The Code (19 page)

“There'd probably be less to worry about out there if I were in Ottawa or Minnesota,” he said.

“Anywhere you play in the league you can find trouble if you go looking for it,” I said.

He was a smart, impressive kid, but he was still a kid, not naive but just innocent enough. Only in a small way did he seem like one of the programmed-for-success kids, talents constantly pushed forward by meddling parents, prospects that are high risks for burnout.

“You've been through a lot this year.”

“It's like my father says, ‘What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.'”

Yup, I read that in one of the magazine profiles of William Mays Sr. I didn't have the heart to tell Junior that Nietzsche beat his old man to the punch. The customs officer in Frankfurt could have recited it line and verse in the original German.

“I've played for coaches who've been fired, lots actually, but I
never had a coach die on me,” I said. I tried to keep the facts cold and hard, to keep the melodrama to a minimum.

“A lot of people have been there for me from the start of the season. My father. My agent. My teammates, Valery especially, in his own way. The fans. The media. People in hockey like you.”

Obviously, Ollie Buckhold had sent the kid the bullet points and he had full command of them. I had to get off them. I had to ask him stuff that he hadn't been prepped for. I didn't go to all this trouble to get scripted answers.

“Tell me about you and your coach …”

He looked puzzled.

“… How it all started. From the start.”

Wonder Boy dialed in.

“It's a funny thing, but I had never met Coach Hanratty before I was drafted by Peterborough. I had met a bunch of coaches and general managers from other teams. They wanted to know my plans before the draft, whether I was planning to go to school in the States on scholarship or play major junior. I had tried to keep my options open 'cause at thirteen or fourteen you just can't know whether you'll be a player or not. But I was pretty determined at fifteen that I was going to play junior. My father felt the same way …”

I got the idea that this was a chicken-and-egg proposition, with the egg claiming he came first and the chicken came around to it later.

“… Flint had the first pick in the draft, but we told their general manager that if I was going to Michigan it would be to play college hockey. I had no interest in playing for a U.S. team in the Ontario league. So Flint wasn't going to draft me. And I let some other teams know that we couldn't guarantee that I'd play for them. I wasn't going to North Bay. We told teams near Toronto that we were likely to sign on, and teams where there
are good universities—Ottawa, Kingston, and the rest—that we'd be interested if I could continue my education.

“Because we hadn't talked to Peterborough and Coach Hanratty, we thought they didn't have an interest in me. My father didn't even consider it. When I met with Coach Pembleton in London he told me straight up that he couldn't see Peterborough drafting me. My father agreed. So we were definitely surprised when we got the news that Peterborough had taken me in the draft.”

Yeah, ninety-nine times out of one hundred Hanratty would have steered clear of a potential “father” issue and any kid who had a notion of going to college and not reporting. The kid was a mile-a-minute chatterbox. I forgave him for being overtaken by his enthusiasm. Some might have thought that this recap was spiced with conceit, but I didn't. I find false modesty harder to take anyway, and that's usually in this script.

I asked him to back up. Why did Pembleton tell him that he thought Peterborough wasn't going to take him?

“I honestly don't know. I hadn't given it a lot of thought going in, really. But as soon as he said it, my father agreed with him, which sort of surprised me.”

The Ol' Redhead had always been a pretty astute judge of talent. He would have had to recognize that Billy Mays Jr. was a player. He couldn't have got that wrong.

I asked Mays to walk and talk. I wanted to make our meet feel less like an interview or quiz show. He was cool with it. He went over to the table where Markov sat and gave his sleeve a tug. Markov didn't look up right away. Probably composing love sonnets to his already pining girlfriend. But at Mays's urging, he came along in tow, walking a few steps behind us, like one of a potentate's wives.

I wanted to get a sense of the arc of Mays's development
and a read on how he'd changed over the couple of years in Peterborough. I asked him about the first conversation he had with Hanratty.

