The Code (21 page)

Madison knew that he had said as much as he could and maybe more than he should, even with a person of so little interest as me and even in a setting so informal as a family joint with “That's Amore” playing in the background. He switched conversation over to hockey. I feigned enthusiasm and I've forgotten what we talked about.

Speeches were made by the organizers. Madison knew not to ask me to prepare a speech. That would have been a sure way to scare me off. Instead, he ambushed me, asking me to stand up to take a few questions from the floor.

The first one was about shutting down the Great One in the finals back in '93. “Jacques told me to stay close enough to him so that I could tell him what brand of gum Gretz was chewing,” I said. “After game three I told him, ‘Juicy Fruit.'” It got a laugh, as always. I didn't say anything like that and neither did he. It was just a line I cribbed from
Hoosiers
, an in-flight movie I sat through three times one season. I visualized Jacques being played by Gene Hackman.

Next came a question from a kid who wanted to know what I thought of Billy Mays Jr. Before I could form an answer, the
kid's father stood up and asked if L.A. was going to draft him. “He's a player of interest for us, that's for sure,” I said, shooting a glance at Maddy. “When the late coach here said Billy was the best to ever play for him, I'm sure he meant it.”

And on it went. It didn't take long. I guess I couldn't sustain their interest for more than a half-dozen questions. The kids didn't want to have to wait for their gelato, and parents looked at their watches. When I sat down, I leaned back in my chair and glanced back at the wall behind the head table. It was covered in autographed photos of former players, celebrities who'd passed through, and community leaders. I picked out a photo of Vito and Hanratty, Vito and players from the old-timers game, Vito and the mayor. Prominently displayed and larger than others was a photo of Vito and Giuseppe Visicale.

I said nothing to Madison about it. He was preoccupied with organizers' duties, counting the take, paying the bills, and sorting out disputes with the silent auction. Vito himself came up to thank me when the tables were being bussed.

“I hope you come back,” he said. “I'll make something special for you, you see.”

“I see that Mr. Visicale comes here,” I said. “Is he a regular?”

“I make a special
cuscusu
for him. He says it's like his mother's.

He comes in after the games when he's in town. I keep the place open for him. Put up the closed sign but he comes to the back door and we sit and talk about the old country.”

Vito talked about Don Visicale's favourite meals. I asked Vito if this special customer was in on St. Patrick's Day. Affirmative.

“I remember because he came with other people, including the mayor. He called me from the arena to let me know to expect a big sitting. He apologized that he didn't tell me before but he was very generous after.”

The CEO of Vis Hockey Enterprises was in the company of
the mayor that night. If you are a person of interest, the mayor wouldn't be a bad one to vouch for your whereabouts.

“It was so sad,” Vito continued unprompted. “The coach was supposed to come that night too.”

“I can't see that. I thought that Hanratty didn't want Visicale buying into the arena and the team.”

“They came here together many times after games, the three of them. Pippo came with the coach and the doctor”—Vito crossed himself—“and he told me that he was going to buy the team. ‘Don't worry what the newspaper says, the coach will help me,' he told me. The way he said it, the coach wanted the money to come into the team but didn't want it to seem that way, not at the start. It was better for the coach if he said he didn't want the deal because many people here don't. Then when he said he'd changed his mind, he could tell other people to change theirs. No, Pippo really appreciated what the coach was going to do. Now with the coach gone, I'm worried that his deal won't happen. People here don't like Pippo and me.”

Visicale couldn't have had blood on his hands or else Vito would have remembered seeing it on the white tablecloths. Bloodstains are harder to get out than his tomato sauce. That wouldn't have meant that he couldn't have had the job done, but whoever did it wasn't a professional. What's more, Hanratty was worth more to Visicale alive than dead. Fact is, the guy who had taken out the Ol' Redhead and Bones had to fear Visicale as much as the law. Visicale was likely a guy who didn't oppose capital punishment.

