Hockey Dads and Hockey Sons
We walked single file through the snow to Lasker Rink, escorted by the coaches. Central Park at night, 1977: in the swirl of a storm, the Park was desolate and pristine. I was eight and had been invited to start skating with the older boys at school. I’d had hockey on the brain for a year, and yet had never really gone to a hockey practice. The Zamboni did a quick dry sweep while we suited up, and then we spilled through the gate onto the ice. Someone dumped out a milk crate full of pucks. I’d never seen such abundance—they may as well have been gold ingots. We scooted and stickhandled around one another, the clatter of our sticks and the rip of our blades muffled by the storm. Whatever anxiety I’d felt about getting out there with the older kids gave way to a saucer-eyed vigilance, the air as bracing as a hit of smelling salts.
Mr. Mila was the hockey coach. His full name was Miloslav Pospisil. He’d been in the Czechoslovak Army and had played on the Czech national hockey and soccer teams. The story we were told was this: One day on the street, in 1968, after the Soviet invasion in response to the Prague Spring, he saw a Soviet soldier shoot a woman who had refused to remove a flower pinned to her overcoat—a rose, the unofficial Czechoslovak national flower. Mila rushed home and told his wife to pack up, and they made their way to the border, then on to Montreal and, later, to New York.
Mila had a military crewcut and a perpetual look of disdain for us kids. We knew him from gym class and were terrified of him. If you horsed around, he pulled you out of the herd and lifted you up by the hair and skin behind your ear. He called this Depozit. He had hoisted boys clear off the ground, sneakers dangling. On the ice, he wore red sweatpants and old skates, and used a stick with a straight blade, no curve at all. He had big thighs and took powerful strides and barked at us with a Slavic severity that we associated with Russian movie villains. An undercurrent of irony, of playacting, went over our heads.
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
I was the only third grader on the team. A month into the season, I was asked to join the other kids at a peewee tournament upstate. Peewees were eleven and twelve years old. Clearly, they needed bodies. This would be my first-ever organized hockey game. The day before the tournament, at practice, an older kid caught me with a wrist shot to the front of the ankle. It could not have been very hard—we were young and not strong—but a puck, when it hits you right, can leave a welt. That night, the ankle swelled up, and, abuzz with worry and excitement, I hardly slept.
We left the city before dawn. Ninety minutes later, in the locker room, I was having trouble tying my skates. The top of the laces, where you tugged them tight, was right on the bruise. My father gave it a go, hauling on the laces, and I yelped. I was young, I was tired, I was crushed, I was soft. And so I began to cry. Mr. Mila came over and watched me for a while. “You are crybaby!” he said. He told me to take off my skates and get out of the locker room: “You no play.”
Who was more humiliated, my father or me? He took me up to the lounge, overlooking center ice, where a woman offered me a doughnut. He kept his distance in such a way that I sensed his disappointment, in spite of his words of reassurance and some grumbling about Mila. No one likes a crybaby. With the other parents, my face a mess of powdered sugar and dried tears, I watched the first round through a layer of glass and a scrim of shame, and I didn’t get back into the lineup that day. I’d have to wait a while to play my first hockey game.
Ice was scarce in the city. We didn’t have frozen ponds or back-yard rinks. No lawns to flood and obsess over in the Canadian-dad way. There wasn’t much artificial ice, either, at least considering the size of the town and the number of inhabitants. Skating was a novelty, a birthday-party gimmick, like bowling. Once or twice a year, you might find yourself clomping around on crappy rental blades at Rockefeller Center, mesmerized by girls in wool leggings.
Now and then on weekends and vacations, our parents sneaked my brother, Xander, and me onto a brackish Long Island pond, my father in faded flared jeans, a red sweater, and a down vest—a tall man even taller on skates. His were brown leather hockey skates, their steel blades speckled with rust: the hockey equivalent of a leather football helmet. I was transfixed by them, as if they were a pair of pistols.
