The Code (5 page)

Back in '84 Hanratty had picked me in the junior draft in the fourteenth round coming out of minor midget and talked to my parents about sending me to Peterborough. A few junior teams had called my folks before the junior draft, and my father let them know long and loud that I was going to college. Hanratty drafted me anyway. He came over to our house and made his pitch. Hard-ass versus hard-ass.

“No,” my father said. “He's going to be the first in our family to get a college degree. It wouldn't have mattered if you took him in the first round. What round did you have him, first or second?”

“Sarge, I hate to break it to you,” Hanratty said. “We had him in the fourteenth. I didn't even know about this college thing until I walked in here.”

My father was offended. He figured Hanratty was a sore loser. In retrospect, I'm sure Hanratty was telling the truth. Direct, yup. Blunt, you betcha. Trying to con my father? Nope. With his history, if he didn't have a parent at a handshake, he'd have said to hell with you. I'm glad my father didn't ask Hanratty to show him his scouts' list because I would have quit the game right then and there if I'd seen the names of 260 Ontario sixteen-year-olds ahead of mine.

I mustn't have made any impression on Hanratty. In the
warm-ups before the old-timers game, I skated by him and gave him a “Hey, coach.” He had no idea who I was. If I told him I was the one who got away, he would have called security.

If you think I ever hated Red Hanratty, you've got it all wrong. I never regretted going to college instead of Peterborough, but I probably would have liked playing for him. He won a helluva lot more than he lost and turned out more pros than any junior coach. More wins in the juniors than anyone else … check that, than any two guys else. Some have thought that his position these last few years was ceremonial—you hit seventy and leave it to your assistant coaches to be on the ice and take on the lion's share of the work. So the thinking went. Not the case at all. He ran every practice, his voice echoing through the arena, every last profanity. He was the one who identified the talent, and he was the one who put them in the position to succeed, first in junior, then in the league. He was the one with the clearest read on opposing teams. His players didn't panic because he did. They played their bags off for him.

If you went by the stories in the sports sections you'd have assumed that Hanratty was the exception to the Rule of Ubiquitous and Everlasting Hate. Yeah, Norm Pembleton's teams had played Hanratty's for thirty-plus years and Pembleton was the ultimate hard-ass—never shook the hand of another coach, not even Hanratty. Still, Pembleton's enmity seemed a little theatrical—the bad moustache bought second-hand from a '40s B-movie villain. And at some level, he and Hanratty knew each other's life and work better than anyone else could.

With this one exception, Hanratty seemed like the Beloved Icon. He always smiled, always cracked wise, always perched a cheap stogie in his pie-hole. (You had an open invitation to enforce a no-smoking bylaw on him and have hockey fans stone you. Fact is, he mostly gnawed at an unlit cigar that lasted
from his morning coffee to last call.) He evoked a time when men were men and helmets were for soldiers. You just sort of imagined that his home looked like a wing of the Hockey Hall of Fame. If you loved this game, you loved Red Hanratty. This was the flipside of the Rocket Richard–Teeder Kennedy vignette: Red Hanratty was the Beating Heart of Oldetime Hockey.

Hanratty was coach of the Peterborough alums that night. His former players, the guys who went on to fame and millions in the league, came out to the old-timers show just to pay homage to the Ol' Redhead. As soon as they heard him bark they were sixteen all over again. When they posed with him for a team photo that would appear in the local rag the next morning, they all beamed like they had just won the Cup. The Peterborough alums lineup had three Hall of Famers: Bobby Reagan, Reggie Hofferman, and Eddie Talbot. All had dropped Hanratty's name in their acceptance speeches at their induction ceremonies, putting him at the top of the list of Those Who Made It All Possible. Talbot, in fact, a three-time fifty-goal scorer but in a lot of ways a social misfit, went into great detail about his indebtedness to Hanratty twice in his incoherent ramble and forgot to mention his own wife and parents.

Whatever Hanratty did to make these guys players is at best mysterious and to my mind debatable. I always say genetics is destiny. Hanratty turned out the most players because he was around the longest and he did less to hold them back. That's not a knock. Hanratty himself admitted that he always believed the worst thing you can do is overcoach talent. Self-deprecation was the perfect coaching philosophy for Hanratty to bring to this old-timers game. Hanratty's chief responsibility this night—check that, his only responsibility—was something he had a lot of practice at. He had to make sure the beer was cold.