On my way out the door at night's end Woody McMullin cornered me. He had emceed the event and with his work done had dived into his jars. He might have been knocking back one of the better vintages of Vito's mom's stock of dandelion wine. I tried to gently bring up the idea of Hanratty being in bed with
Visicale even though the townspeople thought there'd be hard feelings between them. “With money on the line, Red developed a taste for pasta,” he said and then stifled a belch. “Different guys for sure, but Red thought that the team needed more of a budget for scouting and an arena upgrade to compete. Visicale could give him all that.”

The next belch he unsuccessfully stifled and I beat a retreat. He said goodbye with a flourish, like he was throwing to a commercial.

It was the second week of May and Hunts was making a trip he dreaded: Toronto. He suffers through these trips twice a year. The first is the annual road game that L.A. plays here. On the team's last trip in, Hunts didn't fly out after the game with the team. We had two days of meetings at the Royal York with the scouting staff and coaches from our minor-league affiliate. We also brought in a couple of people for interviews: a personal trainer who was looking for a job in player development and a nutritionist who claimed he could raise our team's performance with some sort of organic rocket fuel.

Hunts only made it as far as the Royal York lobby over the course of the meetings. I practically had to drag him out of the hotel on the night before his flight. I wanted to take him to an Irish bar around the corner. It wasn't even a five-minute walk. I thought it would do him good to relax a bit. Instead, he looked like he was marching to the gallows.

“I never have liked this city,” he said. “I never played any good here. Got pulled every other game it seems like, and against
teams that couldn't score if they picked up the puck and tried to carry it in. And there's never any getting away from the game here. It's maybe the only time I get recognized—people come up to me and tell me something they suppose that I don't know about hockey. Doesn't happen in L.A., never. Hardly ever happens anywhere else.”

Hunts isn't a particularly social animal, and that's a liability in his position. It's right there in his job description: The GM is the face of the franchise. He takes no pleasure in the PR part of the job, whether it's making small talk with fans or signing an autograph, or a professional consideration like taking questions from reporters. I suppose he's still a lot like the sixteen-year-old from Morden who used to rush back to the farm in Manitoba at the end of the season. Cities are an inconvenience to him and Toronto isn't just a big city but, worse, the biggest hockey city.

Hunts's second dreaded annual trip to the city is for the league's scouting combine that convenes in Toronto every May. Hunts and I do the breakfast buffet at the Sheraton out by Pearson International Airport when he blows into town for the physical testing and team interviews with the top one hundred draft-eligible prospects. The hotel is as close as Hunts would ever want to get to downtown: forty-five minutes away if there's no traffic, and only five minutes from first-class check-in for the flight back to L.A. The prospect of a quick and easy escape brightens his mood. He always gets a room at the hotel where the league does its testing and his suite serves as our team's headquarters, where we conduct our scouting war-room sessions and player interviews.

Hunts's BlackBerry was pinging with messages from the league HQ with combine updates, players who'd be attending and those bowing out, the interview schedule, and some such. He glanced at the screen but didn't put down his knife and fork as he laid into his cheese omelette. With his attention divided
between news and his plate, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to squeeze in a request that could be problematic if he had follow-up questions.

“Hunts, I was wondering if I could have ten minutes alone with Mays when we bring him in for our interview.”

“That's half our time with him. Don't you think the rest of the guys would be interested in hearing what he has to say? Maybe they'd have questions they'd want answered.”

“I just want to ask him some sensitive stuff, stuff about his family, his mother's problems …”

I opted not to throw in even a faint suggestion that the problems were avarice and nymphomania.

“… and I figure he'd be a little more forthcoming with me alone, seeing as I've talked to him some and I'm more familiar with him than anyone on the staff.”

Hunts kept his head down and kept chewing. He took a bite of his toast. I figured I shouldn't let the silence hang out there.

“I'll write it up in notes and send it off to the guys.”

He chewed. Chewing wasn't an answer.