There was also street hockey, roller hockey, floor hockey. Floor hockey was played at school, in gym class, with plastic sticks and a lightweight orange plastic puck. The walls were padded, allowing for bloodless contact. Mr. Mila presided, severe and disapproving. It was a rare treat in gym to get floor hockey instead of dodgeball or gymnastics. Even now, if I picture the nets and the rolling laundry bin of sticks, I feel a little trill of excitement, like a memory of a circus or an ice-cream truck.
After school, we played street hockey in our shoes, with a ball for a puck, on the uneven paving stones of the plaza where East Eighty-sixth Street comes to an end in Carl Schurz Park. One on one, two on two, five on five: to get a pass off the wall at one end we called out “M.J.!,” for Michael Jackson, after the album “Off the Wall” came out.
Sometimes on weekends, my father played with us. One morning, two older kids on banana-seat bikes cornered a few of us playing street hockey in the park. One of them grabbed our ball and threw it into a fenced lot, which led to a flimsy standoff:
“That’s our ball!”
“Yeah?”
“Go get it!”
“You gonna make me?”
And so on. We had hockey sticks, and so had the means to make them, but that calibre of action—any kind of real bloodshed—was beyond our reckoning or appetite.
I saw my father striding our way with a stick in hand. The big kids, perched on their banana seats, had their backs to him. I gave the bigger one a shove that failed to knock him off his bike. He rebalanced and wound up to throw a punch, but my father caught him by his hoodie and yanked him down to the pavement. He made the kid scale the fence and fetch our ball. It was good to have an enforcer in the family.
You might say we were cake-eaters. That’s what the working-class hockey kids in Minnesota and Michigan call the prep-school swells. I was reared on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Co-op apartment, private school, Wall Street dad: very cake-y. One can, and I often do, parse how much I was of it and not of it. I indulge in the narcissism of small differences. The euphemism of the era was “upper middle class.” My parents had come to New York from Philadelphia the year before I was born, so, privileged as they were, and connected by birth and education to people of influence and means, they didn’t feel like gilded New Yorkers. The high-society rituals—benefits, dancing schools, clubs—weren’t theirs or mine. Not yet, anyway.
During the week, my father travelled to the heartland to advise regional banks on their mergers with other regional banks. He came back with regional-bank swag, the pencils and rulers I used to do my homework. Around town, people sometimes mistook him for a movie star, and he liked that. Out on the street, after we’d seen “Greystoke” at the Ziegfeld, another moviegoer pointed at him and said, “Yo! It’s Tarzan!” His firm took out an ad in the Times with a full-length photograph, shot by Richard Avedon, of my father in a suit. Afterward, his office phone lit up with inquiries from women across the country in need of some corporate finance.
I was, in many ways, a sensitive kid, a good boy. Yet there was something ornery in me, some cussed streak. I’m not sure where it came from, but it was hockey that touched it off, starting around the age of ten. Nothing else made me so assertive, combative, or self-righteous, or brought me so much animal joy. It was an altered state, a kind of goblin mode. I wanted the puck, or the ball or roll of electric tape or whatever doodad was standing in for a puck. I was almost frightened by my hunger to have it and to do things with it, and by the sense of swagger that swept over me when I managed to do the things with it that I wanted to, and by the frustration that coursed through me when I did not.
There was something, perhaps, about the geometry of the game, about finding order amid chaos. And, then, there was another kind of order, a whole alternate ethos that consumed me, an idea of fairness and reprisal. “Do that again and I’ll—” I didn’t know what I’d do, or even what I wanted to do, but an urge to redress certain wrongs took hold. One day, during a street-hockey game, a kid from down the block started pushing my brother around, and I knocked him to the ground and stood over him, poised to throw a punch. I’d surprised myself as much as I had him. With a hockey stick in hand, I could be both artist and vigilante, ace and goon.
