War with Trolls
"To live is to war with trolls."—Henrik Ibsen
Sitting on the bench as he watched the line in front of him run through the assigned drill, Rob tried to mentally note any corrections Herb handed out, so that he wouldn't repeat any mistakes that his teammates were unfortunate enough to make, but his mind, foggy as the condensation on a cool mug of beer, could not perform this basic function with any alacrity. Clearly, he had let himself have a little too much fun last night, but that was probably because he couldn't fully accept that what everyone called the best years of his life—his college years—were over, and it was now no longer considered normal or desirable for him to top off an evening by drinking bourbon out of a shoe that wasn't even necessarily his own.
As if to prove the point that he would have to do more with his post-collegiate career than descend into rampant alcoholism, his typical hangover cure—a freezing shower, a black coffee, and an Advil—had been about as effective as closing the barn door after the stallion had escaped. Now everything was too loud and too bright, and the last two ingredients of his homemade hangover remedy were swirling around in his otherwise empty stomach in a way that made him pray he would not do anything as undignified as vomit all over the ice.
He wished that he had eaten a granola bar back in his room, but he never liked to have breakfast even when he wasn't hungover. It wasn't that he disliked breakfast foods—he actually rather enjoyed them—but he just didn't want to have them any time before noon. In his view, one he was convinced was shared by university students the world over, there should only be two meals a day: brunch and dinner. People who insisted on getting up in time for a healthy breakfast and being all smug about that particular dietary decision should, he firmly believed, be taxed by the government at twice the rate of everyone else.
"That's it! Pick it up!" Herb shouted at the line on the ice, and Rob massaged his delicate temples, wishing that he could find a rock to crawl under to drown out all the noise and light, or that failing, crush himself under. That at least would end his cursed headache. A boulder was a more powerful cure than Advil every time. "That's it! Kick it out!"
Oh, Lord, this is going to be a long practice, Rob thought, closing his eyes against the brightness of the lights reflected off the ice. How blinding that was he had never noticed before, but he was usually more observant about things even he wouldn't typically see (and he was a very detail-oriented person) when he was recovering from tipping back a few too many glasses at the bar. Being drunk, he decided, provided him with his best insight into how it might have felt to be a mad artistic genius like Van Gogh. This was all just part of his higher education to make him a better rounded individual.
"Look for the pass," Herb instructed at the top of his voice, and Rob gave into the temptation to open his eyes to discover what his coach was yelling about now. A second later, he realized that Herb was mad at Mark Johnson for either not taking or not seeing a pass. "Come on, hit him with a pass."
Bad luck, Mark, Rob noted inwardly, sympathizing with the roommate he had been assigned because of where their last names appeared in the alphabet. Mark wasn't a hard person to empathize with, even when you were blasted out of your cranium. His blue eyes made him seem innocent and fragile, even though he was one of the best college hockey players in the country, which meant that he had to be downright dangerous in his own fashion on the ice.
As a roommate, he was unfailingly polite, but he didn't insist on talking all the time. Another one of his chief virtues, in Rob's opinion, was that he didn't confuse the floor of their dorm room with a dresser, or, worse still, a hamper, and he didn't have any annoying sleeping habits: snoring, sleep-walking, or sleep-talking. As far as random roommates went, Mark Johnson was la crème de la crème, at least among a crop of college hockey players.
"Look for the pass! Come on, hit him with a pass!" Herb was screaming louder than ever now, and Mark seemed to be in some hockey zone where he was oblivious to anyone he was not dodging on his path toward goal. This would end well, because Herb loved having his advice completely ignored by his players.
Practice was only going to get noisier, and Rob should probably just accept that it was going to be even worse than the one, as a Gopher, where he had showed up with a black eye, because, loosened by a few brews, he had, for reasons he could not understand when he was sober, repeatedly dared one of his football buddies to punch him in the face. When he remembered to say his prayers, Rob was still thanking God that Herb had taken one look at his bruised face and chosen to just file the whole incident under information he didn't need to know about his players.
"Go, Johnson! Outside!" Herb cried, as Mark streaked down the inside of the ice.
"All right, Johnson, hit him on the other side," ordered Herb, using his stick to illustrate his words, as if Mark had listened to the past three—or was it four? Rob couldn't count with any real confidence this morning—commands he had issued.