At the end of the game the beer was cold. At the end of the night, so was Red Hanratty.

The old-timers game ended up 12–10, and when the goaltenders went down you would have needed a crane to get them back up on their skates. I pulled off the impossible and went scoreless, pointless, again. Most of the time I was the youngest guy on the ice, too.

The Peterborough alums won, natch, while Hanratty and Pembleton jawed at each other. Thankfully, the cheers and hoots drowned out a bunch of f-bombs that were attached to aspersions about manhood, character, heritage, and intelligence or lack thereof. The two old pros invoked incidents, most of them Pembleton's embarrassments, that were league lore. They made it look like it was real. Or maybe made it look like an act. I couldn't really tell which and Pembleton was right standing behind me, reeking of vodka.

I had a beer in the dressing room after the game. A chamber of commerce type came by to thank me and hand me an envelope with gas money and a gift certificate good for seventy dollars toward a dinner for two, drinks extra, at the Falling Water Café.

Who knew Frank Lloyd Wright worked in Peterborough? (I was going to drop that line on receipt of the comp but already had my fill of blank stares.)

All in all, a night well passed. Nobody who played got hurt, though everyone was going to be sore as hell the next morning. Small blessings. For me it didn't even take that long. Arthur had my knee pulsing like the windshield wipers on the ninety-minute drive back to the Big Smoke. By the next day, Arthur was the only one who would remember that I played in the charity game.

I sent a text to Hunts on the drive back—fear not, I did it while sitting in the full-service lane at a gas station just outside the city limits.

No sick leave necessary. Hurtin', chronic but not terminal.

It was about midnight but he was on the West Coast. He knew about the game in Peterborough.

Chek fine print of yer contract: old-timers injury gets unpaid leave only.

One beer in the showers hadn't fully rehydrated me, so I parked trusty Rusty Beemer in the underground lot and limped over to the Merry Widow for a pint or three and a quick update on the league's late games from Nick the barkeep, father of the next phenom, sez he. Hearing the latest exploits of young Pericles was a small price to pay for good company and a seemingly endless stream of jokes. I've never had the heart to tell Nick that a kid in bantam double-A, not his team's best player or even its fourth best, should look to the game for a good time and nothing more. I've always suspected that Perry will follow
his father into the biz and become the hole-in-the-wall's proprietor. I told Nick that he missed his calling—any guy who can watch four games simultaneously at 7:30 and four more at 10:00 and give you eight game summaries from memory while keeping the regulars' orders straight would make a hell of an air-traffic controller. Then again, air-traffic controllers don't bet on the planes landing safely.

“Your company won tonight,” Nick said. It was always easy to tell if Nick had put a check mark or an
X
beside the L.A. game, and it was plain that tonight my team had cost his kids new shoes. He knew that, given my team's favourable outcome, he wouldn't have to pull out the Bushmills and pour me a double. Sure enough, the score came up in the news scroll below the highlights: L.A. 5, Calgary 3. My ragged colleagues on our patchwork staff would sleep the sleep of scouts knowing that their jobs were safe, which was ever a night-to-night proposition. I already knew the score before I walked in. I was listening to updates on satellite radio sports.

“My company needed a win,” I said. “It was starting to feel like we hadn't won in a month.”

“You guys took two of three on the road, what, ten days ago. It's not that bad.”

“That's how it looks to you, not me. If you had a bunch of rich guys in here …”

“I wish,” Nick said, looking down the bar at the unwashed and broken men staring at the last inch of their drinks and rooting around their pockets for elusive change. In some bars they'd be called regulars. Nick called his sorry lot the Irregulars.

Some had names. Polo had just one, a two-syllable handle instead of the three names he was given at birth that totalled over forty letters. Polo was on his BlackBerry, looking at game summaries, counting goals and assists for his all-Czech team
in the Merry Widow hockey pool. Some had jobs. A bunch of paramedics anaesthetized themselves after twelve-hour shifts delivering fallen seniors, stabbed wannabe gangstas, and all-thumbs home handymen to the emerg at East Gen. They had their own cachet, separate from those who wore hospital blues and mostly pushed brooms or delivered food trays to patients. A lot more were familiar faces whose stories went untold and whose source of drinking money was unknown and uncertain.

