Out of My League
Paper Lion
The Bogey Man
Mad Ducks and Bears
Shadow Box
After forays into American football, golf and the world of professional boxing, George Plimpton accepts his riskiest assignment yet: taking to the ice as goalie for his beloved National Hockey League team, the Boston Bruins. Signing a release holding the Bruins blameless if he should meet with injury or worse, his initiation into the league’s toughest tribe begins. But when the Bruins find themselves up against the equally fearsome Philadelphia Flyers, a mere five minutes in the rink can seem an eternity.
Told with Plimpton’s characteristic humour and insight, Open Net is at once a celebration of the thrills and grace of the greatest sport on ice, and a probing meditation into the hopes and fears of every man.
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Epub ISBN: 9781473524347
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VINTAGE
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Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © The Estate of George Plimpton 1985, 1993, 2003, 2010, 2016
Cover photograph © Getty Images
George Plimpton has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Yellow Jersey Press in 2016
First published in United States of America by W. W. Norton & Company in 1985
This edition first published in the United States of America by Little, Brown in 2016
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’ Words and Music by John Lennon & Paul McCartney © 1968, reproduced by permission of Sony/ATV Music Publishing (UK) Ltd/Sony/ATV Tunes LLC, London W1F 9LD
THERE WAS ONE major sport I thought I would never find myself involved in as a participatory journalist. Ice hockey. I had what seemed a logical excuse: I am very poor on skates. I tend to skate on my anklebones. Someone once pointed out that on skates I am the same height off as I am on the ice. It was odd, because much of my adolescence I spent in New England where in wintertime one puts on skates and gets out on the frozen ponds as a matter of course. But I was no good at it. I have heard people insist — and indeed every instruction manual on skating repeats it — that there is no such phenomenon as “weak ankles,” that if the child skates on his anklebones it is because the skates are too large, or have not been laced up properly. I have always been a refutation of that argument. As a youngster I shoved off from the banks of the pond very nearly on four points — however snug and well-laced the skates — so that my skating style was not unlike someone walking along half-in and half-out of a pair of galoshes. I improved as time went on, but not markedly: the only time I was truly erect on my skates, the blades immediately under my weight, was when I stopped the frantic shuffling that had gained me my speed and did some gliding — cruising along, wobbling slightly, but quite aloft, with just a faint wash of wind in my face which slowly died away as my momentum slowed. The skates would then flop over onto the ice — rather like the settling down of a spinning top. Again I would start the scuttling motion to work up some speed. There was always advice from people who watched this stop-and-go advance along the ice. “You need to wear another pair of socks,” they would say.
So when the editors of Sports Illustrated called and said the Boston Bruins were willing to take me on for part of the training season up at their camp at Fitchburg, Massachusetts, I winced and said I wasn’t sure my skating was up to it.
“How long do I have to get ready?”
“A couple of weeks.”
“I’m very skeptical.”
“You can play in the goal.”
“The goal?”
Mark Mulvoy, who was the magazine’s hockey writer at the time and is now its editor, remarked over the phone that I should remember the sentiment that had motivated Tretiak, the great Russian goaltender, namely “that there is no position in sport as noble as that of goaltending.”
I replied that I had no wish to be ennobled, especially at the expense of my front teeth.
“We’ll find you a mask. One more thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“About a month after you report to Fitchburg, the Bruins have an exhibition game in the Spectrum against the Philadelphia Flyers. You’ll be allowed in to play for a while.”
“Allowed in?”
“The Bruins will put you in the goal for about five minutes,” he said, “. . . to see what will happen.”
I asked: “Isn’t there someone on the Flyers named ‘The Hammer’?”
“Schultz,” Mulvoy said. “An enforcer. The King of the Goons. He is no longer with them, you’ll be pleased to hear, but he has left rafts of disciples.”
“Oh yes.”
“You’d better do something about your skating,” Mulvoy said as he hung up the phone.
Almost as soon as we had finished talking, I looked into the yellow pages of the telephone directory to check out an ice rink. I marked down the name of the Skyrink on Manhattan’s West Side, near an entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Then I went down to Cosby’s sports store next to Madison Square Garden. There I bought a pair of goalie’s skates — which are low to the ice with thick cuplike guards over the toes and extra flanges attached to the skate blades to keep a puck from slipping through. I also purchased a protective face mask, trying it on and staring at myself in a mirror through the eye slits.
