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Bench Strength — Page 3
Saying how good the team is is most unFlame-like. I
tell you about these guys to make a point: how much
they gave up by continuing to play in front of me. The
group includes American college scholarship players,
a winger from Bobby Clarke’s line with the Flin
Flon Bombers way back when. We have a former western
Canadian college scoring champion who became CEO of
Finning, a dentist named Hacker, a lawyer known as Boomer,
four guys named Anderson, and Mick Donnelly, an iron
worker who played with the Pembroke Lumber Kings and
helped build the container cranes on Burrard Inlet.
And we have players like Mike Whelan, guys who’ve
become good hockey players by learning from the more
talented ones. In the room, Whelan is the deadliest
Flame of all, master of the ribald retort, our boss
of badinage. He built himself a persona for defending
himself from speeding charges so successfully that he
had the lawyers on the team shaking their heads.
“You mean you can get my wife an
acquittal?” asked one of the legal corps, as if
addressing the jury in an ineptly prosecuted case. “Are
you guaranteeing that?”
“I never said I could get her an acquittal,”
Whelan said, pulling his skate laces tight. “I
said I can get her off.”
The ribbing never ends, the stories accumulate. Dave
Inglis, also a goalie, recently lost for the first time
to his 16-year-old son, yet another goalie, who was
substituting for one of the regulars. That left Inglis
a first-time loser in what he calls a never-ending battle
of the father, the son, and the goalie host. Inglis
took the ribbing with aplomb, even when Boomer’s
voice momentarily rode above the general din.
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There’s
nothing like a steadily worsening condition to
make you live in the moment.
And nobody in hockey lives in the moment quite
like a goalie.
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“I don’t even consider goalies to be human,”
Boomer rasped. Inglis was unbuckling the straps of his
goal pads. “For me, they don’t count. What
are they? Where do they come from? Do you know, Sean?”
There’s nothing like a steadily worsening condition—along
with its dark handmaiden, clinical depression—to
make you live in the moment. And nobody in hockey lives
in the moment quite like a goalie. The Owner knew all
this, and his wordless gestures, aimed at improving
my moments, will remain with me as long as I live. One
day while I was on the ice he arranged a huge goalie
equipment bag on the dressing-room floor, a bag so large
that it swallowed my old bag and its contents whole.
The new bag is on wheels. I can’t tell you how
much easier and more pleasant it has made the process
of getting out of the room after a game.
I’ve always made my living as a writer—of
magazine articles, of books about hockey, about airplanes,
about politics—and The Owner arrived at my door
one morning with a gift. How did he know that my right-side
tremor was making me take several stabs at every letter
east of “T” on the keyboard? He didn’t
say anything, just handed me a brand new big-letter
keyboard and waved goodbye. And he and the Flames began
making annual thousand-dollar contributions to the Pacific
Parkinson’s Research Centre (as I learned from
the PPRC, of course, not from them).
Eager to repay my teammates’ kindnesses with stellar
goaltending, I made a multitude of small adjustments.
I tried taking little pitter-patter steps sideways to
avoid tripping over my right foot. I found myself playing
the way I did as a teenager: in a standup style, post-to-post,
on my feet as much as possible, with the occasional
butterfly when a shooter 20 feet out had either side
to unload into.
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