Two years after he called me a crybaby, Mr. Mila decided that he no longer wanted to coach the games. My father took over. To the rest of the team, he became, and would ever remain, Coach P. He had played a bit of hockey growing up. The lore is scant: One time, as a boy, he played in a game in Philadelphia. He was wearing figure skates, which in itself seems disqualifying. Grace Kelly—local girl, movie star, now a princess—was in the stands. My father, at some point, found himself on a breakaway. Just him, in open ice, bearing down on the goalie. He caught the serrated point of the figure-skating blade on the ice and fell on his face. Toe pick. We hoard our childhood humiliations and dispense them with care. He played in prep school but quit after three years. He hated having to shovel the rink.
Coach P. paced the bench in a double-breasted navy overcoat over a down vest with brown wide-wale corduroys, hiking boots, ski gloves. The other boys were afraid of him, perhaps in a playful way. If you floated around, he called you a “drifter,” or worse. It must have been something for Mr. Utsch to hear Coach. P. yell out to his eleven-year-old son, “Utsch, you’re a pussy!” Xander and I knew that his fits of anger were fearsome but harmless, as did the others who’d spent time around our family. Behind the bench, the hard-assery was more gag than threat. The Great Santini with a touch of Chevy Chase.
He didn’t know much about the game’s finer points. He was not, as they say, an X’s and O’s guy. He said, “Forecheck, back-check, paycheck” and “My way or the highway.” His coinages, we thought. His highest compliment, the opposite of a drifter, was “hustler.” I endeavored to be one.
He wrote out the lineup in his left-handed script, in blue ink, on swatches of graph paper. He carried it around the days before our games and showed it to my brother and me. Here was a grownup—a man’s man, who came home at night from an office tower wearing a tailored suit and invited us into his walk-in closet, which held his executive clothes, his leather belt and English-leather lace-ups, the cedar shoe trees and horsehair brushes and jars of cordovan polish—caring so sincerely about, and devoting so much time to, an undertaking that, although it meant the world to me, even then I knew to be utterly trivial. It struck me that he knew my friends’ tendencies, that he had a sense of our hierarchies and skills, that he thought more of the better players and less of the weaker. I pictured him at his desk on Wall Street folding a sheet of graph paper into four quarters and writing out the names of eleven-year-old kids. It was flattering and unnatural, and it provided a first shudder in my perception of him as an infallible giant.
In the summer of 1982, I aged out of Coach P.’s squad. Eighth grade, thirteen: bantams. I signed up for a house league in the Bronx, rostering with a team from Pelham, just over the county line. We wore purple and yellow, like the Marcel Dionne Los Angeles Kings. I knew no one. Here was my first locker room rife with talk of jerking off and getting laid. I kept quiet, off and on the ice. Puberty hadn’t hit me yet. Jerking off, to say nothing of getting laid, was as yet a rumor. My shifts on the ice came and went, rarely with any consequence. The games were rougher than I was used to. I shied away from trouble and became a perimeter player. My father came home early from work to drive me to the Bronx and back. He watched from the corner. I could sense the disappointment, the boredom, his reassessing the worthiness of the sacrifice. I saw myself through his eyes and didn’t like what I saw.
About halfway through the season, I tried to avoid a check and got clipped in the leg, knee on knee. The knee swelled and stiffened. By the time it got better, the schedule was all but done. I doubt the coach missed me.
There wasn’t any burning preconception that our two boys would play hockey, or, for that matter, become anything in particular. My wife, Siv, and I were open to whatever might come, or so we told ourselves. We weren’t yet, and would probably never fully be, aware of the expectations and received ambitions that we projected onto the boys. The older one was Oli, pronounced with a long “O,” like the Finnish player Olli Jokinen. On his third birthday, in the fall, we gave him his first pair of skates, Bauers no bigger than my fists.
“Do you know what day it is?” his mother asked.
“Hockey!” he said.
And so it was that he spent many days that winter at public sessions and on frozen ponds, puttering around with a chair or a held hand, and this may be proof that I was, and am, not being honest with myself. To call the pull of the ice gravitational would be an abrogation of agency. I wielded the magnet, whether I meant to or not. I was the one who saw something edifying in it all, who imbued playing a game with the making of a man. I was the one who made arguments on behalf of pushing through exhaustion and pain, of showing up even when you didn’t feel like it.