"Get them up!" Herb added to the defense coming up to confront Mark, apparently recalling that there were other players on ice he was supposed to be barking instructions at. "Look for him."
"Move and hit him, Johnson!" Herb was after Mark for not passing to a line mate again. "He's open."
As Mark, definitely not passing the puck, continued to weave down the ice with a speed and grace Rob couldn't help but admire, Herb snapped, "Center, center. Come on, Johnson!"
By now, Mark's maneuvering had landed him in front of Jim Craig's net, and, a second later, after some more impressive stick handling, his shot had sailed into the goal. Some might have said that Mark's goal was pure luck, but if a player was as consistently lucky as Mark was, that had to be regarded as a certain talent and Rob would want that person on his team. Anyway, he didn't believe that what Mark did on the ice was luck. He thought that it was just some special hockey sense that the Wisconsin boy had either been born with or had honed through hard training.
Of course, Rob didn't expect Herb to be impressed. He could imagine what Brooks would say if he, Rob McClanahan, had sped down the ice and scored that goal. He would say cuttingly for probably the millionth time since they had met four years ago, "You think you're fast, McClanahan? Here's a tip: the puck moves faster if you pass it."
Sometimes, Rob, having a better long term memory than a goldfish, would remember this and pass. Other times, his high school puck-hogging tendencies would dominate his instincts, and he would horde the little black disc like a dragon jealously guarding a cache of gold. Then Herb would chew him out for needing to be told the same thing over and over. He just hoped, for Mark's sake, that Mark was a faster learner than he was. Otherwise, they'd both be hearing a lot of the same stuff all the way to Lake Placid.
"Johnson!" Herb's whistle blew, resounding with enough force inside Rob's head to give him a migraine. As Mark, looking resigned to his fate, skated over to hear whatever criticism Herb had to make, Coach Brooks went on crisply, "That coast-to-coast stuff may work here, but it won't against the teams we'll be playing."
Mark nodded, accepting the reprimand, although Rob was prepared to bet that he had about a hundred more wild cards tucked up his sleeves to show off in future practices, and Herb, determined to keep the practice moving at a blistering pace, said, "Next line up. Let's go. Let's run it again."
Next line up. That included Rob, so now was the moment of truth: the time when he discovered whether he currently had the coordination required to skate, pass, and not throw up. This should be a fun experiment, he thought, as he clambered over the boards, feeling some relief that he had passed this first test without doing a face plant. There were only about a thousand more hurdles for him to jump successfully before he could return to the bench for some water that might flush out his head a little.
"This is a breakout play, gentlemen." Herb repeated the same speel that he had given the previous line up, and Rob reminded himself to focus on the reward of a water break that would come if he could get through this drill without embarrassing himself. "So, please, let's get rid of the puck early."
Rob turned his head to try to get a measure of what Morrow, who should have been on the line beside him, was planning to do, so they could be at least somewhat in sync with each other, and realized instantly that would not be happening, because Jack O'Callahan, one of the BU boys, was standing where Morrow should have been.
His queasy stomach knotting, Rob observed that Jack had a distinctly demonic gleam in his eyes that promised unpleasant surprises and trouble. Unlike Rizzo, O'Callahan was plainly not willing to leave the 1976 NCAA final in the past any time before the world ended, and he looked practically homicidal. It was just Rob's good fortune, since he had apparently been selected as the punchline of some cosmic joke again, to end up paired with a psychopath, or, as the teachers would have euphemistically phrased it in parent conferences, someone who needed to brush up on his social skills.
Bracing himself to be the brunt of whatever mad scheme for vengeance that was brewing in O'Callahan's evil brain, Rob heard Herb shout, "All right, let's go!"
Herb shot out the puck, and, glad to place as much distance between himself and the team maniac as possible, Rob glided off after it, relieved to discover that skating was not as challenging as he had feared in his recovering alcoholic state. In fact, it was easier for him to skate than think right now.
He was circling with the other forwards around the net, trying to create scoring opportunities when O'Callahan rammed into him with all the force and rage of a rampaging rhinoceros. Inertia sent him sprawling onto the ice. The metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth, telling him a second before the pain did that he had bitten his tongue.
Reflexively, because he had felt his teeth bang into each other even through his mouth guard, he ran his tongue along the back of his mouth guard, checking that all his teeth were still present and intact. He had just confirmed that his mouth had suffered no permanent damage when the first indignant gasps of "Oh!" and "Oh, my God!" began to float from the bench, eliminating any doubt Rob might have had about his collision with O'Callahan being a deliberate attack.
