All-Star Pride (3 page)

I pulled on my pants. I didn't have a Walkman or a Game Boy. Just an empty wallet, a cheap watch and five hundred dollars to return to Chandler Harris. “Get out of here. Maids can't just walk in our hotel room and steal.”

“I'm serious.” Nathan was fully dressed now. “This is my second year on the tour, remember? People are desperate here. Poor. You should know that just from how bad the showers work. And this is one of the better hotels.”

Cold, dribbling water was the best our shower would do, which was why we had both skipped it.

I shrugged. “I'll take your word for it.”

I finished dressing.

Nathan grinned at me as I picked up my food bag. “By the way,” he said, “if it's anything like last year's tour, I think you'll find breakfast quite interesting.”

It didn't take me long to discover what he had meant. We walked into the large room that our team would use as an eating area. Cheap folding chairs had been set behind long wooden tables. The tables were bare, except for cutlery, empty bowls, and bottles of cola, already opened.

I took my seat beside Nathan.

“What's this?” I asked him. “Where's the milk? Juice? Water?”

“Like I said, this is Russia. You can't drink the water, you might get sick. Same with the milk, even when it's not sour. And juice is too expensive.”

He searched through his food bag for a box of cereal. It rattled his bowl as he poured. Then he took a bottle of cola and dumped it over the cereal.

“You'll get used to it,” he said between bites. “It's better than eating cereal dry. And
lots better than getting sick and spending hours on a toilet or, more gross, leaning over a toilet and—”

“I get the message,” I said.

“The worst thing is they think it's special service to open the bottles ahead of time. So not only is the cola warm, but it's also flat.”

“Great.”

He watched me pour cola into my bowl.

“Bon appétit,” he said, “and welcome to hockey in Russia.”

I caught up to Chandler Harris as we were filing out of the breakfast area. I pulled him aside in the hallway so we could speak privately.

“I need to talk to you about the money,” I said. “I can't keep it.”

He stared at me as if I were crazy. “You can't use five hundred dollars?”

“Not when I haven't earned it.”

“You will,” he said.

That set off major alarm bells in my head. “How?”

“You'll find out.”

“I don't think so. I'm giving it back to you.” I reached into my pocket and brought out the wad of money. I held it out to him.

Chandler put his hands on his hips and stared me straight in the eyes. He wore the grin he always gave goalies after scoring on them—a mean, teasing grin. “If you don't want it, Hog, throw it out. Dump it down a toilet. Give it to beggars. Or drop it here in the hallway for the next person to pick up. I don't care. I'm not taking it back.”

Without another word, he walked away from me.

Fine, I told myself. I won't throw it out. I won't dump it down the toilet. Or give it to beggars. Or leave it here in the hallway. I'll keep it until I find out what he wants me to do to earn it. And then I'll tell him no and give the money back.

“Listen up, guys,” Coach Jorgensen said.

We listened. With about thirty minutes left until the start of the second game against the Russians, we were in various stages of equipment and uniform readiness in the dressing room. But we stopped our chatter and gave full attention to the man who had just walked in.

I had a small propane blowtorch in my hand. I had just lit it and was preparing to heat up the aluminum shaft of my hockey stick.
Some players preferred to use a traditional wooden stick. I couldn't. I tended to snap the shafts too easily. The aluminum shafts lasted longer. Only trouble was I often needed to replace the wooden blades, and the only way to do that was to heat the aluminum with a blowtorch to loosen the blade insert.

When Matthew Martin Henley walked into the dressing room, I adjusted the valve on the blowtorch so that the blue flame barely showed and barely hissed. It would save me time relighting the flame later. I set it nearby on the floor.

Because he had flown in the first-class section on our way here, this was my first good look at Matthew Martin Henley, the tour promoter who had put this series together. Henley had his hair spiked, shiny and short. His face was red and sweaty. He was fat and wore a three-piece navy blue suit. Although he had an unlit cigar in his mouth, ashes from previous cigars were sprinkled down the front of his navy blue suit. Not that I would let him know what I thought about his appearance. Matthew Martin Henley was
the one who would be signing my paycheck if we won this series against the Russians.

“Last night's game wasn't bad,” Henley said. He plucked the unlit cigar from his mouth and waved it around in his fat fingers like a baton, slashing the air to emphasize his words. “But it wasn't good enough.”

Not good enough? We'd shut them out four to nothing. What more did he want?

“This ain't no charity tour,” Henley told us. “You guys probably got that figured out. Every penny of your expenses and every penny of prize money comes out of my wallet.”

He paused to dig in his pockets and came out with a heavy silver lighter. He waved his unlit cigar some more, as if he'd forgotten about the lighter he had just grabbed. “It works the same as last year. Our video crew patches the highlights together to make a one-hour special. Sure, the tour has seven games. What's that? Seven hours of ice time? Figure it out, guys. Seven hours cut down to one. Only the best hockey gets put on tape. And last year's special got good ratings. Real good ratings. You think it would hurt your
pro career to get a big chunk of that hour on television? What I'm saying is each one of you should be trying to be a big hero and get your cut of the prime-time action.”

He coughed and wheezed. Talking so much must have taken too much of an effort. I looked at his huge belly covered with enough navy blue material to make suits for three regular-sized men. I wondered when Henley had last been able to see his feet.

Matthew Henley brought the lighter up and jammed the cigar in his mouth. He flicked a flame and drew hard on the cigar, rolling it in his mouth to light it evenly. When he finished, he held the cigar up to admire it, then blew smoke into the center of the dressing room.

“So what I'm saying is it isn't good enough just to win. I want you guys passing the puck less.”

Less? This was a team game. I glanced at Coach Jorgensen to see how he was taking it. After all, Henley had just marched in and given us orders, something that was supposed to be the coach's job. Coach Jorgensen simply
stared at the ceiling. Obviously Matthew Henley signed Jorgensen's paycheck as well.