It wasn’t that I believed myself to be so staunch; I wasn’t a marine or a monk or even an athlete of any distinction. I’d quit in high school, fed up with playing for other men—the coaches, my father. Or so I imagined. I was on to and into other things, whatever the opposite of sports was. Books, music, pot—a demented life of the mind. In time, I came back to hockey. It was a relapse, of a kind. Roller hockey, intramural hockey, men’s league.
The boy coached by his father was now the father coaching his sons. I knew, as much from failure as from absorption, that if hockey was good for anything it was for its lessons of forbearance. Maybe my boys, if I handled them right, would turn out sturdier than me.
When Oli turned five, we got him the full kit. I went to Cosby’s, the bedraggled hockey store next to Madison Square Garden, and bought the smallest pads I could find. In the apartment, I helped him tug on gear and tighten straps with the brisk tenderness of a veterinarian tending to a sedated pet. His excitement, visible behind the lattice of the face mask, was intoxicating, the pride of a novitiate. The extent to which even this kind of innocent dress-up is a means of indoctrination—the knottiness of this early gender programming—is leavened or perhaps obscured by its adorableness. He bumped around the house, proud and almost delirious with his transformation, and with the cognizance that he might be pleasing his father. The armor both emboldened him and somehow sapped him of strength, as though the plastic exoskeleton had drawn starch from his bones. After a few minutes, he lay on the floor with arms out and legs splayed, and looked up at the ceiling, daydreaming of who knows what. Every frozen pond has one, a distrait child squinting into the sky, making angels of the ice shavings. Here, in the one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment, was ours.
I signed Oli up for a local hockey program called the Mighty Mites, coached by a guy I played beer-league hockey with. Oli showed up a few times, bumped around on the ice with the other kids, but then one day in the locker room, perhaps cowed by the bluster and chatter of the dads, he refused to get ready for practice. I pleaded, he held fast. In a panic, I called my wife. She said to let him be.
“But he made a commitment,” I said.
“He did not make a commitment,” she said. “He is five.”
That was it for the Mighty Mites. But he took up hockey again the following year, as a kindergartner at a new school, the one I’d attended. His class practiced on Friday afternoons at Lasker. I volunteered as an assistant coach, which meant being out there as an errand boy and horsing around with the kids. It was as casual as could be, a romper room on ice. More than half the kindergarten class had joined the program. Most of them couldn’t even get dressed in the gear, much less skate. Some came with their mothers, very few with their fathers, and a lot of them with nannies, South Asians and West Indians, who lugged or wheeled their charges’ bags of gear. I roamed the locker room and helped with the pads and the laces. To see, or try to see, these little princelings through their babysitters’ eyes made the whole thing seem a bit ridiculous, if not insidious. The idea was to toughen up the kids, teach them some self-reliance, yet here they were, attended by their handmaids.
Before practice, as the Zamboni made its rounds, the boys piled up behind the door to the ice, jostling for position. After a moment—the sanctified fermata of waiting for the new layer of water to freeze—a coach unlatched the door and they tumbled onto the ice, not one remaining on his skates. The pads, the helmets, the sticks, the bounded ring: it was all a pretext for roughhousing. No one discouraged it.
I was happy that my boy was skating and enjoying it, and was immediately eager for him to do it more. Where did this come from? Was it keeping up with the Joneses or meeting some idea of an athletic standard instilled by my father? Was it a resurrection of my thwarted ambitions for myself? Which is to say, was I living through my child? Of course I was.
