The Team Player
There are only seconds left. I take a seat on the bench and wait for it to be over, squeezing in between two guys nicknamed Henny and Ferg. From far away, we all look the same. Our green and blue jerseys that have an angry-looking shark stitched on the front. Our identical helmets and pants and padded gloves. Then there are our skates, two carbon fibre boots with steel blades screwed into their bottoms, three-quarters of an inch thick, and sharp.
But underneath it starts to differ. Underneath the logo and the matching gear, I’m wearing a long sleeve shirt and pants that are too small and made out of a stretchy spandex material. I have others, plenty, but it’s this combo for games: holes in the armpits, tears in the knees. Right now they’re soaked and stuck to me. After the game I will peel them off like a layer of dead skin. And once they’re off, it’s just me. My arms and legs, tendons and ligaments. I am the result of training specifically to move a certain way on the ice, to move within the flow of a game that features ten skaters, two goalies, and one puck.
But right now, you can’t see any of that. Out here, I’m all covered up and protected. Out here, I know where I fit in.
I stare back at the clock. In orange bulbs the scoreboard reads 4-1 for the other team. We’re going to lose and another season is going to end. As much as I don’t want it to be, this is it, this is my last one. I’ve aged out of junior hockey, and once that happens your options become limited: college, some semi-professional league, or grow up and move on with your life, and I'm not good enough for the first two.
I want the clock to stop ticking, not only because I don’t like to lose, but because I don’t know what will happen once it’s over.
Six seconds
I’m not old, only twenty-one, but I’ve been at this thing for a long time. Eighteen years, or 86% of my life if I round up. Statistics like that—meaningless numbers, in other words—they find me, they somehow sear their way into my brain with ease. I know how many assists Wayne Gretzky had during the 1982-83 season, ten years before I was born. He had one hundred and ninety-six. I don’t have to look it up, I just know. A decade later, the Montreal Canadiens beat Gretzky’s team to win their record-setting twenty-fourth Stanley Cup. I’m not sure who started WWI or when the printing press was invented, but those things—Gretzky and the Canadiens—those are the things I remember. I guess that’s what eighteen years will do to a person.
This game is why I’ve never gone to college or had a real job outside the summer gigs of cutting grass or pressure washing porches. For as long as I can remember the most important thing has been this: the rink and the sweat and the numbers in my head, like I’ve been playing one big, never-ending game. And yet, after all that time, I still don’t feel particularly good at it. Above average, sure, but I’ve never been a standout. Never the guy who will cause someone to pause and admire the natural finesse of skating, or the surprisingly delicate skill that goes into shooting the puck exceptionally hard. Instead I’ve sort of shuffled through and found a way to keep making teams: a coach that liked me, an emergency call-up, the last pick in the draft. It’s been a matter of getting a chance and holding on for as long as possible.
Five seconds
I’ve held on long enough to get me here, and here is an hour and a half outside of Halifax, in a rink that was built in 1949 and smells like cold air and French fries. There are maybe three hundred people in the stands, people who paid eight dollars to sit in a freezing rink for two and a half hours and watch people like me. It’s a mix of locals, parents, and teenagers with nowhere else to go on a Saturday night in late February. We are the ticket. The women huddle together, blankets pulled over their legs. Some of the men like to stand behind the top row of the wooden bleachers. I can tell who the high school kids are: the nervous ones, holding hands or pop bottles filled with liquid that doesn’t match the label. It’s the same everywhere we play.
Tonight, the only real rise from the crowd came back in the second period. A guy on their team speared one of our younger players, a red-haired kid who we call Bessie, so I grabbed him and we punched each other in the head a few times. I don’t even know his name, this guy who I exchanged haymakers with, had never spoken to him before I shoved him and said, “We’re going,” as if I was his drive home. The fight was mostly uneventful though. He caught me once, a jab that sent one of my teeth into my bottom lip. Our medical trainer is a volunteer university student and she looked queasy as she dabbed at my mouth. She had on her blue latex gloves and tilted my head back and cleaned the cut after I was released from the penalty box. But blood has continued to drip down my chin and onto my jersey since then. There’s a little circle right below the collar that will probably leave a stain, a sign that I was here.
