The Last Season (31 page)

C
anucklehead
... it had begun the week before in the
St. Louis Dispatch
after I took a run at the Blues' pretty-boy, Garry Unger, and now it was all over the Spectrum's walls. Two huge posters were up along the east wall, and on the south side a massive queen-sized sheet had been painted to show a hammer and sickle being bent double under the skates of a raging Flyer who was wearing my number, 32. I know, I know ... but Bill Barber had dibs on 7 before I got there from Pittsburgh and had already made the number less than it was, if that's possible. Not that Barber wasn't a fine player, but his reputation around the league was precisely the opposite of mine: if Barber took dives, then Batterinski was the hidden rock in shallow water. One predictable, the other not for a moment. So 32 it was. At least it was distinctive. Over the bottom of this cartoon for Big Number 32 the sheet was spray-painted red for blood. And over the top, in magnificent Flyer orange, four words:
CANUCKLEHEAD JA, SOVIETS NYET!

Everywhere there were American flags or posters going up.
END THE RED PLAGUE! BORIS IS BORING! THE BELL OF FREEDOM WILL RING SOVIET SKULLS! THE FLYERS ARE COMING, THE FLYERS ARE COMING! BROAD STREET BULLIES 10, LENIN SQUARE COMMIES 0!

Central Red Army was in town for the final game in an eight-game NHL Soviet series, the first since Paul Henderson had salvaged Canada's pride in Moscow back in'72, with a lousy 34 seconds left. The two touring Soviet teams had already taken the series in a walk, easily defeating the Islanders, Rangers, Black Hawks, Bruins and Penguins tying the Canadiens on New Year's Eve and losing only once, to Buffalo. But since we were the defending Stanley Cup champions, the NHL was expecting to avenge each and every insult in the final match. Schultz, Kelly, Dupont, Saleski and Batterinski were suddenly white knights riding out to meet the forces of evil. We were going to war, and all Philadelphia was at our feet.

Poppa even called, the first time he'd ever done so, with the exception of Christmas and Good Friday. For some reason I thought it was the press, somehow finding out my unlisted number, and I tore into the poor bugger for daring to use my Christian name.

“Hello Felix?”

“Who's this?” I yelled.

“That you, Felix?”

Dat. Dat.

“Poppa?”

“That you, Felix?”

“Yah, it's me. Where the hell are you, Poppa?”

“Home, right here in the kitchen. I'm sitting in your old chair, son.”

“What's up? Everything okay?”

“Sure everything's okay. I'm calling about you, not me, eh? They're all talking about you up here. Danny and all the rest of the lads. I hear ‘em.”

Duh
lads.

“Yah, what about?”

“Tonight. You boys are gonna send them Russians packing. It's going to be on the television.”

“So? You haven't got one.”

I could hear Poppa's laugh, a hiss above the constant hiss of the line. “I got one now, thanks to you.”

“What do you mean, ‘Thanks to me'?”

“I used the money you sent to get one.”

“I told you to trade that old shitwagon in on a new truck, Poppa.”

“Old truck's perfectly fine. I got an overhaul down at Betz's and Jan found an alternator for her over at Renfrew, so she's good for some yet. Besides, Batcha can't enjoy the truck. I got the television for her.”

“She'll
be watching tonight?”

“She won't watch much. Says it hurts her head, not knowing where the lights are coming from.”

“What lights?”

“She's old. She doesn't trust it. She won't even use the telephone.”

“Who'd she call? She's got no friends.”

“Now, now, son. There's no need for that, eh?”

He was right. No need for
dat.

“You're going to watch, eh, Poppa?”

“You bet. You play your heart out against them Russians, understand?”

Poppa seemed so serious. Did he really think Batterinski needed a pep talk?

I couldn't help teasing. “Why Poppa?”

“You're a Pole!”

I could feel his anger through the wires.

“What's that got to do with it?”

The Russians are the root of everything bad that ever happened to Poland. Don't you forget that!”

“How could I?”

“You'll have God on your side, you watch.”

“God?”

“Damn right. You watch. Look, we're almost up to three minutes. I better go. You play well, son. We'll be watching.

“Okay, Poppa. Thanks for calling.”

“Goodbye, Felix.”

