Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (11 page)

And into my weed-induced coma came a ray of light, carried by a DVD box set special-ordered from Canada.
Hockey: A People’s History
had sat on my shelf forever, purchased like all the other sealed DVDs in my collection for some future version of myself who’d have the time to enjoy it. And there I was in my self-imposed exile from the Internet, between projects, with lots of time to kill.

I broke my own rule and started smoking weed and
not
being creative. Instead, I’d blaze and passively
watch
TV—or, rather, a DVD box set of a Canadian documentary series that was the northern equivalent of Ken Burns’s
Baseball
. The more I smoked, the more the Canadiana seeped into my pores. Emotional tale after tale told the epic of a self-made land full of practical dreamers who loved and understood the importance of something so seemingly silly as this kids’ game. Their struggles became
my
struggles. I went through one disc after another like I was catching up on a season of
Weeds
or
Lost
. I’d burst into my bedroom down the hall periodically and download on my wife astounding hockey facts and trivia—none of which she cared a tin whistle about as she smiled at her husband who was suddenly passionate about something other than pussy and movies.

Because what’s
not
to connect with about the culture of hockey?

In hockey, you get to watch sixty minutes of the most in-shape athletes on the planet rocket across the surface of a giant fucking diamond.


People literally walk on water in hockey. Granted, the water is frozen, but still: The last guy to popularize water-walking got a
religion
built around him. (That guy was Rocket Richard; the religion is the Montreal Canadiens.)


Hockey is safely homoerotic for the hetero man. Men in this game touch and rub up against one another more intensely than the barely legal boys in hard-core twink porn, yet straight guys in the stands simply
scream
for more.
Woof-uh-licious!


More so than even wrestling, hockey is like a comic book come to life. You’ve got heroes! Villains! Colorful uniforms! Masks! And show-stopping battles!


At any moment during a hockey game, someone might try to punch someone else in the face. I know that’s not a sentiment the National Hockey League wants to promote, but here’s the worst-kept secret in marketing: The promise of violence puts asses in seats. Why shy away from that? What are the movies that always top the box office? Blockbuster action flicks. Why do we go to action movies? Because we see imagery in promotional materials that shows people or things fighting, exploding, or going very fast. All of our popcorn movies end with giant, explosive showdowns or massive twenty-minute fistfights. Hockey is a mash-up between sports and movies: At any moment, the players on the stage can become so passionate about their performance, they may punch a motherfucker right in the mouth. You don’t get fistfights in baseball, basketball, or football, and yet that’s rarely trumpeted in the marketing; nobody sells the big three with “
Enjoy these athletic competitions in which there’s little threat of true impromptu releases of frustration or physical expressions of general dislike/disapproval!
” There’s no need: Most of those athletes understand they’re getting paid millions of dollars to play a grown-up version of a kids’ game that’s ultimately unimportant in the grand scheme of things. But a hockey player knows a higher truth—which is that nothing else in this life will ever matter or be right until they raise a
Stanley Cup. Hockey players skate to the beat of their own drum, and their game is a graceful but aggressive pastime that can elevate to and just as quickly retreat from physical hostilities at the drop of a puck.

Just like life.

We’re all hockey players at heart. We’re goal-oriented, but it’s never easy finding twine because we get hit hard when we rush the net. We take our shots, and the more we shoot, the more precise and dangerous we become. We try to stay out of the scrums, but sometimes we rush into the corners, accepting the fact that even the best players will get penalized from time to time. It doesn’t matter what line you’re on, you come over the boards and you
contribute
; you produce for the
team.
We assist and we
receive
assistance, but you can’t skate every shift, and you can’t win alone.

It’s an exhausting but exhilarating game, best when played with heart. If you go out there unprepared, you’re gonna lose teeth. Actually, with age, you’re gonna lose teeth regardless; might as well lose ’em fighting
for
something. It’s a fun game, a brutal game, a beautiful game, the fastest game.

But as with all discussions of hockey anywhere, sooner or later, all talk turns to the greatest hockey player who ever lived—an athlete who dominates the top stats of his sport by larger margins than the leaders in all the other sports dominate
their
respective leagues. And as the Wayne Gretzky story unfolded, I was transfixed. Transformed, even. I’d listen to stories told by his father about a boy who would go out of his way to help lesser teammates score goals. I marveled at the symmetry of his seemingly storybook career: how he
met his hero Gordie Howe when he was just a boy, and how he’d later skate beside the living legend in the World Hockey Association. My heart would swoon every time they talked about how giving he was with the fans and the press. And my brain exploded when I read the numbers and realized that the greatest hockey player who ever lived—a scoring genius like no other—had more assists on his record than goals. He didn’t need to score every time he was near the net with the puck; if you were on the ice with him, Wayne Douglas Gretzky would rather pass the puck to
you
—so
you
could score.

So even though I’d only ever net-minded in street hockey games on the tennis courts of the Highlands Recreation Center and was not (by any reports) the Great One at
anything
, there was something
familiar
about this star center from the fabled Edmonton Oilers—the last dynasty team the NHL has ever known.

He didn’t look like a hockey player. He was an average skater, and his slap shot wasn’t very powerful. Nobody expected anything much from him, at first glance … and that’s when he’d hit ’em with
his
game, a game that took folks awhile to understand, because Gretzky saw hockey differently than anybody else. And that was because of a little piece of advice his father gave him.