Some people think this about me, but it’s wrong: my sole purpose isn’t to try and beat people up, it’s just part of it, part of the agreement we all signed up for. I didn’t make the rules, they were written before I got here. Why there is fighting in a league made up of guys aged sixteen to twenty-one, I’m not sure. I just know what it feels like to be one of them. To know that something changes when you get here and the metal face mask you’ve worn your whole life suddenly comes off and the plastic visor goes on. When that happens, there’s no longer anything protecting your teeth and nose and chin from the sticks and pucks and skate blades. It’s a step into an entirely new category, one where you can punch someone in the face and not be charged with assault. Did I feel like fighting an hour ago? No, I wasn’t even angry, and truthfully, Bessie is pretty annoying. If I was on the other team, I might’ve speared him too even if he is only seventeen. But in that moment—and for a little while longer—we’re on the same side. And someone had to do it, someone had to show they still cared.
Four seconds
The team we’re playing isn’t even that good, they’re just better than us. We don’t match up well. They’re fast where we’re slow, they take less penalties, their goalie is too good for this league. Everyone can see it, his quickness and flexibility—it’s like he knows what you’re going to do with the puck before you do.
When it comes to matchups like this, though, there is a way to overcome it. There can be a game plan to reduce those discrepancies, but all twenty guys in the locker room need to accept it before the puck drops. Together—that’s really the only way. But we’re way past that. We’re too stuck in our ways. Our hope of a successful season disappeared months ago and our record of 14-29-7 is proof of that. Throughout the year, our local paper has described us as dismal, underwhelming, lacking talent at all positions. And even though it depressed me to do it, I still collected all of the clippings and the box scores as we traveled across the Maritimes and lost. I’m not sure exactly when, but somewhere along the way it happened: we got used to the losing and stopped putting up a fight. Tonight has been no different. As the score grew into an insurmountable divide, we barely seemed to notice. Almost as if most guys couldn’t wait for the season to be over.
Three seconds
There are twenty of us in uniform right now, but over thirty different people have worn the Sharks’ jersey this season. Guys we called up from lower leagues, guys we traded for from Ontario and then sent home after three games, guys who walked out after another 8-0 loss and had to find their own way home from Miramichi.
But no matter how long each guy stuck around, they all got paid to do this, if you can believe it. I guess it’s more of an allowance: rookies get thirty bucks a week, guys like me who have played a few years get a hundred, and the top scorers get more because you have to keep those guys happy.
Every second Friday, when we're arriving at the rink or packing up the bus to go on a road trip, our owner Jimmy hands us a small white envelope. Jimmy is five-foot-five on a good day and owns a couple of car dealerships. And sometimes, if you’ve scored a big goal or gotten punched in the face by someone bigger than you, there’s a little bonus in the envelope. Jimmy will look up at you and give you a wink or pat on the shoulder and say, “Way to go out there, that’s the Sharks’ way.” And we can use that extra twenty to buy some Gatorade or chewing tobacco when the bus stops for gas in Amherst or Fredericton.
I never dreamed of making it to the NHL like all the other kids. Something deep down told me to not bother. I caught the signal of reality early. But if I look back and consider everything, maybe I have made it, just in my own way. I have to remember that not everyone gets this far.
Two seconds
From what I've seen, there are two types of people who do get this far:
The person who is born with it. They might not care that they have it, but they have it. They respond to the stresses of the sport in a strange, predestined sort of way. Their lungs inhale more oxygen than the normal human does during exercise. Or they have the perfect combination of fast- and slow-twitch muscle fibres. It’s a DNA thing. This is not something that they acquire. They have an unnatural superiority, and it’s their choice whether to use it or not.
This person has a little bit of what #1 has, but not enough to be lackadaisical about it. They have to work out more and watch what they eat. But they are also here because they have learned how to lose themselves in what they think is a greater good. They have learned how to fit in. They’re the ones who are willing to fight or sit on the bench for half the game. They choose to do this and do it without complaint. They are the team player.