That same evening I dropped in on the Skyrink to try everything out. The Wurlitzer organ was playing “Waltzing Matilda.” Extraordinarily capable people sailed by, the men with hands clasped comfortably behind their backs, chins thrust out, and dreamlike expressions on their faces, while at center ice the young women pirouetted in tight circles, most of them very young girls with their heads thrown back and their ponytails hanging down and swinging as they turned. I stepped out onto the ice in my goaltender’s skates and to my surprise found myself creeping along the sideboards like the frightened muskrat, Chuchundra, in Rudyard Kipling’s “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” who never dares to come into the middle of the room . . . taking crotchety steps as I tried to dredge out of my past even the simplest fundamentals. I had forgotten everything . . . how to stop . . . to skate backward. I had always assumed that once one had learned to skate, it was inevitably there — however awkwardly one did it . . . like bicycling, or remembering how to play “Chopsticks,” or swimming, or folding a sheet of paper to build a glider. But all that was left of my skating past, with its crazy abandon, was that I still sagged over onto my anklebones. Some of the skaters whizzing by glanced curiously down at my goalie’s skates as I moved slowly over the ice. Could any of them have imagined that they were looking at someone who in a few weeks’ time would be playing for the Boston Bruins?
I went back to the Skyrink evening after evening — grimly circling the ice until things began to improve. Sometimes I glided to a stop and hunched down in front of an imaginary goal. I tried the quick lateral movements I knew would be required of the goaltender. What could my skating companions at the rink have made of this — a solitary figure hopping and shifting back and forth across a small rectangular area of ice . . .?
I haunted the strange neon glow of the place. I came to know its hierarchy, which was established in circles, like the rings of an immense archery target. On the outside were the unwashed, the clumsies, the shriekers, the flailers, the board clutchers, the small tots who took six quick walking steps and then glided, teetering slightly, for three yards. It was in this first circle that I had toiled during my early visits, towering above the children, until slowly, as the sessions went on, I gained confidence and worked my way gingerly into the inner rings. Here the movement was quicker and more professional. Skaters moved in rhythm to the music, their skates biting into the ice on the turns. Among us moved a speed skater with his long blades, and, on occasion, an older couple, wonderfully proficient, the man very natty, with a small white mustache, and the woman with a woolen skating dress of scotch plaid with a big decorative safety pin, both with gloves and holding hands to do the dance turns as the waltz poured out over us from the Wurlitzer.
In from us was the sacrosanct center oval in which the figure skaters performed — the girls in pert skirts that lifted when they twirled, their shanks extended by the height of their skates, so that their long-legged enchantment was exaggerated, like the romanticized heroines in a space-age comic strip. There was invariably a child prodigy or two — thin, stiltlike girls, beautifully kempt, and often so young as to be barely on the edge of being able to talk, each as spangled as toy poodles, and launched out onto the ice by young mothers who never took their eyes off their daughters and who sat waiting on the benches with the straw picnic baskets that contained their suppers.
Out in the center, the faces of the skaters were bland with concentration, either about what moves they were about to execute, or, more likely, in egocentric consideration of what an enviable spectacle they presented to the rest of us — we lesser moons to their planetary brilliance. One had only to see one of these estimable creatures stumble and have her bottom slide a swatch across the faint snow coating on the ice to know the true misery of the pratfall. This rarely seemed to happen, though those of us on the perimeter wistfully wished it happened more. The girls jumped up with slight frowns, very brief, and were immediately as composed and superior as members of a royal court, which of course they were, with only a slight tuft of ice shavings on their rumps to show that anything untoward had happened.
One evening, as I was seated on one of the long benches, skates off and working my toes back and forth, a man skated off the rink and sat down next to me. He asked if I would like to stay after the public had left the rink and play some midnight hockey. Oh yes, he went on, that was a regular tradition. There was actually a team that played out of the Skyrink — Gitler’s Gorillas.
“The Gorillas.”
The man nodded and said that he had noticed my skates. “Goalie, eh?” He told me that their regular goalie had just telephoned to say that his butcher’s shop in Kew Gardens had been damaged by fire the night before and he was still taking inventory. He could not make it for that night’s scrimmage. Would I take his place? His question came just as I was imagining the barbecue smell of cooked steak drifting above Kew Gardens.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. My mind raced. “I’m not really a goalie. I’m learning to be a goalie.” I could not bring myself to tell him what team I was getting myself ready to play for . . . it would have seemed such an impertinence to drop the Boston Bruins’ name on top of Gitler’s Gorillas.
