36 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019
The light dimmed, the ringing kicked up, and the fog rolled in again.
PERSONAL HISTORY
THE SYMPTOMS
My year of concussions.BY NICK PAUMGARTEN
ILLUSTRATION BY KEITH NEGLEY
T
he first concussion in the year of
concussions was delivered by the
right fist of a man whose name I either
don’t know or can’t remember. You could
say it was a mild concussion, and I al-
ways will, but many experts say that there’s
no such thing. You have a concussion or
you don’t. You can’t be mildly pregnant.
But a brain injury is not a baby. We know
what a baby is.
I didn’t lose consciousness, or even my
footing. When it was over, I skated away,
with a ludicrous grin but without every
item of my equipment or all of my wits.
I had a sudden headache and a sense al-
ready of an alteration in the fabric of the
world beyond the confines of my skull.
Teammates leered at me. Aluminum rink
light glinted off a thicket of surfaces: ice,
plexiglass, helmets, sticks. The referee
bent to report the infractions to the time-
keeper, through a slot in the glass. In the
penalty box, I fought the urge to lie down.
This was men’s league—beer league.
You play hockey, then you drink beer.
Beer in the locker room, beer in the
parking lot, beer at the bar. Specifically,
this was Game One of the league final,
best of three, early July, 2016, after a
sixteen-game season and a couple of
playoff rounds. We all cared more than
we should have. We ranged in age from
just-out-of-college to my-kid’s-apply-
ing-to-college, with varying degrees oforganized-hockey experience. I was one
of the oldest, and one of the least experi-
enced—I’d quit in freshman year of high
school—but I’d never stopped skating in
pickup games. I’d been a beer leaguer for
twenty-five years and could still contrib-
ute here and there, and even, with crafty
editing, create a mind’s-eye reel of my
highlights to play as I drifted off to sleep.
Our team was called the Intangibles,
for the sports cliché describing that un-
quantifiable quality of grit and attention
to detail which valuable players, espe-
cially older ones, are often said to have,
and which we reckoned was all we had
left, amid a general decline in fitness and
skill. On our jerseys, black, with a little
orange and white, the word “Intangibles”
ran diagonally from top left to bottom
right. On the back: numbers, but no
names. Most of us wore matching socks,
black with orange trim. The rest of the
gear—helmets, gloves, pants—was rag-
tag. A motley militia, in the reeking re-
galia of past schools and teams. The games
were at night, sometimes as late as mid-
night. We got a little nervous on game
day. We perfected the timing of the nap
and the meal. We stretched at home. We
knew we were ridiculous, and made fun
of ourselves constantly, but approached
it all with enough sincerity to wring real
gratification out of it. A good beer-league
team consists of players who take it no
more or less seriously than you do. Ours
was a good team. Afterward, we could talk
about a game for hours—about our own
failings, in front of the others, and about
the others’ failings, behind their backs.
What led to the first concussion? I’d
decided to repay an opponent who had,
during a battle for a loose puck, shoved
me into the boards head first. I’d been
having neck issues, and this had made
them instantly worse. Ours was a no-
checking league, and yet we were allowed
to play the body, as they say, and hostil-
ities bubbled up from time to time. Now
the game was basically over, and we were
losing by several goals with a minute left.
Fuck it. As the guy stole the puck from
our captain and bore in uncontested on
our goalie, I came off the bench on a line
change (a player substitution, often mid-
play) and skated toward him as hard as
I could. I came at him from his blind
side, and arrived just as he slowed up a
touch to execute a feint on our goalten-
der. My check blew him off his skates.