Chapter 15 Nate - December 2018, Pittsburgh
With under a minute left we were down one and I went for it.
We got a stop behind our own net and I came around the far post and looked up ice, and everything was there. Our center climbing the middle lane, their weak-side winger cheated in, a seam that was going to be open for about a second. I'd made that pass a thousand times.
I cleared the weak side with my eyes, which is the mechanic. Look off the middle, find the far winger, put it where the middle is going to be.
And Riley Kowalski was standing in the seam before I moved my hands, not skating to it but already standing in it. By the time the puck left my stick there was nothing between him and a two-hundred-foot walk except a defenseman twenty feet behind the play, which was me.
I got there, which nobody in that building expected, including him. I knocked it into the corner and the horn went and we lost by one, and my father said something above me in a booth about compete level.
But somewhere in that backcheck my brain served me a sentence with teeth in it.
Nobody else in that league did that to me.
In two seasons, exactly one person had ever been standing where I was about to put something, and I'd never asked him how.
That was the part that got me in the tunnel afterward, not that he'd done it but that I'd had his phone number for twenty months and never once asked.
The Courtyard off exit fourteen had a Chili's next to it and a light out at the far end of the lot. I booked it myself, on my own card, in my own name.
He knocked just before midnight and I had the door open before he finished. "That's the security problem again."
"Get in."
He got in with a coat on over nothing much and snow in his hair, still hoarse from the game, and I got a fist in the front of the coat and put him against the inside of the door before it was properly shut.
He laughed into my mouth. There was always a sound in there somewhere in the first two seconds, and it was never the sound you'd expect.
I held his jaw with one hand and took my time, opening him up slow, tilting his head a half inch left because he always came in a half inch right.
His coat was cold on the outside and he was hot underneath it.
He got both hands in the back of my shirt and pulled it out of my waistband, palms flat on my spine, and he made that low noise in the back of his throat, the one I've never told him I can feel in my own chest.
I came off him about an inch. "I want to ask you something."
"That's the worst sentence in the English language and you said it with your hand on my ass. Ask me in twenty minutes. Ask me tomorrow. Ask me at my funeral, Sinclair. Stand up at the front and ask me there, and I'll get up out of the box and answer it just to get you off my back."
"Under a minute left. Our breakout. You were in the seam before I looked."
He blinked at me.
"I want to know how you did it," I said.
And I watched something happen to Riley Kowalski's face that I'd never seen happen to it before. He went completely still. Then he lit up, from the middle out, like somebody had thrown a switch in a building.
"You're standing in a hotel room with your hand still on my ass, asking me. Say it again, slower, I want to be sure I've got the wording."
"I'm asking you."
"No, hang on, I need a second with this." He put a hand up and stepped back off the door, out of my hands, which he had never once done. "Nate Sinclair, Calder Memorial trophy, first pair, has walked into a Courtyard Marriott in the middle of the night and asked me to explain hockey to him."
"I'm going to withdraw the question."
"You can't withdraw it. It's out, it's in the room, it's in the minutes.
" He was already moving. He got the pad of hotel stationery and the pen off the desk, looked at it, then went into the bathroom and came back with the little pad from in there too.
"Sit down, Sinclair. You've opened a door and I've been standing outside it for twenty months with a bag packed. "
I sat on the end of the bed, and he sat backwards on the desk chair with the pad on his knee, and did not stop talking for the next twenty minutes.
"Okay. First one. Easiest one. Everybody's got this one, and I mean everybody, it's not a secret, it's just that nobody watches you long enough to see it, because when they watch you they watch the puck."
He drew a rectangle. He drew a stick figure in it with two dots for skates and labeled it N.
"You drop your left shoulder a half beat before you reverse."
"That's not true."
"It's true and it's not even the good one.
Here's the good one." He drew an arrow. "You don't drop it when you're going to reverse.
You drop it when you've decided to reverse, which is not the same moment.
There's a gap in there where you've made the decision and your body's told me and you haven't done it yet.
