Chapter 4 #2
It hadn’t used to, but the more Sandro thought about it, the more he wondered what his purpose here was. For most of his life, he’d gotten to play a sport he loved and make a career out of it. He’d won the Stanley Cup four times with the Trailblazers.
But what was the point of it all? What legacy would he leave behind when he retired? He was no Roman Kinsey, leaving behind a team culture based on communication, trust, and respect.
He was just Sandro Zanetti.
“Nah,” Sandro said, answering Cotton’s question. “I’ll probably do like you: sleep for a week and travel. Maybe visit my parents in Tobermory for more than a few days at a time.”
“Not a bad gig, right?” Cotton rose and slipped his jacket on. “How’s the mentorship with Eli going, by the way?”
“We haven’t had a chance to get started yet. We met earlier this week, but Eli had to leave early. You’re mentoring DeShawn, right?”
“Yeah. I’ve mentored a rookie for the past four years.” Cotton headed out of the locker room and Sandro fell into step beside him.
“Got any tips? I haven’t mentored anyone in years, and I’m not sure where to start.”
“I’d say the first thing you want to do is find common ground.
Hockey is an obvious one, but outside of that .
. . what do you have in common that could help establish a rapport and foster a comfortable connection?
After that . . .” Cotton shrugged. “Figure out what kind of mentor you want to be. Will you be the guy Eli calls when he’s drunk at the bar with his friends at one in the morning and he needs a lift home?
Will you be the guy he comes to when he’s homesick and wants to sleep on your couch?
Or is this strictly about hockey? And beyond that,” he continued while Sandro mentally took notes, “establish goals. Find out what Eli’s long-term goals are, but also what his goals are for this mentorship.
What does he want out of it? What do you want out of it?
And you’re going to want to set expectations—”
“Jesus, Cotton, I need a notebook to write all this down.”
Cotton snorted a laugh. “Hey, you asked.”
“Fine, fine. What were you going to say about expectations?”
“Set them.”
They made a right at the end of the hallway, aiming for the player’s parking garage. When a whole thirty seconds went by with no further explanation from Cotton and only the sound of their footsteps echoing off the walls, Sandro said, “Set them? That’s it?”
“You don’t need a notebook for that, do you?”
Laughing, Sandro shoved him. “Asshole.”
“When are you meeting Eli next anyway?”
“In about twenty minutes. We’re meeting at the Church Street Marketplace. He went ahead of me because he rode his bike here this morning for some godforsaken reason.”
“And how are you getting there?” Cotton asked. “Your car’s in the shop again, isn’t it? I could swear I saw you get out of an Uber this morning.”
Sandro smiled winningly at him. “I thought you were driving me?”
Cotton rolled his eyes, but he was laughing. “Sorry, who’s the asshole?” He pushed the door open to the parking garage.
Sandro hesitated a moment, glancing back over his shoulder, but the hallway was empty.
“You waiting for someone?” Cotton asked, already striding toward his SUV.
“Uh, no.”
God. Had Sandro paused in case he caught a last glimpse of Bennett for the day?
Ugh.
The Church Street Marketplace was busy with nine-to-fivers grabbing a late lunch or early afternoon coffee.
Cotton had dropped him off along Main Street since the marketplace was pedestrians-only, and Sandro had scrambled out at a red light.
It was cold, so why Eli was biking in November was anybody’s guess.
Probably because he still had good knees.
They’d agreed to meet at Black Cap Coffee & Bakery to grab a drink before they walked around—because although it was cold, it was sunny. Plus, walking as they talked might make this whole mentorship thing feel less awkward. Or less formal at the very least.
“Can I order for you?” Eli asked as they stood in the short line.
Sandro narrowed his gaze. “Like, you want to pay for my drink, or you want to order something off the menu without consulting me first?”
“The latter.” Eli bounced on his toes. “Well, the former too, but mostly I want to see if I can guess your order.”
“You can do that without actually ordering for me.”
“True, but it’s not as fun. Let’s see . . .” He perused the menu while Sandro did the same. “Maybe one of the specialty lattes? No, they’re all too sweet.” Eli sighed grandly. “You’re getting a black coffee, aren’t you?”
Amused by him, Sandro asked, “Why do you make that sound like a bad thing?”
“It’s just so . . . blah.”
“Maybe I’m a blah person.”
“Ha! I doubt that.”
What did that mean?
Before Sandro had a chance to ask, they stepped up to the counter, where Eli ordered and paid for them both.
A few minutes later, drinks in hand, they were back outside, Eli with a croissant to go with his sugary specialty latte. Should Sandro just launch into expectations or goals or . . . what was the other thing Cotton had said? Common ground!
The latter was probably a good starting point.
“Oh, that looks cozy.” Eli veered away from him toward The Vermont Flannel Co, where the window display showcased a handful of mannequins wearing shirts and pants in several different shades of plaid.
Eli gestured to one wearing a white-hooded flannel pullover with green and blue stripes.
“I could wear that under my winter coat when I go snowshoeing.”
Thank you, Eli, for plopping common ground right into my lap.
“You snowshoe?”
