The Late Bloomer (15 page)

Forty minutes before the game, the team—the goalie always goes first—leads the players out to the ice for a fifteen-minute warm-up. Players fire pucks at the goalie—at first slowly, then they slap them rocket fast—till he breaks a sweat. Then the team heads back to the locker room for a pep talk by Slater.

As the crowd fills the bleachers, the Zamboni floods the ice, turning the snowy surface into a icy pond so smooth you want to lick it like a Popsicle.

The referees, then the visiting team, take to the ice, to a chorus of boos from the Starr Rink faithful.

Inside the sweaty locker room, Slater sermonizes to the players, a
variation on the same strategic and motivational themes.
Dump and chase the puck. Work the boards. Play the man. Use your legs. Shoot, then go for the net.
After a season and a half, I've heard just about every different permutation of the Terry Slater Pep Talk.

When the team manager gives the nod that the enemy has taken the ice, Slater usually barks, “Let's go, Dave!”—only this time, he says
“Kenny.”

The moment I charge onto the ice, the pep-band musicians rise to their feet and—THE PLACE GETS ELECTRIC—a brassy cacophony of tubas, snare drums, bass drums, trumpets, clarinets, cymbals, explode into a pounding rendition of the Colgate Fight Song. Frenzied students, most drunk off their ass, wave maroon-and-white banners and sing along to the marching-band melody:

Fight, fight, fight for dear old Colgate!

With heart and hand now we'll win for thee

Oh, we will fight, fight, fight for Alma Mater

On to victory, we're marching

Foes shall bend their knee before us

And pay homage to pow'r so great

And so let us send out a cheer and banish all fear

While we are fighting hard for Old Colgaaaate

Fight!

The collegiate partisanship and pageantry gives me goose bumps every time. This is
war,
after all. Not the type Kris and I used to play with toy soldiers. This is for real, acting out my most primitive of human instincts—
fight for alma mater!
—and Darwinian impulses—
fight, fight, fight!
—for the next two and half hours. I will never feel so alive as when I am playing hockey, never so much of a man.

The game starts. The action is faster than any of the hundreds of practices I have endured over the last two years. Not having started in an actual hockey game for nearly two years, I am rusty. And nervous.
I've sweated so much that in between the first and second periods I have to change into a dry T-shirt. But by the second period the butterflies have left, my heart rate is steady, and I drop into the ever elusive Zen state—
no distractions, no one in my way, free of negative thoughts, fears, insecurities
—of goaltending, existing somewhere between unconsciousness and total self-awareness. I feel the energy of three thousand bodies of humanity, three thousand fans staring down at me through the Plexiglas. Their shouting isn't a distraction; it's fuel. The puck is metal; my body, a magnet.

During a stoppage in play I glance up to the stands and see Kris and Dad watching my every move—just like old times. There's nearly three thousand people in the building, but I only care about two. I love them, and their attendance is an expression of love; my playing my heart out for them is mine. In my family, no one says “I love you,” no one gives hugs or kisses. My father doesn't
tell
me he loves me; Kris doesn't
say
he's proud of me. It's an unspoken rule—show me; don't tell me—that my family has always lived by.

After the game, Kris tells me Dad popped half a nitroglycerin tablet in the third period, during a particularly hectic five-on-four power play in which I had to kick out a flurry of six or seven shots. We won 7 to 5.

I start the last two games of the season, losing to RPI 6 to 2 and beating Vermont 5 to 4. I'm not exactly Jim Craig in the 1980 Olympics, but, hey, at least I have a winning record.

Dave returns for the playoffs, and he is back to his goaltending acrobatics. The heart of the team and an All-American, Dave is both the man I despise and the man I want to be. I'm just the team's margarine, a mere substitute for the real thing; yet, I have just earned my stripes in a way that no funny joke or body shaving ever did.

Dave Gagnon, my pothole in the freeway to the big leagues, drops out of school near the end of his junior year. After carrying the team to the NCAA finals, Dave signs with the Detroit Red Wings. Finally, as a junior, I have a realistic chance to shine.

