The Code (3 page)

I had drawn up my reports and patched them into the team database right after the games in Hradec, while impressions were still fresh and before jet lag made me incoherent. I started to go down the rest of the list and strategize. Who to go see and where I'd have to go to see them.

I didn't really need to do a workup on Galbraith in Vancouver. I'd seen all I needed to at the world juniors and, like I said, he was off the board. We wouldn't be picking that high. That left Mays, Meyers, and Thomas—Peterborough, Halifax, and Saskatoon, respectively. Peterborough: I'd be able to commute from Toronto and sleep in my own bed, but Mays was knocked out of the lineup a couple of weeks before I left for the Czech Republic. Halifax: Okay, I could see flight delays with the fog but, again, a decent place to work out of. Saskatoon: I'd catch up with Chief, our main guy out west. Not a garden spot in March and it could be a lot harder to get to, plus a helluva lot worse when you get there. But better than the next name on the list: Vachon.

Freakin' Baie-Comeau. You have to hit the brakes or you'll fall off the edge of the map. That's why my list went only eight deep. Avoidance.

How glamorous does the job sound so far?

Despite the unexpected extra cost of my Lufthansa ticket, I'm a real value to my still-sober GM. A lot of guys on the L.A. scouting staff can't write an intelligible report. That's not the worst of it, though, just a sore point for me. At the start of my second full year, Hunts began sending me to check out the players flagged by scouts who work the regions or Europe. I was designated as the de facto amateur scouting director, the cross-checker, a role that's usually reserved for a veteran. I had taken on a job more complicated than the average scout's: assessing the players and assessing the assessors.

My promotion after a year and a half on the L.A. staff put some noses out of joint, and I can understand why someone who has put in five or even ten years would feel that way. I had a job they coveted. Still, Hunts figured I'm a quick study, and by nature I'm suited to the job. A lot of things I just do by intuition. I'm a fly on the wall outside the dressing rooms in arenas hither and yon. I listen in on conversations in the media rooms at tournaments, floating a little disinformation out there.

The scouts in other organizations know when I'm in the arena—any scout worth his salt can survey a crowd of ten thousand and pick out the competition. Still, I try to be cagey about exactly what I'm doing there. I'll leave a notebook on a table in the scouts' room and make sure it's open to a page where I've made bogus notes about a player I'm not interested in, circling his number just to make it all the more obvious to rubberneckers. I keep my cards close to my vest.

You'd think that everyone in the business would maintain a similar embargo on advertising his intentions, but such is not the case. A sizable contingent of hopelessly insecure and underqualified guys in similar positions can't resist the urge to share their work. Either they want to look like they're a big deal to their peers or they're fishing for some sort of confirmation of their flimsy opinions.

I come by the stealth honestly. I grew up in a none-of-yourbusiness culture. My father's approach to parenting, as with all aspects of his life, was of a piece with his work. I grew up watching him asking questions but fielding none while he took notes. He retired from Metro Toronto's force after more than thirty years and had high hopes that I'd go the same route.

He wasn't a detective, never got on that career track on the force, though I don't doubt that he could have. He ended up as the staff sergeant of the mounted division, but his other role made him something of a legend, known by everyone from the greenest rookie right up to the commissioner: He was the coach of the cop hockey team. He was a player-coach, on the ice right up until his fiftieth birthday, when he made it clear that he felt he could still play but could no longer tune out my mother's ever more vocal protests.

I was in grade school when he brought me to practices to work as a stick boy and play deaf when the guys swore a blue streak. By
the time I was fourteen, he was letting me skate with the team in Saturday-night pickup games. He convinced me that I should go to college rather than to major junior when I was in my teens. Sarge figured a college man with some sort of useful specialty could make officer in a hurry. He never said a word to me about my major until I declared it: criminal and social justice.

