Everett
Sacco is waiting for me in the service entrance of the arena.
He looks grayer than when I saw him last and thicker through the middle, but he’s wearing the same club windbreaker he was wearing when I was small enough to sit on the skate bench and watch practice.
Head coach, my father’s best friend, thirty-odd years with the club between the ice and the bench, and he’s going to be here until the day he dies.
“I’m sorry about your dad, Ev.” He puts out his hand, then thinks better of it and just looks at me.
Nobody has called me Ev in twenty years.
It’s been almost two decades since I set foot in this building, and the first person in it makes me feel like a little kid again. I hate this place.
“Thanks, Coach,” I say. I don’t mention that no one calls me Ev anymore.
He looks me over once, head to shoe.
“You got tall, Ev,” he says, flat. Whatever he’s measuring me against, I don’t pass.
He takes me up the back stairs, past decades of framed team photographs, and unlocks my father’s office.
He straightens one frame with two fingers as we pass, without looking at it. Nineteen eighty-nine. He’s in that one.
The corridor smells like my childhood and makes my stomach twist. It’s cold. I can scent old coffee, sweaty gear and machine oil. I spent a lot of time here as a kid. I’ve never missed it.
Above us, faint through the concrete, a machine is circling the ice.
“Practice ended at noon,” he says. “Building’s empty so you shouldn’t be bothered by anyone.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that.”
“Nobody’s touched anything,” he says from the doorway.
“Callahan’s coming up before you leave. Your captain.
He wants to introduce himself.” A pause I can read with my eyes shut: and he’s worth more to this club than you are.
“If you need me, I’m down by the coaches’ room. You remember where it is?”
“Yeah.”
Then he leaves me alone with it.
The office hasn’t changed since before I left. It’s all wood paneling with team photographs on every wall: thirty years of men in the same sweater. My father is in the middle of every one of them, grinning.
There are no family photographs in this office. There weren’t any the last time that I was in here and there are none here now.
His reading glasses are still on the blotter. I hang my coat on the hook by the door.
Thirty years of a franchise, run by hand, by one man, out of one room. There is no chief operating officer. There is no real front office. There is a caretaker general manager two years from retirement whose signature appears wherever my father’s told it to. The org chart is a portrait.
I don’t want any of it.
My father’s will was simple. The franchise passes to me. If I sell inside the restricted period, every dollar of the proceeds goes to a charitable trust.
There was a handwritten letter with it. Learn the game before you judge it, Ev. That’s it. One damn line. Even in death, the damned game was more important to him than I was.
The man was obsessed with hockey. Obsessed. It broke up my parents’ marriage. He was never home or never interested in anything that my mother did, unless it was about hockey.
Same thing with me. When I was still little and he assumed I was going to be an alpha like him, then he cared.
Then I was the light of his life: the next big star as soon as I was old enough and big enough.
All he wanted was the name Rourke on a jersey and an alpha son big enough to shove and punch like the rest of the thuggish herd.
Of course, that didn’t happen. I don’t think he said ten words to me after I presented as an omega.
My first instinct when I heard the will and read that damned letter was to sell it anyway: get rid of the team and never look back.
But that would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. The Barons have done very well over the last decade. They’re worth real money. I’d be a fool to get rid of a valuable asset for no reason other than to spite a dead man who is no longer capable of knowing or caring.
So: hold the team until the clock runs out, then sell to whoever writes the largest check.
I need to hold it for two years and it’s mine to sell. Break early and a charity I’ve never heard of becomes the luckiest organization in this city’s history.
I don’t do hockey. I had the whole horror of a game pushed on me enough when I was a child, but now I need to catch up.
I have zero interest in actually managing this club, but I don’t want to screw up either.
I’m here to clean out the office because apparently that’s my job despite not seeing or speaking to my father in more than five years, and to catch up enough on the team to be sure that handing over control to Sacco for the next two years isn’t going to come back to bite me in the ass.
I come around the desk and open the drawers, feeling like I’m intruding. I was never allowed to touch his desk, but it’s my desk now.
