The Last Season (10 page)

Danny came back in with Bucky trailing behind. Danny had on his best Irish, his eyes coming down on me like Doc Rafferty's the time I had the mumps.

“Bats,” he said with great gentleness. “Maureen says she's through, okay? No more.”

“Yah,” added Bucky, hitching up his pants. “She's exhausted, eh?” I knew he was lying.

“Tough luck,” Danny said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “We should've let you go earlier, I guess.”

I batted his hand away with all my might. “Fuck off!” I shouted at him. I took out the key, shook it and threw it at him so it bounced off his chest and he caught it.

“Lock the fucking place up,” I said. “I'm going home.”

I waited outside the arena, on the crest of the parking lot leading toward the river, and I bawled. Right out loud I bawled. That bitch! I wanted to kill her. I waited and I waited. But they never came out. Tired, my ass. She hadn't fallen asleep. They were all back for seconds.

Pimples!
I slugged myself in my face. Once, twice, three times.
Talk!
Why couldn't I talk like Danny or even like dumb-ass Bucky? I spit and spit and spit and spit. The tears rolled down, stinging until they froze on the edge of my chin.

When the fury rose I didn't even bother to try and contain it. Let it come. I ran out across the ball diamond, jumping through the snow, leaped and pulled the scoreboard clean off the posts, snapping it in half so it cracked like a .303. The sound was so incredibly loud in the cold that it scared me off and I ran out across the field, ploughing through the higher drifts, up beyond the high school. I thought about phoning the police as I ran. Telling on them. That'd fix them. But it was my key they had. Besides, it was her, really. She'd done it to me. Not Danny, not Powers, not Bucky. But I hated them for knowing. The
bastards
!

Out beyond the high school on the river had a single car was parked, probably frozen up. A 1958 Dodge, black, I thought in the bad light, with an aerial. No houses around, nothing. Not even a street light. I grabbed the aerial as I walked past and twisted and it gave almost instantly. I took the broken end and ran it along the side of the car, digging it as deep as I could into the paint. Then again. I whipped the aerial off into the trees, watching as it spun, listening for it to land, but it hit the powder without a sound.

I should have walked away. I should have gone home and cried or beat my pillow or whatever, but I didn't. I went around behind the car and stepped up onto the trunk, then walked up the rear windshield onto the roof. I could feel it giving slightly, bouncy like the swamp back home. I jumped twice and the side window popped, spilling like gravel down the side of the car I jumped again and another window gave. I jumped again and another window gave. I jumped harder, slamming my heels down onto the roof as I landed each time and each time the roof gave a little. It was like driving fence stakes. Then the rear window gave, turning first like honeycomb and then falling slowly into the back window ledge over a box of Kleenex.

When the windshield gave it burst, exploding out and in and ringing, skidding, scraping out along the hood and silently out into the snow. I jumped and jumped and jumped and the roof fell until it rested perfectly along the backrest of the front seat.

I stepped down, quiet and calm, and walked away slowly, turning up the first side street that would bring me back into town and Riley's and my bed.

Maureen the Queen stayed behind, in the car.

“‘We're going to have to do something about all this violence,' the late Conn Smythe once said, ‘or people are going to keep on buying tickets.'

Nothing proved Smythe's point better than hockey's early expansion years, when a baby boom of diluted talent combined with easy investment money to produce, in six short years,
thirty
major professional hockey teams in North America, where in 1967 there had been only six.

The vast majority of expansion took place in the United States (in the 1974–75 season fifteen of the NHL's eighteen teams were American-based) where the customers were too often hockey unsophisticates. (‘How do they pump the air into that li'l black thang?' a Houston fan asked Gordie Howe.) Hockey had to be sold, and any ticket outlet knew wrestling outdrew the symphony: the stage was set for a Schultz, a Kelly and, of course, a Batterinski.