It wasn’t long before Oli joined a travel-hockey program. Day One was at a rink in a mall up the pike, in New Rochelle. This was mini-mites, five- and six-year-olds, mostly, the smallest of the small. We drove up at daybreak, Oli in back, still in a booster seat. When we got to the rink and he started dressing, I could see the trepidation and doubt in his eyes. Older kids strutted around in their pads. Their dads made a caffeinated ruckus. I tried, in Oli’s presence, to convert the boisterousness and swagger of the others into cheerfulness, but I could sense that he knew I was forcing a mood. This never worked with him. Something gave way, some dismay set off by the jersey he was given or the number he’d chosen or the bravado of the other children or the merrymaking of the parents or the nervous exhilaration of his dad—those first-day heebie-jeebies, one’s own memory of which persists deep in the bones. He refused to go on the ice, and he wept. My moonfaced boy, wrecked somehow by a disconnect between what he’d wanted and what this was, dug in. Other dads sidled up and tried to coax and reassure him, but, if I couldn’t, they didn’t stand a chance. We sat awhile. Limbo. My heart ached for the boy, yet the task at hand was to get him onto the ice and into the program. The striving, the striving. He sat on a bench, his tiny legs not even reaching the floor. I left him alone for a while and stood at the glass watching the session, my soul a twist of sympathy, frustration, embarrassment, and even something like fear—that he might be too sensitive for this world, too soft—and the realization that I might feel this way about sensitivity, about the proper mettle in a boy, made me ashamed, too, so the brain, the self-justifying cortex, whichever lobe that is, got to work formulating arguments on behalf of my impatience and stipulations, to override the shame.
The mood passed, and he eventually stood up and skated out onto the ice and made his fleeting impression and got sorted into a group that wasn’t the top group.
Once you spent some time on the ice with the younger kids, you realized quickly that maybe one out of three of them had the ability to cultivate a sense of strategy and structure. There were those who just chased the puck and those who ignored it. You had your blinded bulls and your daisy sniffers, your Ratóns and your Ferdinands. It was hard enough for a lot of the kids to stand in line, maintain eye contact, keep from crying. The capacity for abstraction and awareness didn’t necessarily align with intelligence or skill. Spatial awareness, hockey sense—maybe it was a cast of mind.
Still, parents had a hard time letting go of the idea that their tyros were miniature professionals. A year later, I began helping coach the mini-mites, who now included my younger son, James. The head coach, from Calgary, Alberta, had been a star college player and had had a couple of stints in the American Hockey League, the best of the minor leagues. Now retired and starting a career in finance, he was more or less a volunteer, and the seriousness of the parents at this paltry level of ours astonished and amused him. But, with that western-Canadian knack for self-possession, he revealed none of this to the constituents. The day after Halloween, he arrived a half hour late for a 7 A.M. Saturday practice and stepped onto the ice reeking of booze, with smeared lipstick on his collar and white Dracula face paint on his neck. I fetched a towel and tidied him up—what else are assistant coaches for?
A Sunday game in Queens, at dawn, Dracula and me behind the bench: Our mini-mites wobbled around a full sheet of ice like grapeshot on a dinner plate. There were lines painted under the ice—blue, red—but none of the kids had any idea what they signified. Once the referee dropped the puck, the parents in the stands shouted at their kids. Go! Skate! Get it! Shoot!
After the game—a loss, according to the scoreboard—a father came up to me to complain that our players seemed not to have a grasp of proper positioning on the breakout. I was new enough to it all, and I understood that this was preposterous. But it wouldn’t be long before I would forget and be tricked into expecting too much. Something came awake in me, an incubus of ambition—a desire for excellence, obviously of a shine that would reflect back on me. The vanity of parenthood took hold.
I hadn’t set out to coach my sons. The earliest impulse was to be on the ice with them. If I was going to go to the rink, I might as well get to skate. I wanted to play with them, not teach them to play, much less to play for me. Still, it was pride, of a kind, that drew me to the bench. A sense that I knew something about the game, that I could be a nurturing or at least an entertaining adjunct to the professional coaching staff. Most of the coaches were Czech, a new generation of Mr. Milas. My father, when he took over, had embodied a sense of hockey—and life!—as lark, not just as proving ground. But eventually a dad’s tutelage sets in motion the familiar cycle of expectation and disappointment.
