Chapter Eighteen
SAINT
There is a list of things I hate, and it is short, because hating takes maintenance and I run a tight operation. Logo carpets. The word “vibes” applied to goaltending. Airports without oatmeal. And at the top, alone, in its own weight class: the long-form sit-down interview.
Not the scrum. The scrum is honest, everybody standing, nobody comfortable, over in ninety seconds like a penalty kill.
The sit-down is the other thing. Two chairs angled at each other like a trap that went to design school, soft lights, a host with empathy training, forty minutes built to make a man forget cameras have memories.
I had refused every one for two years. There was a folder in Junie’s system labeled “Saint longform asks, declined,” and she’d told me once it had forty-one entries and that she kept it partly as an archive and partly as a shrine.
On the Monday after Deacon’s teaser, I called Rich and told him to book one.
Rich made a sound like a kettle. Then he said, “Which one?” and I said, “The Merrit woman,” because if I was going to do the thing I hated I was going to do it with the interviewer everyone called fair and nobody called soft, the one who’d made a Hall of Fame defenseman cry about his father on national television with four gentle questions and a silence.
Corinne Merrit. If the goodwill was going to be bought, it should be bought at the honest store.
Junie fought me on it for a full day, which needs recording, because her argument was the professional one and mine was not.
Her position: the teaser was still just a teaser, we didn’t know what Deacon had, going long-form now meant putting my whole face in the window before the first shot.
My position, which took me until the diner that night to say correctly, over a plate Marge didn’t ask about and a coffee Dot signed something rude about:
“He’s going to tell a story in April. Right now the world knows nothing about me except that I stop pucks and gave one good scrum.
That’s a blank wall. You can project anything on a blank wall.
If the first real thing people ever learn about me comes from him, it’s his wall.
” I turned the mug a quarter turn. “I’d rather build the wall myself.
Then when he throws his story at it, it lands on something that was already true. ”
She looked at me for a long moment across the laminate.
“That’s media strategy,” she said. “You just did media strategy. Unprompted. In a diner.”
“I’ve been sleeping with a professional.”
She threw a creamer at me, and Dot, at the register, signed “pancakes,” which per canon means “ceiling,” which per Dot means everything, and it was settled.
The taping was Thursday, at a studio off South Lamar, and I prepared the way I prepare for anything, which is that I decided in advance what was in the net and what was not.
In: the deal, its origin, its terms, everything Deacon could screenshot, because you can’t leak what a man has already said on camera.
In: Olle. That was my call, made alone at 4:40 that morning over oatmeal in my quiet kitchen, and it cost me, and I’ll get to it.
Out: Theo. Absolutely, non-negotiably out.
My brother is sixteen, he is at a school he loves, he did not sign anything, and no engagement graph on earth has a claim on him.
Junie never even asked. That’s noted for the record too, that she never once asked, that she’d been guarding that door since before she knew what was behind it.
Corinne Merrit was smaller than television makes her and exactly as calm. She shook my hand, told me she’d watched the Quebec game twice, and opened, once the lights settled, with the mercy of a straight question:
“Lars. The internet calls it Saint and Sunshine. Your GM calls it a marketing arrangement he never expected to have to explain. There’s a podcast promising receipts. Tell me what actually happened.”
So I told her. Forty minutes, and I’ll compress it here to what mattered.
I told her about the content day, the puck, the ring light, taping a wrist on a hot mic.
I told her the team asked us not to deny what the internet had already decided, that Junie drafted terms because Junie is the kind of professional who drafts terms for a fire drill, that yes, there was a document, that the document had rules, and that the first rule, the one I required, was that nobody lies to the locker room, and nobody ever had.
“The team knew from day three,” I said. “You can ask any of them. I’d recommend Duffy if you want it long and Coach Halvorsen if you want it accurate. ”
She asked why I’d agreed to it, a fake romance, a man like me, and there it was, the door I’d decided to open, and I want it recorded that I opened it at the speed I’d planned, not the speed she pulled.
“The franchise had three seasons to prove Austin could hold a team,” I said. “I have reasons to stay in Austin that I won’t be discussing, and they’re the best reasons I have, and you can leave a period there. But I’ll tell you the other reason. The rituals.”
And I told a camera about Olle.
I had never done it. Two years of “personal reasons” and “family” and the flat face.