In 1972–73, the Philadelphia Flyers set a new all-time penalty record with 1,756 minutes, a full thirty games' worth of playing at a man disadvantage, nearly ten hours more than the next most surly team, the Boston Bruins. The following year, in 1974, the Philadelphia Flyers won the Stanley Cup. Evil was triumphant.

The years in Philadelphia were Batterinski's glory; the years in Los Angeles his demise. ‘Hockey wasn't the first priority out there,' remembers Batterinski's then close friend, Torchy Bender. ‘Not the second, either, nor third, fourth or fifth. He wasn't used to meeting people who didn't already know him through his statistics.'

In Finland, however, they knew him well by reputation. His hiring was controversial, a subject of debate in both the sports and editorial pages. ‘No true Finnish hockey fan,' wrote Arto Pakola, the country's most respected columnist, ‘can condone violence, but neither can he deny convincingly that Finnish hockey might gain much by a little infusion of aggression. Batterinski does not deserve to be written off as a plague, at least not yet. Who knows but one day we may honour him as the turning point in the ill fortunes of Finnish hockey.'”

— Excerpted by permission from “Batterinski's Burden” by Matt Keening,
Canada Magazine
, June 1982

T
hey
are paying me to coach as well as play, but it is not like hiring an electrician or a plumber. I have no training. There are no instructional manuals. The parts don't come with numbers on them. They simply name you coach and if the team wins they slap your back and if the team loses they stab it.

It's always said that journeymen make the best coaches. These are the guys who have spent so much time warming the bench they have no choice but to try and sound knowledgeable about the game. It's kind of like being one of those phoney artists whose paintings so obviously stink that their true art becomes their tongue. The tongue gets them press and the press gets them sales and eventually the sales turn around and give them respect. A hockey coach then, is simply a player who handles his mouth better than a stick.

My problem is maybe I was too good an NHLer to make a great coach. I know I've still got to work on my tongue. I don't seem to be able to talk them into a victory, so I've been searching for an appropriate charm to help us. Don't get me wrong, I'm no Phil Esposito. I don't have to do everything according to ritual — which leg you stick first through your long underwear, things like that — but I'm not beyond wearing the same clothes when we're on a winning streak.

Lately, I've taken to walking to the Ishallen hockey stadium by different paths each game, hoping one of them will work.

I'm still hanging in at the Inter-Continental, room 622. No one got too upset when I said I wanted to stay right here in Helsinki. Sudbury with a harbour, I called it at first, but at least it's a city and there's a bit of action. The team executive seemed to expect I'd be reluctant to move out to Tapiola. Besides, it's only about ten miles away and all we have is the odd practice out there, and that's about it. Our major practice every second week is a day-long affair up at the sports complex at Vierumaki, maybe 80 miles or so straight north. And until Tapiola gets a proper arena we'll continue playing out of Helsinki, so there's every reason for me to stay right here.

They insisted I at least go on a tour of Tapiola and sign some autographs at the big shopping centre. No problem. I agreed. But I had a hell of a time keeping from throwing up. A miracle city, they kept bragging, everything planned perfectly by one man, houses like you'd see surrounding a model train track in a Christmas window, bicycle paths through the pines. At the town centre I took a good look at the people, and they weren't at all like Helsinki Finns. I've seen that type before, in places like Ottawa and Washington, cities where skinny, bird-muscled men in suckhole beards jog but won't compete, and where their wives speak calmly to screaming brats in supermarkets. No thanks, not for me.

The Inter-Continental suits me quite well. There's a pool, sauna, and Broom Hilda waiting at her rubber-sheeted table for you to drop your shorts and climb on so she can sand you down with hot, soapy water, and a sponge like a Brillo pad. There's a disco and bar lagoon or walk to the Jaahalli Ishallen, where we play. Tram 3B takes me downtown, 3T brings me back. The use of a rented Saab 99 whenever I want.

The Inter-Continental is also on the same street as the Viisi Pennia, which Pekka — he's our best forward and already my best friend here — says means “The Five Pennies” and refers to some jazz trumpeter I never heard of named Red Nichols or something. Everyone goes there after practices and games. I like it because I haven't had to introduce myself once.