It was comforting that none ever bothered me with questions about the game or players I knew. They weren't the least bit impressed. The worst cases didn't go there to be social. Exactly the opposite. They went there to forget themselves.

I ignored Nick ignoring me and carried on with my rant. “… those rich guys would be asking you to turn off the game and put on a business channel where they can watch the stock ticker to see if Apple is down a nickel. You could drop a bomb beside them and they wouldn't hear it. That's human nature. Every loss is a kick in the nuts. Some are worse than others, but there's no upside to having your whole living threatened. A kick in the nuts is a kick in the nuts …”

My diatribe was gathering from stage four to five, but Nick drifted off into his thoughts, some graduate-level calculus, a formula factoring the night's handle at the bar plus sales he didn't ring in, less his lost wagers and the vigorish. The last line of these complicated equations would be his stake for an all-night poker game in the basement of a souvlaki palace in Greektown. Little did his countrymen suspect that they were regularly cleaned out by a high school dropout Pythagoras.

My BlackBerry pinged. Another text from Hunts. He must have been channelling me. Did he know I was in a bar? We're tight. As soon as the draft hit my lips, he probably broke out in a cold sweat.

Did you ask Red about Mays????

Billy Mays Jr. was seventeen going on two point five million.

In four months' time he was going to be selected in the top ten of the league's draft, quite possibly top five. As a result of a pretty wizardly shell game orchestrated by Hunts on the trading floor the previous June, we owned Columbus's first-rounder, a deadsure lottery pick. Mays was way up on our list, even though his left arm had been in a sling a few days back, the result of a hit from behind a couple of weeks earlier. He was Red Hanratty's leading scorer this year. He'd shattered a Peterborough rookie scoring record that had stood for twenty years. He was six feet three and two hundred pounds as lean as a slice of deli turkey, and blond with a jaw borrowed from an actor on the soaps. With his arm now out of the sling, he had nothing but open ice and a league owner's open wallet to look forward to.

Scouting reports from the L.A. crew read like mash notes to
Tiger Beat
. The last and representative entry in our database was filed by Kapps, our impossible-to-impress septuagenarian part-time bird dog in Sudbury:
Upside is franchise forward, all-star.
That passed for a discouraging word among the twenty game reports on Billy Jr. this season.

Red Hanratty said that Billy Mays was the best pro prospect he'd ever coached, and, though the coach was a famous BSer and hype artist, no one doubted it. That meant Hanratty rated Mays a better pro prospect than two guys who wear Cs in the league right now: Floody in Phoenix and Rox in Edmonchuk, who just happened to be the youngest captain in the league. Better than the three Hall of Famers who came out for the old-timers game. Better than two other guys in the lineup that night who would have plaques in the Hall of Very Good: Mel Malinowski (394 career goals, including a Cup winner) and Kevin O'Brien (a.k.a. K.O. the Destroyer).

My GM figured that if I was in Peterborough I might as well get the goods on Baby Jesus from the Grand Old Man. It was something the GM and I had talked about, but I had decided to wait until the next time I saw Peterborough play. Red probably had a jar going and was being pulled in every direction all night long. Better to handle it when I could buttonhole him privately (and introduce myself if necessary), I thought.

Just asked around.

A white lie. A lot of guys freeze when you pump them. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, you have to keep your radar on if you want the Juice Not from Concentrate. Especially if you want the Juice with Lots of Pulp. I was listening hard (and not just for someone to cheer for me in the pre-game introductions). You have to scope things out like a security camera, replaying the significant moments, the character tells after the fact. Life as a scout is a stakeout, chum.

Golden Boy came into the room before the game to shake hands with the legends. He introduced them to Markov, the Russian import who was his linemate, his roommate, and his special project. A lot of Russian kids are phlegmatic, but not the one Mays had in tow. Markov was engaged, pretending to recognize names and understand what was going on around him. The one thing he did know was that his friend owned the room.