“You heard me,” Henley said. “Less passing. Carry the puck more. I want some tough, gritty hockey. I want some great clips for the television special.”

He grinned at us through a blue haze of cigar smoke. “Boys, don't think of this as hockey. Think of it as entertainment.”

I was beginning to understand. Mainly because of what Nathan had earlier explained to me about this tour.

Matthew Henley and his financial partners backed all of it. Our expenses. The camera crew's expenses. The cost of renting each ice arena. The hundred thousand dollars in prize money for the team that won the best-of-seven series—two games here in Moscow, three scheduled in St. Petersburg, followed by a final two games back in Moscow.

Apparently it had taken a lot of wheeling and dealing for Henley to put the first tour together three years earlier. First, he'd had to convince the Western Hockey
League to let him approach a selection of all-star players. He had promised the league would get excellent prime-time exposure on television, plus a percentage of the profits.

His second step had been to sign up
WHL
players. That wasn't difficult. We knew we would split the prize money. Our team had twenty players. If we won, it meant five thousand dollars to me. While the guys in the
NHL
made much more serious money, for us players, one step below, a chance at five thousand dollars for only seven days of playing seemed like a good deal, especially since we would have played for nothing—just to be able to play. It didn't hurt, either, that the high visibility of the series might help us make the
NHL
some day.

Henley, in fact, would have preferred to put together an all-star team from the
NHL
—even if it would have cost him ten times as much. But he had found it impossible; all the players were bound by contracts and couldn't play for anyone else in the off-season. We
WHL
juniors, of course, didn't have those
kinds of worries, although we all hoped for and dreamed about the day we would.

After getting commitments from the all-stars in North America, Henley had gone to Russia and convinced them to put together a junior all-star team. Not only did he promise them a chance at the prize money, but he also gave them all the gate receipts from spectators. Nathan had explained that the Russian players couldn't divide the money like we did. Instead, it would support the team in its travels to different tournaments around the world during the rest of the year.

Nathan had also informed me that Henley had invested close to five hundred thousand dollars. I'd whistled. A half-million dollars.

I'd asked why Henley and his partners would spend so much.

Nathan had solemnly said just one word: television.

Matthew Henley called this the
East Versus West Shootout
, and he reduced all seven games into a fast-paced one-hour hockey extravaganza. This television special
would be released three months from now, in September, right when viewers were itching to see hockey again after the summer without it.

Henley had already sold his special to Canadian, American and European television networks for a big profit. The networks, in turn, sold advertising space and made an even bigger profit.

“You got me, boys?” Henley was saying. “You ain't hockey. You're entertainment.”

He waddled close to where I was sitting and looked down at me. “You're Burnell, right?” He shook his head. “Don't take no offense, kid. I can't figure any of you out unless I got a program in my hand and you got numbers across your shoulders.”

“I'm Burnell,” I said. I could smell strong cologne. It had to be real strong to get past the raunchy cigar in his hand.

“Burnell. It's what I figured.” He raised his voice for the rest of the guys. “I want more of you laying out hits like Burnell did to that kid last night. Hits look real good on television. And they don't hurt your chances of winning none.”

He took a couple more puffs. “That's all I got to say for now.”

He left us in a cloud of smoke. I reached for the blowtorch and twisted the valve to extend the flame. I was glad he had noticed me. I'd find out later that was a stupid thing to be glad about.

I nearly killed myself attempting my first hit of the game. Henley had me so pumped and ready to perform that I was drooling at the prospect of a spectacular body check for the television cameras.

It was halfway through my second shift on the ice. Their defenseman had taken the puck behind the Russian net. I was forechecking hard. So was Miles, my center.

Miles raced down the right side of the ice, turning hard to spook the Russian
defenseman out from behind the net. The Russian hesitated and looked for a safe outlet to dump the puck. He didn't find one.

With Miles charging in, the Russian started skating to the left side of the ice. It took him away from the safety of the net and squarely into my sights.

He put the puck in his skates and tried covering up, pressing himself against the boards and waiting for the impact as I slammed him.

Dead meat, I said to myself. Dad's going to love seeing me crush this guy on television.

The Russian knew I was coming at him, of course. Wouldn't you hear a locomotive steaming in at full speed?

Unfortunately, he made a move I'd never seen before. Just as my body screened him from the referee, he turned his stick at an angle—stick blade jammed into the boards at ice level, the top end of his stick pointing directly at my stomach.

I couldn't do a thing about it. My momentum carried all 250 pounds of me into the stick at full speed. Except it wasn't
a stick. It had become a spear. And I hit it so hard I knew I had just installed another belly button somewhere in the lower part of my back.

I fell back and flopped like a fish in the bottom of a rowboat. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't scream. I wanted someone to slam me over the head with an oar to put me out of my misery.

Roughly five years later, I was able to take my first breath. It took another five years for my second breath.

One of the Russian's hockey gloves had fallen from his hand as I'd spun his stick away from him. It lay on the ice, just out of my reach. I crawled over and scooped it toward me.

I heard Russian protests. I ignored them. My stomach was about to give its opinion on what I'd just done to it.

I brought his glove to my mouth. It wasn't that I had anything against the Russian defenseman. He'd suckered me, and I deserved the punishment for my carelessness. No, it was the fact that I didn't have the energy
to pull my own gloves off. Nor the time. And I didn't want the embarrassment of putting my last meal all over the ice in full view of the television cameras—and thousands of Russian fans.

I found enough air for one more breath. Then I threw up into the Russian's glove.

They didn't take me off the ice to our players' bench. Instead, when I managed to stand and gasp out a lie that I was just fine, the referee and linesmen took me to the penalty box.