Batterinski's table is always centre table at the Viisi Pennia. They can't get enough of what I can tell them or make up. They want to know all about cocaine and Mr. Snow with the New York Rangers; they want to know who are the perverts (better they ask who aren't) and who besides Murdoch has gotten fouled up by drugs. I tell them what former L.A. player had the league's smallest penis and what former import from Sweden was found out to be a faggot. It's the type of information you can't find in the
NHL
Guide
or
The Hockey News
but, I swear, these are the records the true hockey nuts discuss most. They all know the same published material. Statistics are just a courteous step toward the true obsession of hockey fans: individual dirt.

I'm better with dirt than praise anyway. But too often they want to talk about The Kid, Gretzky. His picture seems to be in the Urheilu section of the paper twice as often as my own, for Christ's sake, and he's not even in the Finn league.

He looks like he's got a perm now, kisscurls. Just like all the other asshole Goody Two Shoes. Him. Gary Carter. All of them. But only I see through this crap. Every night it's the same question:

“Do you know him?”

I don't, no. He came up when I was falling down. We might have met several times around the blueline if I hadn't lost a step or two, as they say. But every night it's also the same answer: “Wayne? Shit, you kidding?”

“He's very good looking,” every sweet young thing at the table will say.

And always someone will ask: “Is he as good as they say?”

“He's lucky,” I usually say, leaving it at that.

It's funny the way things go in cycles. Right now hockey is all Gretzky and those damn Czechs, the Stastny brothers in Quebec and the Swedes, and guys like Perrault and Dionne again. Five years ago it was all me and Hound Dog and Battleship and Bird and Schultzy and the Bullies. Cycles, round and round and round, like a whirlpool sucking deadheads like me and Hound Dog down.

Gretzky. What is he, twenty? If we met and he was twenty and I was twenty those kisscurls would end up in casts, I tell you.

Still, talk like that serves its purpose. It draws the talent. It's a simple system: throw a few big names in the air like you expect them to walk in through the door any minute, and before you know it you're walking out the same door with the trophies that fell for the lure.

Fleeting victories, perhaps, but at least I was winning at something — unlike this team. Sometimes I wish a few of these guys had pimples like I once had, anything that might give them some spunk even if only to bust up a few opposition faces that had never been struck with anything, least of all fists. As they say back home, we
own
the basement. And we deserve it.

That's not to say we are exactly nobodies. We are Tapiola Hauki,
hauki
meaning “pike” in English — the ugliest, meanest, most tasteless fish we know back in Pomerania. It refers to the giant Finnish firm that takes little pieces of balsam wood, whittles them down so that they vaguely resemble creek chub, paints them fluorescent orange and green and blue and silver, glues on a couple of treble hooks and a plastic lip to make them dive and then sells them at five bucks a shot to North Americans who snag them on deadheads before the first week is out and buy another. Hauki obviously makes so much money that management can't figure out how to spend it, which is the only rational reason for Tapiola becoming the eleventh entry in SM-Liiga, Finland's poor-man's version of the NHL. As of last night, the standings were as follows:

GP	W	L	T	GF	GA	PTS
Karpat Oulu	8	8	0	0	41	17	16
IFK Helsinki	7	7	0	0	31	13	14
Tappara Tampere	8	7	1	0	35	23	14
TPS Turku	8	6	1	1	34	22	13
SaiPa Lappeenranta	7	4	1	2	28	26	10
Assat Pori	6	4	1	1	27	22	9
Jokerit Helsinki	8	3	3	2	43	31	8
Ilves Tampere	8	3	4	1	29	36	7
Kiekkoreipas Lahti	7	2	5	0	21	39	4
Lukko Rauma	8	2	6	0	19	41	4
Tapiola Hauki	7	0	7	0	13	52	0

I make no excuses for our showing. The goddamn press set me up as some kind of saviour when I arrived in September, but I'm too old to fall for that crap again. Sportswriting serves the same purpose in any language — the spreading of lies.

