The Meaning of Hockey, Chapter 10

A few hours later Bobby was in Frida’s living room eating takeout food from the Szechuan Chongqing restaurant.

“It isn’t right,” he said, taking a bite out of a rice pancake wrapped around some Moo Shu pork. “Blair is a good kid and a good hockey player, but the other guys just won’t give him a break. I mean who cares if he’s gay?”

“Can’t you do something about it?” said Frida, who leaned over the coffee table to open a container filled with General Tso’s Chicken.

Bobby spread some hoisin sauce on another pancake as he thought about his responsibility.

“I could. And maybe I should,” he said. “I should fire Brad. He’s the one sending out the message to the players that it’s okay to make faggot jokes about the team’s leading scorer.”

“So, why don’t you?” Frida said.

Bobby ignored her question as he loaded his pancake with bits of fried egg, chopped scallions, mushrooms, bean sprouts and spicy strips of pork. “Brad is doing his best to undermine me. He wants me to lose control of the team because he thinks Anderson will make him head coach.”

“So why don’t you get rid of him?” Frida asked again.

Bobby placed his plate on the table. He looked at Frida for a few moments before answering. “Why don’t I quit? Why don’t I just leave the game completely? Why don’t I tell all the assholes that they’re assholes?”

“Is it that complicated to fire him?” said Frida.

“You’re missing my point,” said Bobby.

Frida picked up a Szechwan green bean with her chopsticks and put it to Bobby’s lips. He smiled then opened his mouth.

“I can’t do anything,” he said, chewing the spicy hot bean. “I am incapable of acting.”

Frida fed Bobby another green bean. “You can eat.”

“True,” Bobby said, munching on the bean.

“You can smile.”

“True,” Bobby said, smiling.

“So, there are some things you can do.”

“I can’t do anything that involves making a decision,” said Bobby.

“Why?” said Frida.

“I don’t know. Maybe, because I have nothing to base my decisions upon. I don’t believe in anything.”

“What do you mean?” said Frida.

Bobby picked up a spring roll with his fingers. He took a bite.

“I’m like a spring roll with no filling,” he said. “You take a bite out of me and all you get is a crispy fried exterior but nothing of substance.”

“I don’t believe that,” Frida said, smiling.

“I lock myself in my office and think about why my life is so miserable and I figured it out today. Right after Blair talked to me. Here was this mixed up 18-year-old kid, who has been tormented by his teammates because he hasn’t quite figured out if he’s a homo or a hetero or whatever. But the truth is, he’s got a better idea of who he is and what he believes in than I do. He’s got his hippy, back-to-the-land parents and they’ve taught him a certain philosophy of life and he’s bought into it so he’s got some way of making sense of stuff going on around him. He’s got a way of judging right or wrong. He doesn’t just go with the flow. He doesn’t immediately blame himself if something goes wrong.”

“Is that what you do?” said Frida, who poured a few ounces of a Gehringer Brothers Gewürztraminer into her mug and then into Bobby’s. “Do you blame yourself?”

“My son Mike is 19 and has read all sorts of books about anarchism and socialism — he knows who this Noam Chomsky is — and even though it seems weird, at least he believes in something.”

Bobby picked up the clear-glazed, brown-clay pottery mug and gulped the Okanagan white wine.

“I’m more than twice the age of Blair or Mike and I haven’t got a damn clue what the hell I believe in,” said Bobby. “Sure, most of my life I’ve spouted off like I’m some sort of hard-ass, hard-hat, red neck, Don Cherry type, but that’s always been an act. Just words and an attitude that I picked up along the way, like the drills I use in practice. I don’t know what I really believe, so I can’t act. I can’t make a decision, because I don’t believe in anything. I have no points of reference to judge good, bad or indifferent.”

“That is not possible,” said Frida. “Everyone has some sort of code of conduct, except a sociopath.”

“Well, maybe that’s what I am,” said Bobby. “A hockey sociopath.”

Her smile scared him.

“No. I don’t think so,” said Frida. “You’re suffering a clinical depression.”

“Look,” said Bobby. “If I said to you, what do you believe, you’d answer ‘I’m a socialist’ or ‘I’m a Catholic’ or ‘I’m a humanist’ or something. All I got is ‘I’m a hockey player.’”

“You’re having a mid-life identity crisis,” said Frida.