When Minnesota drafted me in the third round back in '86 after my freshman year at Boston College, things became complicated in ways I'd never imagined. Minnesota had a big fat contract waiting for me after my sophomore season. It was impressed on me that the contract might not be there after I graduated or even in a year's time. My agent gave me the song and dance about finishing my degree by correspondence, but truth was always the first casualty of his commissions. It turned out criminology just wasn't going to fly as my major if I was doing courses by mail, so I had to switch to history, to my regret and my father's. Not that it mattered. Before my pro career passed me by, the window for joining the force slammed shut on my fingers.

I eventually did finish my degree, six years after signing away my life to Minnesota, but I've never really had a chance to put my knowledge of pre-Confederation Canada and Elizabethan England to good use. My two years of criminology eventually did help out, though.

After I hung up my skates, my cash flow vanished and my net worth vaporized. I had to watch as the receiver catalogued each and every thing I owned and threw it up on the internet to attract bidders and amuse those in the league who had me on their hate lists. I was thoroughly destitute and wouldn't have had a car but for the old Beemer that my father lent me.

Starting your life again in your mid-thirties: I don't recommend it, especially when you're starting in a hole up to your
hairline. I had to work a square job to make my child support payments, so my father made a call to an old friend who had taken early retirement from the force and established a privateinvestigation business. I was qualified to snoop around gathering intelligence for divorces and other miseries. I had been through my own and knew what to look for. I picked up insurance work. My favourite: I was a one-man tree-hidden gallery for a guy with a debilitating back injury who shot five-over for thirty-six holes.

I spent four years in the mire and developed a deeper appreciation for just how awful people are. I worried that I was becoming one of them, that mid-life crisis was an infectious condition. At my lowest point, Hunts threw me a life preserver. Supposedly the owner was impressed that he had a real-life detective on the payroll, though that billing vastly overstated the case.

Canadian customs was a walk in the park. I dropped my bags in the hall of my tight little apartment on the Danforth and checked my voicemail. My absence hadn't sparked an international manhunt. Ten calls in five days.

Five of them were someone trying to get me to switch banks or phone services.

Three were where-are-yous from Sandy. She understands the scouting dodge, plans made, plans torn up, new plans made again. With each call her concern escalated minutely.

One was a thought-you-were-coming-back from Lanny, my daughter, calling from her boarding school in Wisconsin. She wanted to talk about a tournament her team won in upstate New York. She had a stack of hockey scholarship offers from schools in the States, so her boarding school tuition was sort of a front-loaded education. She wanted me to further front-load it by wiring her spending money. Which I was fine with, so long as it kept her a distance from her mother, who could better afford tens of thousands than I could C-notes.

The last call, from two days ago, was an invitation to an old-timers game in Peterborough. It was being organized by Vis Hockey Enterprises, an outfit that had started with the purchase of a kids' hockey organization in Woodbridge and grown into a multi-million-dollar business with teams and arenas across the province. Like everything else out of Woodbridge, Vis was as Italian as grandma's ziti. And like a lot of things in Woodbridge, it was a family business, with gobs of money from sources unknown, suspect, or shady. Vis was founded and run by Giuseppe Visicale, ostensibly for his sons, four tanks who never won a sportsmanship trophy, tough enough to play pros but with less than half the skills to pull it off.

I was advised that Vis Hockey was organizing this charity old-timers tilt to raise funds for a hospital. I suspect that Vis was looking to get a piece of the publicly owned Peterborough arena. And once Vis Hockey Enterprises got a piece of something, it generally ended up with all the pieces.

Before I checked in with the women in my life, I got back to the organizers of the game. Yeah, I was free the next evening, St. Patrick's Day. Sure I'd come out.

F
AMOUS STORY:
About twenty years after they last played the game, Rocket Richard and Teeder Kennedy wobbled down the red carpet to do a ceremonial puck drop one night at the Gardens. They didn't make eye contact and didn't shake hands the whole time they were out there. That's how it is. With guys who play in the league, hate's always there. Even after their playing days are over, it doesn't pass. It ages like Scotch.

