Chapter 10 Nate - March 2018, Philadelphia
The Calder trophy race stopped being about hockey somewhere in early March.
By then it had become a referendum on the country.
Pedigree against grit. The academy against the plant floor.
Whether the sport rewards the right things.
There were columns, and a segment where a man drew a diagram.
Neither of the two actual human beings involved was ever asked about any of it, which is standard, but it was strange to watch a thing with your name on it float away from you like that.
At one in the morning in the second week of March I was on my couch with a panel show on and a laptop open.
"He's a wonderful, wonderful story," said a man in a checked jacket. "But there's a ceiling on that game. That's an effort game. You can't run that engine for fifteen years."
"That's what Grant Sinclair said in July," said the woman next to him.
"And Grant was right in July."
I stopped the show and opened a document. I wrote six hundred words.
It was a letter to the network, addressed to their coordinating producer by name.
I made the case that Riley Kowalski had the highest hockey IQ of anyone in our draft class, and that describing him as an effort player was not a compliment with a limitation attached but a factual error.
Then I proved it. Controlled entry rate.
Entries with possession versus dumps, split by score state.
His numbers shorthanded, which nobody looks at.
Two specific sequences from our own games in which he read a breakout of ours before it existed, with time stamps.
I signed it as the person who had to game plan against him four times a year. I finished after three in the morning and I did not send it.
At eight I called my uncle.
"You want to defend Riley Kowalski," Uncle Marsh said. "On a network your father works for."
"I want to correct a factual error, and that's not what it's about."
"Nate." I could hear him walking. "I'm going to say one thing and then I'll listen to whatever you want to say back. Lane discipline."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning you're twenty-two, you're in a two-horse race for the biggest individual award of your career, and you're proposing to spend the last month of it publicly advocating for the other horse.
There is no read of that letter that doesn't have you in it.
Not one." A door closed on his end. "It's a beautiful letter.
Print it and frame it, but don't mail it. "
He was right. He was always right about the thing he was talking about and never about the thing underneath it.
"Fine."
"Good. Now, separately…"
"If this is about the appearances thing… No!"
"It's a program, and it's six evenings a year, and this year it's easier because you'll be at all of these events anyway. I've got three names. They're all lovely, they're all busy, nobody's asking anybody to fall in love."
"No, Uncle Marsh." And it came out with about four times the force I intended, loud enough that I heard it come back off my own kitchen wall.
There was a pause on his end that went on slightly too long.
"All right," he said, pleasant as ever. "It's there when you want it."
I hung up and closed the laptop without saving. The letter died that morning.
Ginny Okafor, rotated my bag over for the playoff run in the first week of April. Regular season bag out, playoff bag in, everything transferred. And in the side pocket of the new bag, taped down on two sides so it wouldn't move, was a UMD keychain.
She did not mention it. She handed me the bag and said, "Your left skate's got a bad rivet, I'm doing it Thursday," and walked off.
Angelo's campaign entered a new phase and produced a physiotherapist named Perpetua.
"That's a saint's name, Nate. She's a saint and she's got hands like a bricklayer. You'd love her."
"No, Ange."
"You're going to die alone in an apartment with the tag still on the pillow."
My mother's shipments went from one tie a month to two.
That was a change in the record. I noticed it and did not ask about it. Two ties per box now, one normal and one slightly ridiculous.
That month's ridiculous one had tiny Zambonis on it.
Riley: I score the tie 9/10
Nate: Why only nine?
Riley: it's a nine! that is the highest score ever awarded by this office
Nate: What is a ten?
Riley: there is no ten
Nate: There has to be a ten. That's how scales work. That's the entire idea of a scale.
Riley: not this one. this one goes to nine and then it stops and you live with it like the rest of us. goodnight, Sinclair
In our room, at the end of March, one of our veterans got going about Riley over a card game.
"He's a one-year wonder," he said. "That's a shooting percentage year. You watch. Nineteen percent always comes down, and then he's a guy who hits people."
I was two stalls over taping a stick. I did not look up.
"His five on five shooting percentage is eleven point four," I said.
"The nineteen is all situations, it's inflated by an empty netter and two deflections.
Expected goals says he's outperforming by about four and a half, which is normal for a guy who gets that many entries with possession.
His controlled entry rate is fifty-eight point one, which is second in the league behind one guy in Winnipeg.
And he plays two and a half minutes a night shorthanded as a rookie forward, which nobody does, because coaches don't trust rookies to read a kill. "
The room went a bit quiet.
"So the shooting comes down," I said, "and he's still a top line player, because the shooting isn't what he is."
I put the tape down and did the heel knob with my thumb.
Somebody at the back said, "Jesus, Sinclair scouts like his old man."
Everybody laughed. It was a friendly thing. It was the correct thing to say, and it got the room back, and it was funny.
It sat in my chest wrong for two days and I did not do the inventory on why.
Big Jack drove down on the first Tuesday in April and ordered the same sandwich he'd been ordering for years.
"You look better than last month."
"I feel fine, grandpa."
"You don't look fine, you look better." He pointed a finger at me. "Those are different words. I chose them."
He ate for a while. Then he put his sandwich down and wiped his hands on the napkin, taking his time with it, and said, without any lead in at all, "What's the Kowalski kid like?"
I looked up.
"You've played him all year," he said. "Everybody in America has an opinion about him and every one of them came off a television. What's he like when the cameras are off?"
I gave him a scouting report. That's what I told myself I was doing.
