2. Rhett
Rhett
The banner with my name on it is the first thing I see when they walk me out, and it is, as ever, the worst part.
They’ve got it hanging from the rafters where they put it five years ago, white and blue, MERCER and the number underneath, and a spotlight on it now because somebody in marketing decided the cameras needed to find it.
I spent twenty-two years trying not to look up at that end of the building.
Today they’ve arranged the whole press conference so I have to.
A banner is a strange thing. They raise it when you’re done, when there’s nothing left to take from you, and from then on you’re not a man anymore, you’re a number people point at to feel something about their own younger lives.
I’ve stood under it at charity nights and alumni weekends and let strangers cry on me.
None of them knew me. That’s the part the banner does to you that nobody mentions: it makes you permanently alone in a building full of people who’d swear they love you.
I keep my face still. Stillness is a thing I’m good at. You learn it taking questions after a loss, the trick of looking like nothing is happening behind your eyes while everything is. I learned it so well I forgot how to turn it off, which is a separate problem, and one a marriage did not survive.
There’s a kid with a headset steering me by the elbow toward a curtain, and through the gap in the curtain I can see the room, and the room is the part I wasn’t ready for.
She’s running it.
The girl from last night. The one who argued with a teleprompter and then argued with me, the one in the giant hoodie who held a binder against her chest like I was going to take it.
Except now she’s in a blazer the color of a good Scotch, and her hair’s down, and she’s moving through forty filled chairs and a wall of cameras like she built the room with her own hands, which I suppose she did.
She’s got a clipboard. She’s pointing two camera guys to different corners.
She laughs at something a reporter says, and the laugh does the same thing it did at midnight, which is make the air in the immediate vicinity slightly harder to breathe.
I did not get her name last night, and she did not get mine, because she had no idea who I was.
I could see it. She’s not a hockey person, if she were, she’d have known the face even in a dark room, even five years and a lot of gray later.
To her, I was just a rude stranger messing with her binder.
There’s something restful about that. Nobody’s looked at me without the banner attached in a long time.
There was supposed to be a fix for this.
A nine a.m. green-room briefing, her and me, a run-through before the cameras.
It was on the schedule the team emailed me twice.
I skipped it. Sat in the parking garage with the engine off until it was too late to do it, which is a thing I do now, apparently, avoid the rooms where people want to manage me.
Ops walked me straight in through the players’ entrance and parked me behind the curtain, away from the floor, away from her.
So the first time she’s going to lay eyes on me as the answer to her question is the same second the whole city does.
I’m aware this makes me a coward and also problematic in this situation.
“Two minutes, Coach,” the headset kid says.
Coach. Still strange in my ear. For five years I was a retired guy with a bad knee and a lake view and too many hours in the day.
Now I’m Coach, because my son called me in February and offered me the job in a voice that gave away nothing, and I said yes before I let myself think about why he was really asking.
I’ve turned that phone call over a lot of nights since.
Caden doesn’t ask me for things. He stopped asking me for things around the time he turned fifteen and figured out I wasn’t going to be at the thing, whatever the thing was, the game, the recital, the hospital the time he broke his wrist and his mother called me in Edmonton and I said I’d get the next flight and didn’t.
A kid only asks so many times. Then he builds a man who never asks.
That man grows up and runs a hockey team.
And one day in February he calls his father out of nine years of silence and offers him a job.
You can spend the rest of your life trying to figure out whether it was a business decision or a hand reaching back across a long table.
I still don’t know. I said yes to find out.
That’s the real reason, the one I don’t put on cards.
Through the curtain, she steps up to the podium to do the intro.
She’s good. I can tell from here she’s good, she doesn’t oversell it, doesn’t do the radio-voice thing, she just tells the room that the Crowns are doing something today that matters to this city, and lets the wanting build.
She’s about to bring out a legend. The crowd’s already leaning in.
She turns to gesture at the curtain. At me.
And she sees me.