He told me it was all very informal and friendly. Among the people who came to the rink at midnight were a jazz vibraphonist, two or three stockbrokers, a magazine writer, a chef, an antique-furniture restorer, and, of course, the goaltending butcher from Kew Gardens. One of the Gorillas, my friend told me, was a bell captain at the Plaza Hotel. That grand place has since seemed slightly less imperious and tony for knowing that one of its gold-button-fronted entrance custodians is sailing around the Skyrink, banging his stick on the ice for the puck, at one a.m.
He told me something about the organization. The founder was a jazz entrepreneur named Ira Gitler who formed the Gorillas (utilizing the Great Ape moniker for alliterative nicety) in the spring of 1973. Actually, I was told, his wife was better known in hockey circles — a sculptress specializing in life-size assemblages of sports figures — most of them hockey stars wearing real pads and wielding Northland or Koho hockey sticks. Her work turns up in corporate headquarters and banks. I was told a particularly dynamic assemblage re-created a Derek Sanderson and Orland Kurtenbach fight in the late 1960s.
“Is the assemblage realistic?” I asked. “Can you recognize Sanderson?”
“It’s difficult,” I was told. “Kurtenbach’s hands are in Derek’s face. But it is realistic. Kurtenbach suffered a skin condition and in the sculpture you can see that he’s wearing a gray medicinal glove.”
I stayed to watch them scrimmage. The Gorillas, or perhaps their opponents — the varied jerseys and sweatshirts gave no hint of a common identity — appeared about half an hour before midnight with big equipment bags. They sat down heavily on the long green rinkside benches. With their leg pads, the white plastic helmets, and the rest of the hockey accoutrements, they seemed a world removed from the long-legged girls still spinning their last pirouettes in the center of the ice — rather like the football players on the edge of the field, limbering up, settling their helmets into place, while the majorettes with the little pom-poms on their sneakers are still kicking up their long legs and the silver batons are twirling in the sky.
“Have you had any . . . er . . . clumsies out there playing on the Gorillas?”
My companion looked up briefly into the rafters of the rink. “Well, we had this lawyer who came out one night, a real Rangers fan, entirely dressed up in Rangers regalia, even the Rangers colors, red and blue, on his helmet. After a couple of strides in a scrimmage he fell down and broke a collarbone. I’m not sure anyone even got his name. We supported him off. I helped. I remember the new crisp feeling of his hockey jersey.”
I finally succumbed and told my friend from the Gorillas why I was there — that I was preparing for a stint with the Boston Bruins. He did not seem especially surprised. In fact, he mentioned that to scrimmage with Gitler’s Gorillas was just the way to round into shape to show the Bruins a thing or two when I got up to their training camp.
I agreed. But I also demurred. I told myself that if I should happen to get hurt playing with them and was someday asked, “What’s happened to the right side of your face?” it was one thing to reply, “Slap shot . . . off the stick of Wayne Cashman of the Boston Bruins,” and quite another to report that the deed had been done by the doorman of the Plaza Hotel during a scrimmage involving Gitler’s Gorillas.
“I’m not quite ready yet for the Gorillas,” I told my friend. “For the time being, I’ll just watch.”
While my evenings were taken up with skating sessions at the Skyrink, I prepared for Fitchburg in more sedentary ways. I did considerable reading — instruction manuals (especially on goaltending) and various biographies of hockey personalities. I kept notes. Also I thought a lot about the protective face mask I had bought at Cosby’s. My notion was to get it decorated in such a way that would perhaps give the opposition a slight start, as well as providing me with a small psychological boost.
The face mask has been around since November 2, 1959 (I wondered if I ever would have had the nerve to accept playing in the goal if such things were not available), when the Montreal Canadiens’ Jacques Plante introduced his in a game against the New York Rangers in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Plante had a wonderful excuse: “I already had four broken noses, a broken jaw, two broken cheekbones, and almost two hundred stitches in my head. I didn’t care how the mask looked. I was afraid I would look just like the mask, the way things were going.”
Incredibly, his colleagues looked upon Plante with scorn for wearing such a thing — derisive comments were made that he had gone soft. The fans did not think much better of him. One of them once asked Plante: “Doesn’t the fact that you’re wearing a mask prove that you’re afraid?” In reply, Plante produced a most appropriate analogy: “If you jumped out of a plane without a parachute, would that prove you’re brave?”