The story of Wayne Douglas Gretzky reads like the Great Canadian Novel. The firstborn child of Walter and Phyllis Gretzky of Brantford, Ontario, the boy laced up his first pair of skates at age two and scored his first goal by age three, sticking that shit squarely in the five-hole of his beloved Grandma Gretzky as she tended goal in her recliner
in the basement between periods of
Hockey Night in Canada.
The boy took to hockey so passionately, his father flooded the backyard, creating a small personal skating rink, where Wayne played and practiced for months each year, augmenting his virtuoso natural ability by aggregating endless hours of ice time.

It was a simple lesson the boy’s father taught him, the first rule of hockey, so far as Walter Gretzky was concerned: “Don’t go where the puck’s been; go where it’s
gonna
be.”

Puck-chasing was the domain of those who couldn’t figure out where the puck would wind up. If you’re chasing the puck, you’re always a step behind; but if the unpredictable nature of frozen, vulcanized rubber could somehow be counted on to do what
you
thought it might in any given moment during a game, then you wouldn’t care what it was doing, you’d only care about what it’d likely do
next
. You’d see the puck where it was but know where the puck was
going
to be in the immediate future. If you know where the puck’s gonna be, you’re a few strides closer than anybody else on the ice to scooping up the biscuit and putting it in the basket. Knowing where the puck’s gonna be doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll win the game or even score a goal, really … but it will certainly give you an edge in a game of tough competitors.

Getting baked and watching these DVDs, I suddenly found a role model in this athlete from Canada whom I began focusing on as a higher power. He was an inspiration, even though he was long retired from the game. This boy from Brantford and his scrappy team of hall-of-famers-in-training became Christ and his apostles to me. Like a
recent Alcoholics Anonymous member going whole-hog, I’d whip around chapter and verse from the Book of Gretzky in nearly all conversations, making the hockey legend a philosopher demigod of sorts whose father’s advice against puck-chasing was now my mantra.

A few emo-bitches tried to take the wind out of my sails by pointing out that, ultimately, Wayne Gretzky—the greatest hockey player who ever lived—was no more than an entertainer. When you remove poetic metaphors, hockey
is
just a kids’ game. Some could even argue that being excellent at playing hockey is about as useful and important in the grand scheme of things as being excellent at playing Monopoly. If civilization collapses, the skills of any entertainer mean fuck-all.

But while the center still holds, we love our entertainers—particularly the ones who ply their craft with absolute passion. Wayne Gretzky did that: Number 99 played the game like he was saving mankind from destruction. He was Hockey Jesus. At thirty-eight, I discovered an artist of another sort who did something so utterly useless so incredibly well, and with such vigor and conviction, that you believed the game he was playing actually
mattered
somehow. Suddenly, the Stanley Cup went from being a simple challenge trophy to Christ’s own Grail, where your name could be stamped into immortality.

What I do for a living (much like what Wayne Gretzky did for a living) is ultimately unimportant. It will not save lives. It will not stop the planet-killing asteroids, should their time come. It will not change how we survive as a species.

But so long as I pour everything into it as if it
does
matter? So long as I empty the tank and play the game with pure passion? Then even the mundane elements of a life that will likely end badly can be elevated, elaborated, and celebrated.

I think I encountered Gretzky at the right time—when film suddenly failed to capture my imagination the way it did when I was in my early twenties. In my Gretzky studies, one of the most important aspects of his career biography is the end, when he hung up the skates for good. Here was a man whose every thought for most of his life was hockey oriented. Here was a man known the world over for being synonymous with hockey—whose very name had become interchangeable with the game he played.

And even
he
stopped playing hockey eventually—gracefully, and without much fuss. Wayne Gretzky decided to end his career on his terms, well before his body could ever say, “Fuck you, Gretz,” and quit on him. He’d chased his passion and won his dream job, getting paid handsomely to do something he’d have done anyway for free, something he
loved
. And after that was done, he hung up his skates and did something else entirely.

The tough shit we learn from the culture of hockey is that everything ends—even the good shit.
Especially
the good shit. You never know how long you’re gonna be on the ice, so it’s important to suck the marrow out of every moment in life—because before you know it, the moments become memories, and the to-do remains undone. Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy—and even the greatest hockey player in the world has to walk away from the game he loves sooner or later. Or, rather, skate away.

But before I skated away from
my
game, I was gonna give ’em a strong third period. I wasn’t interested in where the puck was anymore; now I wanted to know where it was
gonna
be.

Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss a hundred percent of the shots you never take.” I realized I was just being cute with my puck. It was time to start firing that shit top-shelf.

S
ome filmmakers are talented enough to let their work simply speak for itself.

I’m the other guy.

I’ve always been more P. T. Barnum than P. T. Anderson when it comes to getting a film out there. That’s because I was trained by Harvey Weinstein—the slickest salesman since Don Draper.

After Miramax picked up
Clerks
at Sundance 1994, Harvey had Scott and me up to his office for a “Welcome to the family” chitchat. As Scott and I sat across the desk from him, Harvey was approving artwork, looking at a recut scene, fielding power phone calls, and generally multitasking like a cartoon octopus, all while dropping pearls of wisdom on me and Mos. But it was one particular bon mot he’d drop that would define the type of showman I’d become.