"What's O.C. doing?" Rammer demanded, his angry words making the question sound more like an insistence that the violent lunatic who smashed into his own teammate be cut immediately. Mike Ramsey had only just finished his freshman year at the U, so he had no memories of the bitter bench-clearing brawl between the Gophers and the Terriers at the NCAA finals in 1976. To him, that year was practically ancient history. Rammer made Rob feel old, something that he didn't think should ever happen to a twenty-one-year-old.
"That was cheap," put in Neal Broten, another player who had just completed his freshman year at the U. "He didn't have the puck."
"What the hell are you hitting like that for?" snapped Phil Verchota, who sounded as though he wanted to knock O'Callahan to the ice, and Rob might have smiled if his mouth didn't hurt so much. Minnesota boys always stuck together like glue, so to mess with one was basically to mess with them all, and there were more players in this rink from Minnesota than Massachusetts. If Jack wanted a re-match of the 1976 brawl, he should have chosen a better place—one where he had more allies.
"That's bush league, O.C.," Buzz Schneider added reprovingly, pulling his head out of the cloud it normally resided in long enough to show some anger.
"Nice hit, O.C.," remarked Dave Silk, a BU boy who had a smug smirk in his tone, and Rob thought resentfully, Screw you, Silk, and the skates you came in on. He had no idea how Rizzo, a friendly and seemingly sane individual, had managed to survive being on a team with O'Callahan and Silk. It was probably a testament to Rizzo's character that he had not done what a less resilient person would have under the circumstances: transferred, committed suicide, or gone on a killing spree to rid himself of his more vexing teammates.
Speaking of killing, Rob really wanted to murder Jack O'Callahan this very moment, but he wasn't sure whether it would be wise to rush at the Boston boy with his fists flailing. Rob could feel Herb, as always, watching—those cold eyes burning into Rob's back, either waiting to pass judgment or already delivering a verdict—and he had to think about what Herb wanted to see from him. Herb liked fierce players, but he also appreciated clean ones. He had no time for anyone he perceived as a weakling, but he didn't value people who collected penalty minutes like awards or who tore into teammates as though hockey were a sport for stars instead of teams.
Would Herb rather Rob retaliate and get into a fight with O'Callahan, or would he prefer to see Rob not take the bait and go on skating as if nothing out of line had happened? After four years of playing under Herb, Rob felt he should know the answer to this crucial question, but his fall to the ice, courtesy of the brute O'Callahan, had destroyed the few brain cells he had been left with after last night's binge. Everything was so confusing when your mind was a haze that would not stop spinning.
"Tell your boy to keep his head up, and he won't have to worry." The derisive edge to O'Callahan's ugly, sharp Boston accent made up Rob's mind. When he needed hockey advice from Jack O'Callahan, hell would have frozen over, and they'd be playing hockey there, too.
Now, Rob was irate enough that he did not care that Herb had a front row seat for this confrontation. He no longer was considering his audience, just his own urges and desires. He needed to punch the sneer off Jack O'Callahan's face even if it was the last thing that he did on this team. It was as simple and as complicated as that.
"Let's go," he growled, ignoring Verchota who had asked if he was all right, and surging across the ice until he crashed into O'Callahan. The inexorable laws of physics sent them both wheeling, leaving them clinging onto each other's arms for support. Then, they steadied themselves enough to begin throwing punches at one another's faces, and Rob, seeing that O'Callahan's helmet strap was already undone, took advantage of this, aiming a blow that sent it clattering to the ice below.
The world shrank to the size of the fists flying at his face, and he only was dimly aware of the shouts of the players who were, by the sound of it, restraining Buzz and Bill Baker from joining the fray. He didn't hear the words of encouragement tossed at him or O'Callahan because he was, despite his struggles, being pushed down onto the ice.
As he hit the ice, Jack's balled hand slammed into his nose. Skin tore, warm blood spurted out of his nostrils, and he could only be grateful that he hadn't heard or felt a crack that might have indicated a broken bone. Now his entire head ached, and he began to feel that getting into a fight while he was hungover ranked at the top of the list of his poor life decisions. If this fight wasn't broken up soon, he might not even have a life anymore. That was how rock bottom stupid his choice was.