But however logical Plante was, no one seemed convinced. Chief among his critics was his own coach, Toe Blake, who tried incessantly to get Plante to discard his mask, only giving in when Plante said just as vehemently that he wouldn’t skate out onto the ice without it.
Now, every goaltender wears one. The last goaltender to play without a mask was Andy Brown of the Detroit Red Wings . . . which so worried one of his female fans that before every game she sent him “lucky cookies” and sprigs of heather.
Since Plante introduced his mask in 1959, a number of goalies have taken the trouble to decorate them, usually with the team colors. The most famous mask was undoubtedly that of Gerry Cheevers, the first-string goalie on the Bruins team I was about to join, which was decorated with stitch marks painted on to depict the real ones Cheevers might have required if he had been playing with his face unprotected. In the locker room, very often still shaken by the concussion of the puck striking the mask, he would say, “Well, that was worth about eight,” and the trainer, a man named Frosty Forristall, would draw a replica of that many stitches on the mask with a felt pen.
There were others. Gilles Gratton — a goaltender who played for the New York Rangers — had an impressive lion’s head painted on his mask in deep vermilion. It turned out that the lion’s head was not so much to instill dismay in the opponents as to reflect Gratton’s interest in astrology: he was born under the sign of Leo. Gratton had a turn of mind interested in such things: he believed in reincarnation; he told his Rangers teammates that during his life in biblical times he had stoned some people to death.
Was that so? his teammates had asked.
Yes, and that was why in this life he had ended up playing goal.
When his teammates looked confused and asked about the connection, Gratton replied that in his system of things the good and bad were paid back in later lives, and because he had made the mistake of once stoning people he was now paying for it by having to stand in the goal mouth and being, in a sense, stoned, inflicted by what he referred to as a “plague of pucks.”
He was quite a character. He believed he had been a sixteenth-century soldier, stabbed to death. He had been an archduke. In his present incarnation he had once “streaked” the Maple Leaf Gardens — soaring out of the wooden gate in the sideboards naked and doing a turn around the ice at full speed before the startled crowd before he disappeared. At least that is what I had heard. Perhaps he had done it on a dare, or a bet. He would be someone to check out once I joined the Bruins.
There were one or two other imaginatively decorated masks I had heard about. One was Gary Simmons’s of the Los Angeles Kings. He had a green cobra painted on his which I had assumed was to startle people, or at least to illustrate his connection with the Kings — the King Cobra. But not at all. Apparently, Simmons had a thing about cobras. He had one tattooed on his right calf; he liked to be called “Cobra.” “Hey, Cobra, how’s it going?” was a greeting to which he responded with delight. One summer in Arizona he killed a rattlesnake with his bare hands and he wore the remains looped around his trousers.
Even the Russians were intrigued by face mask possibilities. A Moscow radio station had a competition for the most original face mask that listeners could design for Tretiak, their national team’s brilliant goaltender, the one who Mark Mulvoy had said felt goaltending was ennobling. Hundreds of suggestions were sent in — most using the motif of wolf or tiger heads. The listeners also used the opposite approach: someone sent in a mask painted to the likeness of a pretty girl, demure, with long eyelashes, a shy smile, the sort of face (so the assumption was) that might cause even the most hardened of Cossacks to take pause before zinging a puck at it.
The most original idea — at least of those I read about — was one which suggested that Tretiak affix a powerful electric beam to his mask to be used like a laser beam in a science fiction epic.
All of this inspired me to a number of designs for my own mask. I drew them clumsily on telephone pads. Some were quirky — a chipmunk’s face with small, apple cheeks, perky and with a prominent pair of long teeth showing in the middle of a sunny smile, bright blue eyes sparkling above; some were meant to puzzle, such as one I designed that was decorated with a large question mark; others were graphic — a mask that read simply enough in red letters, NO!; yet another was a psychedelic swirl that was supposed to make anyone who gazed on it slightly dizzy.
The design I finally fixed upon seemed to combine all these elements. I sent the mask to an artist friend of mine in Rumson, New Jersey, with instructions to paint on it “a large blue eye.” My notion was that my own confidence would be shored up by this image of being all-seeing, and that the forwards coming down the ice on attack would be transfixed by this great Cyclopean eye.
The artist’s rendering, when I got it back, seemed graphic enough, but only — somewhat to my disappointment — when viewed from close-up. The mask seemed pathetically small as I removed it from its wrappings; I experimented by putting the mask on the mantelpiece and stepping back . . . to find that the eye seemed to lose its hypnotic power beyond a range of about eight feet.