“Sure,” Eli said easily. “I grew up in Saskatoon. It snows for, like, thirteen months out of the year.”
That startled a laugh out of Sandro.
“If I wasn’t playing hockey, I was outside doing some other winter sport.”
“Same,” Sandro said. “My parents used to force me and my siblings out of the house in the winter so we didn’t hibernate.
Sometimes we’d take our snowshoes out and take a walk around the block, pushing and shoving each other as we went .
. . or until one of the neighborhood kids started a snowball fight. ”
“Does your family come to games when we play in Toronto?” Eli asked as he continued walking. He took a large bite of his croissant, flakes getting everywhere.
“Not usually. It’s almost four hours to the city from Tobermory on a good day. One of my brothers lives in Toronto with his family, but he travels so much for work that we’re hardly ever there at the same time.”
“What was your first year as a Trailblazer like?”
Eli didn’t look at him when he asked, instead peering intently—and very deliberately, it seemed—into the window of Phoenix Books.
“Was it . . . intimidating?” Eli pressed.
The way he asked . . .
“Eli.” Sandro paused, but Eli still didn’t look at him. “Do you find being a Trailblazer intimidating?”
“I mean, kinda. I’m playing with players who’ve won the Cup, some of them more than once, like you.
” Eli tossed his empty croissant wrapper into a garbage bin.
“There’s a lot of pressure to go for a three-peat, but there’s also a lot of pressure to conform to a team culture that seems a little idealistic from an outside perspective. ”
Conform. That was an interesting point of view. Sandro and Roman Kinsey had been with the Trailblazers since the team’s first season, and Sandro had witnessed how Roman had gradually changed and improved the Trailblazers’ culture to get them working as a team.
But if Eli saw that as conforming instead of instinctual integration into how the Trailblazers did things, that was a problem Sandro needed to bring up with Roman.
“There’s just . . . a lot of expectation,” Eli went on, shoulders hunched.
“I’m expected to always do my best and always put in the effort and always eat right and always stand tall and always think of my—and the team’s—image when I’m out in public and always properly represent my sponsors and always smile—”
“Who the fuck told you to always smile?” Sandro broke in. “Not Roman.”
Hell, if anybody needed to be told to smile, it was Roman Kinsey. So if he was telling people to always smile . . .
Talk about hypocrisy.
“What? No, not Roman.”
“Dabbs?” Sandro guessed, because the team captain was the only person Sandro would attribute that kind of advice to.
But that didn’t make sense either—Dabbs was also slow to smile, but in an I’m-stoic-and-strong kind of way, unlike Roman’s I’m-a-grumpy-sourpuss way.
“What? No.” Eli waved a hand. “It was the social media intern. Steven?”
Sandro groaned. “Christ. Do me a favor and never listen to social media interns. They mean well, but most of the time, they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.”
Eli snorted a laugh and sipped his latte. “Noted. So? What was your first season with the Trailblazers like?”
“Not intimidating,” Sandro said immediately.
“My first season in the NHL was also the Trailblazers’ first season.
The team was made up mostly of young players—I don’t think we had anyone over twenty-five.
People expected us to fail because of that, but also because of where we are, geographically speaking.
We’re the smallest city with an NHL team—nobody expected us to fill seats. But we have, and we do.”
“So your first season was easy?”
“Fuck no. The pressure was very real and there was uncertainty in every direction.”
Including in his personal life.
With him in Vermont and Bennett in Illinois, things had felt .
. . topsy-turvy. Bennett had grown more and more distant with each passing day of their first season as professional hockey players, and Sandro had thrown himself into the sport and his new teammates and his new city in a way most people threw themselves into new hobbies—with intense enthusiasm and focus, determined to soak in every piece of knowledge he could.
Professionally, his first season had been amazing.
Personally, it felt like his foundations were crumbling around him.
Sometime around Christmas of that year, Bennett had admitted to second-guessing his decision to play professionally.
“It’s not what I expected,” he’d said. “It’s all forcing a smile at community events and for the media and pretending everything is fine and making sure I don’t fuck up so my sponsors don’t drop me and putting on a brave face.
Nobody prepares you for the expectations that come with being a professional athlete. ”
What he’d said wasn’t dissimilar to what Eli just said.
To Bennett, Sandro had responded with a benign, “Don’t sweat it, B. Once you’ve got your NHL legs under you and you’ve adjusted to this life, you’ll be fine.”
Except Bennett had retired from hockey at the end of that first season.
Retired from Sandro too.
“How did you deal with the pressure and uncertainty?” Eli asked now, drawing Sandro from a past he wasn’t keen to revisit.
“I kept my head down, played good hockey, and showed up where I was told to. Don’t worry, Eli. You’ll be fine once you’ve got your NHL legs under you.”
Eli didn’t seem any more impressed by that than Bennett had.
Sandro seriously needed to up his encouraging-words game, but it’d been so long since he’d been a rookie himself that he was struggling to figure out how to relate to Eli. He had to figure it out, though, because the alternative was leaving Eli out in the cold to flounder alone.
And that wasn’t what the Trailblazers’ family was about.