With Dave gone, Slater and the players treat me differently, with more respect. All of them call me “Bakes” now (it helps that I have lost about ten pounds, mostly through a regime of running and starvation). And the season has started smashingly. I have beaten Cornell, Princeton and Yale—shut those bastards down. I was even voted the MVP goalie at Yale's annual Thanksgiving tournament. I'm starting to feel again like that boy from Buffalo with big dreams and big glove saves in the final minute of overtime.

Dad drives to Hamilton for every home game, even though he is high on Valium most of the time, complaining that the pain in his arms and legs from the diabetic neuropathy is driving him mad.

Townies, previously ambivalent about my existence as a benchwarmer, want to know me; kids beg for my autograph; the postmaster from a nearby town asks me if I want to take his seventeen-year-old daughter out on a date. Local charities ask me to appear at their fundraisers. The old lady who makes sandwiches at the Annex always offers me free grilled turkey subs and french fries. Students chant my name
at the games; a few even fashion signs out of the sides of cardboard boxes (G
O
B
AKER
!). Pretty girls, just like the ones in my freshman psych class, approach me at parties, wetting their lips and flashing flirtatious eyes. Even though I don't have a girlfriend, I don't flirt back or try to “do” them, as my teammates tell me to. I ignore the girls. Instead of admitting to myself that I am afraid of them, I tell myself that I don't want to fuck up my hockey focus by getting distracted.

I have changed. I am no longer the bitter class warrior that I was when I arrived at Colgate. I don't despise anyone just because they are rich; instead, I first give them the benefit of the doubt. If they are snooty and annoying, I just try to ignore them. This happens rarely, however. I may not be as into partying as most of the other students, and I may not be as studly with the girls as I'd like to be, but I can't blame my feelings of inadequacies on the other students. That's my own deal.

Above all, though, the puck is my focus. I split time with Greg Menges, now a senior. I start a game, then he starts the next. With Dave gone, Slater is running a two-goalie system. I'd rather be the team's sole number-one guy, but it's better than not playing at all.

Then Slater altogether stops playing me. He gives no explanation. And I return to riding the pines. In fact, even the freshman goalie, Shawn Murray, an NHL draftee from Minnesota, is dressing in my place as I watch from the press box, disgusted but glad that I at least will have a real career to fall back on now that I have over a 3.0 GPA every semester and now that I have learned to love the written word as much as the slapped puck.

It's time I start thinking about Plan B, and that plan is journalism. My English professor, Don Snyder, suggests that (a) I read as much journalism as possible, and (b) do an internship at a local newspaper before I graduate. I heed his advice, devouring every periodical at the library; for the first time in my life I read
The New York Times
—every day. Just as I used to learn from watching the goaltending acrobatics of Tom Barrasso, Patrick Roy, Tony Esposito, Mike Palmateer, I start
dissecting the style and structure of Maureen Dowd, Rick Bragg, John Tierney, Chris Hedges and any other writer who is getting paid to do what I think I may like to someday: tell other people's stories.
The Syracuse New Times
generously publishes my amateurish attempts at feature writing about the life of a wheelchair-bound man, the gambling controversy on an Iroquois Indian reservation and an ambitious but misguided businessman who wants to build a
Wizard of Oz
theme park on a remote farm in central New York.

Growing up in a place like Buffalo, closer to Cleveland than Manhattan, you feel like you are in the middle of the country, away from the places where life
really
happens. Or at least that is how I always felt. I didn't live in the United States; rather, I lived in Fly Over Country, where I would lie on my back in the front yard, staring up at the jets scraping chalk lines across the sky, passing over peons like me to more exciting people and places. The media—mostly MTV and
The Buffalo News
—offered me a window into those more important places. The news fertilized my imagination and brought me to places I otherwise couldn't afford to visit in person. So it's no surprise that I end up aspiring to write the news.

