4. Rhett
Rhett
The first morning of camp, my knee tells me it’s going to be a long winter before I’ve even laced up.
It does this now. Five years off the ice and the joint still files its reports, a deep ache along the inside where they took the meniscus and most of my twenties.
Cold rink, bad knee. I tape it, I don’t limp, I get out on the ice at six-fifteen because a coach who’s late to his own first camp is a coach who’s already lost the room.
The players are watching to see what I am.
Forty guys, half of them weren’t born when I was captain, all of them deciding in the first hour whether I’m a legend they have to respect or an old man they have to wait out.
Forty-one years I’ve been getting on the ice at six in the morning.
The body keeps the appointment even when the man would rather not.
What’s changed is the recovery, at twenty-five the knee complained and shut up by noon; at fifty-three it files a grievance and keeps the receipt.
I’ve made peace with the pain. The pain was never the enemy.
The enemy is letting a room see it cost you something, because the second they smell weakness on the man at the front, you’re done, and a room smells it on a coach faster than it ever could on a player.
I make them skate until two of them throw up. Respect comes faster that way.
They’re a young team that’s forgotten how to win, which is worse than a team that was never good, not untalented, just convinced.
You can see it in the way they cheat the hard reps, brace for the whistle, skate like men waiting to be told they’re not enough.
I wore that look myself once, a long time ago, before a coach I’m still grateful to skated up beside me and told me the only thing wrong with my game was that I’d decided there was something wrong with my game.
I came back to be that for somebody. Twenty somebodies, ideally.
First I have to outlast their certainty that I can’t.
What I don’t account for is that I have a shadow now, and the shadow has a clipboard.
She’s there at the glass when I come off for the first water break, in a Crowns quarter-zip and sneakers, hair up, looking like she’s been at the building since four, which she probably has.
Maren Hale. My assignment, or me as hers, the org chart’s never been clear on which direction the leash runs.
“Morning, Coach,” she says, bright, for the benefit of the three reporters loitering behind her with their phones out. “We’ve got media availability at eleven, then the youth-clinic photo op at one, then a sit-down with the team’s own channel at three.”
“No.”
She doesn’t blink. “Which no.”
“The one o’clock. I’m not doing a photo op in the middle of the first day of camp. The players need the ice and I need to watch them on it.”
“The youth clinic is forty kids from the South Side who’ve had this on their calendars for a month, and the photo of you on the ice with them is the single warmest piece of content we’ll get all season.
” She says it without raising her voice, still smiling, and I notice the smile is load-bearing, a tool she keeps sharp.
“You can give me twenty minutes. The players will survive twenty minutes of you not staring at them.”
“They won’t.”
“They will, because you’ll have spent all morning making them throw up, and twenty minutes of recovery will feel like a gift.” She makes a note on the clipboard. “One o’clock. I’ll have you back on the ice by one-thirty.”
I look at her. She looks at me. Behind her the reporters have stopped pretending not to listen.
“Fine,” I say, because the alternative is having this argument in front of cameras, and she knows that, which is why she had it in front of cameras. She’s good. I keep finding out how good in small, irritating increments.
The eleven o’clock is where she finds out I meant what I said in Studio C about doing it my way until I decide otherwise.
She’s set up a thing she calls a media-training session, which as far as I can tell is a room with the young guys and a couple of cameras where she runs them through mock interviews so they learn not to say anything that ends up on a blog.
Reasonable, for the rookies. She’s asked me to “model it” for them.
Demonstrate the technique. Sit in the chair and answer her practice questions in front of the kids so they see how a pro handles it.
I understand what she’s doing. She’s trying to make me a teaching tool, which makes me useful to her program and harder to argue with.
It’s smart. So I sit in the chair, and the rookies file in along the wall, and she stands with her little card of questions, and I decide, somewhere between the chair and her first question, that I’m not going to play.
“Coach, the team’s coming off a sixth-place finish,” she says, in her best mock-reporter voice. “What gives you confidence this season’s different?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Confidence is for after.”
A couple of the kids laugh. She doesn’t.
“Try again,” she says pleasantly. “What’s the message you want fans to hear about this group?”
“That they should buy tickets and find out.”
“Coach.”
“That’s my answer. Next question.”
She sets the card down. The room gets quiet in the specific way a room gets quiet when the two adults in it are about to have it out and twenty rookies realize they have front-row seats.
I’ll be honest, part of me is enjoying it.
I’ve spent five years where nobody pushes back on anything I say because I’m a banner now, a thing you’re polite to. She pushes back like it’s a reflex.
“Okay,” she says. “Everybody out. Five minutes. Go get water.”
The kids clear out fast. They’re not stupid. Then it’s the two of us and the cameras she clicks off, one by one, and when she turns around the pleasant thing is gone and what’s underneath it is better.
“You want to sandbag your own media session, that’s your call,” she says.
“But you did it in front of twenty kids who are going to copy whatever you model, and what you just modeled is that the way to handle the press is contempt. So tomorrow when one of those rookies tells a reporter the team’s a sixth-place team and confidence is for after, and it runs under a headline about a locker room that’s already given up, that’s on the tape you just made. Not me. You.”