“Look, I know it's our pick and by ‘our' I mean you and me.

It doesn't matter what the other guys think so much. You and I own this pick. We're gonna wear it for better or worse. It's the team but it's also our jobs. I need you to trust me on this one. Ten minutes.”

Hunts was just about to take another bite. At that moment, however, a waitress came by the table to freshen our coffees and take away empty plates. She lingered. She seized the silence.

“Hey Chad, whaddaya figure you're gonna do with Harris this season? He's got one year left on his contract, right?”

Hunts looked at his plate, his head as motionless and his eyes as focused downwards as Tiger Woods at the top of his backswing. He rolled his eyes upwards.

“He's got a year left to prove that he's worth another contract. If I didn't think he could prove it he wouldn't be in L.A.”

“He's my neighbour's cousin,” she said.

“Everybody's got a neighbour and every neighbour's got a cousin.”

“Yeah, but not every neighbour's cousin makes four-pointfive and is a year away from being an unrestricted free agent.”

He raised his head and looked to his left, not Tiger Woods any longer, more like a guy who couldn't break a hundred, like me.

“That's one helluva point you got there. I think I'm gonna get that engraved on the back of my watch.”

The waitress walked away with two of our empty side plates and her coffee pot.

“Hunts, the ten minutes at the end of Mays's interview …”

“Yeah, yeah, not a problem. I gotta tell you, I can't get out of this city soon enough. It's not like everybody's a fan here or an expert. They all talk like agents.”

T
HE PHYSICAL TESTING
is always ugly. Any kid putting in half an effort on the stationary bikes for the aerobic testing is on his knees barfing afterward. I've never paid too much attention to the results. You can always make these kids physically bigger, better, stronger, fitter, whatever. I just like to get an idea of their physical maturity—some are men and have little room for growth, others are boys and have a chance to improve a lot.

All the GMs and scouts stand around watching the kids go through their assorted ordeals. When you see one of us smiling as a kid faints dead away, you're looking at a sadist. And when you scan the floor at the combine, you'll see a lot of smiles. I don't smile. It's too much like team hazing and I dropped a guy on a minor-midget team because he gave me a hard time about
not wanting to get involved. The rest of the team backed off on his recommendation. They didn't stop hazing other guys but they kept clear of me. I wish someday a kid would see a GM or scout smiling at the combine and then get up off his knees and sucker the creep. I'd draft that kid.

The league physicals are more important to me than a kid's VO2 capacity or his vertical jump. I want to know if a kid has had concussions, if he has had or is going to need surgery, if he has physical issues that make the investment of a pick too risky. We see all kinds of things show up on those medicals. A kid who gets a completely clean bill of health is like a car that gets a mechanic's certification. And just like the mechanic's sign-off doesn't mean you're going to be able to drive the car forever, a clean bill of health is no guarantee. A kid can shred his ACL on his first shift after signing his contract or his first concussion can end his career.

T
HE LEAGUE SENT
US the schedule for interviews. Some players had only three or four interviews. Some had twenty-five or more. Some meetings were scheduled before their physical testing, some after. With a hundred players involved, the making of the interview schedule was probably as complex as making the league's schedule of regular-season games. Mays was going to be our second-last interview. L.A. would be the last team he'd talk to.

The combine interviews remind me of my film studies class at B.C. The funniest film we did in a course-load of doom and gloom was Mel Brooks's
The Producers
. In that flick Bialystock and Bloom, played by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, are auditioning actors for the role of the Führer in
Springtime for Hitler
. I remember watching the movie in class and splitting a gut. Determined to produce a Broadway bust, Bialystock and
Bloom have a cattle call and bring in the world's worst actors for auditions to play Adolph Hitler. They settle on Dick Shawn, a stoned hippie, for the lead role, but it's the others that stuck with me. After watching it I thought that Sarge must have gone through the same sort of thing when he was questioning witnesses and suspects. Life's rich parade passes by.