When my artist friend called me up to see what I thought of his handicraft, I told him as much. He replied, “Well, you didn’t exactly give me very much area to work with. The effect is not going to blaze across the ice like a Van Gogh flower.”
“No,” I agreed.
“You’ll have to think of it as something for use at close quarters. If somebody gets really close to the goal, turn your face suddenly towards him and zap him with it.”
“Absolutely.”
So when the time came to leave for Fitchburg and the Bruins’ training camp, I packed the mask in my suitcase along with the heavy goalie’s skates and some sweat suits, T-shirts, and four or five pairs of tennis socks. I packed a tin of Band-Aids for blisters. The face-mask eye stared up at me from the suitcase’s contents. I dropped some T-shirts over it and zipped up the bag.
FITCHBURG IS A small mill town about an hour-and-a-half drive north of Boston. Driving in — at least by the route I took — one travels past the slope of a vast graveyard hill that overlooks the town. Its stones shine in the sun. I tried holding my breath as I drove by — that ancient boyhood ritual — but held up briefly in a small traffic congestion behind a truck full of chickens staring at me beadily through the slats of their crates, I could not do it: a large expulsive gasp and I murmured to myself that things would not go well.
I found my way to the Holiday Inn where the Bruins team was quartered. The rookies had been there a week. The veterans had come in the evening before. A group of young men wearing seersucker suits and ties were lounging around the entrance — somewhat elegant men at first glance, each with a plastic name tag affixed to his lapel which, as I approached close enough to read, bore the jolly announcement HI, I’M and the bearer’s name written underneath in block letters. I thought fleetingly, “Well, this is very genteel of the Bruins organization indeed — to make the newcomers feel so much at home!”
But then I saw that the nameplates identified the group as connected with the Simplex Corporation — executives, presumably, standing out in the afternoon sun on a coffee break.
My room was 136. I had been assigned a roommate. The Bruins organization thought it would help me in my research if I were settled in with another goalie. There had been guffaws in the background when they told me this over the phone. The rookie’s name was Jim “Seaweed” Pettie. I was told he was quite a “number.”
“Seaweed?” I asked.
Seaweed was not on hand when I unlocked the door and stepped into Room 136. The room, which was on the ground floor, seemed overcrowded with suitcases; a set of barbells rested against one wall. Although it was late afternoon, both beds were rumpled and unmade. I had been told at the front desk that there had been a second occupant, another Bruins rookie, but that he had been dropped from the roster earlier that morning and was being shipped out. The initials on a number of the bags read CWC. I hoped “CWC” would be leaving without any argument or rancor, at least not directed at me for being the one who was about to take over his bed.
The Gideon Bible lay open on a round table near the window. I could not resist glancing at it to see if perhaps it bore a message of significance to me at that time . . . one that might provide a better omen and would cancel out the consequences of my inability to hold my breath past the graveyard hill outside of town. I read: “He shall return no more to his house. Neither shall his place know him anymore.”
Just then a figure appeared at the window, wrenched it open, and clambered in over the windowsill from the parking lot outside. He landed with a thump next to the table with the Gideon on it, and seeing me on the far side of the room, he called out my name, and announced himself as “Seaweed.” He came forward and we shook hands. He said he believed in shortcuts; that was why he had materialized through the window. “Welcome to the Union,” he said, apparently in reference to my being considered a fellow goaltender. I grinned at him in gratitude.
I said I admired his abrupt entrance.
He laughed and said that he had learned it from Derek Sanderson who the year before was trying a comeback and was Seaweed’s roommate during the training season. “He’d leap in through the window headfirst and land on his stomach on the floor . . . a running start in the parking lot, through the flower bed, up and in. You’d hear a crash in there as he slid along the floor. One night we were coming back from an evening out in Fitchburg and after he’d parked the car he took his dive through the wrong window. I heard the crash and a kind of high nervous yell. Apparently there were three people in there, two of them watching television, and a third playing cards at a table. Sanderson passed out on the floor in a heap. I had to go around through the lobby, down a corridor, and get in their room to haul him out of there. The people were just in shock. Dumbfounded.”