I don’t say anything.
“You think being difficult with me is harmless because I can take it. I can take it.” She steps closer, and there’s color in her face now, and I notice it the way I notice everything about her.
“But you’re not just being difficult with me.
You’re teaching. You don’t get to not be the example.
That’s the job you took. Coach the kids in the chair the same as you coach them on the ice, or don’t sit in the chair. ”
She’s right. She keeps being right. She says it cleaner than my old coaches ever did, and she’s half my age, and she just dressed me down in an empty room. I should mind that more than I do.
“Bring them back in,” I say.
She blinks. “What?”
“The kids. Bring them back in. I’ll do it right.” I lean back in the chair. “You’re going to ask me the sixth-place question again, and I’m going to answer it like a man who wants them to believe we’re better than that. Because I do.”
She studies me for a second, recalibrating, and then she goes to the door and calls the rookies back, and when she asks the question the third time I give her two messages and a clean quote and I watch the kids watch me do it, and out of the corner of my eye I watch her not smile, which from her is the highest grade there is.
By the time we break, it’s nearly one, and the part of the day where she wins without either of us saying so is already waiting on the ice.
The youth clinic is forty kids, gear two sizes too big, the littlest one a scared toddler in a facemask who will not let go of the boards.
I get out there with them in my skates and my taped knee and I run the most basic drill there is, the one my own father taught me on a pond.
My knee screams at me on the first hard stop and I eat the wince before it reaches my face.
I eat it. I think I eat it.
I look up and she’s at the glass with the team photographer, and she’s not looking at the camera.
She’s looking at me. At the leg. She caught the stop, the half-second I went down on the edge wrong, the thing forty children and three reporters missed.
I can see her seeing it. And she doesn’t write it down, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t change her face, she just clocks it and holds it, the way you hold a thing you’re not going to use against someone. Yet.
It should make me feel watched. It makes me feel something closer to the opposite, which is worse.
I skate the scared toddler around by his jersey until he laughs. The photo of it ends up being, she’ll tell me later, the best content of the season. She’s right about that too.
Forty kids who’ll go home and tell their parents the old man from the banner showed them a crossover.
I’m good with kids when the kids aren’t mine.
I learned that too late to do my own son any good, and it sits in me every time one of these little ones grabs my sleeve, the easy patience I never once managed to spend on the one child who actually needed it.
Maren’s still at the glass. She watches me with the toddler and something crosses her face that she puts away fast, but I notice it the way I notice everything about her, and pretend, the way I always do, that I didn’t.
***
It’s almost seven before the building empties out. I’m in my office with the lights half off, watching the morning skate back on tape, when I pass her open door on the way to leave and she’s still there. Of course she is. She works all the time; it’s her whole personality, she told me so.
She’s got her laptop open and a takeout container she hasn’t touched, and she’s typing something, and she looks up and catches me in the doorway before I decide whether to keep walking.
“You’re still here,” she says.
“So are you.”
“I’m always here.” She gestures at the chair across from her desk, then seems to regret it.
I sit down. I shouldn’t. The building’s empty and she’s my son’s employee and I’m the worst idea she could have.
I sit down anyway, because the office is warm and the lake house is not and she’s the most interesting thing that’s happened to me in five years.
“You handled the room today,” I say. “The kids. After I gave you a hard time.”
“It’s my job,” she says.
“It’s not, though. Or it is, but you do more of it than the job asks for.
” I nod at the takeout she still hasn’t touched.
“You didn’t have to make that kid laugh today.
The little one in the facemask. You told the photographer to wait for it, I heard you.
That’s not optics. That’s a person who couldn’t stand to leave a scared kid scared. ”
She looks at me. “You notice a lot, for a man who won’t read his own cards.”
“I notice people. It’s the one thing I was ever any good at off the ice.
” And then it comes out, the true thing.
“Figured that out about thirty years too late to spend it on the person it was meant for. So now I spend it on rookies and scared toddlers and comms leads who work too late. Cheaper that way. Nobody you can disappoint.”
The office goes quiet. She’s gone still, and her face does the open thing, the one she hides fast, and for a second the desk between us stops being a desk and starts being the only thing keeping a fifty-three-year-old man from the single worst decision of a career that’s had a few.
I stand up. The knee files its complaint. “Eat your dinner, Ms. Hale. Go home at a human hour, once, as a personal favor to me.”
“You first.”
“I’m the cautionary tale. I don’t count.” I’m already at the door, and I don’t look back, because if I look back I’ll sit down again, and the building’s empty and she’s my son’s employee and I am exactly the wrong idea for her in every direction at once. “Goodnight, Maren.”
I use her first name on the way out, where she can’t make anything of it, where I don’t have to watch it land.
I drive to the lake house with the heat up and the radio off, and I think about a woman at a desk who couldn’t stand to leave a scared kid scared, and I do the thing I swore I was finished doing.
I let myself want something I have no business wanting, for exactly the length of one dark highway, and then I put it away at the door like I put everything away.
I put it away. I always put it away.
It doesn’t stay there. That’s the part I haven’t learned yet.