This is why there is a depth chart. It’s something every team has and is written out and taped on a wall or a door before each game. It explains where each guy fits in, what is expected of them whether they like it or not. Sometimes it can change—someone gets injured or is having an off night—and a guy can become more than what the depth chart deems them as. But only momentarily. Afterwards, the elastic snaps back and there they are again.
In hockey the depth chart is laid out like this: four lines of forwards, three pairs of defense, and two goalies. Twenty guys and where I fit in is right in the middle. The third line, sometimes the second in an emergency. If we’re down a goal with a minute left, I’ll be on the bench. I’m good at other things, relied on to be reliable, to not screw up.
It’s a game of give and take, and I take time away from the clock, help whittle down the sixty minutes so there’s less room to manoeuvre in. You don’t want to give the other team too much.
It’s battles within battles.
It’s all about momentum—that ethereal aspect of the game that you can’t alway see. It happens on the inside, it’s a feeling or a sudden belief. It’s what we spend the entire game chasing, that subtle tilt from your heels to your toes. It makes you feel like nothing can go wrong.
One second
There was a lake down the road from where I grew up. In the winter, when there was a cold snap—a solid week of minus ten—my parents would let me skip school.
I would play for hours, I would pretend to be other people. No one else was around.
00:00
The buzzer sounds and the game is over. Bodies start to shuffle around me, hopping over the boards and crossing the ice toward the exit. I feel a thoughtless pat on the back and hear a couple of shallow “Good games.” No handshake or ceremony, nothing formal. The people who came to watch are filing out and have no idea that this is my final exit. Maybe they’ll keep the game program with my name on it, but I doubt it.
I’m the last one from our team to leave the ice. I think about turning around to take one last look but stop myself and keep moving forward. I walk down the hallway toward the dressing room, and once inside I take my helmet off and sit in the wooden stall. The coolness of the ice has disappeared and been replaced with an air that is thick with body heat and sweat. It’s like a solid force that’s taking up space.
All around the room guys are getting undressed, pulling jerseys over their heads and slipping out of shoulder pads and wiping snow off their skate blades. I hear the pull of velcro over and over and see the nineteen different faces that I shared the ice with tonight: Henny and Ferg and the rest of them. I see Bessie in the corner. He’s in a rush, down to his underwear already, and why wouldn’t he be? He has a science test in the morning and three years left in this league. I can see a mark like carpet burn on the inside of his pale leg where he was speared. He gives me a nod and I try to give him a smile, but my face only gets halfway there. Then our coach comes into the room and all the noise and motion stops and fades away into a disciplined silence.
“Just a sec, fellas,” he says. He paces for a moment and runs his hand over his shiny head. “Wasn’t the year we wanted, y’know? But you guys battled right to the end, and I’m proud of you. Next year—I’m real excited about what we’re building towards, alright?”
He keeps going but I can’t listen anymore. Two of my knuckles are missing chunks of flesh and I stare at the raw redness until the speech is over. Then the sounds of undressing start up and everyone is in a hurry to leave again. Guys are stepping into flip-flops and heading for the showers, others are shoving their legs and arms into matching blue track suits. I know that the bus has already pulled around back and is waiting for us like it always does, but I still haven't moved. Can’t move.
After a while, coach sticks his head back in the room.
“Let’s get a move on,” he says. “It’s a long drive home.”
I nod. Everybody’s gone at this point. “Yeah, I’m coming.”
I tug at my jersey and pull at my elbow pads. But once it’s just me again I stop, still wearing half my equipment, still half protected. I look across the room and see the sheet that has our team’s depth chart written on it. It’s taped to the wall near the door, the lines and the pairings, the little spot where I fit in.
BRAD DONALDSON is writer and former hockey player based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His stories have been published in The Antigonish Review and recognized by the CBC Short Story Prize (longlist), RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award (finalist), Budge Wilson Short Fiction Prize (winner). In 2020 he was awarded the Bartholomew Gosnold Scholarship for International Writers to attend the Cuttyhunk Writers’ Residency.