"He doesn't watch the puck," I said. "That's the first thing. Everybody watches the puck. He watches hips. He'll bait you into a lane he's already given up on and stand there looking bored while you take it, and by the time you understand what happened you're the wrong side of him and he's gone."
"Hm."
"His stick is always a half second earlier than it looks on television.
Always. You can't feel that from a couch.
" I turned my water glass around. "And he talks the entire game.
Every shift, start to finish. About a third of it is genuinely funny.
He'll say something to you on the wall at a faceoff that makes you want to kill him and also makes you laugh into your own mouthguard, and then the puck's gone past you, because that was the point. "
"That's a lot of scouting," Big Jack said, "for a man who plays him four times a year."
"He's the only player in the league who's ever made me feel like somebody was reading me instead of watching me." I said it before I'd decided to. "He'd be embarrassed if he knew how good he was. Which is a strange thing to say about the loudest man in the sport, and it's true."
I talked for a long time.
My grandfather did not interrupt once.
When I stopped he sat back and looked at me and didn't say anything. Then the waitress came and he ordered pie. He ate two bites of it and asked me about my ankle.
There was a silence in the middle of that lunch with a door in it. Both of us saw the door, and neither of us went near it.
The season series finished in my building on the 9th of April.
One goal game. It was a war. Riley got hit twice by our number six and got up both times and said something both times. I stripped him at the top of the circle in the last minute, and we took it three to two, which put the head to head at two wins each.
Even. It started even in Chicago and it ended even.
Late that night I drove an hour west with him following in a rental.
There was a rink out past Downingtown with a roof full of pigeons and a snack bar that hadn't opened since the last recession. I'd found it myself, in February, on a day off, by driving around with a list. I told myself I was getting out of the city.
The kid working the desk was about nineteen and did not look up from his phone. There was cash, a notebook, and two names in it.
We did not bet on anything.
We had a whole system by then. We had a treaty and a code and an economy, and we got on a fresh sheet of ice at midnight in an empty building and did not put anything on anything.
We just skated.
Slow laps, no pucks, for an hour. Sometimes side by side and sometimes not. He did the thing where he skated backward in front of you for no reason.
"You're going the wrong way," I said.
"I'm supervising."
"You're going to hit the net."
"I know exactly where the net is, Sinclair. I've known where the net is since I was four." He hit the net about a second and a half later, went down, lay there on his back with his arms out, and did not get up for a while. "It moved."
"It's bolted to the ice."
"It moved," he said, to the roof, "and there were witnesses, and one of them is a liar."
At one point he flicked a glove at my head and missed and had to go get it.
Neither of us said one word about the Calder trophy, which was going to be announced in June, which was the only thing anybody in either of our lives had talked to either of us about for months.
That sheet of ice was the one place in the country the race could not get into. We both knew it, and both of us called it cardio.
Afterward in the parking lot, two cars nose to nose with the engines running and the heaters going and both driver's doors open, we were sitting sideways with our feet on the asphalt.
He was retying a skate lace he'd taken off for no reason. He did that with his hands when he was about to say something.
"Hey," he said. "If I lose the trophy, I'm glad it's you."
I turned my head.
"I'm not saying I'm going to lose it. I think I'm going to win it.
I think the voters are cowards, I think you had a better April, and I think it's going to come down to a handful of votes and a couple of guys in Alberta who don't like my haircut.
" He wound the lace around his fingers. "But if it's you. I'm glad it's you. That's all."
Nobody bet him for that.
That is explicitly not how it works. We built an entire machine specifically so that neither of us would ever have to do that, and he sat in a rental car with the door open and just handed it to me.
Which meant I owed him. Not by any rule we'd written. By the only rule that actually ran us.
"Last July, the night my father did the segment… Effort not talent."
He went very still.
"I was in my apartment, and I watched it, and I had to go stand outside. I couldn't sit down. I stood on the balcony in the heat until my heart came down, because I was so ashamed I couldn't be in a room with a television in it."
"Nate."
"And then I got your number out of my wallet.
" I was looking at the snack bar, because it was easier than looking at him.
"The napkin. And I drafted an apology to you four times.
A long one, a short one, a funny one, and then a one-line one that just said I don't agree with him.
" My hands were on the wheel and I don't know when they got there.
"And I didn't send any of them, because there was no version of it that wasn't me telling you something about myself. So I put the napkin back."
He didn't say anything.
"You'd met me for three days," I said. "In April. And I stood on a balcony about you in July."
I looked over. He was sitting completely still with a lace wrapped around two fingers, staring straight ahead through his own windshield at a chain link fence, and his mouth was shut, and Riley Kowalski's mouth was never shut.
"You still breathing over there?" I said, and then, when nothing came back, "You sure?"
"Yeah," he said.
That's it. That's the entire thing he said, twice, from a man who has never in his life used one word where forty would do.
He got in his car and shut the door and pulled out. I sat there for a minute, and then I followed him back toward the interstate for a while.
He drove the whole way about ten under the limit. I could see his tail lights ahead of me, dead steady, both hands on the wheel, like a man leaving church.
Both of us went out in the first round. Us in five, them in six, four days apart, which meant the no-playoffs clause got voided before it was ever once tested.
The finalists came out in the middle of May. Three names, two of which mattered. Vegas, in June.
I packed on a Sunday.
I had a rack in the closet and the ties hung left to right by how often I wore them, and at the far right end, by itself, with nothing next to it, was the navy one with the little lighthouses.
I hadn't worn it since Chicago. Fourteen months.
My hand went to it and stopped. I stood there with my hand an inch away from it, and then I took the one next to it, a plain charcoal, and put that in the bag and zipped it.