The Meaning of Hockey, Chapter 2

Few spots are as desolate as an empty 17,000-seat hockey arena at seven in the morning after a sleepless night. Bobby Benoit was in tune with both place and time.

The forty-nine-year-old owner and coach/general manager of the new Vancouver Totems junior hockey franchise had sat down in an upper level blue corner seat of the Pacific Coliseum a few minutes before midnight. The seven hours had passed slowly despite Bobby’s conviction that he had long ago learned to deal with time. Thoughts of boredom or even anticipation were supposed to be banished. Like all successful athletes he had achieved the mental discipline to live permanently in the moment. He had divided his waking existence into three simple states of consciousness.

There was the now, during which thoughts or words or images simply flowed into his brain. The source didn’t much matter — it could be television or a book or another person talking — what was important was proper processing of the information: one needed to laugh, cry, understand, disagree or in some other way respond. During the now, neither the past nor the future could be allowed to intrude. Focus was the key.

Some players claimed they lived their entire hockey-playing lives in the now, but Bobby had discovered that this did not allow for a complete range of experience, so he developed two further states of consciousness.

There was the no now, during which all thoughts were banished. One simply did. This was his game mode, appropriate also for sex, or other moments when uber focus was required.

Finally there was the reflected now, the story-telling mode, when he allowed himself memories of what had gone on before. This was the time for analysis, the learning and coaching mode, useful to dissect experience and impart knowledge gained through that experience. Or for bull shitting on the bus.

Once his playing days were over, Bobby continued to live by this philosophy of time and consciousness. It had worked for more than three decades, but that day both Mike and Maggie Moo ganged up on him he had lost control. The now and the no now became slippery and elusive, coming and going as they desired while the reflected now dominated. He surmised that he had used up his lifetime allotment of concentration during his playing days and that his brain was no longer capable of focusing on the present.

Worse, he could not sleep. The problem with insomnia was that it caused his mental discipline to break down even further. The problem with his breakdown in mental discipline was that it worsened his insomnia. The deteriorating spiral of sleeplessness and worry inevitably led to thoughts of the future. Therein lay self-doubt and depression, a realization of the pointlessness of life and contemplation of ending it all.

This particular sleepless night Bobby’s brain wandered like a six-year-old playing his first game, chasing the puck, always a few strides behind the play. Flashes of his son Mike, his economic woes and the visit to that psychologist flew at him like pucks from the blueline during pre-game warm-up. A few times he had tried to think about more important matters, such as the Middle East or global warming or buying a liquid plasma big screen TV. Or the hundreds of essential tasks that needed his immediate attention as owner, coach and general manager of a junior hockey team only a few days away from playing its franchise-opening game. But war and starvation and extra pixels only made clearer the irrelevance of his existence. How could he even contemplate which players to cut or who to trade or worry about his assistant coaches or consider what to focus on in yet another practice that was supposed to begin in a couple of hours on the ice below?

He was unable to focus on anything. Fragments of thoughts, pieces of memories, bits of conversation bounced unpredictably around his brain like an improperly frozen puck.

He felt sorry for himself and that made everything worse.

Sister Marie-Claire was right all the way back in Grade 7: self-indulgence is pitiful. I am pathetic. There I go, feeling sorry for myself again. More self-indulgence. My essential self is slipping from pathetic to patheticer. How has it come to this? Just when my dream to buy my very own hockey team has come true. What was the saying? Beware of geeks bearing gifts? No, that’s not it. Beware of what you wish for because it might come true? Something like that.

Bobby had cashed out every single investment he had made in 18 seasons in the National Hockey League to buy his very own team, his very own rink and his very own entertainment corporation. It was a grand idea that seemed, in the beginning, to be a guaranteed gold mine. Vancouver was a hockey-mad city with a mediocre NHL team that had recently moved to a privately owned, new downtown arena. That had left the 30-year-old city-owned 17,000-seat Pacific Coliseum in working-class, east-Vancouver with no prime tenant. Plus the city owned three smaller adjacent arenas, perfect for concerts and other events, that had been part of the Pacific National Exhibition grounds, which was about to move to the suburbs. When the ex-Vancouver Canucks’ star approached the Parks Board, a deal was quickly struck for a 20-year, renewable lease on all four arenas. And the top-flight junior Western Hockey League allowed him to buy an ailing prairie franchise and move the team to Vancouver.

But the financial underpinnings of his plan had begun to unravel along with his Internet and biotechnology investments. The $22.54 million Bobby thought he had when negotiations began became $8.32 million when final payment on the team was due. When a search for a sympathetic banker failed, Bobby made a virtue out of necessity and went public with his desire for a partner with a background in the concert/entertainment business. The result was that his very own team and his very own rink were 25-per-cent owned by concert-promoter/strip-club-owner/jerk-sleazebag and probable gangster Gordon Anderson. Worse, the contract that cemented the partnership was thicker and filled with more small type than the Moose Jaw phone book that Bobby remembered from his youth. The only thing he knew for absolute certain about the effect of the contract was that a lawyer he retained for advice spent five minutes skimming over it before saying “You’re not really going to sign this, are you?”

Yet impending financial doom rated less insomnia-affected/producing thoughts than did worries about his son Mike or lust for Frida the psychologist.