You learn two things immediately when you make the NHL: one, you keep your head up; two, you don't trust the press. You take your average sports reporter in North America and you've got a fat slob who can't keep his shirt tucked in or his pimples popped. If he hasn't got a speech impediment he bites his nails. If he's not an old washed-up drunk he's an uptight kid who'd look more comfortable carrying a purse than a Sherwood P.M.P. Never listens — if he's not talking he's eating, for free, of course — and even those who pretend to listen screw it all up in the end anyway, out of sheer stupidity. I cut out the
Sports Illustrated
quote from Norm Van Brocklin when he was recovering from a big operation last year. “It was a brain transplant,” the old quarterback said. “I got a sportswriter's brain so I could be sure I had one that hadn't been used.”

I'd hoped they'd be different over here. But no, everybody has to keep pointing out how Carl Brewer came over here and suddenly IFK Helsinki were league champions, but they neglect to point out that IFK Helsinki was an established team before Brewer ever arrived in town. Apart from me, Tapiola is a joke. Well, Pekka's not bad: he was first draft choice from the slush pile the other teams made available last spring. He has that long, extended look of the better European skaters, and he's a beautiful stickhandler, almost in the class of Marcel Dionne. But back in L.A. when a puck spilled out from a crush of players in the boards, Dionne was there waiting to rifle it out into an a upper corner of the net; here, when a puck spills out, Pekka is usually just another Finn scrambling in the other direction to avoid having to carry it through the heavy going.

They can talk all they want about the differences between the two styles of hockey and I say it's all bullshit. It's not rink size, not skating, shooting, passing or even all the malarkey about them playing in five-man units. The difference is that Canadians have a need to possess the puck — control meaning power for them; and I don't give a damn how many times Gretzky says the first thing he thought about when he scored his fiftieth goal was that it helped the
team
, the simple absolutely honest truth about Canadian hockey players is that the individual comes first, the team second. Europeans play like they'd rather have someone else do it; all they want to ensure is they don't get blamed for the screw-ups. There's something all too precious about European hockey. Pretty to look at but hollow within, like an Easter egg.

That's why they need a bit of Batterinski.
Hardboiled
.

Tapiola's boss is Erkki Sundstrom. I call him “Jerkki.” He's got one of those round Finn faces with thin hair plastered close to the scalp, a perfectly round face and perfectly round wire-rimmed glasses, so it looks like somebody drew him up with a compass during a study break. He's gone on record saying I'll turn this team around in the second half of the season, and I somehow kept shut about it.
This
team? We've got a left winger named Jorma Aura who insisted on wearing a silk scarf when he played, like he was Douglas Bader in
Reach for the Sky
. First intermission of the first game, I ripped the scarf off his neck in front of the whole team, blew my nose in it and threw the damn thing into the garbage can at the entrance to the dressing room, and that was the end of that, not that it improved his play much.

Tapiola
should
be a great team. The first time we had a sauna together up at Vierumaki I couldn't believe my eyes. There can't be five pounds of flab among the twenty players out. All thick-necked and big-armed with wide shoulders. Naked, they looked like they could eat hockey pucks. I had to think of all the dressing rooms I'd been in and could only shake my head. Phil Esposito's big tire of flub, Butch Goring's grade-six build, Guy Lafleur coughing for a weed and looking like he's sixty years old, Bobby Clarke looking like you'd have to search for the card tied to his toe to figure out who he was.

But they, at least, are hockey players. These guys here are engineers and students and mechanics and civil servants first, hockey players second. Hockey is more like a hobby to them. Only three of them — Pekka, big Timo, my defence partner, and, for some unknown reason, our weak-ankled goalie with the glasses — make more than fifty thousand Finmarks and that's only about eighteen thousand dollars. I'm getting twice that and feel I'm being gypped. Some of them are getting only six or seven grand for the year.