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Bench Strength — Page 4
I found myself playing behind what I thought was the
superior team almost all the time. If I was right about
that, I did not feel patronized. I was getting help
that I needed. My teammates would squeeze their sticks
as bad goals-against followed good ones; they’d
hammer the boards behind my net in frustration as I
fished the puck out of the net. Guys would take the
rap for some invented mistake, like missing a check,
and apologize to me. But I knew when I’d seen
the shot all the way and should have had it. I knew
I’d begun hugging the post too tightly, a habit
of goalies who’ve lost their confidence. The shooter
scores into the long side, and your bench has the air
sucked out of them. I got raves for routine saves. It
became an ongoing joke for the rest of the team to congratulate
me and then say to someone who’d scored a hat
trick, “Oh, yeah. You were okay, too, Jack.”
At some point, I realized, the team in
front of me had accepted the handicap of shaky netminding—literally—and
begun to prevail nevertheless. I don’t really
know how it happened, or whether anything was ever said,
but my team started spending most of the game in the
other team’s end. They would wear down the opposition.
The other goalie would be bombarded until a tap-in goal,
a goal in any league, got slipped in behind him. I’d
watch much of the game from a distance of 180 feet.
I’d enjoy long stretches of Drydenesque, chin-on-stick
respite. Occasionally I’d even get to be a winner—not
often, and I was certainly never what you’d call
the winning goalie. Instead, I was sometimes the goalie
who happened to play behind the winning team.
I set myself the modest task of making enough saves,
among the relatively few shots that came my way, to
keep my team in the game. Sometimes I succeeded. When
I didn’t, and apologized for giving up a soft
goal, Morrison gently admonished me, invoking one of
the venerable sporting clichés: “There’s
no ‘I’ in ‘team.’”
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Eventually,
I was begging for medication.
I decided to accept the usual penalty —drowsiness—in
return for some
small mitigation of my tremor, and
of my darkening mood.
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For the first 18 months after my diagnosis, I’d
remained unmedicated. I felt proud of myself. I thought
that turning down Levadopa, the gold standard of Parkinson’s
treatments, would buy me time when I needed it in the
future. I fell flat on my face tripping over curbs.
I knocked over my water glass at dinner, dumped platefuls
of lasagna on my lap. I let in soft goals. The Flames
were obtrusively helpful, carrying on as if every goaltender
in every oldtimers league spends 10 minutes sorting
out a single buckle or trying to find the left sleeve
of his jersey. More than that, they are enormously sensitive
to whether I actually want help.
Eventually, though, I was begging for medication. I
decided to accept the usual penalty—drowsiness—in
return for some small mitigation of my tremor, and of
my darkening mood. I started with an anti-depressant,
Effexor. Parkinson’s patients suffer depression
at a much greater rate than people with other chronic
diseases—not just because they have a chronic
condition, but because chemical changes associated with
the loss of dopamine trigger depression.
About six months ago, Dr. McKeown gave me a prescription
for a drug my wife and I had been hearing about at Parkinson’s
lectures, the only treatment taken just once a day.
It had been effective over a 10-year period in Europe—an
Israeli product, just recently approved in North America.
McKeown’s rationale for making it available to
me was that my right-side tremors were resistant to
everything we’d tried.
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