“Bye, Poppa.”

I hung the phone up slowly.
God?
What could He do to help? Centre a line between Hound Dog Kelly and Hammer Schultz? Okay, Poppa, He's got experience, so we'll let him handle the floods.

Clarkie put a knee into a Russian just before face-off, and before much more than ten minutes were played Eddie Van Impe had elbowed a Soviet forward, Valery Kharlamov (the very one whose ankles had been busted by Clarkie back in '72) so hard those of us on the bench thought the crack had been the poor bugger's neck, but ended up being only his suck helmet hitting the ice. That caused a whistle; it also caused the Soviet Red Army to skate off the ice, lock the dressing room door and refuse to come out until Eagleson promised them we'd settle down and try, at least once in a while, to put our sticks on the pucks rather than Soviet flesh. We knew the moment they skated off they were beaten. Returning to the ice was merely a formality to run out the clock and accept defeat.

Near the end of the first period Freddie the Fog touched my shoulder and I sprang over the boards into a grenade of applause. They stood; they cheered; they whipped American flags back and forth; they screamed, blew horns, whistled , stomped Dixie Cups, threw toilet paper, punched the air and partners and waited: for me. I skated to my position for the face-off as if the rink were empty, my legs closed, blades drifting, head down as if I were weighing myself on a bathroom scale. When I looked up it was just once, and then to see what the airhead with the signs had to say behind the Soviet goal. He held one high, dancing in circles, and when it came around me I spat on the ice.

NUCLEAR CANUCKLEHEAD!

The face-off was in our end to the left. Torchy would take the draw; Saleski stood to the right, snorting like a workhorse, Kindrachuk on the other side, staring at eyes you see at deer hunts when the booze starts working into the trigger finger. Beyond Kindrachuk stood the closest Soviet to me, Kharmalov, who less than half an hour ago had seemed on his death bed, courtesy of Eddie Van Impe. Kharmalov was looking right back at me, also aware of the crowd shouting my name, and he was smiling.

And then he winked.

Winked!

It caught me so off guard I blinked myself and he kept smiling and nodded at me. I looked down at my feet and felt the old heat rising in my ears. Not the old heat, a different heat; this warmth was not comforting, but disturbing. How many dozens of incidents had set Batterinski off before? That blown kiss in Vancouver ... the geek who called me a “Polish sausage” on Long Island ... the fan who threw a bag of used Tampons over our bench in Boston ... dozens of fool's plays, and all of them ending in blood and Batterinski skating away in his stalled-time, distracted manner.

Kharlamov saw: here I was a journeyman hockey player, at best a man who had completely ignited the crowd by doing nothing other than skating slowly, without falling, from the bench to the face-off circle. Players like Kharlamov and Lafleur could only turn the crowds on that way through realization. But I did it through expectation. And in Philadelphia, where the good play was seldom realized but violence always expected, Batterinski was the largest draw.

It stunned me that Kharmalov understood this and was amused by it. Not only did he see the absurdity of the crowd from his elegant side of hockey as clearly as I saw it from the animal side, he had the nerve to share this insight with me. This guy had guts, taking a chance like that, and I had to admire him for it. I found I couldn't look up. Afraid I'd return his wink.

The puck dropped and it squirted to Kindrachuk and then back to Torchy, who put it behind the net to me as I swung quickly before the far corner. Christ, but it was good to be back playing with the only guy who never had to look to find me. As soon as Torchy dropped me the puck he took off in full flight for centre and I sent a high, quick one, leading his chest so he could glove it before the centre line. The perfect play: Torchy Bender's breaking speed, Batterinski's thread.

But the puck never arrived. Sent out in perfect flight, it was intercepted straight out of the air before it even reached the blueline, a heavily taped stick snicking it clean as a cat would a floating Kleenex.

Kharmalov!

The puck seemed to rest on his stick as he brought it down into his skates. I dove to poke-check it, convinced he would be tied up momentarily, but the drop into his skates was deliberate, the puck moved like a pinball, left blade onto the stick, and me skidding out over the blueline like a curler who's found Krazy Glue on his rock handle.