“He told me that he was going to be fair and that everyone started with a blank slate,” he said. “I didn't think anything different, really. That's the way it has been everywhere else and how I've always been treated. I didn't want anything special, just a chance to play and make a positive impact.”

“What about your father's experience?”

“My father has never talked about his time in Peterborough much. I think it was hard for him, though. I imagine that it's hard to see your career wind down in junior.”

I didn't bother to break to the kid that, if it winds down in junior hockey, you really haven't had a career.

“What about your last conversation with your coach?”

“Yeah, I remember it really well. It was strange and I think about it every day. It was almost like he knew something was coming. Maybe that was just because he'd had a couple of beers. But he told me, ‘You'll go on to great things, hockey or not.' And he told me, ‘You're part of this team even when you're not on the ice. You get this Russian kid goin', will you. You're the only one who can reach him.'”

I looked behind us. Markov was still tailing us, head down, messaging frantically.

“I figured he was always at him. Calling him Ivan the Terrible and stuff like that. But I think he was frustrated. He could see all this talent but couldn't coach him. And Busher always said the coach's biggest problem was when he couldn't coach a kid … ‘When he can't coach 'em, he forgets about 'em or ignores 'em.' But Spike also said Coach had changed over the years and that he was okay with things changing.”

T
HE TAKEAWAY:
Hanratty's last words to Captain Fantastic were a succinct scouting report on the kid's character and leadership.

I made notes of it in my workup on Mays in our database. What really stuck with me, though, was his thinking that Hanratty knew something bad was going to happen. Or already had happened. I would have put it down to a kid's imagination in ninety-nine other cases out of a hundred, but not with Mays, not completely anyway. He was a pretty clear-eyed kid. And he thought that Hanratty was saying goodbye to him. I'd be thinking about something like that every day too.

After seeing the kid off, I called William Mays Sr.'s number. Straight to voicemail. I hung up. I'd be way down his list of priorities.

I messaged him.
Mr. Mays, is there any way I can come in and talk to you about your son and our team? Let me know what will work for you.
Automatic out-of-office reply that said he would be in meetings the next two days.

I was about to throw in the towel, but within a minute I had a reply.
I'm available any time today. I will be at the Scarborough Hunt Club for a late tee time today. If you'd like to meet for lunch or even get in a round, let me know.

Lunch I was good for. I let him know. Declining to play eighteen at an exclusive course wasn't going to impress him. The oak panels in the clubhouse and expensive stogies weren't going to impress me either.

M
AYBE MY MESSAGE
wasn't clear enough. I was coming up to interview him. I was coming up as part of a get-to-know-you. He
must have read my message as a sign-up for one of his business seminars. Rather than talking about his son and the game, he spent the entire hour giving me a summary of his
Seven Keys of Turning Maybes into Wills™
. I felt like the first stop on his book tour. When I tried to budge him off this line, he found a way to segue. When I tried to talk about our team, he said that his lesson plan could put us on a championship course. When I tried to talk about his son, he said that Billy Jr. was but one happy by-product of a life dedicated to the
Seven Keys
™
. I felt like I had been put in a cage and restraints and forced to watch late-night infomercials. I expected him to tell me that telephone lines were open and to call in the next thirty minutes.

The creepiest thing, though, was Mays calling the kid “my creation.” A lot of parents get a vicarious thrill from their sons' games but this one crossed every line.

A friend of a friend of a friend knew the brother of one of the Peterborough players' fathers and reported back to me that the former Mrs. Mays was a well-preserved former finalist for the title of Miss Canada. By this same very reliable fourthhand report, Mrs. Mays would have had a better chance at the crown if she had been given the opportunity to show her true gift in the talent competition. Other beauties might have been able to warble or play a fiddle, but she had an almost unmatched aptitude for separating rich men from their sometimes hardearned millions. She had a way of making wealthy but otherwise normal men feel like Mr. Canada.

