Chapter 22 Team Captain #2
Benji’s former coach, David, used to say that Benji would be late for his own funeral.
If his teammates didn’t check that number 16 was out on the ice, he could easily be lying asleep in the locker room when the game started.
Sometimes he missed practices, sometimes he showed up high or drunk.
But today he arrives at the rink on time, gets changed at once, and goes straight out onto the ice.
Elisabeth Zackell turns toward him as if she’s surprised that a hockey player has turned up for hockey practice.
Benji takes a deep breath and apologizes, the way you learn to do if you’ve big sisters who hit hard: “Sorry I didn’t come to practice yesterday. ”
Zackell shrugs. “I don’t care if you come to practice.”
Benji notices that there are five thick ropes lying on the ice, several yards long.
Zackell is holding a paintball gun in her hand: the hardware store in Beartown didn’t have any, but the one in Hed managed to find one in the storeroom.
A scattering of small paint spatters on the plexiglass at one corner of the rink indicates that Zackell has already practiced firing the hard little pellets of paint.
“What are you doing?” Benji asks, baffled.
“What are you doing here so early?” Zackell counters.
Benji looks at the time. He’s right on time for the practice, but the only other players on the ice are Amat and Bobo. He grunts, “My sister says you’re thinking of making me team captain. That’s a bad idea.”
Zackell nods without blinking. “Okay.”
Benji waits for her to go on. She doesn’t. So he asks, “Why me?”
“Because you’re a coward,” Zackell says.
Benji has been called many things in his life, but never that.
“You’re full of crap.”
She nods. “Maybe. But I’m giving you the thing you’re most terrified of: responsibility for other people.”
Benji eyes darken. Hers are expressionless. Amat is standing behind them, his skates twitching with restlessness, until he eventually loses patience and blurts out, “Practice is supposed to start now! Why don’t you go and get the others from the locker room?”
Zackell shrugs her shoulders nonchalantly. “Me? Why would I care about that?”
Benji squints at her, increasingly frustrated. He looks at the time again. Then he leaves the ice.
A lot of the older players in the Beartown locker room are only half changed when Benji walks in.
“Practice is starting,” he says.
Some people can make themselves heard without raising their voice. Even so, some of the older players misinterpret Benji at first and reply, “She doesn’t care if we’re on time or not!”
Benji’s reply is brief, but the silence that follows it is deafening: “I care.”
Power is the ability to get other people to do what you want. Every adult man in that locker room could have rendered the eighteen-year-old powerless by remaining seated on the benches. But he gives them thirty seconds, and when he walks back to the ice, they get up and follow him.
That’s not when he becomes their team captain. That’s just when they all—including him—realize that he already is.
Benji doesn’t want to lead his team, but he does so anyway.
William Lyt is over in Hed, and he wants nothing more than to be told to lead his team, but he isn’t.
It isn’t fair, but sports isn’t fair. The player who spends the most hours practicing doesn’t always end up being the best, and the player who deserves to be made team captain isn’t always the most suitable.
It’s often said that hockey isn’t a contemplative sport: “We just count goals.” That isn’t strictly true, of course.
Hockey counts everything, it’s full of statistics, yet it’s impossible to predict.
It’s governed too much by things that aren’t visible.
One term that is often used to describe talented players, for instance, is “leadership qualities,” even though this is an utterly immeasurable concept seeing that it is based on things that can’t be taught: charisma, authority, love.
When William Lyt was younger and Kevin Erdahl was made team captain, William heard the coach say to Kevin, “You can force people to obey you, but you can never force them to follow you. If you want them to play for you, they have to love you.”
Perhaps no one loved Kevin more than William did, and he did all he could to get that love reciprocated.
He was unfailingly loyal, even after the rape; he followed Kevin to Hed Hockey when Kevin’s best friend, Benji, stayed with Beartown.
William gathered his guys and beat up both Amat, who had snitched on Kevin, and Bobo, who tried to defend Amat.
When Kevin suddenly disappeared, William stayed at Hed, disappointed but still faithful.
He has the same coach he had in Beartown, David: it was he who persuaded William and almost all the other old players to switch clubs.
Not by defending Kevin but by using the simplest argument that sports can offer: “We’re only interested in hockey.
Not politics. What happens off the ice stays off the ice. ”
William believed him, and deep down he hoped that now that Kevin and Benji were both off the team, maybe David would finally recognize William’s loyalty. But there was no show of gratitude, not a single word of encouragement. He is still being ignored.
So when William comes into the locker room today and opens his locker and sees what someone has left in the bottom of it, things happen that no statistics can measure.
There’s a cigarette lighter lying there.
The same sort that filled William’s mailbox back in the summer, the same sort Leo had on the beach.
At the same time, one of his teammates comes through the door and says, “Hey, Lyt, have you heard about Benji? Beartown’s new coach has made him team captain!”