But all that journalism stuff is still a backup plan. Right now, though, I am continuing to work on Plan A, and I desperately want to know why Slater has cut me down at the knees after teasing me with the thought that maybe he doesn't hate me after all.

“You should disguise your voice and call in to his radio show,” Dad jokes one night on the phone, “and ask him why Baker isn't playing anymore because he did so well at the start of the season.”

“I have a better idea,” I say. “I'll get Friberg to do it for me.”

John Friberg is my new roommate, and my best friend. He is a normal guy like my other closest friends at Colgate—polite Sean from East LA (who, it turns out, is gay), John Marrin (a computer-gaming enthusiast and English major from Manhattan) and Kevin (my freshman year roommate, who, alas, has transferred to Berkeley, because it has a better swim team). Friberg is an excellent student, but not
exactly in the school's mainstream “hip” social crowd of jocks and fratboys. But the goofball New Hampshire native is willing to do anything for the sake of a good laugh.

Slater takes phone calls from fans on his
Coach's Corner
radio show every Monday night. Friberg chugs a Heineken at the kitchen counter, perhaps to take the edge off, and dials in to interrogate Slater. I lie on my bed, listening to my clock radio.

Skip Barlow (the host):
“Okay, this is
Coach's Corner
with Colgate's hockey coach, Terry Slater. We're going right to the phones tonight. Hello, you're on with Coach Slater.”

Friberg (in fake, deep voice):
“Hello. Um, I know that Coach Slater said that he has three good goaltenders and, uh, and that's certainly true. We've seen a lot of Menges and Murray recently. But what about Ken Baker? I saw him at Cornell, against a tough Big Red squad, and I was very impressed with that. The home games against Princeton and Brown he looked good in as well. Why haven't we seen him in some time? I think it has been since the Syracuse Invitational?

[Awkward pause.]

Slater (in unsteady voice):
“My feeling right now is that, uh, Kenny is playing just as well at practice as, uh, Murray and Menges. Um, if we would have played the, uh, the game against Mercyhurst College last week, Kenny was due to play in that game to get him back in action and he would have saw some pucks, and saw a little bit of game pressure because they've got a pretty good hockey team, and then probably I would have either used him this weekend or used him the coming next weekend coming up. So the rotation would have gone with the three goaltenders.

Friberg:
So you are rotating the three of them, sort of on a semi-regular basis? Or do you have any long-term plan for the three of them?

Slater:
I'd rotate them. Uh . . . uh . . . my theory of looking at the goaltenders is to look at them all week in practice and who I think is hot that week, by Thursday, I judge the number of shots they've had—I keep a record of it—and if I feel that one goaltender is stronger than another, usually he will get the nod on Friday night. The long-term range is that Menges is a senior and we've got Kenny and Murray, who are both good Division I goaltenders, so both of them will see a lot of action.

Friberg:
Ok, thank you very much, Coach Slater.

Yeah, thanks, Coach Slater. Thanks for stating what I had surmised over the last three years: No matter how hard I work in practice, no matter my being the “hot” goalie in any particularly week, you don't think I am worthy of the starting nod. Thank you, very much.

—

As much as I hate to admit it, Slater may be right. Maybe I'm just not worthy. I work harder than any player on the team; I work harder than I did when I was a teenage prodigy, when I would improve a thousand percent from one season to the next just by putting in my time. What the hell has gone wrong? Is it because I don't see enough game action (which is faster and more challenging than practice), or is it because I have lost my killer instinct, my drive, the motivation that always carried me to the next level? What the fuck is wrong with me? I lift weights three days a week; yet, I don't see any results of my hard work. Instead of turning fat into muscle, I turn fat into hard fat. Some athlete. Colgate pays me over twenty grand a year in tuition and room-and-board fees for me to build this inadequate body?

I am an upperclassman, a campus celebrity. I'm invited to fraternity and sorority parties every weekend, but I rarely go. I must have received a dozen valentines last year, half of them from girls who I'd imagine any guy would dream of dating. So, then, why am I still single? Why don't I ever make the move? Why have I never gone on a date? Why
am I so afraid that my dick isn't going to work, like that night in Toronto with Jenny that still haunts me some four years later?