Physically, my roommate reminded me of a young, very agile version of Gene Wilder, the pop-eyed Hollywood character actor. He told me he was called “Seaweed” for the wild, stringy look of his hair during and after a game — a conditioning problem that was apparently hereditary since he informed me that his father’s nickname was “Kelp.” “Seaweed” was shortened to “Weed” by most of the Bruins, and that was what he told me the fans yelled in Rochester, New York, where he had played for the Americans, or Amerks as everyone called them, the Bruins’ farm club. When he made a good save in the goal, the crowds would shout, “Weed! Weed!” He had also — he went on — picked up the nickname “Mad Dog” . . . this for his aggressive play on the ice despite the limitations one would assume were imposed by being weighed down by all the goaltending equipment. He told me he had been assessed 150 minutes during the preceding season at Rochester, which is a record — he announced rather proudly — for goalies in the professional leagues; among other things he had clambered up into the stands (he must have seemed, with the bulk of his equipment on, like a gorilla on the loose) to beat up a fan who was “chirping” at him.
“What’s ‘chirping’?” I asked.
“Mouthing off,” he explained. “What you can’t be in this game is a candy-ass, which is a player who wants no part of mucking it up.”
“Mucking it up?”
“Protecting one’s rights. Not letting anyone get advantage of you. Fighting . . .”
“Ahem,” I said. “And even the goalies . . .?”
“The great goaltenders have to muck it up to be respected,” Seaweed said. “Tomorrow you’ll be seeing Gerry Cheevers. Players have such respect for him that you don’t ever find players standing in the crease with him. He belts them in the ankles. He can break an ankle with his stick.”
Seaweed leapt up and illustrated how this was done with a wild swipe of his arm. I was to learn that this was a common trait — to illustrate some technical aspect of goaltending with a physical pantomime . . . often a great leap off the mattress that seemed to soar him up to the ceiling. I knew I was in for an exhausting time. He was an incessant talker. Hockey simply absorbed him. He told me that first afternoon that he had read only one book completely through, and that one many times — The Jacques Plante Story, the goalie who had introduced the face mask. Most of his family were involved in the hockey business — a Toronto puck manufacturing concern called the Viceroy Rubber Company. As Seaweed described it in his lively fashion: “My mother makes pucks, my sister sells pucks, and I eat pucks.”
I told him that it was not a culinary habit I was looking forward to.
“You may not have any choice,” Seaweed said. “What have you been doing to get ready?”
I told him about my evenings at the Skyrink in New York and how the first time I stepped on the ice it was as if a straw man had been flung out there. “I hadn’t gone three feet before I was down,” I said. “So I went out there night after night. I did a lot of reading, too,” I went on. “I looked at about fifty books on hockey.”
“Have you read Plante’s book?” Seaweed asked.
I told him I had. It had scared me. There was a part in it in which I remembered Plante had said that being a goaltender was like being shot at. He wrote that Bobby Hull’s slap shot would kill someone . . . it was said as simply as that.
Seaweed said, “That shot of his would take your glove off your hand and carry it back into the net with the puck in it.”
I believed it. I told Seaweed I was reminded of another description I had read about Hull’s shot by a goaltender named Les Binkley. “It starts off looking like a small pea and then disappears altogether.” I had another one, a longer one — this by Gerry Desjardins, then with the Los Angeles Kings. I had copied it in my notebook. I went and got it out. “The one that scares me the most is Bobby Hull,” I read aloud. “He scares every goalie, though he may lie about it. He’s built like a bull and skates like the wind and he shoots from everywhere — the puck can be rolling on end and he’ll take a swipe at it — and his shot has been timed at 125 miles per hour and it’s deadly accurate. He uses one of those curved sticks and the puck whistles in and curves and dances and sort of explodes on you. His shot is very heavy. If you can catch it, he can bruise you right through your glove. He hit me on my leg once and it was sore two months later. He can drive you into the nets with a shot . . .”
My voice died away. It was this last image that left the most visual mental picture . . . the thought of being hit by a puck in the midsection and lifted up off my skates and jackknifed back into the folds of the net.
To ease my discomfiture, which was beginning to make me fidget, I tried to shift the focus away from my own problems; I asked Seaweed how he felt he was doing in the Bruins’ camp.
Seaweed admitted that his chances of making the Bruins team were slim. Five goalies were in camp — the veteran Gerry Cheevers, Gilles Gilbert, and Ron Grahame who had come over from the recently defunct World Hockey Association, and the rookies — Dave Parro from Saskatoon and Seaweed himself.
“There’s another one,” I reminded him.
