Red Army, Blind Justice, Lady Blue,
Wheat Kings, Rink Rats, Polar Bears,
Blackjacks, Hit Factory, Triple Canopy,
LCHC (Lamb Chop Hockey Club),
and THC, which, of course, stood for
the Hockey Club.
Meanwhile, my sons got deep into or-
ganized travel hockey, the weekends a blur
of games and practices. For a
number of years, I helped out
as a coach. To do so, I had to
take a series of seminars and
online modules, including a
perennial refresher devoted
to concussions, with strate-
gies for getting children to
provide an accurate account-
ing of their symptoms. But,
when it came to self-diagno-
sis, those were superfluous.
I got the next concussion that fall, in
a game in Central Park, at the outdoor
rink where I’d learned to play, four de-
cades earlier. This was a league for play-
ers older than forty. The team was called
Tiger Williams, for a notorious goon.
On a chilly night under the lights by the
Harlem Meer, with friends on both teams,
the mandate was to play it cool. Skating
backward, defending, without much con-
viction, against an onrushing forward, I
leaned to execute an over-fortyish poke
check. The forward, maybe with too much
conviction, cut hard and caught the side
of my head with a shoulder. The contact
helicoptered me into the air and then
down to the ice. I stayed prone awhile,
then made my way to the locker room,
where I undressed and zombied my way
home. Headache, vertigo, unrelenting fa-
tigue: the symptoms reminded me of al-
titude sickness. I acclimated after a mo-
ment or two. I took six weeks off, and
then resumed skating after Christmas.
The third concussion came months
later, in another Intangibles game, the
clock running out on a late-night mid-
season loss. A freak accident, a collision
with a teammate: we hadn’t seen each
other. I got the worst of it. The light
dimmed, the ringing kicked up, and the
fog rolled in again.
In the following weeks, my skull felt
as though someone had draped a towel
over it and was pulling down on all four
corners, or maybe cinching tight a bank
robber’s stocking. I had trouble concen-
trating. If I tried to exercise, the head-
ache came galloping in. I couldn’t handle
crowds or concerts or the ordinary din of
New York. The thought of playing hockey,
the sight of men playing football on TV:
it seemed as reasonable to stroll on foot
across the New Jersey Turnpike. After
an hour or two in front of a computer
screen, a kind of dizzy fatigue washed
over me. I began napping a couple of
times a day. The Advil stopped
working. My moods dark-
ened. My work stalled.
At the urging of family
and friends, I went to see a
doctor, who said that the
symptoms were consistent
with post-concussion syn-
drome. Still, a diagnosis is an
approximation. An M.R.I.
showed nothing, except some
other things, which had noth-
ing to do with concussions or my symp-
toms, and which I’d probably have pre-
ferred not to know about: White matter
intensity is generally preserved, however a
solitary probable chronic lacunar infarction
is present in the right caudate head, and
trace probable microangiopathy is present in
the parietal region on the left. A neurologist
told a friend, to whom I had sent the re-
port, “He shouldn’t freak out (too much).”
I was familiar with the murk of con-
cussion science. Like anyone who fol-
lows sports, I’d been reading for years
about professional athletes undone by
head injuries, marooned in the dark, mull-
ing suicide. One knew about C.T.E., the
disease of progressive neurodegenera-
tion, brought on by repeated blows to
the head, that seemed disproportionately
to afflict boxers and football and hockey
players, such as the linebacker Junior
Seau, who shot himself in the chest, at
the age of forty-three, or Todd Ewen,
the N.H.L. enforcer known as the An-
imal, who shot himself in the head, at
forty-nine. One of my son’s coaches, a
retired N.H.L. player and a gentle giant
who participated in more than a hun-
dred fights as a pro, had several episodes
a year of overpowering vertigo that lasted
for days. Of course, I hadn’t done any of
this. I hadn’t even played high-school
hockey. I was just a mildly rambunctious
boy on planet Earth: bicycle crashes, ski-
ing accidents, pitiless shore breaks, a
drunken tussle or two. But it was widely
accepted that the damage accrues.
I bore witness as the kids opened their
own accounts. In a peewee practice, oneof my sons collided with a teammate, and
the other boy had to quit hockey and
miss months of school. I attended a con-
cussion-awareness fund-raiser at his par-
ents’ apartment, featuring a former pro-
fessional football player and the former
pro wrestler Chris Nowinski, who suffered
sixteen concussions and now runs a re-
search-and-advocacy group called the
Concussion Legacy Foundation. This is
an epidemic, they told us. There’s so much
we don’t know. When in doubt, keep
them out. The youth-hockey organiza-
tion my sons played in adopted some-
thing called the King-Devick test. At the
beginning of the season, we took the kids
aside, one at a time, and had them per-
form cognitive exercises while an adult
timed them with a stopwatch. Patterns
of numbers on flip cards, read aloud, in
sequence. This established a baseline. The
idea was that, if a player was suspected
of having a concussion, we’d administer
the test on the bench and compare it with
the previous result, and thereby have some
basis for a decision about his continued
participation in the game.
One day, during a game on Long Is-
land, a boy on our squirt team (squirts
are nine- and ten-year-olds) got clocked
in front of our bench. The referee saw it
but gave no indication that he consid-
ered it a penalty. Home cooking? The
visitors always think so. Our player lay
on the ice. From the stands, his father
started shouting at the referee, who skated
over and told him to knock it off. The
father yelled, “That’s my son!” Then he
let loose with some obscenities. The ref-
eree ordered him to leave the rink. The
father went quietly, which was a relief,
because he had a black belt in judo. An-
other father went with him, to make sure.
On the bench, I took the boy aside
to administer the King-Devick test. He
had put up a conspicuously slow time
on his baseline. He was immensely tal-
ented but easily distracted: sometimes,
when a coach explained a drill to him,
his vacant expression brought to mind
the badger sidekick in the movie “Fan-
tastic Mr. Fox”—eyes just spirals. Now
the boy sat on the bench, facing away
from the ice, and read out the number
patterns. He got through them much
faster than he had for his baseline. This
scenario hadn’t come up in the pre-sea-
son tutorials. We sent him back on the
ice, which was almost certainly the wrong38 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019