Now I sat in a lit chair and told the world about a welder from Duluth who built a rink in a backyard with shop lights on extension cords, who flooded it at ten p.m. in January in a lawn chair coat, who taught me that a goalie talks to his posts because the posts are the only teammates who never leave position.
I told her about the oatmeal, 4:40, steel-cut, why: because that’s when he ate, before night shifts, and a boy who eats when his grandfather eats is a boy with a schedule to hold onto.
I told her he died two summers ago in a lawn chair in July, mid-sentence, and that the sentence was about the Twins bullpen, and that we never found out what his verdict was, and that some part of my game since has been an argument with an empty chair about middle relief.
“The taps on the posts,” Corinne said gently. “Left, then right.”
“Left first. The left post is older.” I heard the studio not understand, and let it. “He’d have liked that nobody gets it.”
She let the silence sit, the famous Merrit silence, and I sat in it comfortably, because silence is my home rink, and I think that surprised her, and she smiled a little and moved on, and we did hockey for a while, honest hockey, the Quebec game, Tremblay-Roy’s glove-side habit, Barb’s bench, and it was, I am reporting this against my own interest, not terrible.
The trap that went to design school turned out to have a fair woman in it.
Then, at the end, with the wrap light already on somewhere behind her, she did the thing she is paid national money to do. She tilted her head half a degree and asked it plainly, no setup, no soft entry:
“So what’s real?”
And I want to describe the silence honestly, because the internet later timed it, put it to music, layered it over sunsets, and argued about it in numbers Junie’s dashboards rendered as a cliff face, and everyone had a theory about what I was doing in those four seconds.
Here is what I was doing in those four seconds.
I was standing in the whole inventory. Denver, 814, a hand over a pillow wall.
Room 617 and a storm and a woman saying my actual name.
A screenshot named after a date in March that she’d carried alone and then set down in front of four people because a rule I wrote asked her to.
Two hundred things I couldn’t say without spending her, and one I could, because it was already public, because it was the founding document, because eleven million people had watched it happen before either of us knew what it was, and because it was, of the true things, the one that was entirely mine to give.
“The tape was real,” I said.
Corinne Merrit, who has interviewed presidents, blinked.
“The wrist tape,” I said. “First day. The clip everyone’s seen.
There was no arrangement yet, no document, no cameras that I knew about.
She got hurt at my net and I taped her wrist the way I’d want it done, and everything anyone has ever seen between us grew out of ninety seconds that nobody staged.
” I looked at the lens, once, deliberately, the way you look at a shooter to tell him you’ve seen the play.
“People can decide what they want about the rest. That part I’ll certify. ”
The interview aired Sunday night.
I watched it at Junie’s insistence and against my policy, on her couch, with Hazel providing commentary from the kitchen like a broadcast partner (“he’s SITTING like a folk tale,” “Junie, his HANDS,”) and Junie herself uncharacteristically silent beside me, her thumb moving on the back of my hand in a rhythm I eventually identified: twice, then twice.
Left, then right. She cried at the Olle section, made no attempt to file it under allergies, and at “the tape was real” she went so still I checked on her, and she said, “Don’t look at me, I’m watching the numbers,” and she was not watching the numbers.
The numbers, for the record, since somebody in this arrangement should keep them: eleven million views on the clip in a day.
The Merrit silence became its own genre for a week.
Three sponsors who had “expressed concern” after Deacon’s teaser expressed the opposite of concern by Tuesday, one of them with a term sheet.
The league’s official account posted the tape story next to the original January clip, side by side, and the top comment, forty thousand likes, read “so it was never fake it was just PAPERWORK,” which was so close to the actual truth that Junie printed it out and pinned it to the media room corkboard next to a photo of a destroyed ring light.
And Deacon’s teaser sat there in the feed, aging.
Still coming. April, receipts, all of it, still coming, and everyone knew it.
But the wall was built now, and it was mine, and when his story hit it, it was going to land on a welder from Duluth and ninety seconds of tape, and I had watched enough pucks come off the glass wrong to know how that bounces.
Barb summarized it Monday, passing me in the hallway, gum slow, not stopping.
“Saw the interview.”
“And?”
“Your grandfather flooded at ten p.m. because the ice sets harder when the air’s coldest.” She was three steps past me. “Mine too. Keep faking.”