Chapter 1 #2
Ben knew how lucky he was. He was thirty-two years old and at the top of his game. Where most players were forced out of the league in their early thirties due to injuries, declining skills, or—in the worst cases—both, he was in the best shape of his life.
Between the Washington Capitals and the Philadelphia Flyers, he’d already had the good fortune of enjoying twelve very successful years in the NHL. If his luck held, he’d be able to add a few more to his tally—but this time, as a Challenger.
Unfortunately, no one’s luck was perfect.
What he didn’t share with anyone was how difficult it was getting to keep up with the physical demands of his job.
Every year, he had to add more cardio, stretching, and strength training to maintain his competitive edge.
It was almost scary how much more time and effort he had to put in to achieve even the slightest gains.
His enterprise had paid off thus far, but he knew it was only a matter of time before experience and sheer dint of will stopped being enough.
As much as he hated to admit it, nothing would prevent him from aging out of this game he’d dedicated his life to. It was simple biology.
If he continued to play smart and avoid injury, Ben felt confident he had a few more good years of play left in him, but probably not much more than that. Now was the time to strive for whatever career goals he had left.
It had felt like all his hard work had paid off when the Challengers organization had reached out to him last spring. Their offer had paled in comparison to what he’d been earning with the Flyers, but playing for his home team, in his home state, had appealed to him.
His agent had called him a sentimental moron for giving up his status as a free agent and even entertaining such a significant salary reduction, but Ben didn’t care. So what if he’d agreed to a substantial pay cut? Playing for Chicago was worth more to him than money.
The lone shortfall of his contract was that the team had only agreed to a one-year no-trade stipulation.
That meant Ben was only guaranteed one run at the Cup.
If he didn’t perform the way the team hoped, corporate would be able to trade him at the end of the season.
He might get another shot at hoisting Stanley, but it wouldn’t be for Chicago.
Ben took a steadying breath and shook away his doleful thoughts. He would do his best to make himself indispensable to his new team. If they didn’t win the Cup this year, maybe they would at least keep him on the roster and give him an additional year or two to try for it.
Knowing how good this year’s team was buoyed Ben’s confidence in the gamble he’d made by leaving Philly to play for Chicago.
McGuire was right; victory wouldn’t come without great effort, but the team did have what it took to bring the Cup home.
He just had to buckle down and be the playmaker the Challengers needed.
Focus re-established, Ben reached into his locker to pull out his city clothes. He took his shirt and pants off their hangers and set them on the bench. He shook his head when a trickle of water started to course down his face.
“Holy hell!” Richie, as John Richards was best known, shouted when Ben accidentally sprinkled him with water. “What did you do, shower in the polar ice caps? That water is freezing!”
Richie grabbed his own towel and proceeded to rub down the parts of himself not covered by clothing, as if he’d just emerged from glacial waters.
“It’s not that cold,” Ben chided. “And you’re not that wet.”
“Whatever, man,” Richie returned, shivering dramatically.
“I don’t need to ask whether you still subject yourself to that torture, but I’ll say it again: I don’t care how much you enjoyed our team trip to Finland.
You’re not Finnish. If you like the saunas and hot treatments, all the power to you, but for the love of God, give up the snow rolling and sub-zero dunking.
The Finns likely started the cold treatments because some long-dead fanatical dimwit thought he could better survive the fire licks of hell if he froze his balls off in the here and now. ”
Ben rolled his eyes at Richie’s theory. Far be it from Richie to entertain the possibility that some people might find the dramatic change in temperature invigorating, not to mention therapeutic.
Ben knew he did. He might not spend a lot of time in a heat-filled wooden box these days, but racing around the ice in full padding created its own kind of sauna.
Richie had played for the Flyers during Ben’s first few years with the team. Richie knew about Ben’s penchant for cold post-game showers because he’d been with him and some of their other teammates on the off-season trip where the practice had started.
When the team had returned to Philadelphia, Ben had taken the practice, or as much of it as he could, home with him. Since clean snow wasn’t always easy to come by in Philadelphia, Ben had settled for having a sauna installed in his apartment and taking cold showers afterward.
