“Not really.”
“You need to know what the other team is trying to do in your zone. And you need to know what your team is trying to do to defend that. There’s a reason for all of that positioning.”
“I think our guys are just trying to remember where the coaches want them to be.”
“Look, I appreciate the role of the goalie in a way others can’t. Because you’re smart, once you understand the patterns, the systems, you can use your head in connection with your talent to move far beyond others playing your position. I’m sure your coaches already recognize that. Maybe your guys just aren’t ready for systems, or surely they’d be teaching you how to play, wouldn’t they?”
He asked about my parents and my relationship with them. What were they like? Where did they come from? What were their interests? What had they done in their pasts? What were they doing now? Surely, given their backgrounds, they would understand that I needed to be challenged, and they were already encouraging my intellectual pursuits and supporting me in my athletic and academic efforts, weren’t they?
The seeds of doubt were sown. Who was there to teach me? Who understood me? Who was there to champion me? My parents? My coaches?
Graham asked me what I wanted to do with my life. Did I want to pursue hockey, or did I want to do something with my education? If it was hockey, he said, there would be no stopping me—provided I received the right coaching and training, and he could help me with that. If it was something else, he, a teacher, could also provide guidance as I worked toward university. But if it was a combination of the two, he, as both a leading figure in the hockey world and a teacher, was ideally situated to be my mentor.
I wanted to do both. I had always wanted to do both. I told Graham that my dad had only gone to Grade Eight and that I would be the first in our family to go to university. He would have heard the way I said it, the determination in my voice. He would have understood that I wanted to be different from my dad, better than my dad.
“My dad focused on hockey and look where that got him.”
And with that statement, without realizing it, I had crossed a line. I was now speaking disrespectfully about my own father to somebody outside the family, somebody who until very recently had been a complete stranger. The one thing Graham would most easily have learned about me and my relationships with my own family was that I wasn’t going to be like my dad. Graham instantly saw that as a way to connect to me, to bond with me.
Those seeds of doubt. Who was there to teach me? Who understood me? Who was there to champion me? After our meetings I would think long and hard about what he had said. He didn’t tell me that my parents were bad or that my coaches were bad. He left me to come to my own conclusions. He prompted me to ask myself what I wanted and how I might best achieve that. But before prompting me to ask myself those questions, he had already positioned himself as the answer to my dreams.
We increasingly discussed how I could best develop as both a player and a person. He now knew that I wanted to play varsity hockey at university, and there was no way I was ever going to change my mind about that, notwithstanding his position as a junior hockey scout. There were rumors of a new rule that would make those playing major junior hockey, the level of the teams for which Graham scouted, ineligible for NCAA university hockey in the United States (this rule was, in fact, adopted the next year), so he never pushed me to the Saskatoon Blades or the New Westminster Bruins or whoever else he may have been helping. Graham took great pride in steering players into what is now the Canadian Hockey League, but that was never on my radar.
“I understand you. You want to do what I wanted to do, exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to get a scholarship and play hockey in the States too, but my asthma got in the way. It’s smart. You get the best of both worlds. You’ll have your hockey and an education to fall back on. That education will always be there.”
“Graham, I’m not ever going to play in the NHL.”
“You have no idea just how good you are and how much potential you have, do you?”
“No.”
“Well, I understand you. Only somebody like me can understand you. People like us, we need to stick together and help each other.”
He would never let too much time go by between our meetings, but he was also never so in my face that it became off-putting. He walked a delicate line between keeping me on a string and appearing to allow me to move on with other aspects of my life with other people. He was able to maintain an emotional hold on me, and I would increasingly ask for less and less time to pass until we could get together again to talk. Yes, in a way, getting together became my idea. His time was now something he was doling out in limited amounts while I craved more. Not only did have me on a string, he had me swimming toward him.
Graham started revealing himself to me. He told me that he believed that he was misunderstood, that he was a good guy but that many people seemed to be insecure around him, almost in awe of his education and coaching talent. What he hated most, he said, was having to dumb himself down in certain circles to be accepted. He was frustrated that he was in many ways a loner dedicated to making the game of hockey better. He never understood how sportswriters, especially Jack Matheson of the Winnipeg Tribune, could keep their jobs after supporting goon hockey. He thought it was unfair that sportswriters, who, he said, generally knew nothing about hockey, had the right to comment about anything to do with the game. He believed they were hurting the game, and once told me that the definition of a sportswriter was somebody who had failed English but could remember the winner of the last twenty Stanley Cups.
That was Graham. He would say anything to make a point that served his immediate interests and made him look better than everybody else. He was trying to get me to see that he was smarter and funnier than everyone else while appealing to my intellect and my sense of humor.
It worked. More and more I wanted to be like him.
Graham sympathized with me, saying that people like my father, who had dropped out of school before high school, could never understand people like us, people who lived a different life inside our heads. One night at dinner, my dad was talking about somebody’s son who was in engineering at university. He couldn’t understand why somebody would go to university to learn how to work on a train. I just nodded and looked away. But I laughed with Graham about it, thinking that he understood me and cared about me. I laughed with my eventual abuser about a perceived shortcoming in my dad. I can’t ever take that back.
Graham told me he could help me develop to the point where he could get me a scholarship to an Ivy League school. He could develop me. He could get me something. It was now all about what he could do for me and how I needed him to get what I wanted. Except, there’s no such thing as an athletic scholarship to an Ivy League school, not that I knew anything about that at the time (there is need-based financial aid, which often amounts to virtually total funding when a student-athlete comes from a family with a low income like mine). A simple sentence, but one with so much embedded in it, designed to position him between me and my dreams. Yet, all I could see at the time was that he was encouraging me to chase my goals.
Near the end of one of our meals at the restaurant he was very clear: “Look me in the eyes. Look hard. I believe in you. You can do this. It doesn’t just have to be a dream. But it will require commitment. You’re going to need a lot of help. Nobody makes it without a lot of help. But I believe in you. You have every right to succeed, no matter who doesn’t believe you can do this, no matter who believes this is beyond what somebody like you can achieve. I believe in you. We can do this.”