Four days earlier he had found Mike’s name on a list of players waived through the Ontario Hockey League. His son was available to teams in the two other major junior leagues, or anyone else willing to take a chance on the “biggest troublemaker in the history of the game” as an old teammate who coached in the O told Bobby. Mike’s 37 goals, 61 assists and 112 PIMS were not enough to overcome “the incident” in last season’s OHL playoffs. Bobby had been too scared to ask Mike about his version of events that had come to be known as the “Anarchist Revolution.”

No one, not even his closest former teammates, knew that Mike was his son. Guys knew that he paid child support, but Bobby had never told anyone more than that.

Why? Embarrassment? Maybe Mike would be embarrassed.

Should he call?

A father should to talk with his son. He must be going through a lot of pain. Teenaged angst, that’s what Brad called it. What was the name of the book he told me to read to understand it? The Catcher and the Rye? Sounds like the life of Red Nose Benny. Remember him? Sat on the bench for the Red Sox most of the two seasons I played in Beantown. I should call my son. Would Mike talk to me? Remember how Benny, mouth full of chewing tobacco, would line up six shots of Canadian whiskey and down them all in twenty seconds through two straws stuck up his nostrils. A father should try. I’m a father? That’s a stretch. The Catcher and the Rye Up His Nose. Still, I should call. What if Mike hangs up on me?

Bobby desperately desired to be a good father, or at least some sort of a father, but his fear of another rejection was greater than his fear of never seeing his son again.

Self-centered and selfish. Big surprise.

Coaches, fans, teammates and girlfriends had attacked his ego for as long as he could remember. The difference was he never cared before and certainly never indulged in “Je m’accuse.”

Self-centered and selfish. Of course I am.

So, how could he be a good father? Why would he want to be? Seemed so absurd. Still, he did.

Why hadn’t he talked about this with the psychologist? It was the damn skirt chasing again. Bobby had taken one look at Frida Rodriguez and forgotten all about his son. It was a bad habit, like cheating on the backcheck that he never broke through his whole career.

At the end of their first session, Doctor Rodriguez had told him to consider whether or not he could be completely honest with her. That would be a condition of seeing her. She couldn’t help him and wouldn’t see him unless he promised total honesty at all times.

Promising total honesty was easy. He was an accomplished liar who could sincerely promise anything.

But what would be the point?

Could he really be honest? It was a rather offbeat concept. Maybe it would be fun. Maybe she would find it attractive and therefore find him attractive. Doctors weren’t supposed to have relationships with their patients, but maybe Frida wasn’t quite as interested in honesty in that end of her life.

It wasn’t much to have thought about in seven sleepless hours on a hard wooden bench, but that’s about as far as Bobby got before his assistant coach, Troy Best, wearing the ever-present Totems track suit, was climbing the forty or so stairs to his side.

“You okay Bobby?” shouted Troy, a one-time minor-pro tough guy, who at six-foot-two and 245 pounds still had a well developed body, but was what one of Bobby’s former coaches used to describe as a puckhead — “dense, hard and perfect for slapping with a stick.” The same coach used to claim one puckhead per coaching staff was essential for protection against the puckhead players on the team and to scare the owner away. Yet, here was the owner chatting with the puckhead assistant coach.

Troy did have a way with words. Well, at least a way with one word.

“Fuck me. You fucking well spent the whole fucking night on that fucking chair? Fuck a duck.”

Bobby simply nodded and smiled. Anything he could say would be mere noise in response to such eloquence.

“You’re fucking crazy,” Troy said, hoping for some kind of response.

Bobby stared vacantly at the empty sheet of ice below him. His thoughts were about Frida.

“Fuck. Okay, I can fucking take a fucking hint. ‘Fuck off Troy.’ Okay, I’ll fuck off.”

He bounded down a few stairs and then stopped and looked back at Bobby.

“Fucking worried about the fucking team? Fucking right. I had a fucking hard time fucking sleeping too.”

Bobby felt a shiver of guilt. Despite his limited vocabulary, Troy did not have such a limited IQ. Plus, he was a truly nice guy and very loyal, the sort of teammate every hockey player desires.

“I have a lot of things on my mind right now, that’s all,” said Bobby, more as an apology for his rude behavior than an explanation.

“Fuck, Bobby, you don’t have to fucking tell me that. Fuck, if I had half as fucking many fucking things to fucking worry about as you. Fuck.”

Troy’s vocabulary was like one of those African tonal languages where the same word can have many different meanings, depending on how the word was spoken, thought Bobby. Fuckese was the language. Troy speaks Fuckese. Bobby grinned. Suddenly the prospect of facing another day at the rink didn’t seem quite so grim.

His assistant, who reminded Bobby of one of those goofy lap dogs that slobber and constantly look for approval from their master, appreciated the smile. That appreciation, in turn, gave Bobby the energy to stand up.

“I’m going down to take a shower. Change my clothes. Can you open up the office?” He handed Troy his set of keys.

This gift of responsibility, as minor as it was, pleased Troy.

“Fucking eh,” he said, looking like a happy face sticker on a four-year old’s lunch box. “Bobby?”

“Ya?”

“Every fucking thing’s going to be all fucking right. You can fucking depend on me.”

“Fucking eh, Troy. Fucking eh.”

Bobby sighed as he started down the steps towards the dressing room. Every fucking thing’s going to be all-fucking right. Bobby could depend on Troy. Every fucking thing’s going to be all-fucking right.

Next chapter: Monday

The Meaning of Hockey runs three times a week for 16 weeks exclusively on The Tyee. To offer advice, to criticize or to reserve your printed copy of the story email [email protected]