Chapter 6 Declan
DECLAN
Jamie Kowalski makes a no-look, backhand saucer pass through two defenders in the third period of a Tuesday night game against Carolina, and the pass is so good that I write "how" in my notebook and underline it twice.
The puck leaves his stick blade at an angle that should not be physically possible given his body position (weight on outside edge, momentum carrying him laterally, two defenders bracketing the lane).
It rises, rotates, floats over the first defender's stick, clears the second defender's shin pad, and lands flat on the tape of Jonah Park's blade at the far post. Jonah doesn't even need to adjust. He redirects it into the net like he was expecting the puck to arrive exactly there, which, based on the celebration, he was not.
The play is eleven seconds long. It contains approximately four decisions that a normal hockey player would need two seconds each to make and that Jamie Kowalski appears to make simultaneously, as if the decision-making process in his brain runs in parallel rather than in sequence.
In the post-game scrum, I ask about it.
"The saucer pass in the third. Walk me through the read. Where did you see the lane?"
Something happens. The kid who gives monosyllabic answers to monosyllabic questions straightens. His shoulders drop from their habitual position (up, guarded, defensive) to a lower, more natural setting. His eyes, which typically address the floor during press conferences, come up and find mine.
"The lane wasn't there when I picked up the puck," he says.
"It opened during the carry. Their D-man was cheating toward the boards because he expected me to go wide, which is what I'd done twice in the second period, so he was playing the pattern.
But I felt Jonah moving to the far post. Not saw.
Felt. The weight shift on the ice changes the sound, and I could hear him cutting across.
So I threw it where I knew he'd be in a half-second, not where he was. "
He talks for ninety seconds. Full sentences.
Animated hands. He describes the biomechanics of the saucer (the wrist angle, the blade position, the follow-through that gives the puck its spin) with the enthusiasm of a person who loves the subject so much that the love temporarily overrides the caution.
The other reporters write down the quotes. I write down the quotes and the posture change and the eye contact and the way his voice sounds when he's talking about something he understands, which is lower and steadier and more present than his podium voice.
I use the quote in my game recap. "Kowalski said the lane opened during the carry and he felt Park's movement through the sound of the ice.
'I threw it where I knew he'd be in a half-second, not where he was.
'" The quote is good. The kind of quote that makes a game recap more than a summary.
The kind of quote that suggests the player has a brain as interesting as his skating.
After the scrum, the hallway.
The same hallway. The same fluorescent lights.
The same floor wax. But the hallway has acquired a quality over the past three weeks that it did not have before, which is the quality of being a place where Jamie Kowalski and I occasionally end up at the same time, walking in the same direction, in the ten-minute window after the scrum disperses and before the building empties.
Tonight, the window opens.
He's walking toward the exit. I'm walking toward the media room.
Our paths converge at the junction where the players' corridor meets the press corridor, a T-intersection that is, architecturally, the most unremarkable point in the building and has become, through repetition, the place where I am most alert.
"That saucer pass," I say, because I have something to say about it and because saying it feels more natural than the silence that is the alternative. "The way you described hearing Park's movement. That's proprioception, right? Spatial awareness through non-visual input."
He stops walking. Turns. Looks at me.
"You know what proprioception is."
"I read a paper on it last year. Perceptual-motor coupling in elite athletes.
The idea that high-level players process environmental information through channels that aren't visual.
Some of them are auditory, some are kinesthetic.
It's why great playmakers can make passes they shouldn't be able to see. "
He stares at me. The stare is not the blank stare of the podium. It's the stare of a person who has just been spoken to in a language he didn't expect to encounter outside his own head.
"Nobody's ever asked me about that," he says. "The hearing thing. Coaches tell me I have great vision but it's not vision. It's something else. It's like the ice talks to me."
"That's a great line. Can I use it?"
He almost smiles. The almost is the important part. The corners of his mouth move, the muscles engage, the expression begins its formation, and then a secondary process intervenes (the filtering, the caution, the checkpoint) and the smile is arrested mid-assembly.
"Yeah," he says. "You can use it."
We talk. Three minutes. Not an interview.
Not a source interaction. Two people standing in a hallway talking about proprioception and ice acoustics and the way a puck sounds different at different velocities and the way a goalie (Mars, specifically) can apparently track pucks by sound when the visual is screened.
Jamie is animated. His hands move. His voice has the cadence of a person who is enjoying the conversation, which is a cadence I have not heard from him before and which is distinct from his media cadence the way a live performance is distinct from a recording. There's a vitality in it. An aliveness.
Then he smiles. Not the almost-smile. A real one.
Full. The checkpoint fails or is overridden or simply doesn't fire, and the smile arrives on his face unfiltered and unedited, and it changes his face entirely.
The guardedness dissolves. The age drops.
He looks, for one unguarded second, like a nineteen-year-old who is happy.
I notice the smile. I notice that I notice the smile. I notice that the noticing produces a response in my chest that is not the response of a journalist cataloguing a source's behavior but the response of a person seeing another person be, for one moment, uncomplicated and beautiful and free.
"I should go," I say, because I should.
"Yeah," he says. "Me too."
"Good game tonight."
"Thanks." He pauses. "And thanks for the question. The proprioception one. It was a good question."
He walks away. I walk away. The hallway is empty again. The fluorescent lights hum their indifferent hum.
I get in my car. I sit behind the wheel.
I do not start the engine for two minutes.
The two minutes are not productive. The two minutes are a man sitting in a parking garage with his hands at ten and two and his journalist brain saying "that was a source interaction, nothing more" and another part of his brain, a part that does not wear glasses and does not carry a notebook and does not give a damn about professional ethics, saying "he smiled and the smile was real and you saw it and it mattered. "
I start the car. I drive home. I write the game recap. The recap is professional and thorough and includes the proprioception quote, which is an excellent quote, and makes no mention of the smile.
The smile is not relevant to the game recap.
The smile is not relevant to anything except the growing, inconvenient, professionally dangerous recognition that Jamie Kowalski is becoming a person to me and not just a source, and the distance between those two categories is the distance between a career and a catastrophe.
I close my laptop. I take off my glasses. I rub my eyes.
I put the glasses back on. The glasses don't help.