—

The team locker room is a perverted confessional, where my teammates boast of their sexual adventures from the night before. Meanwhile, I never have my own conquests to boast about. I grow most uncomfortable whenever one of the guys admits he was too drunk to even get a hard-on, an affliction they jokingly call “whiskey dick.” I doubt they would joke about it so much if, like me, their dick malfunctioned even without the disabling powers of Jack Daniel's.

I usually just sit at my locker stall, put on my equipment and let out a manly chortle at the appropriate moments while the kiss-and-tellers have their fun. I am the team's anti-stud, the intellectually inclined, pasty-white goalie from Buffalo. Even though I haven't had the most distinguished career, the players do respect me for sticking it out and giving it my all—day in and day out—throughout the season.

My senior year, the athletic department honchos give me the Rob Ries Award, a plaque anointing me “the varsity hockey player who best demonstrates qualities of leadership to his fellow players.” I'm also inducted as a member of Colgate's senior honor society—the first hockey player to do so—for keeping my GPA above a 3.0 and volunteering in local charities like the village of Hamilton Big Brother/Big Sister program.

I appreciate all the recognition, and it's heartening to know that I probably won't have to return to Buffalo and eke out a depressing postgraduate existence, but what the hell is wrong with my body? It's not as fast as it used to be. But, then again, the pucks come at me faster now than they did in high school. I don't know. But I do know that I feel sluggish—constantly. I don't even bother scheduling classes before ten in the morning because I can never drag my sallow ass out of bed that early. And what's with the dark, Goth-like, half-moon circles under my eyes?
Man, I look like shit.

In high school, when I'd complain about my sorrowful abs and flabby butt, my dad called it “baby fat” and assured me it would go away as I grew taller. But it hasn't. At five feet eleven inches and 175 pounds, my dimensions—on paper, at least—seem solidly athletic. But I hate the person reflected in my mirror: his spare tire, the womanly saddlebags hanging just below his butt, the Play-Doh–soft biceps. Pear.

I might have once possessed what Olympic team coaches called “lightning-quick reflexes,” but that was when everyone else had a prepubescent musculature. Now I am competing against the big boys, despite my adolescent physicality, and they have thighs like tree trunks and forearms thicker than my calves.

They don't realize how lucky they are. If they like a girl, just about the only thing stopping them from being with her is the girl. I also have to contend with myself. I used to think that I was better than everyone else, that my thoughtfulness and respect toward women was a gift, but more and more I feel like I am a fraud—tough and manly by image only. I even let a girlfriend cheat on me and get away with it. I let teammates tool on me and coaches treat me like shit. And I do nothing about it. Where's my
oomph
?

I don't know what's causing this hormonal misfiring. I don't want to know. I can beat this malaise. I
will
beat this malaise. And that's what it is: a mental condition that I will overcome with hard work and dedication to my sport and to life.

As for sex, I don't need to practice abstinence; I already practice avoidance, which is a whole lot better than experiencing main-engine shutdown when a girl is priming me for launch.

I can just see it: I'd take a girl home, one of those fresh-faced fans, kiss her and let her touch me. She'd rub my crotch, but my dough wouldn't rise. She'd slide down my pants and use her mouth, but, still, my dick would stay as squishy as the foam finger (“Go Raiders!”) she was waving in the arena stands a just few hours earlier.
Ohmigod! Ken
Baker—the goalie!—is impotent!
She'd tell her sorority sisters, who would tell their boyfriends, who would then tell my teammates, an insensitive lot who invariably would razz me, tell me I'm for sure a homo, a FUCKING FAGGOT! Indeed, impotence, or at least the fear of it, has kept me celibate throughout most of my college career. Other guys, it seems, have a sex drive emanating from an inner need and desire for pleasure, while I act more out of obligation than titillation. I fear that if I don't pursue girls, my friends will think the worst. On a hockey team, homosexuality is equivalent to leprosy.