Chapter 2 Declan
DECLAN
The press box at the Atlanta Reapers' practice facility is a glass room suspended above the ice, and from up here the game looks like a language.
My name is Declan Osei. I'm twenty-seven years old.
I grew up in East Atlanta, moved here from Accra when I was seven, got my journalism degree from UGA, and have spent every day since graduation trying to get to exactly this chair in exactly this press box covering exactly this team.
The Reapers are the story. Four openly queer couples on one roster.
An expansion team that went from league joke to playoff contender in three seasons.
A culture that the sports world can't stop writing about and can't quite explain.
Every major outlet has done the Reapers piece.
ESPN. Sports Illustrated. The Players' Tribune.
They all fly in, spend three days, write the same article about courage and visibility, and fly out.
I'm not flying out. I'm here every day. And the daily view, the one you only get from sustained proximity, is the one that reveals the real story, which is not about courage.
The real story is about how thirty men learned to treat each other's full humanity as ordinary, and how that ordinariness changed the way they play hockey.
I watch practice through the glass. The couples are visible if you know what to look for, and I know what to look for because I've spent two weeks studying the team's dynamics the way I study everything: systematically, patiently, with a notebook and a pen and the specific attention to detail that my UGA professors called "obsessive" and that I prefer to call "thorough. "
Cole Briggs and Mikhail Volkov on the blue line.
They communicate without words, their bodies speaking a shorthand built over three seasons of playing together and longer than that of loving each other.
Cole shifts left, Mik adjusts right, the gap between them stays constant as if measured by an instrument.
On the bench during a water break, Cole says something that makes Mik's face do a thing that I've learned is the Volkov equivalent of laughter: a slight loosening of the jaw, an almost imperceptible softening around the eyes.
If you blinked, you'd miss it. I don't blink.
Wes Chen, the former enforcer, now playing regular shifts on the second line.
The transformation is one of the stories I want to write.
A man who was paid to fight, who has remade himself into a two-way forward through sheer will and what I suspect is an extraordinary amount of pain he doesn't talk about.
During a break, the equipment manager (Luca Moretti, Italian-American, visibly incapable of silence) passes a thermos through the bench door.
Wes takes it without looking. The not-looking is the intimacy.
The thermos transfer is so routine it has become invisible to everyone except a journalist in a glass room who is looking for exactly these gestures.
Jonah Park, the center, running drills with a grin that suggests he has never experienced a negative emotion.
His partner, Ren Briggs (Cole's younger brother, which is a family dynamic I want to explore in the feature series), isn't at the facility today, but Jonah is wearing a bracelet that I've noticed he touches between shifts, and the touching is a tell.
Mars Santos, the starting goalie, talking to his left goalpost during a water break. I've been told this is a regular occurrence. The goalie talks to his posts. The posts, apparently, are good listeners.
And the rookie.
Number 91. Jamie Kowalski. 4th overall pick. The biggest story on this roster this season, and the hardest one to get to.
On the ice, the kid is electric. There is no other word.
His skating speed makes the other players look like they're moving through something thicker than air.
The crossovers are so clean they seem to violate physics, the blade transitions happening at a pace that my eye can barely track.
When he gets the puck in open ice, the acceleration is visible and visceral, the kind of speed that makes press boxes lean forward and scouts start recalculating their rankings.
Off the ice, he's a ghost.
I watched him at the media scrum yesterday. Twenty reporters in a semicircle, cameras, microphones, the full machinery of sports journalism pointed at a nineteen-year-old in a backwards cap who looked like he was being interrogated under stadium lighting.
"How was your first practice?"
"Good."
"What's been the biggest adjustment?"
"The speed."
"How are your teammates treating you?"
"Good."
Three questions. Three answers. Eleven total words. The media handler thanked the press and Jamie was gone, walking away with the relieved stride of a man who has just survived something he'd rather not repeat.
But I noticed something. In the half-second before each answer, there was a pause.
Not the pause of a person searching for words.
The pause of a person deciding which words to withhold.
The monosyllables weren't empty. They were strategic.
Jamie Kowalski was not a kid who had nothing to say.
He was a kid who had something to say and was choosing not to say it.
The gap between the ice version and the podium version is the story. The gap is always the story. You learn this as a journalist: the interesting thing is never the performance. The interesting thing is the distance between the performance and the person.
I write in my notebook: "Kowalski, more there than he shows. Feature potential."
After the scrum, the hallway. I'm walking toward the media room to file my practice notes.
The corridor is institutional and fluorescent and smells like floor wax and athletic tape.
Players filter past in various states of post-practice dishevelment, heading toward the parking lot.
I'm looking at my phone, scanning the wire for any league news I need to incorporate into my report.
I look up. Jamie Kowalski is walking toward me.
Not toward me specifically. Toward the exit, which happens to be the direction I'm facing. He's in a T-shirt and joggers and his hair is damp from the shower and falling across his forehead, and his eyes are on the floor in the way that his eyes are always on the floor when he's not on the ice.
He looks up. Our eyes meet.
The moment is maybe half a second. Not even a full second.
A fraction of time that should be unremarkable, the kind of incidental eye contact that happens a hundred times a day between strangers in hallways.
But his stride hitches. Not a stop. A micro-hesitation, the deceleration of a step that started at one pace and finished at a slightly different one.
A journalist notices this because a journalist notices changes in pattern.
A civilian would not have seen it. I see it.
His eyes are blue. This is an observation, not an assessment.
Journalists observe. His eyes are blue and slightly wide and carrying something that I cannot identify from a hallway distance and that I do not have enough context to interpret.
He looks away. His stride resumes. He passes me. The hallway continues to be a hallway.
I walk to the media room. I sit down. I open my laptop. I stare at the screen for longer than is professionally efficient, and then I write my practice notes, which are thorough and well-structured and make no mention of the hallway or the eye contact or the blue.
Journalists observe. We catalog. We do not interpret without evidence, and a micro-hesitation in a hallway is not evidence.
It's a data point. A single, uncorroborated, almost certainly meaningless data point that I am filing in the back of my mind the way I file every observation: automatically, comprehensively, and (in this specific instance) with a level of attention that I will not be examining.
I finish my practice notes. I send them to my editor. I pack my bag. In the hallway, on my way out, I pass the spot where the eye contact happened. The spot is empty. The hallway is just a hallway. The fluorescent lights hum.
I adjust my glasses and walk to my car.
The glasses are new. Well, not new. I've worn glasses since I was twelve.
But the frames are new, a pair of matte black rectangles that my friend Priya helped me select because my old frames, according to Priya, "made you look like a librarian who had given up on joy.
" These frames are professional. Serious.
The frames of a man who covers the most important hockey team in America and who is taken seriously in press boxes and media scrums and editorial meetings.
The frames are also, if I'm being honest about their function, a barrier.
A thing I wear between myself and the world that says: I am working.
I am here in a professional capacity. The things I see are material for stories, not material for feelings.
The glasses are the on switch. When the glasses are on, the journalist is on.
The person behind the journalist is not relevant.
I get in my car. I take off my glasses. I rub my eyes. I put the glasses back on.
The person behind the journalist is not relevant.
The person behind the journalist is thinking about blue eyes in a hallway, which is a thought the journalist will not be writing in any notebook.
I start the car. I drive home. I have a game recap to write and a feature outline to develop and a career that I have spent three years building, and the career is the thing that matters, and the career requires objectivity, and objectivity requires distance, and distance requires these glasses and this notebook and the practiced refusal to let an observation become anything more than what it is.
A data point.
I'm sure that's all it is.