“I thought you can’t be my psychologist,” said Bobby.

“I can be your friend,” said Frida.

“My only friend,” said Bobby, as he put his left hand on Frida’s wrist, making sure there were absolutely no sexual undertones. “And I really appreciate it.”

Now I’m touchy feely. What’s happening to me?

“Friends help each other work out what’s bothering them,” said Frida.

“Okay,” said Bobby. “What’s bothering me is that I don’t know what I believe. What’s bothering me is I have no philosophy of life. I spent most of my life avoiding discussions about politics and philosophy, stuff like that, and now I’m paying the price.”

“I thought you told me hockey players talk about stuff all the time,” said Frida.

“Shit ya. On buses, airplanes, in airports, hotel rooms, hotel lobbies, dressing rooms, empty stadiums, restaurants, bars, and at all times of night and day,” said Bobby. “But teammates got to get along, so you avoid talking about anything that’s going to make someone mad at you. There’s kind of an unwritten rule that you avoid politics and religion. That’s why born-agains are so unpopular. They wreck team unity by creating cliques of Christian insiders.”

“So what do you talk about?” said Frida, as she chewed a spicy piece of ginger beef.

“Mostly stories of something that happened to you or something that you heard happened to someone else,” said Bobby.

“Do these stories have a point, or a moral? Do you learn something from them?”

“Sometimes,” said Bobby, who had never before thought about hockey’s tall tales in this way. “Sure, I guess the point of the stories is usually about some kind of behavior that’s either good or bad.”

“So the stories can be a tool to teach younger players about hockey morality or team politics,” said Frida.

“I guess.”

“Sort of like the story-telling traditions of pre-literate warrior societies. Stories were how these societies passed on critical information to future generations. An informal education system. You don’t go to school, but instead you sit around and tell stories,” Frida said, biting into another piece of General Tso’s Chicken.

“Sounds like hockey, all right,” said Bobby.

“Some anthropologists say these stories are the foundation of early literature. Great stories like the Iliad or the early Greek plays.”

“Puts a whole new light on hearing yet another whopper about Eddie Shore,” said Bobby.

“He was the guy who was supposed to be the dirtiest player ever?” asked Frida.

“Ya, and then he became the meanest son-of-a-bitch owner in the history of hockey.”

“So the stories about him teach owners what not to do if they want happy players?”

“More like they teach players ‘you think you got it bad here — it could be a whole hell of lot worse.’”

“But the point is you do talk about morality and politics, you just do it in a way that is indirect,” said Frida.

She is smart and beautiful, thought Bobby. He suddenly realized that he could only aspire to have a relationship with this woman sitting across from him. In a previous life, when he was a star, the woman aspired to be with him.

One more change of life’s scenery.

She was the star and he was … He really did not know.

He spoke more words just to forget what he was thinking.

“My point is I need to figure out what I believe. Or maybe I need to figure out what the stories I’ve been telling mean. I want to believe in something. Maybe it will help me with Mike. I want to be able to say I’m a something. Discuss Noam Chomsky with him. Can you help me with that?”

“Sure,” said Frida. “Easy. Everyone believes in something. Maybe you’ve never defined yourself, but that doesn’t mean you don’t believe in anything.”

“I told you, my whole life has been hockey,” said Bobby. “There may be a philosophy there, but it doesn’t make much sense in the real world.”

“Not true,” said Frida. “You believe in treating your players fairly, right?”

He nodded his assent, but followed with a “so what” shrug.

“If you don’t have a philosophy, why do you believe that?” said Frida.

Bobby shrugged again.

Frida crossed her legs to gain height as she sat on the 1930s-era, thick, burgundy sofa on the other side of the dark oak coffee table. Bobby felt good because he could see she was excited by the idea of helping him.

“Hockey has some sort of code of behavior, right?” she said. “Coaches are supposed to treat their players fairly, players are supposed to treat their teammates in a certain way, right?”

“I guess,” said Bobby.

“Tell me about it.”

Bobby momentarily lost track of what Frida was saying because he was thinking about how beautiful she was, about how her eyes became lighthouse beacons when she grew excited, about how he actually felt something approaching contentment.

“Tell me about what you believe in hockey,” Frida said, regaining his attention by stretching her arms up and out in a kind of secret semaphore. “Tell me about the code of conduct you have lived by for the past forty years.”

Next Chapter: Friday

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