Changing his post-game showers from warm to cold had been a natural progression. Cold showers might not be the most exciting post-game ritual, but they felt good, so Ben had stuck with them.
“If I recall correctly,” Ben shot back, “you did a little bit of your own snow rolling in Finland.”
“Maybe,” Richie allowed, “but only because the hottest naked woman I’d ever seen invited me to do it with her.”
Ben resisted the urge to shake his head.
He and Richie might have developed a friendship over the years they’d both played for the Flyers, but Ben had never been able to understand Richie’s interest in casual hookups.
Maybe it was because of the way he’d been raised, but the idea of sleeping with a woman whose name he barely knew made something inside him recoil.
A muffled bang sounded from the back of the locker room, causing both men to look in the direction of the closed door of Dodds’ office. If Ben had to hazard a guess, he’d predict another inanimate object had just felt the force of their coach’s displeasure.
“So, what do you think of Coach McGuire?” Richie asked with a jerk of his chin. It was clear Richie didn’t feel the need to ask about Ben’s opinion of their head coach.
“He seems like a nice guy,” Ben observed. “Fair. Decent. I like him.”
Richie nodded with great feeling. “Thank fuck he’s part of the coaching staff. Could you imagine if he wasn’t around to temper Jimmy Boy’s hotheaded ass?”
Ben knew Coach Dodds was revered as one of the most skilled tacticians in the NHL.
He could outwit other coaches with the barest of efforts, keeping them guessing with his every move.
Unfortunately, even though Dodds might qualify as a member of Hockey Mensa, he was also a shoo-in for Assholes Anonymous.
It was a testament to Coach Dodds’ intelligence that he was still coaching.
Now that Ben had spent time in his company, he knew how considerable it must be to offset his fractious demeanor.
Ben turned when he heard a knock on the locker room door.
He watched as Alexei Volkov, an unassuming Russian whom Ben had rarely seen without a book in his hands, moved to open it.
He never made it. No sooner had his hand raised to grasp the handle than he was unceremoniously pushed out of the way by the much larger Eric Cassidy.
Nowhere but in the world of professional sports, Ben mused, could the six-foot-one-inch muscle-bound forward be considered small.
Beside him, Richie groaned. “Please tell me that isn’t the press. I really don’t want to deal with the press tonight. Some things are just too embarrassing to talk about.”
Ben wanted to assure his teammate they hadn’t played that badly, but he’d never been a good liar.
Instead of making things worse with platitudes, Ben focused his attention on looking beyond the locker room door.
If there was a reporter on the other side of the door, he’d rather know about it in advance.
Not that a minute’s warning was likely to do him much good, but it was better than nothing.
Ben’s curiosity grew as he watched Cassidy open the door just wide enough to poke his head through. From Ben’s vantage point, it looked like Cassidy was trying to block the knocker’s view into the room.
Cassidy conversed with the knocker for a couple of minutes before pressing the door shut. Although his eyes never left him, Ben was unprepared for the ear-splitting whistle that erupted from Cassidy’s lips when he drew his fingers to his mouth.
“What the hell, Cassidy?” team captain Kevin Phillips accused as he lobbed a hockey glove at him from the opposite end of the locker room.
“Are you trying to make my ears bleed? We didn’t all grow up on a cattle ranch.
My ears can’t take that decibel.” A few other team members muttered their agreement.
Cassidy dismissed their criticism with an unapologetic shrug of his shoulders. “I know I might be asking the impossible,” he said with a dramatic sigh, “but try to make yourselves presentable, will you?”
“Why?” Kyle Knight, a rookie who had barely been on the team for longer than Ben, asked. “Is it your girlfriend? Are you afraid she might see something she doesn’t see at home and decide to dump you for someone better?”
Cassidy treated the rookie to an exaggerated eye roll.
Knight was a first-round draft pick with some of the most impressive puck handling skills Ben had ever seen. Perhaps that explained how the kid felt confident enough to goad a veteran player when he was still so new to the team. Or maybe it was simply the folly of youth. Time would tell.
“You know damn well I don’t have a girlfriend, rookie,” Cassidy chastised. “And, if I did, she certainly wouldn’t have any reason to go looking elsewhere.”