This revelation had only just come over him when he felt hands tugging him away from O'Callahan, and, even though he knew that it was in his best interests for the pounding his throbbing head was receiving to be over, he still struggled for one last opportunity to throw a punch at his least favorite teammate ever.
"Well, how about it, boys?" Herb's question was as rough as sandpaper rubbing against an open wound. "Look like hockey to you?"
Finally deciding to give up the fight, at least for today, Rob hoped that O'Callahan would have the sense not to answer this obviously rhetorical question. It was safer and altogether more prudent to just allow Herb to rant whenever the urge overcame him, rather than try to head him off early.
"Looks like a couple of monkeys trying to hump a football to me," continued Herb, and Rob wondered if even Herb knew what that looked like, because Herb had used that simile to describe at least fifty very different things in Rob's time at the U. Of course, Rob tried not to think about this too much, because it gave him nasty mental images that he believed no coach should be permitted to inflict on his impressionable players. "What do you think, Craig?"
"Yeah." Coach Patrick's nonplussed tone made it plain that he didn't understand what he was agreeing to beyond the fact that teammates should not be trading punches in the middle of practice. Everybody was tripped up by Herb's graphic and frankly weird figures of speech, then. It wasn't just a generational gap.
"You want to settle old scores, you're on the wrong team," announced Herb curtly, treating first Jack and then Rob to his most disapproving glare. Both of them went on glaring at one another, because that was safer than returning Herb's furious stare. "We move forward starting right now! We start becoming a team right now!"
Here, Herb smashed his stick against the ice, spraying chips of ice in the air, to emphasize his point. Then, because nobody could argue that he lacked a flare for the dramatic, he lowered his voice as he went on to provide what he doubtlessly wanted to become the team's mission statement.
"Skating," he said, gliding over to lock eyes with Rob, who could only meet his stern gaze for a second. Ducking his head, Rob thought that he knew he was on this team mainly because he was one of the fastest and smoothest skaters in college hockey, so Herb would definitely be expecting a lot from him in the skating department, and he did not want to disappoint Coach Brooks again anytime soon.
"Passing. Flow." To Rob's relief, Herb skated over to skewer O'Callahan with his gaze, and then returned to the center ice to finish his lecture. "And creativity. That is what this team is all about, gentlemen. Not old rivalries."
He paused, as if to permit this final prohibition ample time to sink into his players' brains, and then suggested in a deceptively mild tone, "So, why don't we start with some introductions? You know, get to know each other a bit. Where you're from. Who you are. Go ahead."
Rob thought this sounded like an incredible waste of time and oxygen. He and Jack already knew who each other were and where one another were from. That was why they had come to blows in the first place. If there was anything Rob hated more than a circle introduction to those who didn't know him, it was a pointless introduction circle to people who knew him. Judging by the contemptuous expression on O'Callahan's face, he didn't regard Herb's idea much more highly than Rob did, which meant that they now had one thing in common, and the universe would be imploding soon.
Perhaps seeing this and realizing that he would have better luck convincing someone who had played for him for four years and had witnessed on many occasions how dangerous a wrathful Herb Brooks could be, Herb glanced proddingly at Rob, silently ordering him to open the introductions.
Desperate for a way out of this stupid activity or at least a chance to stall it, Rob looked at Verchota, who returned his gaze in a manner that clearly stated, "Just bite the bullet, Robbie."
Rolling his eyes, Rob decided that if he had to obey a dumb command, he didn't have to do it with alacrity. There would be no polite smiles, handshakes, or "pleased to meet you." There wouldn't even be complete sentences, just fragments. He would do the absolute minimum Herb had required; he wouldn't act like he was meeting somebody respectable for a round of golf at a country club when he was actually addressing the psychopath Jack O'Callahan.
"Rob McClanahan," he answered flatly, directing his words more toward Herb than to O'Callahan, because he wanted to talk to the BU boy as little as possible. "St. Paul, Minnesota."
Or, more precisely, North Oaks, but only people already familiar with Minnesota's geography could find that suburb that had sprung up to accommodate affluent urban professionals in safe neighborhoods with good schools on a map. Worse still, those who could locate it on a map tended to automatically assume that he was a snob if that was one of the first, defining attributes he provided about himself. Over his years at the U, he had learned it was better to reveal his hometown only after he had given the person in question a chance to see that he wasn't the biggest snot east of Los Angeles and west of Manhattan. He wasn't ashamed of where he was from, but he wasn't about to set himself up to be a constant victim of stereotyping either.
