THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER11, 2019 37
This was an uncool thing to do. Even
in the pros, it would have been at least
a charging penalty; in a middling no-
hit beer league, it was beyond the pale.
Also, the guy was much bigger, stron-
ger, and younger than I was. He rose to
his feet and rushed at me. I stood still,
hands at my sides, in wonderment at
the size of him, and at the purity of the
grievance. I had an inkling that I de-
served what was coming. His head was
the size of a bucket. He shook his gloves
off and quickly landed a series of right
hooks before my teammates swarmed
him, like rodeo clowns. The punches
caught me behind the left ear, below
the edge of my helmet. The thud was
thicker than I’d expected. It felt as if my
head had been slammed in a car door.
I had never punched, or been punched
by, an adult before. The last time I’d used
my fists was on my younger brother,
during a tussle in our early teens; he re-
taliated by pelting me with a boom box.
It got me in the mouth. I should have
learned then: put up your dukes. The next
morning, a dentist levered my teeth back
into place with a tongue depressor and
cemented them in line. I showed up for
freshman year of high school with a man-
gled upper lip and a smile made of grout.
After the Game One punch-up, I sat
out the rest of the series. I didn’t feel
right. We won without me. The rink
manager handed the guys a yard-tall
plastic trophy, which wound up on the
bar of the tavern where we hung out after
the games. I was a longtime fan of the
Philadelphia Flyers, who in their heyday
and my formative years were known as
the Broad Street Bullies, for their use of
physical intimidation as a tactic. So I al-
lowed myself to believe, half seriously,
that I’d contributed something. The boys
encouraged me in this. I’d sacrificed my
services, and my head, to change the
complexion of the series. One intangi-
ble is knowing when to be a jackass.
I
skate low, torso over toes, head tur-
tled forward. It’s not awful, but it’s not
ideal, either. I catch a lot of stray elbows.
It’s hard to count the times, after those
late-night games, that I’ve felt dazed the
next day. Headaches, stiff neck, trouble
finding words. But then there were al-
ways other variables: beer, dehydration,
a severe shortage of sleep. Stay out or go
home, six pints or two, I always needed
four hours, from the time of the open-
ing face-off, before I could fall asleep.
Midnight games on Mondays left a mark.
After a day or two, the fog would lift.
Nothing ever stuck, and so I decided that
those passing head shots, the little dings,
weren’t anything at all. It seemed a small
price to pay for the weekly company of
the boys. There was the Brad, a master
rigger of industrial cranes, whose gruff
diatribes against bankers, bike lanes, hip-
sters, and “harelips” we surreptitiously
recorded, for laughs. Pat (Patty) Patter-
son had grown up down the block from
me; in the late seventies, our local street-
hockey game had made the Daily News.
We had a couple of smooth Minneso-
tans—Scoobs, a soulful bull of a kid who
ran a charter school in Harlem, and Ma-
honze, our ringer from Duluth, lanky
and shy. And some spicy Mainers, too:
Brawny, who was always grumbling about
the libs; Bix, who smelled like a dead an-
imal; and Junta, whom I met playing
roller hockey in Tompkins Square Park,
in the mid-nineties, and who had a thing
about the size of his own wrench, which,
admittedly, was prodigious. New recruits
were always amazed to learn that Phish
had named its first album for him. He
came up with a lot of the nicknames,
some of which only he used. Our goalie,
whom we called Z, had eight children
and lived in a shoe. Or so it was said.
Hockey nicknames are determined by
an esoteric set of principles, the most basic
one being that you add a long “e” to a
name that does not have one, and drop
it if it does. Clarke was Clarkie, Gretzky
was Gretz. The Intangibles called me
Dickie, for Dickie Dunn, the beat writer
in the movie “Slap Shot.” For us, as for
a generation of hockey players, “Slap
Shot” was both a mirror and a prompt,
in the way that “The Godfather” was for
the Mob. There’s a scene in a bar in which
Dickie tells Reg Dunlop, the player-coach
played by Paul Newman, “I tried to cap-
ture the spirit of the thing.” We were all
about the spirit of the thing. We took
turns doing the post-game writeups:
mock heroics, gong shows, choice chirps.
Our team’s captain, for a while, was a
handyman for a bunch of wealthy ten-
ants of Upper East Side town houses;
reared in Detroit, he’d played college
hockey at Liberty University, during a
born-again-Christian phase, and then,
as a pot-smoking apostate, had been
Woody Allen’s superintendent. He made
paintings and signed them “Evryman.”
We called him Reg. One year, after we
won a league championship, I e-mailed
my brother a team photo. The trophy,
the flushed faces, the thinning hair. My
brother singled out a Philly kid we called
Murph—for Audie Murphy, because his
surname contained the letters “a-u-d”
(and no long “e”)—or Jesus, because he
performed miracles. “That guy looks like
a tough dick,” my brother wrote. I shared
this e-mail with a few of my teammates.
From then on, Reg implored us from the
bench to play with an edge: “Tough dicks,
boys. Tough dicks.” Hockey, it needs to
be said, brings out the dickishness in us
all. It may even require it.
I
n New York City, in the nineteen-sev-
enties, when I was a kid, recreational
ice hockey was a curiosity, an obscure
pastime of hard-nosed Long Islanders,
Massholes, preppies, and Hell’s Kitchen
roughnecks. There was a men’s league at
the old Sky Rink, on the sixteenth floor
of an office building near the West Side
rail yards; one misremembers it now, with
its steamed-up windows and its hothouse
violence, as a kind of puckhead’s Plato’s
Retreat. There were rugged barns at
Coney Island, Long Beach, and the
World’s Fair site in Queens. During the
winter months, I skated in Central Park
and the Bronx, getting just a handful of
weekend games in the suburbs each sea-
son. In summer, I went to hockey camps
for a couple of weeks, in New England
and Nassau County. But mostly I played
roller hockey—pre-Rollerblades, on the
old quads. The city had a lot more open
asphalt than open ice. We used garbage
cans for goals, a roll of electrical tape for
a puck, and wooden sticks with the blades
worn down by the pavement to the width
of paint stirrers. The pace was slow, and
nobody wore shin pads or helmets. Still,
the games got chippy. My sharpest mem-
ory is of a full baseball swing I took to
the back of a knee from the stick of a
neighborhood bully known as Fat Allie.
Thirty years later, I was out mucking
it up on the ice two or three nights a
week—at Chelsea Piers, mainly, but also
in Long Island City, Flushing, and Cen-
tral Park, in leagues and in regular pickup
games. It was my outlet, my social life,
my private map of New York. One team
blended into the next: Flin Flon, Team X,