The weekends teemed with hockey, each boy with as many as five engagements over the forty-eight hours. Two or three games and a couple of practices at a web of rinks, back and forth across toll bridges and state lines. Siv maintained a color-coded hockey calendar that, if you looked at it too long, induced an epileptic fit. She and the other moms had a car pool for the weekday practices, and she was often with one boy when I was with the other, although I strove to be everywhere, to see every shift, and often took her leg of the weekday car pool, since I was supposed to be on the ice coaching anyway. Still, she watched more hockey and huffed more Zamboni fumes and developed more nuanced opinions about it all than she would ever have imagined.
My participation, as driver, dad, coach, manager, crank, and fan, sucked the strength out of me, like going overboard in a wintry sea. The rank refrigerated air, the burnt coffee, the Tastykakes, the cross-chop of excitement and stress and boredom and disgruntlement. By Monday, I was saturated by it all, sallow and hoarse.
On the weeknights, it was my turn to play, on whatever team in whatever league. One night, my father, after a business dinner nearby, dropped by the rink to watch. Beer league means never playing in front of your parents, or anybody at all. So this was an oddity. I experienced a little flutter at the first sight of him, standing in the corner up against the glass. Coach P., in the overcoat. A teammate nudged me on the bench: “Is that your dad?”
It had been a lifetime since he’d appraised me on the ice: a skinny longhaired kid in Pelham purple lost amid the carnage of a bantam game in the Bronx. Now about the age he’d been then, and attuned to his presence, I skated harder than usual. But, when the third period began, I noticed he was gone.
The next morning, I waited for his report. He called in the afternoon. “What did you think?” I asked.
“You guys are terrible!” he said.
I was cocksure enough to find this pronouncement more inaccurate than unkind, needy enough to find it hurtful, and man enough to see the sense in it.
A Sunday 7 A.M. game at the Playland Ice Casino, in Westchester, versus the Rye Rangers. The kids arrived in darkness and began warming up in the parking lot. The younger you are, the earlier you play. Perhaps it’s to weed out the faint of heart. The kids who learn to wake up at 5:30 A.M. to play hockey are the same ones who in thirty years will have the fortitude to skate at midnight.
One of my beer-league teammates, a master rigger of industrial cranes, and I were assistant coaches. His son J. and my boy James were teammates and friends as mites. J. was tiny, with long curly hair and goggles like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s, and he treated James—who was eight, a year older, tall and wiry, with a blond bowl cut and a volatile streak—as the big brother he didn’t have. The head coach was Lada, a former Czech junior player fresh in town from Kopřivnice. He spoke very little English. He led skating clinics for the kids, designing convoluted edge-work drills that he couldn’t explain. He had J.’s dad and me demonstrate the sequences, then barked at us, half facetiously, when we got it wrong, endearing him to the kids. When James lost his temper on the ice, which was often, Lada bellowed, “Red eyes!,” his term for hot temper, and benched James for several shifts, the son seething while his father, pretending to be objective, tried to ignore him.
That Sunday, it wasn’t yet 8 A.M. when a Rye player shoved James from behind into the boards. James went down awkwardly and stayed prone a moment, then leaped up and, with an implausible ferocity, cross-checked the other kid in the ear. The Rye boy collapsed to the ice, and the other kids poured in and began grappling with one another, while parents shouted and pointed. Soon there was a pile of mites, with the two referees pulling players off and flinging them aside like puppies. Through the windows, you could see that the sun had risen over the Long Island Sound. I thought of my son’s fellow second graders back in the city, likely still asleep or watching cartoons in their pajamas or getting dressed for church or whatever the unrinked got up to on weekend mornings, but here at Playland my boy had instigated a munchkin brawl.
On the bench, I kept my cool. It can be a matter of pride among hockey men—coaches, executives, scouts—to maintain a poker face when hell breaks loose on the ice. Cross your arms, chew your gum. Act like you’ve seen it before. But inside I was all twisted up. From a certain remove, the mayhem amused me, but I worried, with a dad’s fierce, selfish concern, about James’s well-being—his head, ribs, neck, shoulders—and muttered justifications to myself for the retaliatory stick to the ear. “Kid had it coming,” my inner hockey man said. Yet I also worried about that Rye boy and felt the rustlings of embarrassment, guilt, or even outrage. The refs kicked James out of the game and gave Rye a five-minute power play. They scored twice. It cost us the game.