I watch it happen in real time, and I will be honest, I enjoy it more than a decent man would.
The recognition hits her face in three stages.
First nothing, just the professional smile aimed at the incoming Important Person.
Then the smile catches, the way a record catches.
Then her eyes go wide and flat at the same time, this beautiful furious stillness, as her brain finishes the sentence: the man from the press room, the rude one, the one I told to leave, is the legend.
Is the hire. Is the entire event I have spent two weeks building.
She does not drop the mic. I give her that. A lesser professional drops the mic.
“…please welcome,” she says, smooth as anything, only I’m close enough now to hear the half-second hitch, “the new head coach of the Chicago Crowns, Rhett Mercer.”
The room comes apart. Standing, the whole thing, two hundred people who watched me play, flashbulbs, a noise I felt in my chest for two decades and told myself I didn’t miss.
I walk out and shake her hand because that’s the choreography, and her grip is firm and her smile is a weapon and under her breath, in the half-second the handshake buys us, she says, “You absolute menace.”
“Good morning,” I say.
“You let me throw you out of my own press conference.”
“You were very persuasive.”
“I will end you,” she murmurs, still smiling for the cameras, radiant, lethal, and then she steps back and hands me the podium and the season.
I look down at it. There’s a card sitting there, her card, the talking points, and I can see from the first line that she took my note.
Un-retired, not retired. She cut the apology.
She leads with the thing I came to do. It’s good.
It’s better than good, it’s exactly right, and she did it after midnight, after telling me to my face she didn’t need my help, and that is going to be a problem in a way I don’t have a name for yet.
So I don’t read the card.
I look up at the room instead and I tell them the truth, which is not on any card.
“I’m not here to wave from the bench,” I say.
The room quiets. Cameras find me.
“I know what the radio says. Nostalgia stunt. Old guy, old number, sell some jerseys, make the grandfathers cry.” A few laughs, uncomfortable ones.
“I’ve heard it. I’m fifty-three. My knee predicts weather.
All of that’s true.” I let it sit. “Here’s the other thing that’s true.
This team made the playoffs once in six years, and the building knows it, and you can feel it when you walk in, everybody’s already bracing to be disappointed.
I’m not interested in managing that. I came back to win, or I’d have stayed at the lake, where nobody films you and the coffee’s better. ”
That gets the laugh I wanted, the real one.
“I don’t have a speech,” I say. “I’ve got a season. Ask me anything.”
And the room goes. Hands everywhere. The energy in it flips from polite to hungry in about four seconds, and I take the questions easily, the way I used to take a faceoff, and out of the corner of my eye I can see her at the side of the stage with her clipboard against her chest, watching her careful event get hijacked by the man who broke into her press room, and watching it work better than her plan would have.
They throw me the easy ones first. The system I’ll run.
The young guys I’m excited about. Whether the legs feel different on the bench than they did on the ice, that one from a beat writer old enough to have covered me as a rookie, and I give him a real answer, because he earned it, because we’re two men who used to be younger in this same building.
I answer all of it the way I should have learned to answer my own family: present, plain, looking the person in the eye.
Funny how the skill shows up decades late and points the wrong direction.
Her jaw is tight. Her eyes could strip paint.
I have not had this good a time in five years.
It lasts right up until a guy in the third row, AP credential, asks the question I knew was coming and hoped wasn’t.
“Coach, you’re being hired by a front office your son runs. Caden Mercer’s the GM. How’s that going to work, father and son, on the same org chart?”
And there it is. The actual story, the one under the banner and the jerseys.
I feel the room shift toward it, because they all know, everybody in hockey knows, that Caden and I spent the back half of his twenties barely speaking, that I missed things a father is supposed to be at, that I was a captain to a city and a stranger to a kid because I was on a plane or on the ice or in my own head about a game.
They know his mother and I didn’t make it.
They’ve all got their own theory about what it means that he’s the one who finally called me.