Then I felt the familiar heat rise. I rose on one foot and hopped back, just in time to see Kharmalov cut in front of Moose and drop the puck perfectly to another Red Army stick for a clear shot, which fortunately caromed of the far side of the post and up against the glass. Kharmalov immediately turned to set up their forecheck pattern, but as he came out toward the blueline his stomach met the same fate as my lead pass to Torchy. I caught him full blade and turned, twisting. No cat with a Kleenex here; the lion with his kill. Kharmalov went down heavily, rolling, but I was immediately blindsided by Petrov, the big forward, who pushed me back toward Moose. I turned and threw down my stick, but not Petrov. He stood shouting something, whether to me or to the referee I couldn't tell, but it didn't matter what it was: I had moved into my fighting time zone. All I needed was for him to drop his stick.

I charged Petrov but he turned his back and both linesmen caught me and, holding an arm each, forced me back toward the boards. I'd never been held this way before. Where was the mutual restraint? Where was the tug and release of so many previous battles, the opponent with his personal linesman, me with mine, the four of us sure of our roles, what was allowable, what was not, when to lunge and when to retreat, when to quit? Where was the old pattern?

I twisted, but they did not release and then grab. Both held fast. They pressed me up against the glass while Michailov moved in, and through the reflection I thought I could see him talking to the referee like they were meeting over lunch. I put my knee to the boards and tried to force the three of us back, but they just pressed tighter. My face went flush against the glass and I could see the crowd pressing back, wide, gaping, outraged mouths all screaming in protest. They were on my side. They wanted me freed. They wanted Batterinski alone in the rink with the Russians.

A hand-held camera moved in on the other side and I could see the cameraman duck down on one of his knees to get an angle on me. I cursed as loud as I could, hoping he might have the pick-up mike on, and stared straight into the camera. There was a small red light on over the lens, but inside the lens was black, with a small white core at the centre. It looked like an eye staring back.

Batcha's eye.
Cursing.

I tried desperately to wrench free, but they held fast. The fans were leaning and pounding fists against the glass now and I could feel their punches on my forehead. Punches given in sympathy, pounding mercilessly. The cameraman panicked and stepped aside, letting the crowd crush fast to the glass. We were less than a quarter of an inch apart now, fists pounding, mouths silently screaming toward mine, eyes bulging with thrill and desperate terror at the same time.

All I could do was stare back, helplessly held by two linesmen.

I'd never been this close to my fans before, never seen what they looked like. Never cared. But I saw now, and I knew finally that I was not Batterinski.

They
were.

Two weeks later, our 4–1 victory forgotten by every Flyer but me, who saw it as a personal loss — but of what I wasn't sure — I was having a beer with the boys out at Rexy's. Torchy had a piece of paper unfolded and pressed flat on the table, an empty Miller at each end anchoring it., and we were trying to make out his scribbling. He'd had to hurry. He didn't want Freddie the Fog to catch him taking down the day's thoughts, but this one had to be saved, it was in a class by itself.

“We know that hockey is where we live,”
the Fog had written on the dressing room blackboard,
“where we can best meet and overcome the pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games.”

Kelly giggled. “I thought Rexy's was where we spent our time between games.”

“What's it mean?” Torchy asked. Only Torchy would have the nerve.

“I don't know. Where's Clarkie? — he'll know.”

“He fucked off home.”

And so we sat, wondering. Kelly finally called for one of the waiters, and Torchy and the rest began scouting around for action, settling on a foursome of pancaked, fidget-eyed, chain-smoking bleached housewives in the corner: Torchy claimed he was responsible for more kids in Cherry Hill eating casseroles for dinner than Kraft was — they put it in at three, he put it in at four, he pulled it out, ate, she pulled it out at six and the family ate. “I sometimes wonder if they can still taste me when they're saying grace,' he used to say.

I sat nursing my own beer, still not in the proper frame of mind since the Russian game. They left the paper on the table when they went to the housewife table and I tried to read it upside down
... hockey is where we live, where we can meet and overcome pain and wrong and death.
What would Clarkie say if he were here? I remember when we won our first game in '74 and just before the final game the Fog wrote:
“Win today and
we will walk together forever.”
Clarkie thought that wonderful; he'd repeat it to the rookies, use it again and again in the dressing room until we all got sick to death of it.