"Who do you play for?" asked Herb, leaning casually against his stick.
Rob wondered when Herb would stop posing questions that he already knew the response to, and then pondered whether the question Herb had just asked was a trick, but, if it was, Rob couldn't spot the trap, so, waiting for the steel to bite into his skin, he replied, "For you, here at the U."
Herb hesitated for a few beats that were just long enough to tell Rob that he had failed whatever that last test had been about. That was bad, because Rob still did not understand how he had messed up. Should he have said, to avoid sounding like a new graduate who couldn't handle the pressure of life outside the insulated environment of the U, that he played for the Buffalo Sabres, even though he had only been drafted by them and hadn't yet played for them? Neither response made him sound like he did much more with his life than lounge around on his parents' sofa, watching television all day and mooching off their money. A woe of being a recent college graduate was that people inevitably expected you to make something of your life now that your expensive education was finally complete, and any answer you gave them tended to confirm their suspicions that you were rapidly becoming a lay-about who would cost the community thousands of dollars every year in welfare checks.
And, damn it, Herb was giving him a nice long time to revel in the idiocy of his answer, presumably so he could remember this moment and relate it to any future children he had to assure them they had inherited his brains if they ever came crying to him about something stupid they had done. Eventually, though, Herb would figure that Rob had absorbed just how wrong his answer had been, and then the clipped correction, which Rob was already bracing himself for, would come.
"Jack?" Herb prompted, twisting to face O'Callahan, and Rob recognized that the rebuke he had believed was incoming was not going to be launched at all.
"Jack O'Callahan." The Massachusetts boy's arrogant tone made it clear that he was condescending by giving his name at all. Bitterly, Rob thought that jackass was a better first name for O'Callahan.
"Charlestown, Mass.," continued O'Callahan, glaring at Rob, who glowered right back, hating everything about this cocky BU boy from his annoying accent to the way he abbreviated his home state, as if saying the full name would squander too much of his valuable time. "Boston University."
Herb, his lips pursed, didn't seem any more enamored of Jack's answer than he had been of Rob's. That meant that Rob and Jack were equal in that as well as in the enmity in which they held one another.
"Over here." Herb pointed his stick at Ralph Cox from the University of New Hampshire.
"I'm Ralph Cox." Ralph smiled and tipped his helmet as though it were a hat. "I'm from wherever's not gonna get me hit."
There was a ripple of amusement around the ice at this introduction, but Rob was too busy shooting daggers through his eyes at O'Callahan to join in the laughter.
"Very good." As if determined to end the levity before it had a chance to really get its feet off the ground, Herb shouted, "Everybody on the line, let's go!"
Rob stifled a groan as everyone skated over to the far goal line. From the moment he and O'Callahan had been ripped apart to stop them from tearing each other to pieces, he had known that this punishment would come sometime, because Herb was a fan of collective punishment. The theory was probably that since hockey was a team sport, the poor decisions of an individual hurt everybody. The practice was that either the problem player would feel sufficiently guilty about causing his entire team misery that he would take it upon himself to improve his behavior, or else the team as a whole would take responsibility for ensuring that whatever the issue was ceased.
Some teams, Rob knew, responded to collective punishment by treating whoever had brought on the discipline with vindictiveness and snubbing, but that had never been the case at the U. There players banded together, using their strengths to cover their teammates' weaknesses on the ice and in the locker room. That was how Rob had always ended up drawing color-coded weekly and monthly schedules for Don Micheletti, who had lockered next to him and seemed chronically incapable of arriving punctually for practice without this assistance. You became your brother's keeper pretty quickly when it was the sweat of your brow that partially paid for his shortcomings.
I am sorry, guys, Rob mentally apologized to his current team as they assembled on the line, unless, of course, your name is Jack O'Callahan or Dave Silk. Then this is the very least you deserve, and I'm glad that I'm a much swifter skater than either of you, because that will make the upcoming Herbies much easier for me than for you. Please know that, as I watch you pant, I'll have the immense pleasure of reflecting that I was one of the skaters Herb timed to conclude that forty-five seconds was a 'reasonable' benchmark for this grueling drill.