Mrs. Mays had one practice marriage before meeting Mr. Mays, and she must have taken the view that their union had to be demonstrably consummated because Billy Jr. was the only foal in her storied career. The three subsequent attempts at something approaching holy matrimony only further padded her assets. As much as Billy Jr. ever stood to make playing hockey, it's likely he would have to be a first all-star five times before his
net worth caught up to the trust funds of his mother's lawyer's children. And they were only in grade school.

By all accounts, Mrs. Mays was only an occasional presence at Peterborough games. She spent most of the winter in the Caribbean and other time in Saint-Tropez. She had taken no role in her son's development as a hockey player—though she was a shoe salesman's daughter and grew up in a humble bungalow a block away from Ted Reeve Arena on Toronto's east side, she considered hockey rinks intolerably proletarian. When Mays was taking little Billy to the rink, the then Mrs. Mays absented the abode for the racquet club, where the tennis pro served up what her husband couldn't, not that the detectives he eventually hired could prove it.

I guess I could have minded my own business, but if I were so inclined I'd be better in another line of work. The background noise of a messy family life can fog the minds of thirty-year-olds, never mind a kid barely out of high school who is about to be handed millions of bucks. I had to root around this other branch of Billy Jr.'s family tree.

The former Mrs. Mays's current husband, an only partially disgraced scion to a meat-packing empire, had to return to Toronto for a board meeting, an emergency session prompted by an outbreak of listeria. Presumably the production line was spoiled by a batch of swine with herpes or syphilis. I presumed, rightly, that the former Mrs. Mays would put in an appearance at the tennis club just to jangle her jewellery and catch up with the ponytailed Spaniard who gave her lessons. In some other more bawdy sense, she returned the favour.

I knew one member of the Toronto Lawn Tennis Club: M.T. Smith, a former Los Angeles teammate. M.T. was a different cat. He was the only guy in the league who went by initials rather than a Christian name, and he was the only player in L.A. who
took up surfing. He ended up with small bits in Hollywood films, the by-product of friendships he struck up at tennis clubs in SoCal. In fact, he even landed a role in a movie of the pro tennis tour. He played a Swedish middle-rank player with a booming serve. M.T. played the guitar and tennis. He always had something going on, bucks in a golf course here, a housing development there, a new line of equipment with his name. He made millions in the league and millions more in real estate back in the city of his birth.

We'd been in a couple of jams off the ice and somehow talked our way out of them. I had managed to get him inside a couple of Hollywood parties with a simple “He's with me” back when “me” counted for something in movie circles. I didn't have to call in a favour to get him to bring me along as a guest to the club. He even went as far as to find out when the former Mrs. Mays had booked a lesson.

“That's her there,” M.T. said.

“Jesus,” I said. “How does she get two hands on her racquet?”

“Yeah, I know, it looks like she's wearing two deployed airbags.

Her first husband was a plastic surgeon and she was his invention. Doris. We all say that's ‘Double D Doris.'”

“No wonder the kid turned out to be Superboy. The breastmilk he scarfed down was poured through a silicone filter.”

M.T. and I hit a few balls on a neighbouring court. I never picked up a serious interest in the game, even when my ex had a supporting role in a romantic comedy that was set at a tony tennis club. I don't have tennis whites or even a racquet of my own and I had to blow the cobwebs off my Adidas Stan Smiths, but still I could pass for an occasional player. Between points I managed to give her a “good shot” and a smile. She didn't get five husbands plus à la carte items by ignoring flattery. She had
a neediness that neither the Miss Canada title nor even Miss Universe could temporarily sate.

She knew my buddy—he had been the realtor of record in several transactions spilling out of her divorce judgments. It wasn't the hugest surprise that she made her way barside in the lounge after her lesson. Introductions were made. Things started to run their inevitable course. She was an equal opportunity flirt. She looked at M.T. and me and undressed us both, like she was wearing X-Ray Specs.

“You were married to that actress, weren't you?” she asked.