I'm the last guy they call for old-timers games, and the first to jump at the chance. Most people didn't notice that I was in the league, never mind that I'm gone. Still, I'm as public-spirited as the next guy, more than most who pass through the league.

I'm young enough and my Arthur isn't bad enough that I can't get through a bunch of half-speed shifts with fifty-year-old men whose knees are ten years younger than mine.

Truth is, it's a voyeuristic deal for me. When I accept that invitation I am witness to a secret spectacle. Yeah, at any intersection of twenty former players in a dressing room you're bound to find four- or five-decades-old hatreds, and I get a kick out of watching them try to set aside blood grudges, rub scars the other guys left, and smile through gritted teeth, all for a good cause. Accept an invitation? I'd pay for hockey entertainment like that. For me, it's like watching the war from a Swiss mountaintop.

As for the other crap that goes with old-timers games, well, I'm up for shaking the hands of people I'll never see again and signing autographs for kids who have no idea who I am. I'm game to meet people who might help me in my working days at the arenas. I'm not a people person but I can fake it.

It's easier for me to get out to these games than it is for a lot of guys. I'm not bound by family. My girlfriend, Sandy, is no ingenue. Hitting forty. Married once. Through the wringer variously. Scrapbooks that haven't been opened for years. Kids nearly grown. Spooked. We're meant for each other. She accepts me for who I am precisely because she sees all that when she looks in the bathroom mirror.

Sandy signs off on my taking a few nights over the course of the winter because she wants me to feel young for a little bit and she can use a girls' night too. She also knows that, on the next opportunity, the make-good is her choice of dinner, her choice of movie. Yup, she'll trade a night away from me for future considerations.

Reliable, relatively unencumbered, and absolutely incapable of commanding a dollar for an appearance: That's why I'm on a list of numbers to call if the league alumni group needs a
spare body or two to fill out a roster on short notice in Ontario. That's how I ended up in a dressing room in Peterborough on a Wednesday night in March, surrounded by a lot of guys who are famous names and regulars on the old-timers circuit.

I was the last of the old-timers to make it to the arena that night. The others had all landed in P'boro the day before and been put up at the best joint in town so they could sit at the head table of a sports celebrity rubber-chicken shakedown, uh, I mean, fundraiser. They were already dressed and waiting to lace up when I was pulling into the parking lot and getting my bag and sticks out of the trunk.

I scanned the lot for Norm Pembleton, the veteran GM from the London juniors who was the honorary coach of the all-stars and me. I wanted to at least introduce myself, maybe work him up as a source. He had one draft-eligible kid who was a mild prospect-of-interest to me.

I figured Pembleton would be outside chain-smoking in advance of three twenty-minute withdrawal sessions. Sure enough, I spotted him in an undesignated smoking area, ankledeep in the butts of unfiltered Exports. He stamped out a bare stub and before lighting another took a long hit from a silver flask.

Just hours before, he'd been in a hearing with the league's commissioner. This had become an almost weekly meeting. Pembleton had been involved in several incidents this season. After a disallowed goal he'd emptied a stick rack onto the ice and would have gone over the boards and after the refs if he hadn't been restrained by one of his players. That was eight games. He'd grabbed a player by the neck at a practice. Six more. In the most recent brouhaha, Pembleton had narrowly avoided suspension for a profane and slightly physical encounter with a fan in a hallway at the London arena. By the most believable eyewitness account, the fan had slandered Mrs. Pembleton and then spat on this coach.

The latest episode was just another reason to restart the debate about Pembleton's fitness to coach teenagers, a debate that played out in newspaper columns, on talk radio, and across panels in television studios. His judges and juries were guys who'd never darkened the door of a junior hockey arena. The highest and mightiest said he should be booted out for life for the next merest transgression. I thought that was extreme, and I'd bet his players would too. I'd rather have the Mean Old Bastard Who Knew Hockey as my coach than A Builder of Character Who Couldn't Match Lines.