By then, James was hiccupping back tears alone in the locker room. After a nod from me, a dad in the stands went to look in on him. This man no doubt held me in some way responsible, as both father and coach, for the violence and loss of self-control. I could see it in his expression, in the mixture of sympathy and scorn. I absorbed his judgment, and even though, on entering the locker room, I immediately checked in on James to ask about his head and spine and give his shoulder a surreptitious squeeze—what he really needed was a hug—on the car ride home I began to criticize him for losing his cool, for attempting to hurt another player, and also for putting his team down a player and depriving it of his services. “You can’t keep doing this,” I said. “We need you out there.”
I knew it was bad to talk to James about the game, or really to say anything at all besides “Let’s get some pancakes,” but, because I was wound up myself, or because I felt that I needed to impart some kind of lesson, as a father and as a coach, or because there was some childish part of me that needed to spill my own disquiet onto someone else, I persisted. Sometimes I savored the sweetness of driving to and from the rink with one or the other son in back; other times, I felt like little more than a chauffeur. Today, I was a cop, with a perp in back, behind a scrim of parental expectation as impenetrable as bulletproof glass.
James said nothing. In the rearview mirror, I could see him in his black compression shirt, his hair a sweaty mess, his face red and eyes puffy and cheeks rimed with the salt of his tears. The mood in the car was sour. I had a headache from too little sleep and too much coffee, plus all the griping and yelling—mine and everyone else’s. My coaching jacket smelled like a dead mouse. I took an absent-minded inventory of the right pocket’s contents: whistle, pack of gum, wad of used hockey tape, and my triplicate copy, as team manager, of the score sheet from the game, on which I knew it was written that No. 19, in green, had incurred a major penalty, for cross-checking, and a game misconduct. I wondered about the rules and whether he would be suspended, and then about the possibility that he might welcome the time off. I worked up the grace to suggest that we stop somewhere for breakfast.
One strives to be better. Parenting is a practice. You learn from your mistakes and then repeat them anyway. My father, watching my boys and their teammates from the stands, often criticized the plays they made, or failed to make, and so I felt compelled to defend them, even though those plays and failures often irked me, too.
A couple of years later, James, now ten, was the captain of the team and the top dog on defense. I was coaching the defensemen; I was coaching my son. I stood at their end of the bench, worked the door, called out the pairings, kept an eye on the matchups and the length of the shifts, and chatted with the boys. Sometimes my delivery was playful, jesting, even conspiratorial. (I’ve since been told that it is hurtful to be sarcastic with children.) Other times, I was keen, instructive, even scolding. James, of whom I expected the most, sometimes bore the brunt.
Somehow the tournament semifinal game went to overtime. Sudden death: next goal wins. Early in the overtime, my son and his partner botched a retrieval behind our net, which led to a turnover and a goal. Game over, tournament over. Our boys, dejected, drifted back toward the bench. James’s body language suggested that he blamed his partner. So I pointed at James as he came to the bench, and said, not playfully or jestingly or even conspiratorially, “That was on you. That was your fault.” I couldn’t take it back. He looked at me with something like disgust, both because he didn’t agree and because he knew that what I’d said was harsh and uncalled for, an instance of an adult betrayal of dignity and comportment.
The following week, I agreed to quit working the bench. I wouldn’t coach James again. It may be that this was when, if perhaps not why, James began to lose interest in the game. He still played, often eagerly and very well, but he had come to resent hockey’s monopolization of his time, and, perhaps, the yoke of expectation. Also, he had discovered basketball: pickup with friends, then the team at school. Basketball! Sacrilege. Out on the hardwood, as an energy guy off the bench, he bounced around with the avidity and glee of a parolee. I took it as a delicious rebuke. Another dad exclaimed, “James is the happiest basketball player on the planet!” ♦
This is drawn from “The Intangibles.”