“Christ, yes, you!” Seaweed exclaimed in mock dismay, smacking himself in the center of his brow. “Six goalies in camp! That means a lot of ‘riding the pines’ — sitting on the bench.”
“I won’t mind that,” I said. “I can take notes.”
I mentioned that he didn’t seem annoyed there were so many other goalies.
“Oh, no,” he said. “We have to stick together. The Union!”
I asked if there was indeed that much distinction between the goalies and the rest of the team.
“Oh, absolutely,” Seaweed said.
He went on to point out that Gerry Cheevers, the Bruins’ main-man goalie, never even shook hands with the opposing players when at the conclusion of a play-off series the two teams lined up to exchange congratulatory handshakes, never, ever — it was a contradiction to shake hands with someone who has been firing a puck at you. But Cheevers would skate past these lines of people, ignoring them pointedly, to shake the hand of the opposing goaltender. They were both in the Union. Why, if a rival goalie got in a slump, Cheevers would try to help him out of it! Goalies stick together. They look after each other.
Seaweed had only played one game for the Bruins. The year before he had been called up from the Rochester Amerks when Cheevers left for home on an emergency leave. At the pregame meeting, Don Cherry, the coach, announced Seaweed’s name as the starting goalie that night against the Black Hawks . . . just at the end of the meeting . . . and his Bruins teammates burst out laughing because Seaweed’s eyes popped so at the news. “I was sick immediately,” Seaweed told me. “I got up from the meeting and went into the crapper and got sick. Out on the ice I was sick behind my mask the first time the Hawks came across the red line. I was sick between the periods. I was sick after the game.”
“Did you manage . . .?”
“Oh, I won the game 6–3,” he said, using the personal pronoun in the manner of a prizefight manager.
We began talking about how hockey players ever become involved in a position which gripped them with such tension. Seaweed said, “Actually, it’s usually the smallest kid on the block who gets to be the goalie. In playing ball-hockey in the summer he’s the guy who’s always made to run down the street after the ball that’s been shot wide. He spends a lot of time under cars fishing for the ball. I didn’t much like running down the street, or getting dirty from axle oil on my back, but I got to like the goaltending part of it. My grandfather would set me up in an alcove in the house and try to throw a baseball past me.”
It is almost impossible to find goaltenders who willingly took on the position at the start of their hockey careers. Glenn Hall, often announced by the Chicago public-address announcer as “Mister Goalie,” had become a goalie at the advanced age of thirteen in his hometown of Humboldt, Saskatchewan, because just before a pickup game no one else on the team would volunteer; the opposing players skated around, jeering, waiting for someone to make up his mind. Hall finally shrugged and went in — “between the pipes,” which was one of Seaweed’s phrases for being in goal — because he realized that there was not going to be a game if he didn’t.
Once in, the player seemed stuck there for good. I told Seaweed that in my reading I had found only one player, Harry “Rat” Westwick, who had moved from being a goaltender out to the forward position. He performed at the turn of the century with the Ottawa Silver Seven and as a forward averaged better than a goal a game.
“Rat?” commented Seaweed. “Yeah. He was no member of the Union to be doing a thing like that.”
There were, however, a number of interesting examples of the reverse — forwards and defensemen who had abruptly been pressed into service as goalies. What transpired, however quick they were with skates and their hands, was predictable and disastrous. A defenseman named Harry Mummery, who played for the Quebec Bulldogs in the 1920s, was ordered into the nets — all the regular goalies had been put out of action — where he immediately had eleven goals scored on him by the Ottawa Senators. Curiously, he rather enjoyed his evening at that position — more likely because of his gargantuan eating habits which diminished his effectiveness anywhere on the ice except in the goal: he weighed 250 pounds and was known to cook meals, big steaks, down in the ice rink furnace room.
One of the most famous examples of a goalie being relieved by a stranger to the position was Lester Patrick’s feat when he was the coach of the New York Rangers. His goalie, Lorne Chabot, had been carried off with an eye injury. No replacements were available in those days — it was just assumed that a goalie would spit out a tooth or clap a hand over an eye and yell “Hey!” and then go on. Patrick put himself in. He is supposed to have called out to his people as he skated lumpily to his position, “Check as you have never checked before, fellows, and protect an old man.”
The Rangers took a 1–0 lead into the third period, but Montreal — its city’s team was the Maroons then — scored a tying goal and the game went into overtime. Frank Boucher, a member of the Rangers’ famous “A Line” with Bill and Bun Cook — who in the off-season was a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police — scored at 5:07 of the overtime. Patrick, his jaw agape, skated off the ice, scarcely believing what he had been able to accomplish.
