Chapter Three #2
“For a while there...” Sundberg looked toward the far corner of the locker room, searching for the right words. “Everything felt heavy for him. Every goal, every practice, every question. You could tell he was carrying last season around with him, even when nobody wanted to talk about it.”
The answer was more personal than anything McLean had offered. Tessa wrote it down carefully, aware that Sundberg was trusting her with an observation about a teammate rather than simply praising his work ethic.
“And now?”
“Now he's chirping guys in practice again.”
She blinked. “Chirping?”
Sundberg's smile returned. “Believe it or not, Belly's one of the funniest guys in this room.”
Tessa almost laughed.
The funniest guy in the room?
She glanced toward the hallway where Belov had disappeared less than ten minutes earlier. The man who had barely looked at her while answering one question and then accused her of pretending to care about his perspective apparently spent the rest of his day making teammates laugh.
She would have bet almost anything that wasn't true.
Sundberg seemed to read the disbelief on her face.
“You wouldn't know it,” he said.
“No,” Tessa admitted. “I wouldn't.”
“When Belly likes you, he's impossible to shut up.”
Something about the phrasing stayed with her.
When Belly likes you.
The implication was clear enough. Whatever version of Matvei Belov his teammates saw, Tessa hadn't been granted access to it. Neither, apparently, had most of the media.
She thanked Sundberg and stepped away from the stall, flipping back through the pages of her notebook as she walked. The notes were messier now than they had been an hour earlier, with arrows connecting thoughts and phrases squeezed between questions she'd never had the chance to ask.
Enjoying hockey again.
Quicker feet.
Smiling more.
Carrying last season around.
One of the funniest guys in the room.
None of it fit the picture she'd built in her head before entering the locker room.
The articles she had read described an aloof, difficult man who treated every interview as an inconvenience. His coach and captain had described someone obsessive about his craft, deeply affected by the previous season and noticeably happier after spending the summer rediscovering the game.
Both versions could be true.
Tessa stopped just outside the dressing room doors and leaned against the hallway wall for a moment. The media traffic had begun to thin as reporters headed back toward the elevators, but she remained where she was, reading through the notes again.
She still didn't have a usable quote from Belov.
Normally, that would have bothered her.
Actually, it did bother her.
A good story shouldn't be built entirely around other people explaining its central figure. She wanted his voice in the piece, even if it consisted of only two or three sentences. Without it, there would always be an empty space at the center of the story.
But not enough of an empty space to kill it.
The more she considered what McLean and Sundberg had told her, the less important Belov's refusal became.
His answers probably would have been guarded and generic anyway.
The people who knew him best had provided something far more interesting than the routine training camp clichés she'd expected to collect.
For the first time since he'd walked away, Tessa wasn't thinking about the interview she'd blown.
She was thinking about the disconnect.
The goaltender described in years of media coverage and the man described by his teammates sounded like two completely different people.
One was cold, arrogant and perpetually annoyed.
The other was funny, relentless and beginning to enjoy his work again after a season that had nearly overwhelmed him.
That wasn't a problem with the story.
That was the story.
Tessa tucked her notebook beneath her arm and headed toward the elevator.
The doors opened almost immediately, and she rode back to the press level with several other reporters discussing which prospects would survive the first round of cuts.
Nobody asked how the interview had gone.
Nobody seemed particularly interested in the fact that Belov had dismissed her.
By the time the elevator doors opened upstairs, the media workroom had settled into its familiar rhythm. Fingers hammered across keyboards. Phones vibrated against desks. Someone near the back argued with an editor about whether a European prospect's name required an accent mark.
Tessa returned to Frank Donnelly's old chair, placed her notebook beside the keyboard and opened a blank document.
The cursor blinked against an empty white page.
For a moment, she typed the working headline she'd planned the night before.
Can Matvei Belov bounce back?
She stared at it.
The question felt too simple now. It reduced the story to statistics and outcomes when everything she'd learned downstairs suggested the more interesting change had already happened.
She deleted it and began again.
Inside Belov's reset: Why the Convoy believe their star goalie is poised for a rebound
The headline wasn't perfect.
Neither had the morning been.
Tessa opened the statistical database on one side of her screen and arranged her notes beside the keyboard.
She began with the previous season, laying out the decline without dramatizing it.
The save percentage below .900. The stretch in January when Belov lost the crease.
The lingering questions surrounding the knee injury.
Then she moved into the summer.
McLean's explanation about quieter feet and restored instincts gave the story its hockey foundation. Sundberg's comments gave it weight beyond mechanics. Belov wasn't simply moving better. He was lighter, happier and more recognizable to the people who shared the room with him every day.
The words came more easily than she'd expected.
She still felt the absence of his voice each time she reached a place where a quote from him should have gone.
But rather than force the few words he'd given her into the story, she left them out.
Winning added nothing. Using it simply because it was the only direct answer she had would make the piece weaker, and she refused to build a lead around a quote he clearly hadn't intended to become one.
As Tessa worked, the noise of the media room faded into the background.
The empty document gradually filled with paragraphs, quotes and transitions.
She checked every statistic twice, listened back to the interviews to make sure she'd captured the wording correctly and rewrote the lead until the story began with the summer rather than the failure that preceded it.
When she finally leaned back from the screen, almost an hour had passed.
She read the piece from beginning to end.
It wasn't the story she'd expected to write when she arrived at Atlantic Centre.
It was better.
A flicker of movement beyond the windows drew her attention away from the screen. Several players had returned to the ice for an informal session, scattered across the surface in small groups. Some worked on shooting. Others moved slowly through passing drills without coaches directing them.
Tessa found Belov almost immediately.
He was alone in his crease at the far end of the rink, taking shot after shot from one of the development coaches. Most of the other players had already begun drifting toward the tunnel, but Belov remained set, pushing across the crease and resetting after each attempt.
One puck came toward his glove.
He caught it cleanly.
The next hit his pad and kicked toward the corner.
Another struck his blocker.
The coach gathered the rebounds and began again.
There was no audience beyond a few reporters working upstairs. No cameras positioned against the glass. No reason to make the saves look impressive.
Belov didn't know she was watching.
He didn't look toward the press level once.
Tessa rested her fingertips against the keyboard and studied him through the glass. The repetition looked less like punishment than routine. Every save led directly into the next, as though there was always one more movement to refine and one more puck he needed to stop before he could leave.
Maybe years of coverage had been right about one thing.
Matvei Belov really did hate reporters.
Tessa wasn't nearly as convinced that he hated hockey.