Chapter 5
Jenna
By the time the puck drops on a Tuesday-night home game in week five, I have been awake for sixteen hours and I have made a series of dietary decisions I would not put in print.
The game goes to overtime. Then it goes to double overtime. The Wolves and the visitors have been trading the same scoreless period back and forth for what feels like a geological era, and the press box has gone quiet the way press boxes do when everyone's deadline is quietly dying.
"You good?" asks the analyst next to me, a former defenseman named Russ who does color for the regional broadcast and has the calmest voice I've ever heard, the voice of a man who has personally been hit by a slapshot and lived.
"I'm running on a hot dog and spite."
"That's most of this league, honestly."
In the second overtime, Cole scores.
I don't even see how, at first. It happens fast, the way the good ones do — a scramble, a loose puck, a stick that arrives a half-second before anyone else's, and the puck is in, off an angle that shouldn't have been an angle.
Russ exhales next to me. "Ohh," he says quietly, the way you'd say it about a sunset. "That's a hard play. People at home won't know how hard that is. That's a really hard play."
"How hard."
"He's got maybe four inches of net and a defenseman's stick in his way and he goes high glove off his back foot. Most guys in this league can't do that on an empty net at practice." He shakes his head. "Don't tell him I said anything nice. I have a reputation."
I write down high glove, back foot, four inches, Russ says hardest plays in the league, off the record, protect Russ's reputation, and I underline the last part, because Russ is good people.
The scrum afterward is a crush. Cameras, recorders, the whole press corps pushing into a hallway that smells like ice and adrenaline.
Cole comes out in a half-unbuttoned shirt with his hair wet, and he answers questions, and the thing that happens — the thing the whole press corps clocks, because the press corps clocks everything, we're all the same disease — is that he answers my question first.
Doug asks something about the power play. Cole answers it. Then I ask about the overtime goal, about the read, about whether he saw the lane or felt it, and Cole turns slightly, toward me, and answers like the rest of the hallway has gone soft-focus.
"Felt it," he says. "You don't have time to see it. You spend all week seeing it so that when it matters you can feel it."
It's a good quote. It's a great quote. It's the kind of quote that builds the spine of a feature.
And he gave it to me first, in front of everyone, and I am aware that everyone noticed, and I am aware — this is the part that bothers me, in a way I can't file — that I don't mind.
The scrum clears. The hallway empties. I go back up to the press box because my transcription is a disaster and my notes from the second overtime are mostly the word Russ with increasingly emphatic underlining, and I have a deadline that does not care about my hot dog.
It's nearly midnight. The building is emptying around me — the cleaning crew is starting at the far end, the methodical drone of an industrial vacuum eating the day's popcorn off the steps.
Cole appears in the press box doorway.
"You're still here," he says.
"You're still here," I say. "You scored the winning goal four hours ago. Go home."
"Team channel ran long. They wanted me to break down the goal." He leans on the doorframe, which is a whole posture, a posture that communicates I have made a decision and the decision is to be standing here. "I'll wait."
"You don't need to wait."
"I know."
"That wasn't an invitation to wait. That was me releasing you from the obligation to wait."
"I know," he says again, and doesn't move, and I go back to my transcription because arguing with a man leaning on a doorframe is a losing position and I have a deadline.
I finish. I pack up. We walk out of the arena together, down through the guts of the building, the concourse empty and enormous, just the two of us and a crew vacuuming the lower bowl in the dark, the scoreboard off, the whole place exhaling.
And I ask him the question I've been not-asking for five weeks. I've been carrying it around like the hot dog, this question, knowing I'd eventually give in.
"Is there anything else I got wrong?"
He doesn't answer fast. That's a thing about him I've learned — he doesn't answer fast, he answers true, and the gap between the question and the answer is where you can see him working.
"The party photos were real," he says.
"I know."
"I cancelled the appearances. I told the agent to stonewall you. Everything in the piece is a fact."
"I know that too."
"So, no." He stops walking. We're at the parking level, by the exit, the air gone cold the way arena exits always are. "You got the facts right."
"But not the picture."
He looks at me. Something shifts in his face — not dramatic, nothing he'd let a camera see, just a small recalibration, a man deciding whether to say the true thing.
"Not the picture," he agrees.
We stand there. The vacuum hums somewhere behind us.
There's a moment where the obvious thing would be to keep talking, to fill it, to do the thing I do, and I don't do it.
I let the silence sit, because for once I'm not trying to get a quote, I'm just standing in a cold parking garage with a man I got completely wrong, and there's nothing I want to add.
"Goodnight, Farrow," he says.
"Goodnight, Weston."
We go separate ways to separate cars.
I drive home through empty streets at half past midnight, and somewhere around the third red light I admit it to myself, fully, the way you finally say the thing out loud in an empty car:
I am not writing the story I was assigned.
I was assigned a story about team culture, the ecosystem, what it takes to build a contender. I'm going to write that story. It'll be good.
But underneath it, threaded through it, is a different story, the real one, the one about a man the entire public thinks they know and doesn't, and the journalist who told them the wrong thing two years ago and is the only person in a position to tell them the right thing now.
It's the best material I've ever had.
It's also, I'm beginning to understand, a problem. Because you're not supposed to feel like this about the best material you've ever had. You're not supposed to drive home thinking about the gap between the facts and the picture and have the gap be shaped, very specifically, like a person.
I get home. I don't sleep. I open the document and I work until the sky goes gray, and the piece gets better, and the problem gets worse, and I do not know yet that those two things are going to turn out to be exactly the same thing.