“They would have given him the standing ‘O,’ that’s for sure,” Seaweed said.
“The what?”
“The big ‘O.’ The Ovation. That’s what we’re all working for out here — the standing ‘O.’”
I suddenly thought to ask about the mysterious second roommate — the player with the initials CWC whose gear, including the barbells presumably, was stored along the wall.
“‘O’ for ‘Out.’ He’s gone,” Seaweed said. He went over to one of the suitcases. “Try lifting this thing.”
I could barely budge it off the floor.
“It’s full of barbells and weight-lifting material. Irons,” Seaweed explained. “They belong to Wild Bill Frazier.”
“Wild Bill Frazier?”
Seaweed said that Frazier had been dropped by the Bruins — “gassed” was the expression he used — just the day before.
“Why is all this luggage still here?” I asked.
“Wild Bill is a strange guy,” Seaweed said. “He may have just gone off and left the stuff for good. I mean there’s nothing in those bags but a lot of iron.”
“What about the initials — CWC?”
Seaweed shrugged. “Maybe he borrowed those suitcases from his girlfriend. Or an aunt. But I’ve never seen anything in them but weight-lifting equipment. He arrived with one pair of blue jeans, a T-shirt, and two tons of iron to pump . . . building himself up so he could fight.”
Seaweed went on to say that Frazier’s hope of making the squad was actually based almost entirely on his willingness to mix it up and slug people — what hockey people called a “goon.” So he worked with those barbells all day and night when he wasn’t at practice. He’d wake him up in the middle of the night: “Hey, Seaweed, do you think I should start a brawl at tomorrow’s practice?”
Seaweed said he would stir from his sleep and suggest that perhaps Frazier should wait until the Bruins played another team. “That’d be a good time to do it.”
“But, Seaweed,” Frazier had replied. “It might be too late. I could be gone before I can show the coach that I can really stick people.”
Seaweed said he could hear the bedsprings squeak as Wild Bill worked the barbells. “I don’t think that guy ever slept,” he told me, “what with building up his strength and thinking about whether he was going to bust someone. He was a true goon, which is a guy who will go.”
“How many goons are there on the Bruins?” I wanted to know.
“During the exhibition season there are a lot of them on every team,” Seaweed said, “racing around and trying to make an impression. Goalies like us have to look out for them, because they’re wild, and they’ll put it up in the top drawer, shoot up on the roof a lot.”
“Up on the roof . . .”
“They’ll throw the puck in high and bust you in the melon, like as not.”
Seaweed was an expert at the lingo. That first day I learned that the head was not only the “melon” but also the “puss,” the “pumpkin,” the “coconut.”
“The dumb guys on a club,” Seaweed continued, “are called ‘cement-heads.’ You don’t find too many of them in hockey, but we had one on our club in Rochester. He’s called ‘Portland.’”
“Does he mind?” I asked.
“No, because it’s true,” Seaweed said. “And besides, I’m not sure he’s yet made the connection between ‘Portland’ and ‘cement.’”
The worst put-down, far worse than being called a “cement-head” apparently, was to say of someone: “He’s got no seeds.”
“That’s like handing a guy a white feather,” Seaweed said.
“Oh yes.”
“Nothing worse than that.”
“I see.”
“What’s the goal called?” I asked, changing the subject.
Seaweed said that old-time goalies referred to “being in the barrel,” but these days no self-respecting goaltender would say such a thing. It was a demeaning phrase apparently — the connotation being a fish in a barrel, or in a barrel going over Niagara Falls, or a clown in a circus barrel.
Seaweed was adamant about it. “A goalie might say he was ‘going between the pipes’ or ‘in the cell’ but he would never say he was going in the barrel.”
“But it would be accurate.”
“Oh yes,” he admitted. “Damn right. Yes. You’ll see. Tomorrow. You’ll see in the first practice.”
I asked, “What’s the worst time a goalie ever had in the nets?”
Seaweed said he had heard of a goalie named Lorne Anderson, who was a third-string goaltender for the Rangers in the early fifties. He knew about it because he had established a rather dubious record. In a game against the Chicago Black Hawks, Bill Mosienko of Chicago’s famous Pony Line had got three shots past Anderson in twenty-one seconds!
“Mosienko said about it, ‘I caught lightning in a beer bottle.’”