Chapter 18 Riley - May 2019, Bratislava, Slovakia
Both teams went out in the second round and USA Hockey started making phone calls, because the World Championship happens in May and in May everybody good is either still playing or lying about a hip.
My agent called me on a Tuesday. "They want you for Slovakia."
"Okay."
"You want to think about it? Riley, this is a three-week commitment in Europe, there's a physical, there's an insurance rider…"
"I said okay. Who else is in?"
There was a pause on his end, and in it I understood that I had just asked a question in a tone of voice I had not authorized.
"They're working on a list."
"Great. Call me when the list is a list."
He called me back on Thursday. "Sinclair's in."
"Then I'm in."
Moose got called home to Finland, obviously. He packed at his stall like a man loading a truck for a funeral. "So we're enemies."
"For three weeks."
"You're going to have to hit me."
"Yeah," Moose agreed, "and I'm looking forward to it, and I want you to understand that it is not personal, it is national.
" He zipped a bag. "Also I will beat you both in a neutral country, which is the best way, because then there are no excuses about the ice and you will have to go home and be sad in an airport. "
"You haven't even seen the bracket."
"I do not need the bracket." He put his coat on and left.
The federation sent the rooming list on a Thursday and I was at a red light in Pittsburgh when it came through. It's a spreadsheet with a hotel name at the top and a column of names under it, the single most boring document in international sport.
Two rows, one under the other. Kowalski, R. Sinclair, N. Same room number. The car behind me honked.
There was a staffer on the call the next morning, a very nice woman named Margot who does communications, and she was thrilled.
"So, we did think about this one a lot, and honestly, the two of you together is such a great story for us.
Obviously if either of you has an issue we can move things around, but… "
"No issue," Nate said, on the line, in a voice like a man declining dessert.
"Riley?"
"None at all. I've always wanted to know what he's like at four in the morning."
There was a silence on that call about one beat long, and then Margot laughed, and I sat in my kitchen with my heart going.
In the first two days in Bratislava I learned that Nate Sinclair travels with an iron.
Not a hotel iron. His own iron, small and European-voltage, in a padded sleeve with his initials monogrammed on it in thread, because somebody in this world thought that was a reasonable gift to give a human being.
He ironed everything. Shirts, obviously. Then the collar of a golf shirt, separately, after the shirt. Then, on the third night, socks.
"You're ironing socks."
"They were folded wrong in the case. They get a crease."
"Nate, they get a crease inside a boot, inside a skate, on a foot, at a hockey game, in a building where the floor is ice. Nobody has ever, in the history of this sport, been beaten by a crease."
"You'll notice it."
"I will not notice it, and neither will you, and neither will anybody." I sat down on my bed. "I need you to know that I'm going to be telling people about this for the rest of my life. I'm going to lead with it. Weddings, funerals, the Hall of Fame if they're stupid enough to let me up there."
His half of the room looked like a store. My half looked like a suitcase had gone off. By day four there was a system in there that only I could read, and he stood over it once with his hands clasped behind his back. "Where are your shorts?"
"Third layer, left side, under the sweatshirt with the hood, past the shoes."
"Why?"
"Because that's where they are. It's not a filing cabinet, it's a bag, and I've never once in my life failed to find a pair of shorts."
Then the thermostat war started, and the thermostat war was not about the thermostat.
He wanted it at eighteen. Eighteen is a meat locker, a number for storing fish. I put it up to twenty-two on the second night while he was in the shower, and he came out with a towel around him and looked at the panel and did not say one word and put it back to nineteen.
Nineteen. Not eighteen. He negotiated with himself.
I put it to twenty-one at midnight. He put it to twenty when I was asleep. I woke up and put it to twenty and a half, which the panel would not do, so I put it to twenty-one and turned the display off.
Media day was in a conference center with reporters from a dozen countries. They sat us on stools side by side.
"One word," said the guy from the wire service. "Describe each other. One word."
"Effective," Nate said.
"He's effective. That's my word too, I'm taking his word, and I'd like to move on before somebody asks a second question."
The room made a noise.
"Riley, one of your own?"
"Present. He's present. He's there. Every night, there he is."
