course of the draft and across the span of years, will keep our team in the playoffs, keep my GM's nameplate on his door, and keep me on the payroll.

I had been in Hradec Králové to see Dailey play for the U.S., Sorensen for the Swedes, and Popov for the Russians at the Five Nations under-18 tournament. The Canadians don't send a team to the tournament, only to the world under-18s in April. Six hours in the arena every day, three hours commuting
from Prague to Hradec and back, and at least three more hours working up thumbnail reviews on forty players, and I'd seen absolutely nothing of the Czech Republic.

But what the trip lacked in glamour it made up in substance. Dailey had been a force, the leading scorer for the Americans, who won the gold. He was a Bloomfield Hills kid who probably would have been playing football ten or fifteen years ago before hockey established real traction in Detroit's tony exurbs. Dailey was in the top two of the draft, a coin flip with Galbraith, and thus off the board for us unless our Ping-Pong ball dropped first in the lottery. My entry in our team's database:
Best player on the ice any game here. Prototypical power forward, upside is first-line franchise player and 40 goals. Physically dangerous. Will play in league at 19.

I liked Sorensen a lot. And I had liked him more in March than in December. He showed a great stick in the two games I saw in Stockholm and you had to wonder what he'd become when he physically matured. But he was sometimes a highly skilled enigma, going from an A game to a C minus the next night, from first line to benched.
Creative but inconsistent. Benching a strange one. Coach assured Sven it wasn't illness or injury. Some noise in the background about him being “difficult.”
That “noise”: Sven, our Swedish scout, usually a fierce advocate for young Tre Kronors, wasn't a fan of Sorensen. I suspected it had something to do with Sorensen's agent being a hated rival of Sven back in their playing days.

Popov was a high-risk, high-reward proposition with Moscow Spartak. Any team that drafts a Russian invites the hassle of coaxing the kid to come West and offering dough that competes with the tax-free coin he makes in the Kontinental Hockey League. Compared to other teams, though, we've done pretty well landing Russian kids—they'd rather be parked poolside with the cocoa butter than fitting their Lamborghinis with snow tires.

Popov had spent all season lighting up the K against veteran pros and making seven figures tax-free. No wonder he looked bored.
(Amazing dangle and finish, can't find his own end with a GPS.)
I had him listed purely on talent. We weren't going to draft him in the first round. Hunts didn't need the headaches. If Popov were already playing junior in Canada, okay, you at least know that he wants to play in the league rather than the KHL. Popov didn't even talk to the Quebec junior team that owned his rights.

I know what you're thinking about those thumbnail evaluations, but I'm not sent traipsing across two continents to file deathless prose. I'm sent to make dead-accurate evaluations of future pros. When you're dealing with eighteen-year-olds, dead accuracy is an occasional thing and certainty is for fools. I'm like all the other scouts sitting in the corner seats—just out there taking notes and making educated guesses.