There’s nothing exciting in it: rubber bands, a tin of mints. A whole drawer given over to pucks, each one taped and dated in silver marker. Goals, I assume. I roll my eyes. Dad was bothered to remember the dates of the goals. He wasn’t bothered enough to remember the date of my birthday.
No. I’m not doing this. The little kid in me is all riled up by the smell of the place and being back here after so long. I got over my dad not giving a shit about his omega son years ago.
I leave pretty much all of it where it is. The next owner can decide what to do with the taped-up hockey pucks.
I pull out the things that are of interest and put them into a pile: a sponsorship renewal, half annotated, a contract summary for L. Berg. A qualifying offer for a defenseman whose name I don’t recognize.
Someone is going to have to make a decision on this stuff. I check the closet next, not expecting anything of interest.
There’s not. Just a bunch of smelly old gear and a practice schedule taped on the door.
My phone buzzes. I cross back over to the desk and pick it up.
It’s Priya, my assistant. She’s texted from London to let me know that my re-entry documentation has all cleared.
Coming back to the U.S. took a surprising amount of paperwork: residency declarations, tax forms. I’d signed them all without looking, the same way I’d signed off on the funeral arrangements without looking.
I didn’t make it back in time for the funeral. The excuse is that I wasn’t able to get the flights, but the real reason is that I just didn’t want to.
Priya asked if I wanted her to arrange for anyone to travel with me.
There wasn’t anyone. I’ve spent ten years building a career instead of a life, and the truth is the career hasn’t arrived where I want it either.
It’s just eaten everything else. If I ever do get there, wherever there is, I’m not sure who I’d tell.
I sit down again and read through the papers. Hockey was everything my father lived and breathed so for the first twelve years of my life that’s what I lived and breathed too.
I’d never even enjoyed the game that much. I’d just wanted to please him. I spent my entire childhood out here on the cold ice, getting roughed up by bigger kids and all I got for it was a father who looked at me with disgust and disappointment the moment I presented as an omega.
My parents divorced shortly after and my mother moved to London. The old man didn’t bother to keep in touch.
I’m half surprised he even left me anything in his will. Even if it is the stupid franchise.
Twelve years of hockey as a kid means I know something about the game.
I know the positions, the game play, the dumb ‘code’ that means you’re allowed to beat each other up, but I don’t know much about the current players and what’s going to help me get the best value for the franchise once I can sell it.
I’m going to have to suck up to Sacco. He’s a dick too, but nobody alive knows this club better.
If the practical management of this team can sit on shoulders that aren’t mine, his are the first ones I’d choose.
From the look he gave me earlier, I suspect he likes me just about as well as I like him. Not that it matters too much.
All I need to know is that he’s not going to block me when I need it. I’m not interested in the day-to-day running, but I also don’t want him to make choices that are for the good of the team and not the sponsors.
I’m aware that statement makes me sound like the dick and maybe I am, but again, if dear old Dad didn’t want me to sell his team for as much as I could get then he shouldn’t have been stupid enough to leave it to me.
If Coach Sacco proves to be too much of an asshole, even for me to pass over the team for a hands-off approach, then I’ve got another potential candidate lined up to take control.
Brody Callahan. Fifteen years with the club, career Baron, my father’s favorite subject at every press conference he held.
He was like that, my father. He had favorites.
When I was little, I was one of them, but the favorites never held.
Sooner or later, they always fell out of favor as soon as they were no longer useful to the great hockey god.
Brody Callahan is due in this office in twenty minutes: the old meet and greet.
I don’t want to hand the reins to him, but Callahan is older, knows the club and is loyal to it.
He’s also not Sacco. He’d have to retire first — the league treats an active player running a club as a conflict of interest, full stop — but at his age that can’t be far off.
I could hand off to a third party, some hired executive, but it makes sense to pass to someone who has the passion for it. They’ll want the win more.
The main problem with Callahan is that as of my father’s last game, he owns the most famous fists in the city.
I watched my father’s last game. All of it. It was the first time I have watched a hockey game in over a decade.
I didn’t watch live.
I watched immediately after I got the call that came to my hotel in Zurich at four in the morning.