The room laughed at us. Out loud. At us, not with us. The wire guy put his pen down. "That's the worst hostility I've ever seen in my career."
I rode it. "Look, I'll be honest with you, we've been asked to be professional and I'm finding it very restrictive."
"Riley Kowalski, professional," Nate said, to the ceiling.
"I have a lanyard. I represent a country now." And then, because a room that is laughing is the safest place on earth and because I'm an idiot, I turned on the stool and looked at his collar. "Although can I get something on the record?"
"No."
"He's not wearing a tie. A dozen countries in this room, a national team blazer, a photographer from every one of those countries, and this man is out here with an open collar. Where are the little lighthouses? That's my one question for the podium today."
He did not blink. He looked straight ahead at the room. "The tie's retired."
Big laugh. Biggest one of the day. Somebody clipped it and it went around and the federation's account posted it with three emojis.
And something went across my chest at the word retired. I declined to open it. I got off the stool and did four more interviews and was extremely funny in all of them.
On the second night we drafted the Accord. That was him. I was on top of the covers with my shoes on watching a Slovak cooking show and he came out of the bathroom and stood at the end of my bed with the federation stationery in his hand. "We need paper."
"We need what?"
"Twenty-one days. One room. Forty-six other people in this hotel, half of them on this floor, three of them on our team's leadership group, and a communications staffer who thinks this is a great story." He sat down at the desk. "So we need paper."
"Nate."
"You know I'm right. You knew it on the plane and you've been hoping I'd be the one to say it out loud so you could be annoyed at me instead of at the situation."
"I know you're right. That's the offensive part. You've been right about one thing this whole trip and it had to be this one."
So we wrote it. Real letterhead, with the crest at the top, at 10:40 at night, and he wrote because his handwriting is better, and by the end it was the most beautiful document either of us has ever produced.
Whereas the parties are lodged in a single room for a period of twenty-one days.
Whereas the walls of this hotel are, by inspection, four inches of nothing and a poster.
Whereas the parties are here as the guests of a sovereign country and the representatives of a national federation.
Now therefore it is agreed that all business of the Kowalski-Sinclair Invitational is suspended for the duration of the tournament, including but not limited to trade proposals, counteroffers, wagers, honest answers, and the collection of any debt outstanding.
Article Two: No contact of any kind.
Article Three: This Accord expires at wheels-up on the return charter and not one minute before.
Two signature lines. He signed and I signed, and then we sat there and looked at it on the desk between us.
He put his hand out, which is a formal thing, and it was a joke, and I took it. And then neither of us let go for about three seconds too long, and I was standing there holding a man's hand over a piece of federation letterhead, and I leaned in about an inch.
"Article two."
"I know what article two says. I helped write article two. I've got a real problem with article two, I'd like to open the floor, and I'd like the record to show that the ink isn't dry."
"Riley."
I let go.
We both slept better that night than we had since the plane. And both of us lay awake first. I heard him not sleeping, and at some point around one he turned over, and a man who has fallen asleep does not turn over like that.
The near miss was the next morning and it was entirely my fault. I was out of toothpaste. He has a toiletry kit that looks like it belongs to a surgeon, a zip case with elastic loops and everything standing upright in its own place, and it was on the counter, and he was in the shower.
I got the outer zip open and found the toothpaste immediately, which should have been the end of it.
But there was a second compartment along the back, zipped separately, with something in it wrapped in a shape that did not make sense for a toiletry kit, and I was already reaching, because I'm a man who has never once in his life not opened a thing.
The shower stopped. "Kowalski!"
He was in the doorway with a towel and his hair flat to his head and water still coming off him, and he crossed the bathroom in two steps and picked up the entire kit off the counter with one hand and zipped it in the same motion.
"Toothpaste," I said, and held it up.
"You could have asked."
"You were in the shower."
"Then you could have waited." He put the kit in the cupboard over the sink, up high, and shut the door on it.
I stood there with a tube of toothpaste in my hand. "Do you know how weird you are? Do you have any idea? Any normal man just says take the toothpaste."
"I said take the toothpaste."
"You said you could have asked, which is what a man says when he's got a body in there."
"It’s too small to hold a body."