It's not long. It's about as long as it takes a guy to change his mind, which you never do, which is the other half of the problem. "
I did not say anything.
"Second one." New page. "The stretch pass.
You clear the weak side with your eyes, right, you look off, that's what you were taught, that's what everybody's taught.
Except you do it the same way every time.
Far winger, then back through the middle, then you go.
Two beats. Always two. So the second your head goes to the far winger, I've got two beats to be somewhere, and I don't have to guess where, because I already know where you want it. "
"That's coaching. Any video staff in this league could put that on a page and hand it around the room, and half of them probably have."
"That's you, and no they haven't, and I'll tell you how I know.
Guys do it in three beats, guys do it in one, guys look off the wrong way to lie about it.
You do it in two like a metronome, because you learned it correctly when you were fourteen and nobody's ever been mean enough to tell you.
" He was drawing while he talked. "Third one, and I want you sitting down for the third one, which you already are, so that's convenient for both of us. "
"There's a third one?"
"There's a list, buddy." He looked up. "This is the one from Chicago."
I felt it in my hands.
"You want it or not?" he said, and his voice had come down about a third, which is the only warning he ever gives.
"Say it."
"Overtime. Six minutes in. You're on the kill, they get the entry, you break it up, the puck comes around the wall to you at your own line and there's a little room.
" He put the pen down and used his hands instead.
"And the shoulder went. And I was already going.
And I want you to understand that I did not think about it.
I didn't decide. There was no read, there was nothing in my head at all.
My body just went, because I'd watched every one of your November games in a dorm room in Duluth, on my laptop, at two in the morning, with a bowl of cereal, and I did not tell anybody I was doing that, including me. "
The room did nothing for a second.
"You watched every tape of me," I said, "before you met me?"
"I watched more than that. I watched enough that when they finally put us in the same building I already knew which way you'd look coming out of your own end, and I had to stand there in a hallway and act like a guy meeting somebody."
"Why?"
"Because you were the best player in the country and I was going to have to take it off you." He picked the pen back up. "And then I met you, and it stopped being about that inside of an hour, and it never went back."
I'd never been that naked in front of another human being in my life.
The only thing that made it survivable was that it was shop talk. From any distance it looked like two guys arguing about hockey, which was the architecture of everything we ever did. So I paid him back in kind. "Give me the pen."
"Absolutely not. This pen is mine now, and it's seen things, and I'm having it mounted."
"Riley. Give me the pen."
He gave me the pen, and put both hands behind his head, and tipped the chair back, and grinned at me like a man who has been waiting on a delivery.
"I'm going to teach you how I build a pre-scout.
You asked me in Chicago who I was and I never answered.
This is the answer." I pulled the desk out from the wall about a foot so I could sit sideways to him.
"A pre-scout is a dossier, and it has four sections, and you build it the same way every week for every team for your whole career, and by year three you're not building it anymore, it's just running. "
"Sections."
"Tendencies under pressure. Tendencies under fatigue. Tendencies when they're behind. Tendencies when the building's loud."
"Those are the same section, and I want you to know I say that with respect."
"They're not remotely the same section." I drew four boxes.
"A guy who cheats when he's tired is a completely different problem from a guy who cheats when he's losing.
One of them you exploit at the end of a shift.
The other one you exploit at 6-on-5. Put those in the same box and you'll spend a career being wrong at the wrong time, and you'll never know why, because you'll be right often enough to keep doing it. "
"Okay." He had sat forward. He was not joking. "Keep going."
"You've got a tell."
He laughed. "I do not."
"You've got one, and I've had it since your rookie year, and I've never used it."
"I don't have a tell, Sinclair, I'm the guy who finds tells, that's the entire…"
"There's a hitch in your crossover."
He stopped.
"Coming down the off wing," I said. "Two, three strides before you go to the move you love, the one where you pull it through your own feet and go backhand.
There's a hitch. Half a beat. Your outside leg shortens a stride because you're loading for it, and it happens every single time, and it's happened every single time since Duluth. "